Category Archives: miscellaneous

What’s Brewing? September 2021

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After the summer brewing hiatus, I’ve been able to brew regularly lately. That is a good thing, because I’ll have another few weekends without brewing due to work obligations. Gotta build up the supply!

Beer Batch Updates

  • I brewed an American porter (Turtle Toes Porter) on September 11, roughly in the realm of Deschute’s Black Butte Porter. It has had a week of fermentation at 66°, and is now out at ambient to finish up.
  • I also brewed an American pale ale (Cascade Pale Ale II) on September 4, to celebrate the arrival of a bunch of this year’s Cascade hops from my dad. It’s a little more rich on the malt bill than many American pale ales, in that it has Maris Otter as the base, with a bit of Munich and crystal 40 to round things out. I kegged the beer the other day, and it’s currently carbonating.
  • Yesterday, I brewed a German pils (“Farke’s Best Pils”) using German-type hops that my dad grew, including Sterling, Hallertauer, and Saaz.

What’s On Tap?

  • “Mow the Damn Lawn, Farke,” is the light offering on tap, and I’m drinking through it fairly steadily. It’s a decent beer, but not really my favorite at the moment.
  • Raspberry Belgian 2021 is another light offering, and is delicious as usual. It’s surprisingly clear now, because I used the floating dip tube.
  • Byzantium IPA is my final brew on-tap, and it’s nearly gone. I’m quite enjoying it.

What’s Coming Up?

  • It’s perhaps a little later than planned, but I am definitely doing a hefeweizen next weekend. It will be a slightly modified rebrew of Humboldt’s Hefeweizen, which turned out so well last time!
  • In a few week’s, I will brew a clone of Ill-Tempered Gnome, a winter seasonal beer from Oakshire Brewing. It’s a curious winter seasonal, in that it doesn’t have any spices added–which was a selling point for me! I plan to brew it in early October, so that it has a month or two to condition before the holidays.

Other Notes

  • I made another batch of spicy brown mustard this weekend, because the last batch turned out so well. So well that it’s long gone! I more-or-less use a recipe from The Spruce Eats, except I only use whole brown mustard instead of whole yellow mustard.

Brew Year’s Resolutions 2021

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New Year, New Beer! I did fairly well in hitting most of my 2020 brewing resolutions, and I pushed my homebrew experience in some enjoyable new directions. This year is primarily about refinement–taking things I’ve done already, and working to perfect them or explore them in more detail.

  • Kveik.
    • I want to brew more with kveik. I had lots of fun exploring Hornindal from Omega, and will try out a few others this year, especially as the summer months hit. I’m particularly intrigued by Lutra and the concept of pseudo-lagers.
  • Pilsner.
    • I want to perfect my German pils recipes, especially with the local water. I’m feeling pretty good about the basics, but need to dial things down a bit in terms of bitterness and amp up the aroma and flavor aspects of hop character.
  • Big Beers in Small Batches.
    • I sometimes like sampling bigger beers, but I almost never want five gallons of them. As a result, I’ve done little brewing of many higher gravity styles, or more unusual styles. I aim to change this in 2021, with more 2.5 gallon batches. I’ve started a bit of this already (as mentioned in the December 2020 brew update)
  • Belgian Beers.
    • I like many Belgian beer styles, but I don’t love most of them enough to brew five gallons. As a corollary to the above resolution, I’m going to do some smaller batches of Belgian styles to explore that universe.

Follow-Up: 2020’s Brew Year’s Resolutions

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At the beginning of the past few years, I’ve set annual brewing goals. Now that we’re almost to the end of 2020, it seems like a good time to review my resolutions and see how it all went.

