Batch #3 Post #2

Notes from today's bottling:

I finished bottling the third batch. Other than spilling more beer than I would have liked, it all went well. This time I cleaned the bottles by hand, but then used my dishwasher at home to sanitize them (it has a setting that is supposed to do that). If that works well it will be a whole lot easier than cleaning all the damn bottles by themselves.

I ended up with 12 twenty-two oz bottles and around 61 twelve oz bottles.

I went back to the Fox Valley Homebrew and Winery shop in Aurora earlier today and picked up another case of bottles because I didn't have quite enough. While I was there I also picked up a 21 inch stainless steel brewers spoon and some more caps. It's longer than my other one so I won't burn my hand and there will be less risk for contamination in future batches.

I've been thinking about my next batch and I might try to experiment a bit and try for a pale ale. I'm wanting something with a lot of hop aroma and flavor, but not quite as much bitterness as an IPA. Also a lighter color beer would be nice, as the three batches I've made so far have been relatively dark colored.

After the problem I ran into before of mixing up my different bottles between batch 1 and 2, I decided to buy a permanent marker and just write a number 3 on the cap of all of this batch. Problem solved.

Next time I am bottling I need to remember to use the hose which is a little thiner. The one I have was a bit too wide for the bottling wand, and it sort of leaked a lot.

Batch #3 Post #1

So I am in the middle of bottling, but letting some stuff settle out. I'll post more later on the actual bottling process, but I thought I'd take this time to give the recipe for my third batch:

Batch #3:
6 lbs. Dried Wheat Malt Extract (55% wheat/45% barley/9EBC)
1 lb. Orange Blossom Honey (Dutch Gold Brand)
1 lb. Crushed Wheat Grains (Briess White Wheat Malt, 6 Row, Lovibond 2)
1 oz Hallertauer Leaf Hops, Alpha: 8.6
1 oz Willamette Pellet Hops, Alpha: 4.6
1.5 oz crushed coriander
1.5 oz sweet orange peel

-Steap the crushed wheat in ~3.5 gallons of water at 152 degrees for 30 minutes (kept right around/under 150 degrees)
-Brought to boil
-Add 6 lbs. of Dried Wheat Malt Extract, dissolve
-Added 1 lb. of Orang Blossom Honey
-Brought back to boil, added 1 oz of Hallertauer hops for bittering, and boiled for 1/2 hour.
-Add 1/2 oz of Willamette hops and .5 oz of coriander and .5 oz of Sweet Orange Peel and boil for 15 minutes
-Add 1/2 oz of Willamette and .75 oz of coriander and .75 oz of S.O.P and boil for 10 minutes
-Add .25 oz of coriander and .25 oz. of S.O.P., and remove from heat.

Note: I didn't add the first amount of S.O.P. until probably 5 minutes or so after I said I would

O.G.: 1.055
F.G.: 1.016
(probably more like a FG of 1.012 cause I added the priming sugar before measuring.)

Moment of Pride

Last night I went over to John's house and brought a few of my beers with for my friends to try. After pouring him a glass of my first batch, Tim immediately said "that's like a Belgian White, kind of like a Blue Moon". That was pretty cool.

Homebrew Shop Review

Fox Valley Homebrew and Winery - Aurora, IL

I went to this shop about 2 weeks ago with my dad to pick up some ingredients for Batch #3. It was in a pretty cool looking location, in downtown Aurora right next to the river. It was the first real homebrew shop I've been to (I went to a place that sold homebrew supplies, but was a hobby shot), so I didn't know quite what to expect.

Anyway, we went on a Saturday. You walk in and it is sort of plain looking with a little display area with some various homebrew equipment. They have a room behind their office/desk area with all of their supplies. It was a little bit cramped in there, but they had a decent selection. They only had LME in name brand cans, none that you could buy by the weight, which was a little disappointing. A good selection of grains which they also will grind for you. Considering the hop shortage, they also had a pretty good selection of hops (I would say about 10 different kinds stored in a freezer).

Pricing varied a bit. Their hops and malt extract seemed a little expensive compared to what I've found online, but they had some decent prices on certain equipment (they had bottles for pretty cheap comparatively). I picked up a large wire and mesh strainer for more reasonable (and a larger one) than I've found most places online.

