Brewing day!

It's brewing day in the House of Fermentation.  I've been dying to brew up my second batch o' homebrew, this time a steam style (aka California common) beer as a nod to one of my first true beer loves, Anchor Steam.  And, since the style involves using lager yeast fermented at ale temps, it should work well in our house, which we keep cool in the winter.

I've had a lot of time off lately, using up leave from what will shortly be my old job and getting ready for a new gig, but I've managed to be really busy anyway.  Just when I was starting to wonder when I'd get some time off during my time off, I got today.  The Queen of Fermentation planned a bunch of activities for her and the kids, and I woke up knowing that TODAY WAS THE DAY!  Brewing day!

So, I am writing this quick post surrounded by hop-scented steam swirling around the kitchen, the sound of boiling wort emanating from the brew kettle.  I love this.  I love the aroma and the sound, the attention to detail and the anticipation.  The fermentation bucket is sanitized, I'm almost ready to add the finishing hops, and then it'll be on to cooling the wort, transferring it to the bucket, and pitching the yeast.

The brown ale I brewed up has been really well-received by various friends, which of course just encourages me to brew more.  I'm thinking about getting a carboy for secondary fermentation - hey, if you have thoughts on this, add them to comments - and I might even get another fermentation bucket so that I can do more than one batch.  Beer is intoxicating.  Brewing might even be more so.  There's the timer... time to add the finishing hops.

Homebrewed English Brown Ale: a postscript

A few extra days of cellaring and conditioning has really rounded out the homebrew's flavor profile.  Served in a red wine glass at cellar temperature, it has a malty aroma: a bit of bread, lots of brown sugar, some chocolate.  Hops are present too, just a bit of flowers coming through.  The taste is a touch sweet, the brown sugar is there, as is the chocolate.  It has a nice, medium mouthfeel, and the carbonation is feeling just right.  The hops provide that key bit of balance, with the floral notes and bitterness coming through softly.  The finish is rather long, with that brown sugar and chocolate combo remaining balanced off by the hops.

Now, it's not like I made this recipe up.  Far from it!  My hat's off to Brewer's Best for putting the kit together.  So, don't take this post as me saying that I've come up with something great.  Rather, I'm quite impressed with the kit, and this beer has turned out very nicely, particularly for a first batch of homebrew.  If you're reading this and thinking about homebrewing, go for it!  You can make some good beer right from a kit and learn a ton in the process.

My boy, Sir E, is proud of his English Brown Ale.

Homebrewing: Batch brewed, lessons learned, part two

Welcome back to the House of Fermentation!  When we left off, I had managed to spill some water into the wort from the unsanitized airlock.  Not the most auspicious moment, but everything is a lesson.  The question was whether this lesson would be a harsh one.

I put the fermenter in the laundry room and set our space heater, which has a thermostat, to what had been described by the Adventures in Homebrewing folks as an ideal temperature for the particular strain of yeast I was using.  I wanted those sweet babies to be comfortable.

The next morning, I went in there first thing, hoping for bubbles in the [potentially germ-ridden and thus catastrophic to my brew because of my idiotic spill] airlock water.  And there were!  Signs of life!  The right kind of life!  At least so far!  Fermentation confirmed!

In the meantime, in the spirit of sibling harmony, I had already promised my 7-year-old that the next batch would be named after her.  In fact, I already know the style: steam beer, aka California common.  The reasons were straightforward enough.  As a reader of this blog, you may recall from an older post that I have a particular love of Anchor Brewing, including its flagship Anchor Steam Beer.  I want to brew something like that.  Obviously, on just my second batch, and using extracts instead of having the control of all-grain (where you mash the malt yourself), it might not match up, but I want to try.  But it's not just about love and reverence.  There's also a practical reason: steam beer is made with lager yeast but fermented at closer to an ale temperature.  Lager yeasts ferment at much lower temperatures than most ale yeasts, and I don't want to be using that space heater quite so much next time around.  So, by using a lager yeast at the temperature at which the House of Fermentation hovers in the winter, I can brew up a batch of steam beer without resorting to the heater.

Down in the basement, the yeasts continued to work their magic.  Day after day I went down, and day after day I saw triumphant, burbling bubbles rising to the surface of the airlock at regular intervals.  If I sniffed at the right time, I could catch a whiff of the developing beer.  The aroma was still on target.  Hope was building.

Instead of the 4-6 days that had been described, I had active bubbles for 7-8 days, and then let it rest as instructed for 2 more days.  There are stories out there of exploding bottles caused by bottling beer that is still fermenting too actively.  Glass shrapnel, huge mess... hmm, best avoided, no?

