Cascade House Pale

It’s a snow day for most of Georgia, Sarah and UGA included.  There are no such things as snow days for me.  However I’m a little under the weather so I took the day off to recover, plus because Sarah has a snow day.  Last weekend when I really felt bad I did manage to bottle my latest batch of beer; a second attempt at an all Cascade hopped pale ale.

I’m calling it Cascade House Pale hoping that when I finally get a keezer built and installed this will stay on tap, or one of its sister brews.  Like a house pale with a different hop.  Or a haus pale with German hops and/or malts.  These recipes with be minimal so to showcase the hops or malts in the beer.

Cascade hops going for a swim

 

Cascade House Pale getting bottled

I brewed this beer once at Gratis and while it turned out okay, I pitched it after some yeast experimenting.  Winds up I didn’t pitch enough so it only fermented to around 1.020.  It wasn’t bad, but I thought it was a little too sweet and didn’t let the Cascade hops shine.  Some people say it tastes like a Deschutes Mirror Pond, which I believe is also all Cascade hops.  Looking at their mobile website the recipes are close.  This five gallon batch was hopped with leaf hops at 60 minutes, 30 minutes, 15, 10 and five minutes.  Plus an extra seven-day dry-hopping.  I’ve opened the first two bottles on this snow day after being in bottles for only three days.  There is some slight carbonation already, but not enough yet.  I can tell that it’s still kind of flat, but not completely.  It’s better with the dry hops.

Now the decision is to brew this recipe again or brew a different variation in time to get it bottle for this year’s Peach State Brew Off.  I do have some bottles of chocolate porter properly bottled that I hope to get entered.  Now to figure out a group for that brew.

Cheers songbirds!  Keep drinking.

Chocolate Beer

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This post has been a long time coming but finally a few words about a chocolate porter I brewed back in October. I was able to get some nice chocolate notes using typical unsweetened Baker’s Chocolate.

Big Ginger (little cinnamon) Pumpkin Porter

This gallery contains 9 photos.

Home brew season has started and I’ve ramped my system up to do all grain brewing. I’m still working on getting my schedule, set-up and other practices down, but finally we have a good beer off the new system. A pumpkin porter dubbed Big Ginger (Little Cinnamon) Pumpkin Porter

First all grain brew day

My new all grain set up

In all honestly though this isn’t my first all grain brew day. I actually did one at home, though more like a BIAB using drilled plastic buckets at a sparge vessel. I’ve watched Denver during a couple of brews. I’ve done several 85% – 90% ‘all me’ brew days on Gratis Brewing’s rig, so those kinda count too. Those have helped me the most with understanding the process. They have both helped me decide on which route to go when I did decide (read: Sarah said it was ok) to finally go all grain. The two most obvious choices were, make sure it’s a fired mash tun and make sure you can do a full boil. Check and check! So I’m trying to remember why Sarah was in such a good mood, but I know she was sitting on the couch, probably playing Snoopy Coaster on her iPad between pauses of some dumb show on DVR. I gave her just enough information to get the remarks, “That’s not too bad, go ahead I guess.” Thankfully Mark over at 5 Points Growlers and Home Brew Supply helped me with everything I needed, plus no shipping and I bought local. I did manage to sneak a grain mill by her though. Which I honestly meant to mention but it arrived home before I did.

Caution! I’m milling grain by hand.

After one of my best friends acquired me a 10 gal brew kettle and my other best friend helped drill it and valve it, I was finally ready to brew. Seeing as how I was going to brew on Labor Day I would need to use Belgian yeast since it’s more tolerant to warmer fermentation temperatures. I also didn’t want to go big on my first brew day with this new rig in case I missed my numbers I didn’t want to feel like I wasted a load of money on a large grain bill. I’m expecting a few more weeks of warm weather before it finally breaks, so I wanted something small with low ABV to enjoy on football Saturdays. I brewed a Saison once before and actually had to re-pitch with Wyeast 1056 to finish it out. So to avoid that hassle again I went with White Labs Saison II yeast, plus the guy at the shop recommended it after using it a few weeks prior.

