I brewed up another batch of Oatmeal Stout with a few minor tweaks (I’ll post the recipe separately). Got up at 5AM on Sunday morning to brew so I could hopefully finish before my wife went to work at 11.

Everything went fine with the batch except my chilling process.  I guess I didn’t clear my water supply hose well enough after the last session (Holiday Ale), because it had some frozen blockages in it.  So I had 7.5 gallons of 212F wort in my kettle on the burner and no way to hook up the immersion chiller (IC).

The only option I had was to transfer the beer directly into a sanitized bucket fermentor, add the IC to the bucket of wort, then carry the 5.5 gallons to the side of the house where I could get the IC to reach the faucet.  I chilled as usual without issue.

My concern is adding 212F wort to a plastic bucket may force some plastic like flavors to become evident in the beer.  I know from my extract days I used to put hot wort in a the bucket with out problem.  But in that case, I just added cold top off water right away.  Using a chiller, the wort cools down slower than that.

We’ll just have to wait and see.  Check back on this in a few weeks when I get the beer into a keg.

I was probing around some online chat forums and discovered some advice on making a red ale. I have struggled in the past with getting a red ale to actually be red and not some sort of weird yellowish-hued-brown color. A couple other red ale brewers said that low amounts of black patent or roasted barely (1-2oz total) imparts a red color without much flavor.

So I put my own recipe together. Don’t know when I’ll get to it, but I am intrigued to try it. Here it is:

Irish Ale #1

9-D Irish Red Ale

Size: 6.5 gal
Efficiency: 65%
Attenuation: 75.0%
Original Gravity: 1.049 (1.044 - 1.060)
Terminal Gravity: 1.012 (1.010 - 1.014)
Color: 19.2 (9.0 - 18.0)
Alcohol: 4.82% (4.0% - 6.0%)
Bitterness: 26.79 (17.0 - 28.0)

Ingredients:

12 lbs American 2-row
1 lbs 2-Row Carapils® Malt
0.5 lbs Midwest Wheat Malt
0.5 lbs Crystal 60
0.125 lbs Crystal 120
0.25 lbs American Black Patent
0.25 lbs Roasted Barley
1.5 tsp Irish Moss - added during boil, boiled 15 min
0.5 oz Nugget (13.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min
1 oz East Kent Goldings (5.0%) - added during boil, boiled 20 min

1 ea White Labs WLP004 Irish Stout

Mash temp 154F.

Results generated by BeerTools Pro 1.0.28

I was doing some random reading about mash enzymes and realized I had the wrong impression about which enzyme did what during conversion. I had my thoughts backwards about alpha- and beta- amylase. So I’m posting my new found knowledge here:

Beta-amylase- only cleaves starch chains from the ends resulting the disaccharide maltose (2 glucoses). Optimum temp is 140-148F
Alpha-amylase- preferentially cleaves the brach points of starch molecules leaving unbranched chains, can also cleave the chain ends to generate maltose. Optimum temp is 158F-ish.

When we mash at 154 we get a good mix of both beta- and alpha-amylase activity. That “cooperativity” leads to a very fast conversion. Next time you do a single 154F mash, get some iodine and start testing it every 5 minutes. Seeing as it only costs a few drops of wort, it’s not a big deal. From what I have read within 20 minutes or so you’ll be probably be done converting. (I may have to try this at some point and report back as an experiment) The longer mash time just leads to a drier and drier wort. (FWIW, I still do 60 minute mashes. Although I did my ESB with a 40 minute 154F rest and it seemed fine).

Remember too that alpha-amylase (158F optimum temp), can also cleave the ends not just the branches. So you can get a very fermentable wort by mashing at 158F. It just takes a lot longer time. If you have ever heard of people doing overnight mashes, that is what they are doing. Essentially degrading all the beta with a 158 mash in, then its just alpha slowly working on all the branched then unbranched starches (amylose).
I think that is how things like Mich Ultra is made, long high temp mashes.

