So, in what has now become a quest to get my first home brew done, I have been doing lots of reading and research. Twitter and the Craft Brewing population therein have been essential to that. One twitter user has something the has captured my interest strongly with this post

“- basicbrewing Brewer’s Logbooks are at the printer. Should be on the store by first of next week! http://twitpic.com/iotc” .

He, through his website http://www.basicbrewing.com, has created a log book which essentially provides a “way to record your brewing history.” For me, it’s going to be an excellent tool to begin my brewing with. If you’re a new home brewer, give it some thought; organization with this log may make things much easier to keep track of. I think for new brewers and home brewers in general, it’s a nice tool to have. Face it, when brewing a computer might not always be handy. Even for those who use a computer program to design their beers, this book will be an excellent tool to keep beside the kettle while brewing.

James Spencer and Steve Wilkes came up with the idea for this Brewer’s Logbook after commiserating that most of their prized recipes were scribbled on scraps of paper here and there, and they were hard to dig up when they needed to make another batch of tasty brew.

The first section of the book is the whole year of 2008 at a glance. This is for long-range planning - something that James and Steve have heard is a good idea, and something they one day hope to practice.

Section two is each month in a two-page format. Use these pages to make a quick note when each batch is brewed, racked and bottled or kegged. Brewers who lager beer can easily keep track of temperature changes over time.

The third section is where the details of each batch are lined out. You can enter all of your ingredients and the specifics of each step in your process. This is the key to repeatability. When you brew a beer you really like, you can come back to your brew day session page and see exactly how you did it.

The Logbook measures 8.5″ x 6″, including the spiral binding. It contains 127 pages and enough room for up to 50 batches. At only $12.95, it makes a great gift for your favorite home brewer!

For more Information visit basicbrewing.com

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My favorite time of the year is Fall. The weather gets cooler, the days shorter, and pumpkins magically appear at the supermarket. That means it’s time to brew some pumpkin beer!

I have never brewed a pumpkin beer so this will be a learning experience. I bought a pumpkin ale ingredient kit from Austin Homebrew Supply and grabbed an 8 lb pumpkin from the grocery store. The pumpkin is optional but is a pumpkin beer brewed with no pumpkin really a pumpkin beer? Yeah, I didn’t think so. The instructions say you can use canned pumpkin instead of fresh but that sounded messy.

[Note: This will not be a step-by-step home brewing post. Check out the Belgian dubbel post for more detailed instructions. The steps are basically the same except for mashing the grains as described below.]

I decided to try brewing a mini-mash which is between all-extract and all-grain brewing but does not require any extra equipment. Basically, you use more grains and less extract than an extract recipe but the mashing takes place in the brew kettle rather than a mash tun.

Pumpkin beer ingredients (hops not shown)

Here’s the recipe:

Grains:
1.5 lb 2-row
1 lb Vienna
.5 lb Crystal 60L
.5 lb Cara-Munich

Liquid Malt Extract (LME):
4.5 lb extra pale
1 lb Munich

1 oz First Gold hops(6.9% alpha acid), .5 oz @ 60 minutes, .5 oz @ 45 minutes
3-4 lb pumpkin
Spices: 1 tsp cinnamon, 3/8 tsp nutmeg, 1/8 tsp mace, 7 g sweet orange peel
Wyeast London Ale 1028 (or White Labs British Ale 005 or Windsor Ale dry yeast)

Gut it, cut it up, and bake it

The first step is to prepare the pumpkin. Cut it in half and gut it. Then cut it into small pieces and bake in the oven at 350° for about an hour, or until the pumpkin starts to soften. Let it cool then separate the meat from the shell with a knife or spoon. My 8 lb raw pumpkin yielded about 3.5 lb of prepared pumpkin which was just right.

Grain and pumpkin mashing at 155

I didn’t have a grain bag big enough for both the grains and pumpkin so I put them in separate bags. In fact, the grain just barely fit in my largest bag. The pumpkin can be added during the mash (first), to the boil, or to the primary or secondary fermenter if it has been pasteurized. I chose to add it to the mash. To extract the sugars from the grain (called mashing), soak the grain in 2.5 gallons of water at 155° for 45 minutes. Then turn off the heat and dunk the grain bag in and out of the water a few times like a giant tea bag. Place the grain in a strainer over the kettle, heat the mash to 170°, and evenly pour 1.75 quarts (1 quart for every 2 lbs of grain) over the grain. Allow the grain to drain then bring the mash to a boil.

Pour 170 degree mash through the grain

Once the mash starts to boil, remove it from heat and stir in the LME until it is completely dissolved. Return to a boil and add .5 oz of hops for bittering. After 45 minutes, add .5 oz of hops for flavor. After 55 minutes, add the spices. After 60 minutes, remove from heat and cool to less than 80° as quickly as possible.

Pour the wort into a carboy and add enough water to bring the volume to about 5.25 gallons.  When the temperature is around 75°, aerate and mix the wort by shaking vigorously and take an original gravity reading. The target for this beer is 1.055 but mine was well shy of that at only 1.044. My guess is that not enough sugar was extracted in the mash because the grain was so tightly packed in the too-small grain bag.

Yeast pack before and after smacking

After taking the gravity reading, pitch the yeast. This was the first time I had used Wyeast, which comes in a “smack pack.” Inside the pouch is a packet of yeast fuel which you “smack” to pop it and release the fuel. You can see that after 5 hours the pouch had swelled due to the yeast consuming the fuel. This is kind of like a miniature starter which is why I did not make a starter as I did for the Belgian dubbel. I regretted this when fermentation didn’t start as quickly as I had hoped. Once it started, it was pretty vigorous so hopefully I’ll reach my target 1.012 final gravity which will give a respectable 4.2% - 4.7% ABV.

After I was finished brewing the beer I had 3.5 lbs of pumpkin which had been soaking in a barley malt stew for 45 minutes. What to do with it? Make pumpkin pies! Bonus! My wife was able to make 3 pies out of the pumpkin. I honestly can’t taste the malt but you can’t beat 5 gallons of pumpkin beer and 3 pumpkin pies out of a $2 pumpkin. Man, I love the Fall!

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Mr. Beer Home Brewery promises to be easy and fun, and certainly the kit I received for review lived up to that. First things first, I eagerly unpacked the contents of the large, friendly box containing the Mr. Beer Premium Edition Home Brewery in my kitchen. In the box I found the promised brew keg, the bottles, the sanitizing packet and the actual beer ingredients. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the instructions or the bottle stickers. I figure the instructions and stickers were simply lost or misplaced when either myself or Brant went through the box earlier. So if you’re like me an have misplaced your instructions don’t worry, a quick trip to the Mr. Beer website and I was easily able to find and print the instructions for my particular kit. [Edit: Watch the video of the Mr Beer kit unpacking]

First step is assembly and sanitizing. The only real assembly is putting the tap on the brew keg, and you’re ready to go. The sanitizing is really straightforward with an included sanitizing pack. Per the instructions: half now for your keg and tools, half later for the bottles- ten minutes soak in the sanitizer, pour it out, and you’re on to the next step. A couple of notes here- Make sure the spoon you’re going to be using fits easily in and out of the brew keg during the sanitizing process. Also being a health conscious individual, I had to wonder exactly what was in the no-rinse sanitizer. I just had an uneasy feeling knowing that without a rinse, some of that would be in my brew, without knowing what it was.   Also, also, the brew keg itself is made of #3 PVC, which I tend to avoid as it is in one of the more questionably safe plastics.   I emailed Mr. Beer and I’ll have an update when I receive a reply.*

* Mr. Beer returned my email, very friendly, very prompt, and I’ll pass along what they said here:

“The One Step Cleanser is a No Rinse product, so after you have resolved it in water and have soaked your keg, bottles and utensils, you can then pour out all the liquid and either let it air dry or go ahead and use. You actually should not consume the powder itself.
The keg is made with FDA approved PVC, which does not contain Melamine, Phthalates or the following heavy metals: Pb, Cd, Hg, CR(6.  It is safe to ferment beer in it.”

