I’ve been able to get in a bit of brewing this past month during downtime, working through some of my ingredient stock and anticipating the kinds of styles I’ll want to drink over the summer. A perpetual problem is that I rarely have time to lager properly before a tap opens up, so I need to increase the frequency of my lager brew sessions!

Beer Batch Updates

• I kegged my “kitchen sink pale ale” on 30 May, adding dry hops and priming sugar at that time. I let the beer carbonate for around 10 days before putting it on tap. It was super hazy, almost cloudy, for the first day or two, but has dropped out a bit since then. It has a ways to go before it comes close to clear, something I’ve noticed previously with the Windsor and S-04 dry yeast strains. The yeasts have nice character, but do not flocculate anywhere nearly as well or as quickly as the manufacturers imply (in my experience).
• My Dortmunder Export Lager is in the keg, finishing out at 4.9% abv. I kegged it on 6 June 2020, and force carbonated at 33°. A week in, the flavor is really nice, bringing a good malt character without being overly heavy or cloying. It has a decent bit of haze still, so I added a dose of gelatin, anticipating that I’ll be serving the keg sooner than later. I would love to let my lagers condition for a longer stretch, but I just don’t brew often enough.
• The altbier is kegged (11 June 2020), and now carbonating with priming sugar. I hope to let it go another week or so before cold crashing. I might give it a shot of gelatin then, because I’ll likely have a tap slot opening up soon. The beer clocks in at 4.6% abv, and has a really nice flavor on my first tasting.
• I brewed a kölsch-style ale last weekend, trying a slightly different recipe from past iterations. I used 95% pilsner with 5% light Munich malt, Sterling hops, and K-97 dry yeast.
• Yesterday, I made an American amber ale, with a newly devised recipe. It was 70% 2-row and 15% light Munich malt, with crystal 80 and crystal 60 to add a caramel note as well as to use up my supply of those malts. I also had a dash of Carafa III for color adjustment, and Cascade as the solo hop.

What’s On Tap?

• Adalatherium Pale Ale
  • As described above, this was a quick pale ale to satisfy my hop needs.
• The Celtic Elk Stout 1.1
  • I’m almost at the end of this keg, and it still drinks really nice. The altbier will go on tap to replace this one.
• Alta California Lager 2020
  • This beer is nearly gone, also; it has clarified really well, and is a nice beer for hot afternoons.

What’s Coming Up?

• As noted last month, I’m pretty keen on doing a light (lite) American-style lager. I finally punched in the recipe for Annie Johnson’s famous “Mow the Damn Lawn,” and hope to brew it soon. I’ll be repitching the Que Bueno yeast I harvested from my Alta California Lager.
• I’m also thinking a new SMaSH pils, centered on Mt. Hood hops this time. It will be a standard German-style pils, and I’m hopeful I’ll have a little more time to lager it this round before it has to go on tap.
• To use up some ingredients, I’m going to do a Rye IPA (RyePA?) with a Pacific Northwest style hop bill.

Other Than Beer

• My lacto-fermented food projects have been doing pretty well. The carrot sticks I did were super tasty, and we just finished the jar last night. I’m also particularly pleased with my first batch of sauerkraut. It’s tart, crispy, and as good as anything I’ve gotten from the store. I started a second batch last weekend.
• The juniper syrup I made last month was pretty good, and I made a second batch with some adjustments. Specifically, I halved the sugar–the problem with many syrup recipes (or I guess the point of many syrup recipes) is that they have too much sugar, and so you end up too….well, syrupy…in many cases. I’ll need to up the acid a touch, to help it keep, but I’m getting closer to something that works for me. The current recipe is 3 tbs. juniper berries, 3 cardomom pods, 1 srig rosemary, and the peel of an orange, simmered in a cup of water with 1/2 cup sugar for 15 minutes. I let it steep in the fridge overnight, and then filter it out.
• Just for fun, I might try to make a pseudo-gin, by infusing vodka with various botanicals.

As mentioned last time, my brewing activity has slowed as we continue our general shut-down here in SoCal. Even so, I’ve managed to squeeze in a few sessions and enjoy some of my previously tapped kegs.

