Back again

So I'm not entirely sure why I didn't post about my last three brews, but so far they're all fantastic.  I've all but licked my problem with overcarbonation, as the Hefe, the Red, and the Pale all came out at just under what I imagine their carbonation should be.  Which is a very good thing!  And instead of saving my last few bottles of porter for family and friends, I decided to just finish the rest of it.  It's so embarassing having to say "open it over a sink and pour slowly into a glass...and even then it still probably is going to foam out everywhere".  I'll never give out failed beer to anyone ever again.

Having just racked to secondary my fifth brew of the year, an IIPA, I can say with some certainty that I have a knack for brewing.  I'm very confident that once I get my temperatures under control (all but impossible in my current living situation) and up production (a nice conical fermenter perhaps) that my beer will be, dare I say it, approaching a nanobrewery in terms of quality.  Lots of ground to cover until then, and at least half a dozen batches once I feel I've dialed in a brewing setup.  Alas, that situation will not happen until far after grad school completes and I obtain a job (Amazon?  Google?  Valve?  Planetary Resources?  Seattle!) and my life somewhat stabilizes.

This, of course, assuming the world doesn't end as we know it in the coming year.

One form of temperature control that I can have more of a force over is mashing.  The pale ale, initially thought to be skunked, I now believe to have a sweeter and fuller feel due to my higher-than-optimal mash temperature.  I believe I mashed in the high 150s, rather than the low 150s to upper 140s.  Nevertheless, the beer is decent and it was a first round recipe.  Next time I make it, mayhaps soonish, I'll reduce the amount of color by a few points, drop the mash temp (conservatively low as opposed to slightly-riskily-higher), and split the batch into two.  I have an experiment to conduct with a new triple-recipe.  *cue maniacal laughter*

Brew 2, First Hefe

My second brew of 2012 and my first bottling finished, suprisingly, easier and cleaner than all previous batches. To start off with, I didn't have a boil-over. A combination of leaving one gallon (or so) out of the kettle until hot break and a constant skimming of foam caused there to be no boil-over, just a nice, smooth transition from not boiling to boiling.

However, it wasn't until I cooled the wort and pitched the yeast that I discovered my 4 gallon recipe was around 3 quarts short. Now, before with the porter I was a quart short. Now that I think about it, a quart over or under shouldn't matter as long as your gravity was hit correctly. Which, in this case, it was. However, being 3 quarts short made me wonder. Opening up the mash tun to retrieve a bag of grain and to begin the cleaning process I discovered my hose filter wasn't nicely settled on the bottom of the tun. It was, instead, suspended within the grain, leaving a good amount of delicious wort behind. So next time I need to remember that once I'm ready to begin the boil, give the tun a stir to make sure I got all the sweet liquid that I can get.

All in all, brewing today went off well. Stirring the cooler slightly caused the chilling process to go from boiling to 80F in the shortest time yet. It had to have been under 15 minutes, but I didn't check. Hopefully this yeast strain gives me the desired taste. I chose the Wyeast for it's bubblegum qualities, but my local store only had White Labs. We'll see how the taste comes out. All in all, ~3.2 gallons should end up being a tasty brew, and eventually (after a couple of refinements) a perpetual house brew. Oaked Hefeweizen, anyone?

Speaking of oaked, I had a thought that once I perfected my porter I'd take 1-gallon samples and subject them to various types of aging. My winter ale was ... ok ... with oak, but I had wanted it to be sweeter. The porter might benefit from the oak more than the winter ale did. But, after bottling the porter today (busy brew day...) I can say that it turned out, yet again, fantastic. The changes I made to the recipe really brought more chocolate and coffee and roasty goodness out. I'm excited to see how it turns out in a few weeks and I'm going to have to force myself to put a bottle away so I can age it.

Hefeweizen should be bubbling by the end of tonight, porter is bottled, and in two weeks I'll bottle the Hefe. I haven't decided if I'm going to bottle and brew in two weeks or if I'm going to bottle in two weeks, then in two more weeks brew an Irish Red. Today was fun, but it really did eat up my entire day. I want to brew 100 gallons this year, so once I crunch some more numbers I'll know if I'm going to be bottling in two weeks or repeating today in two weeks. Part of me feels that if I do what I did today every two weeks...by the end of the year I'm going to be burnt out. Don't want that.

Rocky start to 2012

After brewing with my father almost successfully sucked every drop of homebrewing desire I had, I had a hard time getting my head in the game to brew today. I'm glad that I did, but the whole process left me feeling drained and unhappy. Maybe I'm coming down with something, who knows.

But, yet again, I brew with a slew of problems. For starters, my mash temperature dropped from 156 to 146 over the course of an hour, I sparged with half a gallon too much water, causing a boil-over. I even took two large glasses of wort out and added them over the course of the boil. And, to top it all off, my dumb ass didn't use a hop bag for my aroma hop addition, so 2/3 of an ounce of hops adorned the last bit of wort. All in all I thought I used half a gallon too much water, but I ended up with 1-2 quarts too little in the fermenter.

There was good news, though. I hit my target OG (1.061, after a temperature adjustment). The yeast starter turned out fine and hopefully by the end of tonight I'll see bubbles. I also used proper cleanser this time (Easy Alkaline), which did a remarkably awesome job at cleaning the brew kettle of the boil-over junk.

Hopefully once I see bubbles and smell beer I'll start feeling better, but in the mean time it's time to start thinking about my next brewday in three weeks (the porter takes three weeks in the primary). It's going to be a simple hefeweizen that should have hints of bubblegum.

New year, new goal - 100 gallons!

Here I am in 2012, with a new brew plan and a brand new MLT (more on that in a bit). My goal is to brew 100 gallons of beer this year, across 8 recipes. I'm going to make five recipes on a cycle until I get them down. These will serve as my five house brews and the plan is to have them available at any time. A porter, red ale, pale ale, DIPA, and hefe. The porter and the hefe are the only recipes that have any of my modifications in them (porter has added coffee flavor and the hefe has my hand selected yeast), but hopefully by the end of it all all five will have sufficient modifications that I can give them a name.

I refuse to name a beer unless it's original enough that it's something new. With that in mind, I'm going to be making the big five beers on a cycle all year, with three beers being brewed later in the year for the holiday season. A pumpkin beer (with real pumpkin, recipe undetermined), an imperial harvest ale (everyone loved it despite it being terribly incomplete), and a christmas ale. Last year the Christmas ale had too much cherry and too much oak, so next year my goal is to make it the way I intended, that being like a gingerbread house in a bottle. So nix the cherries and half the oak and quadruple the ginger and add some to secondary. Or something like that, anyway.

But the real star of the 2012 season is my shiny new (and bright orange) Mash-Lauter ... container. I hate the word "tun" for some reason. Sarah's father gt me a 10 gallon watercooler for Christmas and today I purchased all the parts and put it together. No leaks! Though I did have to use two lock washers to get the installed hardware to sit snugly.

Unfortunately, my local home brew store is closed Monday, so bright and early (early being sometime in the afternoon) Tuesday I'm going to purchase ingredients and cleaners and a few other things. Brewday should be Thursday or Friday once I've had sufficient time to make a starter. Going to do all of my beers this year with starters because why not? I plan on making each of these beers at least three times, so if doing a starter I get weird results that can be attributed to a starter, then no more starters will I do. Also it'll give me an excuse to not have to buy yeast 15 times instead of a more comfortable 5.