On to the next step:

The instructions did not say whether tap water would suffice, or to use filtered water, but some research on my own suggest that you should never use distilled water for brewing beer, use filtered, or spring water.  Since my local tap water is chlorinated, and I wanted a beer that tasted good- I opted for spring water, which set me back all of a buck-sixty at my local grocery store. (I retained one of the empty gallon jugs from the spring water for sanitizing bottles in the bottling step later down the road.)

The Brewing process was straightforward and easy.  Dissolve the included booster, bring to a boil.  Now, it will take some time to dissolve the booster into the water, so take your time. Remove from heat, and its on to the mix.

Time to add the Mix!  Warm up the can in some hot water (I took off the label to keep it from getting gummy and falling into the mix.) and dump it into the booster solution, easy as that.  Add the wort into the keg.  Careful here, I accidentally spilled a bit, and it was a gooey mess on the side of the keg to clean.

Add the remainder of the spring water, stir, and you’re ready for the yeast.  At this stage, the brew smells fantastic.  A 5 minute timer, between a couple of quick stirs and I’m ready to put the brew keg in a nice quiet, dark place for 7-14 days to let my little yeast army do it’s thing.

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If you have ever thought it might be cool to brew your own beer, or even if you’ve never considered it, here are 8 good reasons you should be brewing your own.

1. It saves money
This is the big one. With the sorry state of the economy, gas prices out of control, and the housing market in the tank, the last thing you want to worry about is where your next beer is coming from. Grab a bucket, some soda bottles, and a beer “kit” and you’re ready to make decent beer on a budget. For about 20 bucks you can make approximately 8 6-packs of beer.

2. It’s easy
People have been brewing beer for at least 8,000 years and it was discovered by accident so it can’t be that hard, right? It’s not. You don’t even need a bunch of fancy equipment; you can brew beer in your coffee pot.

3. It won’t hurt you
No known pathogens can survive in beer so you don’t have to worry about your home brew making you sick. The reason beer was so popular before modern plumbing is that it was safer to drink than water, which often contained all kinds of nasty germs. Contaminated beer may taste bad but it won’t kill you.

4. Impress your friends
Sharing the fruits of your brewing labor will impress your friends, guaranteed. You don’t have to tell them it’s not hard.

5. Get your creative groove on
Have you ever wondered what beer would taste like if it had Gatorade in it? Try it and see! When you’re brewing your own, the possible flavors are limited only by your imagination.

6. You’ll gain a better appreciation for beer
The process of turning malted barley, hops, yeast, and water into beer is truly fascinating. Once you have witnessed the magic and mystery of brewing your own, you’ll never look at a beer the same.

7. Save the environment
From saving gas to recycling bottles, brewing at home has many green benefits.

8. You know what is in your beer
Although beer is can be made with 4 basic ingredients — malted barley, hops, yeast, and water, it often contains other ingredients. Commercial beer seldom has an ingredient list so there is no way to know if it has been made with something that you are allergic to, for instance. Corn (sugar), wheat, and lactose are all common allergens which are often used in beer making, although lactose is less commonly used.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and brew your beer!

Popularity: 9% [?]

For my second attempt at home brewing, I decided to try an American Brown Ale. Instead of using a beer kit like last time, I used a combination of malt extract and specialty grains. I also invested in some equipment to make the process a little easier. What follows is a step-by-step description of the process.

I got the recipe from Charlie Papzian’s The Complete Joy of Home Brewing. It called for 5-6 lbs. of amber malt extract, 1/4 lb. of chocolate malt, 1/4 lb. of black patent malt, 3-4 ozs. of brewing hops, and 1/2 - 1 oz. of finishing hops. It was more economical for me to buy a 7 lb. jar of extract than two 3.3 lb. cans. I thought the extra malt would increase the alcohol content but that didn’t turn out to be true. I bought two 2 oz. packages of Cascade hops pellets and used one and a half packages for brewing and the remaining half package for finishing. I decided to add my own little twist to the recipe during the bottling but I’ll get to that later.