I brewed up an ESB a month ago. Last night we had a little family shindig at our place and I tapped into the keg. Served up 5 pitchers of this beer and everyone was really satisfied with the taste.

My impressions were satisfactory. I was really experimenting with this recipe and trying to shoot for something that was very malty and bready in flavor. My initial tasting of the beer made me think of soft pretzels like you get in the mall or at the fair. So I think my breadiness was on the money. The hop bitterness was a little weak but the hop flavor was good. Maybe I’d try a stronger bittering hop next time, I’ll have to research that.

The beer was for the most part clear, with minor haze to it. If I let it cold condition longer I could rack it over to another keg and probably have a crystal clear product. But I don’t think it will last that long.

I missed my terminal gravity though. I ended with a FG of 1.020! I thought it would taste sweet but it wasn’t bad. Probably right at the threshold of sweetness/dryness for my palate. I know what the problem was. It started fermenting at about 72F. That is a little worrisome of a temp for me as I usually ferment at 68F. However, the outside temps are not all that stable right now so my beer fridge doesn’t come in handy to hold a 68F ferment. So I had the fermentor in the basement of the house. I moved it from the 72F room and put it in a cooler corner of the basement. It drifted down to about 65F and continued to ferment. I think the yeast probably crapped out and went dormant before they were done. This is further supported by the presence of a slight diacetyl note in the beer; at least more than I am used to. Next time I should just let it run the course at 72 and see if that produces too many esters for my taste preference.

Regardless, it was a good beer. I think I have a third of a keg left. Maybe I’ll bottle some of it up and send it to a new comp. I think I missed the deadline for the December 1st competition. I’ll think about tweaking the recipe a bit and rebrew it in the future. Stay tuned!

My first post of going all-grain outlined the process of building your newest piece of brewing equipment, the mash-tun. For the second part of this series I will outline the basics of how I setup to mash, calculate strike water temps and combining it all together to start mashing.

For this process we’ll need to start with a basic recipe. Lets look at the grist (grain bill) for my ESB:

14.5 lbs English 2-row Pale
1.0 lbs Crystal Malt 40°L
1.0 lbs Victory® Malt
3.0 oz Chocolate Malt

In this recipe, there is 16.8 pounds of grain to be mashed. I crush them all with my corona mill and store it in a large bin until I am ready. Typically, I crush my grain no earlier than the night before. Too much earlier and that may promote staling of the grains once the husk has been broken open during the crush. Now that we have a recipe and a bin full of crushed grain we need to think about amounts of water and the balance between mash temp and strike temp.

Mash Temperatures:

Mash temp is the final temperature you want the final mash to be at once all your water and grains are combined. An average middle of the road mash temp is 154F. When first getting accustomed to the mashing process and how your individual equipment works I strongly recommend dong all your mashes at this temp. Once you get comfortable with being able to hit that mash temp each time you brew, then it becomes easier to adjust it to suit your needs, depending on style and tastes. If you brew a Stout then a pilsner then a brown ale then a Tripel, and try to adjust your mash temp every time I think that leads to a lot of missed mash temps, and a lot of discouraging results. So trust me on this one. Plan your first three all-grain brews to either be the same beer or styles that will let you get away with the same 154F mash temp (i.e. ESB, IPA, Browns, APA, bitters etc).

I like to mash with a thickness of 1qt/lb. I have seen a lot of recipes, sites and books that use 1.25qt/lb as the average thickness. I find that for my cooler set up, 1:1 ratio give me a loose oatmeal like mash, which is what you want. Also, if I miss my mash temp I can always add some more water that brings the mash to 1.25:1, and keeps me from thinning the mash too much.

There are many calculators on line to calculate the temp of your strike water. Strike water refers to the temperature that you need to heat up the water above the mash temp in order to achieve the desired mash temp. I use this site from the Green Bay Rackers. You need to know what the temperature of your grain is (generally the ambient temp of your storage location). Just fill in the weight of the grain, the thickness and temp of the grain; the calculator does the rest.

