HOMEBREW Digest #1226 Wed 15 September 1993

Digest #1225 Digest #1227


	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator


Contents:
  Posting (Norman Farrell)
  Pumpkin Brown Ale Request (EZIMMERM)
  Beer in Boston ("Stephen Schember")
  Reader/Indexer for Yeast and Hop FAQ (EZIMMERM)
  Lautering / Discoloration (npyle)
  Instant carbonation (Tim Anderson)
  GABF info (inline)
  Heineken Paranoid of Micros? (Mark Garetz)
  Brown Porter / Commercial examples? (Lee=A.=Menegoni)
  help (hhoppe)
  Malt Liquor (Troy Howard)
  Klages or not to Klages (korz)
  Homebrew Digest #1225 (mike.keller)
  oring challenge results (donald oconnor)
  Yeast Washing (The Ghost In The Machine)
  slow sparges (Chuck Wettergreen)
  thin part boiling in decoction (ROB THOMAS)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 07:39:22 CDT From: nfarrell at ppco.com (Norman Farrell) Subject: Posting I recently made a bathc of steam beer and found myself with a mas temp that I thought was 4 to 5 degrees F lower than I wanted. I did not want to add more water and dilute the enzyme concentration. I removed 2 quarts of the mash in a glass measuring cup and heated in the microwave for 7 minutes. This was long enough to reach boiling. I returned the "decoction" to the main mash stirred in and removed another 2 quarts and heated. It took 3 "decoctions" to get the bulk temperature where I wanted. 7 minutes in the microwave was required to boil each time. The resulting beer was wonderful particularly full bodied/satisfying mouthfeel. It was better in this regard than other beers I have made with inffusion or step mashing. Was the amount and heating time I used sufficient to account for the good results? Has anyone else tried this? If it is more likely that everthing in the process just came together to yield a great beer (ie. my decoctions were probably of little effect), how long would I have to heat (and what % of the mash) to do some good? BTW the brew length was 5 gal. and the OG was about 1.050. Thanks for any hints/opinions. Norman (nfarrell at ppco.com) Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1993 08:16:02 -0600 (MDT) From: EZIMMERM at UWYO.EDU Subject: Pumpkin Brown Ale Request Salutations! I'm going to brew a Brown Ale with some pumpkin flavor and because I can't find a source of fresh pumpkins I will be using canned. Yes, I am using pure canned pumpkin ( no xtra water, salt, chemicals, etc. ). What I need is an idea of how much canned pumpkin would be nice for a Brown Ale of aoubt 1.04 to 1.06 OG and if anyone can reccomend some hops for this. I was thinking finnishing with Fuggles... Any ideas? Gene in Laramie Return to table of contents
Date: 14 Sep 1993 10:40:05 -0500 From: "Stephen Schember" <stephen_schember at terc.edu> Subject: Beer in Boston Subject: Time:10:16 AM OFFICE MEMO Beer in Boston Date:9/14/93 The Boston metro area now boasts four brewpubs. The original is the Commonwealth Brewery on Portland St. by the Boston Garden (bitter and barley wine best choices here imho, but everthing pretty dang good). The Boston Beer Works is on Brookline Ave. just across from Fenway park (IPA and Hercules strong recommended). The Cambridge Brewing Company is in Kendall Square, Cambridge (great pale ale and if you're lucky a sublime high octane version of the same, Big Man's Triple). Rounding out the list is John Harvard's on Dunster St,. Harvard Square, Cambridge (good Stout esp. if on "Cask"). The Sam Adams Brewery tour is allways worth the trip to Jamaica Plain (a borough of Boston). While you are in J.P. stop at Doyles Cafe on Washington St., for more Sam Adams limited runs (Dunklewiezen, Cranberry "Lambic", etc.), a healthy selction of taps, and ancient Boston bar atmosphere. Other recommended watering holes: Cornwall's in Kenmore Sq., The Sunset G+T(71 Taps!) on Brighton Ave. in Brighton. Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1993 08:41:17 -0600 (MDT) From: EZIMMERM at UWYO.EDU Subject: Reader/Indexer for Yeast and Hop FAQ Salutations! I was thinking of writing an indexer or data base manager for the Yeast and upcomming Hop FAQs. I would provide the C source code as well as a compiled x86 IBM version for those of us more in the brewing than computing circles. Before I start work on this, however, I want to know if anyone else is going to do the same thing as I'm a buisy student and would hate to waste my time solving a problem someone else is solving. So, anyone else doing something like this or shall I have a go at it? Gene in Laramie Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 9:23:37 MDT From: npyle at n33.stortek.com Subject: Lautering / Discoloration Gene asks about lautering wrt recirculation. He assumes most all-grainers just sparge without recirculation. It is my perception that most all-grainers _do_ recirculate the wort. FWIW, I recirculate the wort until it runs relatively clear, but I don't go to a lot of trubble. I seem to recall Micah Millspaw