Brew Dudes Homebrewing Blog

Hops and Malt Shortage

On November 20, 2007

If you are not aware of the current economics of beer making in the US (and the world currently), then you should be aware of the fact that there is a global shortcoming in the supply of both hops and malted barley.

In short, the supply and demand pendulum has swung unfavorably to far in the demand direction. Since the mid-1990s hop and barely acreage has been decreasing. The amount of growers producing these products has decreased, mainly due to low prices. While breweries and especially homebrewers have enjoyed these low prices growers have not. They have been turning their crop acreage over to more lucrative harvests (i.e. better priced crops).

Couple these decreases in production, with a perfect storm like scenario of bad weather, growing season and flooding in many of the worlds key hop growing regions. European harvests are well below average numbers as are the US production numbers. The demand in the US to use corn for ethanol production has put higher demand on the price of feed quality barely, as livestock feed from corn has gotten too pricey for some farmers. Higher demand for feed barely pushes barely farmers to turn over malt quality barely into feed quality barely.

All these things have contributed to higher prices at the “pump”. You can expect to pay more for your favorite beers as the flow from the taps and what you get in 6-packs. Prices at your local homebrew supply shop are going up too. Many of the top shops don’t even have supplies of things like cascade or East Kent Goldings. The end isn’t coming but you can expect it to be a bit lean for while. Many predict that you’ll still be able to get what you want in variety, but you’ll be paying for it. In some case double to triple what you did before.

There is a nice write up at the American Homebrewers Association website with a little more detail than I have here. I have no fear outside of the increased prices. Homebrewers are notoriously resourceful people. Maybe we’ll just start growing our own hops and trading them online.

Replacing Your Tubing

By Mike

On November 20, 2007

In Equipment

I was thinking last night about sanitation and off-flavors. I think my sanitation process has gotten a bit lax as of late. A couple of the beers that I have had around for a little while seem to be developing some off flavors. Nothing severe but they just don’t taste all that clean.

I realized that I haven’t changed my tubing recently. I try to change out most of my tubing every 6 months or so. I admit the last couple brew sessions I have been late cleaning up things. Now that the colder weather has settled in here in NE, it becomes that much harder to want to go out and do a thorough cleaning of tubing and plastic parts. (I brew in the garage.)

My next trip to the homebrew shop will involve getting several feet of tubing. I need to replace the outlet hose from my kettle and the racking cane hose. I also have to get some fresh tubing for my blow-off tube. That got all gunked up while brewing the Belgian Tripel.

I usually clean the tubing with a short soak in hot PBW, but I can see some black spots in some parts of the tubing that just won’t soak away.

Time to get things cleaned up before I contaminate more sweet beer. How often do others change out tubing?

Going All Grain Part 2: Using the Mash-tun

By Mike

On November 16, 2007

In All Grain, Equipment

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.

Working with PPG and Specific Gravity

By Mike

On November 14, 2007

In All Grain, Extract

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. Let’s 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)

Scoresheet Review

By Mike

On November 13, 2007

In General

If you follow the posts here you know that John and I won a couple awards with our beers at the NERHC. While winning ribbons is nice, my motivation for competition is to get unbiased opinions about my beers from experienced judges. I wanted to review one of my scoresheets and discuss some changes to make according to how the judges commented on a beer.

For this post I want to review my scoresheets from the Oatmeal Stout I submitted. I posted my current “in progress” recipe on the site a while back. Now I want to make some notes to change a few things.

First off this beer scored a 36 out of 50. This beer scored the highest out of the five beers that I sumitted. A score of 36 is falls in the Very Good designation (30-37) according to BJCP. There were three judges scoring in this category. The main points from the judges comments that I want to focus on for recipe changes are:

Low Roast character
Ester like profile in the aroma and flavor, possibly too sweet for style or unbalanced
Low hop bitterness and flavor

Roast issues: I was a little gun shy when putting the recipe together originally with the black malt and the roasted barley. I felt that the chocolate malt was a bit too strong. So to change this I would back off the chocolate a bit and change it to 0.5lbs from the 0.75lbs. Subsequently, I would raise the roasted barley and the black patent too 0.75lbs each. This should also darken the beer a bit more too as one judge had listed the color as dark brown, where I really would prefer an opaque black color.

Ester and sweetness issues: This was the first time I used WY1084 Irish ale yeast. It was an experiment and I would prefer to use my standard WLP002 English Ale yeast. While the english ale yeast does produce esters I am personally much more comfortable with how that yeast performs. Using too high a fermentation temp can lead to excess ester production, but I fermented that beer at a solid 68F so I don’t think fermentation temps led to the estery nature in this case. I’ll switch the yeast back to WLP002 and ferment at 68F again. I also used a 0.25lb of Crystal 120L. I would consider lowering this as it can give you that raisiny sweet like flavor. But if I am going to up the black malt I think that keeping the crystal 120L where it as a measure against the black malt bitterness becoming too strong.

Bitterness: Personally I don’t like hop flavor in my Stouts, at least not in this style which is more of an English style. However for bitterness I would agree with the judges here that with this much malt complexity and a bigger body more bitterness may help with the balance. Knowing that the black malt and roasted barley are going to be higher that may compensate for some of the lacking bitterness, so I think I’ll either have to find some 5%AA EKG hops or just up the amount of my 4%AA EKG to 3oz from 2.5oz.

So the new recipe would look like this:
(For 7 gallons)
12lb Marris Otter malt
1lb wheat malt
1.5lbs flaked oats (quaker whole oats)
0.5lb rice hulls
0.75lb Crystal 40L
0.25lb Crystal 120L
0.5lb Chocolate Malt
0.75lb Black Patent
0.75lb Roast Barely

3.0oz EKG (4% AA, pellets) -60 minute boil
1.0oz EKG (4%AA, pellets) -30 minute boil

Mash at 156F (up from 154F to increase the body a bit more too).

Hopefully I can brew this one up soon while its fresh in my head and I still have some of the last batch in the keg for comparison.
Next time, I review the silver medal winner 60/- Scottish Ale.