This past weekend I bottled up my Kolsch and IPA. I had brewed the Kolsch in a “Better Bottle” carboy. You may have seen or heard of these carboys at your local brew shop, or in your favorite brewing magazine (like Brew Your Own).

I only have one of these, but I love it. Primarily because it’s much lighter and significantly less fragile than the traditional glass carboys that many of us have. I strongly endorse these carboys for primary fermentation, even as a seconday container. I would still use glass if I was brewing an imperial stout for aging or something with a bacteria addition or “wild” yeast addition. But for most applications I think the Better Bottle is the best substitute out there for doing ferments in.

I have been using my buckets to do most of my fermentation in mainly because of their ease of cleaning. However, my buckets are getting tired and I think I may start to replace them with a couple Better Bottles. There is however, on small issue with the Better Bottle that I was painfully reminded of this weekend when bottling.

Because these things are plastic, they are mildly malleable. I tend to put my carboys (glass or otherwise) in a milk crate to help carry them around. This is a great way to support the carboy and pick it up when it’s full as they are difficult to grab onto. As I lifted the carboy out of the milk crate to put it on the kitchen counter, the bottom of the carboy flexed down a little bit with the weight of the beer inside it. This change in shape creates just enough of a plunger effect that a vacuum was created and it sucked a bit of air from the airlock into the beer as I lifted it!

As I put it on the counter, I said “DAMN” to myself. Brewing up a Kolsch is a bit more work than a tradition ale and I may have contaminated it right at that moment with the airlock water. The lesson learned here is that Better Bottles are great, but just don’t take them out of the milk crate when they are filled with beer because of that flexible plastic issue. The saddest part of the story is that this has happened to me before, but I just don’t use my Better Bottle often enough to have remembered that.

So I’ll just be sure to drink up the Kolsch fast enough that if there is a mild contaminant in there it won’t have a chance to spoil the beer too quickly.

Lesson learned,
Brew ON!

Check out our earlier post on Better Bottles!

“Should I use a secondary fermentor?”

I see that question asked a lot in various on line forums. The general consensus among many “expert” brewers is that it is a waste of time. I also find that those same “experts” (myself included) tend to be keggers.

Getting clear beer takes a couple things that happens long before the choice to secondary or not becomes an issue. First, I use Irish Moss or Whifloc in the kettle. This goes along way to helping clear up the beer. Secondly, I employ a 75-90 minute boil. This ensures a really great and complete hot break to denature many haze forming proteins. Thirdly, I use a wort chiller. Getting a great chill on the beer helps to coagulate those proteins in what we call cold break. The combination of these techniques gets you pretty far in the quest for clearer beer.

But what about secondary and does it really help?

I normally ferment my beer for at least 2-3 weeks in primary. So by then… its done! And I think we can all agree that there is really no more fermentation going on in secondary. I hate to break it to you, but when you see a bubbling airlock in your secondary its just dissolved CO2 escaping from the beer…if you actually let the beer finish in the primary.
That said, when I am done with primary, I tend to transfer to a keg. Then I chill that keg down and start my carbonation process, with pressurized CO2. In a week or two I am drinking clear beer.

Now many “experts” do the same thing and say: “Hey, I don’t do secondary.” However, as I see it, my process (shared by many) is the same thing as a secondary but it’s done at colder temps and in the serving vessel! To me I would have to say, that I am employing a secondary in a way, but I prefer to look at it as a conditioning step rather than call it a secondary.

If you can’t chill your finished beer down with a fridge, or if you don’t have a kegging system, then I think a secondary “ferment” can help you out in most applications (whether you are brewing a 1038 OG Bitter or a 1065 IPA). Especially, as an extract brewer doing partial boils that extra step is quite useful for clarity. I think the last key to good clear beer is a cold conditioning step; whether it be in a glass carboy, a keg or in the bottle.

So I say skip the secondary fermentor, but do a cold conditioning step as the final part of trying to achieve a clear beer Nirvana.

Check out our post on primary fermentation as well.

I thought of this post to help newer brewers understand the types of hops they can buy. During the current hop shortage; storability is the most important thing to keep in mind when you finally find a precious ounce of your favorite hop. I hope this is mildly informative and entertaining.

Hop Pellets:

Pellets are ground up whole hops, that are then pressed into a pellet form. The pressing creates a hop product with significantly less surface area than whole leaf hops. Therefore they have superior storage properties to other hops. The fact that they are ground up, means that once the pellets dissolve in the wort, the hop utilization goes up significantly because of the increased surface area of all the little bits. As a result you can’t just sub 1:1 pellet from whole leaf. Utilization can be improved from 10-25% with pellets over whole hops. So using more whole hops is required than pellets to get the same results.

Hop Plugs:

Hop plugs are whole hops that have been pressed (no grinding) into discs that are about a 1/2-3/4 inch thick and have a diameter slightly larger than a quarter. When they are plopped into the wort they slowly expand and will look like whole leaf hops in the kettle. The advantage to plugs is that the storage is improved (not as good as pellets) and there is less manipulation of the hop flower (again, no grinding). Plus, their hockey puck design is ideal for pick up games on the frozen lake down the street. I’m just kidding about that last point, but I thought I would try to sneak one by you.

