Brewing Over an Open Fire

This past weekend, in honor of National Homebrew Day, I returned to 'the land' in central WI where a friend and I brewed and buried a black lager a few years back.  (see story also on this blog).  Our goal for the weekend was to cut down some trees, clean up the site, and brew beer over an open flame.


I did no research on this method before I packed up the van and drove 4 hours for the event.  I figured part of the fun was going to be just 'figuring it out', it doesn't hurt to have a friend who is also a paper chemistry engineer (math guy), i knew we'd create a viable plan on site.  The recipe was a friends delicious Robust Porter. 

We dug a shallow pit to shield some of the wind (20-30mph this day), built up a structure for the kettle and got a fire going. 

I was concerned that the space between the pavers wasn't going to be big enough to put enough wood in to generate the heat we needed to boil 7 gallons of wort for an hour.  I was pleasantly surprised by the efficiency!

It took 60 minutes to bring 50 degree water to 154 degree mash temp.  Not bad! 

I decided to use the Brew in a Bag process for steeping my grains.  I'd never used this process before, but i have to tell you, it's slick!  Since I was traveling with my brewery, I wanted to go light.  A large nylon bad takes up a lot less space in the minivan than a mash cooler!

The mash rest required some attention.  We had to move the kettle on and off the fire to maintain a 154 temp.  The temps fluctuated from 149 to 162 during this process. The cooler air temps and steady wind cooled the mash quickly and the coal base stoked the temps up quickly.

It took another 40 minutes to bring the wort up from 154 to 212, again, not bad!  We had to play around with our wind shields to get the proper heat from the fire.  Too much protection and we cut off the oxygen supply...  to little and the fire was escaping around the kettle itself.

A word on scorching.  As you can see in this photo -->, the bottom of my kettle got pretty scorched!  I was going to wrap it in tin foil, but I forgot it...  Another method to try is the old boyscout trick of dish soap on the kettle.  Note for next time.

As the kettle was pulled off the fire post boil, I just used a green scrubby pad and water to scrub the kettle clean.  The soot on the side of the kettle came off pretty easily, the bottom is pretty bad, even after the scrub. 

Murry creek runs through the land, so we used it as our wort cooler.  The wort went from 190 to 68 in about 30 minutes.  Thank you Mother Nature!

All in all I only went through about 10-12 pieces of dried oak to complete the entire heating process.  My hope is that some of that smoke flavor will be present in the beer.  We'll see in a few months!

It was a fun day and a successful experiment.  I'd recommend anyone try it, no need to fear a complicated set up.  Besides, if it does go south? a propane tank and burner can be standing by to bail you out.

Brew on!
-Chris

Brewing More Beer; Scaling from 5 to 10 gallons

Extracts with ADD note system

Trying to cool my first batch

I'm starting year 3 as a brewer and challenging myself to do more.
Year 1 was about extract kits and understanding the process.  During year 2 I moved to all-grain brewing and concocting my own recipes.  Year 3 is going to be about volume and consistency.  Over the last year I've been up-scaling my brewery from 5 to 10 gallon batches.  My 8 gallon Polarware pot has been replaced with two 15 gallon beer keggles.  My 7 gallon Mash Tun cooler has been replaced with a 12 gallon cooler.  Upgrading wasn't a drain on the pocketbook, my old equipment was sold to fellow brewers for a fair price, brewing equipment holds its value very well! Over the summer I kept my eyes open for old kegs and was able to pick one up by trading a little beer and a Corny keg, and the other I bought from some college kids for $40.  A friend with a plasma cutter helped me out!

Sharpie outline of the cuts needed

HLT

Now it's all about volume, while keeping costs under control.  That $30 5 gallon batch is looking more like $70 @ 10.  I have to find a way to save on ingredients.  Base malt and yeast seem to be the places to focus.