In my example recipe at 1:1 ratio, 16.8 lbs of grain would call for 16.8 quarts of water or 4.2 gallons. In my process, I would measure out 4.5 gallons and start heating it up on my burner. I keep a thermometer in the water and check it regularly. I stir the water I get close to strike temp to be sure its consistent throughout the water.

Combining water and grain:

After the water is at strike temp, I use a one-gallon pitcher to start transferring the hot water into the empty mash tun (with the SS hose-braid already installed). After the first couple gallons are in, I then lift up the pot heating the water and dump the rest in. Once all the water is in I quickly start adding grain. I add about a third of it at a time, and stir well to prevent little dough balls of grain from developing. I try to move quickly so I don’t loose too much of the heat from the water. As I am stirring in that last third of grain, I will put one of my thermometers in the mash. After closing the lid, I wait 5 minutes or so to let the temperature equilibrate, then I open the tun and check the status.

If my mash temp is within 1-2 degrees of what I wanted I don’t try to change it. It seems like too much effort. I do however usually put one gallon of water on the burner to start boiling. That way I have 1 gallon of super hot water that I can add if my mash temp was 5 degrees or so less than I wanted. A quick small infusion will usually get me back to where I want it. As small infusion of cold water works too, as long as the water is fairly cold, so as to not need to overly thin the mash.

I then close the lid, and cover it with a few towels. The lack of insulation in the lid can allow a lot of heat to escape out the top even with the lid closed. I find that two old towels folded in half do a great job insulating the lid.

Then the mash sits for 60 minutes until it time to sparge.

To get the sweet wort out of the tun I use a batch sparging approach. I find this is relatively quick and I get pretty good efficiency (generally >70%).

In part three of this series, I’ll cover clarifying the wort with recirculation, draining the tun and adding sparge water. Also, I’ll show how I monitor the progress of extraction by using a refractometer to get quick and easy readings while I sparge.

If you follow the posts here you know that John and I won a couple awards with our beers at the NERHC.  While winning ribbons is nice, my motivation for competition is to get unbiased opinions about my beers from experienced judges.  I wanted to review one of my scoresheets and discuss some changes to make according to how the judges commented on a beer.

 For this post I want to review my scoresheets from the Oatmeal Stout I submitted.  I posted my current “in progress” recipe on the site a while back.  Now I want to make some notes to change a few things.

First off this beer scored a 36 out of 50.  This beer scored the highest out of the five beers that I sumitted. A score of 36 is falls in the Very Good designation (30-37) according to BJCP.  There were three judges scoring in this category.  The main points from the judges comments that I want to focus on for recipe changes are:

• Low Roast character
• Ester like profile in the aroma and flavor, possibly too sweet for style or unbalanced
• Low hop bitterness and flavor

Roast issues:  I was a little gun shy when putting the recipe together originally with the black malt and the roasted barley.  I felt that the chocolate malt was a bit too strong.  So to change this I would back off the chocolate a bit and change it to 0.5lbs from the 0.75lbs. Subsequently, I would raise the roasted barley and the black patent too 0.75lbs each.  This should also darken the beer a bit more too as one judge had listed the color as dark brown, where I really would prefer an opaque black color.

Ester and sweetness issues:  This was the first time I used WY1084 Irish ale yeast. It was an experiment and I would prefer to use my standard WLP002 English Ale yeast.  While the english ale yeast does produce esters I am personally much more comfortable with how that yeast performs.  Using too high a fermentation temp can lead to excess ester production, but I fermented that beer at a solid 68F so I don’t think fermentation temps led to the estery nature in this case.  I’ll switch the yeast back to WLP002 and ferment at 68F again.  I also used a 0.25lb of Crystal 120L.  I would consider lowering this as it can give you that raisiny sweet like flavor.  But if I am going to up the black malt I think that keeping the crystal 120L where it as a measure against the black malt bitterness becoming too strong.