First runnings

Brew day finally rolled around and naturally I sleep late. I didn’t clean and sanitize the new pots the day before like I had planned. I knew I needed to run out for ice the morning of so I grabbed new propane tanks at the same time. The princess would want breakfast and coffee when she woke up, so there’s that stop too. It’s a warm day already so I wanted to at least start out fresh so I showered after running those errands, which now puts us at 11 am and I’m finally ready to start assembling the new brewery. Assemble? Yeah, Legos! Not quite. I did manage to do a little pre-work by measuring all the pots and oh yeah, new burner too, so I could build a three tier gravity set-up out of cinder blocks. I always brew in the garage, so it’s nice and flat and cinder blocks are sturdy enough that I’m not worried about knocking them down, plus they’re just over $1 a piece too. With this setup my only heavy lifting, which is still moderate since I’m only doing 5 gallon batches, is to remove the mash tun off the burner and place the full boil kettle on the burner. For this time I also lifted the HLT up top with 6 gallons of sparge water too. But I plan to buy some marine water hoses plus an in-line water filter and use the outside tap to fill everything with. Baby steps for now though.

I actually fitted valves, cleaned pots and hoses rather quickly and before I know it my mash water is up to temperature. The new burner is from Academy and it’s an 88,000 BTU burner as opposed to my other one that Sarah bought me (that I picked out), which is only 58,000 BTU. Big biggest difference is the new burner is a single flame so I’m cautious and aware that I’m always stirring if I’m heating the mash. I worry that the single flame while it spreads nicely across the bottom of the mash tun and there is a false bottom could burn some wort if not stirred. The mash is at temp and holding very nicely (again, it’s a mid 80 degree day) and quickly the strike water is at temp without getting it to 220 degrees like some other brew days I’ve been too. I’m not saying a word Brian, I promise! One thing that Brian did teach me, a good thing, is to float the mash from the bottom. This gives the grain bed a chance to loosen some sugars and become more viable for their soon to be voyage to the boil kettle. I finally get to use the mash paddle I cut out of cherry wood and if I leave dough balls behind with this behemoth then I should stop brewing all together. The day didn’t go without a few small hiccups though. I normally like to catch the first runnings and pour them back over the mash to filter out some of those bigger proteins. I was so excited to snap a picture of the first runnings that as soon as I did I remember from the hazy wort I had forgotten that step. Also while trying to fine tune my equipment profile in BeerSmith (brewing software) I set it for 2 gallons of lauter tun dead space. When the wort was done transferring to the kettle I wanted some of that extra wort and this caused for me to over sparge. I now have a really light wort and a low starting gravity. I decided to boil an extra 20 minutes to boil off and get down to my target gravity. Which I’ll be damned, actually worked and without darkening the wort too much. No boil-over either even though it seemed people were begging for it to happen. The other headache was trying to chill the wort after boiling using 30 pounds of ice in swamp cooler and my water hose coiled under it all. It came down to 80 degrees and held there until all the ice melted. So my next trick was to transfer into the fermenter then place that in the swamp cooler with more ice around it. After dinner it was at pitching temperature. I actually think I chilled the wort too much as it took almost an entire day for the air lock to see activity. But I’m not worried now because it gurgled for an entire week before slowing to a bubble every few minutes.

After eight days I decided to pull it out and take a gravity. My target final gravity was 1.009 and if I was close then I’d rack off the yeast, if it wasn’t ready then I’d carry the yeast over to secondary and then do another rack after it finished. To my surprise it was already at 1.006. The Chuck Norris of Saison yeast I guess? It certainly kicked the sugars out of there fast. So that’s where we’re at. First taste samples are dodgy because there’s still some off gases that screw up my palette and even worse my sniffer. It was a simple recipe with low bittering and no additions like bitter orange peel or coriander, which are common but not required in a Saison beer. I’m hoping that yeast will lend enough spiciness and flavoring to be considered as a successful batch. Keeping the fermenter in a swamp cooler worked out pretty well. I kept a thermometer in the water the entire time and I could regulate it between 62*-72* the entire time. I need to work on keeping the big swings out of that equation though. As for the next brew I’m thinking of doing the Cascade pale ale that I wrecked just before summer only dry hopping it this time.

