HOMEBREW Digest #4963 Tue 28 February 2006


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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org


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Contents:
  BABBLE Brew-Off 2006 Results (val.dan.morey)
  Re: Temperature regulation in chest freezer for lagering? ("Michael O'Donnell")
  CARBOY Shamrock Open - March 18 ("Mike Dixon")
  ok (leavitdg)
  Re: Lagering (Randy Ricchi)
  Re: Producing doped beer for taste comparison ("Jason Gross")
  Re: temperature regulation in chest freezer for lagering? (Scott Alfter)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:28:09 -0600 From: val.dan.morey at juno.com Subject: BABBLE Brew-Off 2006 Results Many thanks to the participants, judges, stewards, volunteers, and sponsors that made the BABBLE Brew-Off 2006 a huge success. A 199 entries were received from 11 states coast to coast making this our largest Brew-Off yet. We are very pleased to announce Dave Wohlfeil as the winner of our Entrant Appreciation Drawing. Dave receives a one year subscription to Brew Your Own. Best of show was as follows: 1st - Dan Schlosser - Doppelbock 2nd - Aaron Slocum - Sweet mead 3rd - Steve Pauling - Mild Ale Full results can be found at the following link: http://babblehomebrewers.com/brewoff/results.asp Full list of sponsors can be found at: http://babblehomebrewers.com/brewoff/sponsors.asp Results are in the mail and you should receive them soon. We hope that you will join us in 2007 for another Brew-Off! Thanks again. Prosit, Dan Morey BABBLE Brew-Off Organizer Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:42:41 -0800 From: "Michael O'Donnell" <mooseo at stanford.edu> Subject: Re: Temperature regulation in chest freezer for lagering? >Gavin, I've thought about the same thing a few times: you're right, it should work. I don't remember what voltage home thermostats switch (maybe 24 V), but you're then going to need a relay to control the fridge... add buying the thermostat (~$25) a relay (~$5?) and a power supply ($5 if you can't scrounge one) and you've got a bit of money invested. I was going to try it for my lagering fridge, but $40 on eBay got me a temperature controller that worked out of the box. I probably wouldn't use an old-school bi-metal thermostat for this, only because lagering temps are right at the edge of the temp range and they probably aren't very accurate there... the digital ones are so cheap now... you might even find a heating installer who'd trade you used one for beer. cheers, mike Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 06:16:55 -0500 From: "Mike Dixon" <mpdixon at ipass.net> Subject: CARBOY Shamrock Open - March 18 The CARBOY Shamrock Open competition date will be March 18, with the event held once again in Raleigh at the BB&Y Restaurant. The deadline for entry is March 11. Entrants, judges and stewards can sign up via the online entry form. Contact information for the competition is given on the website. http://hbd.org/carboy/shamrock.htm Cheers, Mike Dixon Wake Forest, NC Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 06:57:49 -0500 From: leavitdg at plattsburgh.edu Subject: ok Thanks for all of the responses re: top up water. This makes sense. I guess that I read too much lately, now here is another: In the same journal there were several tear-out fliers/cards produced apparently by Coopers and WhiteLabs. They have recipes and procedures for various styles. One is a "James Brown Ale" (supposed Newcastle clone). It is a lot of malt extract recipe, with some munich, crystal and chocolate steeped, and removed. Once the grains are removed it says: 'mix in the extract, and FLAKED WHEAT (my emphasis), bring to a boil, etc.' This is an error, is it not, ie, the flaked wheat should be converted...and the starch will lead to haze, no? Darrell <doing too much reading, and not enough brewing!> Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:19:56 -0500 From: Randy Ricchi <rricchi at houghton.k12.mi.us> Subject: Re: Lagering The question was asked: "does a keg of cold fermented lager improve at all if it's conditioned at room temps, albeit 18C / 64.4F? Think of it as a super sized diacetyl rest!" I'll throw my two cents in on this, and also bring you up to date on a fun little experiment I've been doing this lager brewing season. I've noticed that even very clean lagers eventually develop fruity, ale-like flavors if stored warm for an extended period of time (at least bottle conditioned lagers-I don't know if this would happen in the absence of yeast). They might still be a tasty beer, but not what you were shooting for. I like to do a diacetyl rest at about 60F, regardless of whether or not there is diacetyl present. The warmer temp speeds up the activity of the yeast as it reduces some of the compounds (sulfur, diacetyl, etc.) it created during fermentation. The warmer beer releases CO2 which I believe also helps by "scrubbing out" some of these compounds. I used to ferment real clean wort by letting the wort sit for 45 min or so after chilling and then racking off only the clean wort. This resulted in very few nucleation sites for CO2 release, and my ferments took longer and I ended up with real strong sulfur character in the finished beer which took many, many weeks to go away unless I did a "diacetyl" rest for a week or so. This year I threw conventional wisdom out the window and decided to ferment "dirty" with all the hot and cold break, and hop pellets still in the wort. I remembered when I first started brewing and didn't know any better, I never seperated the wort from all the gunk and I had nice strong fermentations, and nice beers. I don't know - maybe my palate was too unsophisticated to notice any flavor problems back then, but so far this year my young lagers taste very nice (with one exception-I'll go into that later), and they finished fermenting in less than a week, and with only minor sulfur. I racked off of