After cleaning my equipment, I put it in a dilute bleach solution to sanitize it. (I have since learned that the One Step cleaner that I use for cleaning also sanitizes so I will not be using bleach any more. I hate the smell.) While everything was soaking, I put 2 gallons of water on to boil. I put my grains, which I had cracked using the grinder at my local beer store, in a grain bag and put it in the water. Just before the water began to boil, I removed the grain bag. Once the water was boiling, I added the malt extract, which I had put in warm water to soften it, and the hops pellets.

The wort is supposed to boil for 30 minutes to an hour. While it was boiling, I removed the equipment from the bleach and rinsed to remove the bleach smell. After about 35 minutes, I turned off the heat and added the rest of the hops. I needed to rehydrate my yeast so I boiled 1 1/2 cups of water for a few minutes, then transferred it to a sanitized measuring cup and covered it with foil. The water has to cool to 100-105° F before the yeast is added. If it is too hot, it can kill the yeast.

While that was cooling, I removed as much of the hops from the wort as I could (called sparging) with a sanitized stainer. I filled my carboy with a couple of gallons of cold water and started transferring the wort to the carboy by pouring it through the strainer to remove the hops that was left. By this time the water for the yeast had cooled sufficiently so I added the yeast and covered it again.

I filled the carboy up with more cool water but it was still over 78° so I had to wait for it to cool some more. I extracted some of the wort with a turkey baster and took a specific gravity reading of 1.040, which was exactly where it was supposed to be. Once the wort had cooled to 78° and the yeast had cooled to about the same temperature, I pitched the yeast.

Papzian recommends using a blow-off tube during primary fermentation to remove some of the kraeusen, which is a frothy head that the yeast creates. This is supposed to make the beer less bitter, which sounds good to me, so I attached a tube and submerged the other end in a water-filled container. During the first several days of fermentation, the yeast was extremely active and a lot of kraeusen was expelled through the tube. Once the fermentation had died down, I replaced the tube with an air lock. At this point, I probably should have transferred the beer to a secondary fermenter but I only had one carboy available.

After a week of fermentation, it was time to bottle. To sterilize the bottles, which had already been cleaned, I ran them through the dishwasher without any soap. Meanwhile, I transferred the beer from the carboy to a 5 gallon bucket into which I had drilled a hole and added a spigot. There was a lot of hops caked around the mouth of the carboy for some reason. I did my best not to disturb it with the racking cane. I took another specific gravity reading and it was 1.022, which is much lower than I expected. If my calculation is correct, the beer is 2.4% alcohol by volume.

To add a little twist to my brown ale, I had decided to use blackstrap molasses as my priming sugar. I thought this might lend a kind of smoky flavor to the beer. Papzian warned against using more than a cup of molasses as a primer but since blackstrap has only 2/3 of the sugar of light molasses, I used 1 1/3 cups. I dissolved it in some boiling water then poured it in the bucket as the beer was transferring. While the beer was transferring, I boiled some caps to sanitize them. I filled 50 bottles and capped them using a hand-held capper.

After another week, it was time to taste my creation. The first thing I noticed was there was a lot of carbonation. In fact, if the beer isn’t chilled first, it will foam out of the bottle as soon as the cap was removed. I should have heeded Papazian’s advice and not used so much molasses. It is quite cloudy and has a deep brown color. As far as the taste goes, it’s hard to get past the over-carbonation. It is much too hoppy for my taste and I can’t detect the molasses at all. The are perhaps notes of coffee and biscuit but there is a distinct metallic aftertaste that is not at all pleasant. It goes away after a few sips but it does not make a good first impression. I have no clue what caused the metallic taste. Feel free to school me in the comments.

