Hot damn, have I ever been busy lately. Got a new job and my mom and her cool boyfriend Ed were in town for a few days for the holiday. Which is all fine and dandy, but these things tend to get in the way of the things that really matter... beer. Yesterday I had the whole day off and a bunch of recently finished malt, so I got up at the crack o' ten and got busy brewing! TWO BATCHES! Last week I came to the decision that I want to pick two beers that I always keep on tap, and one rotating tap. Who were the lucky winners for a permanent spot in the keezer?

Recently I made a porter. Good news: ITS FRIGGIN AWESOME.
I decided that this beer will be one of my first launch beers when I get around to starting up a brewery. At 6 percent, it also makes a fantastic winter warmer, so I decided it has earned itself a life long spot in the kegorator.

I also brewed up a pale a couple weeks ago to start the search for a house pale. I have not yet kegged it, but I did sneak a sample last week and it blew me away, so I decided that it would be the lucky winner of the second permanent spot.

Of course, I will be tweaking these recipes, but when you are malting all of your own ingredients it really helps to be able to plan ahead as far as possible. The grain bills for these beers are extremely simple, so now I know I won't have bags of random specialties that I decided to make on a whim with no particular beer in mind. The best part is neither of them use any crystal malt, which is a pain in eh @$$ to make.

Back to the brew day. All went well, except for a stuck mash at the end of my second brew. I did the pale first, and the porter second. It was FREEZING outside, so I brewed in the house, and discovered that...

HEAT STICK+RANGE=OMG HELLA HEAT BOIL BOIL BOIL
Sparge water and wort got up to temp SO fast. It was amazing.

Im typing this at work, and right now they are both in the tub cooling to pitching temps. Can't wait to get home and toss some yeast in those bad boys. Beer rules.

F F F. My phone decided to stop working yesterday, and so I lost all of the pictures of the latter half of the malting process. I was going to do a step by step on how to malt... anyways, Im going to Best Buy to see if they can help me out. Hopefully they can get my pictures back, if not I might be SOL.

BALLS!

For a while now, I have been malting and toasting my own grains for all my beers. I think the official count is the last eight batches have been made from only home malt. Suck on that, overpriced homebrew shop! The only problem is the fact that I tend to jump into things full-force, like an action star jumping out of the third story window of a burning building while rescuing a baby. Sure, in the end it turns out great, but I don't take the time to think things through and take notes, so when I go to repeat the process, I could end up with a totally different beer. Or using the same analogy, I could end up with a broken leg and a dead baby.

OK, maybe not that bad, but with all of my home malted beers I have been putting in two to four specialty malts, roasted for different lengths of time. This becomes a problem because in the end I don't really know which malt is having the greatest effect on the color and taste of my finished beers. And now that the burning obsession with home malting has died down, its time to get serious and start learning the effects of toasting and roasting on my beers.

So with all that in mind, over the last couple of weeks I made two wheat beers: a dunkleweizen and a hefeweizen. The hefeweizen recipe looked like this:

2.4 lb pale malt
2.4 lb wheat malt
Mt Hood/Goldings to 15 IBU

Easy enough. Mashed in the mid 50's. I racked this one over to "secondary", which basically means I want to free up my buckets and look at my pretty beer in a see through container, and it looks like this:

The dunkleweizen was essentially the same recipe, BUT (and I know I already talked about this in my last post) I roasted half of the wheat malt in the oven @ 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Differnent hop schedule too, but this experiment was more about color, so that doesn't matter. I JUST racked that one over to the OMGlookatmyprettybeerbottle a few minutes ago and it looks like THIS!
Big difference! Also, the sample tasted great. Roasted wheat is something I have never been able to use since it doesn't really exist at a homebrew shop, and it is VERY interesting.

Both beers taste awesome and I am pumped to keg them. Actually, now I think it will be easier for me to continue to let my pumpkin beer age until Thanksgiving, since I know I have these two great beers on deck!

Alright, I gotta go work on getting a keg empty so I can get one of these going... PEACE!

The snow is falling, Buster hates going outside, I have to go find my jacket, and my beers always stay in the perfect fermentation temp... yep, its wintertime again! I never thought I would be the guy to say it, but damn it, I love the winter. Since I have not done a brewing update in a while, I figured now would be a good time to just post my brewing adventures of the last couple of weeks.

