Zestfully clean

After brewing 20 gallons over the last two weekends, I didn't plan much for this week. About all I accomplished was the kegging of 15 of those 20 gallons and a little cleanup.

Kegged: 100501 Geordie-Boy Ale


Interestingly, the gravity samples of the two carboys tasted different even though they both used the same yeast. It could just be that the first sample taste was my first beer of the day, and by the time I tasted the second sample my taste buds were already aligned. We'll see when it comes to serving time. Both of them fit within my expectations for the house brown ale.

The second sample came from the first carboy to take off in fermentation. Its FG was 1.014, for an ABV of  4.43%. The other sample, with the delayed fermentation, came in at 1.013 for an ABV of  4.56%. Isn't it interesting how a single gravity point moves that number so much. I'm going to have to look into the math for that calculation.

Kegged: 100502 Honey Half-Wit


I was a little apprehensive about kegging this one because it looked like there was still a foamy surface on the beer in the carboy, but as I pulled it up to rack it, I noticed that the foam was mostly CO2 bubbles that had aggregated against the floating orange zest. The sample had a pretty good flavor to it, and I definitely tasted a citrusy overtone from the orange. I think this one will be a winner. As it happened, this is the first batch I have had that finished below 1.010, coming in at 1.009 for an ABV of 4.03%.

Good thing I took three semesters of calculus in college


Going back to the ABV math for a second: The Geordie-Boys started at 1.048 and attenuated 34 and 35 points, respectively, to finish at 1.014 and 1.013, giving them ABVs of 4.43% and 4.56%. The Honey Half-Wit started at 1.040 and attenuated 31 points to 1.009 for an ABV of 4.03%. If one point of attenuation is worth .13% ABV, as the Geordie-Boys indicate, then linear interpolation would predict the Honey Half-Wit to be 4 x .13% = .52% lower than the 4.56% of the 1.013 Geordie-Boy, or 4.04%. Pretty close. I will have to dig around in some references to see if that's how it really works or if there's something else involved.

Resisting the Urge for a Headline Pun

It's Monday, the day we observe Memorial Day in the US in honor of those who have served the cause of freedom and given all. I brewed today, exercising one of the rights that the fallen have preserved for me. It seems fitting, especially when it's time to start filling the supply pipeline for Independence Day.

Brewed: 100503 Hook Me Up

Another commissioned batch, Hook Me Up is intended to be an English extra-special bitters based on the commercial beer Red Hook ESB. I started with a base recipe from HBT's Biermuncher and manipulated it to match what I can do and what I have to work with. The original recipe called for Wyeast 1098 but I'm using Nottingham, and I made a substitution on the hop schedule, putting in Saaz instead of Tettnang.

This recipe had a new wrinkle for me - it called for some "toasted malt." Toasted malt is just regular two-row malt that is heated at 350 F for 12 to 15 minutes. It darkens the malt (from 2 SRM to 22 SRM according to BeerSmith), and it's supposed to impart a bit of flavor as well.

I spread the malt onto cookie sheets in as close to a single layer as I could manage, then popped the cookie sheets into a preheated, 350 F oven. The smell of the malt as it toasted was quite pleasant, and surprisingly strong. In fact, at one point during the first toasting go-round, I panicked because the scent was so powerful I thought I was burning it.

Here's a picture of some before and after - the malt on the trays is toasted, while the malt in the round pan is not. It's hard to see the color difference in this picture, but it was more obvious in person. I'm not sure it was 20 SRM different, though.

Other than that, and the four separate hop additions, this was a pretty standard brew session. I did it all-electric again, relying mostly on my 2000W heatstick to provide the energy. I heated the strike water in the mash tun so it was adequately pre-heated. I didn't obsess over the mash temperature this time, in fact I didn't even measure it after I hit the initial 158 F I was aiming for. With an OG of 1.052 it hit the software prediction so that's a plus given my recent problems in that regard.

RIP 100401 Honey Half-Wit


As predicted, this one went fast. It got the Brewmistress Seal of Approval, which is a first for Fork and Hay. (Could the Five Diamond award be next?) Luckily another 5 gallons is already in the pipeline, and I may go ahead and lay in a third batch before July 4th comes.

Quick notes

Just a couple of things:

• In an attempt to cut down on the Chinese 'blog spam' that I get in comments to this page, I have turned on comment moderation. If you post a comment I will have to approve it before it shows up. 
• All three carboys from last weekend are fermenting away in the freezer. One of the Geordie-Boy carboys was slow to take off, which I attribute to it being in actual contact with the side of the freezer, causing it to be too cool for the ale yeast. I moved it away and the next day the krausen was in full form.
• The next 'commissioned batch' will be a Red Hook ESB clone - "Hook Me Up" - based on another well-regarded recipe by Biermuncher at HBT.

