Parti-gyle

I finally got around to doing the parti-gyle I had planned to do last November. Originally I had planned to make a porter and a mild. I have had some rye malt and flaked rye sitting around for a while now as well though. After having a rye porter by Peace Tree Brewing here in Iowa it really motivated me to get on this project again but with a rye twist. With this in mind I set out to make a rye porter and a rye pale ale.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, we'll see when it is finished) I lost count while I was weighing out the Maris Otter, so I ended up with 2 extra pounds of grain. I also got amazing efficiency from a very fine grind so the porter ended up becoming an imperial porter. This means instead of being 5-6% ABV as I planned, it will end up 8-9%. My only real worry with this is that I may not have enough hops bitterness to offset the maltiness of the beer. We'll see how it works out. This was just the first of many errors though.

This was my first brew in my mash tun in over a year. I have been doing a lot of brew-in-a-bag sessions where there is no worry about doing a sparge. I also had a very fine grind and rye malt itself tends to pack pretty tight, so the cards were stacked against me getting it to lauter or rinse effectively. The grains packed down tight forming what brewers dreadfully know as a stuck sparge. I had to dig down into the grain bed to allow for the sugary goodness to reach the drain. This is not ideal since it can cause lots of particles to pass through into the boil. Over all though I was happy with how the wort (sugary tea-like mixture that beer is made from) tasted so I pressed on.

In order to make a big dark beer and a smaller lighter colored beer from the same batch of grain, all the dark grains had to be steeped separately after I had gotten the first run off collected. I added a muslin bag with all my dark malts to the kettle with my first runnings to steep while I started the second mash for the smaller beer. I got busy with milling a few extra pounds of grain for this second run and went and just kicked the burner on full blast under my boil kettle. I forgot however that the bag of dark malts was still in the kettle. Luckily I went to stir it just before it got up to a boil. I just started thinking 'what the heck is this big thing at the bottom of my kettle?' and almost simultaneously answered, 'damn, the steeping grains are still in there!' I managed to pick the bag out and continue on without too much damage I hope, again.

Speaking of damage, I tried something I have not done since my first 2 batches. I used Coralville tap water for this batch. I will disclaim this however to say that I did boil it all first to drive off the chlorine in the water. I was worried about this enough already before I noticed a lot of precipitate falling out of the water and a bit of a hard water film that was formed by this. I decided to take Charlie Papazian's advice: Relax, don't worry, have a home brew. These are works to live by.

The boil for the big dark beer went very smoothly, and I got it started cooling with my immersion chiller as I tinkered around with my now re-stuck sparge on my second mash, so the porter was cooled to 80 degrees long before I was ready to mess with it. I put the second beer on to boil as I brought the first inside to transfer to it's fermenter. I set the kettle on the table with the carboy and funnel under the kettle's spigot, opened it up and just let it run while I went to check on the second batch on the deck. By the time I came back in the kettle was empty. I had forgotten the filter that goes into the funnel to keep all the hops and other debris from getting into the fermenter. I then had to sanitize a third fermenter and decant the five gallons off all this debris, losing about a half gallon of beer or so in the process.

The second beer's boil went better than the first even, and it was transferred to the fermenter with no issues. I did however manage to drop a hydrometer into the fermenter with the second beer, so there it will stay until the beer is done. Not a big issue, as I have a backup hydrometer, but it meant I could not shake it up to get a real good aeration on that one prior to pitching yeast. To make up for this I decided to do a quazi-open fermentation on both beers by just covering the mouth of the bottles with aluminum foil so air can move in and out, but particles won't fall in. This may end up being a mistake in itself, but so far so good. As a matter of fact, I checked them both tonight and I have a nice krausen (yeasty cake on top of the beer) on both beers.

Lots of lessons learned here, like using rice hulls if you even suspect that there may be a stuck sparge. I will say a 6 hour brew day for double the output was a very good benefit to the parti-gyle. A second beer from only 3 pound of additional grain was another huge benefit as well. I am very curious to see how these beers turn out. I am going to order an extra tag for my state fair entries just in case they do turn out good. Overall if I am doing a bigger beer, I think a parti-gyle would be a frugal opportunity for a second beer. It just takes more planning. Brew-in-a-bag still seems to be the way to go if I am just making a smaller non-lagers, for me at least.

