last brew day included our fred clone, but the real focus was our cask experiment. we wanted to brew up a good cask conditioned IPA and decided to try two versions with the same base and different hops. we also threw in my attempt at a clone of the cask-conditioned merlot stout that i had at the town hall in minneapolis.

all three casks turned out great and we settled on our “final” version of the cask ipa, dubbed Hopocalypse by eric. sounds like a great name to me.

one batch just wouldn’t be enough, so we decided to throw in another hop bomb: a clone of Stone‘s Ruination that we’re calling Devastation. tim also decided that he’d like to try his first solo run and brew up a belgian wit. after a little consultation with radical brewing tim and i came up with Witness Protection.

on with the show!

tim filling up the barleycrusher and me supervising.

the grain for the ipa, crushed and ready to mash.

a biergotter first: 3 burners for 3 batches all running in parallel. the usual two plus tim’s setup for his wit.

the three experimental cask conditioned beers we brewed up recently and were tapping for the first time. 10 gallons of IPA, split into two batches with different hopping, and 5gal of sweet stout that had merlot-soaked oak cubes added. It was our first attempt at cask conditioning and a definite success. the stout was great, but not yet merlot-y enough. the ipa’s were both fantastic and it was tough trying to decide between them. we loved the finish of the amarillo batch, but thought it needed something more on the front end. the simcoe+cascade batch was great, but not as nice on the finish as the other batch. so we ended up with a hybrid of the two: simcoe for FWH and bittering and amarillo the rest of the way.

tim’s wit, crushed and ready.

the amarillo ipa in my volo cask fest 2005 glass. just look at that huge, rocky head and the massive chunky lace. it doesn’t get much better than that.

tim working the mash for the wit and eric working on the ruination clone.

closeup of the ruination

and tim’s wit

there’s me checking on the works.

that’s me working the mash on the ruination and eric checking the temperature.

damn that looks good.

jenn hooked us up with another great brew day lunch.

the ipa approaching boiling and the ruination rockin’ along.

eric skimming the FWH and scum from the ipa. chunky!

tim’s wit approaching boiling too.

3 burners with 3 pots and 3 batches of beer.

the ruination looking chunky and angry.

the ipa boiling away too

and the wit.

me checking out one of the beers with the refractometer.

fast forward a few hours. the beers are all in the fermenters and eric and i were relaxing with a few choice beverages. here you have some great lakes blackout stout. damn good stuff.

some of the evening’s beers: bushwakker wheatwine in the cool ceramic swingtop, the blackout stout, and a bell’s expedition stout. not pictured was a great lakes burning river pale ale and a whole bunch of scotch ale when i wooped eric’s ass in some toblero.

the beers (ruination on the back left, ipa’s up front), happily fermenting away. fred aging the back corner. that crazy bastard hit 12.17% and 83.78% attenuation.

tim brought his wit home and pitched it there. as you can see, it was really happy and spewing out the airlock.

Finally, the brew day we’ve been waiting for has arrived. Quite a while ago Russ and I (Eric) discussed brewing up a clone of Hair of the Dog Fred barleywine. It kicks ass, therefor we must brew it. Circular logic, because if we brew it, it must kick ass. Also on our plate was a Merlot Stout that Russ tried at the Minneapolis Town Hall Brewery, and since I’m up for brewing just about anything, a recipe was thrown together. We also decided to brew up 10 gallons of IPA, using two different hopping schedules per 5 gallons, just cause we can, and how else to use the 2 pounds of Simcoe and 2 pounds of Amarillo I picked up from morebeer.com? Actually I could think of a lot of ways but we haven’t done a proper IPA in a long while, so we’re due.

I arrived around 9:15 am, ready to go, and back at Russ’s place we finalized our recipes and weighed out the grain. Turned out we were short on Munich malt, so instead of Munich our IPA got Aromatic malt and some Honey malt, also from morebeer.com. The epic barleycrusher burned through our grains in no time, although the rye malt for the Fred clone was a bitch due to the hardness and size of the grain, although after some intense labour all was well. Just before 11 am we were told Tim had decided to ditch his plans and come help us brew, always great to have an extra set of hands, and he brought some nice beers to sample as well.

