Carolina Reaper IPA Brew Day

On Sunday we brewed an IPA that we're planning as a base for some delicious chili heat. A friend at work has been growing Carolina Reapers (the hottest pepper in the world!) for another friend who loves spicy food. I enjoy spicy beer anyway, such as the Ballast Point Habanero Sculpin, and so brewing a chili beer has been on my radar since we started brewing again.

I found some good info and a recipe at http://www.homebrewing.com/articles/chile-beer.php, so all the brewing was pretty straightforward.  One of the particularly fun parts of the brew day this time was live-tweeting everything from our desert penguin twitter account. Since this beer is a bit tied in with my buddies at work due to the chili peppers, it was fun including more people in the brew day.

The other particularly interesting and fun part of this brew day was creating the chili extract from the Carolina Reaper. We cut the pepper in half and are making two different extracts - one with all the seeds and ribbing intact for full heat, and one with the ribbing and seeds removed to try to get a bit more flavor. The peppers will soak in vodka for the next week extracting the flavor and heat, and I'm really curious to see what that vodka is like in a week when it's time to add it to the beer.

Our plan is to rack the beer into three 1-gallon carboys in order to try three different levels of heat - one with the seedless extract, one with the seedy extract at a normal heat level, and one that is borderline melt-your-mouth for the true hot-heads. That said, I'm a bit worried about our ability to get the spice and heat level just right in the final beers. If we manage to get one batch out of the three that's squarely between "way too mild" and "undrinkably spicy," then I'll consider it a success.

---> [ Carolina Reaper IPA Racking ]

Die Bier, Die Tasting

This weekend we opened the first bottles of our oktoberfest and we're happy to say that our first lager is a success! This time for the tasting we did a blind taste test comparing our beer to Ayinger Oktoberfest-Marzen. It was amazing how similar they were. They were virtually the same color. The head in particular was almost identical - starting out pretty tall with very dense bubbles and eventually dissipating to just a little bit of lacing on top. Even the mouthfeel was pretty similar.

They did have noticeably (though not drastically) different flavors. The Ayinger has a little bit of an almost fruitiness to it, which I had previously thought was just a characteristic of its maltiness. The Ayinger was also a touch more bitter than our home brew.

Two of the three of us doing the tasting did prefer the Ayinger and also correctly identified which one was the home brew. Still, the fact that it wasn't blindingly (excuse the pun) obvious from the first sip, and that one of us even preferred the home brew over the Ayinger, I consider a huge success.

I could still detect a hint of acetaldehyde which may just mean the beer needs another month or two of conditioning time. I'm not sure if there's anything we're doing wrong in our process that keeps giving us this flavor, or if we just need to be brewing with enough lead time that the beer can condition for longer in the bottle before we start drinking it.

And as for the name, it's German for "The Beer, The" and is a reference to Sideshow Bob in the Simpsons episode "Cape Feare." But you already knew that.  ;-)

[ Oktoberfest Bottling ] <---

Doppelbock Brew Day

Today we brewed our second lager - a doppelbock we're hoping to have ready in time for Christmas. Amy found the recipe in a recent issue of Zymurgy and she's been wanting to brew a doppelbock since all the way back in our Flying Barrel brew-on-premises days.

As with the oktoberfest, Annapolis Home Brew didn't have our primary choice for yeast. Instead of rolling with an alternative, this time we went to Maryland Home Brew to pick up a vial of White Labs WLP833 German Bock Lager yeast. As it turns out - I actually should have bought two. Lager ideal pitch rates are a lot higher than ales, and with this being a big lager (target starting gravity of 1.096), we would have needed a 2.5L starter to get the 443B cells we wanted. With only a 2L Erlenmeyer flask and one vial of yeast, we had to boost the starter gravity to 1.046 to have the calculations point to the right number of yeast from the starter. The small starter also led to me accidentally letting the starter boil over, despite using fermcap. We're definitely planning to get a 5L Erlenmeyer flask for next time.

For whatever reason, the starter didn't attenuate as much as it should have. It only reached a final gravity of 1.025 when I would have expected it to reach something more like 1.013. Unfortunately, we don't know whether this was a problem with the yeast or something we did with the starter. It could have been something as simple as not giving it enough time or not having the stir plate set up correctly. Since we were brewing on a Sunday morning too, we couldn't just go to the home brew store and pick up a fresh vial of the same strain of yeast. We decided to just roll with the yeast from the starter, but we're going to be closely monitoring the primary fermentation to make sure the yeast is doing okay.

