https://jon.kelbie.scot/tag/%E3%82%B0%E3%83%AC%E3%83%BC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B6%E3%83%BC/ Recent content in グレーンファーザー on Jon Kelbie | My Site | jon.kelbie.scot Hugo -- gohugo.io en Mon, 22 Mar 2021 19:41:56 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/mair-80-bobbin/ What’s this? A brew day blog post on the actual brew day? My, aren’t we organised! With reference to the title, ‘mair’ is Scots for ‘more’ and colloquially a shilling was called a bob back in the day, with the Scottish beers being often referred to as 70 bob or 80 bob etc. As a result of having some excess grains and hops from my previous brew , today’s beer will be unique and I guess this was my first attempt to design my own recipe. It wasn’t merely a matter of ordering less grains and swapping in those I had in store, though that was part of it! I actually made some conscious decisions on grain choice with respect to my brew day plan. My previous 80/- brew day had a 50 minute mash, which if I understand correctly results in a sweeter beer as there is a smaller window for the amylase enzymes to break down complex sugars into mono- or di-saccharides which can be consumed by yeast. The result would be a lower alcohol beer as there is less ethanol converted and due to a higher amount of residual sugars a richer mouthfeel and sweeter beer. At least this is my understanding. However, I want to provide as much nutrition to the yeast as possible, to exhaust it before conditioning and I think the 50 minute mash, or at least my management of it led to an excess in active, hungry yeast in the resultant beer, or at least at the bottom of the keg of said beer. So, I went with the more familiar 60 minute mash but I still want this beer to be reasonably sweet, for future addition of a slightly bitter adjunct, and as such I opted to include Melanoidin malts, 10% of the grain bill. The blurb on the brewstore website states that if this ratio of aromatic (melanoidin) are added it can add a honey-like flavour to the beer.. Sounds good to me and should hopefully make up for the lower volume of residual sugars in my beer, to some extent. With regards to the hops I have (Magnum, First Golding and Sorachi Ace), I did a bit of reading about their bittering and flavour profiles and decided to include both Magnum and First Golding. Sorachi Ace if used for bittering can lead to a an intense lemon flavour but for flavouring it can bring vanilla, tea & coriander notes, these both sound great but I mis-remembered and thought that these weren’t all suitable for this beer. I intended to use them towards the end of the boil initially. First Golding is a very commonly used hop for this style of beer, its bittering contribution provides a refreshing crisp finish and when used for flavouring can bring orange, marmalade and soft spices to the beer. Both sound good, I’ve gone with this as my primary bittering hop and added some at the end for flavour. Lastly Magnum, a hop with high alpha acid content which is very popular for bittering IPAs, Pils etc. (In Europe anyway). Though it isn’t used much as a flavouring hop, it apparently can impart subtle spice aromas, like nutmeg and this holds interest to me. As such, I’m going with some Magnum mid-boil so that it’s bittering contribution is there but restrained and some in the last 10 minutes with a hope that it subtly adds a little complexity to the flavour. On double checking the qualities of the hops, I actually did mean to use some sorachi ace.. oh well, plenty left for next time. No dry hopping, this is ostensibly a malty beer. For yeast, mainly due to limited alternative stocks at the brewstore , I’ve gone with WLP029 - Edinburgh Ale. It’s the same yeast used for the previous 80 shilling brews and it makes sense to have some part of each brew to remain uniform. I will create a recipe template for the site and post the recipe details, stages and notes at a later date. The original gravity of the beer on transfer to the fermentation vessel was 1.050 which is a bit higher than the other export beers that I’ve brewed which signifies a higher sugar content, so long as the yeast activity is fervent this should result in a slightly stronger beer, I’m hoping for the 5% ABV area which would make my final gravity target around 1.012.. but I’ll be happy with around 1.015ish, I guess. In addition, the beer looked very clear, was a gorgeous colour and smelled great. It remains to be seen if my experimenting results in a tasty beer, but given this is my first attempt at my own recipe and will be tweaked going forward, so long as it isn’t bad it’s all good! I am going to have to change beer types soon though as I am running out of 80 shilling based puns for blog titles! Let’s face it, in that regard, I’m never going to top 80 chillin ! (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/mair-80-bobbin/) Mon, 22 Mar 2021 19:41:56 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/mair-80-bobbin/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/alice-porteresque/ I departed from my current series of Scottish export type ales to make another dark beer for my birthday, or rather the brew day was for my birthday the actual beer is still a few weeks away. I opted for one of Brewdog’s recipes which they have open-sourced for several years, all publicly available for free as in pdf format, or on their website or for a small fee as a hardback book. As this is an published and open-sourced recipe and not part of copyrighted recipe book I can actually post the details for a change! Brewdog has a lot of critics, but I’m not one of them, I enjoy a number of their beers and commend their efforts towards sustainability . I am not however associated with Brewdog or in any way a Brewdog fanboi, unless James discovers this page and hey! I’d really love to come and see your brewery! Another departure I made was that I ordered the ingredients of this brew from The Malt Miller rather than The Brewstore as the recipe calls for specific grains, yeast and hops that were unfortunately not available from my preferred, more local, supplier. I initially tried to find alternatives for each of the grains but it soon became clear that I was moving further and further from replicating the Brewdog version of the beer that I just had to look elsewhere. I was very pleased with the delivery and service from The Malt Miller and my only criticism is that I had to order larger quantities of grains than required as they don’t offer the smaller increments that The Brewstore does, opting for 50g implements rather than 10g. I also had to buy 100g hops packets even if only 5g of hops were required but hey ho, the excess will not go to waste! On to the Brew day! The full recipe can be found here and the ingredients for a 20L brew were as follows: Malts: 2.63kg of Extra Pale 0.88kg of Munich 0.38kg of Crystal 150 0.31kg of Special W - which I couldn’t find so replaced with Dark Crystal 0.44kg of Carafa Special Type 1 0.38kg of Flaked Oats - Which were unavailable so I used torrified Oats 0.31kg of Torrified Wheat Hops: 5g of Magnum at the start (Bitter) - only 5 grams of bittering hops.. presumably this recipe was designed at higher volume and this is a scale down, but maybe not shrug. 25g of First Gold in the middle (Flavour) - had to somewhat guess here, my understanding is that if the hops were added in the middle (30m) they would be roughly 50% bittering and 50% flavour, so I opted for 25 minutes before the end of the boil. 25g of First Gold at the end (Flavour) - It isn’t uncommon to add hops at 0 minutes left but I read that end could mean anywhere from 15 minutes left to 0, so I opted for 5 minutes until end of the boil for this addition. 25g of Sorachi Ace at the end (Flavour) - same as above. Yeast: Wyeast 1056 - American Ale - This was the first time that I used Wyeast and it was a smack-pack, where you smack the .. pack.. to burst the liquid yeast sachet, introducing it to a solution which activates and nourishes it before pitching into the fermenter. Pretty neat! Not really much to say about the day itself, it went to plan without any drama, it was very enjoyable and followed by popcorn and movie day with my daughter, a good day all round. Whilst I haven’t yet transferred the beer from fermenter to keg and therefore don’t have an actual FINAL gravity reading, it has been stable for the past few measurements.. the scores on the board (I do care this time!) are: Brewdog Alice Porter Original Gravity: 1.053 Jon’s Alice Porteresque Original Gravity: 1.053 - booyah! Brewdog Alice Porter Final Gravity: 1.013 Jon’s Alice Porteresque Final(ish) Gravity: 1.012 - やった！ Brewdog Alice Porter ABV: 5.2% Jon’s Alice Porteresque ABV: 5.3% I’ve no idea how close to the original this is going to be once it has finished its journey but {your deity of choice or not} on a bike I am looking forward to tasting it! (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/alice-porteresque/) Mon, 22 Mar 2021 14:33:02 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/alice-porteresque/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/80-chillin/ TLDR: This brew day was successful, in that at the end of it wort was transferred to my conical fermenter. As of yet, some weeks later it is not ready for drinking testament to which is that I just suffered a weekend of yeast eating all available mono-saccharides they could find within in my gut. The grain bill for my tenth foray into homebrewing was taken from Craft Brew by Euan Ferguson and is more or less identical to that of William Bros ’s 80/- recipe included in the book. William Bros are a craft brewery from Alloa , home of my aunt and also a town with a brewing heritage and one that I, for some reason, associate with 80 shilling. The hops were Goldings 5.2% (the percentage being an indication of alpha acid volumes) and the yeast was White Labs Edinburgh Scottish Ale Yeast (WLP028). What was notable about this recipe were the lack of volumes for water and wort at the various stages and any indicative suggested method to follow. As such, I crafted a brew day plan based on previous brews and hope that it works out. In absolute contrast to the previous attempt at this beer, this brew day was almost flawless. After the Grainfather blocked pipe incident that sabotaged my previous brew, I took to the net to find a solution and found that Grainfather themselves had admitted this flaw exists and created a filter basket which