Hey now, you're an all star

I hate reading blog postings where the author makes excuses about the infrequency of his work and promises to do better. You know why? They sound like I wrote them. Instead of a pro forma mea culpa, today I'll follow up with the results of the most recent two kegged batches and describe a new recipe I made.

Kegged and tapped: 100701 Honey Half-Wit and 100702 Geordie-Boy

In the last post I talked about some newfound awareness on my part regarding how to hit the right mash temperature using my process and equipment. I have moved two batches through the process to consumption since then, and they are both pretty good. The Geordie-Boy is nowhere near as malty tasting as its recent forerunners have been, and the Half-Wit tastes as good as ever.

The Half-Wit was scheduled for a 154 F mash and it held that the whole time, but the OG came in several points short (1.036 measured vs. 1.041 predicted). I still don't know if this is due to the honey not being sufficiently dissolved at the time I take the sample, but the number makes the efficiency appear to be around 51%. The FG was 1.008 so the yeast at least took care of what little it could find. As I was racking this to the keg, it almost appeared that there was a layer of honey at the bottom of the carboy, but that might have been my imagination.

The Geordie-Boy is better than it has been. I had the mash adjusted down to 152 F and managed to start at 153. The OG into the boiler was 1.039, somewhat above the predicted 1.035, and the FG showed a corresponding overage of 1.044 vs the predicted 1.041. Since the resulting beer is a little hoppier than I perceive to be normal, I guess that overabundance of sugar was offset by the change to the hop schedule I had to adopt. During the brew day, I realized that I didn't have the right bittering hop and I had to make an adjustment on the fly, using Cascade instead of Target. I tried to adjust the IBU by adding more Cascade (at its 7% alpha acid rating) to take the place of the 11% AA Target. It worked out mathematically, but it might not have worked in the wort. It's not overbearingly hoppy, just more than I expected.

I ran the Geordie-Boy through the filter in an attempt to clean it up a little as well. I probably would have been better off to have used gelatin in it, because the amount of yeast residue that still showed up in the first few pints seems to indicate that the filter didn't do a whole lot of cleaning. Still, it's drinkable.

Didn't The Offspring have an album about this?

For the first batch of August, I wanted to try something new. Looking back on what I've made to date, one thing stands out: the recipes all have a fairly complicated grain bill, and none of them would pass muster under the German Reinheitsgebot beer purity law because of all the adjuncts I have used. (Fortunately the law doesn't seem to apply in Alabama outside of a few mile radius of the Mercedes plant in Vance.) With the recent process issues, I felt like I needed to get (back) to basics and see about creating a beer that was simple enough to help me troubleshoot further.

I have read in various places (including homebrewtalk.com) about a concept called SMaSH - Single Malt and Single Hop. The premise behind SMaSH is that if you really want to know how a particular grain or hop affects the flavor of your beer, you have to isolate them so you know what they're bringing to the recipe. Many people on HBT say that the SMaSH recipes they have made are among their best tasting beers.

For this batch I decided to build a SMaSH directly within BeerSmith. To keep it simple, I opted to use domestic 2-row for my base malt, even though many people have said it's almost too mild for this purpose and the resulting beers are very light tasting. I kind of see that as a virtue compared to what I've been making, and it might get some of the fence-sitters to try one of my beers. For the hops I chose Cascade, mostly because I had some.

When modeling the recipe I wanted to aim for a balanced beer that was neither malty nor hoppy. Not being a real beer scientist, I turned to an expert's advice to see how to do this. Homebrewtalk.com's Biermuncher posts an interesting chart with each of his recipes showing the relationship between OG and IBU (the international bittering unit, a measure of hop content), annotated with sensory bands indicating the degree of maltiness or hoppiness a given OG/IBU ratio has. For an example, look at the chart in the thread for the brown ale recipe that was the original basis for Geordie-Boy. I can't tell where the chart originally came from to provide proper attribution, but I found a copy of the chart hosted at BrewSupplies.com:

I wanted the recipe to be balanced, neither malty nor hoppy. I didn't want it to have a real high ABV, but preferably somewhere in the 4% range. I also figured I wanted to stick with a simple hop addition schedule, so I started out by planning to add equal quantities at 60 minutes for bittering and at 15 minutes for flavoring.