Alstadt Alt
  • Patience.
    • Recognizing that I often rushed my lagers into service quicker than is optimal, I planned my production so that each batch got a more extended lagering time. I did pretty well on this one. Most of my lagers got at least a month of cold conditioning before getting tapped, and in some cases even 5 or 6 weeks. I often felt another week or two of lagering might have been helpful, although the beers inevitably hit their full stride not long after going on tap. So, I count this one as a decent success.
    • Final Score: 7/10
  • Practice.
    • This was a two-part resolution.
      • Rebrew and perfect some favorites.
      • Explore North American “noble hops.”
        • I did pretty well here, also, with varieties like Crystal, Mt. Hood, Sterling, and others figuring prominently in my lagers and German ales (like the altbier depicted at right). Another succcess!
    • Final Score: 10/10
  • Prose.
    • At the start of 2020, I thought it might be fun to write another magazine article, or something similar. Then 2020 happened, and this one just had to go by the wayside. I got some good blogging in, but that’s about it.
    • Final Score: 2/10
  • Prost!
    • I had hoped to keep brewing fun…and, it really was. Even with everything else happening, brewing was a bright spot in my year. I couldn’t get together with friends in the same way, but I was able to arrange some socially distanced growler swaps for later enjoyment, and I got some good time in the early mornings while starting up brew sessions.
    • Final Score: 10/10

2020’s Homebrew Highlights

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2020 was…2020. With everything that happened, from the pandemic to presidential shenanigans, this was one of the odder brewing stretches I’ve had. My homebrewing hobby was a bit of a respite from 2020, giving me a chance to disconnect and relax. Almost as importantly, homebrewing meant I had a steady supply of fresh beer even when the store shelves were bare, or when I really didn’t want to run more errands than necessary!

Here are some of this year’s highlights:

Tremonia Lager
  • Favorite Batch
    • It was hard to pick just one favorite, but Tremonia Lager stands out. The perfect level of maltiness in my version made it incredibly enjoyable, and it was ridiculously drinkable at just shy of 5% abv. More, please! In fact, I have another batch lagering right now.
  • Least Favorite Batch
    • Nothing was a complete dumper (in sharp contrast with the dumper year of 2020), although I found that the Kveik Pale Ale was the most disappointing batch. I blame my hopping strategy, not the yeast.
  • Experimental Recipe with Most Potential
    • Kveik the Keg Brown Ale was lots of fun, and turned out surprisingly well. If I have Hornindal Kveik on hand in the future, I’ll likely do more in this flavor space.
  • Most Fun New Style/Recipe to Try
    • “Favorite Batch” Tremonia Lager also wins this category! It was a new-to-me style (Dortmunder Export, a.k.a., German Helles Exportbier), and I had a lot of fun figuring out the recipe.
  • Upcoming Beer With Most Potential
    • I’ve got a few beers in the fermenter or keg that are still waiting to be put on tap, including a German pils, that rebrew of Tremonia Lager, a Scottish-esque ale, and a double IPA (clone of Avery Brewing’s Maharaja IPA). They’re all full of promise, but the one I’m most excited for is “Off the Rails Belgian IPA”. It’s currently in its second week of fermentation, as an attempt at a clone of Houblon Chouffe. It’s a pretty high octane beer, well on target to hit around 10% abv. The batch is going to condition for awhile before being ready to serve, probably a month or two at least. I imagine that this is going to be a beer that I’ll finish fairly slowly, and may not even put it on tap at the main keezer, but will just pull off a glass now and then using a picnic tap.
  • Best Technique Added to Repertoire
    • A few months ago, I transitioned to electric brewing, which has enabled mash recirculation as well as easier step mashing. I’m still on the learning curve, but the curve is starting to flatten out a bit. The brew day rhythm is locking into place, and I’ve steadily gotten more efficient with each batch.
  • Best Ingredient Added to Repertoire
    • As mentioned above, kveik was a fun yeast space to play around in. I made three batches with it–a pale ale, a brown ale, and my holiday ale. It really does live up to the hype of fermenting cleanly and quickly.
  • Favorite Book(s)
  • Other Milestones
    • I’ switched entirely to stainless steel fermenters, after years of glass carboy use. Safety was a big concern, as well as ease of cleaning.
    • I had a lot of fun in the fermented foods realm, playing with some sauerkraut and other lacto-based items.
    • On the commercial beverage side, I’ve been sampling a variety of non-alcoholic options. They’re not a complete substitute for alcoholic beverages, but are a bit more interesting flavor-wise.
  • Overall Stats
    • I brewed 34 batches of beer this year, with around 160 gallons into kegs.
    • German Pils was my most frequently brewed style, with four batches. American pale ale followed, with three batches. American IPA, Dortmunder Export, Irish stout, and kölsch-style beers had two batches each. Lagers as a group comprised slightly more than a third of my overall brewing this year.
    • Overall beer strength was pretty middle-of-the-road, with a target starting gravity averaging 1.053 (median=1.048). My highest starting gravity was 1.105, for my homebrew club’s imperial stout barrel project. The lowest starting gravity was 1.031, for the Berliner Weisse.