The merlot stout was the smallest of the brews so it was mashed/boiled first, came out as expected, and then Fred followed. The brewday worked out really well, due to the long boil on Fred (2 1/2 hours.) That extra time gave us some leeway to get the IPA started and before long everything had fallen into place. Our beers have come out way above gravity due to ridiculous efficiency, but extra boiloff gave us some room to dilute on the IPA. Russ and I had everything in the fermenters and in the basement by 9 pm, with a total of 21 gallons or so fermenting away. This gave us time to sample some more beers, including the nice coffee porter brewed by Russ and Taavi, as well as Russ’ cider. A perfect complement while rocking out to Guitar Hero.

Heres our weighed out grain bills for the day. From left to right: IPA, Fred, and Merlot Stout. Looks great.

The excellent barleycrusher chewing away. We’re just laughing now while chump homebrews grind by hand.

Another shot of the fabulous barleycrusher, crushing barley.

The Merlot Stout is mashing in the short pot on the left, while sparge water is heating in the converted keg on the right. The plywood is a macgyver’d windshield that Russ whipped up that morning.

Russ looking grim and holding something in his hand.

This is the Merlot Stout during the mash, sure as hell looks like a stout!

The Merlot Stout in the lauter bucket, leaving the cooler free to sparge Fred.

Heres me looking grim/maybe hungover/tired, but all that keeps a brewer on his toes.

Heres Fred being sparged, we sampled a real bottle of the Fred while this happened, and the colour was pretty damn closed.

Heres Tim looking absolutely not grim at all. Ruthless Brewing has convinced me that all homebrewers should have beards.

The remnants of a fantastic lunch, spawning energy to be used creating brewing mayhem. Jenn once again hooked us up with a great lunch.

Me skimming the scum off the Merlot Stout, I can tell its me by the badass New Balance kicks.

Some of the aforementioned mayhem: Thats 2 oz of first wort hops caking up as Fred came to a boil. note that there is about 9.5gal in a 13.5gal converted keg and it’s still close to boil over. the beer was clearly angry.

Another shot of that insane angry first wort hop action, Tim is proving its metal by throwing up the horns. \m/ Dethklok roks.

Fred as it begins its 2 1/2 hour journey at a boil. Reduced from 9.5 gallons to 6 gallons.

Another shot of Fred boiling, with the sparge water for the IPA on the other burner.

A shot of the IPA being sparged, and collecting in the brew kettle. Half of this was removed and boiled in the 10 gallon pot, to use different hop schedules.

Another shot of the sweet sweet IPA wort.

Russ and Tim fiddling around on the computer, browsing some Pr0n, err… recipes.

A shot of the brews we sampled over the course of the day. I count 7 Beeradvocate Top 10’s in there. Not bad at all.

perkuno’s hammer
celebrator
sinebrychoff porter
dreadnaught
dfh 90min
gumballhead
hotd fred
brooklyn monster ale 2005
flying dog horn dog barleywine

not pictured, but we also sampled some Sheaf Stout too.

Nice shot of the fermenter rack Grub built. The two in the front on top are the IPA’s, behind that are the Fred and Merlot Stout. On the bottom is the Oaked Wee Heavy, RIS, Wheat Wine and Bastard Child.

Another shot of happy beer in carboys.

Huge krausen on the IPA’s, nice and full of hops, the smell was fantastic.

Bunch of corny kegs filled with delicious, delicious beer.

Dedicated brewcorner in Russ’ basement, where the action begins and ends.

Russ’ beer fridge, has capacity for dispensing 3 corny kegs at the moment, with room for some extra beers.

Nothing greater than a freezer full of hops. Must be 4-5 pounds in there total. All sorts of great stuff.

update by Russ, monday aug 28th.

checked gravities on all 4 beers wed evening. here’s the status:

fred has dropped from 1.099 to 1.018. that’s 80.54% attenuation and 10.83% abv. oh yeah, and that’s before i added the pound of candi sugar, so it should gain another 1.04% abv if that all gets consumed, and maybe more if we got the yeast excited enough. that’s a 1.107 OG that should finish no higher than 1.018. yowza. interested to see where this one ends up.

