Our First 'Real' Bad Batch and Our New Toy

Ok, yes. We've had one or two less than tasty beers before, but those were still drinkable. Drinkable in the sense that if you got people drunk first on good beer then they didn't notice the nastiness of the bad beer. Anyways, something went terribly wrong on our last batch and we had to pour out 10 gallons of it. What a sad day. We think the problem had to do with the yeast we used since we tried re-using our yeast for the first time ever. Yeast looked good but looks can be deceiving I suppose. As sad as it was it was kind of neat to see 10 gallons of beer swirling down our drain...hopefully we won't have to do that any time soon again.



On a lighter side we now have a kickass keggerator. James and I have talked for quite sometime about converting our chest freezer into a keggerator and finally got around to it this past week. We now have the capability to have 5 different beers on tap. Sadly all that is on tap right now is PBR (hey, it's the cheapest keg greens had and we just wanted to make sure everything worked) but that will change soon. Beer on tap has already started to cut into my productivity...

We Have Moved!

The brewery has officially moved to its new location in Reynoldstown. We are now located just south of Little 5 Points off of Moreland Ave at my new house. After staying up late on our second try at a 10 gallon batch of IPA, we got up early and transported everything to its new home.

Brewing the IPA turned out to be a success, not only because we had another smooth brewing session but because we attracted our first crowd. We had about 10 friends come over to drink some beer and take in the brewing process. It made brewing much more enjoyable and we hope to continue these gatherings in the future.

Starters and Oxygen

Now that we have a couple successful batches under our belts we have begun to move onto some more 'advanced' brewing techniques. Now 'advanced' is in quotes because, well, they aren't really 'advanced.' These are things that we should have probably been doing from the start that we are just now figuring out.

This past weekend doing a 5 gallon Amber Ale we used a yeast starter for the first time. A yeast starter is pretty much just a mini sized batch of beer that is used to generate more yeast cells. I made about a 1 quart starter 3 days before our brew day. It was neat watching the little batch go through all the steps very quickly. Almost immediately after pitching the yeast into the starter I began to see activity with a large amount of krausen forming for about a 15 hours. After that the krausen died down but the airlock was still bubbling along. Anyways, y'all don't care about the specifics. All you need to know is that we grew a lot of yeast.

Another thing that we did differently this time was to use pure oxygen from a welding canister to oxygenate our wort. For the past 6 batches we had just been shaking a 5 gallon glass carboy to oxygenate it. 5 gallons of beer = ~40lbs. Needless to say that is a huge pain in the ass. Now all we had to do was dip our diffusion stone into the carboy and turn on the O2 for about 30 seconds. Much easier.

By using a yeast starter and the pure O2 our 5 gallon batch began fermenting within 4 hours. We have come a long way since our first batch where it took almost 40 hours to see the first bubbles from fermentation.

Radiohead

Oh, what a fun concert. Make sure to ask James about it, he'll tell you everything (haha...yeah right). We tailgated in style before the concert with 5 gallons of a California Common (similar to Anchor Steam). This beer was by far our best so far. It was also a very drinkable beer as opposed to some of the earlier Ale's that we have brewed.

Everyone that tried the beer said it was delicious. Maybe they were just being nice, but I'd like to think that they really enjoyed it. Only a handful of us managed to knock back almost all 5 gallons in a matter of a couple of hours. Our set-up looked awesome too. We caught lots of people staring at our keg and giant CO2 tank wondering what was going on. They were all jealous of us not having to pump our beer, which is really awesome by the way.

This was just the first of many amazing tailgates to come with our beer. There are currently plans in the works for a rolling street trash can that will have four faucets complete with big ass handles. We're talking a rolling bar here folks. 20 gallons of beer and a CO2 tank all on wheels. I can't wait for this fall. We shall be the Kings of the Tailgate.

The horror!

At least this guy is making the best out of a bad situation. Still, this is a sad sight.

Interesting article, "Beer battle brewing in Alabama"

This article really makes me glad that I don't live in Alabama. Apparently it is still against the law to brew beer in Alabama...yeah, wtf. You also can't buy beers that have higher than a 6% ABV. again, wtf. I honestly don't know what the last beer I drank that was less than 6% ABV. Just last week James and I (and Steve) were tasting dozens and dozens of beers at the Classic City Brew Fest that were higher than 10% ABV.

I know we are all in the bible belt down here, but even so, I can't believe that this law is still on the books. Their (the bible beaters) main argument against high gravity beers is that it will endanger teenagers and make it easier for them to get drunk. Really. Ok everyone, play along with me. Can you remember the first beer you ever had. Mine must have been a Bud Light or Miller Lite and I hated it. How could anyone enjoy such a disgusting drink was my initial reaction. It took me years of hard work to gain the appreciation for a fine brew that I currently enjoy. I'm guessing most people had a similar experience. Somehow though, these Alabama lawmakers think teens are going to be going out and spending 4 or 5 times the cost of Bud/Miller to buy a high grav beer. I think not. Although I do think it would be funny watching some 16 year old guys try and funnel a barleywine, but that just wont ever happen.

