Out Of Key Brewing

On my project list for the summer are:

1. Clean In Place Corny Cleaner – This basically pumps cleaning solution into your keg poppits and cleans the inside at the same time, while keeping the mess contained in the bottom of a bucket.  Some good links on the topic are available on the brewing network forums and over at slobrewer there is a great write up on how to create a CIP system for Corny kegs.
2. Brew Cart – Single Tier, 2 burners, ability to store my vessels under the cart.  .  My friend jon has assured me that he knows someone that can do the welding.  I just need to come up with the plans.

I recently bought a 10 gallon corny keg to use as a fermenter.  It is perfect to ferment lagers in because it is as tall as a standard corny so it fits nicely in my kegerator.  In order to use it as a fermenter I simply connect a piece of tubing to a gas ball valve, connect that to gas in, and run that into a growler of sanitizer.  It worked perfectly when I fermented my Yellow Sally Pilsner.

On Sunday I used it as my fermenter for my Wader Patch Wit.  I sanitized it, racked into it, connected the gas valve to the beverage out post….wha wha what!…The next morning when I walked into the fermentation chamber (basement bathroom), the active fermentation had pumped four of the five gallons onto the floor and carpet.

Quite a mess.

Quite a big mistake.

Not one I will be making anytime soon again.

This past Sunday my brewing buddy, his dad, and I brewed up thirty gallons (three ten gallon batches) of summer beers.  Whats a summer beer?  Well for me Summer beers are light in color, typically have wheat in the grist, and are refreshing in nature.  Every year I brew my Wader Patch Wit so that we definatly in the plan.  Last year I brewed up an Oberon Clone  – cleverly named Oberkey Wheat.  My lovely wife did a side by side blind tasting of it and chose it over the real deal so that is in the cards as well.  The third batch was kind of a toss up.  I love me some hops, and I love trying new things so I figured I would make a run at a Black IPA as well.  I named it the Black Beta IPA.

As typical Jon was late getting to the house and had some lame excuse about having to clean up dog vomit.  I say if you are going come bearing excuses next time make it something original.  I mean dog vomit, that is weak.

It was a long ass day lasting over 12 hours.  Longer than usual but fun none the less.  I think the problem was that we were very inefficient in getting our recipes ready for the next batch.  Instead of having batches ready to boil immediately following the cleaning of the boiler, there was a lot of downtime.   I think honestly that it may be my last day of doing 3 batches in a single day.

I modified my standard wit recipe adding 1 oz of organic lavendar from whole foods @ 5 minutes.

The black beta is more of a brown beta at this point.  I am going to try and take the color darker by doing a very quick steep of probably a lb of dark grains, doing a 10 minute boil, cooling and adding to the exsiting fermentation.  It should work, I will keep you posted.

The beer finished at 1020 which puts it at about 9.3%.    I kegged it with 1.6 oz corn sugar and pitched some Nottingham as a bottling strain.  The original yeast was pretty much tapped out I believe.

The beer is very alcohol hot right now.  Its going to have to sit until mid summer before I crack it out to sample it.  It will probably get another dose of dryhops before serving.

I will say that wyeast 1318 really clears a beer nicely.  Two weeks after fermentation started and the beer is very clear.  Clear enough to serve.  A month of cold conditioning should really clear it up.  Another really nice thing about the yeast is that it is VERY easy to crop top.  I probably have a solid pint of gen 2 yeast from an earlier batch of it.  The only thing I am still trying to get a grip on is that it produces a touch of Diacetyl.  Not a bad thing just alittle different.

I don’t claim to have anywhere near the talent that musicians have however I think that the analogy holds.  When listening to music I think its the small subtleties that make a song what it is.  Its not always the hard driving guitar that makes the music but rather what it is you hear in the background.  Or the combination of all the instruments being played together at the right times.  Or sometimes it is just that guitar hitting you in the face.  Man sometimes that it.

Beer is similar.  Sometimes its about laying flavors, the crystals, munich’s, the base malts.  Its about that that subtle hit of coriander in the background of the wit.  It about the balance between the hops and malt.  And yes sometimes it about getting smacked in the face with the hops.

In both cases making music and beer isnt hard.  Making good Music and Beer is difficult.

This past Friday I brewed my house rye beer.  The beer is named harry knuckle in honor of the lost hair on the knuckles of my harry friend Mitch’s.  The first time we brewed he didnt have the  common sense brewing experience to know that you should not have your hand in the burner when you light it.  Needless to say the hair was the first thing to go.

The recipe is basically:

It should yield about 6 gallons of 1074 (based upon 75% efficiency)  wort after the boil.

