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New Brew February 8th, 2013

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Sorry for the lull in updates, the holidays and a vacation interfere with home brewing…

The vanilla bourbon stout turned out pretty decent, I’m going to let several bottles age for a while and see how they are in a few months.

We took a trip to Hawaii, a little baby moon for us. It was nice to spend each day in sunny 80 degree weather in the middle of January, I would highly recommend all you non existent readers try it out!

I brewed another IPA a few weeks ago. This recipe is a clone of the Kern River Citra IPA recipe. This was my first beer using my new stir plate to create an appropriate sized yeast colony. The fermentation actually seemed to start fast, but it went for a long time. Regardless, I hit my target final gravity. One mistake on this brew was that I didn’t add yeast nutrients or a whirfloc tablet during the last 10 minutes of boil… the beer is a little hazy, but not bad for a home brew.

OG 1.068
FG 1.011

I am now dry hopping the beer over a 12 day period.

First dry hop addition Citra and Amarillo
Wait 3 days
Second addition Citra
Wait 3 days
Third addition Amarillo
Wait 3 days
Fourth addition Citra again!
Wait 3 days
Transfer to keg.

I am planning on filtering this beer with a 1 micron water filter setup. I don’t know if the beer will end up being and clearer, but I do believe any hop material still floating will be caught by the filter. If the filter does make the beer clearer that would be a nice side effect of the filter.

Once that’s done I will start force carbing the beer. If all goes as planned we should be serving Citra IPA around Feb 21st.

My next planned beer is a black IPA, I’m hoping that I can create an American IPA, but with a dark SRM, slight roast, and big dry hop flavor. I’m not overly concerned about the nose on this beer, so my plan is to leverage hop bursting for the flavor, and a light dry hop to bring back some of the nose that will be lost from CO2 during primary fermentation.

I’m thinking something like a roasty brown ale with the hop profile of something like Fremont’s interurban IPA.

Until next time faithful readers!

–Chris

American Stout - Sample November 15th, 2012

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The main part of active fermentation seems to be done. I decided to give the stout a taste and try blending some vanilla bourbon into the beer. When the beer was warm it tasted not bad, definitely a burly and slightly chocolate tasting beer. Then I added the vanilla bourbon to the beer and I was really kind of underwhelmed. At this point I’m thinking that I will transfer my beer to secondary this weekend and add half of the vanilla bourbon to the beer. I will very gently “mix” the beer and let it sit for a couple days. Then I will sample the beer again and see how things have progressed. Once I am close to satisfied it will be time to cold crash the beer.

My guess is that this beer will be “done” around the 25th of November, but I am planning on letting this stout mature for a while. I am unsure if I should force carbonate and let it sit or just keep it cold and condition. I will probably do some google searches to see what other people do.

American Stout November 12th, 2012

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This weekend I started in on my next home brew. I decided that I wanted a beer that was appropriate for the season ahead. I also wanted a beer that I could bottle and give to someone to age for a while if they felt the need.

Enter the American stout, with extra goodness.

The plan, to make a roasty and mildly strong stout with bourbon and vanilla beans.

The whole thing started with a trip to Trader Joes, Emily noticed a pack of two bourbon soaked Madagascar vanilla beans for $2.99. I figured I could add these to a beer I made and really bump up the flavor profile, so we bought them.

Fast forward a few weeks and I started thinking about what I could brew to use the beans, and of course my first thought was a stout. But how would I get allot of flavor out of the beans? Make an extract of course! What kind of liquor do you use to make an extract? Vodka of course (because of it’s neutral flavor). Does Chris like Vodka? Not really! What does Chris like? Bourbon of course! Hence the bourbon vanilla stout was born out of what I like and not because of the preference of anyone else. :)

I will post the recipe for the stout later, but there was a blunder with the transposing of the recipe on the Interwebs. One of the ingredients was supposed to be black patent malt, but they read the recipe as black barley, so I added 1.25 lbs of roasted barley/black barley. When I reached the last ingredient of the recipe, I had roasted barley as a really small addition. This made me go back to the web and look up the recipe again. On another copy of the recipe someone had the correct ingredient of 1.25lb of black patent and like 4oz of roasted barley. Well my roasted barley at 1.25 lb was already in the grain bucket, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and add 1.25 lb of black patent malt into the recipe as well. I also increased the hop additions by a few grams each to make sure hop flavor was still present in finished beer with all that extra roasty goodness.