The first thing I did when I got home from tour was malt a batch of wheat. It took FOREVER, I assume because of the colder temperatures. The first thing I brewed with that batch of wheat was my hefeweizen recipe. Same recipe that I always make, but this time with HOME MALT! I just pulled a sample of this batch the other day and it tastes great, only a week in.

The second thing I brewed was a dunkelweizen, kinda. What I did was I toasted 1.5 pounds of my wheat malt in the oven @400 degrees for a half hour, and I also used S04 instead of 06, hence the "kinda." Heres a picture of me preparing for my brew day ritual. Isn't that grist pretty?
Today I started a new batch of barley malt
AND tasted my pumpkin ale, which is tasting pretty damn awesome right about now. I'm trying hold out until my mom visits to keg it, but I don't know if I will make it that long!

Other than that, I've just been enjoying the weather and enjoying my beers currently on tap. Right now, its my copper ale (which is the tits), my Chinook IPA (tasting pretty good as well) and apfelwein, which I can't get enough of. Life is great.

With this current batch of barley I will be making a "how to" on how to malt grain. So stay tuned for that, keep warm, and DRINK HOMEBREW!

While browsing the Homebrewtalk.com forums, I came across a recipe for a hard cider that it seemed everyone (mostly) raved about. Its called apfelwein, and the particular recipe I made was created by a guy on the forum named EdWort. So, after reading all the great reviews on it, four week ago I whipped up a batch. Its really easy, here is the recipe from the site:


Ingredients

5 Gallons 100% Apple Juice (No preservatives or additives) I use Tree Top Apple Juice
2 pounds of dextrose (corn sugar) in one pound bags
1 five gram packet of Montrachet Wine Yeast

Equipment

5 Gallon Carboy (I use a Better Bottle)
Carboy Cap or Stopper with Airlock
Funnel

1. First sanitize the carboy, airlock, funnel, stopper or carboy cap.
2. Open one gallon bottle of apple juice and pour half of it into the carboy using the funnel.
3. Open one bag of Dextrose and carefully add it to the now half full bottle of apple juice. Shake well.
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3, then go to step 5.
5. Pour in the mixture of Apple Juice and Dextrose from both bottles into the carboy.
6. Add all but 1 quart of remaining 3 gallons of apple juice to the carboy.
7. Open the packet of Montrachet Yeast and pour it into the neck of the funnel.
8. Use the remaining quart of juice to wash down any yeast that sticks. I am able to fit all but 3 ounces of apple juice into a 5 gallon Better Bottle. You may need to be patient to let the foam die down from all shaking and pouring.
9. Put your stopper or carboy cap on with an airlock and fill the airlock with cheap vodka. No bacteria will live in vodka and if you get suckback, you just boosted the abv.

There’s no need to worry about filling up a carboy so full when you use Montrachet wine yeast. There is no Kreuzen, just a thin layer of bubbles (see here). I'm able to fit all but 4 oz. of my five gallons in the bottle. Ferment at room temperature.

It will become cloudy in a couple of days and remain so for a few weeks. In the 4th week, the yeast will begin to drop out and it will become clear. After at least 4 weeks, you can keg or bottle, but it is ok to leave it in the carboy for another month or so. Racking to a secondary is not necessary. It ferments out very dry (less than 0.999, see here)

Apfelwein really improves with age, so if you can please let it sit in a carboy for up to 3 months before bottling or kegging, then let it sit even longer. 

I followed this exactly, and last night, I kegged it. I have to say, it is

AWWWEEESSSOOOMMME!!!!!

I have made ciders in the past, some good, some not. None of them were nearly as good as this particular recipe. Dry, yet sweet, and still has a nice apple flavor hanging around. Also, its very strong... like Hercules strong. Here's a  picture, only the second pour out of the keg so its still clearing a bit:

And as fantastic as this stuff is by itself, it also makes an amazing winter/fall warmer. Here's what I did:

1. Pour off about a cup of apfelwein.

2. Put it in a saucepan with a 1/2 TBS raw sugar and about a half of a small cinnamon stick.
Let that simmer for a little on LOW heat. If you make it too hot, you might accidentally boil off some of the alcohol. (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!).

3. POUR IT IN A MUG AND DRINK IT!
Its great on a nice cold evening... or morning... and it will jam some fall spirit right down your throat.

