Brew Dudes

This post is a little late but Summer is coming to a close and we’ve been busy. Actually, I have been busy working out the kinks in my brew process and getting some brewing on… But all that’s a story for a different post and video. This weeek is a homebrew swap from Matthew in PA!!! He sent us two interestingly flavored beers. Check it out!

The first beer we tasted was an Orange flavored Kolsch. Now to be honest I love orange flavor in my wheat beers. I was a tad apprehensive about it in a Kolsch. This beer demonstrates that a great fermentation can break through most weird ideas and still be great. Drinkable beer wins all the time in my book. The light malt and hop character in this beer really balanced well with the orange flavoring. We really enjoyed it. The only detractor was that it wasn’t very Kolsch like. This is likely due to the lack of Koslch yeast in the ferment. But that doesn’t matter really. When a beer is great and easy to drink… its great regardless of the label on it.

The second beer was a chocolate cherry porter. Of course, I have commented that Porter is often the “toilet bowl” beer style. The one that no one can leave alone and just brew porter. If you are going to doctor up a Porter you can’t go wrong however but putting some chocolate in there. This beer had a noticable cocoa nose and flavor. John commented that the cocoa addition even had a hot cocoa like mouthfeel effect. Still dry and crisp like a beer, but the cocao powder was hitting the right receptors on his tongue to make him think of hot chocolate in the winter time. I would have liked this beer to be a bit bigger and bolder. The cherry didn’t really come through. Which is tough to do without getting a cough syrup thing going on. Overall it was a decent beer with a solid English Brown Porter background. It was certainly worthy of conversation.

Big thanks to Matthew for sending us his brews. We are thinking about the logistics of the next swap so stay tuned if you want to trade some beers again.

Cheers and BREW ON!

Thought we’d talk about something different this week and draw attention to a different type of competition that’s out there on the inter webs and has been gaining some tracking since it started. This week we highlight the SJPORR Challenge.

SJPORR is a Youtube vlogger that is credited with the Homebrew Wednesday idea. He started the idea that all these hombrew vloggers should start posting their videos on Wednesday. It started a pretty interesting community of online homwbrewers. There is even a whole community website centered around these brewers at BREWTUBERS.NET! (In the interest on full disclosure we aren’t necessarily part of this group in any real way. We post our videos on Wednesday and that’s how I originally realized there was a whole Wednesday group of brewtubers out there. My hats off to those guys and the very cool community they are building.)

Anyway, SJPORR sponsors an annual home brewing challenge. This year’s challenge focuses on session beers; defined as less than 4.5% ABV. The way it works is that all participants send beers into a central hub. The organizers shuffle the beers around and send new beers back out to each participant. They then taste, evaluate and score the beers sent to them using an online feedback form. Scores are tabulated and the top three beers progress to the next round competing with beers from a different scoring region.

The unique thing is that this is a competition where the brewers of the beers are also the judges of the beers. So its a true give and take process. Pretty cool. This years top prize is to have your recipe converted into a brew craft kit and sold as part of BrewCraft’s Signature Series Recipe Kits line up wherever those kits are sold. Even cooler!

Enough blabbing. Watch the video to learn more from us. Seek out the SJPORR Challenge Website for the real details. But act fast you have to register by the end of August!!! Yikes. Pretty sure I’ll be sending in a beer if its ready in the next week or so!

Cheers!

Some plans just don’t go as planned. This Helles style lager I made with all American ingredients just didn’t really work out. Check it out.

Short story on this one. I wanted to brew up a Helles style lager with some American grain and hops. I use the San Fransisco Lager yeast because I reportedly can ferment like a lager while somewhat on the warm side (low 60s). While summer was coming it was still cool enough in my basement to pull this off with a swamp cooler and a couple frozen water bottles cycled in and out…or so I thought.

Then the heat came here in New England. With it the humidity too. And it never really left. I tried to regulate the temp with the swamp cooler but between work and running around it just got away from me. The first few days were at 62F, but the it creeped to 65F then later 70F. I was afraid to chill it too much at that point in fear the yeast would drop out so I just let it go.

This beer is mildly OK. Its not terrible but the drinkability score is low. Lesson learned I guess is that I need to reinvest in some temperature control. (I have a dead chest freezer that I might mount a window AC unit in.) I am still waiting for this heat to break to get back into the brewing swing of things. I have a Pale Ale in the basement that I fear is going to suffer the same fate of high temps and no control.

Live and learn brewers, live and learn.

BREW ON!

This week we follow up the last couple videos with a one gallon batch brewing demonstration. John reviewed his equipment and we took a poll to let the audience pick the hop variety for the one gallon batch brewing demonstration. This week we are happy to put up snippets of video taken during John’s latest one gallon brewing session.

Some observations as a bystander to John’s process:

1. Its quick. Everything heats up faster and moves a little faster when you are only working with 1-2 gallons.
2. John is using a modified brew in a bag technique and he uses a whopping 4qts per pound of brewing water. I would never had guessed it was that high, but the beers don’t ever seem thin or lacking in mouthfeel.
3. John crafts that bittering addition based on alpha acid content to not have too much bitterness right away. He wants to focus on later addition hop character. Rather than use a standard weight batch to batch he calculates what he needs for 25-30 IBUs from the 60minute charge. The rest gets divided into the flavor and aroma additions.
4. The small volume of wort chills easily using the old fashioned pot in the sink method. He was chilled down in less than 20 minutes.
5. Despite the losses to splashing and left over wort he still gets plenty of efficiency and a good gallon plus of wort to ferment. The small bottle ferment is a little full but he doesn’t usually have too much of an issue with blow offs. But he has an extra airlock and starsan spray at the ready should a switch be needed.

There you have it. Its pretty quick and easy. We hope this inspires you to maybe give smaller batch brewing a try. Its a great way to experiment with new recipes, ingredients or yeast varieties. The technique obviously isn’t limited to just SMASH brewing too.

Let us know if you give one gallon brewing a try.

BREW ON!