I took a pause both from brewing and keeping up with my notes. This batch I brewed the last week of December 2019. It was the eleventh batch of the Knob Creek barrel project.
Barrel participants all brewed different witbier recipes. Mine was a 22 gallon batch – one share each for me & Spencer, a bonus one for the angel’s share, and one to bottle and drink clean. Recipe:
For Thanksgiving 2013, I brewed my first Biere de Garde, after discovering the style and then reading Garrett Oliver’s suggestion that it’s the perfect pairing for the holiday feast. My brew was a hit. At Thanksgiving 2019, we drank the final bottle from that batch.
Friday we drank another final bottle that had been lurking in my cellar, an Eisbock brewed in 2013. Even as many obscure beer styles are pioneered or revitalized in the homebrewing community and then are taken to the public by mainstream craft breweries, Eisbock remains relatively unknown. I expect this is due to the fact that freeze-concentrating beer, at a production scale, would require specialized equipment that most breweries won’t acquire.
Then yesterday we drank the final bottle of a 2011 smoked porter (excellent) and one of the last few of a 2015 smoked porter (one-dimensional).
It may be a stretch to call homebrew art; I see it as more of a craft. Art or craft, it’s something that can only be experienced a finite number of times. The act of tasting it simultaneously depletes it.
A collaboration beer born from the local social network a2mi.social. George suggested a Black IPA; I had Centennial hops to use up so decided to brew “Black Hearted”, an improvised recipe loosely inspired by Bell’s Two-Hearted (though we also used a bunch of newer wave hops in addition to Centennial).
Easy brew day. For recent brews, I had the grain crushed at Adventures in Homebrewing and experienced a middling 70-75% brewhouse efficiency. Their mill is set to a cautious crush. For this brew, George crushed the grains quite fine and we fly sparged slooooowly, which I credit for the whopping 94% (!!) efficiency we experienced. (We did have a stuck mash but got out of it quickly). 94% is not out of the question: Kal, the creator of The Electric Brewery on which my system is modeled, claims to get a consistent 95% efficiency.
For Round 9 of the Knob Creek sour barrel project, we brewed a Berliner Weisse. This was the simplest recipe I’ve brewed: 60% Pilsner malt, 40% Wheat malt, 1.040 OG (our actual was more like 1.035). No hops: hops inhibit lactobacillus and there’s no hop character needed for the style.
Spencer and I brewed a quadruple batch (23 gallons) – this included an extra 5 gallons to be shared by the group, covering the angel’s share and making for fuller take-home portions. I thought I’d get by with reusing the yeast cake from a batch of cider; that failed to take off so I pitched a fresh packet of US-05.
I brewed my first Flanders Red – my first sour beer – in 2010. Other AABGers brewed sour beers but they weren’t yet commercially ubiquitous. I knew mine was good when in a head-to-head tasting it was plainly superior to Jolly Pumpkin’s La Roja.
In a stroke of beginner’s luck, that beer placed 1st out of over 1,000 entries at the 2012 Homebrew at the W.E.B. competition. I won a $1000 gift certificate, which I spent on the two kettles that are are the foundation of the brewing system I use today.
Coming full circle: this is my third Flanders Red, all using the same recipe. This time, instead of fermenting with my own microbial culture mix, I’ll be doing a clean ferment and adding it to the Knob Creek barrel (round 10!) along with my co-brewers.
The recipe was formulated by the AABG’s Jeff Rankert. Hard to see how the maize would be historical, but it should give non-yeast microbes more to chew on.
I started growing hops at my parents’ home in Chicago in 2008. In the summer of 2011 we moved them to Michigan and I built this trellis:
Now that it’s time for the trellis to find a new home, I’m writing up my design for posterity. Notable aspects include that it can be harvested without ascending a ladder and that the top is mounted on a tree.
Each of the three hop plants (Cascade, Mt. Hood, Centennial) has its own starting frame. It runs up the yellow chain for 5 feet, then starts climbing a line up into the trees:
Started with 5 gallons of juice from Plymouth Orchards, fermented (and left on the lees) for 2 years before tweaking what was a boring final product.
The cider itself was clean but dull before dry-hopping. To test the idea of dry-hopping, I’d pulled a 1 liter sample and added the equivalent of 4 oz Mosiac per 5 gallons. The result was fascinating, like a white wine with tropical fruit notes.
I’ve become inconsistent with taking final gravities, especially if the batch is many months old or is being stabilized. Here it’s both, and I never measured the FG. Let’s assume it’s 1.000 which would be an ABV of 6.5%.
Our AABG Knob Creek Barrel Project group decided to rebrew our Belgian Golden ale. This is our first re-brewing of a previous recipe and a testament to how good that beer was.
Brewed 2018-07-18. Yielded about 21 gallons at 1.071 OG, I was targeting more gallons at lower gravity but this was okay. I could always add water at the end of the brewday, but it feels wrong.
Recipe was shaped by the convenience of using a full bag of malt. It’s here on BrewToad. I omitted the CaraPils because I didn’t have any, but would recommend it if brewing again.
The recipe was as simple as it gets:
Had a boilover, doh.
Quick active fermentation. Racked about 16 gallons into the barrel a few weeks later, reserving one 5 gallon share to drink clean.
One participant in the barrel project wasn’t able to participate this round, so we covered his share by adding a carboy of 2-year-old Quadrupel ale I had lying around. It was too dull and boozy to drink and had become slightly oxidized. This will slightly boost the SRM of the combined beer and the other 90% of the fresh beer should cover up the oxidation notes.
I first created Zingibier, a “grand cru” style spiced Belgian ale, in 2010. With beginner’s luck, it won a gold medal in the 2010 National Homebrew Competition, and the recipe is featured on the American Homebrew Association’s website.
The beer is tough to categorize. It’s a strong (~8%) wheat beer that uses a Belgian Witbier yeast and spices typically associated with the Witbier style: coriander, bitter orange peel, and chamomile. It also packs a prominent ginger note, with the ginger sufficiently cooked as to not contribute heat.
This was my 6th time brewing the beer. The recipe was on Brewtoad (now defunct) and embedded as BeerXML (now not displaying). Luckily I grabbed a PDF copy before Brewtoad shutdown, though.
Or, “ode to the carbonator cap.”
A homebrewer friend recently brought a $200 TrailKeg to a club meeting. It is shiny and cool and … a thneed.
Instead, you should use a carbonator cap ($8* as of this writing) and some 1 or 2-liter plastic bottles (free after you drink the seltzer water). While TrailKeg claims superiority over the glass growler, the carbonator-cap-and-PET-bottle (PET = #1 plastic, i.e. a soda bottle) combo delivers in most of the same ways:
Here’s where they differ: