Recipes

I'm planning to brew this Saturday, February 6, and decided to go with a style I don't have a lot of experience with, BJCP Style 8B - Special/Best/Premium Bitter.  I've brewed several ESBs, but never it's smaller cousin. Why am I brewing a Bitter, you ask? Lately I've had a craving for sessionable, quaffable, beers that I can drink two or three pints of without feeling the effects. I've got gallons of big beers, commercial and home brewed, taking up space in my basement but all I ever feel like drinking lately are the session beers. Go figure.

Matt helped a little bit with the recipe formulation, and here is what we came up with:

Stats

• 11 gallons
• 1.046 OG
• 36.5 IBU
• 9 SRM

Grain Bill

• 14# Maris Otter
• 1.5# Carastan
• 4 oz. 80L Crystal
• 4 oz. Aromatic

Hops

• 3 oz. Fuggle, 4.9% AA (90 min.)
• 1 oz. Fuggle, 4.9% AA (30 min.)
• 1 oz. Fuggle, 4.9% AA (2 min.)

Yeast

• Batch split between Wyeast 1028 & Wyeast 1098

Procedure

• Mash ~152°F until converted
• Mashout @ 170°F
• Recirc until wort runs clear
• Sparge @ 170°F to collect ~13.5 gallons
• Boil 90 minutes, adding hops at the appropriate times
• Chill, split into two carboys, oxygenate, pitch yeast, and ferment @ 68°F

That's about it. Here's a link to the recipe on the club's BrewBlogger site, where you can download the recipe in BeerXML format: Brad's Premium Bitter. I'll post an update after brew day, and after tasting to let you know if it's crap.

Yes, it has been many many months since I have posted anything on this website.  Who's got the time?  But Matt's recent proliferation has me feeling guilty about the neglect, so here goes.

November 7, 2009, was the AHA sponsored Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day.  As a West Sound Brewers club event, I hosted several people at my house for an All-Grain demonstration. The intent was to expose extract brewers to a couple different approaches to all-grain brewing. With that in mind, I brewed a batch on my 10 gallon single tier rig, and Matt brew a batch on my old 5 gallon converted cooler rig.

I thought I'd try my hand at a dubbel this time around. Matt helped out a bit with the recipe formulation.  Here's the recipe:

Specs
Style: 18B. Belgian Dubbel
Yield: 11 gal
OG: 1.067
FG: 1.007 (Wyeast 1214)/1.010 (Wyeast 3787) (1.5L starters in each 1/2 batch)
Color: 14.8 SRM
Bitterness: ~26 IBU
ABV: 8%

Grain Bill
19 lb Belgian Pilsner Malt
1.75 lb Melanoidin Malt
1 lb Special B

Adjuncts
1.56 lb Corn Sugar
1.5 lb Dark Candi Syrup (I used D2)

Hops
2 oz Saaz, 5.1% Alpha Leaf, 90 minutes
1 oz Saaz, 5.1% Alpha Leaf, 30 minutes

Procedure
-Mash at 148°F until converted
-Mash out at 168°F for 10 minutes
-Recirc until wort runs clear
-Sparge at 168°F
-Boil 90 minutes
-Chill to 64°F, oxygenate, and pitch yeast

Fermentation
Batch split into two 6 gallon carboys. Split batch between Wyeast 1214 and Wyeast 3787, pitching slurry from 1.5L starters of each. Started fermentation at 64°F, increasing 1° per day after active fermentation started up to 72°. Trasferrred to secondary after fermentation complete and cold conditioned at 35° for at least 3 weeks.

Packaging
Kegged the 1214 half. Bottled 3787 half using Wyeast Pasteur Champagne (4021) at bottling. Conditioned bottles at 68-70°. Beer was well carbonated after two weeks.

Tasting notes
I have had a love/hate/love relationship with this beer.  I loved every sample I took during fermentation, up until the last. They were spicy and flavorful, especially the 1214 half. After fermentation was complete it just seemed blah. Mildly spicy, no complex "dark" flavors I'm used to tasting in commercial dubbels. The 3787 half seemed to be even more boring. I even sat down w/ a bottle of Westmalle Dubbel and my beer and compared them side-by-side. That just made me more discouraged.

Then one day my in-laws were over and I gave my F-I-L a sample.  He doesn't typically appreciate Belgian styles, so I wasn't expecting him to like it. To my surprise he really liked it. That forced me to change my perspective. It's a good beer. It may not taste like a Belgian Dubbel, at least the commercial examples available, but it's a good beer. Maybe even a good introduction to Belgian styles for people who don't typically like them. So I broke out of the "it's a dubbel" paradigm and now I'm just calling it an abbey style beer. It is tasty, very drinkable, and you'd never guess it was 8%, so be careful.