advocating no recirculation at all; something about giving the proteins and other hot break material a nucleation point. Contrary to the popular beliefs, he claimed clearer beer than with recirculation. Anyone tasted Micah's beer? Is Bob Jones still on the digest? Scott asks about discoloring his wife's cooler with wort. I haven't really worried about it since I bought the cooler especially for brewing, but I haven't noticed any real discoloration problems. I suspect one batch wouldn't do it any harm, but I would be careful to keep the temperature below about 170F. Warping of the plastic would probably bug her more than the color. Now that lager season is here on the front range in Colorado (yesterday was first snow!), I'm thinking again about a dopplebock. Anyone with a good all-grain DB recipe? Of course, if it was to taste like Salvator I wouldn't mind ;-). Cheers, norm - -- Norm Pyle, Staff Engineer Head Brewer, Storage Technology Corporation Pyledriver Brewery, A Non-Profit Organization 2270 South 88th Street 1500 Elmhurst Drive Louisville, CO 80028-0211 Longmont, CO 80503-2323 (303) 673-8884 npyle at n33.stortek.com Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 08:43:19 PDT From: tima at wv.MENTORG.COM (Tim Anderson) Subject: Instant carbonation I recently had an experience that I thought was worth sharing. I made a pretty ordinary pale ale from DME and adjunct grains. The process was the same as all my batches. I pitched a large quantity (2 liters) of actively chugging starter (Wyeast London Ale) and aerated with wild abandon. But then I always do. Fermentation started within a few hours, which, of course, had nothing to do with my method of aeration. After 9 days, the bubbling in the air lock was getting slow, and since I had a window of opportunity to bottle, and wouldn't again for at least another week, I went ahead and did it. I primed with corn sugar. I always prime with corn sugar. I'm proud of priming with corn sugar. Now here's the good part. The beer was fully carbonated and fairly tasty in 2 days (!). My first reaction was, "Oh shit." I braced for glass grenades. But they never came. It's been 6 weeks since bottling, and the beer is just fine. Not over-carbonated, no gushers, no off flavors. Pretty boring stuff. I am curious why what usually takes a couple of weeks would occur in 2 days without ill-effect. My hypothesis is that I caught the yeast at just the right moment when it was effectively done with the food at hand, was sitting back with its feet up, enjoying a good cigar and snifter of brandy, but had not yet gone dormant. What's this, dessert? Corn sugar, my favorite! If so, I suppose the timing was lucky and had I bottled just a bit sooner, my closet would look like a war zone. By the way, this is a basement closet that maintains a constant 62F. tim Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 11:09:43 CDT From: inline at vnet.IBM.COM Subject: GABF info Can anyone tell me what one of these festivals is like ? With the airline price wars starting up it might be worth a trip to Denver to check this out. Are there cheap hotels within walking distance of the festival ? I'm not sure I would want to be driving around (in the snow even!) if I'd been tasting all day. Email answers are fine. Thanks ! ************************************************************** Chris Williams inline at vnet.ibm.com ************************************************************** Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 9:21:47 PDT From: Mark Garetz <mgaretz at hoptech.com> Subject: Heineken Paranoid of Micros? Has anyone else heard Heineken's "swipe" at Microbeers in their latest radio ad? They have really taken a good one at our friend Jim Koch: Guy to bartender: "Hey Tom! What's this Benedict Arnold Pittsburgh Lager?" Mark Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 11:48:56 EDT From: Lee=A.=Menegoni at nectech.com Subject: Brown Porter / Commercial examples? What commercially available brews are examples of the "Brown Porter" style as definded by the AHA? Brown Porter: Medium to dark brown. No roast barley or strong burnt malt character. Light to medium body. Low to medium malt sweetness. Medium hop bitterness. Hop flavor and aroma; none to medium. Fruitiness/esters OK. Low diacetyl OK. OG 1.040-50, % Alc/Vol 4.6-6%, IBU 20-30, Color SRM 20-35 Lee Menegoni Lmenegoni at nectech.com Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 13:26:43 EDT From: hhoppe at motown.ge.com Subject: help help hhoppe at motown.ge.com Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 12:21:58 PDT From: troy at scubed.scubed.com (Troy Howard) Subject: Malt Liquor Al writes: >There are even stupider misuses of names (such as the misuse of the word >"ale" in Texas) <snip> Hey! Don't leave us all in suspense, out with the ugly truth. Enquiring minds want to know. What exactly did the Texas legislature do with "ale"? Troy Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 