I brewed the Red IPA yesterday morning and the Northwest Ale yeast took off like a rocket. It's bubbling and gurling something fierce. I was a bit concerned that I might home from work tonight and find a mess in my closet. I should have expected this sort of result after the smack pack inflated considerably faster than most of the other Wyeast yeasts I have used.

WEELLLLLL well well... the Great Cider Experiment has begun.

Girl had yesterday and today off from school, wife is out hiking the Whites al week, so yesterday Neuro and I got a zipcar and went out to an orchard to get apples and unpasteurized / unsulphured cider. You go around back from the shop and they have a cold room with a booth out front.





This guy fills 'er up (and eggs you on to fill it just a little higher), and then you sign a state-mandated waiver stating that you plan on taking care of all those deadly pathogens that haven't killed by either cooking it, fermenting it to at least 1% abv, or some other method. I checked the fermentation box, signed, and got a receipt for $25 (5 gallons).

Brought it home, let it warm up to room temp (was around 50 when I bought it), started ale yeast, tossed 1 ounce of saaz into the carboy (figured saaz couldn't hurt, and I REALLY wanna try dry-hopped cider, hoping 1 ounce is noticeable but not obtrusive), then pitched. It is bubbling very, very slowly this morning.

The other thing we did yesterday was brew a black IPA, which was Neuro's choice. I made him physically do most of it while I made dinner and such.

Malt bill:

14# German organic 2-row Pilsner Malt
0.75# Carafa 3 (pitch black but not bitter, has a nice round sweetness and adds the color I want)
0.75# Midnight Wheat Malt

This time I mashed differently. First of all, I did not hit my temp like I normally do. Was aiming for 150, hit 146. I think it's because the mash tun had been stored outside, not inside, so it was colder to begin with. At any rate, I let it sit at 146 while I did some math about adding boiling water, and wound up adding 1.7 quarts of boiling water and nailed 150 exactly. That brought the volume of mash water up to like 7 gallons, which is another difference... normally I never am able to go much above 6. Then I also had Neuro stir it several times, which is different... normally I just leave it be. And finally I let it go 90 minutes.

At any rate, it came out to an efficiency of 67%, which is much higher than my normally pitiful numbers. We had 5 full gallons of temp corrected 1.078 after the boil, which could wind up much more alcoholic than I intended.

Hops... we used half an ounce of that Admiral high alpha stuff for 60m, then added a shit ton of Pacifica at the end, so it's almost a single-hop IPA. I think he added 1 ounce a -5m, then 4 ounces at -1m, and then 8 ounces at flame-out. Really interested in seeing what this Pacifica stuff can do. I'll dry hop it with more, too.

Yeast was a tube of California V, shaken and pitched directly.

12 hours later there's a fine white krausen and slow activity in the airlock. Smell is good but not as WHOA as with west cost C hops, for sure. Pacifica could be old, and maybe less potent.

EDIT: Shit I forgot the best part. I borrowed a wort chiller. I knocked them temp down to 80 in about 15 minutes. I will be making a better one, possibly today.

Love the cider experiment!

My low rent cider experimentation has vastly improved - still haven't worked up to big pasteurized batches but am getting closer. At a gallon a go I don't make so much I can't just stop it at a nice sugar/booze/taste level and leave the bottles in the fridge til we get through them. Champagne yeast works beautifully this way with maybe 6-7 ounces of brown sugar and raw cider. This weekend brew buddy and I are hoping to try the gluten free thing as a gift for a mutual friend AND open the first bottles of an ale we made up plans for by ourselves, which is new and exciting.

Meanwhile the lager is I guess lagering, which seems to involve very. slow. bubbling. as the temperature edges downward in the chest fridge/freezer. I figured out the weird fruity smell - forgot I'd used terrible plum brandy to fill the airlock!

So talk to me about dry hopping. What's the deal, what does it buy me, how awesome, exactly?

(Plum brandy... awesome)

Dry hopping gets you the SMELL of the hops, and no bitterness. This is just my opinion after having done it and such, so, grain of salt. But what dry hopping does for me is give the finished product this gigantic (depending on quantity, and also with time it diminishes so drink quickly) nose of HOP. Those beta acids each variety is known for - citrus for west coast hops, lemon and black pepper for Sorachi Ace, pine and parmesan cheese for Saaz, that sorta thing... those smells infuse the beer when they are together with no heat whatsoever. As far as I know, dry hopping either adds NO bitterness, or so little that it's not really worth measuring. It's mostly a smell thing, with a little flavor as well but not in the same flavor league as -1m boil or flameout.

