Brad's Brewing

I entered two beers in the National Homebrew Competition this year; an Imperial IPA I brewed on New Year's Day this year (New Years D'Ale), and a barleywine I brewed on MLK day 2007 (I.H.A.D. Barleywine). The IIPA was thoroughly panned (hey, I thought it was good), but the barleywine advanced to the final round by placing 2nd in the Northwest Region in Category 19. I entered it as an English Barleywine (even though I formulated it as an American BW).

Category 19 Strong Ale
Sponsored by Northern Brewer
1   19b   Michael Boos of Seattle, WA, Mountain Top Mashers [AZ]
2   19b   Robert Ginn of Poulsbo, WA, West Sound Brewers
3   19c   Mark Beck, Joe Germani of Walla Walla, WA, Blue Mountain Brewers Club

And here are a few stats from Cat 19 in the NW Region:

Max Score: 39
Min Score: 17
Avg Score: 31.3
# of Entries: 19

I scored 39, but since they use a mini-BOS to determine the winners the first place beer isn't necessarily the highest scoring entry.

The barleywine had an OG right around 1.100 and didn't attenuate as well as I'd have liked. I think it stopped around 1.028. I bottled it and it never really carbonated to the level I wanted. Due to the higher than desired residual sugar the beer is a little more malt-forward than I was shooting for. That and the lower than desired carbonation level explain why it fits in the English category better than the American. In any event, it is aging well and was good enough to get past the first round. I don't expect much out of it in the finals, but I was surprised last year by how well my Tripel did, so who knows. Anything can happen.

Here's the recipe, in both Promash .rec format and HTML: Promash | HTML

I wanted to give a little more detail on some mods I've made to the brewing stand. The first is a mod I made before I ever brewed on it the first time but haven't specifically mentioned. When I first built the rig I had hard piping everywhere, even connecting to the brewing vessel outlets. It became obvious right away that hard connections to the vessels required tolerances in pipe cutting and soldering that are very difficult to achieve in a garage without any special equipment. So shortly after assembling the completed plumbing system I cut out sections of the hard copper piping below each outlet valve and replaced them with high temp thermoplastic tubing. This reduces stresses on the pump heads and eliminates the need to have everything perfectly aligned when assembling the rig. The flex tubing below the hot liquor tank, mash tun, and kettle can be seen in the picture at the left.

The other modification is that I finally added switches for my pumps. Up to now I've been plugging each pump into an extension cord to turn it on and unplugging it to turn it off. Cumbersome at best, and confusing at worst when I'd get cords mixed up and plug or unplug the wrong one. So I bought a 2-switch switch box with switches, three cord grip connectors, and a cord. The cord grip connectors thread into the switch box and have a rubber grommet and compression nut that squeezes the grommet around the cord where it passes into the box. The switches are regular light switches and the faceplate of the box has actuators that flip the switch on the inside of the box when you operate the lever on the outside of the box. I bought all this stuff at Home Depot for around $25.

I cut the plug ends off the pump power cords, drilled holes in the plywood bottom shelf of the stand so I could run the cords beneath it inside the framing channel, mounted the switch box to one of the vertical pieces of framing channel, and wired everything up. Here are some details about the wiring. There are 3 wires in the pump cords; black (hot), white (neutral) and green (ground). The power cord I bought has the same three colored wires. The hot wires are connected to the switches so when the switch is open nothing in the pump is energized. If you wire the neutral wires to the switches they will function and everything will seem alright, but in this case the switches interrupt the circuit downstream of the pumps, so there is live voltage in the pumps even when the switches are in the off position. This isn't a particularly safe way to wire a circuit. All 3 white wires get connected together with a wire nut. All three green wires, plus a 4th which is connected directly to the switch box, get wire-nutted together as well. The 4th green wire ensures the switch box is grounded and is necessary for safety in case something shorts out. Also, since the box is screwed directly to the metal stand, the entire stand is now grounded. If you are wondering about a GFI, the outlets in my garage are GFI protected, so I didn't see the need to add a GFI to this circuit.

The switches work great and I'm looking forward to my next brew day and being able to start and stop pumps with the flip of a switch.

It's been awhile since I posted any updates on the evolution of my brewing stand. I recently made a major conversion to a HERMS. If you're not familiar with HERMS, it stands for Heat Exchange Recirculation Mash System. Basically what it means is that there is a heat exchanger in the HLT which wort from the mash tun is pumped through during recirc to raise the mash temperature. The biggest reason I went with HERMS is that I was paranoid about using direct heat to raise mash temps because I scorched one batch really bad and completely ruined it. Since then, I've been so cautious about direct heat that temp steps take forever. Infusion isn't a practical option because the mash tun isn't big enough to add enough water to significantly raise the temperature of the mash, unless I'm brewing a particularly small beer (which I almost never do).