Rye Porter:
OG:1.078
Grain/Extract/Sugar
12.00 lbs. Pale Malt(2-row)
1.00 lbs. Rye Malt
0.75 lbs. Crystal 20L
1.00 lbs. Flaked Rye
0.75 lbs. Special B Malt
2.00 lbs. Munich Malt(6-row)
0.50 lbs. Black Malt
0.50 lbs. Black Patent Malt

Hops

1.00 oz. Goldings - E.K. 5 min.
1.00 oz. Goldings - E.K. 40 min.
1.00 oz. Northern Brewer 60 min.

Rye Pale Ale
OG: 1.037

added 3 lbs Maris Otter

Hops

1.00 oz. Fuggle Pellet 4.00 3.3 5 min.
1.00 oz. Willamette Pellet 4.90 24.1 60 min.

For the Birds

It's been a crappy week or so. Instead of rehashing the crap I am going to do something completely different for this blog post.

We have a couple bird feeders out on the deck. Syd and I enjoy watching the birds that come into the yard. Lately Heidi has taken to trying to get good pictures of the birds at the bird feeder.

Below is a list of what we've seen in the yard so far this year:

Mourning Dove, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Pileated Woodpecker, Blue Jay, American Crow, Black-capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, American Robin, Cedar Waxwing, House Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, Northern Cardinal, Indigo Bunting, Common Grackle, House Finch, American Goldfinch

Those are the ones that are around often enough to identify. The cardinals and the goldfinches are the most numerous at the feeders, but the house finches are starting to come around more and more. The indigo bunting and northern flicker are the most striking and most rare. We switched out our birdseed so the damn flying rats (otherwise known as house sparrows) would not come around anymore.

There is something very relaxing about coming home, putting my feet up as I sit down with a homebrew and watch and listen to the birds. In fact I think that is how I will spend as much of this rainy day off as possible.

ttfn

For Boston

Good job to the Celts, now lets just have the Bruins finish off the Flyers!




For Boston, for Boston,
we sing our proud refrain
for Boston, for Boston
'tis wisdom's earthly fane
for here are all one
and our hearts are true
and the towers on the heights
reach the heavens own blue.
for Boston, for Boston
'til the echoes ring again

For Boston, for Boston
thy glory is our own
for Boston, for Boston
'tis here that truth is known
and ever with a right
shall our heirs be found
'til time shall be no more
and thy work is crowned
for Boston, for Boston
thy glory is our own

Suggestions for the New Brewer

I recently was asked for some advice about starting brewing so I figured I would post it here for future reference.

In my opinion the best book period for starting out is The Complete Joy of Homebrewing (third edition) by Charlie Papazian. He has a really relaxed point of view and walks you through everything from step one. This is where I learned the basics.

For a more scientific approach there is How to Brew by John Palmer. The first edition of his book is online for free at howtobrew.com

Next up is Basicbrewing.com. They have a ton of audio and video podcasts for free about different aspects of brewing. They also sell an introductory video that is okay.

As far as suppliers, if you have a local homebrew shop, I strongly suggest you support them if you need to buy stuff. (Look at http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/pages/directories/find-a-supply-shop for what shops are in your state.) You can start off cheap by using bucket fermenters and enamel pots if you don't have anything you can use already. Both of the books above will help you figure out what you need. If you do not have a local shop, northernbrewer.com has flat rate shipping for most non bulky items. Midwestsupplies.com has good prices but no flat rate shipping. Finally morebeer.com is pretty good as well.

My suggestion is to start off with an extract kit for a beer style you like (make an ale though and stay away from lagers at first) and see how that goes. Two other tips: be patient and cool your wort down to at least 70F if not 65F before adding the yeast, and have a way to keep your fermenter from getting too warm or cold, keep it around 65-70.

one last link -  http://www.homebrewfinds.com/ a great site for finding bargains.

Hopefully that gives you a good jumping off point.

