Category: Brewing process

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Brewing process Other fermentables

Batch 79: 2016 Dry-Hopped Plymouth Orchards Cider

Started with 5 gallons of juice from Plymouth Orchards, fermented (and left on the lees) for 2 years before tweaking what was a boring final product.

  • 2016-10-08: Pitched D47 yeast.  Can’t remember if I used sulfite/Campden tablets to knock back wild yeasts.  OG 1.050.
  • 2017-03-25: added cinnamon stick, now common practice for all of my ciders.  At low levels, enhances apple perception and does not stand out as cinnamon.
  • 2018-08-18: racked and added:
  • 2018-08-23: kegged.  I hadn’t stirred in the leaf hops and they had formed a thick layer on top, with the top half being dry.  So the practical impact of the dry-hopping will be less than 4 oz for 5 days.

The cider itself was clean but dull before dry-hopping.  To test the idea of dry-hopping, I’d pulled a 1 liter sample and added the equivalent of 4 oz Mosiac per 5 gallons.  The result was fascinating, like a white wine with tropical fruit notes.

I’ve become inconsistent with taking final gravities, especially if the batch is many months old or is being stabilized.  Here it’s both, and I never measured the FG.  Let’s assume it’s 1.000 which would be an ABV of 6.5%.

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Beer Brewing process Homebrew Recipe

Batch 77: Zingibier VI

I first created Zingibier, a “grand cru” style spiced Belgian ale, in 2010.  With beginner’s luck, it won a gold medal in the 2010 National Homebrew Competition, and the recipe is featured on the American Homebrew Association’s website.

The beer is tough to categorize.  It’s a strong (~8%) wheat beer that uses a Belgian Witbier yeast and spices typically associated with the Witbier style: coriander, bitter orange peel, and chamomile.  It also packs a prominent ginger note, with the ginger sufficiently cooked as to not contribute heat.

This was my 6th time brewing the beer.   The recipe was on Brewtoad (now defunct) and embedded as BeerXML (now not displaying).  Luckily I grabbed a PDF copy before Brewtoad shutdown, though.

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Beer Brewing process Homebrew

You don’t need a TrailKeg

Or, “ode to the carbonator cap.”

A homebrewer friend recently brought a $200 TrailKeg to a club meeting. It is shiny and cool and … a thneed.

Instead, you should use a carbonator cap ($8* as of this writing) and some 1 or 2-liter plastic bottles (free after you drink the seltzer water).  While TrailKeg claims superiority over the glass growler, the carbonator-cap-and-PET-bottle (PET = plastic, i.e. a soda bottle) combo delivers in most of the same ways:

  • Unbreakable
  • Lightweight
  • Has CO2 input for carbing the beer and keeping/serving it under CO2.

Here’s where they differ:

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Beer Brewing process Homebrew

AABG Knob Creek Barrel Project

In December 2014, a friend of a friend acquired a 53 gallon barrel that had previously held Knob Creek Single Barrel Reserve whiskey for 9 years.  It made its way from Kentucky to Ann Arbor, then came along with me when I moved houses in 2018.  It currently resides in my basement.

Staining = spilled beer

Since then we’ve rotated beers through it.  In order of fill date:

  1. Imperial Stout (Jan 2015)
  2. Scotch Ale (this beer naturally soured)
  3. Oud Bruin (we pitched 8 packs of Blackman Flemish Sour Mix)
  4. Tart of Darkness Stout (here we introduced Brett C., actually a strain of Brett Anomalous)
  5. Dark Saison
  6. Belgian Golden Strong
  7. IPA
  8. Belgian Golden Strong, again (back by popular demand)
  9. Berliner Weisse (Jan 2019)
  10. Flanders Red (July 2019)
  11. Witbier (Jan 2020).

We empty + refill every six months or so.  The brewers are a rotating cast, with people dropping in and out.  We typically aim to bring 11 shares of 5 gallons each, filling the barrel to the top and leaving some extra to top up the angel’s share.

This barrel has produced consistently good beers and the sour character is now well-established.  Beers from this barrel have won silver and gold medals in the American Wild Ale category at the 2016 & 2017 Michigan Beer Cup.  Brewers often perform a tertiary fermentation on fruit – tart cherries are a favorite, this being Michigan – and sometimes blend with young or clean beers to cut sourness to taste.

Summer 2020 update: Due to COVID-19 it was not possible to empty and fill the barrel in summer 2020, an activity which requires several people in a close space.  We decided to switch to a solera project.  This beer will sit indefinitely, with participants having the option to extract 5 gallons of sour beer and swap in 5 gallons of fresh.  Such a swap only requires one person.