As far as going from partial mash brewing to all grain brewing relied on one comment. Last year when Goose Island was released in Georgia, Brian introduced me to their brewer over at Pauley’s one night. He told the guy (whose name I forget and I’m so sorry for not remembering it at 2:30 am) about me recently winning gold at the Peach State Brew Off with my Citra Pale Ale. During that discussion it came up that I was only doing partial mashes and his comment was to go all grain as soon as I can. He added that while you can make really good beer without doing all grain you can’t sustain making great beer every time relying on extract as an ingredient, basically. This first brew is truth to that with an apparent attenuation of 87% without a starter. Fingers crossed this Saison turns out ok and we keep brewing better.

Cheers!

Mash runnings sample

Post boil sample

Post fermentation sample

Coil fail

Not everything here is chipper and successful.  In fact much of life hasn’t been great lately either.  I hardly see my wife anymore thanks to my new schedule at work.  This has caused her stress level to rise which her doctor isn’t happy about.  It’s caused my stress to rise, now my doctor isn’t happy with my blood pressure.  We had a scare the other day at the dentist when they couldn’t get my blood pressure below 165/115.  But before all that happened I could have bitten a stainless steel coil in half.

Almost a year ago at work they trashed two boxes of 50′ stainless steel tubing that couldn’t be used.  One coil they ruined, the other I salvaged out of the trash.  I have a copper immersion chiller already, so why would I need a less superior stainless steel one?  Lately I’ve rolled my water hose into a coil and put it in a bucket of ice to act as a pre-chiller for my immersion chiller.  This works great too.  I can get a boiled kettle to 65F in about 25 – 30 minutes.  But what if I replaced the chilled water hose with a stainless steel coil in a bucket of ice?  The stainless would chill the water passing through better than a plastic and rubber hose would.  This could make the copper immersion chiller that much cooler and get the wort to pitching temperature in almost 15 minutes; possibly.

So I finally have another day of down time before dental surgery on Wednesday morning.  I have to take sedation medicine, so I can’t go into work.  Maybe I should have taken the sedation medicine before working on this coil?  The biggest concern with doing this (without a tubing bender) is to not put a crease in the tubing, as you can’t get it out without cutting it out.  I naturally don’t have a tig welder at home to piece it back together either.  So I use a fermenter bucket and start rolling the coil around it trying to reduce its size to fit into my large ice bucket.

I make it through the entire length of coil and check its size in the ice bucket but it’s still too large.  So I use the bucket again the entire length of coil and get it to a size that will fit in the ice bucket nice.  It’s almost the size of the inside diameter so it should chill nicely if full of ice.  Now all I need to do is bend one end up towards the other end (to match the shape of the copper one) so that I can connect two water hose ends to it.  What I should have done is left it alone since I’m going to use plastic hoses to connect it to the water hose anyways.  After trying for about two minutes to slowing roll the coil tight enough to turn it inside of the coil I put a huge crease in it.  I then pounce it into crimped pieces and throw it in the recycling bin to carry to the curb side.  No money lost, only time spent working on it.  Now that my blood pressure is already up I go for a nice job down the street and look forward the oral surgery the next day.

My next project is to put a valve in a new kettle then I’m finally ready to brew!  It can’t come soon enough.  I should find time between the four doctor appointments within the next three weeks.

Cheers!