So, here's how I went about converting my rig. I made a coil from 30 feet of 5/8 inch flexible copper tubing. I wrapped the tubing around a corny keg to get the proper diameter. I then soldered 90 degree bends on the ends of the copper coil with short sections of rigid copper tubing that would connect to the fittings in the side of the HLT.

To drill the holes in the HLT I used a step bit or "Unibit." The secret to drilling through stainless steel is to go slow and keep it cool. If you go too fast and let the steel get hot it will harden and make it nearly impossible to drill through. I actually did the drilling over my deep sink and ran cold water over the bit as I was drilling the hole.

For bulkhead fittings through the HLT wall I used the weldless fittings that are commonly sold at homebrew shops and online. Since space inside the HLT to make connections was limited, I turned the fittings around from the typical installation so that the stainless steel coupling is on the outside of the tank and the threaded nipple is on the inside. Connecting the coil to the fittings was just a matter of using 1/2" female iron pipe to 5/8" compression fittings. On the outside of the tank I used a 1/2 inch 90 degree street elbow with a hose barb to direct the flow upwards at the outlet of the heat exchanger and just a hose barb on the bottom fitting for the inlet.

I've brewed in the converted rig once since conversion. It was a simple mash schedule - saccharification rest at 150 and mash out at 170. To raise the temp for mash out, I heated the HLT to about 180 and started recirculating. The temp in the HLT quickly dropped to around 160 and I had to stop recirculating to raise the HLT back up to around 180. I think there was temperature stratification in the HLT and although the thermometer was still reading around 180, the temp was stratified and the average temperature was lower. When I started the recirc, I also stirred the water in the HLT to improve heat transfer, which gave me a more accurate temp reading. Next time I'll time things better and ensure the HLT is actually at 180 before I start recircing, and I'll also keep a flame on it when I recirc to help keep the temperature up.

I'm already considering some modifications to my newly modified rig. The biggest being a bypass in the recirc line that would allow me to recirc w/out running the wort through the heat exchanger in the HLT. When I was trying to raise the temp to mashout on my last brew I stopped the recirc for a while to let the HLT heat faster. If I had a bypass I could have kept it recirculating while the HLT heated.

Finally, I wanted to mention another minor mod. I don't think I pointed out that I removed the hard-piped connections to the brewing vessels. I did this before I even brewed on this rig the first time. I simply cut out short sections of copper pipe below the valves on each of the vessels and replaced it with flexible tubing (high temp thermo-plastic tubing). Along with the HERMS conversion, I also cut out a section of the hard pipe that cross-connects the discharge piping of the two pumps. This section of piping allows the wort pump to pump back into the top of the mash tun as well as kettle. Having all the hard piping connections was putting stress on the pump heads, which are made from plastic, and I was concerned that over time the stress would crack the heads. One added benefit of some of the modifications I made is that the liquor pump now does not lose suction at low flows. For some reason, before these mods, if I throttled down on the discharge of the liquor pump it would end up getting air bound. If I kept the discharge valve wide open it pumped fine. This is backwards from what you would expect if the pump were losing suction due to cavitation, so the behavior was a mystery to me. In any event, after the HERMS conversion I was able to throttle the sparge water flow to a trickle and the pump never lost suction. It doesn't make sense that the HERMS conversion corrected the problem because all it did as far as that pump is concerned is add 30 feet of piping to the system, increasing the head on the pump. The same effect could have been accomplished by throttling a valve on the discharge, which is exactly the situation where the pump would lose suction. I think that putting soft piping in the cross-connect pipe is what fixed the problem. My theory is that the stress on the pump head was warping it slightly and that air was getting sucked in past the O-ring seal on the back of the head. Or maybe through a threaded fitting on the suction side of the pump (which didn't leak with static head on it, so I don't believe that was the problem). In any event, my theory may be way off base, but it's nice to be able to throttle the sparge water flow. Now I can match flows in and out of the mash tun rather than having to cycle the sparge water flow full on and off manually.

I brewed a Tripel again on August 3rd. Why am I just posting about it now, you say? I'm lazy.

This time around I planned to use table sugar instead of corn sugar for 20% of the fermentables. Shortly before brew day I decided I wanted to try to make my own invert sugar instead of using straight table sugar. I searched the web and some books and couldn't find a definitive method for converting table sugar to invert sugar. I did find instructions for making candi sugar, but I wanted to make a sugar syrup instead of a hard sugar product. I decided on a combo/hybrid of various instructions I found online and from advice I got through the AHA TechTalk email forum. Here's what I did: I combined 2 parts table sugar and 1 part water (by weight) with about 1 gram of citric acid powder and heated the mixture slowly on the stove until the sugar was dissolved and the mixture was simmering. I simmered for about 15 minutes, until it was a very pale straw color. Then I cooled it to add to the fermenter. You may ask yourself, "Did he really make invert sugar?" That's a very good question, and I have no way of knowing the answer. At the very least I made a sucrose syrup which was easy to add to the fermenter. At best, I fully inverted the sucrose into fructose and glucose. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between, but I don't have any way of knowing to what extent the sugar was inverted.

