Newsletter from 1/23/2006

Fellow Homebrewers,

Happy Brew Year! (I know, I know, I just couldn’t help myself)

This newsletter has been a slow work in progress this month. As you can see it’s by far the longest newsletter yet. I initially intended the new Tips & Tricks section to be just a few lines at best, but the subject I chose for this issue took way longer than anticipated. You might need a red bull to make it through this in one sitting…

Local News

I was at Upland recently and had their freshly tapped Winter Warmer. At 9% abv they appropriately serve it in a 12 oz snifter, after 2 of these I was definitely feelin’ it. Taste? One word: Good. You must get down there and try it before it’s gone.

Club Stuff

The next meeting is scheduled for this coming Thursday January 26th. I will be hosting this one, the directions to my place can be found at the bottom.

As I read through the minutes from the last meeting here, I just want to thank Daniela Bell for taking excellent notes!

We need a club logo! Since this whole logo thing has been dragging on for a while, we decided to put a deadline on logo submissions. The deadline will be the March 23rd meeting where we will vote on all logo submissions. If you want to have the bragging rights to our logo, and maybe even a free pint glass to the winner, get ‘er entered. We’re looking for a logo that embodies the club’s name and our love for brewing and beer drinking. If you are planning on making a logo submission, email me so I can get a feel for how many submissions to expect.

Once we have a winning logo, the first thing we would like to do is make logo pint glasses for the club members. Kris has volunteered to do all the legwork to find custom glass print/etching vendors. He’ll try to get a few different options for us to choose from so we can get the look we want.

We also discussed at the last meeting what kind of weekend events we would like to have in the next year. Here are the event ideas we discussed at the last meeting. Regardless if you have attended a meeting or not, please feel free to email me back which ideas most appeal to you. If you have any ideas to add, let me know.

1. Intro to All-Grain brewing day. This would be a demonstration of how to brew an all-grain batch of beer, what equipment is needed and all that fun stuff.
2. Potluck Club Batch brew day. This would entail everyone bringing an ingredient of their choice. Although, it might be better to try to narrow the beer intended to a single style so we don’t end up with a nasty witches’ brew of toad stool and newt. The pot luck brew would most likely be kegged and served at future meetings.
3. Have a competition! The idea was for an “Iron Chef” style competition. There would be 1 to 3 people per team and each would be allowed to bring 3 of their own ingredients. The competition would begin with a mystery box of different ingredients. Each team would have to use a certain amount of the ingredients provided. Each team would brew at the competition and then declare the style of beer that they are going for. The beer would then be judged at a later date.
4. Microbrewery trip. We talked about going to Louisville, Cincinnati, Indy, and Northwest Indy to hit different microbreweries.
   

As for upcoming meetings we discussed possibly organizing some to be topical. We have done a few where we explored specific beer styles such as Munich Dunkels and smoked beers. During those meetings we had a presenter speak on the style and then all sampled different commercial examples of the style. Those went well, and probably will continue to do them occasionally. We would like to have some other ideas for topical meetings, but need feedback from you to get an idea of what people would be interested in.

BJCP Study Group

As an offshoot to our normal meetings Eric brought up the idea of starting a BJCP study group. If anyone is interested in studying for and taking the BJCP exam, email me and I’ll get you in the study group loop.

Beer Style of the Month

Since this topic wasn’t discussed at the last meeting I don’t have an official style of the month. However, Dunn and I are conducting a malt experiment by brewing English Ordinary Bitters with the same yeast and hops but with different base malts. We feel that this style is a good way to discover the different characteristics between base malts. So far, we have brewed a batch with Muntons’ Maris Otter and another batch with Breiss American 2-Row. Our next 2 batches will be Simpson’s Golden Promise and Crisp Maris Otter (a floor malted MO).

So why not, and make January English Ordinary Bitter month. Ordinary Bitter is a slightly sweet medium-light bodied low gravity and lightly carbonated easy drinking English ale. It’s a great drinking beer that you can’t unfortunately buy a commercial example of locally (that I know of). Dunn and I are only making 4 different bitters to compare the malts, but it would be really cool if you wanted to jump in and make one yourself and compare it with ours. Here’s the recipe:

All water used was charcoal filtered Bloomington tap water

7lbs of your base malt of your choice.