Paddling Mash

The work begins

I’m not sure why they call it a mash paddle, because paddling mash would make a mess.  Why is it not a mash stirrer?  When I got into home brewing back in November of 2009 I started really simple; like most books say to do.  So my starter kit came with a plastic spoon used to stir the extract into the boil kettle.  As I moved into partial mash brewing or a modified BIAB or even that one-off small all grain batch (that ended up way low on my SG), I used this small plastic spoon.  I’ve always wanted a big healthy mash paddle.  One that would break your ass bone if you got paddled with it.

One of my best friends; my unofficial brewmaster has a nice stainless steel paddle.  Easy to clean; easy to sanitize and will get hot as fire if left near a burner.  I’ve priced them and they’re easily $30+.  You see lots of wooden paddles that are easily $30+ too.  So which do I choose?  I have several friends at work that I know do wood working.  One has a mobile wood mill, but he and another usually only deal with soft wood, cutting trees, making planks from pine and fire wood.  Another I know does do some real woodworking; tables, legs, etc.  So I ask him if he has any hardwood scrap lying around.  He does have a rather large piece of cherry lying around, but it’s too big for a paddle, but I might be able to work with it.  It’s a 2″x6″x4″; which might be what I asked for.  Either way, it’s a large piece of wood, heavy and dense.

1:45 minutes

Now that work has decided to control my social life, marriage life plus my eating habits (I lost 10 lbs in a week) along with already controlling my financial life, I have some free time to start working on making this tree trunk a mash paddle.  My first day off during the week I open up the garage and start outlining the paddle plus chop off the end to make the paddle 30″ long.  If you haven’t heard, we’ve gotten some much-needed rain this year and I’m really enjoying it.  The more I handle the board the more I realize it’s too thick to easily use as a paddle, so I have to split it using the tools that I have.

I know it’s going to suck, but I didn’t realize it was going to be a two shirt job.  I had to change shirts after I finished getting it split.  Because I started using the jig saw to cut it, it didn’t last longer after I split it.  So it’s time to shower and charge the battery for a couple of days since I have to work again.  I finally finished the rough cutting the next day and it has a decent shape now.  My next few days off and I’m ready to get back to work when I find the battery still in the jig saw on the table.  So maybe it needs another day to charge?  Which doesn’t do much because I got two cuts in the paddle head and a dead battery, sheesh!

Cutting complete & first sanding

Another full night of battery charging and after getting the grass cut, I get the paddle slots cut out and get a quick first sanding done on it.  The slots are needed to naturally help in stirring, but also in breaking up dough balls when mashing in.  So this is where we are now, but it’s not complete.  I’m going to do some more rounding on the corners, sand out saw marks, possible thin the handle on the front and back for a better grip.  I may even do some branding down the shaft, either by burning or using a router.  Neither of which I have the tools to use to do this.

I wanted to give some further details on how to make your own and found a great DIY article on BYO.com.  They also suggest a tight grain, low resin wood like white oak, poplar or cherry woods.  I didn’t look for this article until writing this now and see our head designs are similar.  Searching Google images you find lots of circles in the head and the rare one-off work of arts like hop cones or a Dogfish Head logo.  I searched the big box stores for hard wood too and see my local Lowes has a 1x6x6 piece of poplar for under $20 bucks.  You can make two paddles out of that piece which is roughly $10 a paddle (and free labor).  Hmm, does anyone want a custom-made mash paddle for $40 bucks?  I could make a small killing doing that.  The local Home Depot has the same size piece of cherry wood for right around $40 dollars.  So you get a prettier paddle in my opinion, but unless you just want to do the labor you might as well buy a paddle at that cost and save your shoulders.  Mines were shot are splitting this piece for two hours.  Though a 1x6x6 won’t need to be split.

Comment below if you’ve made your own paddle or have questions for me.  I’ve read a couple of blogs just yesterday on fellow bloggers either getting a refresh or putting it down for a month.  I’ve been on an eight month hiatus; so I’m good for a minute.  Expect to see big news soon!

Cheers!