My first action was to add enough 2-row to the recipe to raise the OG to the point where the ABV would be in the right area assuming 70% efficiency. I settled on 8 1/2 pounds, for a predicted OG of 1.041 and an ABV of 4.16%. Next, I began adjusting the hop additions so that the resulting IBU prediction would be around 21-22, a number I selected from the chart as being in the center of the "evenly balanced" range. After several iterations I settled on 0.7 oz of Cascade at 60 minutes and 0.6 oz at 15 minutes, which leads to a predicted IBU of 20.7. I decided to use Safale US-05 yeast, as it's a pretty clean yeast and should allow the flavors of the ingredients to dominate the taste of the finished product. The most important decision was what to call this recipe, of course. I settled on Smash Mouth Volume 1, since I doubt it will be the only SMaSH I make and it will save me from having to think up clever names for Volumes 2, 3, and so forth.

Brewed: 100801 Smash Mouth Volume 1

I got the 2-row already crushed and measured out from Alabrew, and got a pleasant surprise in that it was only 99 cents a pound. With the yeast and the hops, this whole batch came in at under $15.00, making it by far the least expensive one I've made. Chalk that up as another potential plus for this idiom.

I picked 150 F as the mash temperature and almost hit it, coming in at 151 F instead, still well within the beta amylase range. The SG into the boiler was 1.038, which gave me an actual efficiency of 76% into the boiler, and with an OG of 1.043 I got 73% efficiency overall. The wort was exceptionally clear coming out of the mash tun, and it maintained its clarity through the boil (except for the hot break proteins floating around, of course). I tried to whirlpool it after it cooled and transferred it to the carboy with a siphon, and I succeeded in leaving a lot more trub than usual in the kettle.

Even with the slightly higher than planned OG, I'm "in the zone" for an evenly balanced beer. The Cascade hops smelled great when I added them. I am really interested to see how this turns out.

Wish I could remember the awesome title I had for this post

I guess it's a sign of the times. I was getting in the car to go run (and no, the irony of that is not lost on me) and I had a great idea for the title for a blog entry for Fork and Hay. Now I can't recall what it was. I suppose I'll just have to wing it.

Today we're going to talk about basics. I've written before about a strange flavor change I have detected in my batches of late. I don't know how to classify the taste, but whatever it is it is wrong for the styles I have been making. As I was pondering the latest unusual situation that resulted in an unexpected flavor component in a batch, some pieces of information I had encountered in my seemingly endless web browsing over the last couple of years started to congeal into a possible explanation.

At first, I was all set to blame my 10-gallon batch setup for the problem, because all the faulty brews had been 10 gallon batches. I have noted issues with getting the correct mash temperature before, which has prompted me to pursue designing a RIMS system (which I will hopefully finish this fall). My initial thoughts were that I either had trouble measuring the temperature correctly in the first place, or that the mash tun was doing a poor job of holding the temperature required.

In an attempt to eliminate variables, I made the last four batches (including two I'm going to talk about later which are still fermenting) using the five gallon setup. Two of these were Honey Half-Wit recipes, and I have already chronicled the success of the one that's been kegged and consumed. The other finished batch deviated from expectations, and it was the manner of this deviation that finally helped the light bulb come on, because it told me the problem was not limited to the 10 gallon equipment.

100703 Hook Me Up finished high, a full .007 above the predicted level, and it had a sweeter, thicker taste than I expected it to have. Recalling that the Por Favor and Geordie-Boy batches that weren't successful also tasted thicker and a touch sweeter, I noted that a couple of them had higher than expected finishes as well. As I read more, I learned that what I've been characterizing as "sweet" is really "malty," which is a way of stating that there were a lot non-maltose sugars in the wort, sugars that the yeast could not convert to alcohol. The presence of unfermented sugar in the finished beer helps explain the sweet, thick taste, and it also explains the high finish gravities (because sugar that the yeast can't eat continues to affect specific gravity). What could cause this excess maltiness as a shared characteristic of batches that span yeasts, grain bills, and equipment?

Sacch-re bleu!


There are numerous sources around that describe how mashing works, including a highly informative wiki entry at HomebrewTalk.com and this chapter of John Palmer's outstanding book "How To Brew." The essence of the process, as far as the maltiness problem is concerned, is the relative activity of two key enzymes during "saccharification" (the period during the mash where starch converts to sugar): beta amylase and alpha amylase. Beta amylase is the most effective agent in the conversion of mash starches to maltose. Alpha amylase converts some starch to maltose, but it also produces other sugars from starch as well.

