Out Of Key Brewing

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.

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.

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.

This is a great discussion regarding wyeast 1318.  I recently brewed an IPA with this yeast and will be reporting back the results as soon as it is compelete

London ale III – ProBrewer Interactive.

I brewed on Saturday and had a great session.  First I cut the gap on mill to .031, down from .035.    I had been seeing very poor efficiency over my last couple batches and decided to try and combat it.  Every since I started using the pump and new manifold my efficiency was slipping.  My last batch it hit ~63% which was totally unacceptable.

Any time you change your brewing process you introduce new variables that will eventually need to be accounted for.  I have been lazy about it and I finally decided to do something about it.

In addition to cutting the gap I changed my vourlouf technique to encorporate the pump.  By running the output on the pump slow I was able to automate the vorloufing with the pump.  I just turned it on and came back in 20 minutes and the wort was crystal clear.  When I started to use the pump I installed quick disconnects on all of my brewing vessles.  The mash tun has a output and a return valve on back top side of mash tun.  I would love to post pictures of it however I am way too lazy to do that.  Credit on the extended vourlouf goes to Jonny over at LABrewer.  Its great to see him posting again (but where are the ruthless brewer archives) , that guy is a wealth of home brewing knowledge.

I ended up brewing an updated version of the turkey load lager, so it more closely reflects its name.  I want it to look like a generic light american lager but still be able to knock you on your ass with flavor.

Recipe

Mash at 150 for 75 minutes.  No mash out

Collected 5.75 gallons of Wort @ 1086 for a calculated efficiency of just shy of 74%.  It is currently fermenting @ 50 degrees in the fermentation chamber (the basement shower).

A lot of the TSP sold now in the US is actually Phosphate free TSP.  As crazy as that sounds (Tri Sodium Phosphate without the Phosphate is what exactly?), the product that is typically sold in its place is 100% Sodium Metasilicate which is also a strong base.  Additionally Sodium Metasilicate is the active ingredient in PBW.  PBW is composed basically composed of a strong base and surfactants.

Bottom line 2 Parts sodium metasilicate(TSP from ace) to 1 parts Oxyclean (or some other washing sodea) will work great and is a fine replacement for PBW.

For a further discussion check out the PBW vs OxyClean debate.