I hope that my brown ale improves with age as my stout did. I’m rather disappointed in the results overall. I recently met some guys who brew using all grains instead of malt extract. I may try that for my next batch as it gives you more control over the final product but maybe I should stick with extracts until I get the technique down. I would love to get some advice via the comments or email me at joel [at] beerutopia.com.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Life is too short for cheap beer, but higher beer prices won’t make your life any longer, it just seems that way. The cost of malt and hops is going up, forcing brewers to raise their prices. The distributors pass the increased cost on to stores which then pass it on to you and me.

A worldwide hops shortage has driven the price of hops up as much as ten times, from 3-5 bucks a pound to between $30 and $40 per pound. It’s hard for brewers, particularly small ones, to absorb that kind of increase.

I personally haven’t noticed an increase prices but cost is one of the last things I consider when buying beer. To me a good beer is worth exponentially more than the difference in price for a cheap beer. I would rather drink one good beer that costs $1.50 for a bottle than 3 cheap beers that cost 50 cents a can. But that’s just me.

The Coloradoan points out that even if prices are going up, they still aren’t that bad. Beer may cost around $1.50 for 12 ozs, but how much did you pay for that White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino at Starbucks? Or that bottled water you bought in the office vending machine, for that matter?

If the prices are really getting you down, there is an alternative: brew your own. I got tired of paying 3 or 4 bucks for a latte so I got an espresso machine and now I make my own lattes. They taste better than most coffee house lattes because I make them exactly the way I like them. I’ve started brewing my own beer, too. There is a little bit of cost up front but once you make the investment, you can brew for years with the same equipment. If you brew with grains, instead of malt extract, the savings are substantial. You can buy the grain, hops, and yeast for a 5 gallon batch of beer for around $20-$25. You typically get about 50 12oz bottles out of a batch which means your cost is less than 50 cents per bottle! Now that’s a bargain!

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A man in Alabama recently got in trouble for home brewing beer. You see, home brewing is illegal in Bama. This guy was trying to raise awareness of this lunacy in order to get the law changed and made some enemies in the process. Isn’t also illegal to sell sex toys in Alabama? Why the hell would you want to live in such a backwards state?

The “Yellowhammer State” is not the only state that doesn’t want you to get your brew on. These states have laws against it:

• Delaware
• Iowa
• Kentucky
• Mississippi
• Ohio
• Oklahoma

These states have laws that are ambiguous at best:

• Louisiana
• Maine
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York

Fermentarium.com has a good rundown of this anti-home-brewing idiocy.

What about you? Are you making hooch on the sly? I’m legal but I would probably do it anyway.

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If you have been following my inaugural foray into home brewing, you know that I was trying to spend as little money as possible while keeping the process as idiot-proof as possible. After tasting the fruits of my labor, I have to say that having better equipment probably would have resulted in a better end product.

I have opened 5 bottles so far and only one could be called acceptable. Two had very little carbonation and two were obviously contaminated. The contaminated bottles had the fragrance of dirty laundry and tasted about the same. While there are no known pathogens that can live in beer, that is to say it will not make you sick, the beer was undrinkable. The two flat bottles had decent flavor but flat beer is not very enjoyable.

The one bottle that was good had a nice head and mouth feel, though not as full as I like. It also was a tad hoppy for my tastes but I don’t like overly hoppy beer. I would buy this beer but it wouldn’t be at the top of my list. Hopefully there will be some more good bottles in the batch.

So this concludes my experiment. It was definitely a learning experience. I enjoyed the process enough that I’m going to try it again, this time with proper equipment. Of course I’ll write about the experience here.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I finally bottled my first home brewed beer. If you have been following this little experiment, you know that my first experience with home brewing has been a little bumpy. The bottling process didn’t go exactly smoothly but it wasn’t too bad.

I did not bother taking the specific gravity of the beer since I had not taken it before adding yeast. The beer had fermented for about 10 days and I had stopped seeing bubbles in the air locks after day 7 or so. I was reasonably certain that the fermentation was complete. Continue Reading

Popularity: 11% [?]