Word of the Week : Gravity

One of the fundamental measurements related to brewing is the gravity of the beer you are making. The gravity or “specific gravity” of the wort will change during the brewing process as the yeast ferment the wort into beer.

Before the yeast start to produce alcohol, the gravity, or “Original Gravity” of the wort is mostly a measurement of the presence of sugar in the liquid. This number will give you an idea of the amount of fuel that the yeast have to work with in changing your wort into drinkable beer and make it alcoholic in the process. After the fermentation is complete, most of the sugars are used up and there is considerably more alcohol in the beer. At this stage, you can take a “Final Gravity” reading to determine the amount of work the yeast did and the amount of alcohol that they put into the beer by doing that work. Pretty cool!

Most of the time, the gravity measurements are taken using a floating hydrometer. This device is basically a glass tube that has some led in the bottom of it to make is sink. The hydrometer, when dropped into a sample, will sink to a point and stop. The line that the liquid hits on the scale on the side will give you your gravity reading. Generally you have to offset it based on the temperature of your sample but generally it is not that much.

So, now when you go to the corner store and see the 40oz bottle of Steel Reserve High Gravity Lager, you know what they are talking about. Basically, it is some cheap beer that has a lot of alcohol in it.

Cheers!

Word of the Week - Turbidity

According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, Turbidity is the cloudiness or haziness of a fluid caused by individual particles (suspended solids) that are generally invisible to the naked eye, similar to smoke in air and is considered a key test of water quality. Now that you know that, why should you care about Turbidity.

Well, Turbidity is a key to understanding the color measurement for your beer and why it is the color that it is. One way that beer color can be measured is by using a spectrophotometer to measure the absorbance of light at 430nm nanometers, as it passes through a sample. This method was established by the ASBC as a way of standardizing the color measurement process. At the time, it was measured against colored glass plates and was done manually which allowed for a degree of error. The 430nm of light bandwidth was selected at the time to create a set of results that were consistent with the Lovibond measurement that was used at the time. Thus, the Lovibond and the new Standard Reverence Model (SRM) were used interchangeably.

Turbidity makes its appearance as the cause of less light to pass through the solution, thus creating darker wort and a higher Lovibond/SRM scale rating. This explains why you can actually filter color out of your beer if you use a fine enough filter medium.

There are other ways of measuring the color as well. Many brewing suppliers sell charts that brewers can use to compare beer samples to and get a rough reading of their SRM/Lovibond measurement. I have included a table from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Reference_Method that can be used in the same way and also shows where various styles fall on the scale.

Hope you enjoyed the word of the week.

Cheers!

Ultimate SBA Loan

As I was thumbing through the internet looking for news related to brewing I stumbled across this interesting article about a small brewery in Milwaukee that got a huge loan from the government. http://www.biztimes.com/manufacturingweekly/2010/10/11/

At first I thought it was not just a normal SBA loan and it was some sort of fancy sounding bank loan, but behold, it was indeed a Small Business Administration loan. And, for $1.4 million dollars no less!

Getting a loan of that size for a small business was not even something that I thought was possible before I read about the Lakefront Brewery’s success. I read that it is thanks to a new SBA program that President Obama put in place only several weeks ago. That is the fastest I think the government has ever worked, ever!

I guess they used most of the money to refinance existing debt but some of it was used to make a new reception room for brewery tours and install a new whirlpool for beer clarification. Its really nice to see that the SBA is doing big things for small businesses like Lakefront and I hope that when it comes time for me to get a loan for my brewery there will be programs like this to help me out too.

I have never had the opportunity to try Lakefront’s beer but I am going to do my best to find some here in Michigan.

Cheers!

Carboy Drainer

Have you ever been washing out your carboys and stood there for about 10 minutes shaking excess water and foam out of them only to find more water in the bottom later after setting them down. I had this issue for a while. I would always have to drain my carboys about 2-3 times to make sure that all of the water was out of them and then hope that they would properly air dry without mold growing in them.


I eventually came across the Carboy Drainer online at a brewery supply site and though the name was not very inventive, I thought that I would give it a try.

It is basically a plastic collar that is sized for 6.5 gallon and 5 gallon carboys to fit into when inverted. There are small holes in the top where the glass meets the plastic and it sits slightly off of the ground so that there is proper airflow for the carboy while drying. The Drainer is also very sturdy so that you can leave a carboy out on the counter all night and not have to worry about cats knocking it down off of the counter and getting glass everywhere.

