Scottish 80 - Part2

The best beer I've made in recent memory was a Scottish 80. So I'm making it again. The original brew day post was here http://shanebrewblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/scottish-7080.html.

7 lbs British Pale Malt.
0.5 lbs Munich.
1.0 lbs Crystal 40L
0.5 lbs Honey Malt
0.25 lbs Crystal 120L
3.0oz Pale Chocolate 200L

UK Kent Goldings 0.75oz 5.7%AA

WLP002 x1 Date: 3-19-15  Lot: 1012737 with a 2 cup starter.

Whirlfloc
Servomyces

50% RC water
50% Distilled

These brewing salts:

We are shooting for a mash of 158F.

2:37pm - We've had a kind of soft start today. I'm taking my time getting going. I've boiled some ball valves and the O2 stone. Cleaned some stuff. That's about it. Watching football all the while. When this next game is over I will really get after it.

4:05pm - All ready a screw up. I'm cleaning more gear. I think I'm getting an infection from the ball valves which is then making its way into the other equipment. So I'm cleaning a lot of stuff. And I'm trying to multitask. I plan to use one of the glass fermenters because I think the plastic ones maybe infected. So I transferred a bunch of PWB water from the basin to a glass fermenter via a siphon. It was slow so I went inside to do something else and forgot about it. So there is now a few gallons of water on the floor in the garage. Whoops! Anyhow, football game over. Seahawks beat Packers in overtime to go the Super Bowl. So I guess we will get started now.

I've measured out the brew salts, malt, hops, and ground up the grain. Now I will get the strike water heated up while I get the mash tun together.

4:57 - All mashed in. Was going for 158F. Nailed it! I had some problems getting the mash tun to not leak. I thought I was screwed for a second because I thought I had run out of plumbers tape. But, I found some in the drawer and was able to keep it from leaking.

8:51 - All done. Nothing bad happened. OG was 1.050. Way more than I was expecting. Why? I think I sparged with hotter water. This is good to note. I heated up to 180 for the initial sparge and then made sure is was 170 for the second. I'm glad I didn't throw out the remainder of the hops from the 1oz. The recipe called for 0.75oz initially. After I saw the pre-boil gravity of 1.040 I knew we were in trouble. Actually when I tasted the sparge runoff and gave it to Ellie to try I knew. It tasted way too sweet. Anyhow, because I didn't throw out the rest of the hops I added a little more. I can't say how much. Not the rest of the ounce. I just took a guess. The sample at the end of the brew didn't taste too bitter so I think I did ok. Ellie sampled it at the end of the brew and liked it too.

Also, Ellie spent most of the time out there with me. We just hung out. It was nice husband and wife time.

Malty Brown

I've decided to make some beer that is not EKA. So how about some brown beer? I grabbed this from the More Beer site. The goal here is to go easy on the O2. Maybe 10 secs.

I went to the pitch rate calculator and hammered in the details of this brew. I have two vials and no starter. The date on the White Labs vials are Feb 24, 2014. Some googling shows that White Labs yeast was made four months before the date. So that means my yeast was made Oct 24 which give a viability of 75%. Assuming each vial started with 100 billion cells that gives me 75 billion in each vial for a total of 150 billion. A 1.055 beer, 5 gallons, with a pitch rate of 0.75 million cells per mL per degree plato means I need 193 million cells ideally.

Now normally I've been overpitching which leads to me to wonder if that is why I'm having over O2 problems. The yeast don't need that O2 to propagate. So it's more like poison. Since this is an underpitch I will provide some O2. I'm going to do about 10 secs.

Another note is that Brew Brother Jacob saw some horrific shit on the internet about dirty ball valves. So I decided to clean mine. They were is bitch to get open. I've tried before but gave up. Because I am weak minded I suppose. But life is too short to give up on your dreams and I had a dream to open that fucking ball valve. So I bought an extra wrench at walmart that gave the power of GreySkull when used and I He-Maned the fuck up and opened that ball valve. I assure you. God damn I write some beautiful prose sometimes.And there were dirty no doubt. Could that have been my issue all along. I guess we'll see.

Here the ingredients:
9lbs 2-row
1lb Munich
8oz Caravienne
8oz Abbey
8oz Carapils
8oz Crystal 60L
4oz Chocolate

1oz Northern Brewer at 60min 7.8%AA
1oz Kent Goldings at 10min 5.7%AA
1oz Kent Goldings at 1min 5.7%AA

Crystal Geyser water
Whirlfloc
Servomyces

WLP002 x2 - Feb 24, 2015 - Lot # 1011820 (no starter)

1:45 - I'm trying to get this done by 5:30. We have a birthday party to attend. So I'm speeding some stuff up. Thus, I didn't make water. I tried to boil the O2 stone while I heated up the strike water. Success!! That saved 10-15 mins. I also did a few other things in parallel that bought me 10mins or so. So far I feel I'm ahead of schedule. I think I will cheat on the mash time too. Usually 60mins. I think we will try 50mins. My hope is that once everything is cooled down Ellie will help me pour the wort into the fermenter and that will save a few minutes too. Mash temp is 156F. Hit it right off the bat first try. That never happens. That saved like 5-10 minutes too.

