My buddy Chris Danzig and I threw together what I hope to be a rocking IPA on the day before my convocation ceremony at Northwestern. This third one-gallon batch rounds out the end of my inaugural ‘pale’ series as well as the end of my first batch of yeast (this is their 3 pitch). Approximately three brews down I can already run down some of my strengths and weaknesses. Strengths: sanitation, carbonation, process knowledge (no need to reference a book to see what to do next). Weakness: recipe formulation, system-specific knowledge (i.e. boil off rate, but I am getting better). I am also happy to report that with graduation around the corner, my 5 gallon batch is not far behind. Next up for the one-gallon series? Porters and stouts. Yum.


Ingredients
1.20 lb Extra Light Dry Extract
0.10 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt – 80L
0.21 oz Simcoe [12.70%] (60 min) Hops 51.8 IBU
0.20 oz Cascade [6.00%] (30 min) Hops 17.9 IBU
0.25 oz Cascade [6.00%] (5 min) Hops 5.8 IBU
0.05 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min) Misc
0.15 lb Corn Sugar (Dextrose) (0.0 SRM)
1.65 gal Chicago, IL Water
1 Pkgs American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) Yeast-Ale (from #1.002)


The Brew
Soundtrack: As Tall As Lions, Bloc Party, South Park episodes
Brew Beer:  Newcastle Brown Ale, Goose Island 312 (thanks Danzig!)


Stats
Original Gravity: 1.056
Final Gravity: 1.009
Est. ABV: 6.1%
IBU: 75.6 (Tinseth, still not 100% behind these estimates)
Color: 8.0
Brewed: 6.18.09
Bottled: 6.29.09

With batch #001 in bottles and ready to drink, I was anxious to get a chance to brew again and implement the lessons learned. Jim and Brian came on out (with brew beer, very important) to help with this batch. I centered #002 around Simcoe hops, known for their aggressive, citrus tones. For kicks, I zested some citrus I had in my refrigerator to experiment with the results I would get. This batch was also the first time I prepared a preboil tea; Caravienne may not be the optimal choice of specialty grain (aka it’s what I had on hand) but I was more focused on practicing the process.


Ingredients
0.10 lb Caravienne malt, preboil tea
0.55 lb Extra Light Dry Extract (3.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM)
0.08 oz Simcoe [12.70%] (55 min)
0.08 oz Simcoe [12.70%] (25 min)
0.08 oz Simcoe [12.70%] (5 min)
0.10 oz Simcoe [12.70%] (0 min) DH
1 Lime, Zest (Boil 5.0 min)
3/4 Orange, Zest (Boil 5.0 min)
0.30 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min) Misc
0.05 lb Brown Sugar, Light (8.0 SRM)
1.70 gal Chicago, IL Water
American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) Yeast-Ale (from 1.001)


The Brew
Soundtrack: The Ghost Inside
Brew Beer: Sierra Nevada Torpedo, Westmalle Tripel and assorted American micros (none that great) from Jim


Stats

Original Gravity: 1.040

Final Gravity: 1.008

Est. ABV: 4.2%

IBU: 39 (Tinseth)

Color: 7.5 (Est.)

Brewed: 6.6.09

Bottled: 6.15.09

I’ve been hearing and reading from a lot of sources that a making a yeast starter is another powerful tool to make great beer. Giving your yeast ample time to multiply and activate before you pitch is essential to meet proper pitching rates for both store-bought packs and cakes recovered from your primary of a previous batch. In a nutshell a stir plate is used to aerate the starter wort/yeast mixture by spinning a magnetic bar inside the flask. This action keeps the yeast in suspension and continuously mixes oxygen into the mixture. Oxygen – while bad for the beer (aka starter wort) – is an important growth nutrient.

Personally, I am using the plate to start-up a cake I had recovered and washed from a previous primary. It’s been in the refrigerator for about two weeks, so this process (I let them stir and multiply overnight) makes them ready to pitch later during brewday.

Making your own stir plate is simple. The tools you’ll need are a screwdriver or two, drill (with bits), superglue and a soldering iron. I followed instructions or pictures from these following sites: via Homebrewtalk, via David Trumbel, via Beertools. Given that I had a few of this items laying around, this all in all cost me approximately $25.


Parts

• 1 – 4″ PC DC Fan (check the voltage, make sure it will match what you’re feeding it)
• 1 – Project Box Radio Shack #270-1806
• 1 – Rocker Switch Radio Shack – #275-694
• 1 – Knurled Knob Radio Shack – #274-424
• 1 – 25 Ohm Rehostat Radio Shack – #271-265
• 1 – 12v DC Power Supply (old cell phone/camera charger)
• 1 – Rare Earth Magnet from old PC Hard Drive or decent magnets
• Wire (you’ll use under a foot)
• Some way to stabilize the fan (I superglued it to a small, empty spice container)
• Magnetic stir bar (you can find these cheap online)
  

Costruction

1. Drill holes for on/off switch, power supply wire, rehostat in the project box. Ensure everything fits properly.

2. Prepare the fan wires; mine had PC power supply hookups so I did not have to strip the wires.

3. Prepare the power supply wires. Snip the end with the device plug in adapter. Now to quote Homebrew talk user Anthony Lopez “Some phone chargers will have two wires, while others I’ve found have a “braid” going around another insulated wire. The “braid” is our ground or negative and the inner cable is your power side. For the chargers with 2 single wires inside, black is your ground.”