Waiting to bottle the beer, I finally did something that I'd suggest a novice homebrewer do much sooner. I watched the incredibly helpful, straightforward videos at homebrewingvideo.com.  I started off watching the ones about the bottling process and ended up watching them all.  Lots of useful tips in there!  In fact, Video-man mentioned the importance of sanitizing the airlock.  Ouch!  Anyway, I was ready to bottle my elixir.

I sanitized my clean bottles, bottling bucket, and all other equipment.  Then I opened the fermenter, and the aroma of freshly brewed beer filled the kitchen!  Malty, a bit bready, some lovely floral overlay of hops... I had made beer!  Flat beer.  Now it needed to condition in the bottles.  I boiled up a solution of priming sugar as instructed and put it in the bottling bucket.  My dear yeast would be well-fed one last time and carbonate my beer in the bottles.  Perhaps I should mention here that by now, I had fallen in love with the yeast.  It feels a bit odd to fall in love with a microbe.  Sure, I have always had a healthy respect for yeast, given my admiration of beer and bread, not to mention hard cider and wine, but working with them on this first batch, I think I fell in love.  I'm not proud to admit it.  In fact, I should probably get some help for this, but I want to be honest here.

Now, on to the transfer from fermenter to bottling bucket.  Siphoning looked very easy on the video. Obviously, since I went through all the trouble of sanitizing everything, sucking the tube to get it started wasn't an option.  I primed the racking (siphon) tube using sanitizing solution, as instructed, and got it started by running some water "backward" into the tube and then lowering and opening the tube to start the flow, as instructed.  It took me three tries to get the flow.  Video-man did it in one.  Video-man was an expert, but really, we're just talking about siphoning.  I have no excuse.

I got it flowing just in time to stave off panicky thoughts of failure, stopped the flow, transferred the racking cane and tube to the fermenter, and let the flow start again, first into a cup to let the sanitizer out.  Once beer was flowing, I lowered the tube into the bottling bucket, and within minutes I had a lovely bucket of beer there, ready to bottle.

Bottling was straightforward enough.  There's a handy (when it works) valve on the end of the bottling tube that only allows beer to flow (when it works) when it touches the bottom of a bottle.  Did I mention that it didn't work all that reliably?  I mean, it definitely allowed beer to flow, but let's just say it didn't always stop on cue.  Video-man had said to put towels under the bottling area, and never, never, never bottle over carpet.  I listened to Video-man.  Whew.  I quickly learned to re-tap the valve against the bottom of the bottle every now and then to keep it from sticking.

By the way, it is a painful thing to spill beer that you went through the trouble of making.  When that valve stuck and beer overflowed the bottle and soaked the towels, I wondered if it would be undignified to suck on the towels later.

Capping (remember, sanitize those caps!) was a breeze. I put the bottles back in their warm, cozy, pro-fermentation environment and prepared to wait two weeks.  After bottling, there was a tiny bit of beer -- and a lot of sediment -- left in the bucket, and my wife and I isolated a bit of the liquid and tried it.  Sure it was flat and needed to mature, but it actually tasted pretty darn good!  It was definitely beer.  I appeared to be on the right track.

I looked ahead to the two week wait, and it sounded painfully long.  Lucky for me, my friend Sean -- an experienced homebrewer -- said on the 8th day to go ahead and try it!  It's probably ready!  My wife and I put two in the fridge, and close to dinner time we took them out and let them come up to cellar-ish temperature.  I held my breath opening the first one.  Remember that unsanitized airlock spill-over?  Well, I was sure thinking about it, but the bottle opened with a healthy, sharp hiss and didn't crazily froth over -- which can be a sign of infection -- and it poured beautifully.  Nut-brown color, a nice head, aroma of malty sweetness with just a bit of background hops.  And it tasted... GOOD!  Not fantastic.  But good!  A touch sweet, a bit roasted, a hint of chocolate, nice bittering from the hops along with just a breath of floral quality.  It was an English brown ale, as planned.  My wife and I both enjoyed it.  Sean had said to shoot for drinkability with the first batch.  This one exceeded that expectation.  This homebrewing thing is a whole lot of fun.  Sure, there were anxious moments.  There were even moments of utter folly.  But I'm hooked.

Before the first taste, my 5-year-old was watching intently, and as I sipped it, he asked eagerly, "Is it good?  Is it good?"  And when I told him it was, he crowed gleefully.

After all, it's his namesake beer.

Homebrewing: Batch brewed, lessons learned, part one

Friends, since my last post, I have embarked on the homebrewing journey.  For better or worse, I have joined my wonderful wife in playing with microbes here in the "House of Fermentation."  She makes sourdough, yogurt, kefir, and kombucha.  She also soaks grains before cooking with them, just to get a touch of fermentation going and increase digestibility.  Perhaps more to the point, she looks like she's having a hell of a lot of fun, and I gotta say, the results are darn tasty.