Milling 31 lbs of barley

24 lbs of 2-row barley costs around $30 milled at Northern Brewer whereas a 50lb bulk bag of unmilled 2-row barley costs $35,  about a 45% savings.   A 50 pounds sack of grain is great, but it doesn't come milled!  I bought the 3 roller Monster Mill from Northern Brewer for $240.  It doesn't come assembled, and there are many pieces to fasten together.  You'll need an hour, so if you're brewing the next day, plan accordingly.  ROI is 2 years for my operation.



When you upscale there are a few things to consider.

Sturdy and tall

1) HLT:
A vessel containing 10+ gallons of water is very heavy (8.34 lbs per gallon), and at 180 degrees, its also very dangerous!  If you are planning to use gravity to feed your system, be sure you have a sturdy platform that is tall enough to feed your mash tun. Don't plan on moving vessels, especially once your strike water is heated.  Pumps are an option as well.

My old 7 gallon mash tun

2) Mash:
Make sure your mash tun is big enough!  I upgraded from a 7 gallon cooler to a 12 gallon cooler, and ran out of room for a 31 lbs Black IPA grain bill.  I had to mash 2 lbs of grain in a separate cooler (panic!).  Granted I did make a pretty big beer this round, but still, if you are planning to upgrade, plan on a vessel with a 15 gallon capacity, you'll be happy you did.  I'll be upgrading again soon.

3) Boil:
After your mash it's time to boil.  My first 10 gallon batch started with an 11.5 gallon boil.  That's a LOT of hot liquid!  Be careful! And, think ahead to your transfer from kettle to fermentation vessel, gravity only works one way.  Note: you aren't going to lift 10 gallons of wort to a table top.  As it turned out, I boiled the kettle on the garage floor, gravity didn't work so well when trying to transfer to my carboys.  Which leads me to #4.

4)  Fermentation:

Uneven trub! 6 g on left and 5 g on right

There is volume to consider.  I had a 6 and 5 gallon fermentation vessel.  I started filling the 6 gallon first, and filled it to the 5 gallon mark.  I then moved to the 5 gallon and realized I hadn't marked it gallon by gallon (dumb)!  It wouldn't have mattered because by the time I got to the bottom of the kettle all the residue from the 10 oz's of hops I put in made their way into the second fermentor.  So, how much DO I have in the 5 gallon?  Hard to say, which leads to problem #5. (side note, I aerated with an oxygenation kit.  with this much liquid there would be no 'sloshing'.)

5) Yeast:
I bought 2 Wyeast smack packs of American Ale and started it with a 32oz to 1 cup DME starter.  Because I couldn't tell exactly how much wort was in each fermentor I had to guess how much yeast to pour into each, I split it equally. Completely unscientific, and utterly impossible to replicate should it turn out.   I'm thinking I need another 6g fermentor, then need to stir up the wort prior to transfer to try and equal out the sediment in each????  I'm not quite sure how to fix this without buying a 15 gallon fermentation vessel.

Well, that's where I'm at right now.  I'll have to move the two batches to two secondary fermentors in a few weeks, I think I'll blend them together when I do so to keep taste and flavor consistent.  Then comes bottling.  I don't have a 10 gallon bottling bucket!  Grrr. Regardless, as cliche's go... If you aren't learning, you aren't trying..  Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn..  The difference between ordeal and adventure is all attitude.. and I'm enjoying this every misstep of the way.

Cheers,
-Chris

Make Your Own Wort Chiller (for about $65.00)

The Chiller!
For the past 16 months I've been cooling my wort with what I've had available, that was a metal washtub and a garden hose.  I'd curl up the garden hose in the wash tub (outdoors), put my brew kettle in the  tub and turn on the hose.  The water would circulate around the brew kettle cooling it from 212 to 70 in about 30 minutes.  This worked fine but in the middle of a Minnesota winter it made working with a garden hose  and a washtub a pain, plus I had no way of capturing the excess water as it spilled over the sides of the washtub onto the ground.  Wasteful!

Taken from BYO Mag.  Dec 2011

 The December 2011 edition of BYO magazine (click link to purchase)had a great article on chiller performance by Chris Bible.  The chart on the left was my inspiration to build my own chiller. 