Brew morning, brew day

It's a mark of how old I am getting that I'm reduced to making bad headline puns based on song lyrics from bands I don't even like. At least it's from one of their least objectionable albums. The headline refers to this weekend's brew sessions - yes, that's a plural - wherein I laid down 15 gallons in an attempt to refill the pipeline after a long brewing drought.

Brewed: 100501 Geordie-Boy Ale

First up was a 10 gallon batch of the house favorite. I've been disappointed with the last couple of batches of this beer, so I decided to go mostly back to basics. I went back to plain tap water (unfiltered), I didn't use the hop sack, and I cut way down on the agitation of the immersion chiller.

I used the rectangular cooler mash tun, because it was the only one I have that is big enough for the grain bill for this recipe. As before, I heated the strike water in the tun, and after it got to about 140 F I added the grits to get them hydrated before the mash got started in earnest. That allowed me to keep them stirred up and loose instead of having them get all clumpy. I also stirred a lot when adding in the rest of the grain to make sure that there were no obvious dough balls or layers. I got a respectable 1.048 OG out of it, for an efficiency of 79% or so, so it must have been OK. The temperature held just fine as well, so I think the lesson to be had is don't use the big tun for a 5 gallon batch - but with a 10 gallon batch and sufficient preconditioning, it's fine.

When cooling the wort, I realized it was summertime again and my tap water wasn't as cold as it had been. I managed to get the volume down to about 78 F in 35 minutes, at which point I went ahead and put it into the carboys and put them in the cooler to ramp the rest of the way down overnight, with just some aluminum foil to seal the opening. The next morning, I added Nottingham yeast to each carboy and put on airlocks.

Brewed: 100502 Honey Half-Wit


The Honey Half-Wit is proving to be popular with more casual drinkers, so in anticipation of summer visitors I went ahead and put down another 5 gallon batch. I actually considered doing 10 gallons, but as it turns out, getting 4 carboys into the cooler is a bit of a challenge and I didn't want to mess with it. I had logistics challenges enough with this batch without the aggravation.

Alabrew moving closer to the Fork and Hay worldwide headquarters proved to be as useful as I expected it to be. When I inventoried raw materials I found I was short the yeast and all the malted wheat required for Honey Half-Wit, so I sent the Head Apprentice over to Alabrew to pick it up. I learned an important lesson - write out specific product names. It took me going over there to help straighten things out before I had 4 pounds of crushed wheat malt. On the shopping list I had written "4# wheat malt crushed." Turns out the Head Apprentice asked for "4 pounds of wheat malt," which was reasonably interpreted as a request for wheat malt extract. Unfortunately there were two problems with that: first, 4 pounds of malt extract is a lot more expensive than 4 pounds of crushed grain; and second, I probably won't use 4 pounds of wheat malt extract in the entire future of Fork and Hay. I still have an unopened one pound bag of DME I bought a year ago. In the end, Kim worked it out and I got the grain I needed to brew, along with some WLP400 Belgian Wit yeast. I have been using the Wyeast smack pack equivalent (3944) but Alabrew carries White Labs, and this table at Jamil Zainasheff's website says they're the same thing, both being derived from Hoegaarden.

The original Honey Half-Wit batch didn't have much sweet orange character after the boil, so I decided to add an additional ounce of orange zest into the carboy to see if it added some flavor tones. I also dumped the honey in before the wort in hopes that they would mix and I would get a more accurate OG reading. Either the honey didn't mix correctly or my recipe calculations are off dramatically, because I still came in at .010 lower than the prediction of 1.050. The first batch turned out OK even so, so I'm not all that worried about it - just a little puzzled.

Edit: It turns out that part of the issue was that I had the BeerSmith template set to expect 75% brewhouse efficiency. If I ramp it back to 65% the prediction becomes 1.044 which is a lot more reasonable. I calculated 58% actual efficiency for this batch so I need to figure out where I'm losing my sugar.

The first batch fermented so vigorously it blew out through the airlock, so I decided to go with a blow-off tube this time. It looks like three carboys and a blow-off bucket are about all that I can get in the fermentation cooler at a time, so now I know what the real production bottleneck is. I suppose I could bring carboys inside and do the T-shirt trick to keep them cool, so there is a workaround available if I need the throughput. I can only serve 5 at a time anyway, three on real taps and two on picnic taps, so there's an upper limit on demand for ready product.