sits at the top of the mash tun above the upper filter plate and catches errant grains before they reach the circulation pipe.. at least in theory. In practice, this only works if you are brewing a beer with sufficient enough a grain bill to allow the upper plate to sit high enough for the walls of the new filter basket to sit higher than the height of the circulation pipe inlet at its lowest setting.. this was not the case in this brew and I had to spend 47 of the 50 minutes holding the basket in place, with my fingers millimetres above the 71°C wort being circulated below. It seems to me that a far more useful solution to the issue would have been for the basket to be welded to the removable circulation pipe inlet hence ensuring the basket cannot fall below the height of the inlet itself. As mentioned in the previous blog post, looking into this a bit more to see if I could fashion this solution, instructed me that this needs a brazing specialist and is not really a viable option during lockdown. Aside from this, the brew day was good. This was the first brew which I’ve done that mandates a 50 minute mash, previously this has always been at least 60 minutes. The purpose of the shorter mash is presumably to allow for a sweeter wort and resultantly a sweeter beer as the amylase enzymes have less time to breakdown the non-fermentable polysaccharides, so a greater volume of these are transferred to the fermentation vessel and as the yeast cannae eat them, into the beer. As I am trying to work towards a reasonably sweet brown ale for a future recipe idea, I was happy to give this a go. The nominal O(riginal)G(ravity) target for this beer (it was a bit of a hybrid but taking the gravity targets from the William Bros recipe) was 1.048 S(tandard)G and I hit 1.043 which is a little further from that target than I would normally hit if following the recipe verbatim, but the focus of these series of beers is the impact of the grain on the colour and flavour of the beer so hitting gravity targets is an added bonus, if it happens. The F(inal)G of the William Bros beer was 1.012 with an ABV of 4.2%, the FG of my beer after two weeks in the fermenter was 1.018 which would be disappointingly high if I cared, but I don’t.. honest.. and results in an ABV of 3.9%. The current status of the beer has been impacted a little by my kegerator finagling (replacing spar and clasp connections with John Guest connections, replacing gas regulator and trying to eliminate the gas leak that I previously found) and so doesn’t seem to have carbonated effectively with the two weeks of conditioning, it’s back on the gas feed and I’m giving it another week or two. I do NOT want to ingest more live yeast from this beer! On the plus side, the aroma is excellent, it has a treacle-like richness to it that I hope is reflected in the final beer, whenever it decides that it is ready! I am about to keg my latest beer from my eleventh brew day and hope to cold crash it if I can convince my beer fridge to run at close to or below 0°C, I’ll condition it first to try and avoid any oxidation, finger’s crossed that it works! (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/80-chillin/) Tue, 23 Feb 2021 14:32:14 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/80-chillin/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/end-of-the-beginning/ TLDR: This will be a short post as my first brew day of the year was sabotaged by a blocked pipe! However, given that this site is primarily a journal of my brewing experiences and lessons it would be amiss of me to exclude it. The grain bill for my ninth foray into homebrewing was taken from Craft Brew by Euan Ferguson and is more or less identical to that of William Bros ’s 80/- recipe included in the book. William Bros are a craft brewery from Alloa , home of my aunt and also a town with a brewing heritage and one that I, for some reason, associate with 80 shilling. The hops were Goldings 5.2% (the percentage being an indication of alpha acid volumes) and the yeast was (unused but would have been) White Labs Edinburgh Scottish Ale Yeast (WLP028). What was notable about this recipe were the lack of volumes for water and wort at the various stages and any indicative suggested method to follow. As such, I crafted a brew day plan based on previous brews and hope that it works out. The brew day was a little less organised than usual but went reasonably smoothly until post-boil when it came time to rapidly cool the wort before transferal into the conical fermenter. The metal circulation pipe on the grainfather got blocked by wayward grains and therefore wasn’t pushing the boiling hot wort through the counterflow chiller, also as the pipe contained boiling hot wort and I don’t have heat resistant gloves, I was unable to try to investigate and fix until the wort cooled to a more reasonable temperature. It took several hours for the wort to cool by which time I had struck the day off as spoiled. If you let wort cool naturally then it massively increases the risk of dimethyl sulfide formation which would have resulted in a very unpleasant beer. In the heat of frustration, I had decided that after a string of issues with the Grainfather that I was going to immediately replace it. However, once I had naturally cooled down over a period of some hours, I thought better of spending several hundreds of £s for a replacement. As it happens, the grain creep into the pipes is a known issue and after customer feedback to that effect a new filter was created which should help control this. It was £16 so I bought it. This should stop overflow grains getting into the mash pipe and into the wort at the bottom of the mash tun, which should reduce the amount of grains making it into the circulation pipe (though given I had to hold it in place for the duration of the 50 minute mash during brew day #10, I feel perhaps it might have been designed a little better - apparently correcting this flaw will require a brazing specialist so £16 is potentially only the start!). However, there is an additional point of risk. The inner sleeve\grain basket of the unit has a gap between it and the mash tun (which it needs) and if pouring grains in from a wide receptacle (such as a big soup pot) then there is a risk that some grains will fall between the sleeve and the walls of the mash tun into the wort at the bottom and be sent to the recirculation pipe. The additional filter should catch these during mash though. I have (mid-mash on brew #10) adapted my process to transfer the grains using a small 500ml jug from pot to tun. I also need to order heat-resistant gloves as a back up. Anyway - as I wrote the draft of this post (as always) I was brewing again, same recipe as above but with a clear pipe, a new tentatively positioned filter, a more organised start and due care during the mash in stage. Fingers crossed! (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/end-of-the-beginning/) Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:17:03 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/end-of-the-beginning/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/export-from-2020/ Intro For my final brew of 2020 and my first foray into brewing from recipe books as opposed to pre-measured and packaged kits, I opted for a Scottish export style beer, loosely an 80/- (shilling) style. Whilst I knew before I made the choice that I did not have the correct gas for conditioning this beer style - it prefers a CO2-Nitrogen mix and I only have CO2 - I opted for this beer style as a non-complex malty departure from stouts. As the focus of this and future brews will be on learning the different flavour influences of the ingredients of beer and not so much on process, then I’ll ditch the template I had been using in previous posts for a looser, more flavour focused form. I suspect that as I’m learning from recipes in copyrighted books, I’ll not be able to share exact details of the recipes but we’ll see how it goes. ..brew time! The recipe that I followed was “Scottish Export” from BREW by James Morton . The first challenge of this brew was that I was unable to order the precise ingredients listed in the recipe. So I turned to an online resource, brewing grain substitution chart , for suggestions on replacements. A very basic but very handy reference spreadsheet for common grain alternatives. I swapped out the Maris Otter, which is the base malt and makes up the bulk of the grain bill, for Golden Promise Finest Pale Ale, the Special B malt for Dark Crystal and the Pale Crystal malt for Light Crystal. The additional flavour malts were Amber and Chocolate. The grain bill was ~4kg and each of the grains were measured in the following percentages of that total: Grain % of total bill Golden Promise 85% Light Crystal 5% Dark Crystal 5% Amber 2.5% Chocolate 2.5% I had to also source a different hop as the suggested East Kent Goldings was out of stock, I had been assured by the recipe preamble that the hop choice wasn’t overly significant so I opted for Williamette, having never before heard of it (though this is a questionable reason for the choice). The yeast was White Labs WLP028 - Edinburgh Scottish Ale Yeast. I also used Irish Moss, for the first time, as a process aid - it to clarify the beer by enhancing the removal of some proteins that can otherwise contribute to haze formation. As always, all ingredients were sourced from the Brewstore in Edinburgh. The hope was for a malty, very lightly hopped brown ale which can be adapted and made my own in future brews. As this was the first attempt, I wasn’t expecting perfection just something I can work with as a base for furthering my understanding of the influence of the grains. The brew day was very straightforward, it was an easy recipe to follow and everything went smoothly. The beer The resulting beer is drinkable but not overly enjoyable, it’s a bit reminiscent of how I remember this style of beer tasting in the 80’s but I had hoped for a little more of an exciting tipple (photo to be added once I have CO2 again to pour one). The biggest disappointment is that there is very little head retention. This cannot be attributed to the non-preferred gas being used for conditioning, head retention is related to proteins and dextrose and it seems there was some deficiency there in the final beer. It is possible that the beer required more conditioning time before being poured, I left it for 2 weeks in a ~5°C kegerator, unfortunately