I went to my local big box home improvement store and bought a coil of refrigeration grade copper tubing.  It's important to know that two grades are available, one with thicker walls and one with thinner walls.  You want the grade with the thinner walls, you will not be putting anything under pressure, so no need for tubing with a thick wall.  Plus, the thin walled tubing is easier to manipulate.  Per the chart above, I decided to go with a 50 foot coil of 3/8" inner diameter copper tubing.  I spent about $45.  Then...

A look back on my first year as a brewer.

Last year my New Years resolution was to brew beer.  My goal was seven batches which I eclipsed with my tenth batch; a Black IPA.   I have learned so much this past year! I've read several books and magazines dedicated to beer, visited several breweries both large and small and most importantly, talked to others who brew.  There is so much to know, so many variables to the process, that I feel like I'll spend a lifetime perfecting my recipes and process.

Here is a list of what I've learned my first year.

• Kits make great beer!  Someone put the time in to figuring out the right recipe, enjoy their hard work.
• Use the resources at your local homebrew store, those guys know a TON and like to share.
• Define what kind of brewer you are, what are you trying to accomplish.
• Water makes a difference, find out what kind of water you are brewing with, if you are using city water, ask your city water dept for the analysis for your town.  I found out our city water is terrible for light beers. The Palmer book explains water quality very well.
• Sometimes mistakes work to your benefit, sometimes they don't.
• Document, document, document..  If a batch turns out great, you'll want to repeat it.
• All-Grain brewing introduces 20x the complexity to the process over kit brewing.  If you want to really understand the process of brewing, make the switch, but be prepared to make some bad beer out of the shoot.
• Sometimes I like to keg, sometimes I like to bottle, bottles make it easy for sharing, kegs make for less of a cleanup effort.
• READ!  So many great sources of info out there.  I subscribed to 'DRAFT' and 'Brew Your Own Beer' magazines this year.  Lots of great info, seemed that every article in BYoB had some nugget of info for me.
• Don't fear a style you might not normally like.  Brew it all!
• Don't fear a Lager, all you need is someplace cool to store it for a while.  If you live in the midwest, it's easy to find!
• Get organized.  Know where your stuff is.  Create a standard way of logging notes.
• Clean up before putting your stuff away!  When it comes time to brew, you don't want to scrub trub from your fermenter or dried hop residue from your brew pot!
• Get creative, buy a 3 gallon fermenter and play with a few gallons of your beer!  I've added pears, nuts, oranges and lemons to my 'play batch'.  Some have turned out wonderful, others, not so much.
• Be objective! You brewed it, so you're going to be biased, but sometimes bad beer is bad beer.  Don't take it as a failure, learn from it!
• If something went wrong, research the reasons!  you'll learn something.
• Involve others, invite friends over to brew, or to taste, they'll be your biggest fans.
• Set goals.  What are your plans for the upcoming year?  

Best of luck to you in the next year.  Happy brewing!

"Grrrr, My Beer Is Too Thin! Why?!"

I admit that I have very few beer batches under my belt (8), yet my expectations for the beer I brew are very high.  I switched from extract to grain 3 batches ago and my biggest complaint with my first all grain batches is how thin the beer tastes.  How do I fix that?  So many variables with all-grain!

So, I recently brewed a Nut Brown ale which I had high hopes for.  Everything went well during the brewing process.  I hit all my temps, nothing went wrong during the mash, lauter, boil, fermentation process.  So, when it came time to crack one open and give it a taste, you can imagine my disappointment when, after a visual inspection for color and clarity (good!), I tasted it and the first thing that hit me was how thin it tasted.  Damn!

I'm determined to make the Nut Brown my first multi attempt recipe.  I want to keep refining it until it tastes the way I want it to taste.  So, in an effort to alter what I feel is the biggest flaw, I've done some research on adding body to beer.  The first place I looked was Palmers 'How to Brew' as always, he has good info here.  Adding unfermentables can help with thin beer, as can chosing your yeast selection... Read on.. 