Nose to the Grindstone

Yesterday was a big day around Fork and Hay. The eldest apprentice brewmaster graduated from college with a BS in biology and we had quite a celebration in the hospitality area of the brewery (the portion that everyone else refers to as "the house"). The apprentice will be continuing his biology studies in pursuit of a PhD, but in a career-limiting move for a brewer he is concentrating on algal phycology instead of the mycology of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He will be spending a lot of time in the lab, though, and I hope he'll be able to culture out some commercial yeast strains for the brewery's use.

Kegged: 100401 Honey Half-Wit

Just prior to heading down to the apprentice's commencement ceremonies, I kegged the Honey Half-Wit batch I made two weeks ago. I had cold-crashed it in the carboy overnight, so the sampling and kegging took place at about 37 F. The temperature-adjusted FG for this batch came in at 1.011, which seems like a reasonable finish, but given the uncertainty of the OG reading I can't figure the exact ABV. The beer is a nice bright color and has the characteristic cloudiness of the style. The Brewmistress tasted a portion of the SG sample and gave her conditional approval (while noting that it was flat and not cold enough).

I started to carb it but I didn't quite get enough CO2 dissolved before we had to depart for the ceremony. I'll zap it again today and bring it up close to 2.4 volumes, because it's supposed to be a reasonably fizzy beer. The Brewmistress likes fizz. However, I'm going to have a bit of a serving dilemma, because I only have three taps - yes, taps - from which to serve.

Grinding teeth

I am edging ever closer to finishing the keezer after only 10 months. The three taps are installed, tested leak-free, and functioning. About all it lacks now are casters for mobility and a drip tray.

Getting the taps installed and leak-free was a challenge. As I mentioned before, I got a great deal on some Perlick 525SS stainless steel faucets. Faucets, of course, are only part of the entire tap system, and they are attached to the all-important beer line with a shank and a tail piece.

Instead of getting stainless steel shanks, I opted to save a few bucks and go with chrome plated brass ones. After all, nobody can see the shank (unlike the faucet), and while stainless is more durable and less subject to degradation through abrasion it's not like there will be a lot of abrasion in this application. I picked tail pieces with flare fittings, so they can be disconnected from the beer line for cleaning without disassembly.

In the last post I mentioned that I found some issues with this arrangement due to what appeared to be manufacturing tolerance variations among the shanks, and between the spec conformance of the shanks as compared to the faucets. Some real-life pictures would help to explain the issues, but I don't have any, so you'll have to use your imagination and look at this diagram that I shamelessly lifted from chicompany.net.

The faucet (1) attaches to the end of the shank, where its threads are engaged by the collar (2). The faucet has an internal o-ring that is supposed to press up against the end of the shank as you tighten the collar, forming a seal.  To keep the faucet from rotating on the shank, there are some teeth (like a gear) formed on the inside of the faucet and on the outside of the shank.

It was the teeth that were creating my leak issues. I was only able to find one shank-faucet combo where the teeth mated well enough that I could get the faucet pushed onto the shank far enough to allow the seal to be formed correctly. On every other set, I could only get the faucet onto the shank a little, and no amount of tightening of the collar would drive it down to set the o-ring.

I used (and wore out) two steel brush attachments for my Dremel trying to clean up the shank teeth enough to allow the faucet to fit correctly. Eventually, I switched to a grinding stone and simply wore the teeth down to a degree that I could get the faucet connected. Once I did that I was able to get a solid seal that's leak free, and now all three taps are hooked up and freely flowing.

The problem, of course, is that I now have four active kegs. Time for a bigger keezer? Edit: it may be time for a bigger keezer but I solved the immediate problem by dumping the last gallon of 090901 Gayle Bait. It just wasn't doing it for me any more. It's nice to have Honey Half-Wit on tap, and with the right carbonation and an orange slice, it really hits the spot!

Who's the half wit now?

Has it really been two months since I brewed a batch? It sure seemed like it when I went out to the garage Saturday afternoon and tried to remember what to do. At least it wasn't cold.

Brewed: 100401 Honey Half-Wit

When last I tried to make a honey-bearing beer I ended up with the disaster known as 090502 Honey-Brew List. It wasn't the honey's fault, it was my fault for over-adding the coriander and creating a spicy mess. Unfortunately I wasted a pound of good homemade honey on that batch and got nothing but a smelly bucket and a disappointed Brewmistress in return.

Not long after I created that lousy wheat beer, I brewed a different wheat beer batch, 090603 Half-Wit, which was very highly regarded among the members of the focus panel that convened in the garage on the Fourth of July. That recipe had no amendments, and it ended up with a nice clean taste. It clearly is among the top recipes I have brewed to date. (I'm not listening to you out there who are keeping score and saying "you've only brewed six recipes to date, that's not much of a distinction.")

