Brew Dudes Homebrewing Blog

Mosaic Hops SMaSH Recipe

On March 3, 2014

Ok- I was talking over with Mike at his sons’ combined birthday party about my next planned brews. Soon the Dunkelweizen will be brewed and then a simple lambic will be started.

After that, there are some hoppy beers that are the list. There’s an IPA on this list which will have a combination of AU hops.

The other one I want to put out there is this one: A Mosaic hops SMaSH recipe.

We’re trying to answer the question if this hop variety really has a blueberry flavor and aroma or not.

With a single malt grain bill and only Mosaic hops used in all phases of the boil (and beyond), we should get a definitive answer.

Here’s the plan for the SMaSH brew:

Boil volume: 6.5 gallons
Batch volume: 5 gallons

Ingredients:

11 pounds of 2 row pale malt
.5 ounces of Mosaic hops – 60 mins
.5 ounces of Mosaic hops – 15 mins
.5 ounces of Mosaic hops – 0 mins
.5 ounces of Mosaic hops – Dry hopped in secondary fermentor
Irish Moss

Yeast: WLP001 California Ale yeast

Instructions:

Mash malt at 150° F for 60 minutes. Sparge until 6.5 gallons of wort are collected. Add hops into the boil when indicated in the ingredient list. Save a half ounce to add to a secondary fermentor after primary fermentation is over. Add irish moss with fiftenn minutes left to go in the boil. At the end of the boil, chill to fermentation temperatures. Rack to your fermentor and aerate the wort well. Pitch your yeast and ferment at 68° F for two weeks. After the fermentation is over, rack to a clean and sanitized carboy for dry hopping. Add the leftover hops to the carboy and let it condition for 4 days.

Once the secondary is over, bottle or keg as usual.

I may scale this brew down to a smaller volume. It might be better to brew up a three gallon batch for this type of experimental brew rather than have a volume that will take up the same amount of bottle space as a proven recipe.

This recipe is third on my current list so it will get brewed in late April at the earliest.

Have you used Mosaic hops yet? How blueberry are they?

Grain Mill Purchased!

By John Krochune

On February 26, 2014

In Equipment, Videos

Finally, the funds were found to buy a grain mill so I can crush my malt at home. Yay!

I posted a quick poll a few months ago to ask the fine readers of this blog if I should buy a refractometer or a mill. The votes were in favor of purchasing the mill.

I will buy the refractometer at some point but now that I have this new toy, I will too busy to think about what to buy next.

Of all the choices out there, the Barley Crusher was in my price range and appeared to fit all my needs.

It was delivered in two pieces. The base and the roller were intact as one piece, and the hopper to hold the grain was the other piece. With a few turns of a bolt, the hopper was tightened in place to the base. I don’t foresee taking the hopper off at any time in the future, but it is handy that it can come apart for storage.

The piece of paper with the instructions on how to use the Barley Crusher were pretty awful. It was definitely a photo copy of a photo copy. The print was pretty “noisy” and hard to read. They should rewrite the instructions in a Word document and print them out. There’s no need to have instructions of that quality being sent out with your product.

Before I hooked the mill up to my power drill, I did take it for a spin with the hand crank. That was fun for a few minutes but only for a few minutes.

So this was a good test run. Thanks again to Mike for donating his years-old grains for the inaugural run. The birds and the squirrels should be having a feast on the milled malt that I put out there last night once I was done.

Now, the big questions are:

Will I need to adjust the mill settings?

I will have to calculate my efficiency during my next brew session. There’s a dunkelweizen that is just waiting to be brewed. Now that I have a mill, I can get going with it.

Will the mill improve my beer?

It should be fresher, in theory. The only way to learn is to do. We’ll see and let you know.

Brew On.

Boston Homebrew Competition Results For These Brew Dudes

By John Krochune

On February 24, 2014

In General

I submitted a few entries to the 19th annual Boston Homebrew Competition just to see how the judges would rate my beers/meads/cider.

This morning, when I checked the results, there were 2 third place results with my name next to them.

Tonight, when I went to verify those results, they have been taken down as they “double check some data entry.”

Ooh boy.

Well, I will write up what I entered, what placed, and some thoughts about improving.

There were 5 entries in total:

1. Black Lager – I just brewed this beer and entered it as a schwarzbier. It was stretch; I knew it was out of style but it was damn good. Maybe the score sheet will reveal that they thought it was miscategorized.

2. Maibock – I brewed this beer using the kit we reviewed for Midwest Supplies. This beer was awarded third place in the Bock category. Hopefully, it sticks. I will let you know if it doesn’t. I am surprised about this award since I thought this beer was just ok.

3. Braggot – This beer has had a long, difficult history. Brewed on a cold March morning and aged for 2 months, I had to add yeast to the bottles to make them carbonate. Again, not sure it is going to stick but this beer also was given a third place award in the mead category.

If this award hasn’t been taken away, it will settle a bet I made with Mike on New Year’s Eve. I wonder if he remembers what we discussed. It wasn’t a big deal – there was nothing to win but respect.

