My 10 Home Brew Goals for 2014

If I boiled my brewing goals down to one desire it'd be this: get better. Keep learning and working on the details in pursuit of perfection. No big deal. These are the 10 things I'm hoping to achieve in 2014.

1. Consistency
I want to improve the average standard of my brews. This was one of the big things I took away from the competition results in October. At the moment, aside from the odd infection, I'd say my worst beers are around 55/100 and the best are 85/100. I'd like to narrow that gap, get the worst ones up to 75 and the best ones to 90. I think the oxygenation and better yeast practices have been a big step in the right direction. A clean fermentation should get the worst beers up to 65-70 at least. Beyond that I'll have to find other ways to improve.

2. Dial in a couple of recipes
I'd also like to lock down 2 or 3 recipes. I have a number of recipes that are more or less set now but they're for beers where creativity isn't really a factor. There are only so many choices when you brew a hefeweizen, a berliner weisse or a dry stout. I mean beers where there's more freedom or where it's harder to stand out from the crowd. I'm probably shooting for a pale ale/IPA recipe and a saison recipe.

3. Get some experience brewing lagers
I got a new fermentation chest freezer recently so now I can begin to get a handle on lagers and pilsners without tying up my fermentation fridge for 2 months or longer. The home brew that sealed my interest in brewing and got me on this path was a pilsner hopped with Citra. I had no idea what I was doing but it turned out well and the rest is history. I'd like to recreate that beer as well as brew some traditional Czech and German beers.

4. Get to know Australian hops much better
There are quite a few Australian hops but aside from Galaxy, I don't think I've used any of them more than once. I'd like to get to know the hops that are grown practically in my backyard and learn how to make the most of them. I now have 1kg of Galaxy, Summer and Ella in my freezer so that's a good start.

5. Improve presentation
I'd also like to work on the presentation of my beers. Clarity in particular is something I've only taken small and inconsistent steps towards but I'd like to make presentation a basic part of my brewing process rather than an afterthought. Head formation is normally all good but colour is something I'd also like to put a little more thought into.

6. See home brew in Tasmania develop further
It was pretty awesome to do well in the state and national home brew competitions last year and I'd like to continue to enter and do well. More than that, I'd like to encourage other Tassie guys to enter and see them win. I'm hoping that this year we'll also be able to work towards a Hobart based home brew club. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while but I haven't been well enough to put effort into. Hopefully this year I'll have the energy. In addition to that, I'd like to get on the path to BJCP certification. I'm pretty keen to get into a more structured and defined beer tasting routine and it'd be a good thing to have some certified people in a brew club.

7. More brewing with brettanomyces
I've brewed a couple of 100% brett beers in the past but didn't get around to any in 2013. I'd like to get a brett IPA going soon and try out some others recipes during the year. I also want to try bottle conditioning with brett as I've always meant to but somehow never had my act together enough when it came time to bottle.

8. More sours
The story of sours in 2013 is similar to 100% brett beers. The spirit was willing but the body was weak. I reaped the benefits of a sour I brewed in 2012, dry hopping 1/2 of it with Simcoe turning it into one of the best beers I've brewed to date. In 2014 I'd like to get a few long term sours going as well as brewing a few that'll be ready sooner.

9. Keep getting better at yeast handling
In 2013 I gained more confidence in handling yeast, plating samples and growing up starters. In 2014 I'd like to take that to the next level with doing cell and viability counting and also begin fermenting with captured and isolated wild yeast strains.

10. More brewing for events
A big part of why I brew is to share delicious beer and fun times with other people. I consume less than 10% of the beer I brew, I give lots away and share the rest with visitors. I also like the project of designing and brewing beers for a special occasion or gathering of some kind. It's nice having a project to work on given my physical limitations thanks to CFS. The wedding and birthday I brewed for at the end of 2013 haven't even happened yet but I'm planning a few potential events. In particular I'd like to brew something for the World Cup. That'll be interesting since by my calculations, most of the games will kick off between 3am-12pm our time. Breakfast beer for everyone!

Birthday Brew #1: Brewdog Hardcore IPA Clone

For the past 3 years my friend Jason's birthday has been an occasion to gather a bunch of beer loving friends and share some interesting commercial beers. He loves good beer and has been one of my most ardent home brew supporters. This year is his 30th and he's going all out with around 20 people coming to a 2 day event centred on camping out and slow cooking some delicious BBQ.

