Raffle Pale Ale Tasting

So I took some initial tastes of the Pale Ale I brewed and discovered it to be quite flat. Not CO2 wise just lacking in flavor. It wasn't quite a bitter as I expected and there was really no hop aroma. So even though I knew all along that I would need to, I rediscovered the fact that I had to dry hop. I grabbed 1 oz of Summit hops from the LHBS and started the dry hop of my 3 gallon keg on Friday. I tasted it on Saturday night and it was developing, and tried it again of Sunday and found it to be darn near perfect. I like the taste of Summit dry hopped. It is the hop used in Widmier's Drifter Pale Ale as a dry hop and I love that beer and this makes it quite similar. The only issues I have now are that it could have used more bittering. This is probably due to the use of some old, poorly stored hops. Additionally the color was a bit off. I split this between my fear from the last pale ale I brewed coming in too dark and the brewing software that calculated the SRM much higher than it came out as. I am pretty sure that the software was wrong as the recipes I based this on all called for more crystal than I used and I now see why.

All Grain Kolsch Brew Day

So I decided to finally take the plunge and try my hand at all grain brewing. I had been slowly acquiring the parts and pieces for it. I moved to full boils last summer, and I built all the parts to convert a cooler into a mash tun over the winter. I broke down and bought a 5 gallon round cooler at Walmart for $20 and ran to the homebrew store on Friday to pick up the ingredients. For my first brew I decided to start with a Kolsch. I really enjoyed the one I brewed last spring and wanted to try it again. I made a yeast starter on Friday, got up at 6 on Sunday and started my brew day.

My recipe called for 11 pounds of grain and I was mashing with 3.5 gallons of water. My strike temp was 161, with my mash at 150 and once I doughed in and checked my temp I found that I was at around 160. I think that the problem came from my poor temperature taking procedure that really didn't get my thermometer deep enough into the water of the HLT. I dumped in some air temp water that I had sitting around and that brought the temp right down to 150. I mashed for an hour, recirculated the run off 3 times (although I didn't note a lot of clearing occurring in my run off, it was pretty clear to begin with) and move on to sparging. I sparged with another 3.25 of water and after it all ending up in my kettle, I found that I was a bit short of my expected boil amount (maybe 2 gallons). I quickly heated up some more sparge water, but decided to start my 90 minute boil with the 5.5 gallons I already had in my kettle. It took almost a full 30 minutes to finish with that extra sparge (next time I will make sure I have some extra water heated and waiting for sparging, along with another pot to catch my first runnings). I added my hops just before adding the 2nd sparge run off, brought it up to a boil again. At the end of my boil I had a bit less wort than I expected, some of that was due to the longer boil. I pitched the yeast at around 68, and will ferment at 64.

I am reserving the right to judge this brew until after I have a chance to taste it, but I can say I was not displeased at the process itself. I need a second pot (around 3 gallon) and it would be cool to have a larger boil kettle so I can end up with a touch more wort and less boilover risk, but these are the things I learn.

Tasting Round Up

I have been brewing so much, I haven't gotten around to commenting on the results enough.

The Northern Brewer Nut Brown tastes exactly like Newcastle. I have to imagine that is the point of that kit, although I didn't pick the kit up for this reason. I am realizing I really need more regulators as this beer is much better at a lower PSI than the American Wheat and Belgian Blond I have right now. I take care of this by grabbing a spoon and stirring some of the CO2 out of solution before drinking and it is noticeably better that way.

The American Wheat kit that I rebrewed came out way better than it did the first time I tried to brew it. The color is dead on, with a nice cloudy yellow. There is a noticeable clove phenolic in the taste. This is out of line for the profile, and I am going to blame the yeast. I have temperature control and I tried a starter so I have little else left to blame. It used the Safale wheat yeast and I am reading that it is not as clean as it should be for a true American Wheat. For my money it is a near perfect Widmer Hefeweizen clone. I will make note and use a clean ale yeast next time I brew this...that is unless everyone I give it too enjoys it.

APA Brew Day

So this was a week of many brewing firsts for me. It started with my joining the Arizona Society of Homebrewers, a local homebrew club. We did a tour of a local distributor's warehouse and sampled some beers. I also won part of their monthly raffle and chose some hops as my prize: 1 oz whole leaf Warrior and 1 oz whole leaf Pallisades. I decided that I should brew something up using these hops for next month's meeting, and picked an APA. It was the last of the styles that I wanted to rebrew from my early failures. In order to brew, I needed to move my American Wheat out of the fermentor and into a keg. I also was interested in finishing my stir plate to make a starter for this beer. I worked through this in before the weekend and got around to brewing on Memorial Day. I was sick and tired of the continual threat of boil overs, so I grabbed a fan and used it to majorly reduce the risk. Batch turned out OK, but I can say I am not a huge fan of using whole hops in the boil as it made racking a bit difficult.

