2012 Tas Microbrew Fest

This snuck up on me. I don't think it's been promoted very widely. Still, I can't wait. I've loved the Morrisons I've had so far and I'm hoping the Seven Sheds IPA makes the trip down, I've heard good things about it.

Grain mill upgrade

I got a mill for crushing barley nearly a year ago. Before that I was crushing grain for my extract brews (and one partial mash) with a bottle or rolling pin on a baking tray, not a fun way to start an afternoon's brewing. It's not the best one you can get but then it wasn't the most expensive either. It works fine but the hopper was pretty small and flimsy and it was only mounted on a narrow bit of ply.

I lent it to my brother the other day and now it looks like this:

What can I say? Simon has skills

The new hopper holds around 6kg of grain and sits nicely on a 20L bucket. It's more stable and easier to use. A win all round.

Some people get into brewing and love all the planning and building and really enjoy getting everything together. That's not me at all. I sometimes wish it was but all I really want to do is brew. It's awesome having Simon around to make this kind of stuff happen.

Tasting: American Brown Ale

It's well and truly gone now but I found these tasting notes from a while back (20/7/12) and thought I'd chuck them up here so I have a record of it.

Aroma: It has a gentle hop aroma. Passionfruit, citrus, pineapple are the main players. There's also some sweet caramel and coffee in the background.

Appearance: It pours clear and a medium brown colour. A sticky, tight and long lasting head. I don't think of Brown Ales as the most pretty beers but as far as they go this one isn't bad.

Flavour: A mild hop flavour, again passionfruit and citrus are the main characters I can detect. The hop flavour merges nicely with the residual sweetness. Coffee/roast flavours from the chocolate malt comes out to play and there's a firm bitterness that lingers on the palate as the flavours clear. The flavours all play really nicely together and make this beer work well.

Mouthfeel: Creamy, medium carbonation, plenty of body and a light background sweetness. It works nicely with the flavour.

Overall: The aim with this beer was to make something accessible and drinkable. It worked! I found myself running out of it pretty quickly. It was an extract beer but certainly didn't suffer for that. The body along with the roasty flavours makes it a really nice wintery beer but still has the hop notes that hold out the promise of Spring. I can't think of anything I'd change and I'd happily brew it again if I was after an easy drinking Brown Ale again. 

DIY wort chiller

My bro and I made ourselves wort chillers a couple of months ago:

9m of 1/2in copper tube shaped around the end of a bucket.

Finished wort chiller. I neatened up the ends a bit afterwards.

It was really easy to do. I think in the end it might have taken a lazy 20 minutes to make both of them. We also found that you can just jam on a bit of garden hose without mucking around with hose clamps or tap fittings. It's not the prettiest but it works really nicely. 23L of 100'C wort chills to 25'C in about 20 minutes.

Reflections on a dry month

My ongoing health issues have forced us to rethink our diet and over the last month we've been doing a particularly restrictive diet that's supposed to be helpful. As part of that month I had to forgo beer, it was painful. Now the month is up and I've happily fallen off the wagon. Here are some reflections on my dry month as I sip my brother's delicious Hefeweizen.

1. I really like beer. I know it's obvious but I really didn't realise how much I loved it until I had to avoid it. It's complex, varied, powerful and delicious. For at least part of the past 4 months or so I've had to take dairy, fructose, gluten and a few other bits and pieces out of my diet and generally I've been pretty much fine with that since it's meant more meat. Beer was by far the hardest thing to do without. I wanted malty and I wanted bitter and nothing else would do.

2. I like being able to go without for a while. When I worked as a barista I usually had 5-10 coffees a day but I usually didn't drink any coffee on the weekend. I liked not needing it. Same with beer. 

3. It's given me a greater appreciation for beer. This is related to the first two points. It's nice to have access to decent to fantastic beer at any time but I find that over time I begin to drink with less regard to what's going down my throat. I might be drinking something delicious but I don't appreciate it properly. After a month of abstinence I'm savouring every drop and enjoying the wafting aromas.

4. One of the things I really missed was the social beer. Whether it's home brew or not, it's always better when shared with friends. Sure you can drink coffee or tea with people but it's not the same.

