Mai-Bock

I find that I too often brew ales. There is so much variety when it comes to them that you could probably spend your whole life brewing them before you ran out of new things to try. However, in order to be a bit more well rounded one should at least occasionally brew a lager. Lager yeast ferment very cleanly and without all the esters and other compounds produced by ale yeast allowing your malt profile comes through much clearer. This allows you, in my opinion, to get a better grasp on how your malt choices are really affecting the beer.

Since it is spring time, and the month of May is coming up, I decided to brew a Mai-Bock (May Bock). I wanted it to be a refreshing and crisp beer that would remind the drinker of the season. Here is my recipe, but first a quick note on the batch size, I only have a 5 gallon and a 3 gallon fermenter (better bottles) that can fit into my mini fridge, for that reason all of my lagers have to be brewed in a 3.5 gallon size so that I can fill the 3 gallon fermenter I use for secondary to the brim.

3/31 Mai Bock
Brewed with Andrew

3.5 Gallons
OG- 1.040
FG- 1.015
IBU- 28

1 pound Vienna
1 pound Munich
1 pound Malted Rye
1 pound Carapils
4 pounds American 2-Row

Single step infusion 2 quarts/pound 152 F for 1 hour
Batch sparged with 176 F water 30 minutes

Hallertau pellets 7.9% AA, 0.25 oz, 60 minutes
Hallertau pellets 7.9% AA, 0.25 oz, 45 minutes
Tettnang pellets, 4.8% AA, 0.50 oz, 25 minutes
Tettnang pellets, 4.8% AA, 0.25 oz, 10 minutes

1/8 oz coriander added 5 minutes before flame out

Fermented 55 F

4/16 gravity 1.015
4/29 gravity 1.015 Bottled with 1.4 oz table sugar

5/24 Tasting

Appearance: Straw yellow- golden in color. Not much head and carbonation appears to be a little low. There are a good number of bubbles rising from the bottom of the glass. The head lingers as a lace around the rim of the glass.

Aroma: Nice malt aromas, very clean. No aroma at all from the yeast. A slight hop spice appears in the background.

Taste: Crisp and sweet. Starts off a little sweet with a nice silky mouthfeel, really coats the whole mouth before it finishes with a crisp bite.

Overall: I think this was a solid attempt at brewing a Mai-Bock. I would have liked a little more alcohol and the beer to be drier. That being said it is incredibly drinkable and it is going to be gone fast! We added coriander at the last minute hoping to give the beer some citrus aroma to make it more refreshing, it did not really come through but certainly did not take anything away from the beer.

Yeast Starter

Making a yeast starter is a necessary skill for someone who wants to brew beer. A yeast starter takes either a small quantity of yeast and grows it to the volume needed to ferment a batch of beer or takes a culture of yeast that is not healthy enough to brew a batch of beer and produces new cells that will be able to ferment the beer, or both.

In order to create a yeast starter you will need a few basic things...

1. Dry Malt Extract
2. A sterile vessel 
3. Tinfoil
4. A stir plate (not essential)
5. Yeast
6. A sterile toothpick of inoculation loop
7. Scale

Directions...

1. The first step is to make a wort that is about 1.040 gravity. This is easy to do using Dry Malt Extract, simply add 1 oz of Dry Malt Extract for every cup of water. 
2.  Boil the wort to sanitize it
3. Sanitize the inoculation loop and whatever you will be growing the yeast in
4. Add the wort to the vessel and place tinfoil over the top, allow the wort to cool to 80 F
5. Add the yeast, using sterile practices, to the wort (you will only need a very small amount of yeast, a few colonies will do)
1. If you have a packet from Wyeast or a tube from White Labs you can add the whole tube 
6. If you have a stir plate available to you you can place the vessel on the stir plate in order to promote propagation. If you do not you should pick up and swirl the vessel as often as you can in order to keep it oxygenated.

The only tough decision is how much of a starter to make. If you are using a tube or packet from a commercial yeast producer you probably want to use a quart of wort. If you are picking single colonies you will only need 2 cups of starter (that you can then step up to a quart if you would like). I like to place my starters in the fridge after they have grown for 2 days in order to make the yeast fall to the bottom. I can then pour off the majority of the liquid and add only the yeast to the beer. A starter is good for a week in the fridge before you need to think about starting over.