During the brew day, we encountered a few minor issues but nothing serious. The volume of water after the mash was only about 4.8G instead of 5, indicating there was more grain absorption than BeerSmith had calculated. We also ended up only at 1.086 original gravity instead - not sure if there was an issue with the efficiency of the mash or if it was just down to differences in the ingredients compared to BeerSmith's numbers.

Despite those issues though, we're still excited to have finally brewed a doppelbock. Eight hours after brew day and happily we already have good krausen and the airlock is bubbling. Plus with our first lager seeming to turn out well so far, we're very optimistic for another delicious beer!

Oktoberfest Bottling

Thursday night we bottled our Ayinger Oktoberfest clone and, although obviously not carbonated yet, so far it's tasting great!

It's been nearly eight weeks since we racked it to the secondary and it feels like forever since we've done any kind of brewing. The biggest pain with bottling this time was that we had to re-wash all of our brewing equipment because the basement where it was being stored has been undergoing some major construction.

After looking over our previous few brews we decided to go with 150g of DME for the carbonation. That's higher than the 100-120g we used for the Belgian quad, black IPA, and breakfast stout, but less than the 168g we used for the saison. Hopefully we struck a good balance and got the right level of carbonation for the style.

The DME we used is also pretty old, so hopefully we don't run into any problems with the yeast fully processing it. The other possible problem I'm worried about is a general lack of yeast for carbonation since it's been ten weeks since we brewed. Everything I've read seems to indicate that there should still be enough yeast still in suspension in the beer that it shouldn't be a problem though.

It'll be in the bottle for just over four weeks when Oktoberfest starts. I'm anxious to crack open that first bottle in four weeks to see how well it carbonated and how the final product tastes.

[ Oktoberfest Brew Day ] <--- | ---> [ Die Bier, Die Tasting ]

Oktoberfest Brew Day

Almost a month ago now, on June 12th, we brewed our first lager! We used an Ayinger Oktoberfest-Marzen recipe from the Clone Brews book. The home brew store didn't have the preferred yeast (Wyeast Munich Lager if I remember right) so instead we used the recipe's "second choice" of Wyeast Oktoberfest. Who knows what the flavor difference will be, but maybe it'll be interesting having a little bit of a departure from the exact book recipe.

As far as the brew day goes it was basically the same as any ale we've done. Since I did all the tweaking with BeerSmith settings it did seem like the temperatures and measurements went better this time - particularly the strike temp / mash temp that we had problems with last time. The worst part of the brew day was that we started it at 8pm, so we didn't actually get completely finished until 2 in the morning.

One challenge that's new with the lager is that this is our first time actually using the chest freezer to keep the beer cold. Previously we've been using a space heater to keep it at about 69 or 70, but for the lager yeast we wanted fermentation to happen in the low 50s. Even with the temperature differential (the difference between the turn-on point and the turn-off point) of the temperature controller set to only 1 degree, the freezer would kick on, stay one for a bit, and then even after it shut off the temperature would continue to drop several degrees past the shut-off point. I put a small fan in the freezer to help air circulation and that seems to have helped a little bit. Plus, as Amy pointed out, even if the air temperature is fluctuating as much as five degrees when the freezer kicks on, that doesn't mean the actual 3 gallons of beer in there is changing temperature that much.

We waited two weeks to rack the beer, which all went smoothly. The beer seemed to taste good, although it clearly needed more time to develop. It also reached the target final gravity so that was a great sign that fermentation went well and we were ready to start lagering.

After racking we dropped the set point on the temperature controller one degree each day until the beer was down in the low 40s. Now our beer is officially lagering! The plan is to let it sit for five weeks, bottle, and then let it bottle condition for another five. If all goes well, we'll be tasting on September 19th - the official start of Oktoberfest in Germany!

---> [ Oktoberfest Bottling ]

Early Starter Tasting

Our much-anticipated (for me, anyway) Founders Breakfast Stout clone is finally ready to drink and I'm really happy with the results. This was our first beer using a yeast starter, our first beer using temperature control all the way through fermentation, and a fun beer to brew since it involved chocolate and local coffee from Ceremony Coffee Roasters. The beer smelled amazing all the way through the brew process so I've been really looking forward to tasting it.