Did you know that Crystal malts (aka caramel malts) and Dextrin malts (aka cara-pils or cara-crystal) have had their starches carmalized during the kilning process rendering them unable to provide sugars for fermentation?  Well I didn't, but I do now.  I knew flaked barley and oats provided unfermentables, but I thought all grains provided sugars/food for our little yeastie friends.  I found a very good explanation of 'body' here.  Might be a little scientific for some, but the payoff comes at the end when Ron Bach talks about 'Body Builders' and the 'Finishing Process'.

I'm off to Northern Brewer this afternoon to pick up what I need for a Black IPA.  I am going to add a .5 lb of flaked barley and an additional .5lb of cara-pils to the posted recipe to 'body it up'.  We'll see.  The true test will be when I remake the Brown Ale with some modifications to adjust for the thiness of my original.  Stay tuned.

Cheers,
-Chris

Growing Your Own Hops – A Beginners Experience.

Hop Vine shows signs of growth,
cones will soon appear!

In February 2011 I started seeing ‘pre-order’ messages from hop rhizome retailers in homebrew supply magazines Northern Brewer and Midwest Supply.  I was intrigued and put in an order for 4 varieties of Hops; Cascade, Willamette, Nugget &  Golding .  I didn’t do much research before I put in the order, and in hindsight, should have chosen more wisely.  Here is a good source for Hops info.  Turns out I ordered 1 variety of bittering Hops (Nugget) and 3 Aroma hop varieties (Cascade, Willamette & Golding).  Oops.  Should have done 2 and 2.   See my earlier post for Rhizome info.

For planting and growing reference I bought and read Homegrown Hops: An Illustrated How to Do It Manual.  The book is not very good, I have to admit I didn’t do any research for ‘good books on hop growing’, there might be better how-to books out there.  If there are, please let me know.   

Hope cones form in early August

The Cascade vine is performing better than the rest. Why?  I’m not sure. It is the vine that has had the most access to direct sunlight, so I don’t know if that’s why it is performing, or if the climate of Central/Southern MN has something to do with it.  Regardless, I’m going to have a nice little crop of Cascade hops this year.  The vine is currently 12 – 15 feet long, and has 50+ hop cones maturing.  The Willamette vine never produced a shoot.  The Nugget and Golding vines are up, and have climbed about 7 feet, but aren’t producing cones.  The book said not to set big expectations from your first year.  Apparently vines need a year to establish, and do much better in year two.  If you want a quick tutorial on growing check out this link.

First year Cascade crop

I attached my string to wire clothes hangers that I modified which has worked great! Two of the hop vines I grew along side my garage, and the other two vines I placed by our front porch.  The garage height (soffit to ground) is about 7.5 feet.  The height from porch ceiling to ground is about 10 feet. 

Soon they shall be in beer

7.5 feet is NOT long enough for a vine that is growing well.  I had to extend the vine string horizontally along the garage soffit to give it room to grow.  Keep this in mind when searching for your grow location.  The garage set up seems to be working just fine, and honestly, when it comes time to harvest, It’ll be easy to access the cones.  Just plan for your hop vine to reach a length of 15 feet when surveying potential locations.

Next will be ‘the harvest’.  I’m excited to use homegrown hops in a fall batch!

GeoBrew FINALLY ready for the bottle!

time to uncover

  On Memorial Day weekend I was finally able to bottle the beer that John and I brewed and buried 6 weeks prior.  I tried the beer on the Saturday of MDW and it had a buttery flavor, which I read is common for Lagers.  You must warm them up to room temp for 48 hours to allow the yeast a chance to consume those buttery esters (Diacetyl Rest for nerds or for geeks).  I pulled the bottle out of the ground and put it in the woods (covered) for 48 hours, temps were in the 60's, so all was good.

father in law chipping in

dead-lift 5 gallons out of a hole

 Tasting the beer after two days at room temp got rid of most of the buttery flavor.  The roasted malts used in this beer hid any subtle off flavors, which was no accident.  based on the taste of this beer, I think I'll try a lighter Lager next time.  Go for a crisp clean brew.

 So, how does it taste?