Lager Brewing

Tuesday marked our first brew in quite some time.  It felt like an eternity between sessions, but now we're doubling up and going again tomorrow.  Tuesday was different for a couple of interesting reasons.  First, we used my apartment since that's where the chest freezer is living.  Second, we used leaf hops instead of pellet hops.  Third, we actually used an online site to get the recipe correct.

A little about our creative process.  I'm not ashamed to say that we use a Clone Recipe book as a basis for all our brews.  We decide what type of beer to brew, look up some recipes and choose one.  Then we decide how we want to tweak it to make it our own.  This might include changing one type of hops, adding some sort of other ingredient (honey, brown sugar, etc.)  Up to this point, we never paid attention to IBU's, temperatures or specific gravities.  I mean, we measured the original gravity and final gravity to get an ABV reading, but never tried to hit a target.  The thought process was that we would get the right amount of ingredients in at the right time and, voila, beer would emerge.  And emerge it did.  But it could be better.

This time we fed our recipe into a recipe calculator (at www.hopville.com) and made sure to match the temperatures to get specific IBU's and ABV.  Amazingly, we hit all of our targets on the first try.  That isn't to say we didn't have any trouble.  About 40 minutes into the boil, I realized we put the wrong amount of water into the calculator.  Suddenly, our IBU went from 39 to 25.  Holy Crap!  Luckily we had extra hops and the website.  Dan and I (Casey was out grabbing our Ledo's Pizza) fed some quick numbers into the calculator and now our lager is quadruple-hopped and is 36 IBU's.  Disaster averted.

The other odd change was the whole leaf hops.  I'm used to the pellet hops just disintegrating as they are poured into the wort.  I don't know why I was surprised, but the leaf hops don't do that.  They steep like tea. Now, instead of a clear wort, we have a pound of hops boiling in water.  That's fine, but straining that out took some creativity.  We scooped the hops into a strainer, then Casey used the bottom of a pot to press out the extra wort.  That was not in our original plans.

In the end, I'm really excited about this lager, named Tongue.  It's sitting in my freezer and fermenting at about 50 degrees.  The Irish Moss we used was already clarifying the beer, so hopefully it will be a nice, clear yellow color.  The competition is weighed heavily on accuracy to style and cleanliness.  That's 85% of the score.  Fingers crossed, this will be our first excellent beer.

Recipes and Creativity

I've been reading through the book, Radical Brewing, and have gotten about 60 pages in.  To put it gently, I feel stupid for thinking I was making anything close to good beer.  I guess I wanted to read some beer books to get a feel for the creative and technical side of brewing, but I was nervous that it would all be over my head.  I assumed that getting a good recipe and following basic directions was enough to make a quality beverage and it actually was.  But the beer competition got me thinking about how we could make a "very good" beer into a "world class" beer without crazy equipment.

It turns out, with some attention to detail and creative thinking, we could probably elevate the quality of the beer significantly.  The book had one interesting point which really stuck with me.  The author said he always adds something to the beer recipe that nobody would be able to guess.

We're brewing our Pilsner tonight.  What will our twist be?

Review - Meinklang Ancient Grains Ale

The label is the best part.

Recently we haven't done much in the ways of our beer brewing journey.  I have half of the ingredients for the next three brews, with the rest coming on Monday.  The only beer-related stuff I've got is actually drinking the stuff, so I'll continue on with the beer reviews.

I found Meinklang Ancient Grains Ale at Whole Foods in Clarendon and thought I'd pick up a couple of bottles.  I love Dogfish Head's foray into ancient beer recipes and hoped for something similar.  The bottle claims the beer is 100% biodynamic.  I had to look that one up at Wikipedia: "Biodynamic agriculture is a method of organic farming with homeopathic composts that treats farms as unified and individual organisms, emphasizing balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants, animals as a self-nourishing system without external inputs..."  Ok, let's try it then.

Appearance: Golden-yellow, cloudy.  White head with good retention.

Aroma: Bready-yeasty.  Not much else going on here.

Taste: Dull, mostly flavorless.  No hop character and no finish.

Mouthfeel: Carbonation coats the tongue with big bubbles.  Easy to drink.

Overall: Very boring beer.  It actually tastes a lot like Coors Light, but three times the price.