4. Common Cider – I wonder if I will ever figure out how to make a cider that appeals to judges. This cider was made from juice that I got from Poverty Hill Orchards and a cider yeast strain. It was still but very drinkable. I don’t know. If there are any tips from cider makers out there to make an award winning cider, leave a comment or two under this post.

5. Medium Show Mead – I didn’t think this mead came out great. It wasn’t anything special and the biggest reason I entered it was to see if others felt the same way. The score sheet will tell the whole story but I am guessing with its lack of placing in the category, I have a few like-minded judges who tasted the mead.

Again, this post is subject to change. Hmm, if you saw results where you won a few awards, albeit minor awards, and they were taken away when the results were reposted, what would you do? Would you raise a stink? Shouldn’t these results be locked down before they are posted?

A Tasty Red Pyment Recipe

By John Krochune

On February 21, 2014

In Recipes

With a mixed berry mead madly fermenting in my basement, my mind focused on a few other mead ideas. The first one involves black currants and tart cherries, but the one I wanted to put fingertip to keyboard first was one that found the beautiful balance of grapes and honey.

That combination, my friends, is known as a Pyment. Many of the pyment recipes I found online and in books were made with white grape juice. I wondered how one made with red grape juice would turn out, especially if it was aged on oak for a few months before it was bottled.

So here is my idea for a tasty red pyment mead recipe. It calls for some canned grape juice concentrate which should be easy to find at your local homebrew shop. If not, you can find them online. They are convenient and cheaper to buy than the whole wine kits.

Batch Size: 5 gallons

Ingredients

2 cans of Alexander’s Premium Burgundy grape juice concentrate
12 pounds (1 gallon) of any variety honey you can get your hands on
Enough spring water to bring the total must to 5 gallons – buy 4 to be sure
2 teaspoons of yeast nutrient
2 teaspoons of yeast energizer
2 packets of Red Star Pasteur Red yeast
1 package of oak cubes

Instructions

Combine the concentrate and the honey in your fermentor. Pour in the water to bring the total to the 5 gallon mark.

Follow the staggered yeast nutrient/energizer procedure. You can add in a half teaspoon of yeast energizer and a half teaspoon of the yeast nutrient before you pitch your yeast.

Then, uh, pitch your yeast.

After that, you will need to mark time and follow this schedule:

Add .5 teaspoon yeast energizer and .5 teaspoon of the yeast nutrient 24 hours after fermentation begins
Add .5 teaspoon yeast energizer and .5 teaspoon of the yeast nutrient 48 hours after fermentation begins
Add .5 teaspoon yeast energizer and .5 teaspoon of the yeast nutrient after 30% of the sugar has been depleted

After primary fermentation is over, rack to another cleaned and sanitized carboy and introduce the oak cubes. I like to steam my oak cubes for 15 minutes before I put them in the carboy.
How long you age it on the oak is up to you. I think I am going to go for a long time on the oak to see how much flavor I can get out of the cubes. Once the flavor is to your liking, bottle and serve to your wine snob friends.

Harvest Bottle Dregs for Sour Beers

By Mike

On February 19, 2014

In Videos

It’s finally time to dive into making some sour beer. John and I have certainly talked about sour beers and brewing them a few times. However, sour beer making isn’t something we’ve discussed much here on the blog. Well, that’s about to change.

To get started in the process, I thought I’d try my hand at collecting and culturing up some souring microbes from a bottle of one of my favorite sour brews, Petrus Oud Bruin. I like this beer because it has a solid level of sourness to it, yet the underlying malt backbone of a brown beer and the wood character from the barrel aging create a nice complexity.

Why collect organisms from a bottle of commercial beer??? Why not! Its the DIY/Homebrew way. My plans for 2014 still include getting some Roselare blend from Wyeast and brew something with that. Lately though, I’ve been reading about sour beers at home. I’ve been listening to podcasts about sour beers. My palate was starting to crave some nice acidic funk. When I went to the fridge, I decided to try and collect some microbes from some Oud Bruin and see what happens.

The primary things to keep in mind when trying to culture some bottles microbes:

1. Start small. I pitched under 200ml of starter wort right into the bottle. You want to keep what microbes you have at a fairly high enough density so they don’t have the need to overgrow right away.

2. Low gravity. I kept my starter wort to under 1.030. The initial phases of recovering dormant yeast or resuscitating what few are still alive requires a low stress environment. Now is not the time to supply a lot of nutrients to overwhelm your culture. Just enough to wake them up and get them revived.

3. Keep it clean. You want to focus on the microbes in the bottle. Sanitation is still key here. Picking up a healthier wild contaminant form the air or bottle will likely quickly over take the population you are trying to nurse back into growing.

Over the next couple days I plan to monitor this mini-wort and see how things are coming along. In a 3-5 days if things look interesting I’ll double the volume, pitching the whole thing into a flask with a stir bar and see what happens. Then I plan to start monitoring the gravity and maybe even check the pH as an indicator of bacterial activity.

Stay tuned and we’ll see where this first step of harvesting bottle dregs for sour brewing takes me.

BREW ON!