Palmer's discussion of saccharification is particularly understandable and suggests the cause of my problem: if  my worts have excess non-fermentable sugar, there is too much alpha amylase action going on and not enough beta amylase activity. The two enzymes work at different temperature ranges, with beta amylase ramping down at about 152 F and alpha amylase picking up at 154 F. The conclusion, therefore, is that if there's too much non-fermentable sugar in the wort, the mash temperature was higher than it should be, because it left the saccharification mostly in the hands of alpha amylase.

So why am I mashing too high? In every batch so far, I have hit the strike water temperatures required by BeerSmith, and I am pretty sure I can eliminate problems with the software as a factor. To investigate further, I opened up BeerSmith to see what components influence the way the equation is solved, but before I describe what I found maybe I should backtrack a little and explain exactly what BeerSmith is doing for me.

Warning: physics content

The basic problem is simple in concept: heat a quantity of water and grain to a specific temperature. If you could do it in a way as simple as it sounds, for instance adding the grain to the water and then heating the result, everything would be ready to go as soon as the whole mash volume hit the temperature target. Doing it that way, you don't have to worry about how much water you're using and how much grain is involved - as long as the mash is fluid enough to allow you to stir it, it will all get to the right temperature at the same time. Of course the problem isn't that simple. I don't have a powerful enough agitator to be able to roll over a suspension of 8-plus pounds of grain in 3 or so gallons of water so that it doesn't scorch.

It's far more practical to heat the water separately and then add the grain into it, stirring to make sure all the grain is well saturated and in suspension. However, if you've ever cooked pasta  (or grits, but of course never instant) you know what happens when you add pasta to boiling water: the boil stops. That's because adding the room-temperature solids to the hot water lowered the overall temperature of the suspension as the pasta took heat out of the water until the whole mass reached thermal equilibrium.

What we're doing in the mash tun is essentially the same thing, but with a slightly different approach. With a single-infusion mash (one where there's only one charge of strike water), we need to know what temperature the water has to be in order to source enough heat to bring the whole volume into equilibrium right at our desired mash temperature. Mathematically, it's simple - all you need to know is the volume of the water you're using, the mass of the grain you're adding, and the grain's starting temperature so you'll know how much heat it's already harboring. (You'd think you could do the same thing with pasta, but there's a catch: you can't heat water to over 212 F because the result isn't water, it's steam, and it's not helping cook your penne to al dente when it rises out of the pot.)

That's pretty basic high-school level physics and chemistry, and as I said before it seemed unlikely to me that BeerSmith could screw the calculations up. As it turns out, BeerSmith has a far more sophisticated model in place that factors in several variables, including:

• The material used in the mash tun and its weight - because the mash tun itself is not a perfect insulator and will suck heat from the mash both initially and over time. Different materials will have different specific heat values, where specific heat is a measure of how much energy is required to raise the temperature of a gram of the material 1 C. Knowing the material gives you a reasonable ballpark on its specific heat; knowing its mass lets you then calculate how much heat it's going to need as it joins the mash in reaching thermal equilibrium.
• The starting temperature of the mash tun.
• The volume of water to be used in the mash (which is internally converted to mass for another specific heat calculation).
• The weight of the grain bill to be used (but not its specific heat: BeerSmith uses a constant).
• The starting temperature of the grain.

When you create a batch sheet in BeerSmith it automatically pulls in the grain bill weight from the recipe and the strike water volume from the recipe's mash profile. (It can actually do a lot more than that, but I only use single infusion mashing so there are no other steps.) The mash tun material and weight are defined in the equipment profile for your recipe.

The starting temperature of the mash tun and the starting temperature of the grain are given default values of 72 F by the software.

Now we're getting somewhere...I think

My problem batches were created over a fairly long span of time (from November through May), and the grain storage area in the garage varied from being in the 40's to the 70's during that time. That means that the grain and mash tun temperatures varied that much as well, and you know what? I never changed the values in the software to reflect the current conditions.