4. Connect the ground (black) of the power supply to the ground (black) of the fan.

5. Solder the male end of the power supply wires (red or striped) and solder it to the top terminal of the power switch (may be labled supply). If you have it oriented correctly (the ‘O’ on the bottom for off) this is usually the top terminal on the back of the switch. Here is a decent picture of that.

6. Connect the other terminal of the power switch (may be labled load) to the middle arm of the rehostat using a short length of wire. Solder it in.

7. Almost done wiring; now connect the ‘red’ of the fan to an outside arm of the rehostat. This is were I got confused – and it may be a good idea to test out your setup before you solder it in, to ensure you have the polarity right and your rehostat is working.

8. When all of the soldering is done and you’re satisfied, find a makeshift way to stabilize your fan in the position you’d like. Like I mentioned, I superglued it to an old spice container (which was also superglued to the bottom of the project box). Another note if you’re using superglue; give it a few hours to dry before you close up the box or you’ll get crusty junk coming out all of the openings of your device, yuck.

9. Use common sense/test runs, to align the magnets properly to spin the stir bar. Glue them down.

10. Clean up the inside of the box and when you’re sastisfied, screw up the box and enjoy!

Another quick note, if you’re in Chicago and want some help building one of these, drop me a line. I don’t mind :)

Cluster#$@& is now in bottles are ready to be sampled maybe next weekend for the next, more effective brewday. My early idea is to do another pale ale based around Simcoe, but we will see.

#001 cleared up extremely extremely well and has a very light golden color (oh no it looks like a millerwiser! haha). I tried it from the secondary and the taste is – as expected – somewhat thin and yeasty. The aroma gives a hint of cluster but is also on the light side, this could be improved by carbonation though. Regardless, I am glad to have this first one under the belt and can’t wait to hit the kettle with something bigger and definitely better. Another note: I need to get ‘real’ sanitizer (Iodine-based) ASAP, this bleach smell is hard to deal with…

I’m hopping on the homebrew-blog-talk-bandwagon here and throwing in my own $0.02 about the biggest joys and stresses of brewday. Granted I’ve had ONE brewday total to date so maybe this is more like my own $0.002…maybe this remind the veterans of their first time, oh yeah. You can check out more homebrewer’s thoughts at TedBrews and Beer Bits 2.


Joys

• Beer Deconstruction: Have you ever tasted malt? Smelled hops? Drank warm sweet wort? Drinking finished beer is one thing, but examining and fondling each ingredient for the first time was a wondrous experience. It brings tremendous perspective to the already beloved final product.
• Starting the boil: Every thing is cleaned? All cold side equipment is sterilized? All my ingredients are weighed and ready? Then f%$# yeah lets get this boil started! Turning on the burners (or electric warmers, which aren’t as romantic) means ~60 minutes of relaxed stirring, smelling wort and drinking your brewbeer (the cold one you have to drink while making beer, isn’t it brewlaw?).

Stresses

• LME IS STICKY: I was warned but…ARRRRRRRRRRRRG! Next time, I’ll have this on lockdown.
• Filtering: I had all sorts of worries about filtering trub/hopcrud from my first beer. First, I thought putting my hops in a bag would limit the larger particulates – but the other half of my brain got nervous about limiting the contact with the wort. Secondly, cheesecloth filter worked great as an abstract boat, floating about the incoming cooled wort, resulting in a chunky mess swirling around the fermenter. In the end, I let gravity do it’s thing and my beer looks lovely sitting in the secondary. OVERALL WARM AND FUZZY MORAL OF THE STORY: RDWHAHB; most mistakes can be fixed with a little engineering or time and if they can’t then call them features.

Finally got the guts and time to whip together my first homebrew. Instead of doing a full 5 gallon batch as I had originally planned, I scaled down and did an ‘experimental’ one gallon batch. I approached it as a learning experience and definitely learned many valuable lessons on the way, even though my beer is sure to suck.

I decided to stay very simple and only use one variety of hops (cluster, if you couldn’t tell already from the name). Many pictures are included (thanks Jenny!) to fully document this blissful trainwreck, here’s to many more – brews, not trainwrecks. At least the name/logo is cool right? Eh? Eh?