the stout is being somewhat uncooperative. after throwing it on a yeast cake of wyeast 1968 (london esb) it did nothing. still no sign of activity on monday the 21st, so i smacked a fresh pack of 1968 that i had in the fridge, let it swell and pitched it in. it showed some life, but never got a really strong krausen going. it was mostly stopped again by wed when i took gravities. started at 1.062 and was down to 1.023. that’s 64.95% attenuation and 5.19% abv. that yeast should hit 67-71% attenuation, but it also might not have been done. i’ll see how they look in the next day or so and go from there.

both halves of the ipa are looking good. the simcoe/cascade half started at 1.065 and was down to 1.019, so 69.63% attenuation and 6.09% abv. the amarillo half started at 1.067 and was down to 1.019 too, for 70.49% attenuation and 6.35% abv. might have dropped a little more since. both looking good.

fred will stay in primary for at least a few days, then likely get a longish secondary. right now i’m debating what to do with the others, whether to throw them into a keg now to secondary and carbonate, or transferring to secondary for a week and then into a keg to condition them. should be clearer if i do a real secondary, but i thought the extra yeasties might help speed up conditioning. they’re being cask conditioned, so a little residual yeast is ok, as is lower carbonation. at this point i’ll probably leave them in primary until thursday and then keg and prime them.

since jayc relocated to PA earlier this year we haven’t had him around for any brew days, so when he said he was going to be in town for the weekend it seemed like a great excuse to brew something. we tossed around some recipe ideas and since i had a big bag of wheat and we’ve got a truckload of hops we decided to try brewing up a wheatwine with lots of amarillo. we put together an initial recipe, aiming for a gravity of 1.121 and over 50% wheat.

on brew day we got setup and weighed everything out. as always, the barley crusher tore through the malt without breaking a sweat. however, when it came time to grind the wheat that wasn’t the case. the first problem was that the extremely hard wheat was a little too much for the motor, so we threw the hand crank back on and got to work. that worked for a little while, but then something odd started happening. the hand crank and shaft were turning, but the wheat wasn’t moving. we scooped most of the wheat out of the hopper and could see that even though the crank was turning, the roller inside the mill was not. if i turned the crank backwards a little and then went forward it’d grind a little, then stick again. at this point i was panicing that the precious barleycrusher was broken and that we didn’t have anywhere near the amount of wheat we wanted. we decided to test whether it’d still crush barley, and it seemed to work fine, which was a relief. so we adjusted the recipe and replaced the unground wheat with maris otter. still a big, badass wheat beer, even if it wasn’t quite what we were aiming for. the final recipe for the wheatwine still looks damn good.

when Jenn saw that we had less wheat than we wanted (27% instead of about 55%) she dubbed the beer “mini-wheat” (something i often eat for breakfast). it seemed appropriate, but we kind of laughed it off…

the expected grain bill for the day. on the left about 45% barley, and on the right about 55% malted wheat.

i think this was during mash out…something that involved the mash sitting on the burner.

the hop bill for the day. simcoe and chinook for bittering and lots of amarillo.

mmmm, skum.

just one of the beers jay supplied for the brew day, the liquer de malt. the finest malt liquor i’ve ever had….but that still doesn’t mean it’s really all that good. of course, dogfish head knows that all malt liquor should be in 40oz portions and be served from a paper bag. the only problem with this is that it’s bottle conditioned and chunky as hell. even carefully pouring into pint glasses, the last glass was pretty chunky. i swear there was whole kernels of corn in there.

jay and i admiring some beer. i can’t remember if it was the LdM or not. we drank alot of beer that day.

there’s me skimming some skum.

jay loves his malt liquor.

first half of the bittering addition.

admiring the aroma of the hops.

and the second half of the bittering addition.

jay and i spilling some malt liquor “for our homies”.

right about now the beer got really angry with us. about 7 gallons in a 15.5 gallon keg and it was ready to boil over.

a long boil that was mostly uneventful, but we didn’t have quite as much boil off as we expected so we ended with just over 6gal at 1.088 instead of the 5gal at 1.110 we were expecting…another way this beer taunted us. at this point i accepted the title of “mini-wheat”.

the photo above shows the beer less than 4 hours after pitching and already blowing off like mad.

the beers we sampled on the brew day and the previous night. Jan dropped by and brought some authentic czech pilsiners and a bottle of speedway stout. i’ll never say no to some alesmith. lots of fine beers, including a bunch of homebrew that wasn’t pictured.