In order to save time when doing a work day session, I have been doing all day mashes.  I will prep the grain,  water, and mash tun the night before, then the next morning before work I mash in, then run off when I return home.  I have done this once before for a pilsner and did see an increase in efficiency to about 80%, but that was nothing compared to what happened with this beer.  I ran off and sparged and collected just shy of 8 gallons.  I took the preboil graving and it was 1033 @ 210.  I went inside to do the temperature correction and was quite surprised to find the corrected reading was 1074.  That was my target post boil number!  When I did the calculations it showed that I was 97% efficient.

Now I still cant believe that number.  There is just no way that the beer came in with that high an efficiency, but I thankfully whatever the cause, I caught it before I started adding hops.  I added an ounce of Magnum bittering hops (75 min) bringing the total IBUs’ up to 115 and a SG of 1093.  So given the high gravity and the high IBU’s I now give you The Very Harry Knuckle, my first Double Rye IPA.

I pitched the yeast cake of Wyeast 1318 and it is currently fermenting @ 68 degrees.  By Sunday it was already down to 1030.  I suspect the long mash will result in low finishing gravity in the 1013-1017 range which would yield a ABV of around 10%.

It should be an interesting beer and I am looking forward trying it sometime in early May.

I have had some bad brew days before.  Things like stuck mashes or extended days of being covered in boiling mash, but I can honestly say Ive never done it with 6 bbls of hot mess.

I just wanted to send out a big congratulations to the Bruery for nearly making it to 1 year.  I have not had the pleasure of tasting any of Patrick’s beers yet, however the man is truly an inspired brewer.  If you want to hear about some of the amazing beers he is coming up with listen to the Brewing Network’s sunday session show he was on.

Additionally I would like to say a big thanks to him for taking the time to blog the entire process of getting his brewery off the ground.  It is a great source of information for every brewery to be out there.

So Congrats and may the next 11 months bring you more of the success you have experienced in the first 11 months.

Last year I decided to make a go at brewing a summer wheat beer with fruit.  There seems to be a lot of interest in the 21st Amendment’s Watermelon wheat so I thought I would that recipe as a basis for my recipe.

Sean O’Sullivan, the brewmaster at the 21A, is pretty tight lipped about his recipe but he has given several interviews over the past year that give many tips about the recipe.  I used these tips to derive my recipe.  So without further ado here are the notes:
•    The recipe is 60% pale malt, 40% Wheat – There are no notes of crystal in the grist.
•    Hallertauer Hops, 17 IBU
•    Clean yeast: Probably White Labs 001-  “O’Sullivan ferments with a house strain of ale yeast, which scavenges the sugar in the fruit and leaves the essence of watermelon without a sweet fruit flavor.”
•    400lbs of Watermelon In 370 Gallon Batch
•    Dry Crisp Finish (Low finishing gravity?)
•    Pale Straw Color
Based upon these notes I came up with the following for my recipe (10 gallons):

Grist:
12.00 lb    Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
8.00 lb    Wheat Malt, Bel (2.0 SRM)

Hops:
2.00 oz    Hallertauer [3.60%] (60 min)    Hops    14.7 IBU
2.00 oz    Hallertauer [3.60%] (5 min)    Hops    2.4 IBU

Mash @ 152 for 1 hr, Target Gravity is ~ 1050, Ferment in the Low to Mid 60s for 1 week.

On brewday or before cut the flesh from 1 20 lb watermelon.  This should yield approx 12-14 lbs of fruit. Put the chunks / juice in ziplock bags and freeze.  Quick note here my batch was ten gallons.  The important ration here is the about 1.2 lbs of raw watermelon into 1 gallon of beer.   Ive gone as high as 1.5 and it was still not overpowering.

Thaw and add to the primary fermenter after about 1 week, it should be towards the tail end of the fermentation.  This will restart the fermentation, like crazy.  Now this is important dont let anybody who will potentially be drinking the beer see inside the fermenter, because they will never drink it if you do.  It will be a yeasty watermelon mess, but damn it will smell good.

Before kegging/bottling pull out the chunks of watermelon.  I used a slotted spoon, this made transferring much easier, but it was still a pain in ass due to the seeds.

What you will have when you are done is a great summer beer.  Its not going to taste like a watermelon jolly rancher, it is going to be a nice wheat beer with great watermelon aroma and a strong hint of watermelon flavor.  Your guy friends will claim that its a chick beer, however they will quietly sneak back to your kegerator for a second or ever third glass.  As for the ladies, yes, they too will love it.

Brew it up and let me know how it turns out.