Whole Leaf Hops:

Whole leaf hops are just virgin picked hops dried and put in a bag, hopefully vacuum sealed. This is where plugs and pellets start from. Whole leaf are great when they are freshest, but will have the shortest shelf-life. When using whole leaf hops its important to plan the brew carefully so that an open bag of while leaf is used rather quickly. Once exposed to air whole leaf hops degrade faster than the other two forms.

Personally, I am a pellet fan. The main reason for this is storage benefits. In the past I would buy hop pellets by the pound. They come in a airtight bag that is nearly impervious to gas exchange. Once opened I press and seal the bag the best I can, often with a binder clip or two. Then I put the bag in a large ziploc bag, pressed and sealed to remove more air. I store these double bagged hops in the freezer. I have found that I can use a bag of hops and still have fresh hop character within 6-9 as long as I am careful each time. I have used hops that are over a year old with this storage methods and detected little change in quality. Being sure to rotate the stock of hops and plan out the brew session to use older hops first keeps me from letting the hop pellets get too old.

I was reading more of John Palmer’s How To Brew book last night.

(I have been skipping around and reading chapters out of order. Maybe over the holidays I’ll make a concerted effort to read the whole thing all the way through.)

I flipped through his chapter on water, which is a very important ingredient in beer. Heck, it makes up 95% percent of the finished beer.

It does take a back seat to the other ingredients…well…because….it’s water and water isn’t as fun as say a new strain of yeast.

I’m no chemist so I don’t want to type at great length about ions and parts per million, but if you are beginner and you want to increase your chances of making a good beer the first few times around…you can do what I did.

I bought spring water. I bought five gallons of the cheapest (store brand) spring water I could get at the grocery store.

I know the credo is “if it tastes good enough to drink, then you can brew with it”…so using the water out of my tap probably would have been fine (and it has been) but I wanted to buy as much insurance as possible to make something enjoyable.

I think anytime you start up something new, you want to have some success right away to keep you interested and motivated to keep trying to get better. If you are a beginner, try using spring water. It was the advice of my late uncle and I am happy I took it.

We can get into water additives and getting an analysis of your municipality’s water supply later.

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.

How much malt is really in a 1.040 beer? We need to understand how to use the PPG values associated with your malt, regardless of its source as grain, DME or LME. PPG stands for Points per Pound per Gallon. PPG relates the amount of gravity points contributed by one pound in one gallon of water. PPG bridges the gap between a “dry” ingredient (DME or grain) and the anticipated specific gravity of that ingredient once its in solution. Remembering that specific gravity as a number refers to the density of a liquid.

The best way to illustrate and conceptualize this in your mind is to think about a one-pound bag of DME. DME has a PPG of 44, or 44PPG. If you dissolved a one-pound bag of DME in on gallon of water it the resulting gravity would be 1.044 SG (specific gravity). Subsequently, an easier way to use this number is to ignore the gallon part of the equation. Before you add the water to your 1 pound of DME, that dry bag has 44 points in it (or 44 points per pound). Using easy math you can see that if you put that 44-point bag (one pound) in 2 gallons the 44 points would be diluted to a gravity reading of 1.022SG. Likewise, you can put that same 44 points into half a gallon and the resulting gravity would be 1.088SG (44/0.5 is 88). But the total points are always the same regardless of gravity readings. (22*2=44, 44*1=44 and 88*0.5=44)

How do we translate PPG numbers into 5-gallon batches? It may be easier if we think of recipe formulation in reverse. Lets say you want to make a 5-gallon batch of 1.044 OG. A specific gravity of 1.044 can be taken to mean 44 points per gallon. So in a 5 gallon batch there is actually 5*44=220 total points. So to make that beer you need to get 220 total points of malt in there. If you were to make it entirely using DME, which is 44PPG, then you would need 5 pounds. 220 total points divided by 44 points per pound (ignore the gallon part of PPG because you already accounted for the gallons by calculating total points). 5 pounds makes sense because if 1 pound of DME in one gallon makes a 1.044 gravity wort, then it would take 5 pounds in 5 gallons to make the same strength beer.

Here is a tougher example:
You want to make a 6 gallon batch of 1.064 beer using LME. LME has a 37PPG rating.

The principle is the same for LME; just think of it as if it were a dry ingredient. You can do this because its PPG is lower because the water in the LME has already been accounted for, hence lowering the malts PPG from 44 to 37.

So for 6 gallons of 1.064 that would be 6*64 or 384 points needed. LME provides 37 points per pound, so 384/37 is 10.3 pounds of LME.

Being able to calculate anticipated gravity from the ingredients we use is critical to being able to formulate your own recipes, or more importantly to make changes in recipes you have. If you have a 1.040 beer and you think it would be better as 1.050 you’ll be able to calculate how much more DME to add to get there.

(BTW, for 5 gallons you would need 1.1 pound of DME to boost the gravity to 1.050)

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.