sly fox 113 ipa
marin brewing co ipa
lagunitas old gnarleywine
hair of the dog fred from the wood
brooklyn black chocolate stout 03/04
brooklyn black chocolate stout 05/06
dogfish head liquor de malt
alesmith speedway stout
stone 9th anniversary
rye barleywine
slatopramen
primus
original flag porter

after a week this one had dropped from 1.088 to 1.021, which is
74.76% attenuation and 8.92% ABV. tasted fantastic. if i didn’t know better i’d swear it had apricots in it. looking forward to drinking this one!

one final note on the barely crusher. even after the trouble i had with the wheat (and the same issue with the rye in our fred clone) i still love this thing. i emailed the manufacturer to tell them about my problems. Randy immediately replied and was very apologetic. he told me that since i had already figured out what the issue was there was no need to return my barley crusher to them for inspection. he said that if i felt OK with taking my mill apart and installing a new roller he’d ship me one out right away, otherwise i could return the mill to them and they’d happily install and return it to me. i gave him my info and less than a week after i emailed them i had the new roller in my hand. not only does the barley crusher kick ass, the lifetime warantee and customer service are also awesome. as their website says, homebrewers can be sure that “this will be the only grain mill they will ever purchase!”. i still can’t recommend them highly enough. buy a barley crusher. you will be very happy you did.

this saturday rob and i celebrated canada day by brewing up a batch of beer. when it looked like nobody was available for last weekend’s brew day, i sent out an email asking about everyone’s availability and inquiring as to whether we should postpone. as it turned out, the only person available to brew this weekend was rob, and since rob doesn’t make it out to brew with us very often i decided that we should definitely brew somewhere on the 1st so he’d be included. since i was the only other person available, that meant brewing at my place.

since it was just rob and i, we started talking about our recipe options. rob didn’t feel like the chocolate vanilla stout from his wishlist, but said he’d be interested in an IPA or something for the summer. since we hadn’t done an IPA since last fall, i thought it was a good idea, and i even had yeast (wyeast 1056) and a variety of hops that would go great in an american IPA. his other suggestion was to make an arrogant bastard clone. i have read a few discussions on cloning the bastard on the homebrewing forum at beer advocate, so i knew that the recipe would require lots of chinook, a hop i didn’t have on hand. a little searching and i found a good clone recipe that seemed to have lots of positive response (both on that site and beer advocate). however, i also didn’t have the 120L crystal that was required. i quickly checked out paddock wood and was in luck: they sell both extra dark crystal at 125L and chinook. in total the order would come to about $20 for 1kg of crystal and 6oz of chinook. both rob and i were ok with the slightly higher cost for the batch, so i finalized our recipe and placed the order.

rob arrived shortly before 10am on saturday. i’d already measured out our water and had it heating and was working on weighing out the grain. finished off my bag of maris otter, so we had to suppliment with 10.8# of the generic british 2-row. with more than half maris otter and all the crystal and chinook, i’m guessing we won’t notice the difference.

the day went smoothly, with the only real problem being the wind. it was so windy that it seemed to take forever to heat things up (heating water, mashing out, boiling). it took 2 hours for the 14 gallons to reach a boil, which is much longer than usual. i kept turning up the burner, but it didn’t seem to matter much. i wasn’t too suprised by this when we were cleaning up and i saw that the bottom of the kettle was completely clean. usually the outside is black from the burner and sometimes the inside gets at least a little bit of stuff, but today both were clean. we just weren’t getting very efficient heating with the wind. not really a big deal though, since it just meant that we were able to sit around and relax. rob especially appreciated this, since his last two brew days were the insanely long and very cold imperial stout/rochefort brew day in november and the insanely hot and fairly long ipa/scottish brew day last june. sitting around and relaxing on a nice breezy saturday afternoon was certainly enjoyable.

by 7pm the cleanup was done and the carboys each had 5.5 gallons of our bastard child, aerated and pitched with a big starter of wyeast 1056.

after doughing in, you see rob checking the temp and me manning the mash paddle. we were still a little shy of our target temp, so we had to throw it on the burner for a bit to bring it up to 155F.

brew day snacks, and healthy ones too! jenn always takes care of us, making sure we’ve got food and beverages on brew day. today it was some strawberries and cherries. tasty!