One of my favorite things about it is that I can wash and sanitize my carboys, leave them upside down in the drainer while I am doing other things and it drains out most all of the foam and water that was in the carboy.

I do recommend sanitizing the drainer before using it as with any other equipment you may be using. It is also a good idea to put some paper towel under the drainer so that it does not leak the water all over your counter.

Final thoughts: I got mine for about $7 and it is worth every penny. The construction is sturdy and durable and it does exactly what it was designed to do, assist in drying carboys. I highly recommend one of these and give it 5 stars for sure.

Cheers!

Keg-o-rater

So, this project has been a long time coming… I started this last summer with the intentions of completing it then but, as most things go with me, I got delayed a bit. Any way, I wanted to get a Keg-o-rater for a while as I had been brewing beer and putting it in bottles but wanted to put it in kegs in stead. Beer seems to take up a lot more room in the fridge when it is in 16 oz bottles and you have 10 gallons of it in there. : )

After some initial searching on the internet for new keg-o-raters, I realized that the ones that were in my budget were too expensive for the quality of the machine that I was getting. This sent me on a quest for plans on building my own as I figured that I could make a better cooler for the same price as the cheaper ones on the internet.

I ended up settling on the plans at Mike Beer (http://www.mikebeer.net/chestfreezer.htm) and making a few modifications to them. Though, the idea is basically the same; Get a chest freezer, convert it into a keg-o-rater and make sure it can be converted back without any damage if needed in the future.

With those goals in mind, I started with the Holiday 7.0 Cubic Foot Chest Freezer from Lowes as this one had a good internal capacity along with a seal on the lid that seemed better than others. It also had a drain in the floor that came right out the front of the unit for easy cleaning and draining. The inside will fit 3 Cornelius kegs with some room to spare and there is a nice, raised “step”, for lack of better words. This “step” was great for putting my CO2 tank on as it gave me easy access to it so I didn’t have to reach down into the freezer when I needed to get at it for some reason. One other bonus about this freezer is that it fits in the back of a Ford Focus hatchback. So, we could take it home and not have to rent the Lowes Truck! Bonus!!

Next, I took tons of measurements of the lid and the outside to make sure that my collar would fit just the way I wanted it to. One thing that I wanted was a collar that would extend low enough that I could mount a drip tray on it without damaging the freezer by drilling it into the side-wall. I also did not want to put it on the floor as the pets would be drinking out of it in no time. I hit Home Depot for all of the lumber and screws. I ended up getting 2x4s for the top part of the collar and some ¼ inch thick plywood sheeting for the wrap that went down the outer face of the freezer. Some nice 90 degree moldings were used to finish off the corners and give them a more polished look as well. I cut all of the wood and it all ended up fitting together more or less how I wanted it to. Again, bonus! After this point, I took the “small” hiatus on the project. It was not until the party that we are having this coming weekend that I realized that I should finish the project so people would not have to open the lid and use the cheap plastic taps every time they wanted beer.

Off to the local homebrew store went the wife and I to get the pieces and about 30 minutes later we emerged with everything we needed and $210 poorer. We got a one-to-two splitter for the gas as I felt that I would not have three beers on tap regularly enough to require a third tap or a third beer line. That ended up working out nicely as there is more room in the freezer now for beer people bring over to parties as well as it makes taking kegs out and putting them in a little easier. That’s one of the cons of a chest freezer conversion is that you have to be able to lift the full kegs up and over the rim of the freezer unless you have a stepladder or something, which I do not.

We also got two 5 inch shanks for the beer to travel through the collar and some nice stainless steel taps with little, generic handles. I will change the handles out with something cooler later but these work great for now and they were only a couple of bucks each. Thankfully, I already had a temperature control unit at the house so I did not have to get one. We finished up the order with 12 feet of beer line, 3 feet of gas line and some adapters for the kegs. I would have gotten less beer line but the guy at the store mentioned that I would want more line to ensure less foaming from the beer. I guess the length of line helps the beer to handle the pressure difference better and not foam up like if I had a short line going to the tap. Once again, beer store guys know their stuff.

It took me a couple of hours total to get everything sanitized and installed in the freezer the way I wanted it. I had to get a 7/8 inch drill bit at Home Depot for the hole that the shanks were going to use to go through the collar but that was it for the Home Depot. That’s pretty good for me as I usually have to go there at least three times for any project that I do, no matter how well I plan it out.