So just toss in when you pitch the yeast? Like in a cheesecloth baggie or some such? Do you need to use tons more since you're not heating it?

I'd use

You should do it after primary fermentation. I have done both methods. I used whole leaf hops when I added oak chips to an IPA during secondary fermentation, and I have used cheese cloth as well. I used stainless steel bolts to weigh the bag down and attached fishing line to the bags before I dropped them into the fermenter.
p.s. I wouldn't use more than two ounces.

Ideally yes, after fermentation. In a bag will keep the bits out of the cider, which you may / may not care about. I had a sample of it last night, it's probably 1/2 fermented so maybe 2.5% abv at most, and fuck me it was delicious. Still sweetish, but with a faint Saaz hops smell / taste and with a tiny booze kick.

Fingers crossed.

Laying out a new stout recipe, finally using brewer's friend dot com. Sure as hell makes the calcs easier. Can't decide what I want to aim for. I feel like past tries were too sweet and chewy, so I'm thinking I'll aim more for some dryish, but not Irish dry.

I've been planning out new recipes, including a holiday beer, but I kind of want to make some sort of pepper beer as well. I was thinking of trying a Scotch Bonnet stout, but I'm not sure I could handle consuming it on a regular basis, and I don't really feel comfortable brewing this sort of beer for an event.
As of now I am going to use a Scottish 80 shilling ale as the base beer for some sort of Winter Ale.

I'm also contemplating making a Honey Rye Ale with some form of Belgian Yeast. I wouldn't mind making a Tripel or something pretty boozy for the Holidays.

After a week in the bottles, I tried one of the unintentionally sessionable dunkels (4.4%). I finally got a dry beer profile, with that low mash temp. So intentional or not that's good to know that I can do it. Seems like my stuff always comes out middle or sweet. The bittering hops are more prevalent than I intended, was just an ounce of admiral but I guess it is potent. Finishing saaz hops are incredibly minimal, leading me to conclude that the pound I bought is just old and stale. Sucks.

Do any of you subscribe to Zymurgy?
There is an interesting piece on cider yeast comparison in the latest issue that might assist you and others in your cider experimentation. There is also a piece on hop bursting and sustainable home brewing. This issue highlights a lot of things that have been mentioned on here lately, so if you don't subscribe to it or are not a member of the AHA, you might want to try to find a copy of it or try reading it online.

No kidding.. no not a member or subscriber. Sounds like I should be.

I have added a request for it to my christmas list - does kind of sound up my alley.

I have not done secondary fermentations on most of the ales I've been making, though I am for the lager currently sitting around the basement, so dry hopping may not be for me yet. For the basic ales, what difference does it make? Do those yeasts benefit much from the second go-round off the trub?

Started some easy ginger beer last night for DH, so he can have fancy rum drinks with it.

Also, tasting the first Galen-and-Shelley designed recipe and it is nice! Buckets of citra at the end, yum.

Siphening off to a clean secondary is supposed to do a few things that I know of... 1) get the beer off dormant yeast before they autolyse (break down and canilabilze each other) and thus produce off flavors, and 2) clear up the beer by getting it away from most of the sediment, and letting more settle out into the secondary... In other words make the beer clearer and less yeasty-tasting.

Recently there's been a fair amount of argument over whether any of this matters in this day and age for a 5 gallon homebrew setup. I personally put no stock in #1 because of the shape and volume of a 5 gallon carboy -- in short it takes a lot of pressure and heat to make yeast autolyse, and in a big commercial conical fermentor you get that, but at home on 5 gallons with a flat bottom you don't. #2, fine, depending on the style and how the beer looks I may rack to a secondary for a week or something to clean it up. I may not.

And finally I'll defer to Cats or Prom who know more than me, but I see no reason you can't dry hop in the primary once the yeast settle down and drop out. Like, wait 10 days or so til the party dies down, toss in some dry hops, wait another week. I am doing this as we speak with a black IPA. I put a grain sock in there with 4 oz of those old, blandish Pacifica hops to try to salvage the IPA-ness out of the black IPA, and a few days on it smells pretty damned good... much better than before. -shrug-

My motto: Read the advice, do whatever the hell you want, but keep good notes.