The guy there who helped us was really friendly. They also sell wine supplies, which was more his expertise. He knew the basics of beer making, but didn't know a whole lot more than I do. He was nice enough though to call up one of the guys who knows more about beer when I had questions. That was pretty impressive customer service. He also said usually they had someone there, but it just happened to be a time when they didn't. They also apparently have some classes and tastings for wine and beer making, which also seemed pretty cool. I might have to look more into that over the summer.

Overall Opinion: It was a pretty decent place. I'll definitely go back. It's hard really to give an opinion since it is the first dedicated-to-brewing shop I've been to. If you are as big of a stickler for costs like I am, you can find some decent buys there, but know comparative prices of what you want online. If you are just looking for one or two ingredients, it is probably cheaper than buying online with shipping costs figured in, but if you are looking for buying all your ingredients for a batch, the costs can add up.

Batch #1 Tasting #?

Belgian White Tasting

So I['m back home for the weekend where I have a few bottles stored where I know what they are.

Date: March 28th, 2008

Time Since Bottling: ~5 weeks

Color: Dark Golden with a hint of orange.

Clarity: Cloudy

Aroma: Light-Medium Hop aroma (sweeter smelling hops), and a bit of coriander.

Head: Started with a good 1"+ of head after pour. After about 5 minutes sitting has about 1/4"

Tasting Notes: Fairly light tasting. Sweet at first, but turns more spicy quickly. It starts off smooth but kind of hangs in your mouth after swallowing. You can taste the coriander, but I wish there was more of an orange taste in it. The next batch I brewed used sweet orange peel instead of bitter orange peel, so I will be interested to see how it turns out. We also used more coriander and orange peel. After about half of the glass, there is still some head left, it seems to be holding pretty well. It is leaving a little bit of "head rings" on the glass as it is being drank, but not much. This is a little spicy/bitter for my taste, but it isn't bad. About 10-15 minutes after pouring I'm close to the end of the glass, and there is still some head, which is good to see.

Batch #2 Tasting #1

Amber Ale Tasting

So I'm pretty sure the bottles I've opened lately with no head have been my from my second batch. It seems for some reason some of them have been carbonating more than others. I'm guessing that the priming sugar didn't get mixed in too evenly. It doesn't seem to make that much sense, but it's the best I could come up with. A few of the bottles had real nice carbonation while some had almost none and some were just a so-so head.

Date: March 27th, 2008

Time Since Bottling: 2 weeks

Color: Fairly dark amber color.

Clarity: Slightly cloudy.

Aroma: Not too strong, more malty than hopy.

Head: Varies. Anywhere from a good amount of head to almost none at all.

Tasting Notes: As far as my tasting notes go, I like this one. It's not great or anything, but it goes down pretty smooth. There isn't too strong of a hop aroma or taste to it. I would probably use more or stronger hops next time, but not too much. It has a pretty malty flavor to it that I enjoy.

Batch #2 Post #1

Alright, for my second batch, I decided to make something a little less ambitious, an Amber Ale Again, I bought the kit for this from www.austinhomebrew.com.


Ingredients

Grains
1/2 lb. Crystal 60L

Malt Extract
7 lbs. Amber Extract

Hops
1 oz. Sladek (half for bitter, half for flavor)

Yeast
White Labs California Ale 001


The process was pretty much the same, and I used bottled jugs of water again. I used a different method of cooling though. In the episode of Good Eats on brewing, Alton Brown suggested to just buy a 7 lb bag of ice and pour the hot wort over it to cool it down. I did this, but I don't know how much I liked the process. It wasn't the exact amount you needed, and it also was hard to control. I think in the future I might freeze my own ice in a smaller quantity to put in the wort and still use an ice water bath so I have a little more control. I already brewed #3 so I think I will do it on #4.


Another thing I tried for the first time on this batch was to save the yeast. Yeast can be pretty expensive ($6.50-$7), and it's one of the areas that you can keep the costs down especially if you brew repeated batches of the same style. Basically after the primary fermentation winds down you can scoop some of the yeast off the bottom and put it in a sterilized jar and keep it up to about a year in your refrigerator. You've got to try and separate the yeast from the other stuff in there, but it's not too hard, you just need to shake it up, let the heavier particles settle on the bottom and the yeast on top, and then skim it off into another jar. You do it a couple of times and you should have mostly yeast left. I am planning on brewing with this yeast sometime over the summer (there's a few more things I want to try first).

Up to this point...

This is a list of all my brewing activities up until this point. I'm going to try and go back and flesh out the other stuff in subsequent posts, but for all the stuff I have posted and is described in this post, I will be recalling past events and not writing them immediately afterwards like I hope to in the future.