I don’t really have anywhere to properly condition the beer at a stable, ideal temperature of 12°C, still perhaps it could have been conditioned for longer. It is also possible that the replacement grains that I chose lacked the desirable properties of those in the recipe and that some adjustment might be required in order to protect the foam retention properties of the beer, for example, adding oats or wheat malts, or a greater proportion of crystal malts (though the latter seems unlikely given they already made up ~10% of the grain bill). However, it is most likely that the addition of Irish Moss removed too much protein from the wort resulting in a poorer head retention. It used half a protofloc tablet for a 20L brew, but it seems like that measure is recommended for a 25L brew and as such this is likely the main culprit. That said, as a first step in a learning process, I’m happy enough with it, we’ll drink it ;) Next Plans for next beer - change up the grain bill and adjust irish moss measurement! I found the recipe for Williams Bros Brewing Co. 80/- and have modified my grain bill based on it. I haven’t changed the yeast to match theirs, nor am I using the mix of hops that they are using, I will stick to a singular malt with few additions to simplify the process. The grain bill contains oats and malted wheat so hopefully the next beer will retain its foam for longer than the current one. Photos (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/export-from-2020/) Mon, 18 Jan 2021 10:35:58 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/export-from-2020/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/end-of-the-imperial-march/ Wow, 5 months have passed since my last homebrew journal entry and it was written on the day of the first of today’s summarised brews. The seventh of my brews was back in late September just after I started my PgDip Brewing and Distilling course , much writing about beer has happened since then but all academically and not on this site, though I am happy to report that things are progressing well in that area and for anyone interested I have links to my assignments on my bookmarks page . Anyway, let’s crack on, shall we? In the same vein as my previous post I’ve decided to bundle both brews together as they were using the same base recipe with minor adjustments to adjuncts. As you might expect with a series of brews that are essentially the same, improvements were notable in each subsequent brew and the last one, in which I had assistance from my wife, zero mistakes were made.. not a typo! As I’ll be covering two brews I’m going to condense my normal layout a little and skim over parts which went well for both brews. Both brew days went smoothly but in the area of gravity measuring a discovery was made in the latter brew which proved to be a valuable learning experience. The Beer Kit The beer kit for both of these brews was this Imperial Stout 23L All Grain Beer Kit (pictured above) from Edinburgh based brew store . The kit contained a pre-ground bag of grains (unspecified) and 2 vacuum-packed foil wrapped packs of hop pellets (namely hop A and hop B). The yeast for both brews was a dried yeast (Mangrove Jack’s M44 West Coast Ale Yeast ). Additionally on brew day #6, I tweaked to volumes of the adjuncts from the previous brew to try to produce a more chocolate-y stout so I used 150g of cocoa nibs and 100g of coffee beans. On the next brew day, I reduced this to 120g of cocoa nibs and dropped the coffee altogether. The ingredients were accompanied by some general brewing tips and as always the … Brew Day Sheet This very handy two page guide split the brew into its composite stages and provided target temperatures, gravity readings and volumes as well as space for recording timings and measurements throughout the day. It was very useful and despite my occasional flapping it kept me pretty much on track. The composite parts of the sheet will be incorporated below in the stage sections. Stage 0 - Prep! No issues here on either day so, moving on! Stage 1 - Striking & Mashing This stage went very well on both days, though on brew day #6 I accidentally brought the temperature down to 66°C for the mash, but recovered to 68°C and maintained the temperature for the hour. During both brew days I took more time to constantly, gently, mix and move the grain bill around whilst the temperature was reducing from the strike temp. of 76°C, than I had previously. In earlier brews I was concentrating on getting the temperature down quickly and less focussed on loosening the grains and breaking up clumps, this led to a more vigorous approach which it seems might have been somewhat counterproductive. As noted previously my grainfather is definitely struggling a little with consistency when heating and maintaining heat, it is a candidate for replacement when time and funds are more ample. Stage 2 - Lautering & Sparging Again, I followed a similar procedure on both days which was to gently coax the water from the grains during lautering, breaking up the grain bed gently so that the wort could flow a bit more easily. When it came to sparging, I was a little bit more aggressive with the breaking up of the grain bed, allowing the rinse water to pass through somewhat quicker than before. Compared to brew day #5 this process completed almost 2 hours earlier! Stage 3 - Boiling On both of these brews, and in comparison to previous brews, there was a much more generous protein build up at the start of the boiling stage. It took about 6 minutes to break it up and this I believe is a good sign and is a direct result of the tweaking of my mashing method. Stage 4 - Hop Additions The schedule for this both brews was: 36g of hop B at 60 minutes (start of boil) 36g of hop A at 25 minutes (35 minutes into the boil) In addition for the second of the brews: 150g/120g of cocoa nibs at 5 minutes (55 minutes into the boil) 100g of coffee beans at end of fermentation for 24 hours for brew #6. No whirlpools again, this is a future experiment because its an invite to chaos with the false-bottom in my grainfather. Stage 5 - Cooling No notes were taken with regards to cooling and I have no adverse memories of this part of the process, so I gather all went well. Stage 6 - Fermenting As a result of learning more about yeast on my microbiology course, I had developed a deeper understanding of the requirements for a good fermentation by the time I did my 7th brew, I have a deeper still understanding now but it remains to be seen how that plays out in future brews! As such for brew #7, I was intent in increasing the available oxygen for the yeast for the initial phase of fermentation, and the conical fermenter is a little too heavy to lift and shake.. So after transferring the wort from height (normal procedure), and through a sieve (ineffective), I experimented with using an electric whisk (sanitised of course) and this definitely greatly increased the surface oxygen and produced the amount of frothy bubbles that I was looking for. For reference the following were my volume and gravity targets and final gravity (FG) results: Desired Volume: 23L Actual Volume (day #6): 23L Actual Volume (day #7): 18L is what I have written in my notebook.. but that can’t be right! Desired OG: 1.083 Actual OG (#6): 1.081 Actual OG (#7): 1.083 Desired FG: 1.016 Actual FG (#6): 1.041 Actual FG (#7): 1.041 Actual FG (#7 with a device I can actually use): 1.022 Desired ABV: 8.9% Actual ABV: ~5.25% (but really ????) Actual ABV: ~5.51% (but really ~8%) As previously suspected, I am not using the refractometer that I have used to measure every one of my brews, correctly. It seems to measure higher gravities reasonably well but doesn’t fall below 1.040, which isn’t ideal since every single final gravity target is lower than that by some margin. Having received advice from a few mutuals on mastodon, it seems like it needs to be calibrated with purified water and maintained at 20°C +/- 0.5°C and needs to be regularly recalibrated.. Thankfully, I had a hydrometer lying around which requires no calibration and which gave me much more promising results. It does require a sacrifice of more beer for measuring but for some degree of accuracy that’s fine with me. Also as a result, I don’t really know how close to previous targets I hit but.. onwards! Stage 7: Kegging & Carbonating During the transferring of beer to keg on brew day #7, I took multiple samples at different stages to measure with the refractometer as mentioned above, this was really to rule out a niggle that maybe at different stages of the transfer there would be different trub concentrations that perhaps were affecting the gravity reading of previous samples taken from the tap at the bottom of the conical fermenter.. it didn’t really seem to make much difference but a worthwhile exercise nonetheless. Stage 8: Drinking Both beers were delicious, the first was a novice attempt to come close enough to Mouse Mousse chocolate stout by Fierce Beer and I don’t think I was overly far away but perhaps the coffee inclusion detracted from the comparison a little. The beer didn’t really taste much like an imperial stout, which tends to confer an oily quality and strong alcohol flavour, it was instead a very easy to drink and pleasant, if not slightly thick, chocolate stout with a subtle coffee aftertaste. It was a glorious success and did not last long in this stout loving household. The latter beer was my greatest triumph yet, not only because finally I acquired an accurate reading of the final gravity but it is (not was, more on that shortly) indisputably an imperial stout! By lowering the cocoa nibs volume, the strong chocolate flavour of the previous beer was lessened but still a little more than subtle and it is very much my favourite beer so far. Unfortunately, after pouring some of it, I noticed that I was out of CO2 and had to immediately stop pouring lest I decompress the keg. Due to lockdowns, my access to the shop where I bought the gas canister is essentially outlawed and so I’ve been without gas for over a month.. I have just a few days ago discovered that the shop is actually supplied by a company in my town and that they would be happy to top the canister up if I can swing by their warehouse! I’ve had conversations with a local taxi company explaining that they’d be transporting a pressurised gas canister and we’re good to go. I just need to clarify cost of top up and how long the process will