this time we’re doing our mash out, with rob again watching the temperature and me stirring away. the first where we were actually working, and then posing for the photo.

looking good already.

with the mash out done, we loaded up the tun and got ready to sparge.

first runnings. didn’t take long for this to start running clear. great colour too.

and a while later we had collected 14 gallons, so that following the 90 min boil we’d end up with about 11 gallons of sweet tasty wort.

the hop bill for this recipe is simple: an assload of chinook. that works out to 2.5oz at 90min, 2oz at 30min, and 1.5oz at flameout.

on the burner and starting the (slow) journey towards boiling. here we see the first bit of hot break forming on the surface.

rob showing off my arrogant bastard pint glass, containing a bit of ed fitz. upon taking his first sip, rob said something along the lines of “oh my god, that’s fucking awesome”. exactly the sort of review i like to hear.

finally boiling. it was quite windy out, so it took about 2 hours to reach boiling. i really need to make some kind of a wind screen for the burner for days like this.

guess the burner managed to get pretty hot, because one of the feet sunk into the driveway about an inch, and the others made a smaller impression.

the tree next door was dropping pollen all day, and with the wind it was really getting everywhere (including into the boil pot). i joked that we would have to add “pollen” to the recipe. realistically, i don’t think enough got in to have any real effect.

just about done the boil. you can see the hops (4.5oz at this point) rolling along.

a shot of our handy measuring stick. i took a piece of 1/2″ dowel that was laying around and measured 1 gallon increments. i made a notch at each point, then cut in roman numerals to indicate every two gallons. works with our three converted kegs, and for the other 10 gallon pot we just use the stick and a tape measure.

the beer going into the carboys. we ended up with 11 gallons at 1.078 for 88% efficiency.

both carboys got aerated for about 90 seconds with pure oxygen through a 0.5 micron diffusion stone, then got a nice big starter of wyeast 1056.

today was another brew day. the plan for today was two follow-on batches using the yeast cakes from the “single malt scotch” ale: an oaked wee heavy (our first time using oak) and eric’s project, a clone of Hair of the Dog‘s Fred. unfortunately, eric is having more back troubles, and between that and scheduling issues he wasn’t able to come out today. so i threw his half of the yeast cake in the fridge for later use, and decided to go ahead with the wee heavy. eric also recently graduated and has joined the “real world”. i don’t think he’s enjoying the schedule as much as student life ;)

since none of the biergotter regulars were available, i asked taavi if he’d like to come out again for the brew day. that’s when he let me know that he’d recently got engaged and asked if i’d consider making all the beer for his wedding. i congradulated him and said that it would be an interesting and fun project. since the wedding is scheduled for august of next year, we had lots of time to decide on recipes and do some trial batches. i think that the bulk of the beer will be something along the lines of our pale ale, but we’ll probably also do a batch or two for those with more “educated” tastes. when i asked about what sort of things he likes to drink, the first thing he mentioned was mill street‘s coffee porter. as i love almost all things porter, including mill street’s porter, and i’ve long been considering trying a coffee porter, i was definitely interested. i started with our sweet johnny porter and came up with what i’m currently calling java johnny porter. it’s a fairly straight robust porter, but i’ll be cold steeping some coffee and adding it at bottling time. delicious!

the day started around 9:00am. i went out to the garage to set things up for the brew day and found that almost everything was covered in a layer of dirt, shingle bits, and wood chips. we had our roof redone yesterday, and it appears that all kinds of crap rained down when they were stripping off the old shingles. maybe it’s only really an issue since our roof was definitely past its prime. taavi arrived at about 9:30, which turned out to be perfect timing as i’d just finished cleanup and had started weighing out the grain for the two batches.

the other change for today was no more protein rests. so far we’ve been doing them with all of our all-grain batches, but as i’ve learned more i don’t think it’s necessary. these days malts are very well modified, so in general there’s no need to do a protein rest. i tested this out on our last brew day, skipping this rest for the pale ale v2. it turned out just as good as the previous run and we had no problems with efficiency either.