all the sludge while there was only 2 gravity points or so left to go until terminal gravity. One of my 6 batches of lager may end up fruity. I was caught off guard by how rapidly the beer was fermenting and it must have warmed itself up a little too much during primary. It was fruity when I racked it. I had a half gallon or so of headspace in the 6.5 gallon secondary, so I kraeusened it with freshly fermenting beer a couple of days later to top off the carboy. I don't know if this will help with the fruity character, but it surely can't hurt. The following beers were fermented colder to avoid this problem. My first batch, which was pitched with fresh liquid yeast culture built up first with a pint of wort, and later with a quart of wort the day before pitching, was fermented at around 52F, and was done in one week. Pitching temp was 58F. This beer is very clean tasting, and it was a very quick ferment for a lager. The next batch was fermented with approximately one cup of slurry from the previous batch, and the slurry was full of hop particles and trub - real pretty stuff. This stuff, pitched into "dirty" wort at around 58 degrees and put into a chest freezer set at 48 degrees, fermented out in 4 days. It turns out this was too fast, resulting in a fruity character. Further batches were handled the same way, but fermented a little colder, between 42 and 45 degrees and finished clean, in about 5 to 6 days. By racking to secondary when there are a couple, three gravity points left to ferment, I'm getting the beer off of the old yeast cells and all the trub, and there is still enough activity to fill any headspace in the secondary with CO2. The beers had no diacetyl that I could detect, and only a very slight note of sulfur, and except for the one fruity one, taste quite clean. All the beers are held in the same chest freezer (it's a big'un), and after the final batch was done with primary and racked to secondary I allowed the temp to rise over a couple, three days to 57 degrees. Last night I set the thermostat at 52 degrees. I'll dial it down to 47 tonight, and keep dropping it 5 degrees per day until I get to 32F, which is what I'll hold the beers at for as long as I can wait before kegging and drinking. Since my storing and serving chamber is one and the same, when I keg the first one, I'll be pretty much done with very cold storage since I don't want to drink my beer at 32 degrees. I'll generally store at 45 or 46 degrees from there on out. One thing I really liked about my "dirty" brewing technique is I don't have to sanitize a carboy and racking hose and cane, or clean a brewpot on brew day. I use an immersion chiller and just chill the beer in the brewpot, pitch the yeast in, oxygenate, cover, and throw it in the fridge. Simple methods for a simpleton. Perfect for me! If I discover later that this whole thing was a huge mistake, I'll surely let you know. Randy Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:22:25 -0700 From: "Jason Gross" <jrgross at hotmail.com> Subject: Re: Producing doped beer for taste comparison Randy Mosher lists some good DIY methods in "Radical Brewing". Although, he recommends them for aroma only and not taste. Nail Polish Remover Lager or freshly rasped Biere de Circuit Board anyone? How about some Packing Tape Porter? Yum... Cheers, Jason Gross Mandan, ND Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 17:25:23 -0800 From: Scott Alfter <scott at alfter.us> Subject: Re: temperature regulation in chest freezer for lagering? Gavin Last wrote: > Hi, I'm looking for some advice. I want to create a device for controlled > temperature lagering using an old chest freezer and a home thermostat. I did this for a short time, and it got the job done. In addition to the thermostat, you'll need a relay, a power supply, some wire, and a plug and outlet (like you'd use to fix an extension cord). I'd use a 12V DC power supply and a relay that uses a 12V DC coil. (A transformer and an AC-coil relay would also work, and I think you can pass up to 24V through the typical thermostat. DC components were what I had on hand at the time.) The relay contacts should be DPST or DPDT, rated for somewhere around 5-10 amps at 120V AC. Wire the plug and outlet to the relay contacts so they'll be connected when the relay is energized (connect live through one set, neutral through the other, and connect ground directly). Connect the negative output from the power supply to one side of the relay coil. Connect the positive output to the common terminal on the thermostat, and run a wire from the A/C terminal on the thermostat to the other side of the relay coil. I put the thermostat (a cheap digital model) inside the fridge, with some Cat3 exiting through a hole in the side to go down below. The relay and power supply were taped to the bottom frame near the compressor. The fridge's power cord was then plugged into the outlet connected to the relay, and the plug connected to the relay (through a suitable length of cord) was plugged into the wall, along with the power supply. The thermostat I had could be cranked down to maybe 40 degrees, IIRC. That should be good enough for any fermentation, and it's borderline passable for lagering. I ended up replacing the thermostat with an Apple II and some custom hardware for temperature sensing and relay control, which lets me set a lower temperature and do some other nifty things (like slowly ramp temperatures up for the diacetyl rest and back down for lagering), but one of these days, I'll replace that with a microcontroller-based system that'll be smaller and more reliable. (I've burned through a couple of Apple II power supplies, and you can't just run down to Fry's and buy another one.) _/_ Scott Alfter / v \ Visit the SNAFU website today! (IIGS( http://snafu.alfter.us/ Top-posting! \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet? Return to table of contents
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