Batch #1 - Belgian White - Brewed February 7th, already bottled and tasted
Batch #2 - Amber Ale - Brewed March 2nd, already bottled and tasted
Batch #3 - Different Belgian White - Brewed March 16th, currently conditioning and waiting to be bottled.

Homebrew Supply Shops visited:
Leisure Time - Urbana, IL
Fox Valley Homebrew and Winery - Aurora, IL

Uh Oh...

So quite a few bottles of either Batch #1 or #2 have come up tasting pretty bad. I forgot to label them and mixed em up, so I'm not sure exactly (and since my first batch originally didn't taste quite like a Belgian White, I'm not positive which it is).

I tasted the second batch a couple of days ago, and it seemed fine, so I think that these are probably the first.

Either way, it is rather flat and tastes pretty funky. There's very little head at all, and it isn't sticking around. If it is #1, it's gotten darker. If It is #2, its gotten a little bit more of a different color to it (#2 was an Amber Ale that I sampled a few days ago and seemed fine.) My bet is that for whatever reason, the first batch didn't have a long shelf life. It tasted pretty good the first time I tried it (actually pretty close to a Belgian White), but seemed to bitter more with age. I hadn't tried one in probably a week and a half.

Batch #1 Post #2

So this beer seemed to go pretty good as I brewed it. I wish I kept better track of the exact temperatures and times of everything, but I'll lay out in genera what I did.

The water I used was store bought spring water from Meijer. The kind that comes in big jugs. I don't think there's anything in particular wrong with Urbana water, but I decided better safe than sorry.

- Took the yeast out of the fridge a few hours before to let it warm up.
- Brought the water up to 150-155 degrees.
- Took it off the heat and steeped the grains in 2.5 gallons of water starting at about 155 degrees for about 15 minutes. (meanwhile I placed the LME in some hot water to make it pour better)
- Brought the temperature back up, and then dissolved in the LME.
- Brought the batch up to a boil, and added half of the hops and let boil for 30 minutes
- Added the crushed coriander and bitter orange peel for 15 minutes
- Added the last half of the Amarillo hops for flavor for 5 minutes.
- Removed from heat and cooled in a ice-water bath. Got it down to about 80 degrees in about 15 minutes.
- Poured 3 gallons of water into my fermenter and then added the batch.
- Pitched the yeast.

Note: I didn't strain the beer before putting it in the fermenter, so the orange peel, coriander, and remains from the hop pellets went into the fermenter.

The biggest problem I had in brewing was that I forgot to shake up the water that I added afterwards. You need to aerate it usually and I didn't do that. So after about 24 hours I didn't notice any signs of fermentation, and upon realizing my mistake I opened the fermenter up and mixed it real well. It seemed to go fine from there.


Fermentation

I let it ferment for about 7 days, but then I started to get concerned that the spice and hop sediment would start to give the wort a bad taste. So I racked it to a secondary fermenter. In hindsight, after reading up on it (www.howtobrew.com), I realized that I aerated the beer too much when moving it (I used the spigot and just poured it through the tubing into the other fermenter). I also think that I ended up racking it too soon. There was still a fair amount of fermentation going on inside (if I recall, probably bubbling every 15 seconds or so).

After another week in the secondary fermenter, I bottled the beer. The process is pretty simple here, you just boil some water and dissolve some priming sugar in it, then mix that in with the beer and bottle it.

Batch #1 Post #1

In hindsight, I was a little ambitious on my first batch. I chose a semi-complicated beer to brew. I got the kit off of www.austinhomebrew.com. They seem to have one of the top HomeBrew ingredient sites on the web, and offer a wide variety of their own recipes. Since I was flying a bit blind but eager to jump in, I chose their Belgian White Ale.

Something I'll explain briefly about picking a beer that I came to learn. Pretty much every HBer starts out with Ales. There are two prime categories of beer - ales and lagers. The difference is in the type of yeast they use. Ales use top fermenting yeast and lagers use bottom fermenting yeast. The bottom fermenting yeast usually requires a fairly cool environment to work. It's in the 50-60 degree range. Ale yeast, however, ferments best right around room temperature, making it much easier to use for HBers. I believe lager yeast also sometimes lets off a sulfuric smell that Ale yeast doesn't.

So back to my selection. I had to pick an ale, and I like Belgian Whites. That was pretty much my reason.