Beer Batch Updates

• I kegged my imperial stout for the homebrew club project on April 11, and sent it off for transfer to the club barrel (all done without in-person contact, of course!). The final gravity was 1.030, down from 1.105, for 10.2% abv, and I ended up with just a shade below 5 gallons. The flavor is quite rich, and the Belgian character of the yeast comes through nicely. I’ll be interested to see what it tastes like when barrel aged with everyone else’s contributions!
• I kegged my Schell’s Pils Clone on 4 April 2020 (using a purged keg and closed transfer), and it has a final gravity of 1.010 (for 5.7% abv). I saved the yeast culture for a future brew. I just moved the beer into the keezer (after a shade under two weeks lagering), because I had finished my kolsch and had an open tap. The beer really needs a little more time to condition, and should be quite a bit better in a week or two. It had a slightly harsh yeast edge to it during the first day or two on tap, and has improved dramatically since then. I’ve noticed this issue with WLP830 (White Labs’ German lager yeast) before, because it flocculates fairly slowly. The head and head retention on this beer are amazing! I can’t wait to see where it ends up when fully conditioned.
• Two weeks ago (April 4), I brewed this year’s batch of Alta California Lager. The 2020 edition is vastly simplified, using flaked corn instead of a cereal mash with grits. I also am using the Mexican lager yeast strain from Imperial (instead of the White Labs version), because that’s what was available at my local homebrew shop. After two weeks at 51°, I let it free-rise to 60° to finish up. I will likely keg it in another week or so (but am not in a particular rush).
• On Saturday, I spooled up my Celtic Elk Irish Stout, as a quick turn-around beer. I figure it will be ready to keg in around 10 days. As an experiment, I’m going to carbonate it in the keg with corn sugar, as a way to reduce the amount of CO2 gas I’m using.

What’s On Tap?

• Wildfire IPA. Since posting the tasting, this beer has continued to clarify, and the hops are really singing now. I love this recipe!
• Czech-Style Dark Lager. This is another great beer. I am enjoying it more and more as it continues to condition; I suppose it’s growing on me!
• Schell’s Pils Clone. As mentioned above, it’s got a little ways to go in terms of maturing. I’ll post a review once the beer is in prime shape.

What’s Coming Up?

• Within the next weekend or two, I’m going to do an altbier, with some of the yeast saved from my kolsch a few weeks back.
• I’m going to try something in the Dortmunder Export world, because it’s one of the few (?only) pale lagers that is okay with heavily mineralized water. I may try to reduce the carbonate load a bit with slaked lime, but that’s a topic for another post.

New Equipment

• I want to learn more about our tap water, and how it varies through the year. The annual test reports are handy, but they don’t tell me much about my water at-the-moment. I recently invested in the LaMotte water test kit, and have run the tests a few times already. Look for an upcoming blog post on the topic!

March has been an…interesting…month for brewing. I didn’t have much activity during the first half of the month due to busy weekends, and there hasn’t been much brewing during the second half due to a global pandemic. Nonetheless, there are a few newsy bits.

My brew club is doing a barrel project (planned prior to the pandemic-related closures), with a Russian imperial stout. Members are brewing 5 to 10 gallon batches, which will go into a 53 gallon Maker’s Mark barrel for extended aging. This is probably one of the biggest beers I’ve ever made, filling the entirety of my mash tun. The grist used nearly 27 pounds of grain, and target starting gravity was 1.110. I hit 1.105–not shabby at all! I brewed the beer on 23 February, and it took off with a very vigorous fermentation. This created a bit of a mess in my temperature-controlled chamber, so I added a blow-off tube. The beer was was at 1.030 when I checked gravity on 7 March. I agitated the fermenter at that time, to hopefully re-rouse any dormant yeast and knock back the last few percentage points. I don’t expect it to end up south of 1.025. Due to the current health crisis, it’s a bit up in the air when we’ll be able to get it all into the barrel, but we’re working out some ways to safely move the beer where it needs to be without gathering a bunch of people together. The good thing is that this beer won’t be too awfully hurt by sitting for awhile. That’s the point, after all!

My other brew for March was a rebrew of the Schell’s Pils Clone I did last year. This was one of my favorite pilsners, and I would love to have it on tap again! Plus, it fits nicely into my 2020 brewing goal of exploring more American equivalents of German hops. I brewed the beer on 7 March 2020, hitting a starting gravity of 1.053. It’s fermenting at 52°, and should be ready to keg soonish.

I still have my kölsch in the lagering chamber, and I kegged the Czech dark lager on 22 February 2020. Right now, I’ve got my red rye lager, Crystal pils, and Wildfire IPA on tap. All of them are drinking beautifully! It’s a shame I can’t more easily share them in the midst of social distancing restrictions…as a result, I’m not going through the beer as quickly as normal. This means a longer lagering time, which is perhaps the single silver lining to the current situation.

In the equipment upgrade realm, I’m now trying out the Clear Beer Draught System. This system replaces the dip tube in the keg with an intake that floats at the top of the liquid. The idea is that this area should typically have clearer beer than the stuff at the bottom of the keg where a normal dip tube would be. I will have a better idea of its efficacy in a month or two (the only beer on tap with it is my IPA, which has a giant hop load and thus is hazy by nature).