So other then that, my brew day went pretty smoothly. 90 minute boils give you allot of time to sanitize all your equipment and if you don’t have allot of hop additions you can really get some other crap done while you wait. Wert chilling went really fast this time, I think that I was a bonehead in the past and didn’t have the water turned up very high on my immersion chiller, so the water was losing all it’s cooling power very quickly as it traveled through my coil.

Also, I pitched two vials of WLP002 instead of one vial like I normally do. I am hoping the finish on this beer is allot cleaner due to the extra yeast power.

I will report back when I take a reading after primary is finished. OG was 1.074, shooting looking for a FG of about 1.017. I should hit an ABV of about 7.48 which I’d round up to 7.5%

I came in a little higher on my brewhouse efficiency again. I adjusted the recipe for 80% efficiency knowing this was still a little low when looking at past results. I can increase my efficiency again if I want, but before I do that I think I am going to make sure my evaporation calculations are correct during my boil. I could be getting slightly higher OG due to more water boiling off then my brew software compensates for.

Okay, enough with my ramblings.

I’ll post with results next weekend.

–Chris

2046

Another CO2 leak November 7th, 2012

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So after “fixing” my last CO2 leak I hooked up a fresh tank of CO2 to my system. Everything seemed to be going well and the beer carbonated and everything was swell. Then tragedy struck again, I went to fill a growler of our cider for a gathering with friends and nothing came out of the tap. So I open the fridge and see that my CO2 regulator has NO pressure again!!!! *sigh*

So I go to the homebrew store and purchase a CO2 refill which was way more expensive then the welding supply store… highway robbery if you ask me…

Now I am ready to hook everything back up again, but where did all my CO2 go? So I start troubleshooting my system, and find that the nut and hose barb (MFL connector) isn’t very tight on the gas in coupler so I wrench that down and hook everything back up again. This time I decided I would pressurize everything and then turn off the CO2 tank just in case.

I haven’t lost this tank yet, but I also haven’t left it on for a long period of time… I am still suspicious of my CO2 splitter and also the keg that my IPA was in. One of my poppets wasn’t completely closing the CO2 in post.

Fast forward to Nov 5th, I poured a couple of growlers of my IPA and had a few pints and blew the keg (keg is empty, not exploded). Now I have ordered all the parts to rebuild the keg, and I will unhook my gas system and thoroughly test everything yet again…

Sigh…

If only the reward for all this work weren’t so delicious.

–Chris

Running out of gas October 25th, 2012

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I ran out of CO2 on Tuesday. Usually this isn’t an issue, but when I noticed that there was no pressure reading at all on my CO2 regulator I realized this is an issue. Here we go…

Imagine a beer keg. Inside your keg is a bunch of beer, and a tiny bit of space for air. Now when you put CO2 in that space, lets say you put so much CO2 in the keg that it gets up to like 15 psi. The pressure in that tiny airspace is way higher then your beer, so the CO2 pushes it’s way into the beer and the pressure of the beer and the head space equalize. Eventually you will get 15 psi of atmospheric pressure in the head space and in the beer. This is how you force carbonate beer. Now let’s say that tank isn’t sealed, maybe there’s a tiny leak somewhere between your CO2 regulator and your keg. What happens is that CO2 slowly leaks from your tank and when that’s empty, the head space in your keg starts to lower in pressure. When the head space pressure gets lower then the CO2 that’s in your beer starts to release because the pressure is trying to equalize again. Eventually if your leak isn’t plugged you end up with flat beer again.

This is what happened to me, so when it came time to entertain some of Emily’s co-workers on Wednesday our beer and cider were both flat.

Lame.

Anyway, my leak as in a 5/16″ hose barb to 1/4″ hose barb fitting that I purchased when I first started kegging my beer. I wrenched down the fittings so they were much tighter and the leak stopped. I actually plan on disassembling this piece after my IPA keg is empty and applying new plumbers tape to the threads.

Enough rambling about co2 leaks.

–Chris

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