Whenever it again becomes possible to do another full empty/fill cycle, we will evaluate the barrel’s state.  In the meantime, what better substance to keep the barrel full and wet than beer?  Even if that beer ultimately becomes too sour to drink.

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Brewing process Homebrew Other fermentables

How much sorbate and sulfite should you add to stabilize cider?

I re-researched this every fall when it came time to backsweeten the previous year’s cider, so I wrote this guide to future me.

If you add sugar to hard cider and don’t want that addition to restart fermentation (which would increase alcohol and leave the cider even drier), you’ll need to stabilize it.  The most common method in home cidermaking is to add both potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfite (“K-Meta”).  This guidance from BYO magazine on backsweetening provides background on the approach.

Tl;dr

For each gallon of cider, use 1/2 tsp of potassium sorbate and 1/2 tsp of 10% sulfite solution (an extra step, but worth making – the solution is easier to work with than dry potassium metabisulfite).

Longer version

How much potassium sorbate?

Winemakers say…

Winemakers talk more about sorbic acid, the relevant chemical; potassium sorbate is 74% sorbic acid.  There are legal limits of 0.2 g/L (Europe) and 0.3 g/L (America); the sensory level for perceiving this chemical’s flavor is reported at 0.135 g/L.

Adjusting these from sorbic acid -> potassium sorbate (what a homebrewer weighs) gives legal limits of 0.26 g/L and 0.4 g/L, respectively, with a taste threshold of 0.18 g/L.

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Beer Brewing process Homebrew

Batch 68: Zingibier V (Spiced Ginger Belgian-style ale)

As a beginning homebrewer, I got lucky and struck gold.  Literally: my improvised recipe for an imperial spiced witbier won a gold medal at the 2010 National Homebrew Competition.

This is my fifth rebrewing of that recipe, tinkering with it each time.  I don’t often repeat in my brewing schedule, but I enjoy learning from iterations of this recipe.

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Beer Brewing process Homebrew Recipe

Batch 67: Tart of Darkness clone sour stout with Black Raspberries and Cocoa Nibs

A friend came into a 53 gallon Knob Creek Single Barrel Reserve 9 year whiskey barrel that now lives in my basement and houses homebrew.  We’ve done a Russian Imperial Stout, a Scotch Ale, and an Oud Bruin.  The fresh barrel contributed a massive oak character, but over 3 batches and 1.5 years, the oak faded.  When the barrel naturally went sour during the Scotch Ale, we switched to intentionally soured beers and added 8 sachets of the Flemish Ale F4 blend from Blackman Yeast.

Next up is a sour stout, very low on hops (<10 IBUs), inspired by The Bruery’s Tart of Darkness.  The low IBUs are friendlier to souring microbes and also avoid the clashing of bitterness and acidity.

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Brewing process Homebrew Recipe Uncategorized

Smoked Porter 2015

Over the 4th of July, I smoked about 3 lbs of Pils malt on an old potbelly stove.  It smoked with mesquite chips for a few hours in two batches, then was left to condition for ~7 weeks in an open paper grocery bag.

I first brewed a smoked porter with home-smoked malt in 2011.  I used alder chips then, in an homage to Alaskan Brewing Co.’s Smoked Porter.  It turned out well and the bottle I opened yesterday as I brewed the 2015 version has aged nicely.  The biggest flaw is that the smoke flavor is too phenolic.  I tried to avoid chlorinated water throughout the process but may not have succeeded.

I brewed this year’s smoked porter on the same potbelly stove I used to smoke the malt.  I’ve already written about the process of brewing on the potbelly stove, so I’ll stick to the recipe and batch notes here.

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Beer Brewing process Homebrew

Homebrewing on a Potbelly Stove

My in-laws have an old potbelly stove sitting around.  Some research indicates it was made around 1900.  I smoked about 3 lbs of Pils malt on this stove on the 4th of July, and decided I’d see if it could crank out enough heat to brew a 5 gallon batch of beer.

The answer: almost.

pot on stove

It heated about 4.5 gallons of mash water fairly well, heating it 86.7 degrees in an hour.  The slope leveled off a little as it reached strike temperature:

potbelly_temp_ramp

This performance of 390 degree-gallons per hour (when heating water starting at room temperature) is not too much worse than this same pot when I’m heating with a 1500W, 120V electric element – that setup yields about 480 degree-gallons per hour.

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