1.5oz of 4% AA (6 HBU) Fuggle (60 minutes)

1.0oz Fuggle (20 minutes)

1tsp. Irish Moss (15 minutes)

0.5oz Fuggle (0 minutes)

Pitch a starter of White Labs WLP002 English Ale yeast

Mash in with 10 quarts of 163 degree water. Maintain a 152 degree mash for 60 minutes. Sparge until you have 6.5 gallons of run off. Bring to a boil and add boiling hops and being a 1 hour timer. Immediately chill the wort at the end of the boil. OG should for this recipe should be 1.038 (but we actually hit 1.044-47 with our first two batches). Pitch a vigorous 250ml starter. Oxygenate well. Fermentation should finish within 3 days at 68 degrees. Rack the beer to secondary and let clear for 3-5 days. Keg at 1.3 CO2/vol, or if bottling, use ½ the amount of priming sugar that you would normally use. This beer should be ready to drink within a week of bottling/kegging.

If you would like to compare contrast with ours try one of the following malts:

American 6-row

Beeston’s Maris Otter

Belgian Pilsner Malt

Thomas Fawcett Maris Otter

Thomas Fawcett Halcyon

Thomas Fawcett Optic

German Pilsner Malt

Munton’s English 2-row

If you are an extract brewer replace 5lbs of the base malt with 3lbs of light DME. First in a pot, steep 2lbs of your selected base malt around 152 degrees for 45 minutes then rinse with hot water. Add your DME and bring to a boil. Follow the remaining recipe. If you are only doing a partial boil, i.e. only boiling around 2 gallons, then increase boiling hops by 1/4 oz for a total of 1.75oz of boiling hops.

Email me if you’re planning on brewing this recipe, I’ll be sure to get you in on the tasting when it comes time.

Tips and Tricks

As I mentioned in the last newsletter I was going to add this tips and tricks section. If you have anything that you find useful pass it on to me in an email and I’ll add it to a future newsletter.

When I pondered what I should put in my first edition of the Tips and Tricks section, the first thing that came to mind was yeast pitching rates. In my first several years of brewing I never made yeast starters or really worked hard at oxygenating my wort, and still made beers that were drinkable and sometimes fairly good. However, they all had that taste what some of my friends referred to as that “homebrew taste”. When I brewed my first batch with a yeast starter the results were dramatic, clean, almost commercial clean tasting beer. Because it has such a big impact on fermentation quality, I think this subject is perfect for the first Tips and Tricks article.

Every batch of beer that is chilled and transferred to the fermenter either in a home or a professional environment is ALWAYS contaminated with unwanted bacteria. Sanitation as always is a must and does reduce the number of unwanted bacterial contamination in the fermentation vessel, but it does NOT get rid of all the bacteria. So the only way to keep this bacteria from multiplying and causing off flavors and aromas in your beer is to give those bacteria as much competition as possible.

That competition comes from the yeast that you pitch. Bacteria eats and thrives in wort just as well as yeast, so the only thing you can do is toss in as many healthy yeast cells as possible to consume the sugars before the bacteria has a chance to thrive. Plus, when yeast starts chugging along, it starts producing its own sanitizer, ethanol (alcohol), to help kill off unwanted bacteria. So yeah, wort needs yeast, and lots of it.

A Homebrewer can buy yeast in basically two different packaged forms: liquid and dry. Liquid yeast is already hydrated and is “ready to pitch” into wort and contains around 100 billion cells per package. Depending on the date of manufacture most of these dormant cells are viable and are ready to chow down on some wort. Liquid yeast is available in many different strains and costs between $6-8 for each “smack pack” or vial.

Dry yeast, has been processed to remove all the water from the dormant yeast cells to extend their shelf life. The upsides to using the dry is that there is up to 5 times more yeast cells and it usually costs less than half of what liquid yeast costs. The downside to dry yeast is that there aren’t as many strains available and it needs to rehydrate before awakening from their dormant stage. If added directly to the wort, this rehydration adds more lag time. I would like to point out though, if you pitch yeast directly from the packaging into the wort, in most cases, the dry yeast will usually show signs of fermentation before the liquid yeast will. This is because the dry yeast package contains many more yeast cells than the liquid yeast. Even though the liquid yeast starts reproducing right away it still has to time to propagate 2-3 fold to catch up to the cell count in the dry yeast package.

Even though 100 and 500 billion yeast cells sounds like a lot, it’s not! Don’t get me wrong here, I’ve made decent beers by just pitching yeast packages directly into the fermenter. But the following advice will greatly improve your chances of making a clean and well attenuated beer.