our usual brew day procedure is heat up 1 quart of water per pound of grain to 130F, mix well, and when we’re not at 122F we’d heat it to reach that point. this would rest for 30 minutes. then we’d boil 1/2 quart of water per pound of grain, add that and then heat it until the grain is at the desired temp for the saccarification rest (150F-160F) and rest there for an hour. with the last brew of the pale ale, i did the same thing, but without a rest between adding the 1 qt/lb at 130F and adding the 1/2 qt/lb at boiling. that worked out ok, but is kind of annoying. this time i decided to try out a feature in promash that i’ve never used before, the strike temp too. this thing is pretty cool. i stuck in the mash tun thermal mass (i used 0 as a first try), total grain weight, water/grain ratio or total water, the desired strike temp, and the current grain temp. i did this for the two batches and when i did the dough in both batches exactly hit their target temps for the sacc rest. this was much easier (and faster) than our usual procedure.

started both batches pretty much at the same time, with the sacc rest for the wee heavy starting about 15min before the porter. i wanted to run them pretty much in parallel to minimize time for the brew day, but then realized that the one thing i can’t do in parallel is chilling, and with the extra 30min on the boil of hte wee heavy, i’d have them finsihing at almost the same time. however, that didn’t account for differences in the time to sparge both of them. the smaller grain bill on the porter and the bucket tun made the grain bed set quickly and the sparge on this one was done quite fast. actually ended up with the porter reaching a boil 30min before the wee heavy, and with the extra boil time on the wee heavy it meant we ended up with an hour between when the two would finish. just enough time to chill the porter, transfer it into the fermenter, and get ready for the second batch.

when the yeast was pitched and everything was cleaned up it wasn’t even 5:00pm yet. pretty good for two batches.

on with the photos!

the barley crusher tearing through some grain. man i love this thing. best brewing investment so far.

the wee heavy grain, waiting for dough in.

water for the wee heavy rising towards the target of 167F.

jenn came out to say hello and checked on the water for the porter.

exterior view of the new bucket tun, for use with “small” batches (under 15#).

interior view of the tun. the manifold is a ring of soft copper tubing with slits cut about every quarter inch, then a small piece of tubing joining it with one end of the hose barb. the other end of the hose barb goes out through a hole in the side of the bucket and has a hose attached for collecting sweet sweet wort. there’s also a few pieces from the old cooler manifold, which finally died after the last batch. one piece raises it up off the bottom of the bucket, the other lifts it and helps push it away from the side, closer to the center of the bucket.

the new copper manifold for the cooler. the two pieces in the center are scraps that are used for positioning the manifold in the center of the tun and raised up off the bottom.

that’s me positioning the new maifold in the cooler. the first piece of copper tubing is used to lift it off the bottom of the cooler and help keep the rubber stopper in place.

final position of the tun. there’s an elbow and small piece of tubing on the upper left end to hold it away from the side and off the bottom. the outlet is actually hidden at the lower right end of the photo.

that’s me again, this time checking on the vorlauf of the porter. already nice and clear!

collecting the sweet sweet wort for the porter.

and collection for the wee heavy.

close up view of the porter. note the adjustable wrench on the right hand side of the image. picked up this tip from one of the guys who sent us an ask biergotter message. richard dropped us a note and tim and i went out to visit one of his brew days. we sampled some of each other’s beers and traded stories. when i first noticed him using an adjustable wrench to control the flow from his tun i thought it was a little odd, but then i tried it out and it’s great. hose clamps never seem to stop in just the right spot, but wiht the adjustable wrench you can set it to exactly where you want.

close up on the wee heavy too. another adjustable wrench in use here too.

promash and lunch: sausages, munchos, and the resurrection of the edmund fitzgerald. damn this stuff is good!

hops ready for addition. on the left is the 15min and 0min fuggle additions for the porter (60min addition of northdown had already gone in), and on the right is the 90min northern brewer addition and 10min fuggle addition for the wee heavy.

the porter, happily boiling away.

the wee heavy, not quite boiling yet.

shinny copper manifolds!

the porter heading into the fermenter. taavi looks like a proud father with his first beer.

damn your eyes, porter!

the remains of the scotch ale. about a half gallon of beer and a whole lot of yeasty goodness.

the wee heavy heading into the fermenter.

post brew day carnage. 3 kegs in front, one of the two propane tanks, cooler tun, two burners and extra grain under the table, two 5gal pots and one 10gal pot, bucket tun, bin with all the odds and ends.