16:19 CDT From: korz at iepubj.att.com Subject: Klages or not to Klages Well, I guess it's time to eat crow... the latest issue of Brewer's Digest (Aug `93) completely contradicts my previous assertion that Klages is no longer grown in the US. It apparently is being grown in 1993 along with 12 other varieties of malting barley. The seven 6-row varieties of malting barley being grown in the US in 1993 are: Azure, B1602, B2601, Excel, Morex, Robust and Russell. The six 2-row varieties are: B1202, Crest, Crystal, Harrington, Klages and Moravian III. Klages appears to be grown in the following states this year: Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. From the map in the article, it appears that there is little overlap between barley strains grown in the Western States (those mentioned above) and the Midwestern States (N & S Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan). Excel and Morex appear to be the only ones grown in both the W and MW. Strangely, there are no 2-row varieties grown in the MW this year! Sorry about the misinformation. I had heard from various sources, for two years in a row now, that Klages was discontinued in 1990. Unless it has just rebounded in popularity, I was given incorrect info. Al. Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 93 03:04:00 BST From: mike.keller at genie.geis.com Subject: Homebrew Digest #1225 >From HBD 1225: ||From: CCAMDEN at delphi.com || ||Subject: Cake mixes, and other half-baked ideas || ||The first is a "cake mix" question. I recently received a || ||catalog from The Home Brewery. They have a liquid malt || ||extract that they call Yellow Dog(tm). It is 87% 2-row || ||Klages, 12% malted wheat and 1% chocolate malt. I find || ||myself intrigued by this product. Has anyone in HBD-land || ||ever used Yellow Dog and if so, what are your comments? || On GEnie, we used Yellow Dog as the main ingredient in the extract version of two recipes we designed online, an ale and a porter. We made up an extract version and an all-grain version, and we used the Yellow Dog for the extract version because the Home Brewery listed the ingredients, so we knew the make up. After we each brewed our own batches, we then swapped via UPS a few samples of our efforts, and compared them. The result? The Yellow Dog is just fine, everyone's beer was good, but in the end you get so much variation in technique that the "cake mix" you use is less important than how you brew it. I thought the Yellow Dog was fine extract, and if I had to mail order I would consider it, but I now have two local homebrew stores, and I'd rather support them. I can add my own wheat and chocolate, and I often do! mike.keller Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1993 22:14:46 -0500 From: donald oconnor <oconnor at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu> Subject: oring challenge results For nearly a year now I have avoided posting the results of the oring challenge even when it seemed appropriate such as the time George Fix referred to "O'Connor's oring beer." Quite honestly I didn't want to hear another damn word about orings. The oring challenge was never what I said. I said that the beer had been in a used keg with a used oring. I further said the keg had once held either coke or Dr. Pepper or root beer. I asked them to tell me which. In reality, the beer had never been in a keg. I spiked each 12 ounce bottle with 9 ml of Diet Coke. That's an incredible 1.35 cans of diet coke per 5 gallon batch. I simply poured from bottle to bottle to make it look as if it came from a keg, sediment free. The beer was tasted by 5 certified judges and several others. NOT A SINGLE PERSON TASTED COKE. The reason I did this was to offer a concrete example that the threshold for coke was too high to believe an oring could soak up enough syrup to be the culprit. However, the really remarkable results came from the group of 4 certified judges in Chicago. They not only did not taste coke, they IMAGINED TASTING "GRAPE or GINGER ALE" which they surmised came from the oring. They surmised the keg had once held grape or ginger ale. So what did the oring challenge prove? Were these judges incompetent? Far from it. Quite impressively, the judge in N. Carolina actually picked up a sweetness that was not like malt sweetness. Another judge in the Chicago area tasted 2 bottles a month or two apart and noticed a big difference because the beer was very oxidized by the time he drank the second. Two others, not judges, noticed the rather odd dark color of the spiked beer. All I can say with absolute certainty is that 1. 5 certifed judges and several others did not taste 1.35 cans of Diet Coke in 5 gallons of pale beer even when they were looking for it. 2. 