Grade: D (if only because I was expecting much more)

Only three reviews on BeerAdvocate with an average of C (will stay there or lower when I'm done).  One guy gave it an A- but it seems that's for "easy drinking".  Tonzi at J Street Beer gave it his "Meh" rating (1 out of 3) and compared it to Budweiser.

I'm glad I'm currently drinking DuClaw Misery.  Much, much better.  Too bad I'm lazy right now and won't do this review.  But Misery is worth a try.

Real Feedback

We received the results for the BURP.org competition that took place last weekend and, frankly, I wasn't surprised by the results.  The basic outcome was that Honey Brains is a "very good" beer - almost "excellent".  Weisenheimer just wasn't ready yet (we knew this but figured it was worth the $5 entry on the off chance it aged well in the meantime).

Very Good means: Beers in this style may have a minor flaw (technical or stylistic), or may be lacking in balance or complexity.

The fact that the three of us can make a beer that's considered Very Good (near excellent, actually) after a few months makes me quite happy.  Here are some of the professional notes for Honey Brains.  Black is the first judge, red is the second judge.

Aroma: Subdued malt - touch of chocolate, maybe some toast, but not as strong as it should be.  No hop aroma - could use more.  Clean - no phenols, diacetyl, etc.  Not as much malt sweetness with alcohol notes.

Appearance: Deep amber, clear, good head -  off white/tan holds well.  Amber, good head and head retention.

Flavor: Complete malt, touch of hop flavor, but dry in finish - more than should be.  Phenol/tannin astringent just a bit.  Could use more sweetness, but outside of that - good job.  Clean.  Some malty flavors, pleasant.  Missing the intense, complex multilayered malt flavors.  Flavors do blend well.  Smooth finish which is not overly sweet.

Mouthfeel: Med. body, med. carbonation - good.  Astringency is there, and dry for style.  Medium - some warming.

Overall: Astringent but mainly just attenuated finish is dry for style - and a higher mash temp would help - a lot.  Rest is good.  Not a big, malty barleywine but very drinkable.  Everything fits well.  

Review - Honey Brains

We use whatever bottles we have hanging around.

 A little background here: Our first beer together was a barley wine called Brains.  The tag line was "We Are Scientists".  If I remember correctly, it was named Brains because it was ready on Halloween and we were thinking Zombies!  Plus it was really high ABV so it goes right to the head.  Anyway, our first true home brew endevour was to recreate Brains with some tweaks (see Our Beers page).  Honey Brains, aka Brains 2.1, is our second attempt at the original Brains recipe.  We added quite a bit of organic honey purchased by Dan's mom in Syracuse, hence the Sweet moniker.  We thought this was going to be the beer to make the finals of the Home Brew-B-Q (alas!).  It's also entered into the upcoming BURP competition next week (fingers crossed).  I'm looking forward to getting some judging feedback from both.

Now on to the review:

Appearance: Pours a copper color with a thin, white head that reduces quickly to a skinny ring.  It seems to retain that small ring for quite a while.

Aroma: Sugar-coated dark fruits, like prunes, and faint apricots.  Definitely can smell the alcohol in there as well.

Taste: Surprisingly peppery taste mixes well with dark toffee, malt and a bit of strawberry.  Alcohol burn with more berry in the finish.

Mouthfeel: Light, prickly carbonation gets the front of the tongue.  It then finishes very dry on the sides of the mouth and that feeling lingers for quite a while.  I can feel the alcohol on the back of my throat.

Overall: I think this is a solid attempt at a barley wine.  The smoothness of the beer has dropped a little bit during aging, giving way to some more alcohol notes.  You may have noticed that I mentioned that a few times, and that's because the 9%ABV is prevalent here.  That doesn't mean it's "bad," you just have to enjoy big and boozy beers.  Were we to brew this again (which I'm sure we will) I'd push to add more bittering hops, hoping that a hoppier finish would balance out the alcohol notes.  I continue to enjoy this beer, but it's certainly not for everyone.  You need to be a malty beer lover (me!) more than a hop-head.

The "2" on the cap is for the second version of Brains.

We received a ton of positive feedback last Saturday night when I poured Brains Explosion, Honey Brains and Weisenheimer for a few friends.  Their consensus: "I'd buy a 6-pack of this beer."