take (whilst the taxi meter ticks) and then hopefully this week I’ll be able to continue pouring my best beer yet! Next up will be my first foray away from kit beers as I try a Scottish export type style from a recipe book. I chose the recipe due to its process simplicity and low volume of hops so that I could play around with different grains over the next few brews and see how I can tweak it into something delicious. (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/end-of-the-imperial-march/) Mon, 14 Dec 2020 08:40:00 +0100 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/end-of-the-imperial-march/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/not-black-and-white/ Subtitle: A little less stout* As I sit waiting for the mash stage of my 6th brew to complete, I figured this was as good a time as any to post the belated summary of my previous two brews. I’ve decided to bundle them together as both brews were using the same base recipe and whilst one was a pretty smooth ride, the other was a catastrophe of errors! As I’ll be covering two brews I’m going to condense my normal layout a little and skip over parts which went OK for both brews. First though, a small bit of background on these two brew days.. Brew day number 4 was on a Friday, a day which is traditionally reasonably quite for my job and thus, I figured a day where I could fit in a brew whilst also working.. That Friday was not a normal Friday, that Friday demonstrated the clairvoyance and devilry that my colleagues apparently possess.. just as every single stage deadline approached, I was called, pinged or otherwise engaged to carry out some work. Stage transitions were rushed, wort was spilled and walls were decorated in partially formed stout.. It was a terrible idea and a disaster of a day! Brew day 5 was an entirely different beast, having learned from stupidity, it was scheduled for a quiet Sunday. Every stage was carefully considered, measured and executed and bar introducing the 2nd hop 5 minutes early and not having fine mesh hop bags available, the day was a resounding success! The Beer Kit The beer kit for both of these brews was this Imperial Stout 23L All Grain Beer Kit (pictured above) from Edinburgh based brew store . The kit contained a pre-ground bag of grains (unspecified) and 2 vacuum-packed foil wrapped packs of hop pellets (namely hop A and hop B). The yeast differed between brews, one brew day #4 I used a liquid yeast (White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast ) and on brew day #5 a dried yeast (Mangrove Jack’s M44 West Coast Ale Yeast ). Though, to what end this contributed to differences in the beer, I am still too inexperienced to ascertain. Additionally on brew day #5, I added a couple of adjuncts, 100g of cocoa nibs and 100g of coffee beans. The ingredients were accompanied by some general brewing tips and as always the … Brew Day Sheet This very handy two page guide split the brew into its composite stages and provided target temperatures, gravity readings and volumes as well as space for recording timings and measurements throughout the day. It was very useful and despite my occasional flapping it kept me pretty much on track. The composite parts of the sheet will be incorporated below in the stage sections. Stage 0 - Prep! No isues here on either day so, moving on! Stage 1 - Striking & Mashing On brew day #4, I started poorly and continued in a similar but more frantic vein.. First mistake, aside from scheduling a brew on a work day, was that I had pushed the pipework too far down into the heated grain was unable to retrieve it, resulting in grains being able to bypass the false floors and potentially block the filer in the brewing unit. On brew day #5 there seemed to be some sort of blockage in the circulation pipe and it wasn’t circulating as much as I’d have liked, but I managed to fix this on the fly with only a momentary drop in mash temperature. Otherwise, the striking and mashing stages went OK for both brews, though I noted yet again that my grainfather is definitely struggling a little with consistency when heating and maintaining heat. Stage 2 - Lautering & Sparging DISASTER ZONE! For day #4, I was very, very flustered by this point and was trying to rush the sparging stage. In order to try and get the sparge water to drain more quickly, I was attempting to stir and break up the grain cake, however the metal bar supporting the insert containing the grains and water was not designed for additional weight, the force that I was applying was too much for it and it kept disconnecting from the unit and as a result wort and grains were propelled around the room, primarily up the wall and over a frustrated amateur brewer! I was certain at this stage that any hopes of making a drinkable beer were ruined. No issues experienced here on day #5, I made no attempts to rush the process, though I did very gently stir the grain on occasion when I couldn’t hear water passing through. It took almost 4 hours! No mess though! Stage 3 - Boiling Nothing to see here. Stage 4 - Hop Additions The schedule for this both brews was: 36g of hop B at 60 minutes (start of boil) 36g of hop A at 25 minutes (35 minutes into the boil) In addition for the second of the brews: 100g of cocoa nibs at 5 minutes (55 minutes into the boil) 100g of coffee beans at end of fermentation for 24 hours. Post boil on brew day #4, I attempted a whirlpool but the additional false bottom within the unit was rising every time I got some sort of pace going.. conclusion, no more whirlpooling attempts with this set up. Stage 5 - Cooling This is where the grainfather’s flaws come into play, whilst trying to rapidly cool the wort and transfer to the fermenter, it’s heating unit kicked in and started super-heating the wort. The fermenter is thankfully temperature controlled and was able to cool the wort back down to the target range before I added the yeast. This happened on both days but I was more mentally equipped to deal with it on the second of the brew days. Added a lot more time to the process though! Stage 6 - Fermenting My experiences with previous brews led me to purchase a cheap cooling system for my fermenter, involving an ice box and pipes which pump cooled water through the sleeve of the fermenter. As such despite the wort hitting the fermenter at a higher temperature than desired on both of these brews, I was able to cool it down in the fermenter before pitching the yeast. Not much otherwise to report here from a process perspective, the only difference between both stout brews was that after arriving at a consistent final gravity reading for the second of the brews, I added 100g of coffee beans which had been briefly rinsed with boiling water into the fermenter, and then let it steep for 24 hours. Despite the calamity of the first of these days, the gravity figures were surprisingly similar which you might think would mean a similar alcohol by volume figure.. that doesn’t appear to have been the case, although the estimate is pretty much the same the drinking experience suggests that the second beer was considerably closer to the target than the first. The impact of the booze after drinking was definitely more obvious with the latter beer. For reference the following were my volume and gravity targets and final gravity (FG) results: Desired Volume: 23L Actual Volume (day #4): 23L Actual Volume (day #5): 22L Desired OG: 1.083 Actual OG (#4): 1.070 Actual OG (#5): 1.069 Desired FG: 1.016 Actual FG (#4): 1.040 Actual FG (#5): 1.044 Desired ABV: 8.9% Actual ABV: ~4% Actual ABV: ~3.5% This leads me to believe that I have a little bit more to learn about how to use my refractometer. The first stout might have been around 4% the second was not, it was definitely much stronger. I have a fairly high resistance to alcohol (not a brag) and I was decidedly tipsy after just 3 schooners of it, 3 similar sized 5% beers have little noticeable impact normally. Yes, this is circumstantial but I’m calling the 2nd beer as hitting its ABV targets regardless of the evidence suggesting otherwise! This screams user error to me! Stage 7: Kegging & Carbonating Not much to mention here, I’m reasonably well versed in this process now and didn’t experience much worth reporting, except disappointingly off-target figures, but as noted above, I suspect I am somehow recording these inaccurately. Stage 8: Drinking The first beer turned out to be surprisingly passable, it wasn’t a clean tasting beer, it had a bit of funkiness, probably due to the comedy of errors surrounding it’s inception, but it was assuredly drinkable regardless. It was a homebrew though, no doubts about that, it would be returned at a bar and replacement sought. It seems though that perhaps stouts, in our house anyway, have a larger buffer for success than IPAs do. The second beer was OUTSTANDING! It was exactly what I wanted it to be, it’s an imperial stout so not really designed for ease of drink, it’s thick and oily, carries a punch in flavour and alcohol volume but is rounded off with very subtle hints of coffee and cocoa. This wasn’t just passable, it was wonderful! As I sit here, now at the boiling stage of my current brew, I can only hope that I am able to replicate this level of beer for my 3rd imperial stout in a row! Imperial stout number three is so far going well, and is basically the same as from brew day #5 but with 50% more cocoa nibs. They are only in the mix for about 5 minutes so not much time to make an impact so we’ll see how that goes. Onwards! A little less stout came to me one evening in the 90s as I sat in the Bell’s bar in Aberdeen for happy hour with a good friend. The bar was quiet, and to entertain ourselves we were re-branding the drinks we could see at the bar or marketing them with new slogans. One of my funny at the time creations was Guinness Lite with the slogan ‘A little less stout’. Whilst we went on to get fairly inebriated that one always stuck with me.. then some time later when I took my girlfriend (now wife) to Dublin to propose, we visited the Guinness storehouse and I discovered that at some point (possibly the 70s based on the font and graphical stylings) that Guinness in fact did have a beer called Guinness Lite, though I have no idea if they ever used the slogan ‘A little less stout’. (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/not-black-and-white/) Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:40:00 +0100 