Aha! I thought. Let me adjust the grain temperature of a Geordie-Boy batch and see what effect that has on the strike water temperature BeerSmith calculates to hit the target 154 F:

• 50 F grain: 173 F water
• 72 F grain: 169.8 F water

These numbers seem to indicate that I should have had lower mash temperatures when the grain was colder than the calculation allowed for, because I used 169 F water instead of the 173 F that was required. Clearly that's not the case, because lower mashing would favor beta amylase activity (as long is it wasn't too low, like below 131 F) and the production of maltose instead of unfermentable sugars. When you add in the fact that I didn't adjust the mash tun temperature either, the "too cold" disparity becomes even greater, with the strike water requirement moving up to 174.1 F when the grain and tun were at 50 F.

The analysis left me puzzled for a while, and then it hit me: it was about the time of the first weird batch that I started heating the strike water directly in the mash tun with my heat sticks. I first did that all the way back in November with 091103 Por Favor, and I've continued that way ever since. You've doubtless spotted the issue by now, and it goes all the way back to the beginning of the physics lesson above. If you heat the water in the mash tun, the mash tun and water are the same temperature all the way along.

Rather than starting with a 50 F or 72 F mash tun, I was starting with a tun at the strike water temperature of 169 F. There's no doubt that having all that extra heat available influenced the mash temperature upward, which could explain the apparent preference for alpha amylase, but what was the real effect? Could it really have been enough to push the mash clear out of the beta amylase range and lead to an excess of unfermentable sugar?

Going back to BeerSmith's calculator, I started doing a little iterative solving, holding the grain temperature constant while changing the mash tun temperature until it and the calculated strike water temperature converged. What I found was startling. The strike water temperature I had been using was up to 5 F too hot, because the number I converged on was around 164 F.

To figure out the effect on the mash temperature, I did a little more iterative solving by changing the mash temperature desired and the tun temperature until the strike water and tun temperatures were both at 169 F. The calculated mash temperature under those conditions was 157.5 F - pretty dramatically above the top of the beta amylase range. No wonder those beers were too malty!

The moral of the story

If anything, this exercise has taught me the value of paying attention to details (again, but if you're a regular reader here you know I'm a slow learner). By not fully understanding what all the factors were that went into the strike water temperature calculation, I wasn't able to adjust for a process change that affected its computational basis. This translated into a probable error of up to 4 F in the mash temperature of several batches, which I now know results in an increase in the ratio of unfermentables to maltose in the wort. Unplanned non-fermentable sugars lead to higher than expected finishing gravities and a maltier taste which, if not properly balanced, might not be desirable.

In short, if you don't know what you're doing, you'll screw up. And that truly is a lesson I keep learning.

Next time (soon, I promise) we'll meet the first post-revelation batch of Geordie-Boy and check in on another batch of Honey Half-Wit.

The biggest holiday disaster since the "Star Wars Holiday Special"

There were so many things that went wrong this weekend I don't even know where to start. I guess I should begin with the one thing that actually seemed to work.

Filtered and kegged: 100503 Hook Me Up


This batch had been in fermentation for about 5 weeks before I finally got to a place where I could keg it. I had already decided that this would be the test case for my beer filtration setup. I had shopped around and listened to some podcasts on The Brewing Network to finalize the design for a keg-to-keg filtering system, and what I finally decided on was an adaptation of the same water filter I described last October.

The filter idea is pretty straightforward. I took another Omni U25 whole house water filter and traded out the 3/4" NPT connections for a pair of reducing bushings and 1/4" barb fittings. I then attached about a foot or so of beverage tubing to the barb with a hose clamp, and at the other ends I added swivel flare fittings. To those I attached a pair of liquid ball-lock quick disconnects.

Once the assembly was completed, there were some setup tasks for the filter. First, I took an already clean keg and put about a gallon of water into it. I then used my compressor and a gas ball-lock QD I already had, and pressurized the water keg. I then attached the filter to the "out" posts of the water keg and a separate corny. This allowed the water to flow from the water keg through the filter. I did this part of the setup with plain water because the filter cartridge was new and I wanted to get any activated charcoal dust out of it before I started running sanitizer or beer. After I had flushed all the water through, I went back to the water keg (bleeding the pressure first of course) and added about a gallon of Star-San solution. I then pressurized the keg with CO2 and bled the air out of the headspace, so that there was mostly only CO2 remaining. I hooked it back up to the filter and ran Star-San through the assembly for about three minutes. When I had gotten all of the sanitizer out of the keg, the filter emptied (mostly) and the remaining space was filled with CO2. At this point I disconnected everything - the filter was ready to go.

