HOMEBREW Digest #556 Tue 18 December 1990

[Prev HBD] [Index] [Next HBD] [Back]


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


Contents:
  high-gravity recipes (synchro!chuck)
  102 on tap? (Norm Hardy)
  WYEAST attenuations (Mark.Nevar)
  More kegging questions (Mark.Nevar)
  live yeasts in commercial beers (Jon Rodin)
  Shipping Homebrew/Orange County Brewpubs (John Bates)
  Lambics, at Home? (Martin A. Lodahl)
  Enzyme additives (mcnally)
  water analysis (Chip Hitchcock)
  Where to go, what to do? (Lloyd Parkes)
  Homebrew digest stack (Andrius Tamulis)

Send submissions to homebrew%hpfcmr at hplabs.hp.com Send requests to homebrew-request%hpfcmr at hplabs.hp.com [Please do not send me requests for back issues] Archives are available from netlib at mthvax.cs.miami.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Dec 14 13:54:00 1990 From: bose!synchro!chuck at uunet.UU.NET Subject: high-gravity recipes Howdy - I received a few requests for some of my high-gravity recipes, so I figured I might as well post them to the digest. Unless otherwise noted, these are 10 gallon partial mash recipes. I brew about 7 gal of wort in a 10 gal kettle, followed by 7 gal primary and 2 5 gal secondaries, then 2 5 gal kegs. Otherwise, standard procedures are used. Special Bitter 15 lb pale unhopped dry extract 2 lb crystal malt 1 lb flaked barley 1 lb pale malt 1 tsp gypsum 1/2 tsp salt 1 tsp irish moss 4.5 hbu fuggles (boil) 14 hbu n. brewer (boil) 5 hbu cascade (boil) 1/2 oz fuggles (finish) 1 oz e.k. goldings (finish) 26 g fuggles (dry) 40 g goldings (dry) young's yeast culture (from the brewery) 8 beechwood chips 1990 Christmas Ale (9 gallons) 9.9 lb pale unhopped liquid extract 6.6 lb liquid wheat beer extract 3 lb honey 1 lb flaked barley 1 lb pale malt 1 lb malted wheat 10 g orange peel 1 tsp gypsum 1/2 tsp salt 1 tsp irish moss 14 hbu chinook (boil) 7 hbu n. brewer (boil) 1 oz goldings (finish) 1 oz cascades (finish) young's yeast culture (from the brewery) Helles Belles Maibock 18 lb pale unhopped extract 2 lb crystal malt 1 lb lager malt 1 lb toasted lager malt (5 min at 350 deg) 1 tsp irish moss 14 hbu hallertau (boil) 14 hbu tettnanger (boil) 1/2 oz hallertau (finish) 1/2 oz tettnanger (finish) anheiser busch yeast culture (from bakers yeast) one: chimay two: chimight three: you can't Chimight (chimay light) (9 gal) 15 lb pale uhopped extract 3/4 lb brown sugar 1 lb crystal malt 1 lb flaked barley 1 lb pale malt 1/2 lb wheat malt 1/4 tsp gypsum 1/4 tsp salt 1 tsp irish moss 7 hbu n. brewer (boil) 14 hbu chinook (boil) 1 oz saaz (finish) 1/2 oz tettnanger (finish) chimay yeast culture (from a bottle) Chimay Trippel (7 gal) 3.3 lb pale uhopped liquid extract 12 lb pale unhopped dry extract 1 lb 6-row pale malt 1 lb wheat malt 1 lb vienna malt 2 lb light brown sugar 1/2 lb corn sugar 10 g coriander 8 g orange peel 4 hbu saaz (boil) 4 hbu hallerau (boil) 4.5 hbu fuggles (boil) handful of boiling hops added to finish 1 tsp irish moss chimay yeast culture (from a bottle) Brain Death Barleywine / Light (5 gal full strength + 4 gal half strength) 17.5 lb pale unhopped pale dry extract 3 lb crystal malt 1.5 lb flaked barley 1.5 lb wheat malt 1 tsp gypsum 1 tsp irish moss 68 hbu chinook (boil) 20 hbu cascade (boil) 2.5 oz goldings (finish) 10 g chinook (dry) 20 g goldings (dry) 50 g cascade (dry) sierra nevada ale yeast culture (from brewery) 1/2 to 1 lb special hops (herbal hop substitute) * * Special hops should be repeatedly soaked and sparged in lukewarm water for at least 4 hours to eliminate water-soluble off-flavors. Special hops are added to secondary about one week before kegging. Quantity depends on quality and potency of the herbs. Warning: having two kegs of this stuff on draft in your living room can be dangerously fun. - Chuck Cox (uunet!bose!synchro!chuck) - Hopped/Up Racing Team - Return to table of contents