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/not-black-and-white/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/of-sugar-munchers-and-chilly-gas/ As I settled down to read over the brew sheet for my impending Imperial Stout brew and after over 2 hours of cleaning and sanitising kit, I made a discovery.. I did not have enough yeast for the next day’s brew and had no means of acquiring more in time. So I hugged the windows in this mobile network black spot we call home in order to latch on to a signal to advise my scheduled brew buddy of the postponement. YEAST When buying the beer kits I have been using to learn brewing, I had noted that for certain kits I could choose dry yeast or liquid yeast. I had previously read in slightly out-dated brewing books that liquid yeast is superior to dry yeast and so I have, for the last few orders, been opting for liquid. As it turns out, in doing so I’ve unknowingly been brewing with insufficient volumes of yeast! Nowadays, due to improvements in the science dry yeast is apparently pretty close to liquid yeast in terms of quality but one advantage to liquid yeast is it enables you to create a yeast starter. This is currently too advanced a process for me to include but in essence you create a low gravity wort using dried malt extract and pitch the yeast into this a day or two before, which enables you activate and grow the yeast cultures so that you have sufficient volumes to pitch into higher gravity worts. Still with me? (who am I kidding, I’m the only one reading!). This is also advisable if your yeast is a bit older. As a result of the previous paragraph, when you order liquid yeast in the kit, you are only sent by default one sachet. If you don’t make a yeast starter then this is likely to be insufficient, and you have the option of ordering more. If only I had realised this at the time of ordering I’d have an exciting stout in the fermenter.. and my last beer would be much better! This may go a large part of the way to explaining why I missed my final gravity reading in the last brew. So today, I’ll order the extra two sachets of liquid yeast required to munch on high gravity stout wort and then I’ll buy dried yeast going forward until I’m ready to advance to yeast starters. Force Carbonation As I opted to skip the bottling phase for the time being and keg my beers, I have been trying to follow steps with regards to properly carbonating the beer post-fermentation. Carbonating using CO2 rather than brewing sugars is referred to as force carbonation (not force carbonisation as I keep calling it) and the trick is knowing what PSI or volume of gas to introduce to the keg for how long. Force Carbonation NOT Force Carbonisation Everyone seems to have their own method and so for the beers I have made up to now I had opted to follow a generic instruction from the manufacturer of my brewing kit, Grainfather. Their instructions are simple to follow: 30 PSI for 2 days 10-12 PSI for 1 day 8-10 PSI and refrigerate for 4 hours They are simple to follow but haven’t really worked for me, in each case the resultant beer was a little too flat. My experiments thus far in correcting this have been disappointing, for my NEIPA I cranked the PSI up for too long, resulting in a massively over-carbonated beer, I’ve been able to eek it down again but there is a lasting bitterness in the beer as a result. I’ve been looking in to this and possibly the issue is that I’ve not been considering temperature as a variable. When I pressurise my kegs, I do so inside the kegerator (for that is where the gas outlets live) and this is maintained at a temperature of 4°C whereas the instructions above seem to infer that the keg is only refrigerated for the final age. My meanderings led to further discoveries, namely gas carbonation charts and gas carbonation calculators because I, of course, and not re-inventing the wheel here.. many brewers precede me and careful web searching could have saved me a bit of effort. Different beer types have different recommended gas volumes and working out how to deliver this volume at my working temperature can be attained using either the charts or the calculators (the latter being quicker, easier and more likely to be my way forward).. so from here on in I’ll be using this calculator from Brewer’s Friend, a website which I suspect I’ll be visiting often. (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/of-sugar-munchers-and-chilly-gas/) Mon, 17 Feb 2020 23:56:18 +0100 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/of-sugar-munchers-and-chilly-gas/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/chinook-what-i-made/ After the abject failure of my previous brew determination was high. Mistakes would not be made, at least not with regards to the most important stage of the process, sanitisation! This was my first brew day with assistance, in the form of my dad, and having someone to “teach” really helped my focus throughout the day, not only were there considerably less mistakes there were also notable improvements throughout the steps compared to previous attempts. TL:DR I DIDN’T DESTROY THIS BEER!! WOOHOOO!! In my summary of brew day ichi-ban I described in detail (my understanding) of the steps involved so I’ll not go into as much detail this time but will attempt to follow the me structure. The Beer Kit The New England IPA 19L All Grain Beer Kit was the same beer kit that I had used in the previous disastrous brew however due to issues with online payment I had to vistt the brew store to pick up, and the hops that were included in this kit were different from the previous kit. I’m a novice so I didn’t question this at the time but at various times during the brew I considered that perhaps I had been given the wrong hops. In the kit this time was a bag of mixed grains, 200 grams of Chinook hops as well as a sachet of White Labs WLP066 London Fog Ale Yeast (liquid). As previously ingredients were accompanied by some general brewing tips and the … Brew Day Sheet This very handy two page guide split the brew into its composite stages and provided target temperatures, gravity readings and volumes as well as space for recording timings and measurements throughout the day. It was very useful and despite my occasional flapping it kept me pretty much on track. The composite parts of the sheet will be incorporated below in the stage sections. This was actually missing from the kit on this occasion but I had the previous brew’s sheet and I noted all of the important steps and numbers in a notebook. Stage 0 - Prep! Not only did I clean and sanitise EVERYTHING immediately after the last brew, on the night before this one, I went through the whole process again! This time however, on the advice of a retired chemist on the fediverse I noted every measurement and each step down. In addition to directly address the issue that wrecked my last beer, I bought accurate measuring devices in the form of a glass pipette set which enabled me to measure exactly 2ml of the ’no rinse’ sanitiser in with 1 litre of water for the spray bottle. I also endeavoured to spray less enthusiastically, or rather less intensely.. enthusiasm levels were high regardless of the somewhat tedious task at hand. The extra focus on preparation definitely provided a solid foundation for the next day’s activities! Stage 1 - Striking & Mashing Another lesson learned from the previous brew was to heat the strike water as soon as I rolled out of bed, this meant that by the time the brew started the water was already at the correct temperature.. enabling me to spend just short of an extra hour with my daughter before I started in earnest. Previously, I had noted that the thermometer probe wasn’t secure and had slipped out during the last brew.. this was firmly taped to the unit this time and didn’t budge through the whole day. With the mash, we actually actively mashed and stirred the grain in for the entire duration of the water dropping from 76°C to 66°C.. this was tough work, I’m not entirely sure how long it took but my dad and I took turns, and in actively working the mash for the whole time we not only reduced the cool down time considerably but also released more sugars into the wort than previously. This stage was absolutely nailed, a marked improvement on previous attempts, and the benefits of having a brew buddy became very apparent, very quickly. Stage 2 - Lautering & Sparging According to the brew sheet for this NEIPA recipe, approximately 8-10 litres of 76°C water should be rinsed or sparged through the spent grains in order to hit a pre-boil wort volume of 25 litres.. I needed 12L which was the same as last time. It could be that there are improvements that could be made to this part of the process so I’ll maybe agitate the grain a bit more during this process to release more sugars and move the sparge water through, I suspect that of the 12L poured in a fair amount was still sitting within the grain cake. Stage 3 - Boiling Somewhat excitingly (likely to a very limited audience only) there was some proper protein build up as the wort hit the boiling point. I had experienced this during a trip to the Stewart Brewing Craft Beer Kitchen with friends a few years previous and was a little confused as to why it hadn’t happened on my earlier brews.. but it seems that our increased activity during the mash stage was the reason. What nice, natural, confirmatory feedback on our enhanced efforts! With the confidence that the thermometer probe was securely attached and accurately measuring temperature, after breaking up the protein with a paddle, the rest of the boil went very smoothly. We filled the time reading brewing books and chatting about my future brewing plans in Japan. As my dad was driving later in the day we weren’t drinking.. my next brew buddy is a non-driver! Stage 4 - Hop Additions There was an initial 50g of the Chinook hops as a 10 minute (from end of boil) addition, then the hop stand which involves lowering the temperature post-boil to 70-80°C, adding in another 50g of the hops and holding the hot wort at that temperature for 30-45 minutes, we went for 40 minutes at 76°C since 76 appears to be a special number. So far the hop stand seems to be a specific step for this style of beer and must contribute to the hazy or rather juicy look of the final beer. Whilst we were reading in the previous stage, I had spotted a note attached to a recipe from BrewDog’s DIY DOG 2017 which stated that they get the be results when dry -hopping for 5 days (rather than 4 recommended elsewhere) at 14°C. It wasn’t overly clear if they meant specifically with the recipe the note was attached to or as a general rule of thumb but with my newly acquired chiller, I gave it a go. Hop schedule for this brew was: 50g of hops at 10 minutes (50 minutes into boil) 50g of hops post-boil in a hop stand 100g of dry hops post-fermentation for 5 days at 14°C Stage 5 - Cooling Post-brew it occurred to me that I missed a step which could logically fit in this age, I briefly mentioned it in my first brew post and will remember to do it next time. The whirlpooling stage is primarily meant to separate trub (errant hops or grains which managed to escape the grain basket post-sparge) from the wort by dragging them down to the bottom of the .. boiling vessel.. but also the act of a 5 minute (yup!) whirlpool will also cool the wort a little, albeit slower than the cooling coil that comes with the Grainfather. We cooled the wort to 18°C and transferred into the fermenter at a higher elevation than previously in order to increase the oxygen in the wort for the hungry yeast. Stage 6 - Fermenting The target original gravity (OG) for this beer is 1.063 which on my previous disastrous brew I hit on the nose, this time though I missed it by a little, landing on 1.059.. There was about an extra litre of of pre-boil wort and it seems that this was extra sparge water resulting in a very slightly weaker final wort. The fermentation of this beer was the most active (noisiest) so far.. even into day 8 there was still the occasional bubble through the airlock. However, as previously experienced the active yeast increased the temperature of the wort in the fermenter, and it occurred to me finally that I had forgotten to buy a cooling system, so I ordered an inexpensive one and took immediate action whilst awaiting its delivery. On noticing the temperature creeping up to almost 23°C, my wife and I carefully moved the fermenter on to a worktop in the utility room, opened the window to a Scottish winter and watched the temperature drop. The fermenter has a heating element so whenever it drops below the target temperature it slowly recovers.. so whilst there were a few periods where the temperature was slightly below 18°C, they were brief and the heat never exceeded 20°C for the remainder of the fermentation window. During the fermentation, I noted that the yeast dump deposits were a bit smaller than previously but this made sense because the yeast was .. expiring.. at a slower rate. Where the fermenter previously went dormant after 4 days it stretched out twice as long this time before fermentation seemed to be done. Again though, my final gravity (FG) reading was higher than the target and this time I’m not sure why. It was closer to the FG this time (1.026) than last time (1.033) so some progress is being made. Perhaps I need to look into the pH levels of the water or perhaps it will improve upon the introduction of a 5 minute whirlpool.. This is a challenge I feel will take a bit of time to understand. As a result of missing both OG and FG targets my final ABV (according to the Brewer’s Friend Calculator ) is 4.33% had I hit my OG this would have been 4.86%. For reference the following were my volume and gravity targets and final gravity (FG) results: Desired Volume: 19L Actual Volume: 19L Desired OG: 1.063 Actual OG: 1.059 Desired FG: 1.013 Actual FG: 1.026 Desired ABV: 6.6% Actual ABV: 4.3% Stage 7: Kegging & Carbonising I force-carbonated the beer for 2 days at 30PSI, brought it down to 12PSI for another 24 hours, hooked it up to the tap and lowered the pressure to 10PSI. However, as I had noticed on my first brew this resulted in a slightly under-carbonated beer so I cranked up the PSI to 30 for another 24 hours. Stage 8: Drinking Vindication you taste awesome! OK, dialling it down a bit.. this is a tasty beer, I would be happy if I ordered this in a pub and would enjoy every last drop. I wouldn’t necessarily rush back to order it again though but that’s an issue of personal taste.. I like my NEIPAs to be almost fruit juice like, certain hops give off more fruity qualities that I think are better suited to a NEIPA than others. Chinook has some of those qualities it seems but also some resin-y qualities, this is fine, Fierce Beer make a very nice juicy beer which is quite resin-y (Late Shift ) but it just isn’t my personal preference. As an exercise in brewing this was a fantastic experience and my confidence and enthusiasm has been restored. Will I drink this beer? Of course, with pride and I’ll make it again, but next time I’ll use El Dorado hops and see if they taste like I think they would taste without the accidental inclusion of sanitising chemicals. For the next brew, I have a friend joining me and whilst we enjoy this NEIPA, we’ll be having a crack at an Imperial Stout.. arguably my favourite type of beer! (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/chinook-what-i-made/) Thu, 13 Feb 2020 23:56:00 +0100 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/chinook-what-i-made/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/crying-tears-of-hazy-gold/ Enthusiasm for my second brew day was very high, expectations were moderate and preparation was good (or so I thought). Enthusiasm for writing this blog post after the disappointing conclusion to the brew day was somewhat minimal, but at the me time I am a new brewer and I need to record failures as well as success if I am to learn from my mistakes! TL:DR this brew failed and resulted in all of the beer being poured down the drain! In my summary of brew day ichi-ban I described in detail (my understanding) of the steps involved so I’ll not go into as much detail this time but will attempt to follow the me structure. The Beer Kit I had hoped to use the me beer kit consistently for the first three or four brews but I also wanted to step up from 11L to a 19L brew and the previous beer kit was not in stock for this volume, so I opted for New England IPA 19L All Grain Beer Kit , once again from Edinburgh bad brew store . I knew off the bat that making a NEIPA is a more involved process but I was up for the challenge. In the box this time was a slightly damaged bag of mixed grains, some of which were clearly oats and as I hold the opinion that any beer is made better by the inclusion of oats, I was pretty happy with that! In contrast to the previous brew I also knew which hops I was using! 200 grams of the excitingly named El Dorado hop as well as a sachet of White Labs WLP066 London Fog Ale Yeast (liquid). As previously ingredients were accompanied by some general brewing tips and the … Brew Day Sheet This very handy two page guide split the brew into its composite stages and provided target temperatures, gravity readings and volumes as well as space for recording timings and measurements throughout the day. It was very useful and despite my occasional flapping it kept me pretty much on track. The composite parts of the sheet will be incorporated below in the stage sections. Stage 0 - Prep! I almost feel like I should address this section last but as I’ve already shared the disappointing conclusion to the brew day, I’ll grudgingly explain the one major mistake of the day which added an unplanned heat to the drinking of the final product.. think less of habanero and more that acid vat from robocop. As I had previously extolled as the most important factor of the entire brewing process, I cleaned EVERYTHING and sanitised EVERYTHING so that no stray bacteria would contaminate my beer at any age of the process. Look how shiny it is! The issue wasn’t with cleaning, everything was as clean as it needed to be. The issue wasn’t that I forgot to sanitise anything, absolutely everything that had any contact whatsoever with the ingredients and the wort at each age of the process was sanitised. So what was the problem? Over-sanitisation, or rather insufficient attention to detail when mixing the sanitiser with water resulting in the wrong ratios and a much more potent solution than I should have been spraying on absolutely everything. The sanitiser bottle comes with a 10ml measuring, eh neck section.. which is the amount to be mixed with 5L of warm water. My spray bottle holds only a volume of 1L so I eyeballed 2ml .. because obviously there is such a huge margin of error that this was a class A idea. I have had some sound advice from a friend on the fediverse who previously worked in pharma, which I shall be following henceforth! Namely, record everything in detail to which I’ll also be incorporating proper measuring implements. Let’s leave this disappointment behind and move on to the actual brew day, shall we? Stage 1 - Striking & Mashing The temperatures involved in the striking and mashing ages mirrored that in my previous brew though obviously the water volumes increased for the larger grain bill and thus the heating process took a lot longer. Note to self: Start heating the water as soon as you get out of bed! This should have been a straight-forward, stress-free age and a simple repeat of la time, however I discovered my first issue with the Grainfather brewing unit, and that is that the thermometer probe does not snap or lock into place. Due to this, the probe actually slid out a little and the temperature readings as a result were not accurate. When I noticed and pushed the probe back in, the accurate reading was higher by several degrees than it should have been.. and by this point I had already mashed in· So the strike water was too hot and it took longer to cool to mash temperature, which elongated the process and would have impacted on the gravity and potentially the taste of the beer had it not been already, unwittingly destroyed by this point. I tilted off the lid from the Grainfather which would normally be sitting atop the unit, in order to try and facilitate the cooldown process. Otherwise, the grain bill was well mixed and mashed and despite this minor setback I was excited to plod on. Stage 2 - Lautering & Sparging According to the brew sheet for this NEIPA recipe, approximately 8-10 litres of 76°C water should be rinsed or sparged through the spent grains in order to hit a pre-boil wort volume of 25 litres.. I needed 12L to hit about 24L thanks to the increased evaporation in the previous stage. This would presumably have very slightly weakened the wort but not by enough to be concerned. An off-the-cuff amendment to bring the