I highly reccomend making some of this! Its totally easy, especially if you don't have any actual brewing equipment. I used a Homer bucket from home depot to ferment it. Anyone can make it, although without a keg you would have to bottle and carbonate that way.

Happy Halloween!

Bleep blorp. Since I've been home, I've done a lot of sitting around and doing nothing. Drinking my new beers and smoking my Leedy pipes have been keeping me fairly busy throughout the day, but two days ago I just got so bored I couldn't stand it. Since all my primary buckets were full, I decided to bust out old skool Cramped Space style and brew up a one gallon batch!

I have not done much experimenting when it comes to actual BREWING lately, so I figured I would use the small batch opportunity to try out two things: caramelizing my wort and saving hop flavor/aroma while using my newly adopted no-chill method. What is no-chill? Well, recently I started to genuinely HATE chilling my beer after the boil. Its not fun, it wastes water, and in the summer it takes way too long. So I did some research, and found a process that the Aussies have been doing for quite some time: NO CHILL BREWING! Basically, instead of using an immersion/CFC/plate/what-have-you chiller, you just dump the boiled wort into a food safe bucket, seal it, and let it chill over night. The next morning, dump in the yeast. Since learning about it I have been using it with great success, and I don't plan on ever going back.

The problem with this method is that the hops spend more time than usual at near-boiling temperature, which turns pretty much any hop addition into a bittering addition. Dry-hopping obviously helps with aroma, but I have been having difficulty getting the hop taste back into my beers. Couple this with my desire to make a dark beer the way our ancestors used to before the really dark malts, and I had myself a fun experi-brew-day.

So first things first... BEER
Mashed in. One thing I didn't think about was the difference in thermal mass between a 2 pound grist and a 5-7 pound grist. I tried to mash at 158, but for the life of me I couldn't get it to hold any higher than 150. Lame. I should have done it on the stove like the olden days.

 And added my only bittering hop addition. Set my timer for one hour and let her continue to rip.

At this point, I ran off another quart of wort, got it boiling and measured out .3 oz of Chinook.

I then boiled the Chinook for 5 minutes, then added another .4 oz of Chinook and boiled that for an additional 5 minutes. Then I strained the liquid and put it into the freezer to cool off.
After the boil, all that was left to do was to dump the wort into a Homer bucket and let it chill. With a one gallon batch it only took a few hours to cool down to pitching temps. Then I mixed in the hop mixture, pitched my yeast, and VOILA!

Well, I finally got home last night! It was actually a pretty great homecoming. I walked to my friend's house to pick up my van from the bus stop, and what do you know... my buddies Brandon and Andrew were just about to start a brew session! And had awesome beer to share! So instead of heading home to be alone all night, I got to hang out with my best buddies in Denver, help them brew a sour pumpkin ale, drink beer, and smoke a "THANK GOD I MADE IT HOME" cigarette. Yay.

So lately I have been doing some SERIOUS malting. The first batch of wheat malt I made ended up in a terrible beer. TERRIBLE. But I now have four batches of beer made from all home malted, home toasted, 100 percent Colorado grains.

Today was a crazy day. Brewed a beer, and I assumed my usual 75% efficiency when I put the recipe together. I also decided to do a REAL fly sparge... and it took forever. An hour to be exact. Apparently the word "sparge" literally means "to sprinkle," which is what I did. Sprinkled water over the grain bed til I eventually had all the sweet wort I needed to brew.

Problem is, I kinda sorta forgot about it, and I ended up getting a gallon more than I needed without realizing it. I really don't know how this happened, it just did. Anyways, as I was getting near the end of the boil, I checked how much wort I had, and it was 4 friggin gallons. Great I thought. Now Im gonna have a super weak beer. So, I came to terms with it, and I proceeded to start cooling down my wort.

This is where things get awesome.

After cooling the wort, I took a gravity reading, 1.055. Which was only 4 points under what I was aiming for if I had THREE gallons of wort. With 75% efficiency, and an extra gallon of wort, it should have been around 1.044.

So after a lot of checking, double checking, Google searching, forum trolling, and soul searching, I finally was able to except an awesome fact. Even if only for today, I rocked a 93.8% brewhouse efficiency.

So. Friggin. Awesome.

The End.

Busy day. Barley is fully modified, so I finally got to use my new contraption that I built a week or so ago!