Oatmeal Cookie... Beer

Heidi has been asking about an oatmeal cookie beer ever since we heard about one on a podcast. Today I got around to making this one for her, not that she will end up drinking much of it, LOL.

In order to brew this up though I had to get the blonde ale off the cal ale yeast in the fermenter. At 8:30 this morning I started bottling up that batch. I was very pleased with how my sample tasted. I ended up with 52 bottles of 5% ABV blond ale and a very nice cake of yeast.

I had done a little research, formulated a recipe and then figured out workarounds for what I had onhand. So I came up with this recipe:

7# Maris Otter
.5# Crystal 90
.5# Special B
.5# Biscuit Malt
1# Rolled Oats toasted at 300F
1# Brown Sugar

.5 oz Spalt
.25 oz Perle

I was going to do a traditional mash for this one. Once I looked at how fine my grind was, I was worried about getting a stuck sparge though, so I broke out my brewing bag and did a brew in a bag session.

I must be getting better at this because I got around 85% efficiency this time from my mash. I did go lower with the temperature and tried to mash between 150F and 153F. I don't know my exact temp though because I have broken my good thermometer.

Everything was going good until about half way through the mash. This is when I realized I had not bought any hops for this brew. I started rummaging through my brew box and found the hops I listed above. They are left over from the hefeweisen I brewed, last summer that is. I am not looking for a lot of hops character, just a little bittering, so hopefully it will work out well. It tasted pretty good before I pitched the yeast. I was originally at 1.060 so I added some water to bring the OG down to 1.054. After I pitched the yeast slurry it was 1.050. I hope the lower temperature will make this ferment out a bit more than my last two brews did.

It was a very good day. I started at 8:30 bottling and finished cleaning everything up at 15:00. That makes it only 6.5 hours for everything and about 3/4 the time it normally takes me to do both operations. Yehaw.

Blonde Ale

I did another brew in a bag session today. This time it was a blonde ale that I made. Overall I am happy with the process, but I have decided that my kettles are too small and my boil is too vigorous perhaps for this method, so I will use my mash/lauter tun on my next brew day.

Recipe:

5 gallon batch
6 gallon mash

9# Maris Otter
1# Cara-pils
.75# Wheat Malt

1oz EKG @ 60min
~.5oz home grown cascade @10 minutes

After the mash there was under 5 gallons in the brewpot, so I added enough water to get back up to 6-6.5 gallons. This dropped my gravity too low, so I threw in .5# of pilsner DME.

After the boil I had about 4.5 gallons of wort, so once again I added some water, this took me from 1.051 to 1.048. Not too bad, but I was gunning for 1.054. I think I will get some foam control too so I can start my boil closer to 7 gallons from now on. I had one small boil over today that wasted some wort...

My starter looked and smelled great, so I threw the whole thing in to the fermenter and it is down in the basement now and should be fermenting at around 63F.

I really like the time savings that brew in a bag offers, but I just do not have a big enough set up to effectively brew above 1.050 with this method. Since most of my beers tend to run 1.050-1.065 I think I will go back to my cooler mash tun.

I have had the heather ale in the fridge in the garage cold-crashing for the last day and a half and look forward to bottling it tomorrow.

ttfn

April Fool's Day

My son picked today to miss the bus, so I got up and drove him to school. Since I was out and about early and it is payday, I decided to get my errands run early this morning. By the time I got back home it was over an hour from when I left.

Heidi was wondering what took me so long at the school. I grumbled a bit and then started into a story about how I had been pulled over by the police. I told her that when they looked up my address that the database had our old neighbor that was arrested a few weeks ago as our address and had alerted them that it was a suspected drug activity area and that they had detained me for suspected drug activity and I had to wait while they searched my truck from top to bottom. Then they had let me go after they found nothing. She was looking at me with a very worried look on her face and before she could ask too many questions I told her, "Happy April Fool's Day hon."

Judging by her comments I am apparently still an asshole.

Happy April Fool's Day to you all.

Brewing notes to follow later.

Quotable Rogue:

“There must be some kind of way out of here,”
Said the joker to the thief.
- Bob Dylan