I think this is an excellent beer considering we are almost complete novices.  I hope that, given time and experience, this recipe will become an excellent beer.

Oak Barrels

We three convened last night for three purposes.  First, we transferred the Sweet Brains from the primary fermenter into the oak barrel I purchased at the Beer, Bourbon & BBQ Festival.  The barrel has not been used to age any bourbon or other spirits despite my plans.  Really, it came down to me not wanting to buy five gallons of bourbon and then store it.  So it's been filled with water for the past month.  However, upon draining the barrel, I noticed something wonderful: the water smelled like oak, vanilla and all sorts of other great things.  This is very encouraging for a beer that has come in at 12.5% ABV.  Hopefully this will counteract any strong alcohol burn in the finish.  We are all really excited by this experiment which is now working its magic in Dan's closet.

Second, we needed to finally plan out our lager for the Pilsner Urquell competition in August.  We need to brew soon so we have time for a second version should the first one come out poorly.  This is a distinct possibility considering this is our first lager and it will be entered into a national competition.  We decided on a Pilsner Urquell clone with a slightly different yeast strain and some dry-hopping.  We're also using leaf hops instead of pellet hops for the first time!

I also decided on an amber alt ale for my end-of-the-year party beer.  This will be the lowest ABV beer we've made so far and hopefully the most accessible.  This little undertaking will happen after the lager is fermented.

Casey still has only one post.

Third, we drank beer.  Good times.

Stuffed Chicken in Dark Ale

I took on a new venture last night - cooking with beer.  I've been meaning to try it for quite a while now, and I may have been subconsciously motivated by the new TGI Friday's ad campaign about meals for "craft beer lovers."  Ok not really.  I saw that commercial well after I decided on last night's recipe.

The meal was stuffed chicken breast over rice.  This is how it went down:

Cooked white rice in my rice cooker with lime juice, oregano, red pepper flakes and turmeric.  This turned the rice a nice yellow color and had a different flavor than the usual white rice.

Sauteed chopped leeks, garlic, red pepper and spinach in Black Toad Dark Ale (purchased at Trader Joe's...it's really good just to drink, by the way).  I sliced the chicken breast to make a fold and then breaded it with panko. Stuffed the chicken with the veggies and then placed each breast in the pan with the stout for about 3 minutes on each side.  Then it went in the oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

Perfection.

Upcoming Competitions

The preliminary results are in for the Sam Adams Homebrew-B-Que competition that Eric posted about a few days ago and we did not advance to the finals. We entered Brains Explosion and Honey Brains and we had high hopes for them, but given the time of year of the contest and the preference of the judges (Eric knows that some of them are "hop-heads"), we probably shouldn't have been surprised by the result. IPAs and other mostly hoppy beers moved on to the finals. We are awaiting the judges comment cards, which we should receive within a week, but we will chalk this up as a learning experience. I still think we have two pretty good barleywines which should only improve with age and hopefully they will perform better in future competitions.

Next up is the 19th annual Spirit of Free Beer competition sponsored by Brewers United for Real Potables (BURP). We have entered Honey Brains and Weizenheimer for this competition. Weizenheimer should be ready to try and Eric sampled one last night and gave generally positive feedback. It was bottled two weeks ago, so it could probably use a little more conditioning. Judging for this competition takes place on May 14th, so hopefully the extra week of conditioning will allow the flavors and carbonation to fully develop.

We are still in the planning stages for our entry in the Pilsener Urquell Master Home Brew competition in August, although we have all the equipment we need to get started now and we will be brewing soon.

End of the (School)Year Brew

I need some ideas.  I kinda, in passing, sort of promised that I would brew a beer to serve at the end-of-the-year party for the science teachers at my school.  I don't mind doing that.  In fact, the more we brew, the better we get at it.  My dilemma is about the type of beer to brew.  What do most people who either a) drink light beers, b) drink wine or c) rarely drink at all want in a beer?  Should I make a pale ale? an IPA?  Would those be too hoppy?  I know I should limit the ABV on this one, so even our 6-7% Weisenheimer Hefeweisen is too much.  An amber ale?

I want to showcase our brewing skills but make it more appealing to everybody.  I don't think Brains would go over well in this crowd.  Too much going on.  Too much alcohol.  Too dark and heavy.  I need something light, refreshing and solid.

Any suggestions?