The ingredients:

Grains
1/2 lb. Flaked Wheat
1/2 lb. White Wheat Malt
1/2 lb. Belgian Pilsner

Malt Extract
6 lbs. Liquid Wheat Extract

Hops
1 oz Amarillo (half for bittering, half for aroma)

Spices
1/2 oz. Crushed Coriander
1/2 oz. Bitter Orange Peel

Yeast
White Labs Belgian Wit Ale 400 #00015


Right now I'll break down the basic process. Since, at the point that I brewed this batch, I didn't understand that much more. The crushed grains and malt extract are sort of the same thing. That is, malt extract is the extract of grains, and all you need the grains for is to extract stuff from them. You can get it in dry (more concentrated) or liquid form (which has the consistency of molasses). This happened to come with LME. From what I've read, it doesn't particularly matter which one you use, you just have to make sure to use the right quantity. DME is basically LME without ANY water, so you use less by weight of the DME. There's a specific percentage but I don't have it on hand right now.

So why use grains at all and not just all ME? ME is bland and doesn't have as much variety. It is a good base to use, but you can get a lot more variety in using grains. You could use all grains, but this requires a lot more time and extra equipment. One day I think I'll venture into this stage, but it is a ways off.

So the reason for the grains/ME is to give the beer flavor and the yeast something to eat. This is basically what they are going to be turning into alcohol.

Hops bitter the beer, give the beer flavor, and also aroma. From what I've read they also can preserve the beer better. Hop selection is very important, but I don't really know enough about it to write intelligently on the subject, so I won't for now. Basically though, you need to select the hops with the correct bittering and flavoring/aroma potential for the style of beer you are brewing.

The Yeast might actually be the most important ingredient, and the least understood ingredient by HBers, and that is true for me. I know what they are doing, but I don't really know what makes one strain better for a type of beer than another. What I do know is what they tell me, and that's why I went with my choice.

I'll add another post on this batch later.

Starting it all off...

So recently I decided to start brewing my own beer. I am a novice at this, but I think it will be a good idea for me to keep track of the steps I go through and some tasting notes as I go through. Facebook is as good a place and any, and while most people won't be interested in it, some might. If you do find this interesting and have questions as to why I did anything I did, please ask. There's a good chance that question will help me to better understand it myself.

For my first entry, I'll briefly start with the equipment I chose to pick up and what caused me to do it. I bought most of this equipment about 6 weeks ago. It cost me in the range of $125-$150. The vast majority of it came from www.homebrewit.com. They didn't seem to have the best designed website, but the prices and shipping were the cheapest I found on the web for most of the stuff. They also happened to ship from Indianapolis so I got everything within 2 days. I would recommend them with some exceptions that you can PM me about if you want more information.

Brewing Equipment:
1x 20 quart Stainless Steel Pot with Lid (Overstock.com)
1x Stainless Steel Spoon (Meijer)
1x Digital Probe Thermometer (Meijer)
1x Mortar and Pestle (Meijer)
1x Hydrometer

Fermenting Equipment:
2x 7.5 Gallon Fermenting Buckets
2x Spigots for the buckets
2x Bucket Lids w/ Airlock Hole
2x Airlock

Bottling Equipment:
1x Bottle Filling Wand
1x 6' Tubing
1x Bottle Cleaning Brush
36x 22 oz bottles
24x 12 oz bottles
1x Red Manual Bottle Capper


In reading up on the subject, I discovered that the exact equipment you needed to brew beer varies. For one, some techniques are optional and not necessary for novice brewers. Additionally, there is different equipment that can be used to accomplish each stage.

So why did I choose what I did? The first was that I watched an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown used much the same equipment. There were a few differences, but for the most part it is the same stuff. While I am not really a huge fan of Alton Brown himself, his show usually has some pretty practical advice. He takes into account things that really matter to people like ease of use, cost, and similar.

Man love for Alton Brown aside, I'm not going to blindly go by something he says, especially when it isn't cheap. So I did some looking into the choices myself. He recommended a different type of bottle - a Grolsch style that caps which he said are easier to use. Those apparently don't work that well and actually can mess up batches of beer beyond your first one. There is a rubber washer that if not replaced every time can contaminate the bottles. This seemingly eliminated the ease of use argument that caused Alton to recommend them. There were a few things like that which caused me to go into a different direction. Through the few batches I did brew I learned a few things that would cause me to change a few things as well, but I will save those for later.