brew day back on track, morale was still high! Stage 3 - Boiling By this age of the brew things have been a bit more hands off for a while, and I was really starting to feel the impact of my scheduled brew buddy cancelling on me, again, for the second time. The whole process was much longer than the previous, smaller brew and extended by the thermometer issue. I was at home and could have attempted to alleviate my encroaching boredom but as I’m still learning the basics, I didn’t want to become too distracted and make more mistakes.. So the isolation started to set in around now. .. the boiling stage is pretty tedious to write about.. wort boiled for 60 minutes, next! Stage 4 - Hop Additions This was the stage I was looking forward to the most, aside from drinking this gloriously hazy, juicy New England IPA that I was crafting. A new process to test and learn! There was an initial 50g of the El Dorado hops as a 10 minute (from end of boil) addition, then the hop stand which involves lowering the temperature post-boil to 70-80°C, adding in another 50g of the hops and holding the hot wort at that temperature for 30-45 minutes. It took about 15 minutes to reach the temperature range and add the hops.. I appear to not have recorded the temperature nor time I maintained the wort at the temperature.. but it was within both target ranges.. I’ll do better with the recording next time. As it turns out this is the only added complexity in this NEIPA brew as opposed to the previous US IPA brew and it would have been nice to enjoy the beer and mull over the influence of this new process.. hindsight! It did make for an even longer brew, that’s for sure. Hop schedule for this brew was: 50g of hops at 10 minutes (50 minutes into boil) 50g of hops post-boil in a hop and 100g of dry hops post-fermentation for 4 days Stage 5 - Cooling During my first brew, I over-chilled the wort and introduced the yeast at too low a temperature potentially killing off some yeast from the get go, I was not going to make the same mistake again. This time, I very carefully cooled the wort to 18°C before transferring the wort from the brew unit to the fermenter and only pitched the yeast once the temperature had been maintained for a little while. Stage 6 - Fermenting Just prior to pitching the yeast into the fermenter I took a sample for original gravity (OG) measurement, my target hydrometer reading was 1.063 and my measurement read 1.063, through the tiredness I felt vindicated that perhaps my amendments had fixed everything and in just two short weeks I’d be swimming in glorious, juicy beer.. I had issues with hitting my gravity target on my first brew and one of the reasons I think was that I didn’t try to oxygenate the wort on it’s journey into the fermenter, so I tried to do so this time and next time I’ll try a little harder to do so.. The liquid yeast and hitting the target temperatures before pitching definitely appeared to make big improvements, this time the fermenter bubbled much more rapidly, aggressively and for several days longer than before. So much so that it naturally increased the temperature in the fermenter to higher than the preferred range.. I adjusted the temperature regulator accordingly. It was during the 10 days of fermentation that I started to suspect something had gone awry. Every 2-3 days I would take a yeast dump (much more carefully this time!) and a sample to measure progress. I also tasted the samples.. for educational purposes, you understand.. and immediately was concerned that this beer was hotter than anticipated. I did however already have a cold and a sore throat so I wasn’t absolutely sure if my suspicions were on point. So I continued. Again though, my final gravity (FG) reading was higher than the target and this time I suspect it’s a combination of the higher strike and mash temperatures leading to a longer mash process as well as despite my attempts, under-oxygenating the wort when transferring into the fermenter. It possibly wasn’t aided by excessive sanitisation liquid contaminating everything. I’m still learning, I’m still learning, I’m still learning. For reference the following were my volume and gravity targets and final gravity (FG) results: Desired Volume: 19L Actual Volume: ~19.5L Desired OG: 1.063 Actual OG: 1.063 - NOT A TYPO!! Desired FG: 1.013 Actual FG: 1.033 - Also not a typo. Desired ABV: 6.6% Actual ABV: ~4% again.. probably.. I guess Stage 7: Kegging & Carbonating I had identified and resolved the minor CO2 leak from my gas cylinder and honestly, this might have been the smoothest part of the whole process. I force-carbonated the beer for 2 days at 30PSI, brought it down to 12PSI for another 24 hours, hooked it up to the tap and lowered the pressure to 10PSI. I left it for a couple of days more before pouring as I was pretty ill and also pretty busy. Stage 8: Drinking So, was it all worth it in the end? sob gulp sob My heart was already seeking consolation from my ankles by the time I came to pour the beer. On a positive, it looked gorgeous, it smelled fresh and lightly hoppy and the head was bubbly, stubborn and inviting. However, I had to check my neck immediately after drinking to ensure it hadn’t burned through my throat and poured on to my chest. Without any further ado, I unhooked the keg and poured all 19L of the “beer” down the sink. Gutted! The brew day was about 8 hours long and it was really hard to keep up concentration levels for that stretch of time. For the next brew, which of course there will be on our return from Japan in January, I hope to try the same beer again and correct the one major and few minor mistakes. I will have a brewing buddy this time, a real one and not just the kindly souls from Estonia and Finland! (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/crying-tears-of-hazy-gold/) Fri, 20 Dec 2019 23:55:51 +0100 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/crying-tears-of-hazy-gold/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/and-so-it-begins/ The much anticipated first brew day in what I hope to be many subsequent and incrementally improved brew days finally culminating in a career in the #craftbeer industry, has come and gone. This shall be a summary of the events as well as the mistakes I believe that I made along the way and thoughts on how to fix them for my next brew day. The Beer Kit For the first handful of brews I am trying to understand the methods and get used to the equipment that I’ll be using for the next few years of home brewing and so I have opted to buy all-grain beer kits in an effort to focus on process. The beer kit for brew numero uno was this US IPA 11L All Grain Beer Kit from Edinburgh based brew store . The kit contained a pre-ground bag of grains (unspecified), 2 vacuum-packed foil wrapped packs of hop pellets (namely hop A and hop B) and one sachet of Mangrove Jack’s M44 West Coast Ale Yeast. The ingredients were accompanied by some general brewing tips and the … Brew Day Sheet This very handy two page guide split the brew into its composite stages and provided target temperatures, gravity readings and volumes as well as space for recording timings and measurements throughout the day. It was very useful and despite my occasional flapping it kept me pretty much on track. The composite parts of the sheet will be incorporated below in the stage sections. Stage 0 - Prep! This was added to this post as an afterthought but it is far to important to be so. Not only did I have to finish setting up my brewing equipment and hooking up gas etc. to my kegerator.. I had to CLEAN EVERYTHING and SANITISE EVERYTHING! Not doing so can lead to the beer being infected and being undrinkable at best. I’ve worked for many, many years in bars and kitchens, I’m an avid cook and I have drilled myself during this time into always maintaining a clean and organseid work area (only in the kitchen!) so this wasn’t a stretch. I also found it very relaxing and quite nostalgic to be cleaning beer lines etc. again after all this time. There was little risk of me not doing this stage well, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it all the me. Always thoroughly clean and sanitise your food/drink preparation and equipment.. anything that comes in contact with the beer or ingredients during the brew day must be clean and sanitary. Stage 1 - Striking & Mashing In a nutshell the mash is the introduction of the grain bill to the hot strike water and steeping at an ideal temperature for a set period of time. The process activates enzymes which breaks down the starches in the grains into sugars which are then dissolved into the hot water to create wort. The first part of this stage is measuring the volume of strike water (12L) and getting it up to ideal temperature, in this case 76°C. Whilst there really isn’t much room for error here, I did heat the strike water in an electric urn rather than in the mash tun.. it may have been quicker the other way around.. we shall see next time. I then slowly introduced the grain bill into the water, stirring as I wanted to ensure that any grain clumps are broken down and then once the porridge-y concoction as in place, we reduce the temperature to 66°C to steep the grains for an hour. The temperature of the mash influences the body of the beer, lighter and drier beers are mashed at slightly lower temperatures than full bodied beers. This beer is middle of the road, a medium bodied beer. So far, so good! Stage 2 - Lautering & Sparging Lautering is a term used for the removal of the spent grains from the mash tun, leaving only wort behind which in larger volume brewing is transferred to a separate boiling unit. My grainfather acts as both a mash tun and a boiler so I guess my beer is only partially lautered?? The next process is the exquisitely named sparge! This step in my generously named ‘brew kitchen’ involves lifting the inner chamber of the grainfather and pouring 4-6 litres of 76°C water slowly through the spent grains so that all of the remaining sugars are rinsed off and into the wort below. My target wort volume after sparging was 15L and I’m relieved to report that I hit the target on the nose. Two stages down and though there may be some efficiency gains for next brew, no actual beer affecting mistakes yet! Stage 3 - Boiling In layman’s terms, this method involves raising the wort to boiling temperature and maintaining that for a period of time, in this case 60 minutes. NAILED IT! Stage 4 - Hop Additions