Wild Brewing: Update 1

So far we have raised just a little under $1000!

Thanks to all of our sponsors!

We still have a ways to go and anything (even 5 bucks) goes a long way to helping us reach our goal!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/498841754/wild-brewing?ref=home_location

Raspberry Wheat: Red 57

For my dad's 57th birthday I decided instead of getting him a gift I would teach him how to brew beer. It was a great opportunity to both share time with him and make him a gift that he would enjoy. We kicked around a couple of ideas and decided to brew a raspberry wheat beer. The recipe is easy to follow, simple, and turned out excellent. The beer was so tasty I submitted it in the 2012 National Homebrewing Competition.

Brewed 12.17.2011

Grain:
5.5 pounds American Wheat
5.5 pounds American 2-Row

Hops:
1 oz Hallertau 60 minutes (4.4% AA)
0.5 oz Saaz 10 minutes (4.3% AA)

Yeast:
1 and 1/2 packets Safale US-05

Mash:
3 gallons at 150 F
Sparged 3.5 gallons @ 180 F

Original Gravity 1.052
Original Volume ~4 gallons

12/24
Gravity at 1.020, racked beer into a 5 gallon corny keg and added 60 oz of frozen sugared raspberries. (Needed to purge keg twice daily to keep pressure in check)

01/2
Botteled ~4 gallons with 3oz of table sugar

Tasting 5/7/2012

Appearance: The beer pours a magnificent pink red color that gives away the raspberries as soon as it comes out the of bottle. The carbonation is a little high and champagne like. It causes little bubbles to constantly be surging to the top of the beer. The head is pink and stable through the entire glass.

Aroma: Raspberries! The berries cover up any hop aroma and there is only a little malt aroma detectable.

Taste: The beer is sweet to start but finishes with a bit of a pucker from the raspberries, this is aided by the high level of carbonation. The berries really come through in the flavor of the beer.

Overall: This is an awesome beer. It turned out wonderful and there is very little I would change about it. Maybe dial back the bottling sugar or allow it to sit in the secondary longer to make sure there is no residual sugar. Although this beer is a little girly it makes a wonderful summer treat.

5/9/2012
Got the score back from the National Homebrewing competition. The beer scored a 31, which equates to a very good.I am pretty proud of my first submission and will be brewing this beer again (with my dad) for competition with the above changes to the recipe. Hopefully we can bring home a medal with it some day!

Wild Brewing

I am very excited to announce a new project! Along with two of my good friends I plan to brew a set of four sour beers. The plan is to brew 55 gallon batches that will be aged in used wine barrels. The resulting beers will be released to the public at tasting events in Colorado. The events will be held free of charge and are meant to raise awareness of this style of beer. In order for this to work my friends and I need to raise money to buy the barrels, grain, bottles, and a few pieces of larger brewing equipment. If you are at all interested please check out our KickStarter site and consider helping us fund this project!

Yeast Basics

Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewers and bakers yeast) has long played a part in human society. It has allowed humanity to create alcoholic beverages and baked goods. The Latin name Saccharomyces means "sugar fungus", crediting this yeast with its ability to chew through large amounts of glucose and maltose. The second part of the name, Cerevisiae (think cerveza in Spanish) is Latin for beer. Another name for this same yeast is "budding yeast" commenting on the way in which it reproduces.

In order to understand how yeast is working in your beer you need to understand their life cycle. Yeast are a single celled fungus that reproduces asexually (most of the time). When yeast are reproducing asexually they are not sharing any genetic material with other yeast. This makes all yeast in a given culture identical to each other (essentially clones). Yeast reproduce through a process known as budding (hence the name budding yeast). In order to do this a yeast cell, known as the mother yeast, grows a bud that enlarges until DNA can be moved into it and it matures enough to split off from the mother cell. The newly created cell is known as the daughter cell.

This is a light microscope photo of budding yeast. The nucleus of each cell is highlighted in blue. Cells boxed in green are not currently budding. Cells boxed in red have a daughter cell beginning to bud off of them.

Yeast are able to grow in both the presence and absence of oxygen. However, oxygen is needed for yeast to create sterols which are used in the creation of the yeast cell wall (basically). Without enough oxygen present yeast will soon stop reproducing but will continue to eat available sugars. For this reasons yeast are cultured in the presence of oxygen.