In operation, the process went as follows. I racked the Hook Me Up batch to a clean, sanitized corny keg in the usual fashion, taking a gravity sample along the way (more on this later). Once the keg was filled, I sealed it and bled the air out by filling the headspace with CO2. I then prepared another clean, sanitized corny and purged its interior with CO2. I connected the "in" side of the filter to the liquid post of the full keg, the "out" side to the liquid post of the empty keg, and pressurized the full keg to about 4 PSI (to the limit of my ability to read the gauge on the regulator).

Slowly but surely, beer started filling the filter assembly and moving into the empty keg. I kept the lid cracked open on the destination keg so that the CO2 inside would escape as it was displaced with beer from the bottom of the dip tube. I didn't keep a close eye on the clock, but I would guess it took between 20 and 30 minutes to push the beer through the filter and fill the destination keg. At the point where it started pushing foam through the line I turned the filter off, even though there was about a pint or so of beer left in the filter. It appears that that's the dead loss for the device. I sealed the keg and put some CO2 in to set the lid.

Cleaning up was fairly simple. Basically I backflushed the filter with sanitizer from a keg that I pressurized with air. I guess it's a reflection of how much sediment had already dropped out before I racked, but it didn't look like there was much material in the effluent from the backflushing. (There was some, so the filtering wasn't a totally wasted effort, but it wasn't like the effluent from, say, the pool filter, which is probably a good thing after all.) I opened the filter up and drained the dead-loss sanitizer but left everything wet, then sealed it up. I don't think there will be a mold issue but only time will tell. I'm wondering if I should have left it full of Star-San instead. I guess I could just go fill it up.

And now for the bad news

The 100503 Hook Me Up finished at 1.020. That's really high compared to what was predicted, which was 1.013. I don't have any idea why after four plus weeks it didn't attenuate any more than that. The flavor is OK, but the finish is a touch thick and a little sweet. I was expecting it to be drier.  That wasn't the worst news for this batch however. In my rush to get it ready for the Fourth of July, I managed to overcarb it pretty badly. I think I have it bled down now, but I really can't tell. Why I can't tell will become evident soon.

So I have a lot of family around the house on the third, just hanging out and enjoying a strangely cool day for this time of year. The Honey Half-Wit, as expected, has proven to be the crowd favorite, and at some point during the day I am dispatched downstairs to draw a few pints for the card-playing crowd. I crack open the tap and...nothing comes out. Not foam, not CO2, nothing.

I quickly check some of the other taps and beer flows from them, so I know there's CO2 in the system. I change out the beer line from the tap to another keg and beer flows, so I know there's no blockage in the tap or line. Not knowing what else to do, I bleed pressure from the keg and open the lid, at which point I notice that the beer is frozen. WTF? A further examination shows that the bottled beer filling in the spaces in the floor of the keezer has suffered the same fate. I check the setpoint on the temperature controller, and it shows 34 F, same as usual, with the current reading being 31 F. Since the setpoint hasn't changed in months I don't know why the keezer picked Saturday to decide to freeze beer, but it did. I pulled the keg out and set it in a bucket of water to thaw, and in about an hour it had re-liquefied and I was able to return it to the keezer (after raising the setpoint several degrees).

Thinking all was well, I went about my business and we had a reasonably good remainder of the day, capped off by a trip to the local Double-A team's game and fireworks show. I discovered that they were serving Gordon Biersch brands at one of the beer stands and had about half a Maibock, but was underwhelmed.

Independence Day dawned and we were caught up in the whirlwind of finishing all the entries for the dessert contest at the annual Indian Springs Village Fourth of July barbecue. Returning home, everything seemed OK and the day wore on well, until I was again dispatched to draw a pint or two. Once again, I opened the tap, and once again, I got nothing. Fearing the worst, I went straight to the "beer is frozen" diagnostic and started to bleed the keg preparatory to thawing it again. However, it turned out there was nothing to bleed. A quick glance at the CO2 regulator told me the tale: the gas was out. How in the hell did that happen? I just exchanged that cylinder!

Needless to say, I wasn't very popular when I went back upstairs with the news.

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.