The other difference between this batch and the last was that I split it between Wyeast 1214 and 3787. 1214 is an idiot-proof yeast that has attenuated very well without any extra fuss in every beer I've used it in. 3787 (supposedly Trappist High Grav) is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery. I love the flavors it imparts in a beer, but other than a small Belgian Pale I haven't been able to coax reasonable attenuation out of it. I used it in the quad-style beer that went into the club's bourbon barrel project, and it petered out at about 1.030 (from around 1.100). I learned later that it prefers incremental feeding of sugars (hence my desire to make a sugar syrup that was easy to add to the fermenter). This time around I held back all the sugar on brew day and added it later. I added all the sugar to the 1214 half of the beer a couple days after fermentation started. I added half of the required sugar to the 3787 portion after a few days, then the other half a couple days later. It still petered out at 1.030. Frustrated, I gave it a couple more weeks (and roused the yeast and bumped the temp up a tad), and it only dropped 2 more points. At this point I gave up on old 3787 and when I transferred both halves to secondary I poured the slurry from the 1214 carboy into the 3787 secondary. Active fermentation started up again within a day or two, and after a few weeks good old reliable chewed it down to 1.010. The straight-1214 half of the batch finished at 1.009 before I transferred to secondary.

After transferring to secondary I had about 1/2 gallon of the 1214 beer left over, which I put into a 2L PET bottle, chilled, and carbonated with my carbonator cap. I had about 1 gallon extra of the 3787 half, which I split between two growlers. I gave one of the growlers to Matt and kept the other for myself. I drank the leftover 1214 beer a few days ago, and I gotta say it was pretty tasty. I moved the 3787 leftovers into the 2L bottle yesterday, carbonated it, and had a glass last night. Again, pretty tasty. I can't wait to get these beers into bottles and compare them side-by-side. Bottling should happen within the next couple of weeks for the 1214 half, and a few weeks later for the 3787.

My recipe and procedures were essentially the same as my last tripel, so I won't go into the nitty gritty details. The only changes were I formulated for 1.080, used self-inverted table sugar instead of corn sugar, added it to the fermenters rather than the kettle, and split the batch between the two different yeasts.

I know, I know, you thought this blog was dead. It's been a busy summer, and when I have had time I haven't had motivation to update you on my brewing adventures. I've brewed several beers that I haven't posted about, and other beer & brewing related stuff has been going on as well.

I've been meaning to post for some time about the schwag I got for the gold medal my Tripel won at NHC. Here's a picture of the haul. I got the 5 Star cleaning kit (big bottle of Star San and a big tub of PBW), an AHA glass, a Sam Adams chilling bucket, the book "The Best of American Beer & Food," a bottle of The Sixth Glass Quad from Boulevard Brewing Company, and the gold medal. Pretty cool. Also, recipes and mugshots for all the gold medal winners were published in the Sept/Oct issue of Zymurgy. You'll find my recipe on page 46.

Here are a few more pics:

I was pleasantly surprised Saturday evening to discover that my Tripel took the gold medal in Category 18 at the National Homebrew Competition. I certainly wasn't expecting such a favorable result considering the fact it was going up against the best home-brewed beers in the country, and that it placed 3rd in the NW Region 1st round. I guess the two months of aging between the 1st and 2nd rounds helped a lot. I can't wait to receive my score sheets and see the judges comments.

Since I can't leave well enough alone, I plan to brew it again soon with some minor modifications. I think I'll use table sugar instead of corn sugar this time around, and ferment half of it with that mysterious beast known as Wyeast 3787. I'll use 1214 again on the other half as a control. I was pretty disappointed with the performance I got out of 3787 when I used it for the Bourbon Barrel Big Belgian Beer. I think it petered out at about 69% attenuation that time. One mistake I made is I didn't allow the temperature to rise during fermentation. Also, Wyeast says it benefits from incremental feeding of sugar, which I didn't do last time either. Oh, and I'll probably use Weyermann Pilsner malt instead of Castle, since Castle has become very hard to come by of late, locally at least.

My tripel placed 3rd in Category 18 in the 1st round (NW Region) of the National Homebrew Competition. Placing in the top 3 makes it eligible for the 2nd round. For the first round, the country (plus Canada) is split up into 10 regions. Each region judges beers separately and the top 3 beers from each region in each category advance to the 2nd round. There were 5,643 entries total in the 1st round with a possibility for around 840 beers, meads, and ciders to advance to the 2nd round. My beer was up against 28 other entries in Category 18 in the 1st round and assuming everyone eligible sends their beers in for the 2nd round there should be a total of 30 entries in that category. I'm curious to see how well it stacks up against the best home brewers in the country. 2nd round judging will take place June 19 during the National Homebrew Conference.