both batches in the fermenters. porter on the left and wee heavy on the right.

next up: rob and i will be brewing up 10 gallons of an arrogant bastard clone. chinooky goodness!

couldn’t decide what to call this entry, but since i’ve been procrastinating putting it up for over a week, this one seemed appropriate.

so june 3rd was another biergotter brew day. tim and eric came out to my place bright and early. the plan for the day was two 10 gallon batches. the first would be a rebrew of the pale ale that i brewed a few months ago, pale ale v2.

the second batch was an experiment that i’ve been considering for a while, a scotch ale using peat and smoked malts and using some oak, taking some of the character from my favourite single malt scotches and applying that to beer. since none of us has worked with smoked malts or oak before, we decided to simplify things a bit and save the oak for another batch. after a bit of research i came up with the recipe for v1 of the “single malt scotch” ale.

up in the toronto area (really, all of southwestern ontario) it’s pretty hard to find any good hombrewing supplies. tons of wine shops, but no good beer shops. as a result, it usually means when one of us is in windsor we’ll make a trip over to the detroit area for supplies.

after reading this post on beeradvocate about a place called “Adventures in Homebrewing” selling corny kegs for $13, i started looking for their website. sure enough, within a few minutes google had pointed me to the Adventures in Homebrewing website. poking around on their site i found that they had much more than just good deals on corny kegs (which are now $15, and still a good deal). I emailed them and got a quick, friendly reply from Jason. then eric emailed him to get a kegerator setup, and jason hooked him up too. i was initally planning to hit there for hardware and make another stop for ingredients, but i was able to find just about everything i could imagine at their shop, so i just went there.

with the recipes in hand, i made the trip over to detroit to check out a adventures. As Jason had told me, Matt was working when i arrived. he was just finishing up eric’s order and was very helpful as i gathered up all of the stuff i needed. tim also decided to go with the same thing that eric was getting, so Matt worked on getting everything for his order. they were even nice enough to assemble the towers for us (and watching him do it, i’m glad: it looked like a pain in the ass).

so i’d be happy to recommend Adventures in Homebrewing to anyone in the detroit area looking for a LHBS, and also to anyone looking for a good place for mail order. can’t beat the price of those kegs!

anyway, the brew day started off a bit rocky, with tim and eric getting a little lost and arriving a half hour late, but my newly-motorized barley crusher made up for that in no time. it took us all of 15 minutes to weigh out the grain for both batches and grind it all. sweet!

the rest of the brew day went fairly smoothly (other than somehow managing to forget to mashout the pale ale) and we even finished up earlier than usual. jan stopped by after he finished work and got to check out the end of the day.

we got to sample some neat beers too. jayc supplied us with a bottle of weyerbacher double simcoe ipa and decadence. we compared this with our dipa, dry hopped with simcoe. the decadence was interesting, and the double simcoe ipa was damn tasty. i should also thank jay for the homebrew too, since i finished off my stash a while ago and he hooked me up with some of his stash.

didn’t take too many photos, but here they are.

my ‘turkey fryer’ burner. the outer ring is exactly the same size as the ring on the bottom of our keg kettles, so they don’t fit properly on it. i added some brackets to create about a 3″ border around the edge and allowing the kegs to sit on top happily. cost about $6 and worked great!

the motorized barley crusher, waiting for action…

…and running at full speed. eric’s topping it up as it runs. tore through the 16# grain bill for the pale ale in record speed.

eric weighing out the grain for the scotch ale. look at the mess he’s making! oh wait, i did that earlier…

tim, and the maiden voyage of his cooler tun. it’s currently filled with the mash for the pale ale.

starting collection of the pale after finishing vorlauf.

i think this was mashing out on the scotch ale. definitely not mash out on the pale since we forgot to do that, and you just saw it being sparged.