Although maltose is the predominant sugar in wort it is not the only sugar available to yeast or the only sugar that yeast are able to metabolize. Budding yeast are also able to consume glucose, trehalose, fructose, and galactose.As yeast are breaking down sugars for energy they produce alcohol, carbon dioxide, and a myriad of other compounds such as esters and phenols (flavor and aroma compounds).

It is the job of any good brewer to create and maintain a happy yeast culture so that the yeast can go about their business in the wort. In order to accomplish this task the brewer needs to provide yeast with not only sugars and oxygen, but also a nitrogen source, vitamins, phosphorus, and some trace metals. Fortunately almost all of these compounds are present in wort if it is made from barley. All that the brewer needs to do is add oxygen and zinc (which is not present in high enough amounts in barley). A brewer could go their whole carrier without adding zinc and everything would be fine. However, if the same yeast is used again and again they will eventually begin to suffer from a lack of zinc. For this reason I add a small amount of yeast nutrients to my wort (I have also had success with adding a 1/4 cup of old yeast slurry to my wort at the beginning of the boil. These old dead yeast have the trace metals and vitamins that I am interested in and by boiling them I break them open allowing those compounds to be added to the wort).

What the basic brewer needs to known about adding yeast to a beer is...

1. How much yeast to add
2. When to add the yeast
3. How to control fermentation
4. At what point fermentation has ended

Anything beyond this can be saved for another day.

1) How much yeast to add: An ale needs fewer yeast cells than a lager, about 0.75 million cells per milliter of wort per degree Plato. A lager is going to need more like 1.25 million cells. Although this may sound very complicated most of the yeast cultures that you buy are going to have an appropriate amount of cells for a 5 gallon batch. If you are brewing something that is really high in gravity or larger than 5 gallons you are going to need to grow up additional yeast.

2) When to add the yeast: This is simple, add the yeast at a temperature lower than 80 (ale) or lower than 65 (lager). Although yeast can survive at 100 F very easily you do not want to stress them out before they begin their big job. You can also choose to add your yeast when the wort has reached the temperature at which you want to ferment it (say 72 F for an ale).

3) How to control fermentation: There is a lot of activity going on during fermentation, and the yeast are producing a large amount of heat. It is important to make sure that they are fermenting at an appropriate temperature, which  often means cooling them down. Otherwise you may get some unintended by-products of fermentation (aroma and flavor compounds that you did not want).

4) At what point fermentation has ended: This may seem very easy, when it stops bubbling right? Wrong. When yeast have finished eating the sugars they go back and clean up some of the other compounds left in the wort. If you bottle the beer before the yeast clean it up off flavors will be present. Make sure the yeast have had time to do their job (~10 days for ale ~21 days for a lager).

This is about all 1 post can handle. I will address how to culture yeast and some other details on yeast in following posts.

Getting Started: Moving Past the Basics

Now that you have a couple of beers under your belt you are ready to move onto something a little more complicated. The first things that I would suggest is going and picking up a secondary fermentor. This time you want to go big and not just buy another bucket. Pick up either a 5 gallon glass carboy or a plastic one. You are going to be using it for the next brew you make. I think it is also time to introduce a couple of new concepts and allow you to do some recipe manipulation. I want to cover with you the following...

Gravity Calculations
IBU Calculations
Hop Scheduling
BU:GU

Once again, you can take any recipe you want to use for your next beer but I am going to give directions for making an American Ale. I am going to allow you to manipulate the hop schedule and the gravity of the beer to make anything from an American Pale Ale to a Double IPA. First we need to cover those previously mentioned items.

When I start out designing a recipe (a topic for latter discussion) I first ask myself what style I want to brew. Once I have picked that out I look at the style guidelines to get a good idea of what a normal beer in that style would be like. Anything fancy needs to be saved for a latter date.

Since we are going to be using an American Pale Ale as our base I would scroll down to page 12 and look at the vital statistics that are listed.

Vital Statistics:           OG: 1.045 – 1.060
IBUs: 30 – 45              FG: 1.010 – 1.015
SRM: 5 – 14               ABV: 4.5 – 6.2%

This table gives me all the information that I need to get started. The IBUs are the amount of International Bittering Units in the Beer. SRM gives me an indication of the color of the beer. OG is the Original Gravity of the beer, basically how much sugar was in the beer to start. FG is the final gravity, how much sugar was left after the beer was done fermenting. ABV is, as we all know, the Alcohol By Volume of the beer.

