Ok, I brewed yesterday while the Missus was having a "chick clothing swap" party, in which 4 incredibly gorgeous women came to my house and began trying on clothing in my living room. Minor miracle I didn't try to mash oatmeal or something. This was the 4th version of my "doublish" IPA, which always hovers just below or just above the 7.0% ABV line, and which always gets minimal bittering hops and a massive late hop addition of some sort. From memory:

14# 2 Row
2# Honey Malt
(malt bill is almost always the same, I think I've varied each of them by 1 pound before but settled on 14 and 2)

Hops... I had a fucking ton on the freezer, as a result of several big orders recently. So This is what I believe I did (I wrote it in the journal at home so I can find out for sure later):

- 1oz Cascade as First Wort Hop, so it went into the kettle as I drained off the mash and stayed in the bag the whole time)
- 3oz Cascade and 1oz Centennial at minus 5 mins
- 4oz Amarillo, 2oz Cascade, 3oz Centennial at minus 3 mins
- 4oz Amarillo, 1oz Cascade, 4oz Centennial at minus 1 min
- 4oz Amarillo, 1oz Simcoe, 4oz Cascade at flame out

...something like that. I know the chunks added up to 1oz FWH, 4oz at -5, 9oz at -3, 9oz at -1, and 9oz at flame out, for like 32 ounces total. All were pellets.

Mash went very, very well. New refractometer continues to impress. At the end of 90 minutes of 152F with a stir every half hour, I hit a grav of 1.090, which is very big. Then I sparged as I drained, and after the boil and chill I had 4.5 gallons of 1.083 wort, which is 10.76% potential alcohol. Will likely ferm down to over 8%, so a more "true" double IPA this time.

Yeast... Cats if you ever read this, I made a starter! The day before, I mashed a little bit of the 2 row, boiled it for 10 mins, cooled and pitched rehydrated US-05 yeast into a half gallon jug with an airlock. Put it somewhere warm, and it began to bubble. So the yeast had a 24 hour head start. Pitched the half gallon into the fermentor, so it all got used. Sure enough they were bubbling VERY slowly within the hour, and this morning it's at a steady clip of a per second. I'm hoping this will get me a good full run, unlike the pale I just made that stalled at 1.029.

Key points: Finer crush on my grain mill, and the refractometer I think. Oh and pH strips don't appear to fucking work, period. Have yet to get any color change at all.

Congrats on your starter. I only do mine with DME.
pics of clothing swap plz thx

When I next hit the homebrew shop, DME will be on the list for just that purpose. So easy.

God help me, I wish I had pics.

........attempting my first batch of beer this Saturday with a friend in the new hood. Attempting a basic "baby's first" IPA using extract.

Disaster looms........will report back.......

Using extract = pretty hard to screw up. Super excited for you, my man. Wish you could smell my coat closet right now, it's Amarillo Heaven.

I finally got around to ordering some supplies for my next beer. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I am brewing an American Rye Ale for the Nebraska Shoot Out, a club only competition.
Here's my recipe:
2 lbs of Flaked Rye steeped until water temperature reaches 170 F
3 lbs of Munton's Extra Light DME at 60
1 oz of Santiam Hops at 60
3.15 lbs of Northern Brewer Rye Malt syrup at 30
1 oz of Mt. Rainier Hops at 15
Wyeast 1272 American Ale II yeast

I'm going to have to make an unscheduled trip out to the local homebrewing shop on Saturday to get some insurance yeast. The Wyeast smack pack that I bought from Northern Brewer arrived mostly frozen and outside of a sealed, but empty brown cardboard envelope marked "Yeast packaged inside refrigerate ASAP.
I can't really blame UPS for having to contend with the arctic chill, but I think the shipping department at Northern Brewer might be starting to go down hill.

Oh fuck. Yeah they don't tolerate being frozen too well.

Also,




...it's fucking Thursday. Where's my report with pics?

Are the brewing yeasts that different from bread yeasts?
I buy my bread yeast in bulk and keep it in the freezer at all times.
The freezer slows down the yeasts' metabolism and helps make them viable way past their room-temp livelihood.

I've always read / been told never to freeze them, only refrigerate. Until I get to the Yeast Vialibility entry in the Oxford Beer Companion (it's alphabetical) I guess I won't know, unless I stop reading it like a novel and go look it up. Now I'm very curious.

I've had mine in the freezer for over a year and they're still going strong.

Looks like I was wrong: Make Your Own Frozen Yeast Bank

Well kickass.

and ah HA -- I wasn't totally nuts about the cell wall issue:

"To freeze yeast successfully, you need to do so without killing the yeast. Yeast can recover from sub-zero temperatures, but frozen water can kill them. Frozen water crystallizes and can puncture yeast cell walls, but two things can be done to prevent this. First, use a small volume of water (hence the small vials) and leave a bit of room for expansion. Second, a bit of glycerine, also known as glycerol (but NOT glycol!!) helps prevent freeze damage."

Goddamit Derris come on already.

Cats! Get the fuck in here. I have a mystery to solve. In short, something is up with spec grav.

- I got the new refractometer, and I know samples need to be at the same temp as the instrument. It reads water perfectly at 1.00 after calibration, and I've rechecked it many times.
- During mash it tells me things that make sense. I see grav suddenly shoot up to somewhere around where it should be.
- During fermentation of the last 2 batches since I got it, I see grav creeping back down, but then they stopped somewhere too high.