4:57 - Done. Time challenge completed. I win!! Beer OG is 1.052. A little low. But I cut corners when drawing the wort off so I expected it. The wort tasted a little bitter and little roasty. In my opinion a little too roasty for a brown ale. But I'm looking forward to drinking it. Ellie is taking me to a party now.

Blonde Ale Tasting Notes

So the last few batches have been a blonde ale with no O2 stone, blonde ale with 20sec O2, and a blonde ale with 30sec O2 and not in a chest freezer.

I poured all three last night and tasted them side by side. The first had a banana/bubble gum taste still to it. If I didn't know any better I'd say this was a Belgian beer. It was a dry yeast packet if I remember right. The second two tasted the same. They tasted pretty clean. Not too much easters. I would like to note that the second of the two did taste eastery a couple of weeks ago and has cleaned up a little.

So it would appear that O2 was the culprit this whole time. It also would appear that the chest freezer adds some easters, but not much. Although, since I added 30sec of O2 instead of 20sec, this may be the issue.

I think the next experiment then becomes how much is the ideal amount of O2 to put into my blonde ale. Since it is in volumes, I'm going to need to do the experiment 5 gallons at a time.

I'm relieved to have figured some of this out. I was beginning to get discouraged. Also, I think I should make some to drink once in a while. Instead of beer for the sake of making better beer later.

Blonde Ale No Chest Freezer

The 20 second O2 beer resulted in estery beer. Not as much as normal though. If it were cold and carbonated, it would be tolerable. Today, I will be using an insulated fermentation bag. It got it from MoreBeer. This thing will house a fermenter and some ice jugs. This should provide a cooler ambient temperature without violent temperature swings. Using this, we will see if the painful esters will be gone from the beer. Or if there is no change.

8lbs 2row
0.5lbs C15

1oz Hallertau Mittelfruh 2.7% AA

WLP001 x2 with starter. 12-11-14 Lot 1009275 and 12-18-14 Lot 1009725

Crystal Gyser Spring water

Whirlfloc
Servomyces

11:37 - Boiling O2 stone now.

12:21 - Mashed in at 152. We started a little high. 156. It's better to fix too high then too low. So it took 5 minutes or so to get it down.

The guys at MoreBeer are screwing with me. I asked for 8lbs of unmilled 2row and 0.5lb of Crystal 15 unmilled.  They sent 10lbs of 2 row, milled. And 1lb of Crystal 15, milled. I too lazy to measure it out so I just eye balled it. And now I need to throw away grain. I hate that. I've tried to just put the left over in the fridge but I don't brew enough. It just goes bad. Speaking of which I need to throw out some old grain and hops in the fridge.

The mill is filthy. It needs to get cleaned.





12:54 - Cleaned a keg. I think I'll keg the beer that's in the fermenter.

1:28 - Ok. Kegged the beer. Cleaned some of the kegging gear. We are in the first runnings. So far, the brew day seems to be going well.

1:46 - Pre-boil gravity is 1.030. A little less than I thought we would get. We should get about 1.040. Everything going ok so far.

4:00 - Fermenter is in the new bag. I've hooked up the nerd box to track the temps.

Interesting things that have happened include:
Ellie made me chicken. It was good. I ate it during cooling.
I made Ellie babysit the beer while I went neddlessly to the pharmacy.
When I put in the chiller, it kills the boil. So I up the gas until we get a boil back. I had my headphones in and got busy. It boiled over. Sugary goo all over the floor now.

It's time to clean up.

4:54 - All done. The gravity came in at 1.040. So a little low. That's ok. We can just drink more of it at one time. Will report back on how the ferment goes. This has been my most productive brew day ever. Not only did I brew a batch of beer but I also cleaned a keg and kegged a brew.

I'm sober. I think I need to fix that. Mrs. Avery isn't. She drank the last batch like a champ with her dad. She made a shandy with lime.

Blonde Ale with 20sec O2 stone

I'm getting a bad feeling that I'm about to make more apple beer. But here we go anyway. The key thing here will be that I will only supply 20 seconds of O2 from the stone.

8lbs 2row
0.5lbs C15
0.25lbs Oats

1oz Willamette 5.3% AA

WLP001 with starter. 01-01-15. Lot 1010000

Arrowhead spring water

4:13 - Boiling O2 stone now.

4:35 - Done boiling. Got the grain milled. Got the strike pot out and setup. All is going well.

4:54 - Got the strike water in the mash tun. We will see if I hit my strike temp. I'll try for 152 but It's not too important to me.

5:07 - Mashed in around 152F. I burned my hand just a little. The strike temp needed to be 165F and started ar 160F. Usually I pull a gallon out of the mash tun and put it back in the pot, boil it, and add it back. It takes forever. This time I thought I would empty the whole mash tun back into the back and it would take 5 minutes to bump up the temp and we would call it good. There is no good way to pour the water from the Coleman Xtreme without it spilling out. And it was hot!!! Lesson learned. But it did get it heated back up real fast. So I got that going for me. Which is nice. I'm going to grill some fish now.