After a short break to eat at the Outback Steakhouse for my grandma’s birthday, I finished up the keg-o-rater and tested it out. Worked like a charm and not a leak to be found! One thing to note, I did have a bunch of stainless steel hose clamps at the house that I used to secure some of the lines, otherwise it may have been a second trip to Home Depot for me. : )

 Overall, the project ended up costing about $400 and not only is it larger than the refrigerators you can get online, it holds colder, better temperatures longer, and I have the satisfaction of telling my family and friends that I made that, not just bought it. Project skill rating is about 2 out of 5. It mostly requires measuring skills and the ability to cut wood. If you don’t have tools to cut wood and a screwdriver of some sort, the project may be a little more expensive but not much.

Cheers!

Brew Hauler

Have you ever finished a wonderful batch of your favorite beer, gotten every last drop into that large 6.5 gallon carboy and sat back to admire your handiwork before realizing “That’s going to be f-ing hard to move without dropping.” Well, that’s the exact feeling, and words, that I got the other day upon realizing that I needed to move a full carboy of fermented Pumpkin Ale into the kitchen where it would go into a smaller secondary carboy and finally to the cooler in the basement for some cold filtering.


This situation is where the nylon Brew Hauler comes into play. I don’t know who invented this but they were geniuses for sure. The Brew Hauler is basically a bunch of nylon straps that form a mesh cradle for the carboy and allow you to carry it easily without fear or dropping it or disrupting the layer of yeast at the bottom.

I had one already that I ordered online but it was on the carboy in the cooler with my other batch of ale. So, I decided to go to the trusty home brew store and get another one. You can never have too many Brew Haulers as you never know when you will need to move some beer. : )

One of the many things that I like about the Brew Hauler is that it is fully adjustable so that it easily fits the large 6.5 gallon carboy and goes all the way down to the 5 gallon one with no problem at all. I’m sure it will do the 3 gallon half-batch carboys that I have been seeing too but I have not purchased on of those small ones yet.

Another great feature of the Brew Hauler is the sturdy plastic backpack style clip that holds the hauler together around the carboy. This clip has catches in two places that allow for an extra secure clip that does not even attempt to come free while carrying the beer. So long as you hear the “click” you are in business. I have been using the first one I bought for almost a year now and have not had the clip fail on me yet.

Did I mention that the Brew Hauler is washable in the laundry?!? Oh yes, just throw it in with the wash and it comes out good as new. I don’t suggest using bleach on it as it may discolor the beautiful black finish and don’t put it in the dryer as it may melt. My first Brew Hauler somehow got some mold on it and needed to be cleaned. So, after a trip through the wash, no more mold!

The Verdict:

I know I sound obsessed with the Brew Hauler but it really is that great. Going back to holding on to glass carboys full of beer and hoping to not drop them as I stumble through the house is something that I never want to do again. I fully recommend buying at least one of these if not one for each carboy that you have. The security and ease of transportation are fully worth the minimal cost.  Did I mention that you look cool using it? ===>

Cheers!!

Best Birthday Ever!

Last weekend I went on an excellent trip with my wife to Denver Colorado. We had planned the trip for a while as it was my thirtieth birthday and I wanted to do something special/memorable for it. My awesome wife Jill found out that they were having the Great American Beer Fest on the weekend of my birthday and set it all up. I’m lucky that she planned it out early as the festival sold out this year as I hear it usually does.

We flew in on Thursday the 16th in the evening. I had a MGD on the plane and had forgotten that it is actually ok beer. Jill told me that we had a shuttle waiting for us to go to the hotel but we had to hurry because it was about to leave and we would have to wait for the next one. I was taking my time getting there because I didn’t mind waiting for the next shuttle when we got outside and I see a truck that looks a lot like my friend Mike’s. It was Mike! I guess Jill had called Mike and coordinated with him to meet us in Denver and hang out for the weekend as he was coming back to Michigan from Washington state where he works as a mountain guide. Mike was in the process of getting a parking ticket from the police when we walked up to the truck as he had stopped in the traffic lane and the police were not happy.