My part in it has been to brew 3 beers for the event. Jason and I were talking about the possibilities a couple of months ago and it was obvious that hops were going to be a big part of things. Jason wanted a version of a Nelson Sauvin single hop Pale Ale we brewed several times 3 years ago so that was easy. I'd just bought Mitch Steele's IPA book and saw the Brewdog Hardcore IPA recipe. The Hardcore IPA was one of the early Imperial IPAs was available to us and it made a big impression so that seemed like a good choice too. Finally, I'd been itching to brew my Playoffs IPA again so I took the opportunity to add that one to the list. Lots and lots of hops. Unlike the wedding, this birthday is mostly made up of people I know who are relatively educated in craft beer and Jason himself loves the hoppy beer so I didn't feel like I needed to moderate my choices like I did with the wedding.

Part of the challenge of brewing a big and hoppy beer with the BIAB method and using a 40L urn is in planning for and managing the losses. As the planned OG increases, the efficiency of converting and extracting the sugars decreases. I planned for 73% efficiency, down from the 80% which is my normal level, and ended up with 72% so I was pretty close. The good thing is that this information allows me to plan some other big beers with more confidence. Along with reduced efficiency, more hops means more wort losses at the end of the brew with the trub and hop debris left at the bottom of the urn. So factoring all of that in I was aiming for 15.5L of finished beer instead of the 19.5-21.5L I normally get.

In addition to the quantity challenges, I've also found quality a bit lacking in the higher ABV beers I've brewed. They've tended to be good but not great, often suffering from off flavours. I've managed to get off flavours through an inadequate pitch of yeast, high alcohol levels or insufficient O2 stressing the yeast and high fermentation temperatures. I've collected the whole set. So with this one I was trying to do everything I could to make sure the yeast was happy and the fermentation was clean. I oxygenated the wort for 2 minutes, twice what I do for a beer in the 1.050s and I built up a massive pitch of yeast (an estimated 330 billion cells). Everything went quite well and the only problem with it was that it didn't ferment all the way down to the 1.014 I was after. With hindsight, I think I should have picked up some yeast nutrient to give them a little extra love and perhaps mashed lower than the 65C I went with.

Brewdog Hardcore IPA Clone (17L batch)
OG: 1.083 (1.082 measured)
FG: 1.014 (1.020 measured)
IBU: 148
EBC: 21.8
ABV: 9% (8.3% measured)

90% Maris Otter
6.5% Caramalt
3.5% Simpsons light crystal

25g Columbus @ 75 minutes
25g Centennial @ 75 minutes
12g Columbus @ 60 minutes
12g Centennial @ 60 minutes
33g Columbus @ 0 minutes
33g Centennial @ 0 minutes
33g Simcoe @ 0 minutes
50g Columbus @ dry hop

Estimated pitch of 330 billion cells of WLP 090

120 seconds of oxygen

I added 200g acidulated malt to correct the mash pH and added 11g CaSO4, 2g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4 as the recipe said to burtonise the water. I wasn't keen to push the sulphate levels higher than I did although I may test the limits of that another time.

Stepped mash: 65C (45 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out.

14/12/13 - Brewed with Huw

24/12/13 - Added 50g Columbus dry hops

28/12/13 - Bottled

Tasting notes

Wedding Beer Catchup #4: Mr Darcy Hefeweizen

The last beer for the wedding is a hefeweizen. It's hard to argue with a hefe on a summers day. Although I guess if you're trying to argue with a beer you have other problems. Beer can't talk. I feel pretty confident with my process for hefeweizens and that kind of security is good when brewing for other people.

Yeast on a plate ready to go into a 5ml vial

Stepped up from 2ml to 20ml

The yeast was one I'd made a plate of back when I brewed the leichtes weizen. It was a simple matter to use my sterilised inoculation loop to scoop up some yeast and deposit it in the vial. Once the yeast was happily fermenting in the vial I stepped it up into a mini erlenmeyer, then into a 250ml erlenmeyer and finally into my 2L erlenmeyer. Several steps but it worked out very well and each time I do it I feel a bit more confident about my processes.

Bernie milling the grain and pulling faces

This brew is pretty similar to the leichtes weizen I brewed for the competition. I went for a 30 minute ferulic acid rest and was planning on a gravity of 1.046. My efficiency was a bit lower than I expected, something that seems to happen often when I use wheat, and I ended up with 1.043 in the fermenter. Will and Bernie helped out with this one and it all went nice and smoothly.

Mr Darcy Hefeweizen (21L batch)

Will helping Bernie mill the grain

OG: 1.043
FG: 1.011
IBU: 13
EBC: 5.7
ABV: 4.2%

60% Best Malz wheat malt
40% Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner malt

15g Aramis @ 60 minutes

1.2L starter of WLP 300 built up from a plate. Shooting for a pitch of 190 billion cells. Fermented at 17C for 5 days and then increased to 19C to finish it off.

