Author: Mark Linton

In a humble log cabin off an unregarded back road, somewhere, deep in the heart of Pennsylvania’s hill country, we find our intrepid hero — the Brush Valley Brewer.
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An Obsession with Brewing Protocol

Sacred Grounds:

“An obsession with brewing protocol is generally the mark of an amateur — that pitiable person who makes a simple thing complicated in the futile hope of feeling kinship with the professionals. Nevertheless, if you are making coffee you might as well make it well.” — Kelefa Sanneh

(Via Boing Boing.)

It is a quote about brewing coffee, but it seems to me to equally apply to brewing beer. Something I struggle with at the moment is trying to decide how much of what I know is how to use brewing equipment or brewing techniques and how much of it is how to brew beer.

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Changing the Night Horse

The start of the journal entry for my most recent batch of dry stout lists the changes from the previous batch. I did not expect much impact from the changes, so I felt comfortable changing five things at a time. Now that the new batch has fully conditioned and I can really appreciate it, I can say it is significantly different from the first. There are no overt flaws, but

  • The roast flavor is harsher
  • The body is thinner
  • The head is lighter in color, thinner, is not long lasting, and leaves little lace

I want to look at the changes to see what I might want to do next time.

Continue reading “Changing the Night Horse”

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LHBS

I took a drive down the valley to the Bald Eagle Brewing Company today. Tom Sweet, the owner, seems like a friendly and knowledgable guy. He has a nice variety of beer and winemaking ingredients and equipment. Tom offers his own beer kits, grains and extracts from Briess and Muntons, yeast from Wyeast and Fermentis, and a nice range of what I think are Hopunion hops. I picked up a few things. His prices are within a few pennies of the best prices I can find online. I do not have to pay shipping. I do not have to wait days to get my ingredients. I think I will go back the next time I brew.

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(32) Saturday, November 26, 2011 Bew Day — Night Horse Dry Stout

Today is a re-brew of batch 29. Changes in today’s version include:

  • Crisp Maris Otter in place of the Thomas Fawcett & Sons Halcyon malt
  • Simpson’s Roasted Barley (550L) in place of the Briess Black Barley (500L) — I thought I ordered Crisp Roasted Barley (695L) but that’s not what my records show
  • Re-pitching the Wyeast 1469-PC West Yorkshire Ale yeast from batch 31 in place of the Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale
  • Single Infusion Mash in place of the Double Infusion Mash skipping the protein rest.
  • As with batch 31, I am going to be using a low vigor boil — medium heat seemed to work fairly well

Note for next time: Gretchen pointed out the flaker marks on the flaked barley just like the ones she gets when she flakes oats for our oatmeal. We got a sack of barley from a local farmer to try our hand at malting, but we could use it directly just by running a pound of it through our flaker.

Continue reading “(32) Saturday, November 26, 2011 Bew Day — Night Horse Dry Stout”

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Be a Drop Out

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It might be a little hard to see, but if you look close you will see that the yeast have dropped out of about the top three inches of my carboy. This is what happens when you cold crash. If I let it go long enough, it would all drop out. Unfortunately, it does not look like it is going to make it in time for me, since I need the yeast in this carboy for the beer I am making tomorrow.

Update: By the next morning, the yeast had dropped to 4½ inches. For it to drop entirely, it would have to drop 10–11 inches. Since I put it into the fridge on Wednesday evening, it has been about 56 hours since crashing. That corresponds to about a 1/12 of an inch per hour (or an inch every 12 hours). In order to drop 10 inches, it would have to crash for 5 days — 6 to be on the safe side.

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I’ve Got Gas

I bought my first CO₂ refill today. I was comparing the receipt to the one I got when I filled my take the last (first) time over a year ago. No change in price! It cost me $11.23 for 5 pounds of CO₂ on 9/21/2010 and it cost me the same thing today.

Since that time, I’ve done 10 batches of beer, so that is my first data point on how long a tank lasts. I probably could have got a couple more out of it. It was not absolutely shot. I did mess around a little to learn how it worked at first, too. I made some carbonated water. I also transferred some sanitizer between kegs and carboys. Maybe I could have gotten as many as 15 batches.

That would be 75 gallons of beer carbonated with 5 pounds of CO₂ at $11.23. That is 800 beers at 1.4¢ per beer.

That is not too shabby.

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(31) Saturday, November 12, 2011 Brew Day — 2011 Holiday Ale

Today I am making another batch of my 2011 Holiday Ale. There are four things I am going to do differently with this batch then before.

  • I am going to get the mash salts into the mash tun correctly.
  • I am going to reduce the vigor of the boil. I have been tracking my brewhouse numbers and I find that my boil off rate is 21% ± 2%. Boil off itself is not bad, but it is a secondary indicator of thermal loading. That has an impact on the reactions that occur in the kettle. Below some level, there is not enough energy to drive off DMS precursors. Above some level, The Maillard reactions start to cause off flavors that can be mistaken for fermentation problems. There is some debate as to what the ideal evaporation rate is, but the suggestions range from 10–15%. Since DMS in Ales does not appear to be as much of a problem, I’m not going to worry about shooting too low.
  • I am going to repitch my yeast from the slurry in the last batch. Mr Malty suggests a bit more than half a cup.
  • I need to do a better job with the fermentation temperature. This is not so much a plan at this point, as an observation.

Continue reading “(31) Saturday, November 12, 2011 Brew Day — 2011 Holiday Ale”

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DMS in Ales

For ales, these sulfur-compound issues tend to disappear. For example, ale malt with only 1 μg of SMM per gram of malt is common. This low initial concentration means that the SMM level at the start of the boil is

1\; \mu g/g\; \times \; 200\; g/L =\; 200\; \mu g/L\;

This initial SMM concentration leaves a SMM residual of

200\; \mu g/L\; \times \; 0.21\; =\; 41\; \mu g/L\;

at the end of the boil. As noted above, 50% of the sulfur-containing compounds (be they SMM or DMS) is removed in the fermentation. Thus, the finished beer will have sub threshold levels of DMS no matter how the wort is cooled. Indeed, any hint of DMS in ales is likely from technical brewing errors, most notably contamination (see chapter 3). This fact probably explains why ale aficionados react very negatively to DMS in any type of beer.

Fix, George. “Production and Reduction of Dimethyl Sulfide.” Principles of Brewing Science: a Study of Serious Brewing Issues. Boulder (Colo.): Brewers Publications, 1999. 71-75. Print.