Next I decide what I want my OG to be, I am shooting for something that will make a nice summer beer so I am going to stay on the low side at 1.050. I use that number to calculate how much sugar I am going to need to add. For that I figure out how many units of gravity are added from each pound of Liquid Malt Extract (0.038 G/pound/gallon). I want a starting Gravity of 1.050 for my 5 gallons of beer. In order to make the math easier I am going to use just the Gravity units, which is just the number after the 1, in this case 50 Gravity units (1.112 would be 112 Gravity units). However, I need 50 gravity units per gallon of beer, since I am making 5 gallons I really need (50 G x 5) 250 Gravity units. The math for how many pounds of Liquid Malt Extract I need looks like this....

250=(Gravity units provided by 1 pound of Liquid Malt Extract) x (Pounds of Liquid Malt Extract needed)
250= 38 x X
solve for X
X=250/38
X=  6.57 pounds of Liquid Malt Extract

Now that I know how much extract I need, I want to figure out how much hops I am going to need. But first I have to figure out what type of hops that I want in the beer and when to add them. It turns out that boiling hops for different amounts of time changes what they do to the beer (Also a topic for another day). Basically hops boiled for 60 minutes add bitterness, boiling hops for 30 minutes adds more of a bitter flavor, and boiling hops for 0-15 minutes adds aroma (this is a huge oversimplification but be patient). There is also a fourth time slot option, dry hopping, in which the hops are soaked in the beer post fermentation to impart aroma.

Using this information and the style guidelines I can create a hopping schedule for my beer. From the vital statistics, "Usually a moderate to high hop flavor, often showing a citrusy American hop character". Right of the bat I know what type of hops to stick with, American, you can read through a hop variety guide to figure out what you would like to add to get that citrus flavor or look on a breweries website and see what type of hops are used in your favorite America Pale Ale. I am going to use Magnum, Perle, and Cascade. Based on what these hops are most often used for and the information provided on them I am going to use Magnum to bitter the beer, Perle for taste, and Cascade for Aroma.

Now comes the hard part, I need to figure out how much of the hops to add and when. I like to get about 70% of the bitterness from my first "charge" of hops, that would be the 60 minute boil. I first decide how much bitterness I want, I like bitter beer so I am going to shoot for 40 IBUs. If I want to get 70% of the bitterness from my first charge I calculate that I need 28 IBUs from that charge (40 IBUs x 0.7). On every bag of hops in the AA% (Alpha Acid % (Alpha Acids are the bittering compound)), this tells me how much bitterness this packet of hops offers in every ounce. To calculate how many ounces I use the following equation...

IBU = (weight oz x % Alpha Acids) x U x 75 / Vrecipe

Where U is the utilization factor (This changes based on the Gravity of the boiling beer and the time in the boiling beer, a chart can be found here)

and Vreipe is the total volume when the beer is finished (include water you will be adding latter, so 5 gallons for us)

Or I could just use this calculator for IBUs

I am going to repeat the same procedure for the Perle hops and Cascade, which I will be using for flavor and aroma. I want to get 25% of the IBUs from the second charge at 30 minutes (flavor) and the remaining 5% from the final charge at 10 minutes (aroma).

The final thing you need is something to up the color of the beer a little bit, for this you can use about 0.5 pounds of a lighter colored grain for steeping, say 60 L caramel.

Now that I have figure out my hop schedule and how much sugar to add I am ready to brew my beer. All that I need to do is pick up the ingredients and some yeast. If I want to adjust this recipe here is how I would do it. Say I want my beer to be more or less bitter, adjust the IBUs. Say I want more alcohol, adjust the Original Gravity (However, yeast can only eat about 75% of the sugars so if I up the ABV it is going to translate into a sweeter beer due to a higher FG). If I want to make an IPA I would up both amounts. You can also play around with color by adjusting the steeping grain. The key here is a concept created by Ray Daniels in his book Designing Great Beers. He talks about the BU:GU ratio, which is the Bitterness:Gravity ratio. By changing this ratio I can control if I am making a Pale Ale or an India Pale Ale.

That is a ton of information for one post. I started a number of topics here that need to be talked about in more depth but I will do that latter, if all you wanted was a recipe for an American Pale Ale, here you go.