It seemed logical to me that I could meet the Brewmistress' demand for a honey wheat by starting with a known good base recipe (Half-Wit) and adding honey and fruit amendments - and thus was born Honey Half-Wit. The modifications I made to the basic Half-Wit recipe were minor. I traded out (in a five gallon batch formulation) 1# of base malt in the mash for 1# of honey, which I added directly to the primary instead of to the boil. The reason for the late addition is that knowledgeable people have written that the risk of introducing contaminants or infections from unpasteurized honey is minimal, while introducing the honey in the boil kills off the components that provide the honey character. To the boil I added about an ounce of orange zest (sweet orange, not bitter orange), which smelled good at the time but I wonder if it will show up in the final product.

An electrifying experience

I decided to try and make this batch using only electric power. With a 2000W heatstick and a 1500W heatstick I figured I had enough power to manage a 5 gallon batch, and this turned out to be the case. I used a 1500W stick to heat the strike water and pre-condition the mash tun. Unfortunately, I also managed to melt a hole in the side of the cooler when I let the tip of the stick rise above the water level for a second. I plugged it with a high-tech solution (metallic tape) and made a note to be more careful.

I am still concerned about the ability of this tun to hold mash temperature. This mash was scheduled for 154F and it actually started just a tad higher, but an hour later it looked like I had lost 8 degrees. It might just be that the rectangular cooler has too much headspace for a small batch, but I have noticed comparable drops even with the 10 gallon Geordie-Boy and Por Favor batches. I either need to switch coolers (again) or speed up my plans to build the new recirculating mash rig.

I used the 1500W and 2000W sticks to run the boil and was able to get a gigantic rolling boil pretty quickly. The 2000W stick was sufficient to maintain the boil by itself, with a pretty reasonable wort turnover. When I put the immersion chiller in to sterilize I added the 1500W stick back in to compensate for the immediate cooling effect, then removed it once temperature stabilized.

When I moved the cool wort to the carboy, I simply opened the honey, pulled off the safety seal, and dumped it in. When I took the specific gravity it was much lower than predicted, coming in at 1.039 instead of the 1.052 that BeerSmith suggested, but at least part of that has to be the fact that none of the sugar in the honey was in solution at that time. However, even when I back the honey out of the BeerSmith model I still show about a 6 point deficit from the prediction. Clearly I'm not doing something right, and again I look to the cooler as a potential issue with efficiency. I guess if it tastes good though I'm not going to complain.

I'm tapping that

Get your mind out of the gutter, I'm referring to my serving system. I have started installing the new Perlick stainless steel forward-sealing faucets I got last month with mixed success. The first installation I did leaked like a sieve through the ring that fastens the faucet to the shank. The shanks are garden-variety chrome plated brass, not stainless, and I recall reading that there can be manufacturing tolerance issues with mating the stainless faucets with the plated shanks. With a little experimentation, I was able to find one faucet-shank pairing that would work correctly, and I now have one functioning tap on the keezer. For the other two I need to try and tidy up the end of the shank to get a better fit for the faucet. I think a little wire brush work may be in order.

No news is...no news

There's no useful news from the Fork and Hay production area. I have the materials all set to make a new batch of Geordie-Boy and a fresh run of Honey Half-Wit, but this weekend was consumed by the rebuilding of a retaining wall in the back yard. Maybe tonight I'll get to the Honey Half-Wit so it will be ready for the big graduation to-do in early May. The brown will just have to wait, but there's about half a keg left for now and I'm in training for a 5K so I have dialed back consumption estimates dramatically.

I have finally accumulated all the parts for the faucet assembly for my dispensing system, which I have been referring to as a 'kegerator' but in point of fact is a 'keezer' because it uses a freezer and not a refrigerator. I just don't like the word 'keezer' as it is uncomfortably close to 'geezer' and I don't need the reminder. I have some pictures that I'll post when I finish the assembly and draw the first ceremonial pint.

Outside the four walls of Fork and Hay there is mixed news. On the legislative front, Senate Bill 253, which would have formally legalized homebrewing in Alabama, died in committee because of politics having to do with petty, trivial issues - pissing matches over electronic bingo, some kind of ruckus around funding the pre-paid college tuition program, and (can you believe it?) school funding. It's too bad our legislators can't get their priorities straight.

On a more exciting note, Alabrew, our local homebrew shop, is moving to a location just minutes away from the world headquarters of Fork and Hay. I view this as being similar to all the auto component manufacturers who have moved into the Vance and Tuscaloosa areas to service the Mercedes plant. Fork and Hay's supply chain just got a lot closer to the just-in-time ideal, and I'll be able to reduce my on-hand inventory of grains and yeast accordingly.