This is where it can get a little tricky because the hops have different functions or rather add different qualities to the beer depending on when they are added. Hops add flavour, bitterness and aroma, I guess technically bitterness is a subset of flavour but it’s my blog and after buying the kit and brewing it.. my beer so :P Hops added at the start of the boil are bittering hops and when added later in the boil or even post-fermentation this is for flavour depth (as in not bitter notes) and aroma. The schedule for this brew was: 10g of hop A and 10g of hop B at 60 minutes (start of boil) 10g of hop A and 10g of hop B at 7 minutes (53 minutes into the boil) 10g of hop A and 10g of hop B - Dry hop 4 days. The hops are added to the fermenter (secondary if you have one) once the beer has fermented and left to steep for 4 days. I had noted from various books and online videos that a very important process when adding hops is called whirlpooling and involves using your stirring implement of choice (sanitised of course) and creating a whirlpool in the wort for about 30 seconds, this allows the hops to disperse more evenly into the beer (or something like that, I need to revisit the theory).. and this was the step where I met my first challenge. Due to me opting for a small batch, I didn’t have a lot of liquid to work with and struggled to create a proper whirlpool without hitting the false bottom inside the grainfather and potentially dislodging filters etc. The same challenge awaited me with the dry hopping stage. So lesson 1, make larger volumes of beer! There are probably other ways to have overcome this challenge but too late for that now! Stage 5 - Cooling During this stage we rapidly cool the wort from boiling to a target temperature of 18-23°C for transferring into the fermenter. In my case using the grainfather this is done by pumping the boiling wort through a counter flow wort cooler which is a coil that ts atop the unit and attaches to a cold water outlet of your choice, the cold water is contained within the cooler and the hot wort is pumped through the coils, reducing in temperature with each circuit. Conveniently the hot wort sanitises the cooler as it goes through the first run as that would be a nightmare to have to sanitise otherwise. I had a few issues here due to buying a cheap garden hose to connect my only compatible tap to the cooling unit a number of metres away.. there were leaks and containing them wasn’t fun.. but only water was sprayed about so no big deal. As I have no thermometer unit in order to gauge the temperature of the wort as it flows through I also over-chilled the wort at this age, reducing the temperature to about 14°C. Which was the temperature that I transferred the wort into the fermenter. Stage 6 - Fermenting The temperature was too low, but I have a temperature controlled conical fermenter so I set the temperature to 20°C and I took my sample to record the original gravity (OG) reading from my hydrometer. However due to the leaks and missed target temperature I got slightly flustered and instead of waiting until the wort had hit the preferred temperature I pitched the yeast too early (at about 15°C).. This mistake inevitably impacted the beer. Once the wort was transferred and yeast pitched, I sealed the unit and added the airlock. Before long the yeast that hadn’t needlesy died of hypothermia started munching on the sugars creating alcohol and causing the airlock to gently bubble reasonably frequently. The sound of the yeast ‘farting’ was a source of entertainment for a couple of days. The wort is left to ferment and turn into beer over the next 7-10 days, or whenever two identical gravity readings are taken over the space of two consecutive days. Every 2-3 days I needed to perform a yeast dump, which is to slowly .. dump dead yeast from a valve at the bottom of the fermenter.. I wish I had paid more attention to the word slowly before engaging in this process. 7 days passed and I had very static gravity readings, not anywhere near target but consistent.. in fact I had them after 4 days but didn’t want to give up hope so waited the week. Hops were added, a failed attempt at whirlpooling occurred and the fermenter was re-sealed for 4 days. So, to summarise my mistakes in this stage: Over-cooled the wort - recoverable, but… Pitched the yeast before the wort recovered to a target temperature - killing some yeast and leading to a higher final gravity and lower ABV beer. Rapidly dumped yeast, losing a fair amount of wort in the process. Lessons learned: Breathe and take your time. For reference the following were my volume and gravity targets and final gravity (FG) results: Desired Volume: 11L Actual Volume: ~11L (woohoo!) Desired OG: 1.061 Actual OG: 1.059 - That seems pretty close to me Desired FG: 1.012 Actual FG: 1.027 - Ah FFG! Missed by a whack but I think it’s explained by the mistakes I made. Desired ABV: 6.5% Actual ABV: ~4% Stage 7: Kegging & Carbonising After 4 days of hops steeping in the fermented beer it was time to transfer this nectar into one or many receptacles.. I opted for a keg because it’s simpler albeit more expensive. I also, as a bartender of almost two decades, really, REALLY wanted to have draft beer on tap at home. Panic set in a little here as I had read so many different carbonation methods, some ’natural’ ones involving the introduction of brewing sugar and storing at room temperature for weeks and some rapid ‘forced’ carbonisation using CO2 at high pressures in order to produce carbonated beer on tap within 4 hours. I am by nature a very patient man but I forgot to buy sugar so.. I opted to carbonate the beer using CO2. The option I eventually settled on actually came from the grainfather manual and involved pressuring a keg at 30PSI for 2 days in the fridge, reducing this to 10-12 PSI for 1 day in the fridge, then reducing this to 8-10PSI and hooking the beer outlet pipe up to the tap.. then after 4 hours.. DRINK!! So I followed the instructions and sampled the beer after the suggested duration.. it poured like a dream! The head retention was phenomenal.. but sadly the beer itself was a shade flat. It occurred to me pretty swiftly that this was due to the lower volume of beer in the keg.. so I disconnected, upped the PSI to 30 again for another day, reduced to 10-12 PSI for half a day then hooked the beer up.. BINGO! However, I have noticed that I do have a very slight CO2 leak. I think I know why, I don’t think the keg is sealed as well as it could be. I’m going to try and focus on this a bit more with the next brew but honestly, I think it will take some practice before the leakage is eliminated. Stage 8: Drinking So, was it all worth it in the end? Hell to the yes! I have never drank this particular beer before and so I don’t have a direct comparison.. It is however, despite its flaws, drinkable and even quite enjoyable! Even more so after a few days of settling. There are improvements that I think could be made and reached primarily by resolving the mistakes above but also I could have used irish moss to clarify the beer if the haziness was of concern (it wasn’t) and this will be a consideration going forward. My next brew day is tomorrow and all of my equipment has already been cleaned, I will sanitise as I go. Whilst I had hoped to use the same beer kit in a larger volume the brew store didn’t have it, so I’ve gone with their limited addition NEIPA (New England IPA) which I am very much looking forward to. The journey continues! Note: The image at the top of the post is a photo of a selection of beers from Fierce Brewing in my beer fridge. They are one of a number of breweries who have inspired me to this point. (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/and-so-it-begins/) Sat, 09 Nov 2019 23:55:29 +0100 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/and-so-it-begins/ https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/beer-journal-introduction/ Some time ago, I made the decision that at some future point in my life I want to be a craft beer brewer. For reasons this has not yet transpired but the dream still remains and recent plans to relocate to rural Japan in 4 years time provide potential opportunity for the wheels to be put in motion. My only experience thus far of brewing was when a few years ago, a friend invited myself and a few others to the Stewart Brewing Craft Beer Kitchen where under the guidance of a resident brewer we had a fairly decent go at making a milk stout. The day in the brew kitchen was excellent and really encouraged me to learn more about the process. As it stands, in a room which was formerly a garage but hasn’t quite finished it’s conversion into anything resembling suitable, sits a Grainfather All Grain Brewing System along with a conical fermenter, a large urn and various other brewing paraphernalia. All as of yet, still boxed and awaiting their inaugural run. I have a few other pieces to “invest” in before I’m ready to start brewing but the main barrier has been the unfinished room.. which will hopefully be finished soon. I’ve been a member of the Beer52 craft beer club since a month after its inception (I think) and have sampled many craft beers from around the planet and each month I learn a little more. I initially started a paper journal, just recording the hop choices and tasting notes for the beers I was getting delivered, however that soon became tiresome and primarily delayed the drinking of the beer so I stopped. I still have a lot of learning to do and am hoping that recording my brewing experiences will help me in this process. So, the purpose of this blog will be primarily self-education and note-taking but I hope that it provides some interesting reading for fellow enthusiasts who like myself don’t necessarily have all the jargon knowledge of more seasoned professionals. I’m categorising this journal under brewshido.. Bushido is the Japanese term for “way of the warrior” and I previously had a blog called bushidodreams (which can be found on this site).. so I’m coining the term brewshido to mean the way of the brewer. I acknowledge that neither my brewing nor my Japanese language knowledge are of a sufficient level to warrant the brashness of coining a new word in my second language but it is what it is! (https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/beer-journal-introduction/) Mon, 25 Mar 2019 13:20:07 +0000 https://jon.kelbie.scot/article/beer-journal-introduction/