Brewing Techniques

Rockville Gordon Biersch Collaborative Flemish Red

June 23, 2016 by Chris Colby 3 Comments

Mike Tonsmeire, The Mad Fermentationist, is collaborating with the Gordon Biersch Rockville, Maryland, location to produce a blended, barrel-aged Flemish Red, and we got the chance to get a preview sampling.

Mike Tonsmeire and Christian Layke with their barrels

One of the best parts of being the producer of Basic Brewing Radio is attending the National Homebrew Conference (Homebrew Con) every year. We typically arrive a day early to take in some of the local beer culture wherever the conference takes us. This year, the get-together landed in Baltimore, and we were thrilled to have Mike show us around his neck of the woods, as he lives in the D.C. area.

Our first stop was a visit to the Gordon Biersch Rockville restaurant and its head brewer, Christian Layke. Christian is a former homebrewer and has been with Gordon Biersch for around eight years. He left a job with a non-profit environmental think tank to work with stainless steel tanks instead. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Beer, Beer Styles, Brewing Techniques

Brewing Liquor For Brown Beers (20–30 SRM)

June 2, 2016 by Chris Colby 2 Comments

For brewers who want to start treating their water appropriately, but don’t want to wade through the requisite chemistry, here’s the third in my series of simple water guides. Today’s post is a quick guide to generating brewing liquor for brown beers, from 20 to 30 SRM. This includes brown ales, some porters, many dark lagers, etc. You begin with 5.0 gallons (19 L) of distilled water and add minerals to create your brewing liquor.

I will post the remaining guide — for pale beers (0–10 SRM) — soon. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: brewing liquor, brown ale, brown beers, calcium, carbonates, dark lager

Beer Foam (Part 5: Brewing Considerations)

May 20, 2016 by Chris Colby 2 Comments

Most of the time, brewers give comparatively little thought to foam. We brew our beers and foam appears on top of them. There is no single ingredient or procedure that creates foam, it simply emerges when a beer is brewed properly. However, there are things you can do when brewing that affect foam production and stability. It pays to understand these things, especially if your foam isn’t always what it should be. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: beer foam, foam, iso alpha acids, LTP1, pitching rate, protein z

The Easy Way to Fly Sparge (Part 2 of 3)

May 13, 2016 by Chris Colby 5 Comments

You don’t need a sparge arm for this, although you can use one if you have it.

Fly sparging can be made less complicated, and less wasteful of water, than the way it is presented by some homebrew books, magazines, or websites. This is a description of “my” way of continuous sparging. It’s “my way” in the sense that this is how I do it, not that I was the first or only person to consider it. I call it pulsed sparging, but some commercial breweries do this as their method of continuous sparging and don’t have a special name for it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: continuous sparging, fly sparging, pulsed sparging

The Easy Way to Fly Sparge (Part 1 of 3)

April 29, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

A sparge arm

When I started brewing, continuous sparging (sometimes called fly sparging) was the only method for sparging a grain bed described on the homebrewing literature. Later, some homebrewers adopted batch sparging as their method of choice, and still later some homebrewers started using brew-in-a-bag methods.

A variety of criticisms have been lodged against fly sparging. I have an easy method of fly sparging that answers some of these criticisms — and the remaining ones are minor, in my opinion. (I’m convinced fly sparging is the best of the homebrew lautering methods, and I’ll explain why in a separate article. But for today, here’s the start of a “how to” article.) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: continuous sparging, fly sparging, pulsed sparging

Beer Foam (Part 1: General)

March 24, 2016 by Chris Colby 2 Comments

At the 2016 New Zealand Homebrew Conference, I gave a talk on beer foam. Here’s that material, reworked into an article.

Foam in a dry stout.

Why would anyone give a talk (or write about) beer foam? Besides the fact that I find foam interesting, there are a couple reasons. When we are served a beer, our first impression is visual — we notice the color, clarity, and the character of the foam in the glass. Secondly, and more importantly, good foam is a partial indicator of beer quality. As we will see, a number of things need to go correctly to get a nice foam stand. So, the presence of nice foam indicates the brewer has (at a minimum) taken sufficient care with his or her process to produce that foam.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: bubble formation, foam

Hops Lose Alpha Acids in Storage (Part 3 of 3)

February 25, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

A spreadsheet (Apple Pages) used to calculate alpha acid loss over time.

In the previous post, I related a quick and dirty way to estimate the loss in alpha acids of hops over time, assuming they were stored in a freezer. That method was based on two measured variables (initial alpha acid percentage and amount left after 6 months at 68 °F/20 °C), plus a couple “guesstimations” — how the rate of loss changed at colder temperatures and a linear extrapolation from the initial condition through the one “data” point.

We would expect the loss of alpha acids to be an exponential function. So, it’s almost certain the simple model underestimates hop losses prior to six months and overestimates them after 6 months — although the deviations should be small. Using the simple method is better than not accounting for the losses at all, but there is a more accurate way of estimating the alpha acids if you’re willing to put in a little more work. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: alpha acids, alpha acids loss, hop storage

Hops Lose Alpha Acids In Storage (Part 2 of 3)

February 24, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

Alpha acid loss in two hop varieties over time, estimated from data from Hop Union. (In reality, the rate of loss is likely not linear. See the next article for more details.)

As I detailed in the first half of this article, hop alpha acids levels decline during storage. Proper handling can slow the degradation of the alpha acids, but even properly stored hops gradually lose their bitterness over time. In this post, we’ll examine if the loss if alpha acids is great enough to matter, and how to account for it if you do wish to take it into consideration. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques, Uncategorized Tagged With: alpha acid loss, alpha acids, hop storage

Hitting Your OG (Part 3 of 3: Over)

February 1, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

Most of the time, when we miss our target original gravity (OG), we are low. However, it can happen that your extract efficiency is higher than you expect and your OG ends up being higher than you planned for. The most frequent causes of this adjusting your grain mill to a smaller gap, using a new base malt, or just learning the ropes and starting to get the hang of things. As with coming in low, you have a couple options.

The first option, of course, is to just accept the higher OG and brew a stronger beer than you intended. If you were brewing a hoppy beer, you might want to adjust the hop amounts up slightly to take the lowered hop utilization into account. However, unless you’re way over your target OG, you can probably just add your hops as planned and be fine.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: cv equation, original gravity

Hitting OG (Part 2 of 3: Low)

January 25, 2016 by Chris Colby Leave a Comment

So let’s say that you’ve collected your wort, measured the wort volume and pre-boil specific gravity and, and used the “CV” equation to estimate your OG. And . . . you’re going to come in low. What do you do now? You have three main options. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques Tagged With: hitting OG, malt extract