...either I have 2 batches that had attenuation issues, or the meter is lying.

- The pale, which should've finished in the teens, keeps saying it's in the high 20's. It tastes pretty good, not too sweet, so I'm not sure on that one.
- The IPA, which should also have finished high teens or low 20's (I got a high starting grav due to a really good mash, like 10.5% potential alcohol, I think it was 1.085 or so?), has stopped at 1.038. That's too damned high by far. But it tastes ok!
- Suspecting the refractometer, I had friends bring a floating grav meter over. But I had just bottled, so I used finished beer, a sixpoint Resin. I poured a beaker of carbonated, chilled beer, and let it settle for maybe 2 minutes. So that's problematic I now realize. But still... both meters said the Resin was 1.036, give or take .002.

What the fuck, man? I am now entirely confused.

Sorry man. No pics but the shit is fermenting as we speak.

Had an impromptu gathering in the neighborhood the night before and I ended up overserving myself so all the proceedings took place with a pretty substantial hangover. Which does not inspire good beer.

Still, we feel pretty good about it but I'm sure some mistakes were made. I don't think we did the temperatures right and I think some of the water levels weren't done properly. We brewed the wort with 2.5 gallons of water and then added water at the end, which may not be the best way to go. We'll see. I don't think it's going to be as hoppy as we want.

Pretty good learning experience though as I already know of some things we'll correct for the next time. You say it's easy but there are all kinds of moments through the process that allow for opportunities to completely ruin the beer.

No it doesn't. Glad you powered through it though.



"Temperatures"... was this an all-extract brew? I can't remember if you were doing partial-mash on the stovetop. If it was partial mash, then more or less the worst you could probably do is extract the wrong kinds of sugars from the grains. If so, then you'd wind up with a slightly sweeter beer with less alcohol than you intended. If it was all extract, then all you had to do was boil it. As for boiling partial volume then "crash cooling" with several gallons of cold water at the end, it has advantages and disadvantages. It means the hop acids won't isomerize as well (you'll have less hop flavor and aroma) vs boiling in a larger volume of liquid. But then again, the quick cooling when you mix on 2.5 gallons of cold wwater is GOOD, and helps fight off some bad flavors you might get by cooling too quickly. It ain't no thing.



Glad it was somewhat fun, still. Now imagine doing it without a hangover, and with half the anxiety!

Cats and Capn:
I know you guys aren't mead makers, but I tried a Maple wine last night that is pure Maple syrup fermented like Mead. It was pretty tasty. I'm not sure how plentiful real maple syrup is in Minnesota, but I know that you can get your hands on plenty in New England.

So I was hoping to have my last bomber of IPA tonight with some Thai Red Curry I was cooking in the crock pot, when I discovered that the bottle was empty and broken at the base. There wasn't much residual beer left or evidence of any explosion, so I'm not sure when or how it happened, but the cap was still intact and the base was stuck rather tightly to the wooden shelf.
Has this happened to anyone else here? I posted it on my home brew club's Facebook forum, and I guess this sort of things happens every so often to other brewers as well.

No, shit.

I'm going to be working the KC Biermeister's home brew club contest next weekend, and I will most likely be helping out with the first round judging of the National Homebrewers Conference contest as well in late March. I helped out at both of these events last year, and I look forward to drinking some delicious home brew both weekends. I'm also hoping that Boulevard provides us with a test batch of something special this year, or simply keeps the judges's lounge stocked with some 80 acre.

Yeah that would be fine. Fucking love 80 Acre.

So I solved the "refractometer is lying to me" mystery. Alcohol throws them off. So you can't measure the final with a refractometer, for that you need a floater. I fuckiong KNEW those beers tasted fine. That means the Doublish is somewhere between 8.5% and 9% abv, which explains how little of it I need to drink before everything suddenly becomes funny.

Brewed a "thank you" batch for Neuro on Saturday to thank him for buying us a grain mill. He went to VT a month back, and had some Hill beer with Motueka hops, loved it, went across the street to a homebrew shop, and grabbed 4 ounces of motueka. So I asked him to describe the beer he liked so much (pale, light, delicate, soft, balanced, subtle, low bitterness but strong late-hop presence without being exactly in IPA territory), then built up a recipe based on the one constraint I had: 4 ounces of Motueka.

What I came up with was a 3 gallon batch (turned out I got too strong a yield, so I kept sparging and wound up with 3.8 gals to keep the abv from creeping up past 5.7%... chasing that "balance" adjective) of pale. Ingredients:

6# of UK Pearl 2-row
1/4# of organic cane sugar
0.5oz Motueka at 5 mins
2.5 oz Motueka in a hop stand for 20 mins
1oz Motueka dry after primary
Nottingham yeast with a good starter

Mashed at 148F, hit the temp exactly, stirred every half hour, mashed 90 mins.
Sparged with 2 gallons at 170F, didn't use all of it.

At the end I hit the intended OG exactly, 1.056. The hops smelled lovely - very lemony and floral - and the yeast were bubbling inside 30 minutes... go yeast starter! So it should end up with 5.6%abv, and very modest bitterness, but with a lively beta profile from all that late hopping. The malt bill is so pale and clean that I'm hoping for straw-yellow at most and a very clean profile. Then I'm going to bottle it, and give all but 2 or 3 to Neuro. This is a VERY different beer style for me, so I'm glad I had an excuse to go this direction.

I bottled my batch of American Rye tonight, and I need to brew at least one more batch for myself in the next month, so I can restock my reserves.