Rebrewing

I have finally reached a point where I am ready to go back and rebrew some stuff. There are still some things that I want to try, but I want to start eliminating things that I didn't enjoy and think about having something like a regular rotation. Before I am willing to commit, there are 3 beers that I brewed in the past that I would consider failures, and feel that I should try and get them right before I decide that I don't want them in the rotation. The 3 are my DIPA, American Wheat and an APA (actually it was an EPA, but that is almost splitting hairs). I am going to start with the American Wheat. I consider this the closest thing to a drain pour I have ever brewed and I am sure that I could be a real crowd pleaser. So I am planning on brewing on Sunday, even though my fermentor is still full as of today. I will rack my brown to a keg tonight, and I will clean out my other carboy on Saturday so that I will be ready to go on Sunday. I am also thinking about bottling up the remainder of my mild. I still don't have my 5th tap, so I have little problems moving ahead with staying one keg down. I am also thinking about bottling off the rest of this keg of cider and move on to my Halloween batch. Plus I am ready to start another cider and will need the keg space for aging.

Nut Brown Brew Day

I wanted to brew yesterday and Sharon wanted to take Mary to try out a church, so I got up at 6 am to brew. I actually started the night before with setup and steeping my specialty grains, along with filling the kettle. This way I rolled out of bed, started the burner and I was moving. Got the water to a boil before 6:45 and was cooling the batch by 7:40. Cooling was a bit more problematic. The ground water temp has risen and I only had a single gallon jug of ice form my recirculating ice water system. In the end I got the wort down to around 75 and then tossed it in the fridge. I was done with cleanup and everything by 9. As of 7 PM there was still no activity in the fermenter.

I had hoped to be writing about a finished kegerator, but I have 2 outstanding issues. One of the taps I got was bad and I will be sending it to Northern Brewer for a new one. The second issue was that I was ordering tailpiece assemblies from BeverageFactory.com, but they haven't even shipped it after placing the order a week ago. I will go back to checking the local homebrew shops to see if I can't pick the parts up and cancel my order, with a hope that I will have a kegerator missing one tap by the weekend.

Tasted the Lefse Blonde last night and it has really come around with some cold conditioning. I really enjoyed it and it will be quite tasty for this late spring, early summer.

Kegerator is Finished...sort of

I am going ahead and posting a picture of the finished kegerator even though A it is not really finished and B I don't like the picture much and note that I have already cleaned it up quite a bit since the picture was taken. Since previous to the taps being installed my entire interaction came from the top down, I didn't notice how ugly the sides looked. The truth is you can't see it real well unless you are looking at it from a distance, but I have gone and cleaned the front and painted over some scratched and nicks. Additionally I am missing tap handles, but this tough as the ones I want run $35 a piece and I was not real happy about dropping another $175 on this project right now. I am also missing the pieces to connect the taps to the liquid, but I have had a tough time finding someone with all of the parts in stock and other than More Beer most places sell it in 3 separate parts. The single tap that is hanging out on the right is the one closest to the door and will be my root beer tap. The one on the farthest left will be cider and the 3 in the middle will be an assortment of beer. I put a bead of caulk in between the collar and the fridge to help seal some gaps and to help secure collar down. With the weight of the collar and the lid it is pretty stable, but the caulk should keep it from being jostled. I am pretty pleased with the results. I now have more storage room in the kegerator, although it is harder for me to reach the bombers I keep on the floor next to the kegs. I will make up for this by storing more in the floating basket on top. You can see that I also use this as a place to store my tailgate supplies. During football season this means all sorts of condiments, but right now it is just 2 bottles of mustard. I also have my yeast, hops and grain for my next brew, which should be a Nut Brown on Sunday.

Kegerator Update

I have finished building my collar and have removed the lid from the freezer. It looks good, I just need to drill holes for the taps and to run the hoses in plus attach the lid to the collar. Today the rest of my shanks and taps come in from Northern Brewer, so this weekend I should finish my install for at least one or two of the taps and may even be pouring 3 beers, 1 cider and a root beer from taps by Sunday. I have decided that once this is done I am chucking the rest of the 12 oz bottles I have sitting around in my garage and free up a little space. I am also extra motivated to clean out the garage to make it a little nicer to show off the finished kegerator.

I have kegged my Lefse Blonde, and took a few tastes although no full glasses. It has a nice Belgian character to it. It is not going to be a super easy drinking beer, but I already have the Mild on tap and am going to be brewing a nut brown next and planning an all grain cream ale after that. A complex beer on tap wouldn't hurt.