5. Related to that, it's made me realise that I generally don't brew just for myself. I mean, I love it, it's heaps of fun to do and I obviously enjoy the results of my efforts but a brew isn't complete until it's being shared with friends.

6. A month with no drinking is a great way to build up the stocks again. My enforced winter brewing break left my cupboard pretty bare but as of today I have 4 batches bottled and in various stages of carbonation. 

7. It drove me to work on a bunch of recipes. I was dreaming of the kinds of beers I wanted to drink and trying to create recipes for those beers. If I brewed a beer a week and just used the recipes I've written so far it'd take me until December next year to brew them all. 

Brewday: Session Saison

Yesterday I brewed a saison, the final beer of three for an upcoming camp. I'm hoping that the low gravity and the high fermentation temperatures will get this baby done quickly so that it has time to carbonate in the bottles.

Now we wait. It hurts.

I'm a relative newcomer to saisons. The first one I had was at Fremont Brewing just over a year ago. It was memorable even among all the other great beers I had in the US. I loved the dry finish and the fruity and peppery characters that came with it. Since then I've also enjoyed the Sierra Nevada Ovila Saison and a number of others from the US, Belgium and Australia. They seem to be a beer geek favourite and I guess with good reason. It gives heaps of freedom to play with grist, mashing, hopping amounts and brett/funky bacteria.

With this one I was aiming for something pretty dry with a decent bitter bite to it. I started fermenting it at 23'C but will up that to 28 or 29'C over the next few days, I'm hoping the higher temperatures will help me get a bit more out of the WY3725 than I did last time. It'll weigh in somewhere between 4.5 and 5% ABV and should be perfect for those lovely Spring days we get in between the windy/wet ones.

The grist is pilsner malt (82%), rye malt (11%) and wheat malt (7%). Not shooting for anything spectacular with that, just light and hopefully with a little edge from the rye and wheat. I mashed at 65.5'C and was shooting for 1.043 but only got 1.040. So far for the 3 batches I've brewed in my urn I've hovered around the 70% efficiency mark, it's not exactly where I want it but at least it's relatively stable and I can build recipes around that. I haven't been doing a mashout in the urn yet and I reckon that'd help get my efficiency up a few points.

I added 26g of Aramis hops at the start of the boil, 30g Saaz @ 20 minutes and 30g Styrian Goldings at the end. It's far from a hop bomb but in a relatively little beer they should come across nicely.

Fermenter of saisony goodness

Camp de Brains Saison
OG: 1.043
FG (est): 1.005
IBU: 31
Batch size: 23L
Mash: 65.5'C for 60 minutes

Grist:
Pilsner malt (82%)
Rye malt (11%)
Wheat malt (7%)

Hops:
26g Aramis (8.2%aa) @ 60 min
30g Saaz (2.9%aa) @ 20 min
30g Styrian Goldings (5.4%aa) @ 0 min

Yeast: Wyeast 3725

I also bottled the IPA on Monday. I'd dry hopped it for 4 days with 40g each of Columbus, Amarillo and Simcoe and bottling it was a pleasure. The aromas were incredible. Tropical fruit punch, strawberry, coconut and lime. I'm really happy with it and can't wait to see how it drinks.

Brewday: Playoffs IPA 2.0

It's great to be getting back into the rhythm of brewing. Even though I'm in the middle of a month off drinking alcohol, I'm enjoying producing it and the anticipation for tasting these brews is high. Yesterday I brewed up a slightly modified version of the Playoffs IPA I brewed back in April. I was really happy with how it turned out the first time and I'm excited to get this version into the bottles and drinking.

I bought 1kg bags of Simcoe and Columbus hops a while back so I went a little crazy with the hop additions. Along with a dose of Amarillo they are the stars of the beer. I also reduced the pale malt percentage a little and increased the rye and crystal malts slightly. The beer is fermenting away in the fridge at a happy 18'C and it's making the whole room smell like tropical fruit punch. I'm going to dry hop it in a day or two with 40g each of Simcoe, Columbus and Amarillo.

