Saturday Home Brewing

Ska's True blonde

This Saturday, along with a very interesting night of drinking Four Loko with good friends, I also made a batch of homebrew beer. I was originally shooting for a "Black IPA", but those plans were quickly thwarted due to the lack of ingredients at my local homebrew store. I typically order all my homebrewing supplies from this place out of Austin Texas called "AustinHomebrew.com". Unfortunately, I was too busy this past week to order my supplies and had to get my homebrew ingredients from "Worms Way", the homebrew store around the corner from my house. Actually, Worms Way is primarily a Hydroponic store, but they also carry enough homebrew ingredients to make some decent beers if you want to brew in a pinch. In this case however, they did not carry enough roasted and dark grains to make a "Black" IPA. So as a compromise, I decided to make a "brown" IPA!

I have never made a Brown IPA, so as a reference I began looking up recipes on-line for clones of my favorite Brown IPA, Dogfish Head's "Indian Brown Ale". Most of the hops were unavailable at Worms Way and the grain bill was composed of Liquid Malt Extract of unknown origins and quantities that I was unable to purchase. As an aside, I am by no stretch of the imagination, a professional beer brewer, but I prefer to make my beer using the "all-grain" method of brewing. All-grain gives you much finer control of the end product than using Liquid Malt Extract and is way more fun than just dumping in some sticky syrup and calling that brewing. Anyway, the grain bill in this recipe was virtually unobtainable and so I had to improvise!

Kettle steeping the grains

My "go-to" beer when I want to brew something with ingredients from worms way, is a standard dry hopped Pale Ale that I actually like quite a bit. I figured I could use the grain base from that beer and just darken it a little bit to bring out the color and flavor I wanted.

The grain bill for the 5 gallon batch of beer is as follows:
8lbs 2 Row
1lb 6 Row

Not a drop remained of the beer made by Dave Morales!

1lb 90L Crystal Malt
1lb Cara Pils Malt
0.5 lb Chocolate Malt

I also needed some hops for this beer which follows:
60min 1oz Kent Golding
30min 1oz Kent Golding
20min 1oz Wilamette
5min 1oz Cascade

and I used Wyeast's American Ale yeast for the fermenting.

I suppose I should just start from the beginning, since I am sure some of my readers are unfamiliar with what is involved with brewing beer. Beer is four things 1) Water 2) Grain 3) Hops and 4) Yeast. Any other flavorings such as fruit or spices are not required to make beer; and in my opinion can sometimes ruin a good beer!

The actual process of brewing consists of 4 phases. 1) conversion of starches to sugars 2) boiling of the liquid and addition of hops 3) cooling the liquid and 4) fermentation. For the average homebrewer, these 4 steps can be completed in about 4-6 hours (with the exception of fermentation which takes about 2 weeks to complete but requires no other energy out side of waiting for your beer to finish).

Here is what went down for today's batch of beer!
Step 1) Conversion of starches to sugars:
All grains were put into a grain bag and placed in 5 gallons of cold, filtered water. This mixture was placed on the stove and allowed to come up to 150 degrees F. After reaching 150 degrees, I stared a Timer for 45 minutes. You want the grains to steep at 150-160 degrees for the entire 45 minutes never allowing the mixture to get above or below those temperatures. After the 45 minutes are up, I move the pot outside, where I have an industrialized size propane burner for boiling my wort (beer, before it is actually beer, is actually called wort (pronounced wert)).

Step 2) Boiling and Hop additions:

My homebrew in the Carboy

I put the spurs to my propane burner and waited about 10-15 minutes for my wort to come to a boil. Boiling is a sensitive time. You must be careful to not boil too hard otherwise everything will boil out of the kettle. The process of boiling only takes 1 hour. So as soon as I saw the first bubbles of the boil, I set a timer and added my 60 minute hop (the one ounce of Kent Golding). Hop additions followed as I have described above with additions of Kent Golding, Wilamette and Cascade hops with 30, 20 and 5 minutes respectively left in the boil time. Hops are added at different times to highlight different features of the hops. Hops added early in the boil impart a lot of bitterness. hops added toward the middle add to the aroma of the beer. Finally hops added at the end of the boil will add to the flavor of the beer.

Step 3) Cool the Liquid:
I have a copper wort chiller that does the trick really fast... if you would like to see how this works, check out this video. Needless to say, I cooled my wort using my chiller, to 70 degrees F and then transfered it to a 6.5 gallon glass carboy (Pictured to the right)

Step 4) Ferment
This carboy was placed in a cool, dry closet (around 70 degrees F, or room temperature) where it will sit for the next week.

I will update you all on how the process is going, when I transfer and dry hop this coming saturday and when I bottle the beer the following week.

Notice Diego consuming the Four Loco in the background!

 I obviously was drinking all during this process. I consumed a Ska "True Blonde", one of Dave Morales' homebrews; a delicious steam beer that I enjoyed a lot (thanks Dave), and one of each Stone "Levitation" and "IPA". I have discussed the IPA in a previous post and will talk about the other beers in an upcoming post. That is all for now, if you have any questions or comments about homebrewing, my technique or the progress of this batch of beer, please post below. If you would like to follow me on this Drinking Adventure, please click on the link on the right where you can subscribe to my feeds. you can also follow me on twitter at @williepawn or friend me on Facebook. You can also email me here. I am also keeping a compiled list of beers tasted HERE that you can look at.