The most important improvement I made in homebrewing was making starters for every batch of beer. Making a starter increases your yeast cell pitching rate and the yeast is active and ready to go bonkers in your wort dramatically decreasing fermentation lag time. As soon as that starter is pitched into your wort it’s actively budding and propagating and ready to chow down on all that delicious wort.

For ale yeasts for beers that are under 1.060 I recommend a 250-500ml (approx 8-16oz) 1.040 starter. For ales between 1.060 and 1.090 go with a liter. For the really big beers make a big 2 quart starter. There is a formula to help figure this all out, but for brevity’s sake the sizes above should be sufficient. For starters that are bigger than 500ml you might want to consider letting them ferment completely for 2-3 days and when activity ceases put them in the fridge for 24 hours. After a day, you should have a nice yeast cake at the bottom of the vessel with clear liquid on top. Since this liquid is usually pretty sour and off tasting you probably don’t want that in your beer, so it’s a good idea to decant most of this liquid off. Then about 3 hours before brewing take it back out of the fridge and add about 250ml of liquid starter to get the yeast active again. Note: for lagers you want to pitch 2 to 4 times as much yeast as you would for an ale because lagers reproduce much more slowly than ale strains. I usually pitch a decanted 2 liter starter for all my lagers.

Here’s how to make a 1 liter starter. In a small pot add 1 liter of water and 3.4oz by weight of light or extra light DME with a pinch of yeast nutrient. The nutrient is option but highly recommended. Butler sells small bottles and bags of yeast energizer/nutrient. Then bring this to a boil and let boil for 5 minutes. Now if you are not using an Erlenmeyer flask for your starter I would highly recommend that you put a lid on your pot while it boils. The lid will be sanitized while on the boiling pot and then be used to keep falling bacteria out of the liquid when you cool it. It is VERY IMPORTANT not to pour boiling liquid into a growler or any other non-heat tolerant glass vessel, it will break! If you do have a flask you can pour the hot liquid directly in the flask, cover and cool it down in your refrigerator, freezer, or ice bath. Once you have a cool (under 80 degrees) liquid starter add your yeast and cover with sanitized aluminum foil or a stopper with airlock.

This then brings me to aeration / oxygenation. There are two different yeast respiration phases. The first stage is aerobic respiration where it uses oxygen to metabolizes sugars to bud new yeast cells and propagate more yeast cells. Once all of the oxygen is used up, it stops budding, and goes into an anaerobic respiration phase where it metabolizes sugars largely into CO2, ethanol and heat. Since our goal here is to get as many yeast cells in our starter as possible we need to aerate as often as we can. There are several ways to do this, you can shake the baageezuss out of it when ever you see it, or you can give it a dose of pure oxygen and shake periodically, or you can get yourself a magnetic stir plate. The aim is to keep the yeast in suspension in O2 rich starter solution for several days. This will maximize the number of yeast cells produced in your starter.

When you are ready to pitch your yeast into your wort, give your starter a good shake and then pour it into your fermenter. Even with your starter, you still need to get more yeast cells to grow in your wort, so you’ll need to add more O2 to the beer. Oxygenating your wort is vital to getting your cell count up and producing cleanly fermented beer. The most basic method of introducing O2 into wort is to vigorously shake the fermenter for 10-20 minutes. You can probably cut this time down to 5 minutes if you use Dunn’s burley-man method of shaking a carboy around like it’s a morocco. However, if you’re not built like a caber tosser there are some alternatives available. Aeration stones, also called beer stones, can be connected to an air or O2 supply to blow super tiny bubbles into the wort. If you connect a stone to a deep tank aquarium pump it will take about 5-10 minutes to sufficiently aerate. If you upgrade to a regulated oxygen cylinder it will cut the time down to about 30 seconds. By the time the yeast have consumed all the oxygen in the fermenter you should have a large enough population to ferment your beer fast and cleanly.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions or techniques that I may have overlooked.

Cheers,

Ryan

Directions to the Jan. 26th meeting:

I live at 3827 Fox Chase Run, 47401. Plug it into mapquest if you want custom directions. Here’s the vanilla: Take walnut south to Rhorer road (Where the new Kroger is) take a left and drive about 2 miles. If you hit a 3 way stop Snoddy/Rhorer you’ve gone about ¼ mile too far. Look for Fox Chase Run on the left hand side of the road. Turn into the addition and I’m the 2nd house on the right.

Copyright 2006