That sounds about right - I like the idea of picking up all that aroma without having to redo sanitation and rack and the like, just to ditch a bit of haze that bothers me not the slightest (though am working on some longer-storing stuff where yeastiness might be more if an issue, so secondary could be part of some winter projects). As ever, your thoughts appreciated!

I would never say that I know more than you, since you came far closer to a professional brewing job than I could at this point in time. I simply started brewing on my own well after I became familiar with BJCP style guidelines and basic brewing techniques and I come at if from a different perspective due to being an almost exclusively extract brewer.
I don't normally dry hop, and I do everything in my power not to use a secondary fermentation. I was told by a professional brewer to dry hop in the primary the first time I did it, and not to worry about autolysis, if that is any consolation to you.
I think the relatively new hop bursting technique of adding everything late and in heavy dosage might circumvent the need for dry hopping in the long run.
I do think racking to the secondary helps with clarity and it might be more beneficial when bottling as well, but whirlfloc tablets and Irish moss do just as good of a job in primary fermentation without having to worry about a loss of beer during transfer or infection.

As far as "bursting" a ton of hops late in the boil -vs- dry hopping, having done both a good bit lately I think they're different. Having the hops hit hot wort gets more of the beta acid flavor INTO the beer, for me, whereas purely dry hopping gets the SMELL of the hops into the beer without necessarily getting as much of that beta flavor to stick. Smell and flavor are of course strongly linked but I've monkey around with it enough to have come to that conclusion... dry hopping = 80% smell 20% flavor, whereas bursting is more like the inverse.

Ky, you should check out http://www.brewtoad.com/

Looks like a newer, slightly slicker version of the older forum-based stuff out there. Interesting.

So I bottled 3 batches yesterday...



- 5 gallons of that cider with an ounce of Saaz in it (samples taste incredible, cannot wait)
- 4.2 gallons of the porter that came in lower gravity than planned (like 6% instead of 9%), got hit with a big shot of maple syrup, and now is at 7.2% but with more of a caramel sweetness to it than I wish it did
- 4.2 gallons of the black IPA that Neuro and I made, which hit 7.7% and tastes great, but features a strange NZ hop (Pacifica) that is good I guess but not Centennial / Cascade / Simcoe exactly... Will be interesting, but I wish I'd had a pound of something west coast to hop it with instead, in hindsight.

This took 5 hours.

But now you are ready for the holidays!

Did you pasteurize the cider? How was that?

Ok, it's been bottled for 5 days, and I've had some. I really like it a lot. To me it tastes like good, dry cider, but I don't really have much of a sense of HOW dry. I let Neuro/Neurette try it, and they said it tasted very, very dry, not undrinkable but close to white wine, but still with apple flavor. The dry hopping has had little effect on the finished product, for sure. Those old Saaz hops were so weak that they barely show up. The wife likes it, as do I, but it makes me want to make another batch and leave it slightly sweeter to compare.

Also the black IPA neuro and I made is pretty good, needs more time to condition but preliminary samples are pretty great. The Pacifica hops are more "interesting" than "fuck yes let's use these again," so next time I'll just go back to what I know - west coast monsters of citrus and funk. The body of it is like a well made light stout with almost 8% abv, very creamy and smooth and not as thin as a normal commerical IPA. Mist people would wind up at 7.7% in an IPA by using some sugar or adjuncts to keep the body lighter, but fuck it, it's basically winter here (30 degrees this morning), so a silkier black IPA with a nice hit of booze is kinda what the doctor ordered. I wanna make more with different hops, stat.

Pulling the trigger on 2 pounds of Cascade and 1 pound of Amarillo. Super bummed that their Centennial crop shit the bed this year, so there doesn't appear to be any, at least at Hops Direct. Gonna make some hoppy motherfuckers soon.

So did you let it ferment all the way out to zilch? Any bubbles left?

I had a crispin at bar trivia last night and came home and had cider we made in the basement without even doing it right and ours was way better. Pretty cool. Also starting to feel this way about my old APA choices at the boozateria. We made one much like that first recipe you gave me but with about four or five ounces of citra at the end and everyone who has one wants a six pack to take home.