3g CaSO4, 7g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4 to increase the calcium and keep the profile balanced

Stepped mash: 42C (30 min), 63C (raised from 42C with an infusion of boiling water, 40 min), 72C (15 minutes) and mashed out at 78C.

60 seconds of oxygen after cooling

07/12/13 - Brewed with Will & Bernie

21/12/13 - Bottled

Wedding Beer Catchup #3: The Lorax Pale Ale

Earlier in the year I brewed a beer with my friends Adam and Will. It was a simple extract pale ale with some Weyermann CaraAmber for a bit of interest. It was hopped with Simcoe and Columbus and turned into an easy drinking, 4.6% pale ale with a huge tropical fruit juice flavour and aroma. When Adam asked me to brew for his wedding, this was one of the beers he wanted.

Instead of doing an extract batch, I decided to translate the recipe into all grain. True to form, I ended up playing with the recipe a bit so that the similarity between this recipe and the original is mainly in the hopping. I got some biscuit malt from Bill, a great bloke up in Launceston, who's been malting and roasting barley at home. Crackerjack, his biscuit malt reminds me heaps of Sao crackers we used to have growing up. My first batch using his malt got infected so I was keen to give it a shot here. I also increased the OG a little because the other wedding beers were all planned to be between 3.5-4.5% abv.

The Lorax Pale Ale (21L batch)

There's no real connection between the two except for the colour

OG: 1.051
FG: 1.011
IBU: 38 (estimated)
EBC: 10.1
ABV: 5.3%

95% Golden Promise
5% Not For Horses Crackerjack malt

30g Simcoe @ 60 min
30g Simcoe @ 0 min
50g Simcoe @ Dry hop
50g Columbus @ Dry hop

1.5L starter of WLP 090 (estimated pitch of 230 billion cells), fermented at 18C

60 seconds of oxygen

I added 8g CaSO4, 2g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4 to the mash to raise the calcium and get the sulphate levels to enhance the hoppiness and 125g acidulated malt for mash pH correction.

Stepped mash: 66C (40 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out.

30/11/13 - Brewed with Adam and Will

8/12/13 - Added dry hops

14/12/13 - Bottled

Tasted on 11/01/14

Wedding beer catchup #2: Buck Mulligan Golden Ale

Golden Ales aren't the most exciting beer but there's something fun in working with more subtle flavours to try to create something almost endlessly drinkable. With this one I'm following the lead of some English breweries. The Internet tells me that these kinds of beers are quite popular at the moment. The general theme seems to be: pale golden colour, 3.5-4.5% ABV, an English yeast and an American or New Zealand hop variety.

This is the perfect time to try out a hop variety that's new to me: Summer. It isn’t a brand new variety, it was developed right here in Tasmania in 1997 by Hop Products Australia. For a while it was called Summer Saaz as one of its parents was Saaz but now the Saaz seems to have been dropped and we have Summer. The description says that it has a balanced, sweet and fruity aroma of melon, citrus and passionfruit. It’s a fairly low alpha acid variety, this batch clocking in around 5.5%aa. In this beer I’m shooting for around 25 IBUs, enough to be there but not to steal the show. I’m after a decent hop aroma though, something surprising to people not used to craft beer but inviting at the same time.

Buck Mulligan Golden Ale (23L batch)
OG: 1.045
FG: 1.011
IBU: ~24 (this is a bit of a guess since most of the bitterness comes from the flame-out addition)
EBC: 7.7
ABV: 4.5%

80% Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner malt
20% Best Malz wheat malt

8 IBUs of Summer @ 10 min
50g of Summer @ 0 min
50g of Summer @ dry hop

Fermented with WY1026 @ 18 celsius

Water adjusted for a balanced profile and to get the calcium to a good place. 3g CaSO4, 6g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4.

Stepped mash: 66C (40 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out

22/11/13 - brewed with Huw's help

04/12/13 - dry hopped with 100g Summer instead of 50g since the yeast had stripped out almost all the hop character

07/12/13 - bottled

2013 home brew review

Keeping detailed records has been invaluable in my brewing experience. For the last 2 years I've been recording the details of my brews in a spreadsheet, adding new categories as I've realised other things I should be noting. It makes it easy to look back and make connections/improvements and track things over time. So here's the summary of my beer in 2013.

This year I brewed 35 beers, not bad considering I spent ~5 months of the year stuck in bed. The beer was mainly brewed in 3 bursts in between CFS setbacks: March-May, August-September and November-December. Of those: 9 were of German origin, 12 American, 4 Belgians, 9 UK beers and 1 Australian.