Next Time
OK, so I still want to brew a dubbel that tastes like a dubbel. I'm thinking maybe half pilsner/half munich for the base, and Matt suggested maybe all dark candi syrup instead of half corn sugar. Also, I think it attenuated just a tad too much, so maybe up the mash temperature to 150°, or add a little more Special B.

Download this recipe: Promash | Beer XML (you may need to right-click & "Save As" the Beer XML file)

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 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.

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

In what's becoming a MLK Day tradition, I brewed today. After the Barleywine Meeting yesterday I knew I'd be getting a late start and would want to do something quick and easy, so I just brewed a basic Extra Special Bitter. Single step mash @ 148°, mashout (direct heat) at 170°, sparge at 170° and a 60 minute boil. I doughed in around 12:30 and was chilling by 4:05. Pretty quick and efficient day.

Here's the recipe: Promash | HTML

Since everyone else is doing it, I thought I'd recap my year in beer. Looking back, it was a pretty good year. I brewed more volume than I ever have, and probably pretty close to the most number of batches. Brewing mostly 10 gallon batches helped a lot in the volume category. A lot of the beer I brewed was earmarked for special occasions; a family reunion, a 40th birthday party or two (not mine), etc. And of course the Bourbon Barrel project claimed a lot of my production.

One thing I noticed is that I only did one lager in '07. I plan to rectify that error, and perhaps reclaim my title of "lagerboy" by brewing at least 4 this year: a Pils, a Dort, a Bock and an O'fest. I also need to brew beer for at least two extended family get-togethers (another 40th b-day, a 50th anniversary), plus my normal consumption. I better get going...

Here's the list. The recipes are available as either Promash .rec files or HTML web pages:

Name	Date	Volume	Recipe
Pacman IPA	1/6	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
I.H.A.D. Barleywine	1/15	5 gal.	Promash | HTML
Irish Stout	2/17	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Bourbon Barrel Imperial Stout	3/3	8 gal.	Promash | HTML
Earwig APA	3/24	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Blonde Swill	5/5	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Bourbon Barrel Barleywine	5/19	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Not Brown Ale	5/20	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Nut Brown Ale	6/10	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Scotch Ale	7/14	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Bourbon Barrel Big Belgian Beer	9/15	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Dortmund	9/29	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Reverse Hopped IPA	11/10	10 gal.	Promash | HTML
Tripel	12/22	10 gal.	Promash | HTML

I sampled the Tripel a week ago, after one week in primary, and the gravity was down to 1.010. That's an apparent attenuation of over 86%, which is pretty awesome. I transferred to secondary in Monday, and afterwards there was still a little bit of active fermentation going on, so it may drop a couple more points.

The sample I drew Saturday still had a lot of yeast in suspension. Rumor has it the 1214 strain is a poor flocculater. The initial taste had that good tripely character, but it was overshadowed by a yeasty/meaty/slick flavor/mouthfeel I attribute to the yeast. I covered the glass and put it in the fridge overnight to let the yeast settle and tasted it again the next day. After the yeast settled out it was quite good. When it's finished and carbonated I expect it will be quite good.

My plan is to bottle most of this batch. I want to put up several 750 ml corked bottles to let age, bottle a bunch in 12 ouncers, and maybe keg 3 gallons or so. I'll borrow a corker from someone in the club, either Matt's hand corker or John's Ferrari. Hopefully the Ferrari.

I brewed a tripel on Saturday. I used a very basic recipe: 80% of fermentables from Castle Pilsner Malt and 20% from Corn Sugar. I doughed in for a protein rest @122° with a relatively thick 1.2 qt/lb water-to-grain raitio, then raised to saccharification temp with a combination of infusion and direct heat. My tun wasn't large enough to bring it all the way up with infusion alone. In retrospect I probably could have gotten away with a 1:1 w:g for the first rest and had enough room to infuse all the way up to 147°. I had about 13.5 gallons in the kettle pre boil. Hops were imported Styrian Goldings for bittering and imported Saaz for flavor & aroma. After chilling I ended up with about 10.6 gallons total at a gravity of 1.080, split between 2 six gallon carboys. I pitched 2L starters of Wyeast 1214 into each carboy. That was around 7 pm Saturday night. By 7 am Sunday morning active, vigorous fermentation was in progress and two hours later foam was blowing out the blowoff tubes. The wort was at about 66° when I pitched the yeast and I'll let it rise to the 70-72 range during the ferment. I want to get the most out of this yeast and not repeat the experience I had with 3787 on the big Belgian I brewed for the bourbon barrel. That one crapped out at about 69% apparent attenuation. I'm hoping for min. 80% this time.

Here's the recipe: Promash | HTML