April will probably be pretty light in brewing. I’ve got an altbier and a weissbier on the horizon, but no formal brew date set yet. The former will reuse the yeast from my kölsch (which I have stored in the fridge), as a bit of an experiment. The latter will be a very quick turnaround, because the style is intended to be served quite fresh. Depending on events, their brew date may not even happen until May! There’s no rush…

Excitement at the brewery! I just got my first stainless steel fermenter, thanks to a clearance deal at my local homebrew shop*. The fermenter is nothing fancy, but the price was right and I have been meaning to start transitioning away from glass carboys in the name of safety and easier sanitation.

Since last report, I have had three brewing sessions, for a kölsch, a Czech dark lager, and an American IPA.

Kölsch is my homebrewing club’s March contest beer. I vacillated a bit on recipe design, but settled for a version without wheat, which supposedly better matches “typical” kölsch in Cologne. Pilsner malt makes up 2/3 of the grist, and kölsch malt (from Schill malting) makes up the remainder. I elected to run with American hops, swapping in Liberty instead of German varieties. It seems to be moving along pretty well, and I will keg it in a week or two before lagering until the contest.

The Czech dark lager is the inaugural batch for my new stainless steel fermenter. I’ve never brewed this style before, but wanted to try it as a dark lager option for the taps.

Finally, the American IPA is taken from a recipe in Homebrew Recipe Bible. It used some hop varieties I haven’t brewed with much (particularly Ahtanum, along with CTZ and Chinook), and some familiar favorites (Cascade, Amarillo, Centennial, and Simcoe). Although I’m fairly comfortable formulating an American IPA recipe, I think it’s good to sample some external recipes on occasion, to see what flavor combinations others like. It keeps me out of a rut!

In the lagering chamber, I have the German pils and red rye lager. I had a near disaster with that a few days back, when I shifted some things around and didn’t notice that the probe on my temperature controller had fallen out of the chamber. The result was an overnight freeze of the kegs! Luckily, the damage seems to be minimal, and I thawed them out over a day or two. One interesting phenomenon–as the beers thawed, they stratified heavily, forming a sort of eisbock. Unfortunately, it meant I had to agitate the kegs a bit to remix the beer, setting back a week of quiet lagering. Hopefully the haze will continue to settle before I serve. When I tasted the beers following thawing (and after agitation), I didn’t notice any major flavor damage. I normally tape the temperature probe in place on a fermenter (to make sure the fermenter temperature is accurately measured), but leave it loose when lagering in the keg. I learned a valuable lesson–find some way to secure the temperature probe inside my lagering chambers!

Right now, I have a festbier, a session porter, and a pale ale on tap. It fits my tap philosophy well, of having something lighter, something darker, and something hoppier on tap at all times.

*If you’re in the San Dimas area, Pacific Brewing Supplies is an awesome, family-run (and family-friendly) business. They have a broad, well-stocked inventory, and the owners are super knowledgeable.

Awhile back, I changed my blogging habits to condense each batch into a single post, rather than split across multiple updates. Some of this was to save time, and some of this was to make it easier to find the full story on a particular batch later on. I’ve (personally) liked this switch overall, but feel that it also can lead to a drought in posting.

So, I’m introducing a new, occasional series–“What’s Brewing?” These will be quick, informal posts to highlight planned batches, currently fermenting batches, and other bits that don’t quite warrant a full write-up.

What’s Brewing? January 2020 Edition

Over the holidays, I brewed up a storm! I’ve been doing a ton of lagers, and hope to have enough backlog that I can let some of them condition for a good stretch of time.

December kicked off with a festbier, which is now lagering in the keg. I brewed it as a fairly traditional version of the style. I followed that up with a German pils, but made with American pilsner malt (from Great Western) and Crystal hops. This one got the double decoction treatment, as I work on perfecting that technique. Finally, I did a rebrew of my Red Rye Lager, an American-style amber lager made with California common yeast (in this case, Imperial Yeasts Cablecar version). The nice thing on the latter is that it’s cool enough that I can just ferment it at ambient, without having to tie up fermentation chamber space!

With so many lagers in production, I was a bit worried about taps sitting vacant while I waited for beers to ferment and condition. So, I kicked off 2020 with two quick-and-dirty kitchen sink brews. One was an English-style porter, the other an American(ish) pale ale. I took some shortcuts with ingredients, using up odds-and-ends that were on hand. I also adopted the “Short & Shoddy” format of Brulosophy, with abbreviated, 30 minute full-volume mashes and 30 minute boils. Those batches should be ready to keg in a few days.

Over the break, I did a full cleaning of my keezer lines. On tap, I currently have my ESB, the smoked Scottish ale, and a cider. The Scottish ale has cleared up and conditioned beautifully, and has been absolutely enjoyable. My cider was made with Treetop brand Honeycrisp apple juice from the shelf and Mangrove Jack cider yeast. It’s dry, hazy, and perfect for winter evenings. Both the Scottish ale and cider are in 2.5 gallon kegs, and will probably get kicked pretty soon. I’m aiming to have the Short & Shoddy porter and pale ale ready to go in their place.