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 90 16:04:13 PST From: polstra!norm at uunet.UU.NET (Norm Hardy) Subject: 102 on tap? Just got back from a 4 day stint in Portland, OR. Actually it was in Beaverton but its close enough. There is a chain of brewpubs running now, with somebody called Dr. Neon doing the brewing (or supervising). They supply different names for the pubs so you have to know where to look. The one I went to was called McMenamins Brewpub and Restuarant. Good stuff with their Terminator Stout being my fave. But, on a tip from a fellow imbiber, I headed for Raleigh Hills to a tavern called The Dublin Pub. 102 beers on tap and although I didn't count the taps, there was indeed many of them. Being a German lager freak I ordered a Paulaner Pils and then a Spaten Munich (helles). Old smell - something was amiss but the taste was fine. My question - how the HECK can a place possibly have that many beers and serve them in reasonably good shape? The joint was busy not not hoppin'. I imagine the NW ales were in okay shape, but I can get them anytime in Seattle. They even had the award winning Deschutes beers there. I thought of Florian's fondness for them and let them be. Norm Hardy Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 08:00:10 mst From: Mark.Nevar at hp-lsd.cos.hp.com Subject: WYEAST attenuations I'm sending this again, as it seems not to have made it the first time. Name Apparent Flocculation Comments attenuation ALE 1007 German 73-77% High Ferments dry & crisp leaving a complex yet mild flavor. Produces an extremely rocky head and ferments well down to 55 F. 1056 USA - Chico 73-77% Low/medium Ferments dry, finishes soft, smooth and clean, and is v. well balanced. 1028 English London 73-77% Medium Rich minerally profile, bold and woody w/ a slight diacetyl product. 1098 English Whitbread 73-77% Medium Ferments dry and crisp, slightly tart and well balanced. Ferments well down to 55 F. 1084 Irish Stout 71-75% Medium Slight residual diacetyl is great for stouts. It is clean, smooth, soft, and full bodied. 1338 German Alt 67-71% High A full bodied complex strain finishes very malty. Produces a dense rocky head during ferment. 3056 Wheat 73-77% Medium A blend of S. cerevisiae and S. delbrueckii to produce a south German style wheat beer with a cloying sweetness, when the beer is fresh. LAGER 2007 Pilsner 71-75% Medium Specific for pilsner style beers, especially for American pilsner. Ferments dry, crisp, clean, light. 2042 Danish 73-77% Low Rich, yet crisp and dry. Soft, light profile which accentuates hop characteristics. 2035 USA - St Louis 73-77% Medium Unlike American pilsner styles. It is bold, complex and woody. Produces slight diacetyl. 2124 Bohemian 69-73% Medium The traditional Saaz yeast from Czech. Ferments clean and malty, rich residual maltiness in high gravity pilsners. 2206 Bavarian 73-77% Medium Rich flavor, full bodied, malty and clean. 2308 Munich 73-77% Medium Smooth, soft, well rounded and full bodied. Sometimes unstable. All notes are from Alternative Beverage Catalog(1-800-365-BREW). No affiliation except as a satisfied customer. There is no mention if the data came from Wyeast Labs or from their own experimentation. My vote is for the latter. Mark Nevar Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 08:00:46 mst From: Mark.Nevar at hp-lsd.cos.hp.com Subject: More kegging questions I'm sending this again, as it seems not to have made it the first time. Sorry if it is a duplicate. Thanks to all who responded to my keg sanitizing question. I kegged a batch of Marzen on 12/6 and used CO2 to provide an initial seal. Now my questions: After 2 days in the fridge, there was no pressure in the keg, so I did the CO2 thing again. 5 more days passed before I checked it again. Same result. So, what is wrong ? I pressurized the keg to 10 PSI and then disconnected the CO2 line. Is this the right pressure and am I supposed to disconnect it or leave the pressure constant. Finally, what dispensing pressure should I use ? 