Bitterness:  Personally I don’t like hop flavor in my Stouts, at least not in this style which is more of an English style.  However for bitterness I would agree with the judges here that with this much malt complexity and a bigger body more bitterness may help with the balance.  Knowing that the black malt and roasted barley are going to be higher that may compensate for some of the lacking bitterness, so I think I’ll either have to find some 5%AA EKG hops or just up the amount of my 4%AA EKG to 3oz from 2.5oz.

So the new recipe would look like this:
(For 7 gallons)
12lb Marris Otter malt
1lb wheat malt
1.5lbs flaked oats (quaker whole oats)
0.5lb rice hulls
0.75lb Crystal 40L
0.25lb Crystal 120L
0.5lb Chocolate Malt
0.75lb Black Patent
0.75lb Roast Barely

3.0oz EKG (4% AA, pellets) -60 minute boil
1.0oz EKG (4%AA, pellets) -30 minute boil

Mash at 156F (up from 154F to increase the body a bit more too).

Hopefully I can brew this one up soon while its fresh in my head and I still have some of the last batch in the keg for comparison.
Next time, I review the silver medal winner 60/- Scottish Ale.

I have a copy of the Zymurgy “Best Articles” book. It’s sort of like a greatest hits album of all the articles from Zymurgy. (For those who are unfamiliar with this publication, it’s the magazine that accompanies your membership to the AHA) It’s a little dated (published in 1998) but there are a few good reads in there, including the one on hot side aeration

I read an article last night written by the late George Fix about hot side aeration (HSA). HSA is the introduction of oxygen (in the form of air) into your hot wort. The presence of excess O2 in your hot wort leads to the oxidation of melanoidins in your wort. These oxidized molecules contribute to staling in your beer post packaging. The more of these there are the sooner your beer will become stale.

I have never worried too much about HSA because: 1. I don’t stir my wort much post boil. 2. I chill with an immersion wort chiller prior to racking the wort to my fermentor.

I always thought the biggest chance of HSA was during these later stages of wort handling, and when the wort is super hot still, i.e. above mash temps. However, Fix states that he believes that HSA happens at temperatures starting at around 86F!

86F!!!!!

His article warns about over-stirring your mash, splashing the runoff too much, and over- stirring the wort during boiling (at least I already knew that was bad). I know there is a lot of debate about HSA and whether it really happens with much ease or if you really need to work to get it to be a problem. Personal experience tells me that my process is not harmed much by HSA because I don’t really have much staling in my beers. At least I don’t think I do…

On the other hand, I will tell you something about my process that has me concerned now that I have read this HSA article. I am a batch sparger as I have said in previous posts. I collect my wort in white buckets as I run off from the mash tun. I have my kettle sitting up on my propane burner when I start. I transfer the wort from the bucket to the kettle by simply pouring it into the kettle…. It splashes a lot when I pour it, and this wort is at 168F. Then I start heating that wort while I collect my next running of wort from the tun. I dump that wort right into the kettle (wort from the bucket is at 168F, the wort in the kettle by now is near 200F) and I have more splashing.

Now like I said, I don’t think I have much in the way of stale flavors in my beers, but Fix was a smart guy and well respected. I do sometimes have a flavor component in my beer that I can’t identify, maybe it is a mild oxidation leading to HSA products in the wort prior to boiling.

What to do…

Well, Fix recommends making the same wort twice. He recommends that you really abuse the first one (stir the mash excessively, pour in the sparge water aggressively, perform a messy vourlaf, stir the wort several times during the boil, splash the wort around prior to cooling). He then recommends taking as much care as you can with the second wort to not introduce any HSA (this may just be doing your regular process), but with a little more care. I like this approach. Using two test batches one that is as close to your normal process as possible, the second… work hard at making the system fail.

Fix says that after you ferment those beers out and bottle them you may then realize how HSA effects your final product. This seems like a strange thing to do, and who wants to potentially ruin 5 gallons of brew?  But this is something to consider. I certainly will have to rethink my transfer method. Next time I may actually collect my running in my bottling bucket and use a hose from the spigot to the base of the kettle to transfer the wort.