6:38 - Starting the boil. I added too much sparge water. The pre-boil gravity check was 1.032. Usually I get around 1.040. So lesson learned. Not too much sparge water. So the gravity should come in at 1.040ish. I help back some hops to keep it from being too bitter. The fish was good.

7:10 - I've decided to have a 90min boil. And I decided to add back a little bit of the extra sparge. I collected it in a gallon jug once I started boiling. Maybe it will bump up the gravity a little. This girl came by looking for her dog. I thought she was asking me about my dog so I went in to be sure I could find the snorted one. I figured she would just come and go and I'd never see her again but in a few minutes she comes back and asks for a leash and some water. So I helped her out. We'll see if I get the leash back.

8:59 - Beer is in the fermenter. O2 for 20 seconds. Got to clean up now. Everything went well. No sign of the leash yet. I didn't run the re-circulation pump on the chiller. It stalls often. So I just stirred. It went ok.

9:36 - All done. The beer cooled down to 62F. Colder than I had wanted. Stay tuned and we'll see how it comes out.

Blonde Ale sans O2 stone tasting notes

It tastes bad. It's banana beer. This is an ester produced by yeast. Usually its in hefe and belgium yeasts. Not US-05. So this yeast was very pissed. Just like always. Although usually its ripe apples. So this is a switch. It could be from lack of O2. So too much O2 = apples. Too little O2 = bananas. Maybe. I don't know.

So I'm going to make a new batch today and only hit it with 20 secs of O2 from the stone. Since I'm feeling cynical about it, I doubt it will work. So I need to start thinking of reasons why I'm making bad beer and devise a series of experiments to find out why. I think back to the time I thought I had an infection. That was a good experiment. It chopped out so many variables. I'm going back through old posts and I can't find any info on the results of that experiment. My memory says that they came out the same. That it didn't matter. In that experiment I used all new/clean gear and one batch was exposed to the O2 stone and another was not. This was because I thought that the issue was the O2 stone. And they came out the same. As memory serves.

Today I was planning to change the amount of O2 I put in the wort thinking that I was over oxygenating the wort and that was causing the horrible esters. Now that I think about it, it won't matter. I've got to think of a new experiment. I'll go ahead and do this one just to be sure though.

As of this moment, I'm thinking about what was common throughout all the estery beer. I'm thinking back to the last time I made beer that wasn't estery. It was beer made in the bathtub. No chest freezer. Could the chest freezer be the problem? Maybe its the wild temperature swings in the chest freezer that cause the yeast stress. I have a hard time believing that's the problem. Pro brewers use glycol chillers that contact the fermenting beer at much lower temps than my chest freezer. Also, many brewers on the earth use chest freezers for temp control. I don't hear any of them complaining. The real problem is I can't do this experiment for a few more months. It's a billion degrees in this house and has been since March. The way the weather here is it won't be until November before it's cool enough in the house to do this experiment.

Honestly I getting discouraged. I read the internet daily for posts of people complaining about my issue and smart people who have answers and there are none. I get no help from others. I have no access to brewers elite enough to help me. I went to the homebrew clud in Bakersfield once. That didn't help. All answers are the same answers to the ester problem. Pitch enough healthy yeast. Temperature control. O2. Well I've done all that. What do you do when you've done all the suggestions and you continue to not get results? How many bad batches of beer should I make before the word futility resonates? I don't know but I'm getting really frustrated. If I can't begin to make headway on the ester problem by the end of winter, I may start thinking about calling it quits.

Blonde Ale sans O2 stone

Guess how the Cream Ale came out. Horribly estery? Yep. I get to reading around and apparently you can over oxygenate the wort. I was always under the impression that was hard to achieve. So I always left the O2 stone in there for two minutes or more. I guess it can piss off yeast and cause lipids or some shit. Anyhow, today we are going to make beer. The lazy way. I'm not putting lots of effort into water salts, yeast starters, etc., etc.

I had two vials for WLP060 but it's a month expired now. We'll be using US-05 dry yeast. It expires 11/2014. I've had the grain in the fridge so long I don't know what it is. I'm pretty sure it's EKA grain bill. I don't know the exact weight though. I'm using 1oz Willamette 5.3%AA.

10:24 - Ellie biked to work. I'm scared. Other people like to hit people on bikes. Anyhow, I'm currently boiling some water for the yeast to re-hydrate.

11:03 - Ellie made it ok. She still has to get home later though. So far everything has been ho-hum. I've mashed in a little high. 154F. But we will go with it. It went really easy too. Just heated the water up until I thought, "that's probably good enough." Then I put the water in the tun with the grain and stirred it up. Lazy way is the best way. I measured the pH to be about 5.2. Didn't really even try to tweak that. Makes me wonder if the strips actually work.

So now we wait and I guess I drink some beer. Ellie bought 4 six packs at the store. That's a lot of work but I'm up to the challenge.

3:51 - I'm done. Ellie made it home ok. I gave her a ride to a pool party. Day was uneventful. We'll see how it comes out.