We ended up going to our hotel, Hotel Teatro, in downtown Denver and dropped our stuff off before we went out for the night. We decided to go out to a bar to get a drink and hang out when we came across a brew pub that was having a party. We walked up to the gate and received a sweet 6oz glass beer cup along with some poker chips for some unknown reason to us. Well, later we find out that this was an invite only party for brewers and their staff from the Beer Fest! It was completely awesome that we ended up getting free craft beer and food all night. I met a bunch of really cool brewers from different breweries around the country too. They had a raffle for things like $100 of yeast and malt but sadly we did not win any of the prizes. That’s what the poker chips were for. We ended up shutting the place down at 2am their time which ended up being 4am Michigan time. Super past my bed-time. : )

Friday turned out to be even better. I woke-up with a mild hangover and proceeded to eat some awesome vittles at Sam’s No. 3 in Denver. Their breakfast burritos are perfect for curing a hangover and they are tasty too. After some Motrin and a Vitamin Water I was ready to go to a Sensory Analysis Training course that was put on by the Seibel Institute. It was a lot of fun as I learned about a whole assortment of ways that beer can be affected by the brewing process, fermentation process and its life in the package. The speaker worked for several years in breweries in South Africa and was a professional analyst. She really knew her stuff! I am so happy that Jill got me tickets!! I spent about 4 hours tasting Budweiser and Budweiser that had been altered to give different faults before the ‘final exam’. I ended up getting one of the five samples correct but before you judge, it is a lot harder to judge beer quality when you are looking for faults. Trust me on that. : ) We spend the rest of the day going to breweries and playing some pool at one of the local bars before heading in for an early night around 10pm as we had a big day planned for Saturday.

Early the next morning, we met up with Mike and he took us to a state park sized city park in Boulder where we hiked up a mountain and did a little climbing too. It was my first time on real rock and I had the crap scared out of me. It was crazy high up!

We went to downtown Boulder to look for a “Tex Mex” restaurant that ended up being another surprise, my friend Jerome who I had not seen in years! Jill told me that Mike set up that surprise visit and it was great. We got some lunch in a local farmer’s market and said audios to Jerome so we could head back to Denver. After being on the freeway for too long I realized that something else was up and asked where we were going. I was told that we were going to a brewery in the airport. I had a feeling that we may be picking up someone and was correct when another of my friends Jamie flew in! Super awesome! We picked up Jamie and headed back to the hotel to get a last minute ticket for Jamie off of Twitter, the best service ever, and headed off to the Beer Fest just in time to get to the 10 mile long line. Exaggerated but close to reality. They let people in the door at 5:30 and we did not get in until about 6pm but the wait was worth it.

The festival was crazy.  There were hundreds of breweries on site and way more beers.  I gave it my best attempt to try them all but did not quite make it to the end.  There was a Sam Adams beer that was 28% and tasted like brandy.  It was supposidly $350 per 40 ounce bottle and only brewed once a year.  I got two samples of that!  I also signed up for a new beer magazine called Beer Conisour.  It seemed like a good magazine at the time, though I had been drinking.  Ill read through and tell you how it is.  Anyway, thanks to my wonderful wife, it was the best birthday ever!!

Cheers!

Pumpkin Ale Recipe

I found a great looking Pumpkin Ale recipe online the other day at BYO (http://www.byo.com/component/resource/article/1289-pumpkin-beer). I was thinking about brewing a holiday (Halloween) themed beer for a while now and wanted my second batch of all-grain to be something special as well as a little more difficult than the average brew. The recipe is not all that crazy but it caught my eye when I saw that it required 5-6 pounds of pumpkin! That, along with the pumpkin pie spices, should make this a pretty tasty beer.

As I mentioned earlier, this is my second all-grain batch of beer. Before this I mostly brewed extract or partial mash but mostly extract. The first batch of all-grain that I brewed was a recipe that I attempted to modify and ended up forgetting to perform the modifications… So, in about two weeks, ill sample it and hopefully it will have turned out ok anyway. It was just a regular Blonde Ale recipe but it was the first time that I brewed all-grain and it ended up taking me about 7 hours straight to finish the beer. That was a long night as I finished at 1am. Yuck!

Moving onto all-grain, I figured that I would take the extra time to make a starter for my wort now that I was taking the time to eliminate the extract. I started making the starter tonight around 8 pm and finished at about 8:50pm. Not too bad considering I made frozen pizza too. Who says I can’t multitask??  : )

To start my starter, I first sanitized all of the equipment that I figured I would need to use and that would not be boiled. Boiled equipment just needs to be cleaned off. My equipment list consisted of a two piece air-lock, the flask for the starter, a bung, the vial of yeast, a quart sized measuring container and a funnel.