Well, I guess its just one more reason to add to the list of why we are glad that we don't live in Alabama.

Stuff White People Like

Link to: Stuff White People Like - Microbreweries

Apparently our quest to make our own beer makes us like a lot of other white people. I am currently looking for a house to buy so we can further our quest to brew the perfect beer. Driving to my parents house is not the perfect situation to be able to brew on a regular schedule and we have not been able to make as much beer we would have liked to lately. Once we find a permanent place to set up the brewery then we will expect to have a lot more friends come out and experience beer in it purest form.

Brewing up Trouble

Brewing up Trouble, it's not only a catchy blog title, but also a catchy team name. Thats right...a team name. James and I will be competing in the Atlanta City Chase under that team name and we are going to win. If you don't know what that is (I didn't know what it was 3 days ago) then google it. It happens May 17th and like I said, we're going to win.

Anyways, that is all completely beside the point. The main point of this post is to tell everyone how awesome we are. Today we brewed our first 10 gallon batch with the help of Kellie C (if it sucks its her fault). The recipe we tried is supposed to be an IPA...but it actually didn't call for dry hopping, so I'm not sure how they can call it an IPA at all, but whatever. It might not even taste like an IPA at all since we changed almost every ingredient called for in the recipe. We didn't have the bittering hops the recipe called for, so we made a substitution. I was so proud of myself for figuring out the math (turned out that it wasn't that hard actually) to figure out the equivalent AAUs (Alpha Acidic Units) for the new hops that I completely forgot to double the hops since the recipe was for 5 gallons and we were brewing 10 gallons. Not entirely my fault, James didn't catch it either.

Well, we realized about 30 minutes into the boil that we (I) messed up, so we made the addition then. Shouldn't mess things up too badly...it probably just won't be very bitter at all and will taste extra sweet. We also decided to use Cascade hops as our finishing hops rather than the England Kent Goldings the recipe called for. So at the end of the day we had completely changed the recipe which means that we actually made our own recipe. Fingers crossed that it turns out delicious.

In other brewing news our second batch tastes much better than our first batch. We also have sort of figured out how to carbonate the beer correctly...we think.

This time brewing went much smoother than all the other times. I was ready to quit brewing already after the last time I brewed, but thankfully that was just due to the flu/being hung over. I think we all enjoyed ourselves today.

Finally!

I was finally able to try our beer today. Petra was nice enough to bring me a bottle back from Atlanta. I'll admit that I was a little nervous about tasting it, but really its not bad. Not bad at all. Yeah, it was almost completely flat (James hasn't quite figured out the carbonation yet), but if I ordered it in a bar I honestly wouldn't be disappointed (except for the whole lack of carbonation thing). Hell, I'd pay 3 dollars for it, easy.

Hopefully we can get the CO2 stuff figured out. I think that with the right amount of carbonation it would have been a damned tasty beer.

Four weeks ago I would have never believed that we could have made a beer from scratch that actually tasted like beer. We did it though...go us.

Tastings and New Assistant Brewer

This has been a somewhat eventful week of brewing. I am living at the "Brewery" (aka my parent's house) while my folks are on vacation and decided it was time for more beer.

On Wednesday, I took another trip to Atlanta Brewing Company with Steve and Blakely to get some expert opinions on our first batch and received good reviews from Chris. Our friends from last time weren't there, so I left a bottle for them to try. We will see...

Also, I made another trip to "Brew Depot" to get some new ingredients and to hear Mike and Bob's opinion on our ale. They both agreed that it came out well and had good flavor but was defiantly not an American Pale Ale, but more like a Red Ale. At least it tasted like beer!

I decided to try a brown ale next and was assisted by Kellie G., as Ben was busy drinking at a lake house... Mike wrote me a recipe using the hops we already had, but I didn't realize that the hops I planned on using had turned brown and were probably were not good. So, I improvised and substituted some other hops we had on the prayer that they will work well with the style and not suck. Again, I changed the configuration of our brewery and think everything went very well. For the first time, we used the grain mill and crushed our own grain. Next, we hit our mash temps perfectly and barely any grain came out of the mash tun. Even the sparging went great. As chaotic everything probably seemed to Kellie, it actually went well. We even tried a great new cask aged brown ale from Dogfish head: Palo Santo Marron It was excellent.

Serving: Beer (Its the first batch, I won't try to categorize it)
Carbonating: American Pale Ale
In the Fermenter: Brown Ale
Next up: Any Suggestions???


BTW: Ben still hasn't tried the first batch and it's been kegged for 2 weeks. Where is the dedication?