It works *great*. Its been literally holding 104 degrees all day. Perfect!

I also made roasted barley
and what ended up being light, medium and medium/dark crystal.

The light is still in the oven drying a bit more.

Tomorrow I will cure some pale malt hopefully and make some other toasted malts. I love this! When I first did the wheat, I was starting to feel overwhelmed. But after using this GREAT barley from Colorado Malting, I have made a complete 180. I am starting to fall really feel as attached to this as I am to brewing... I HAVE TOTAL CONTROL. I AM THE MASTER OF ALL MY BEERS.

BRYAN RULES

Things are going great! No bad smells, good growth. I spread them all out to finish up modifying last night.

They smell really good! I didn't expect that. Thank God for my basement, its holding the perfect temperature all the live long day. MALT SHOT
Im going to see if I can malt enough grains to keep me brewing all year long. I think Ill need something like 150 pounds. Easy.

More updates will come as I have them!

Tonight I sit here deleting all the Simcoe, Amarillo, Warrior and a few others out of all my recipes. Why? Because I'm tired of using proprietary hops in my brews. These hops, along with many others, can only be grown by the dudes that hold the patents or by people who pay royalties for the privilege of being able to do so. It may not sound like a huge deal, but I have a problem with it for 2 reasons:

1. HOPS ARE LIVING THINGS. These companies are mini-Monsantos in their own special way; running around "creating" freak versions of living organisms and claiming them as their own. And I don't think that businesses like that have much of a place in the brewing world.

2. They totally control the flow of these hops. I don't want to give someone that much control over whether or not I can brew a particular beer. Im not saying this has happened, but they *could* decide one year to scale back production to increase demand. Like, you know, the oil companies.

So worst case scenario, they are a hellish Frankestein made of rotten bits and pieces of the business practices of oil companies and Monsanto. But in reality, they are just annoying and apparently I think I'm too punk to use their product.

So there you have it. I'm adopting an attitude of "if I couldn't feasibly grow it, malt it or roast it without getting sued, I'm not going to use it." This is also going to put some grains out of bounds for me... Carapils and Honey malt basically. But frankly, I could do without them.

Grapfruit bombs are overrated anyways.

Today was awesome. I had the whole day off and Amanda was out working on her new business (which Im so excited about as well!), so I figured today would be a good day to figure out how to keep my beers cold. About damn time; Ive been kegging now since Christmas and until tonight I have never poured cold beer from a keg into my glass. Its been a long time coming.

ANYWAYS, I started on good ol' Craigslist. I knew I would rather have a chest freezer to convert into a cool looking keezer down the road, so I, you know... searched for one. I found a 8-point-something cubic foot Kenmore that was in great condition, but they were asking 100 bucks for it, which was a little out of my budget. So I decided to lowball em and offer 60 bucks, and they accepted! Hurrah! I went down and loaded it into the ol van.

I was FILLED with excitement. I was driving home with the very thing that was going to make my life exponentially more awesome, and the freezer in itself is almost a never ending project.

Baby's first keezer.

I got home, loaded it into the office. I decided to go ahead and keg my two beers I had waiting around; an amber ale and an imperial stout, both of which I brewed with this nerd.
It really felt good to be doing BEER STUFF again. The house was taking up so much of my time, it was really nice to be able to put my time and money towards the thing I love the most. Here's some SICK KEGGIN SHOTS AWWW YEA
My brewing space isn't so cramped anymore, is it? HAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAA... Im so funny.

So just a few short hours later I had some cold Amarillo Pilsen Ale and 2 new brews carbonating in my new beer freezer.
I cant really call it a "keezer" yet since it doesn't look cool. In due time though, I assure you. Im not sure which route I want to go down yet, but what I do know is that its going to look friggin' awesome. I think Ill pour one more in celebration!

There is one more thing I want to add before I sign off here. A lot of dudes that build these things also have to drop 30-90 bucks on temperature control modules and what-not so that their beer doesn't freeze. On MY freezer though, there are your regular coldness settings (OFF to 10), but there are also a few little notches between OFF and 1. When I keep it turned to the notch right above OFF, it stays pretty constant just below 40 degrees. Which totally rules, because everyone likes to save time and money! Cold, LIQUID beer without the extra work. Hurrah!

Beer rules. Building stuff for beer also rules. Life is great. Brew more beer.