Big bag o' hops

This was my second go at using my urn and it went better than the first time but I still missed some of my targets. I ended up with more pre-boil liquid than I was aiming for and needed a longer boil to get the gravity near what I planned. Still, I now have 18l of a 1.060 IPA (I was aiming for 1.062) doing its thing in the fermenter so things aren't too bad. Hopefully over the next couple of batches I'll get it dialled in properly.

Now the plan is to build up a starter of my saison yeast (WY 3725) and have that ready to go as soon as the IPA is done. I can't wait to get that yeast cranking in a beer at 27 or 28'C now that I have a temperature controller and see what flavours it gives.

Export Stout 2.0

I like Stouts but they certainly aren't my favourite style. Somehow though I seem to end up brewing them more often than anything else. This one is a second attempt at the ANZAC Day Export Stout that I was pretty pleased with and comes with the added pleasure of being intended for a gathering with some friends I studied with.

Last time around the mash temperatures were a bit high, the efficiency was a bit lower than I expected and the yeast didn't attenuate as well as it should have due to cold temperatures. Together they made the beer lower alcohol that I intended (5.9% abv instead of 7%) and left it a bit sweeter and thicker bodied than I wanted. That said, it was freaking delicious so I was keen to give it another go with some tweaks.

This time I lowered the mash temps which should take care of the residual sweetness and help attenuation. There's rolled rye in the grist which should take care of the body. I also have a proper fermentation chamber and that should give the yeast a hand too. In addition to all this, I finally got the 40l urn I bought back in March up and running so I enlarged the recipe to brew a 20l batch. I was hoping that the size of the urn would help me get better efficiency and reach the 1.070 OG I was shooting for. It didn't work though, I only ended up with 1.062 so I'm going to have to do some more work to get efficiency up.

The Spaceship complete with camping mat insulation

The recipe is nearly the same as last time, just scaled up and with Northern Brewer used solely as the bittering hop. If the tweaks turn out well, this is going to be perfect for some good times catching up with mates I haven't seen for a while. That along with an IPA and a Saison if I have the time should make for a nice selection.

Brewday: Kimberly, a Brown Porter

Room has been made, a fridge has been picked up and beer has been brewed. Finally! I've been desperate to brew for a couple of months and there are like 15 recipes that need to be brewed this minute.

My Brown Porter, sadly there's only room for one at a time in the fridge

Because we live in a cruel world where I can't brew 15 beers at the same time I chose to brew a Brown Porter. It gave me the chance to use the brown and crystal malts I roasted a while back. I called it Kimberly because that's the name printed on the oven I used to roast the barley. Why name an oven Kimberly? Who knows but now it's been passed on to my beer.

It was such a joy to experience the small pleasures of the brewday again. To open the bags of grain and hops and inhale the roasted goodness. The brown malt has mellowed nicely, the crystal malt smelled like fruit toast, all raisins and sweetness and roasty malt. I've never used Victory malt before and cracking the bag unleashed cookie dough upon my senses. Fuggles is nothing new to me but man it was nice to smell those delicious hops.

I also got to use my stir-plate for the first time. It stirs.

The recipe: Maris otter, brown malt, crystal malt, victory malt and chocolate malt. Fuggles hops. WY1469 West Yorkshire Ale.

It's amazing how much of a relief it is to have the fridge set up. I hadn't realised before how much I was worrying about the fermentation when it was at ambient temperature. It's so easy with the fridge. I can be confident that the yeast is getting it's best possible shot and I'm free me to brew and brew and brew. Now I'm more or less properly set up. With the stir plate and fermentation fridge I can control temperatures and treat the yeast properly so there's no excuse for not producing good beer. My aim now is to brew a stack more and try out styles I haven't tried before as well as trying to master a few.

Up next: ANZAC Day Export Stout redux, a Saison and another American IPA.

And we're back!

I haven't been posting because brewing has slowed to a halt. It's so cold down here that even my heating pad can't keep the beer at proper temperatures so I'm just trying to get all the ones on the go fermented out and bottled. Also, I've been busy working on a couple of other projects that will eventually (hopefully) solve my fermentation temperature control issues.

Anyway, I needed to break radio silence to say that I just cracked the first of my Belgian IPAs. It's not quite what I was aiming for but man is it good! So pumped.

There are about 4 other tastings that I still need to write up and heaps of things I want to brew as soon as I can. More and more and more.