Whatever happens in the 2nd round, I'm pretty happy with the results so far considering this is the first Tripel I've ever brewed and the first time I've entered a beer in the NHC.

I wasn't the only club member to place in the 1st round. Matt's Lil Jib Saison took 2nd in Category 16. Maybe one of these days he'll get around to posting something about it.

Saturday was Big Brew. The club gathered at Steve & Frances Shaw's again this year. The setting is beautiful, but the weather wasn't as cooperative as it has been in recent years. It rained the entire day. Undaunted, we set up tents and our gear and six of us brewed a total of 45 gallons of beer. The pic at left is my rig trying to stay dry during the boil. More pics can be found in the gallery on the main club page.

I brewed a Blonde Ale again this year, and again it is destined for a family get-together. My wife's sister is turning 40 this summer and I've been tasked with bringing the beer. Last time I brought beer to one of her gatherings a lot of her friends showed up with their fizzy yellow Mexican beer or industrial American light lagers. My hope is that this Blonde Ale will be a gateway to honest beer for Corona and Bud Light drinkers who might be at the party, but at the same time be something that a real beer lover can appreciate. Am I a beer snob? Yes. And not to worry, I'll also be bringing a hearty Scotch Ale (which I brewed a few weeks ago but haven't posted about yet) and maybe a stout or a nice hoppy IPA.

Anyway, for this beer I wanted to go as light colored as possible and to focus on one hop. To that end, I used German pilsner malt as the base and just 1 lb of CaraPils for a little body. I hopped with Styrian Goldings, which is a hop I've used in the past but never as the focal point of the beer. I mashed at 150° for one hour with a mashout at 170°. I also decided to use a yeast I haven't used in primary before, Wyeast 1007 (German Ale).

Here's the recipe: Promash | HTML

Chris Devlin ferried over to Kitsap to see what Big Brew is all about and to brew his first batch. Matt brought the ingredients for a Pale ale and I brought some of my old gear from my extract days and we walked Chris through the process. Chris doesn't drive, and he couldn't easily carry a carboy full of fermenting beer home with him on the ferry and bus, so his beer is fermenting in my bathroom. He'll trek back over when it's time to bottle and then he'll have to figure out how to get two cases of beer back to Seattle.

You wouldn't know it from reading this blog, but I have been brewing this year.

Besides the ESB I brewed on MLK Day, I brewed a Bock in February and an Oktoberfest in March.

Bock: 2/23/2008
I wanted to try out Wyeasts Hella-Bock VSS, and I also wanted to get a head start on brewing at least 4 lagers this year, so I decided to brew a Bock in February and then an Oktoberfest in March using the yeast from the Bock primary. Looking back I should have switched the beers around since the bock is higher gravity and darker, but I was fixated on brewing the Oktoberfest in March. Oh well. Without going into details, I did a protein/saccharification/mashout step mash and ended up with about 11 gallons of 1.076 wort in the fermenters. I started fermentation at 49° and after some initially vigorous fermentation things got really sluggish after a couple weeks. I raised the temp to 58° to try to get things going, which worked with only marginal success. I transferred to secondary after a total of 5 weeks and the gravity was only down to 1.029. I kept it warm in the secondary for a few more days and the gravity didn't drop much, so I decided to pitch some German Ale yeast (1007) to ferment it down a few more points so it wouldn't taste like syrup. As I type this it's down to about 1.020, which is right about where I want it, and I'll probably crash cool it to drop the yeast then keg it for extended lagering soon.

Here's the recipe: Promash | HTML

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Oktoberfest: 3/30/2008 (phew! just in time)
I went with a pretty basic recipe based on Bob Allen's award winning Cure of the Mouth Maerzen. On brew day I got a late start and had a commitment in the evening, so in the interest of speed I decided to just do a single step infusion mash at 152°. Then I sparged at 170°, boiled, and ended up with about 11 gallons of 1.051 wort in the fermenters. After just 2 weeks in the primary the gravity is down to 1.020 and I decided to kick the temp up to 65° for a diacetyl rest (as recommended by Wyeast). After a couple days I'll crash it and transfer to secondary after I keg the Bock.

Here's the recipe: Promash | HTML

I bottled the other half of the batch of Tripel today. Netted nineteen corked 750ml bottles and thirteen 12 ozers. I primed with table sugar and shot for 3 volumes of CO2. John's corker worked great. I may have pushed the corks in a little too far, but I'm hoping that the pressure will push them back out against the top of the cages. There's about 3-4 mm of space between the top of the corks and the top of the cages. I can't wait for this stuff to carbonate, but I do have a keg of it to tide me over.