Repurposing and Conserving CO2 During Kegging

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With the current recommendations and restrictions on leaving the house, I’m trying to conserve basic brewing necessities as much as possible. This includes propane and CO2–neither of which can be ordered online (and really don’t count as necessities in the same way that groceries do, so it’s hard to justify many extra trips out to get more).

Keg purging is one brewing task that’s non-essential but nice, in terms of long-term beer quality. By keg purging, I mean replacing the ambient atmosphere in a keg (the stuff we breathe) with CO2 from a tank, to greatly reduce oxygen concentrations and postpone noticeable oxidation in the beer. My usual procedure prior to kegging is to fill a keg with StarSan, and push it out using CO2 from my CO2 tank. This doesn’t use a ton of CO2, but it still does use some up that could go to other purposes.

The easiest CO2-conserving scenario is to go without a keg purge, which is my normal procedure anyhow for many “non-delicate” beers (e.g., porters and stouts). However, I’ve noted that lighter lagers, pilsners, and blonde ales do show noticeable oxidation effects within a month or two without a keg purge. In the “good old days” of sharing growlers and homebrew happy hours and such, I could finish a keg in 4 weeks or so. Now, I expect many kegs will stay on service longer, and so I want to extend the quality as much as I can. Keg purging is nice, if possible!

One option I’ve considered is to use sugar-based carbonation (wort-driven krausening or corn sugar), which should both eat up any latent oxygen and carbonate simultaneously. I’ll likely try that for some future beers (especially more robust, darker styles), but I worry about oxidation risk from adding the sugar and also leaving the beer at slightly higher temperatures to allow the yeast to carbonate more quickly. It’s not an ideal option for light lagers.

So, how might I purge kegs to avoid oxidation and simultaneously conserve precious CO2 from my tanks? Reuse CO2 from empty kegs!

When a keg in the keezer is drained of beer, it’s full of CO2 at serving pressure. Normally, I just bleed this off before cleaning the keg. Why not repurpose the gas?

So, I hooked up a jumper between the gas ports of the empty keg and a StarSan-filled keg (the latter being the one I’ll fill with fresh, uncarbonated beer). Before doing this, I let the empty keg warm up, to give a bit more gas volume (yay, physics). I put a picnic tap on the StarSan-filled keg, hooked up the gas, and let the empty keg push out the StarSan.

It worked like a charm! The transfer took around 10 minutes, but the whole keg got drained, with a bit of residual CO2 left over. No CO2 went to waste, and I ended up with a purged keg ready to fill with pilsner!

The keg setup for CO2 purge. The keg at lower right is empty and just moved out of the keezer. The keg at upper left is empty and filled with StarSan. The red line is pushing CO2, and the clearish-white line is moving the StarSan into a sanitation tub (for use sanitizing equipment).
The colored lines and arrows here show the path of the gas and liquid. The yellow arrows indicate the flow of CO2, and the red arrows indicate flow of the StarSan.