There's tons of coffee flavor. There's some chocolate too but not a ton. I could see adding more chocolate if we brew this again. It also could use a little bit more carbonation. We only used 100g of DME for carbonation in this brew compared to 119g for the black IPA and 152g for the saison.

The first bottle I tried seemed to lack a little bit of mouthfeel, but for the second bottle I tried swirling the yeast in the bottom and pouring it into the glass rather than into the drain and it seems to improve the body a little. I'm so used to leaving the last little bit of yeast in the bottle with home brews but maybe that's not always the best idea.

I've been getting a lot of flack for noticing (imagining?) off flavors in a bunch of our home brews, but with this beer I really don't find any. It's a strongly flavored beer so they'd be easy to hide, but hopefully it's a good sign for our current brew process with the yeast starter and temperature control.

The name of the beer is partly a reference to the fact that this was our first beer using a yeast starter. It's also because so many coffee beers are named around the idea of starting your day with a beer. After all, as the saying goes, you can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning!

[ Founders Breakfast Stout Brew Day ] <---

Une Autre, SVP! Tasting

This week we tried our saison for the first time and we're thrilled with the results. The beer has a nice citrusy lemony flavor and a great flavor contribution from the French saison yeast. I think as Spring rolls into Summer this will be an excellent warm-weather beer - just like a saison should be!

While this is technically our second beer where we used a yeast starter, it's the first one we're tasting as the breakfast stout still has a few days to go before it's ready. Honestly it's a bit hard to say what the flavor improvement might have been compared to pitching a yeast pack directly into the beer. With a beer this light too, the difference in yeast count between the smack pack and the starter probably wasn't that high anyway. Still, it would be a lot of fun to do a comparison test at some point where we split a batch of wort and use a starter in one and a smack pack in the other.

The other new thing we did with this beer was use fermentation control all the way from the start of fermentation. There is a ton of (mis)information on the internet in the home brew community about the right way to control fermentation temperature. The core of the confusion comes down to the "ideal temperature" for the yeast mixed with the fact that a wort at the height of fermentation can be as much as 10F degrees higher than ambient. So if my saison yeast likes 71F, do I set my temperature-controlled room at 71F ambient and let the beer naturally rise above that during early fermentation? Or do I try to control the ambient temperature in a way that keeps the wort temperature closer to 71F?

I talked with the owner of my local home brew store about this, and he said to just set the ambient at the desired temperature for the yeast (71F in this case) and then don't worry about the wort temperature. The issue with trying to use something like a thermowell (putting the temp controller sensor inside the wort itself) to control the ambient temperature is that by the time you've heated the air around the wort enough to get 3+ gallons of wort up to temperature, the air temperature can be well over 100F. Then just because you're turning the heat source off, you still have super-hot air that ends up causing the wort to overshoot the desired temperature.

If we were using a heat source such as an electric wrap around the fermentation vessel, where it turns off all heat completely as soon as the wort reaches temperature, then it might be a different answer. With our setup though, we went with just setting the temperature at 71F and left it there for the whole fermentation, even if it meant that the actual wort temperature was rising above that during some of fermentation.

Again it's hard to really say specifically what this particular beer would have tasted like without temperature control, or with a cooler ambient temperature during the height of fermentation (more experiments ideas!), but the fact that we used temperature control and the yeast starter this time with tasty results is a great sign that, at the very least, we don't seem to be screwing anything up. Hopefully I don't eat those words in a day or two when we try the breakfast stout. :-)

One thing I noted in the brew day post for this beer was that we came in 4 points shy of our 1.050 original gravity target. Conveniently our final gravity also ended up 4 points low of the recipe (finishing at 1.004) so we still ended up right at our target of 5.5% ABV. Apparently the issues we had with the strike temperature didn't hurt us too much.

As for the name - it's mostly just a reference to the French saison yeast we used, but also sort of borrows from a funny little interaction with a waiter in Paris when we were there for our honeymoon. Amy was trying to order another of the same beer (Une autre de la meme chose) but butchered the phrase. The waiter just smiled at us and happily brought her beer. Just one of many cases of the Parisians being so much nicer than their reputation. :-)

[ Saison Brew Day ] <---