Brew Dudes

Another week and another product review coming at you! This week’s video comes to you from Brewers Ledger – where “Great Notes Make Great Beer”.

Many moons ago, we talked and wrote about my brewing log. Getting better at anything in life takes practice. Brewing really doesn’t require muscle memory like playing a sport does. Getting better at a skill requires experimentation, review, and future planning. Taking good brewing notes has always been a key part of that for me.

There are many things to record for each brewing session.

It’s not just about recording the grains and hops used.

It’s about recording the strike water temperature for each mash and what the resulting mash temp was.

It’s about recording the alpha acids in hops and how bitter the beer tasted.

It’s about recording which and how much kettle fining went into the boil and how clear was the beer.

In brewing, many little parameters have an effect on the finished product. The toughest part about honing the brewing craft is that the change and effect cycle is LONG. It might be 4 weeks from brew day to tasting day before you can assess outcomes. Good notes is the best way to link the past brew day with present day tasting.

The dudes at Brewers Ledger were kind enough to send one of their logs out to us to take a peek at. I found it well organized and sufficiently spacious to capture all sorts of numbers and observations during the brew day. I really liked the medium size of it because it seems like it would sit on most bookshelves and or fit nicely into a backpack or travel bag.

(What? You don’t carry your brewing notes with you everywhere you go?)

We also really liked the ample appendices included. For quick reference, it’s nice for certain information to be right in the same place your taking notes.

Reminded me of the tables inside a Trapper Keeper Folder… anyone? anyone? Bueller?

OK well, if you are looking for slick little gift for a brewer friend, or maybe you have a relative that doesn’t know what to get you. For around $20, these logs would be great.

Check them out at Brewers Ledger.

Aside from the one free ledger we receive no financial support from this review. We are always happy to review products and demos.

We’re on the dark beer kick right now and there is no doubt about that. This week, we review a little experiment I did to try and sample different dark roasted malts side by side. I conceived of this roasted malt experiment in an attempt to shortcut the need to brew several beers all with different kinds of roasted malts.

Maybe it worked.

Maybe it didn’t.

I created a concentrate of each dark roasted malt in water. I finely crushed each malt in order to get the most extraction from them. I did some fancy math to approximate what it would be like to have about a pound of each malt in a finished beer. My plan was to doctor a commercial beer with a few tablespoons of the concentrate and compare the resulting flavor profiles.

Here are the steps I followed:

• I ground 3 ounces of each malt
• Steeped each in 8oz of water heated to 160°F
• I separated the grain using coffee filters
• I put each infusion into mason jars with a loose lid
• I put them all in a water bath and boiled them for 30 minutes

I boiled the solutions partially to sanitize them as well as create any astringency that might have normally come from the boil. I capped and cooled each one. On the day of the tasting, I put 2 tablespoons of each infusion into 2 oz of Bass Ale. I chose Bass Ale thinking it would be a decent malty stout-like base beer to display each roasted malt against a low hop profile and decent malt backbone.

This project was a complicated and ambitious one to pull of in one video. We quickly sampled the doctored brews each one in succession. It became apparent pretty quickly that this shortcut wasn’t really going to work much.

First off all, the samples taste very grainy and unrefined. I tasted like something non-beer in beer. In addition, although the concentrate did create the color I was looking for, the small amount used diluted the base beer a bit too much and the balance was bad.

I think we could agree that there were some slight differences with intensity of the roast, but the subtle flavors that you’d expect to find in each malt just weren’t there. It may be because the base beer doesn’t support it well enough. Another reason could be the lack of a ferment and resting stage, both of which work towards creating one beer flavor experience rather than a layered swill that I created. I sort of favor that latter as to what happened to make this not work well.

So it’s sort of back to the drawing board experimentally. I think I might have to pick the three that I really want to compare side by side and use John’s one gallon process and actually make real beers and try then out that way.

Perhaps it is a project over the holidays.

Please check out the video. Give us a thumbs up and/or Subscribe to your YouTube channel. Of course as always, join the conversation. Either here or on the YouTube channel.
Cheers!

Our dark beer saga continues with an English Brown Porter tasting. This week, John puts three beers in front of me to try blindly. A commercial porter (Taddy Porter), his home roasted malt Brown Porter from the Brew United Challenge, and his newest Brown Porter made from traditionally roasted malts. We did a blind brown porter tasting.

John put the these three beers before me without my knowing which was which. Straightaway I was taken back by the aroma differences. The old Taddy Porter had the distinct aroma of raisins and sweetened dark fruit. The new fresh Brown Porter had a strong and glorious toasty nose to it. Surprisingly, the home roasted malt version had little to no aroma.

On the palate, it was the same story. The Taddy had signs of oxidation and sweet raisin like flavors with a mild toasty note. The home roasted Porter had some notes of light toast but lacked depth. Finally, the traditional porter one the day with a rich dark toast character along with some nice dark caramel notes and some strong biscuit character.

I was proud of myself for being able to pick the three apart and identify which was which. I was even more blown away by home much the home roasted version had lost it oompf. Just a few short weeks ago I was really impressed by the beer. I am still amazed how much it has fallen off in aroma and flavor. I wonder if that is a function of the home roasting vs. high quality commercial malts, or is it a function that starting material for roasting (making Brown malt from Pilsner malt).

Regardless, it is a fun way to make your palate work a little bit and pay attention to what you are tasting and what you are NOT tasting. Makes me want to re-invest in becoming a certified judge.

Anyhow… we move on. Hopefully I can sit down with some more of that fresh Brown Porter soon! JOHN!!!

BREW ON!

Check out another porter here!

We don’t get a lot of products to review but when are asked, we gladly oblige. This week, we got to try out something totally different.

It is something that I had no idea even existed.

It’s the Sonic Foamer!

This little device is designed to use a quick pulse of ultrasonic waves to agitate your beer. When using a thin based glass sitting on a small pool of water, the sonic waves waves quickly force the nucleation of CO2 in the beer to come out of solution. All these little micro bubbles rise to the surface and recreate the foam the beer once had when it was first poured.

It’s a clever little invention that has appeared on The Kitchen as well as it was once featured on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Now it is the basement studio for a video shoot.

I have to say I was skeptical at first. However, once I saw it in action I was totally taken back by how effective it was at creating foam. It also helps release a new burst of aroma molecules. I could see that aspect being helpful when sampling or judging beer and you want a big strong burst of aroma out of the beer a while after it’s been poured.

You can check out The Sonic Foamer at: http://sonicfoamer.com
You can pick one of these up at Sonic Foamer. Where they retail for less that $20. I thin kit could make a interesting gift for that sort of money.

Have you seen the Sonic Foamer in action? Do you know anyone that has one?

Let us know in the comment section below.

FOAM ON!

FWIW, We get nothing out of these promotions other than the product itself. This is not a paid promotion.