4 certified judges did IMAGINE tasting grape or ginger ale from an old oring that never existed. People can quibble around the edges, but these two facts are indisputable. Before you run out to change the poppet valve, I would simply ask HOW DO YOU GET MORE THAN 1.35 CANS OF DIET COKE INTO THE POPPET VALVE ORING? Finally, I agree with Al Korzonis that some people have more flavor sensitivity than others. I would only add that some people have more imagination than others. Both are essential to the full enjoyment of beer. The trick is to have some idea where one ends and the other begins. Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 20:30:25 -0700 From: pascal at netcom.com (The Ghost In The Machine) Subject: Yeast Washing martin at gamma.intel.com notes : "I have on occasion washed some yeast. The question I have is how do you tell the difference from the trub and the yeast? The yeast is usually an off-white and the trub white, do I just not worry???" I believe the trub is heaviest, and therefore on the bottom, as what is called, in chemistry, the "precipitate". As it contains a hodge-podge of materials, it is rarely of a pure color, and tends to be darker in shade. The yeast - the living yeast cells, not the dead cells, which are amongst the rest of the "precipitated" materials on the bottom - are in suspension, and therefore rest in the layer above the precipitate. The fluid medium in which they both exist provides the third, top layer, and it is clear, totally transparent, and usually only lightly tinted. The trick to separating the three is in a two-fold approach. (1) Add sufficient fluid to allow the three to separate. (2) Adjust the geometry (shape) of the container to help expedite separating the layers - IE, use tall, thin containers to separate very small amounts. It also helps to use something like a baster ( large vacumm-bulb gadget used to suck up fluid under cooking meat and recirculate it over roasts, usually used only once or twice a year, but has many other uses ... ;-) with which to carefully remove specific layers, in order or not. - -- richard Truth : the most deadly weapon known to civilization. Possession forbidden by employers, governments, and authorities, across the known universe. Violation of this regulation punishable by death. richard childers pascal at netcom.com Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 93 12:42:00 -0600 From: chuck.wettergreen at aquila.com (Chuck Wettergreen) Subject: slow sparges In HBD 1224 Steve Zabarnick wrote: SZ) Subject: Slow sparge problems SZ> two full mashes have been successful, but I've been frustrated > by the how slow my sparging has been. Here is my set-up: 5 gal SZ> been sparging with 5 gals of 170 F water while keeping the water > level above the grain bed (I skip the mash-out). Both of my > sparges have taken 2 hours with the valve on the cooler full > open. I would like to get this down to about an hour. Steve, Have you been "floating" the grain on several inches of sparge water above the false bottom as Charlie P. recommends? I was having slow sparges (but nowhere near 2 hours), but found that the combination of first, filling the lauter tun with sparge water about two inches above the level of the false bottom, and second, maintaining the sparge water level above the grain level until the sparge is finished, dramatically decreased sparge time. Chuck Wettergreen * RM 1.2 00946 * Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up. Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 93 08:47:02 MET DST From: ROB THOMAS <THOMASR at EZRZ1.vmsmail.ethz.ch> Subject: thin part boiling in decoction Hello all, I've just been catching up on the last two hbds. Lee in hbd 1225 mentioned that he boils the THINNEST third during his decoction mashes, and he attributes unclear beer to boiling some grains as well. He goes on to suggest that boiling the grains gelatinised their starches, and hence led the haze Well, yes and no! The accepted "industrial" procedure for decoction involves taking out the THICKEST third (ie mostly grain), heating it to conversion temperatures and then to boiling, when, indeed, the starch gelatinises, the inner structure of the grains is disrupted, and generally the starch is made more accessible to enzymes. This boiling mixture is then returned to the main mash. Why is the thick part boiled? Firstly because of the changes it brings about in the grains that were boiled, and secondly because most of the (heat sensitive) enzymes have disolved in the liquor (that is the thin bit), so that if the thin bit is taken out and boiled, the enzymes are destroyed and no conversion takes place. This then leads to low yields AND starch hazes! Therefore, in conclusion, I'd say that Lee's unclear beer was caused by NOT BOILING ENOUGH GRAINS and BOILING TOO MUCH LIQUID. Using the above procedure I've got excellent yields of clear and NOT astringent beer. (There are other features of the decoction system that I won't go into, but in passing, by keeping the boiled part as thick as possible no tannins are extracted during the boil either.) Rob. Thomas Return to table of contents
End of HOMEBREW Digest #1226, 09/15/93