tim starting to load his tun up with the mash for the scotch ale. you can see the nice copper manifold that he built for it. worked out pretty well. i’ve got one about 75% done for jay’s cooler, and a soft copper coil for a smaller bucket tun. the old soft copper manifold from jay’s cooler finally died after the ed fitz brew day and jayw has the bucket tun down in windsor for him to do some brewing. since he’s a proud new daddy we’re not sure how soon that’ll happen :)

and then we jump ahead to 24 hours after pitching. that’s the “single malt scotch” ale. a week later it’s still got a nice head of krausen on top, which i expected as i know that the scottish strain is fairly slow. the current plan is to transfer it to secondary on june 24th, when eric and i will be brewing up 5 gallons each of a wee heavy and a hair of the dog fred clone, with each of them going onto one of the yeast cakes from the scottish. looks like jan will come back for the full brew day experience on that one. always good to get other people hooked!

and the pale ale. after 8 days in primary it had dropped from 1.045 down to 1.011, which is 74.86% attenuation and 4.47% abv. also saved the yeast cake for some future adventure.

an easter weekend brew day for the biergotter crew, even if there were only two of us present today. that’s ok, the beer goes farther when you only split it two ways! :)

eric and i tossed around a bunch of ideas about what to brew, but last weekend when he said ‘hey, we should do a clone of ed fitz’, (referring to the fantastic Edmund Fitzgerald porter by the Great Lakes Brewing Co) i was sold. porters are my favourite style, and ed fitz is one of my all-time favourite beers, so it didn’t take much convincing. i found some info about the ingredients and what was supposed to be a close recipe, and went shopping. hit the usual wine and beer factory for some yeast, hops, and grain on tuesday and we were set.

today also gave me a chance to try out some new hardware: my shiny new barley crusher grain mill, the deep-discount stir plate and glassware, and a nice oak mash paddle that i made this week (post on that to follow). the barley crusher was kickass, and tore through the grain in no time (even with cranking it by hand). crush looked great with the factory setting and efficiency is right around where i expected. the stir plate led to a boatload of really happy yeast. and the paddle worked out even better than i thought it would.

also present for part of today were a couple of guests, rob and taavi. both are interested in learning more about brewing, so i invited them to drop by and see how we do things.

on with the photos!

two of the stars of the show: the stir plate and barley crusher. smacked the yeast thursday morning and transferred it into a starter thursday night just before taking this photo.

mmmm, portery goodness. nice color, even on the head. this is the grain during the saccarification rest.

rob (left) and eric (right), consuming some much-needed coffee. note the handle of the mash paddle sticking out of the keg on the left. more photos of it in a second.

heating it up for mash out.

eric stirring the mash.

closer view of the mash paddle, made from a piece of red oak. it worked much better than the broom handle we’ve been using.

a couple quality shots of me cleaning out the tun, transferring the spent grain to a clear garbage bag so it can go out with our organic recycling. eric needs a little more practice with the camera (although he’d probably blame his hangover).

not one, not two, but THREE shots of the hot liquor on its way towards the boil. i think this was about when rob and eric said it’d be boiling “anytime now”. it actually started boiling about 45minutes later. the wind seemed to make things heat up kind of slowly, and led to a larger boil off than we expected. more on that later.

so the barley crusher is supposed to fit nicely on top of a 5 gallon pail. lets just say that it doesn’t work quite as well on a 6.5 gallon pail. started trying to turn the crank and promptly flipped the barely crusher, spilling about a half pound of pale malt all over the garage floor. oh well, we figured our efficiency would make up for it (and it did). this won’t be an issue once i get around to motorizing it…

here we have rob skimming the hot break. mmm, skum.

eric and taavi monitoring the first carboy as it fills.

me, keeping an eye on the racking cane and trying to keep it out of the sludge at the bottom of the kettle. can you tell porter makes me happy?

two shots of the starter, just prior to pitching. stepped it up on friday, so by pitching time it was full of nice, happy yeast.

the two carboys after about 90 seconds of pure oxygen from the 0.5micron diffusion stone and pitching the yeast. fitted with blowoffs and ready for what i expect to be a fast and vigorous ferment.

when the day was done we had 10.5 gallons of wort at 1.075. woops! we were aiming for 1.058 from 80% efficiency (which should have gave us about 5.8-6.0%abv), but actually hit 81%. pre-boil we had about 13.2 gallons at 1.053, which looked fine, but we lost almost 3 gallons during the 90 minute boil. so that put us at 1.075, which will likely put it closer to 7.5%abv. oh well, if it turns out anywhere close to ed fitz we’ll be pretty darn happy.

oh yeah, here’s the recipe. enjoy!