August 20th, 2010
It’s one of those things… brewers, like many hobbyists have a tendency to at least seem like they’re doing less during the long hot days of Summer. I’ve been doing less too, but for a lot longer than the hot months. Between rather unexpectedly purchasing a house, being absolutely slammed with the real life job, and working on Baltibrew stuff, I’ve slacked on SYD. To my shame. My Twitter account spent about six months broken, and I just plain didn’t have time to devote to keeping things very well updated, much less upgraded as I promised back around Christmas.
That said, with things calming down at work, Baltibrew running at least a little bit more smoothly, and the house… well the house is probably never going stop being interesting, I’m back to thinking more about beer, back to working on upgrades, and back to brewing more.
I’ve finally got my own fermentation space, and I spent Saturday and Sunday working on upgrading my rig from batch sparge only to a fly sparging rig with a copper manifold in one of my mash tuns. The result was a Roggenbier which will be my first solo entry into a competition. The tun worked well, and the sparge seemed to go off almost too well, perhaps maybe even a little bit fast. All of this got me back to thinking about the mash series I’ve been working on, and the importance of detailing mash efficiency, etc. Read the rest of this entry »
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June 10th, 2010
Not really, but this story at the Huffington Post is funny nonetheless.
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May 15th, 2010
Max’s recently had its grand re-opening and featured a beer I had the good luck to try last September at the German Beer Fest — and it’s a weird one. I took a fellow Baltibrewer with me late on the grand opening evening and shoved a mug of it into his hand and asked him to tell me what the weird ingredients were.
“It’s definitely a wheat beer.”
“And…?”
“There’s Coriander in there…”
“Uh huh. And…?”
“Not sure about that last flavor…”
“Kinda’ makes your mouth water a bit, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s weird. It’s really refreshing! What the heck is that?”
“It’s salt!”
A thousand-year-old style nearly lost after World War II, Gose is a beer brewed with wheat, coriander, and salt. It might seem kind of weird to think of salt as being a good additive for beer —salt does retard the growth of yeast after all — but the chemistry involved with salt in beer makes a lot of sense. Mineral salts are flavor enhancers.
Think about Burtonized water; it’s basically adding salt to the water to achieve a number of effects, but most especially it brings the flavor of hops to the forefront of the beer. The naturally saline aquifers around the town of Goslar — where Gose originated — led to a salty beer that enhanced the spicy coriander notes, lactic tartness, and wheat derived flavors that make Gose so perfect for summertime drinking. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Gose, Salt in beer
Posted in Beer, Beer Styles | 2 Comments »
April 20th, 2010
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dave Parker, the creator of BrewPal — a bit of software for the iPhone that I’ve posted about before. I’ve raved pretty extensively both on this site and to people in person about how awesome this app is. There’s definitely some geek speak going on in the interview — discussion of operating systems, user interfaces, etc. — but there’s also plenty of brew talk as well. What’s really amazing is that Dave built this software on his own time, and he’s only charging $0.99 for it. If you have an iPhone and you brew, there’s really no reason not to have a copy.
Here are the results of the interview:
So Yeah Dood: How long have you been brewing?
Dave: I actually started just over a year ago. My friend got a Mr. Beer for Christmas (in 2008) and we used it on December 28, 2009, so it was a year old, and of course the yeast was no good. It was a disaster, but I loved the process
Dave: ended up buying more yeast and dry malt extract at the local homebrew shop
So Yeah Dood: Nice!
So Yeah Dood: What was it that inspired you to build the app?
Dave: I have a collector mentality, so it doesn’t take much to push me over the edge… I think it was about two weeks before I had a starter all-grain setup.
So Yeah Dood: That’s impressive.
Dave: My day job is computer programming and I really fell in love with brewing quite quickly. Always been a beer guy
it seemed pretty natural. I found I was constantly looking stuff up in How To Brew or online, and I wanted it in the palm of my hand.
So Yeah Dood: Did you start out using some other application like BeerSmith, or ProMash?
Dave: Nope, I had only — and have still only — used online calculators and such. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Brew Calculators, Brewpal, Recipe Formulation Software
Posted in BJCP, Beer, Geek-Out | No Comments »
February 25th, 2010
In the last installment of “How do I do that?” I described what’s happening chemically during the mash.
This time I need to tell you how to build a mash tun, but that will also require me briefly describing the ways in which you can sparge your mash. Spargeing is just rinsing the grain bed to remove sugars that have been left behind from the mash runoff. This step actually comes after the mash, which seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse.
Why would that matter? Because how you sparge will have a large effect on how you build your tun.
- If you intend to fly sparge — i.e. slowly drizzle water over the top of the grain bed to rinse the grain — you will probably want to build a manifold for your filter.
- If you intend to batch sparge — i.e. drain all of your initial mash liquid and then add your sparge water to rinse the grain — you can save money by building a tun with a stainless steel braid for your filter.
Building a manifold will not negatively affect your results if you batch sparge — in fact I’ve heard reports that it will increase your efficiency greatly — but you shouldn’t fly sparge with a stainless braid filter. More on that later on.
So… since we know what the mash is, we can start talking about how to build a mash tun and why we choose the parts we do for one.
It’s best to use a vessel for the mash tun that will maintain a relatively static internal temperature. It needs to be insulated, and since we’re going to be modifying it a bit, it should be relatively cheap. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Lauter Tun, Mash Tun, Mashing, Sparge Arm
Posted in Beer, Brewing, Geek-Out | 2 Comments »
February 12th, 2010
I’m heading over to Max’s for a little liquid lunch.
If you’re interested, here’s some links to what’s in bottles, and what’s on draft.
I’ll be there on and off throughout the weekend, including for the Stillwater launch tomorrow. Hope to see some of you out there.
Tags: Max's Belgian Beer Fest
Posted in Events | 1 Comment »