I probably ended up brewing twice as many German beers and half as many Belgians as I usually would, mostly a quirk of reusing the yeast I had on hand several times. For 2014 I want to focus more on Saisons and other Belgian beers. I also didn't end up brewing any sours, mostly because I got sick each time I was planning to. I also never got around to brewing a lager. In 2014 I plan to brew several of each.

4 beers were brewed for a wedding
3 beers were brewed for a friend's birthday
5 beers were entered into competition
1 scored 132/150 in the ACT ABC and got a bronze in the nationals.

Brewing for special events and competition is fun but also a bit stressful. The stakes are a higher and there's less under my control. For all that, it's a great chance to try my beer out on a bunch of people who have little or no connection to me. That makes it a better assessment of where I'm at than my friends who like drinking free beer.

I lost 3 beers to infection, 1 was lost in moving house, 1 suffered from a burnt taste after the urn element got charred in the brewing process.

All up I brewed 707L of beer with an average OG of 1.050 and FG of 1.010 and established a fairly reliable brewhouse efficiency of 80%.

I used 16 varieties of hops and 12 strains of yeast with US-05 being the most popular, going into 10 batches.

More than statistics, I made improvements to my process that made noticeable differences to my beer. I started adjusting water chemistry and pH, something I began reading about during 2012 but only began doing in 2013. The pH helped improve my mash efficiency and I found that my beers cleared much more quickly. It seems that having a minimum of 50 ppm of calcium helps the yeast operate and flocculate more effectively.

A little more recently (November 2013) I finally got started with oxygenating wort. People who know say that depending on the strength of the beer, 8-14 ppm of dissolved oxygen is the optimum level for yeast reproduction happiness. I've tasted the first 4 beers using oxygenation and they have all been a step up from my previous brews. Cleaner and missing a slight off flavour I'd found in the majority of my beers.

Over the course of the year I also refined and gained confidence in my yeast handling practices. I've got a bank of 6 strains on plates in my fridge and enough flasks and vials to easily step up from a single colony to a pitchable amount. I have been better at making sure I was using yeast calculators (the Brewers Friend one is the best I've found) and pitching the correct amounts. This year I bought a microscope and hemocytometer but haven't had the chance to put them to use to check cell density and viability but that's the next step.

It's been a good year for brewing. My beer is better than it was last year, I'm still learning heaps as I go and as soon as I've recovered enough, I've got plenty more in depth reading waiting for me. Unfortunately it wasn't such a good year for blogging, I'd have liked to record my progress much better than I have. I'm hoping that next year will be better health-wise and that I'll be able to brew and record what I'm up to. I've got some fun things planned for 2014 but I think I'll save them for another post.

Wedding Beer Catchup #1: Johnnie Rico Pilsch

After my first post about brewing for the wedding, I obsessed and fiddled and changed the plan a bunch of times. The beer will be consumed primarily by people I don't know, and many of whom probably are not into craft beer. With that in mind, I've chosen to brew beers that are very approachable. They're all brewed now and ready to go with the wedding only 12 days away.

The final list:

• Pilsch
• Golden Ale
• Pale Ale
• Hefeweizen

3/4 of the beer, ready to go

I pinched the idea of the Pilsch from a write-up on the Devils Backbone Brewery on Fuggled. It's a low gravity Bohemian Pilsner recipe fermented with a Kolsch yeast. I was originally going to brew a Bohemian Pilsner but I got sick at the wrong time. I think this will do a similar job but took much less time to get ready. Light, low alcohol (around 3.3% ABV), crisp and with some spicy Saaz goodness. Just the thing for a wedding reception in a nice garden on a summer's day.

The recipe is very simple:

Huw, brewing assistant extraordinaire

Johnnie Rico Pilsch
OG: 1.033 (1.035 measured)
FG: 1.008 (1.009 measured)
IBU: 24
EBC: 3.7
ABV: 3.3% (3.4% measured)

100% Bohemian Pilsner malt

18 IBUs of Saaz @ 60 min
6 IBUs of Saaz @ 15 min

1L starter of WY2565

I added 1g CaSO4, 7g CaCl2, 2g MgSO4 to adjust my water profile to have a higher ratio of chloride to sulphate and enhance the perception of the malt.

Stepped mash: 66C (40 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out

Brewed 14/11/13

Huw generously gave his time to be my hands and get this beer brewed. We've moved house since the last post and although the new house doesn't have a garage like the old place, the kitchen is generous and there's plenty of storage space so brewing is actually a bit easier here. I've also come into a small chest freezer in addition to my fermenting fridge. It's helped me get the wedding beers brewed and I'm looking forward to having the space to brew lagers during 2014.