Ingredients

0.70 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) Extract
0.17 oz Cluster [7.10%] (55 min) Hops 26.7 IBU
0.17 oz Cluster [7.10%] (30 min) Hops 21.3 IBU
0.17 oz Cluster [7.10%] (5 min) Hops 5.5 IBU
0.10 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min) Misc
0.10 lb Brown Sugar, Light (8.0 SRM) Sugar
2.00 gal Chicago, IL Water
1 Pkgs American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) Yeast-Ale (Propagator smack pack)

Ingredient notes: I attempted to split the use of my pale LME between two batches and got slightly overwhelmed trying to put this one together. In the process I jumbled the amount I added to this batch and tried to compensate by a last minute brown sugar addition. *shrug* My gravity is lower than I had hoped so next time I will work harder to get this worked out right. Also, according to Mr. Malty’s yeast pitching calculator the propagator pack had the perfect cell count to pitch straight in after popping the nutrient pack.

The Brew

Soundtrack: Pittsburg Penguins vs. Carolina Hurricanes

Brew Beer: NONE. I KNOW I’M BREAKING MY RULE. NEVER AGAIN.

I won’t go into this step by step breakdown for each batch but I think it’s worth it for my first (and all of my buddies can study up and get ready for the full scale one).

Sanitation: Too early to confirm but I believe I had a great routine down. Everything was properly sanitised in a dilute bleach bath and then rinsed in a water bath with no rinse cleanser. Used my bottling bucket and fermenter bucket in the tub. Worked great.

Boil: Stove and kettle worked fine. No problems. Until I added real ingredients; got a little tripped up measuring out the LME but I’ll chalk that up to noobism. Good experience tasting and experience the extreme stickiness of LME. Will have a better plan next time. Realized later that I slightly overestimated the boiloff rate of my stove/pot, lesson learned. Hops smelled so good. Incredible. I wish my beer could be better to them.

Cooldown: Water bath in my sink worked great. No issues whatsoever.

Fermentation: Biggest mistake came in the transfer of cooled wort from the kettle to the fermenter. I didn’t lay out the cheesecloth correctly so it did nothing to keep out any hop sludge. Going to buy a real strainer ASAP. The funnel I was using also proved to be awkward since it made a ‘perfect’ vacuum with the vessel so my wort going in was backing up big time. I’ll sort of fix this by transferring the brew to my other 1gal fermenter when it’s time to put on the airlock (thereby removing all the heavy hop sludge).

Stats

Original Gravity: 1.025 (lower than expected)

Final Gravity: 1.005

Est. ABV: 2.6%

IBU: ~54

Color: 6 SRM

Brewed: 5.23.09

Bottled: 5.29.09 (short fermentation because I am anxious to try my first, low + stable FG and tremendous clarity)

Yesterday Jim (the tough guy in the photo) and I dug up a huge chunk of my parents lawn to make way for my hops. This all came about after a conversation last week with my mom – the green thumb – about possibly doing this next year. To my surprise she suggested we could still do it now as long as they were planted within a week or two. I got Fuggle, Nugget and Cascade (one of each for now, I think next year I will double up for six total plants). Next up is building a trellis or lattice system to help support what hopefully will become 15 ft. of floral goodness. We’ll see how this goes…

My gear comes tomorrow. Stoked. In between hitting F5 on the FedEx page every 30 seconds I’ve been looking over ‘general advice’ threads on homebrew forums, reddit, etc. Here are some of the clutch quotes, musings:

• You’re going to fuck up. Don’t let that scare you.
• You have to drink beer while making beer.
• Read Jim Palmers ‘How to Brew’. Now.
• Be patient! Fermentation, conditioning takes time.
• There are many good computer tools out there.
• If a full boil is possible, DO IT.
• Clean and sanitized are not the same thing. You need both.
• You aren’t going to save any money by brewing your own beer.
• When in doubt, wait a week.
• Oxygen before fermentation good, oxygen after fermentation bad.
• …and of course: Relax, don’t worry, and have a homebrew!

Interestingly, I also found out that Alton Brown did a homebrewing episode of Good Eats. Have not watched it yet but I already know it’s entertaining. Now I just need the Food Jammers to do one…

I’m not entirely sure when it dawned on me; in retrospect, I’m surprised it took so long to realize I needed to start homebrewing ASAP. When the last week of school wrapped up for me in March, unemployment loomed in the future. To keep my sanity I was determined to immerse myself in something, and my first idea was to review my chemical engineering fundamentals. Very soon after combining studying heat transfer and bio engineering while enjoying some hoptherapy the light bulb went off and I dashed over to the public library to get schooled in the art.
Even though I haven’t even brewed my first batch yet, I think the last month of constant reading has made me MORE than adequately prepared. If you’re interested in starting yourself I highly recommend one of the following resources. Let me know if you know of any others!


introductory:
‘Basic Homebrewing’ – Jim Parker.

median:
‘Extreme Brewing’ – Sam Calagione.
‘Dave Miller’s Homebrewing Guide’ – David Miller.


science geek:
‘Principles of Brewing Science’ – George Fix (Ph.D)


also insightful:
‘Premium Beer Drinker’s Guide’ – Stephen Beaumont


to be read:
‘The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Third Edition’ -  Charles Papazian
‘Ultimate Beer’ – Michael Jackson