While the equipment was sanitizing, I started boiling a quart of water in a 2 quart pot. Once that reached a gentle boil, I added the half cup of dry light malt extract. The yeast need to have something to eat and mashing such a small amount of grain would not be worth it. Maybe later if I ever get crazy enough to do it.

After boiling and sturring the wort for about 10 minutes, I took it off the burner and put it in a bath of cold tap water and sturred it with a boil sanitized spoon until it was about 75 degrees. This took about 10 minutes or so from what I remember and was a pain in the butt. One drop of sink water in there would have ruined the whole batch for sure.  I also got some help from the brew pups.

Once the wort was at the correct temperature, I added it to the flask and proceeded to add the yeast to it as well. One thing to note is that rubber bungs don’t need to be dry to stick to glass properly but foam-rubber ones do. If they are not dry, they will slide all over the place and be a pain in the ass until they finally are dry enough to stick. Again, lame. I made sure to put a towel under the flask so that the bookshelf it was on would not draw heat away from the brewing beer starter. This was a tip from my local home brew store.

So, now that the starter is created, I will be able to finish the batch on this Sunday. See you then…

 
 

Stainless Steel Wort Chiller

Stainless Steel Wort Chiller


I got this wort chiller as a Christmas gift the other year and have been using it in all of my brewing since then. My alternative would have been to use an ice bath and that takes almost forever to cool the wort. My Stainless Wort Chiller came from Midwest Supplies and cost about $50 plus tax and shipping. I know this as I put it on my Christmas List.

The description on the website mentions that it has about 25 feet of tubing and that it should cool a batch of beer down below 80 degrees Fahrenheit in about 12 to 15 minutes. The 25 feet of coiled stainless steel tubing puts the chiller at about a 10 inch diameter, just large enough for a 5 gallon brew pot but a little small for a 10 gallon.

Using the chiller is fairly straightforward. All you have to do is hook it up to your tap, make sure the exit hose it pointed into the drain so water does not spray everywhere, and turn on the cold water. It is advisable to put the chiller in the boiling wort for a few minutes to sanitize it before you cool the wort down. You should always at least rinse it off when you are done so that it does not get sticky and have dust/debris all over it when you go to use it next. But, you will still need to sanitize it before you use it on non-boiling wort. So, it is best to just boil it with the wort for a couple minutes at the end of the boil.

The first few times I used this chiller I noticed it was taking way more than the 12-15 minutes that they say in the description to chill the wort down. After some fiddling around I figured out that if you gently move the chiller in the wort in an elliptical motion, being careful not to splash it around, it decreases the cooling time significantly. If you work the chiller right, you can get the wort down to about 70-75 in about 10-12 minutes! Stirring it around like that also eliminates the hot spots that you may miss with your thermometer and end up shocking your yeast with later on. Never a good thing.

My chiller has a garden hose sized attachment for a faucet on its intake. I had to go to Home Depot to get a converter for my kitchen faucet to make it into a garden hose thread faucet but it is removable so I only have it on when I am brewing. Also, there are small stainless steel clamps on the hoses where they connect to the chiller. These don’t seem to be able to tighten enough to stop the hoses from dripping slightly at the point they meet the chiller and if you are not careful, this water could run into your cooled wort and contaminate it. Also not a good thing. I usually wrap a wash cloth around this area of the chiller and it keeps the drippings from going anywhere. Its not super pretty but it works and keeps the water out of my wort.

Using this works great on an extract or a partial mash recipe but it takes too long in my opinion when using it on an all grain recipe. They make larger sized chillers that would be better for chilling a full sized batch and I would recommend them for doing all grain brewing.







Final Thoughts:

I would recommend purchasing a stainless steel wort chiller for brewers who would like to chill their wort down quickly, to avoid contamination, and want to save money. These are significantly less expensive than some of the pass-through chillers that I have seen and they are very easy to clean/maintain. I have been using mine for over a year and have had no issues with it beyond the slight dripping that I fixed with a washcloth. The only drawback is that it only has 6 feet of hose on it and I have to pump my wort to the sink in order to use the chiller. I could extend the hose if my stove was closer to the sink but I am fine with the setup the way it is. Overall, it beats an ice bath but is no match for a pass through chiller in terms of ease of use but you can’t beat it for the price.