I have a few big events coming up this summer. My wife and I are having a big party at the house at the end of July. We’re also going to a wedding.

For the party, I would like to label some brews so that people knew what they were drinking without asking me. For the wedding, beer makes a good gift and homebrewed beer makes an excellent gift but it should look nice too.

Coincidentally, James at Zumula.com wrote to me to tell me more about what his site has to offer.

They make custom labels where you can upload your images or die cut designs to make them or use templates to help you make your own design.

They have plenty of options to choose from including:

• Rounded or square corners
• Matte or glossy finishes

They are launching more features this year, so take a look now and check back later on to see what they have to offer.

Single Malt and Single Hop, it’s nothing new but it’s new to me.  I have read about SMaSH brewing in many forums and brewing blogs over the years.   As I mentioned in my Munich Lager Recipe post for the Master of Lagers series, I am going to employ the SMaSH technique with that beer.

The point of SMaSH brewing is to plainly put one base-malt right out in front, naked if you will, and subject it to the brewer’s skill to showcase it’s nuances of structure and flavor.  OK,that last part may oversell it a bit, or oversell my skills as a brewer.  SMaSH brewing showcases the one malt and one hop.  It’s a great way to first understand how a particular base malt tastes all on it’s own.  Once you have a good feeling for the base malt of your liking, then you can really start to vary your hops.

While it’s not my focus for the Munich Lager, I think the real power of SMaSH brewing is exploring hops.  You can quickly get a sense of all the aspects of a hop’s properties by using a standard 60, 30 and 0 min additions.  It allows you to explore the hop’s flavor and aroma.

You can answer questions like:

• Is the bitterness harsh or smooth?
• What do the flavors appear to be?
• How does that all compare with the aroma from the late additions?

Although this method can give you a great perspective on hops, for my Munich Lager I want to really get a sense of what Munich malt tastes like.  I normally only use it at a rate of 10-25% in most recipes so using it in a SMaSH format seems to make sense.  I am pretty familiar with the properties of Hallertauer hops so I am not concerned about those getting in my way when trying to focus on that malt.  However, I did leave out a late addition because I do want to be able to focus on the aroma of the Munich malt as well.

Time will tell how it turns out.
BREW ON!

Have you heard of Ward Labs in Nebraska?

Ward Labs is an industry leader in water testing.  Specializing in characterizing the mineral content and contamination profiles of water and soil samples for the agricultural business, they’ve expanded their business to help out Homebrewers.

When you read in How to Brew by John Palmer about all how much alkalinity, magnesium, calcium, sulfates, etc. etc. should be in your brewing water, it gets dizzying to me.  I have a decent background in chemistry, but water chemisty is a very special beast.

The cool thing about Ward Labs is that the will take a sample and quantify all the important minerals that Palmer preaches about.  I have had very little luck getting that information directly from my municipal water department.  Often municipal water departments focus on things like poisons and toxins in the water (lead and carcninogens).  Furthermore, my water department just offers a generic read out taken at one time a year.  If your water source tends to vary slightly season to season, the profile could be different.

I am pretty sure we have fairly soft water here in Northeastern Massachusetts…but how soft?

In a recent post about a bohemian pilsner recipe John hinted at our growing interest in how our brewing water looks.  That’s where Ward Labs comes in.

For a fee of $33, Ward Labs offers a Hombrewers Water Test.  They claim to return the complete analysis by 5PM the day after they receive your sample.

I think I’ll be getting the supplies together to mail out a water sample to help us get ready for our lager sessions this summer.

BREW ON!

Here’s a site/service that may be helpful for you.  It’s called Beertest and Matt will analyze your beer for a number of different things:

• Percent alcohol (ABV)
• Bitterness (IBUs)
• Fermentation by-products (diacetyl or fusel alcohols)
• Color (SRM)
• pH testing

Many of these tests would be interesting to me.  I might want to check out how my alcohol is really in my Imperial stout or how much fusel alcohols did I produce because my fermentation was too warm.

Check it his site here:  www.beertest.weebly.com

I have yet to use the service but I may want to send a sample of a barley wine over to him to check out a few things.

There’s a pretty cool homebrewing site that you may know about. Jason, a fellow Boston area homebrewer, sent us an email a while back telling us about it but we stumbled upon it again recently.

It’s called BrewersHub and it’s part homebrewing resource, part recipe collection, and part homebrewer community.

You can post recipes, keep a online brew log with your notes from the brew day and tasting notes, and some nice calculators.

They also have a recipe builder as well. You can find it here:

http://brewershub.com/recipe_builders/new

So take a look when you get a chance.

The Brew Dudes received an email from Larry at Brewer’s Friend letting us know they had an early release of their recipe builder.  I used it today and it’s pretty good.

The design is clean and self- intuitive.  I found the functionality of adding ingredients and/or deleting mistakes pretty easy to follow.  All malts, adjuncts, and sugars are in  a dropdown under the Fermentables heading and you can select them for your recipe.

The hop addition functionality works a bit differently.  Varieties are presented once you start typing in the open field.  After the one you are looking to use is presented, the typical alpha acid is carried with it to your recipe calculation.  You can modify this percentage though, which is nice because sometimes the package of hops you have may have lower or higher than the average.

The yeast list is up to date and has strains from the big producers.

It has other sections where you can enter in spice, herb, or other additions and one to describe your water chemistry.

Overall, it’s similar to other tools you have used in the past and I think that’s a good thing.  I give it high marks for its layout and its font/text box size.

There are a couple of things I would change to make it even better.

1. Maybe this is just me, but I know yeast strains by their number and not their descriptor.  WLP001 means more to me than California Ale yeast.  When I was using the dropdown to dial in the yeast strain I wanted, it took me a while to find the one I was looking for.  If the strains were ordered by the code number, it would help me to find the strain faster.  Again, maybe that’s what I am used to with other tools so maybe it’s not a big deal.

2. I think the “Matches Style” indication needs to be a little more detailed.  Style Guidelines have many facets and a pass/fail grade may not be helpful enough.  What I would like to know is how close I am to style for all the top level guidelines like color, starting gravity, IBUs, etc.  so I know what to change in the recipe to make it fit the style.

Good stuff.  If you would like to check it out, please go to http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator/

We’ll be entering beers into the 2012 Boston Homebrew Competition again this year.  I think I have at least four I want to submit, plus I can send in a bottle of cider and/or mead.

I don’t think I am going to subject the judges to the Belgian Wit I brewed in the summer.  I poured the contents of the remaining bottles down the sink this weekend and redemption for the sins of the recent past will be the subject of my next brew log.

There is a couple of updates to this year’s competition.  All entries must be submitted online and only entries with the official labels attached to them will be accepted.

Entries must be received by February 17th, 2012.  Good luck to all who enter.