I had thought for months about joining the microbial circus by homebrewing, but I would stop myself by thinking about the simple fact that there are a lot of wonderful beers out there.  Did I really need to make beer when there are so many lovely ones to drink?  Eventually, I answered "yes!"  I just couldn't shake the idea!  So, I went to Adventures in Homebrewing in Taylor, MI, where the helpful folks set me up with an equipment kit and ingredients to make English brown ale -- it's a style that I know and like, and the recipe kit was labeled "easy."  I also attended their Teach a Friend to Homebrew Event, where I mingled with novice and expert homebrewers alike and got a lot of good tips.  I was ready.  I was inspired.  I was thirsty.

The next day, I commenced my journey.  I read the instructions and laid out the ingredients in their handy little packets.  As the clerk at Adventures in Homebrewing told me, making beer is not rocket science.  Perhaps not, but by the end, I knew that it might take a minute to learn to brew a beer, but it takes a lifetime to master.  Othello, anyone?

At the homebrewing shop, I had contemplated buying a 5-gallon stock pot, but I was told by one helpful homebrewer that for the boil -- the only step where the pot is needed -- I could get away with a 3-gallon pot.  Hey, we had one of those!  Yes!  Money saved!  Alas, another homebrewer -- one of the super-experts -- had talked about rinsing steeped grains in warm water, which would add to the volume.  And yet another had mentioned that getting into homebrewing to save money on beer is like buying a fishing boat to save money on fish.  It just doesn't work that way.  So, in hindsight, it was misguided to try to go with the 3-gallon stock pot, but try I did.

I put 2.5 gallons of Ann Arbor's finest water into my 3 gallon pot, brought it up to the designated temp, and put the muslin bag of malted grains in.  Glorious!  It steeped to make an aromatic barley "tea," and that was my first hint of what it would become.  Homebrewing is a process of constructing a beer while deconstructing your idea of beer.  Just when you think you know about beer, homebrewing breaks it down to its components, and for me, smelling that steeped barley was a signal moment.  There would be other such moments, like when I broke open the bags of hops, but the first was powerful.

After steeping, I ran warm water through the bag of grain just like one of the homebrewing experts told me, nice and slow, rinsing those additional sugars into my developing wort.  No, I wasn't getting a lesion on my hand or foot.  I mean wort, pronounced wert, which is basically beer pre-fermentation.  It was time to add the malt extracts.  In this recipe, there were liquid and powered malt extracts.  Before pouring in the malt extracts, it occurred to me that the pot was looking awfully full.   But what the hell, I thought, and poured anyway.  All I can say in my defense is that it didn't overflow.

OK, now I had a really full pot of hot, sweet, barley-sugar water.  As in, up-to-the-brim full.  Crap!  I needed a 5-gallon pot right then.  Turns out that these are somewhat harder to find than they should be.  Or than they used to be.  My 5-year-old was standing there, and I asked him if he was up for a little adventure.  As usual, he was, and off we went.  I'll spare you the details, but let's just say he was a total trouper, and after running all over town, we found what we needed.  As an aside, I'll mention that I'm convinced that the relative unavailability of 5-galllong stock-pots is due to the decline in American home cooking.  Several merchants mentioned unhelpfully (but with very helpful looks on their apologetically-smiling faces) that they used to carry them.

Anyway, we finally got a pot and ran home again.  For his troubles and help, I promised my 5-year-old that I would name this beer after him if it turned out.  He appeared pleased at this and then went off to do something more interesting, like play knights or police or something.  There was a ginger transfer of the hot liquid to the new pot, and I was off and running again.  A bit humbled.  Perhaps even ashamed.  But still in business and full of hope.

The rest of the boil went well.  I kept time precisely and added bittering, aromatic, and flavoring hops on schedule.  The aroma was amazing and seemed right.  Simply right.  Fabulous!  After the boil, I cooled the whole shebang in a sink full of cold water, draining and refilling that several times until the wort was at the right temperature.  Then I transferred it without incident to the sanitized fermentation pail and pitched the yeast and aerated it.  I breathed a sigh of relief, but one remaining moment of total shock came next.  I was pressing the airlock into the lid of the pail when some of the water in the airlock went over the edge and into the beer -- totally predictable, given the fact that I was pressing that sucker into a small hole in an otherwise air-tight bucket.  Well, dear reader, I hadn't sanitized the airlock.  I had sanitized everything -- EVERYTHING -- else.  But not the airlock.  It wasn't a lot of water, but let's just say that the same medium that yeast love so much is a wonderful place to grow bacteria.  After some choice words under my breath and some basic relaxation exercises, I shrugged (que sera, sera) and put the pail in the laundry room with a space heater to keep it at fermentation temperature.

Time would tell.

Time did tell.