This was the first beer I used my new oxygenation kit on. I gave it 45 seconds before adding the yeast. The fermentation was extremely vigorous, being 90% finished after 3 days.

After 5 days @ 16C I increased the temperature to 18C for 2 days, then crashed it to 0C for a week, fining with gelatine 3 days before bottling.

Bottled 30/11/13

Tasted on 10/01/13

AABC results

#AABC2013 First category: LOW ALCOHOL: M Wallace (NSW) 1, S Wardale (WA) 2, N Bultman (Tas) 3 - first AABC medal for Tas!!!
— Canberra Brewers (@canberrabrewers) November 2, 2013

My Leichtes Weizen just got 3rd place in the Low Alcohol category of the Australian Amateur Brewing Competition! I don't know the score or anything but I'm pretty stoked with that and it's great to get Tassie on the board. Given how it did in the previous competition I was hoping it might place but knew the beer was only going to suffer with the extra weeks of age on it. I'm very happy!

Having a go brewing rice wine

I can't stand up long enough to brew beer but that hasn't stopped me fermenting things. I’ve been brewing soft drink and kombucha for several months, more recently I've been brewing milk kefir and last week I started a batch of rice wine. The great thing about these fermented goods is that they are no more difficult to get started than a cup of tea.

Rice wine at the beginning

I was inspired to make the rice wine by a thread on homebrewtalk.com, part of it's beauty is that it only uses two ingredients, cooked rice and rice yeast balls (generously delivered by a mate from Sydney). The method is very simple:

1. Rinse and cook 2 cups of rice, it needs to be fairly glutinous type. Let it cool to room temperature.
2. Pack the rice into a large, clean jar, layering rice and a crushed up yeast ball. Cover the jar with a loose fitting lit or gladwrap/aluminium foil secured with a rubber band. You want some air to be able to escape but keep it protected from other bugs.
3. Give it time in a warm but dark place, mine lives under a cloth at the top of a cupboard. 
4. After 3 or 4 weeks at room temperature the wine should be ready. Strain the remaining rice solids through some cheesecloth and bottle it. The wine should be stored in the fridge as it may continue to ferment. Plastic bottles are probably a good idea to avoid the potential of exploding glass bottles.

Look for these at Asian supermarkets

That's it! Over the time in the jar an enzyme produced by the mould from the yeast balls will break down the rice, and the yeast will ferment the sugars produced by the enzyme. Mine is 4 or 5 days in and the rice in my jar is floating on top of 3cm of liquid. It’ll come out somewhere around 20% ABV. You can try different kinds of rice, different methods of preparation, and addition of fruit post fermentation. There's lots more fun to be had with this I think.

Competition Results

My brewing and posting has been put on hold again thanks to stupid CFS but I'm trying some voice recognition software so I can actually post. Looks like it's working!

The Saison

I got my results back from the ACT Amateur Brewing Championship. Tasmanian brewers get to enter through the ACT competition but get judged separately. So there is an embarrassing scoresheet for the Tasmanian portion of the competition which lists all the entries: Simon's and mine. Next year I hope we can round up a few more Tasmanian entrants.

Overall I was very happy with how my beers went. The big news is that my Leichtes Weizen scored 132/150, it was the highest score of any of the low alcohol beers in the competition by a decent margin. I've sent it off to the national competition, the Australian Amateur Brewing Championship, and we'll see how it does there. I'm not expecting very much though as an extra three weeks of age will certainly hurt it.

The other beers didn't do as well but I was not expecting very much from some of them. Simon's very good Altbier (112/150) was the next best of the six we submitted between us, Then came my Tripel (103.5/150) then Saison (103/150), then the Export Stout (93.5/150) and as I expected, my Blonde Ale (82/150) came last of the lot. I may review each beer and include the feedback from the judges if I can manage that sometime soon.

Overall it was a really good experience and I'm glad I entered. I've learned quite a bit and will work hard to make my entries next year of a more even and higher standard. One thing that let me down this time was my use of poor quality dried yeast. The dried yeast I used in the Blonde Ale and Stout left a sulphur aroma and other off flavours from fermentation. I've learned my lesson and will not be getting yeast from my LHBS again. The other big thing I will try next year is brewing further in advance. I brewed 8 beers in the month before I had to send off the entries and I think this compromised the quality of some of the beers because I was rushing and because some of the beers didn't have enough time to mature.

I was pleased that my thoughts on the beers generally lined up very well with the judges impressions. It was encouraging having them point out f lavours and aromas that I detected but couldn't necessarily put a name to. I'd like to get the BJCP judging qualification or do some other kind of training in beer evaluation so I can do a better job of brewing.