5 PSI ? The beer was in the secondary at 55 F for 6 weeks. I added 1/2 cup corn sugar for priming. Is it possible that no yeast is left alive to carbonate ? Is it possible the CO2 I injected went into solution. I would think it would have stopped going into solution before ALL the pressure was gone. I think I will force carbonate by using 20PSI and rolling the keg around. Does this sound right ? BTW, The keg sealed fine when I experimented with water. Anyway, what I'm looking for is pointers on your procedures for kegging. I saw florian's post in #554 which answered this to some extent, but I'd like to hear if this was for lagers only. Thanks, mark, the puzzled Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 9:12:10 MST From: Jon Rodin <jar at hpcndpc.cnd.hp.com> Subject: live yeasts in commercial beers I just successfully cultured and used a Sierra Nevada yeast for my last batch of brew. It went so well that I don't really see the need to ever buy yeast again. My question is what beers contain live yeast and what kind of yeasts are they? Red Tail Ale appears to be bottle conditioned, does anyone know about the yeast in this beer? The label on the Red Hook beers says "unpasteurized", but the beer (at least the ESB) has no krausen on the bottom of the bottle. Does Red Hook filter their beers. What variety of yeast is in the Sierra Nevada beers (say compared to the Wyeast varieties)? - --------------------------+--------------------------------------------------- Jon Rodin | j_rodin at cnd.hp.com | No brain, no gain. (303) 229 2474 | - --------------------------+--------------------------------------------------- Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 09:20:33 MST From: bates at bjerknes.Colorado.EDU (John Bates) Subject: Shipping Homebrew/Orange County Brewpubs Happy Holidays Gang, I have just had an unfortunate incident with UPS trying to ship some homebrew to the west coast. I had never tried shipping before, so I asked the advice of the local experts (lots of them in Boulder). Following their advice, I wrapped each bottle individually in bubble wrap, used yards and yards of bubble wrap bottom, top, and sides, then shake tested the final package. Satisfied it was well packed, I took it to the local mail station, indicated it was "non-perishable food", and plunked $15 down to ship this 35# package by ground. A week later I got a call from the shipper that UPS had damaged the box and, since there was alcohol inside, UPS was not responsible for any damage. UPS had returned what was left, less than half the bottle and no sign of the original package. From the amount of damage done, it was obvious that the problem was not in the packaging, but in the handling by UPS. I called up the AHA (nice when it's a local call) and spoke to Dan Fink who said they were about to run an article on shipping in the next issue. Still, the bottom line I concluded was that you're SOL if you ship homebrew and it's damaged in shipping. Any other experiences in shipping homebrew??? Also, since I don't have any of my own homebrew to enjoy on my trip to relatives in Orange County, CA, are there any good brewpubs there? Regards, John Bates (Norman's evil twin) Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 7:54:45 PST From: Martin A. Lodahl <pbmoss!malodah at PacBell.COM> Subject: Lambics, at Home? Greetings all. I'm just back from yer basic life-changing experience: an unstructured, largely unplanned tasting & study tour of Belgium. Brought back many pages of tasting notes, and more pages of notes taken at breweries, and as the embarrassingly crucial lacunae in them begin to become apparent, I can see my brewing studies turning in a new direction: lambics! So, some questions: has anyone (successfully) made (pseudo-) lambics at home? I don't mean going the whole route and leaving the bitter wort outside overnight in an uncovered pan to spontaneously begin fermenting, but rather culturing the biota (not just yeast, but bacteria, too!) from a bottle of gueuze or whatever, and pitching that in the usual way into a lambic-like wort? Has anyone yet seen Jean-Xavier Guinard's book on lambics, in the "Classic Beer Styles" series? I'm hoping it can fill in some of the holes in my notes. And those holes are pretty critical: while I have some guidelines, I have no information on how thick the mash is, or what the rests are, in the 2.5 hours between its 122F start and its 167F finish. I also have no information at all on present sparging techniques, but a fascinating book I picked up at the brewers' guild hall in the Grand' Place in Brussels ("Les Memoires de Jef Lambic", Editions La Technique Belge, undated) suggests that in the 1880's the first runnings and the sparge were boiled & fermented separately, the beer made from sparge called "mars". Mars and "lambic" (from the first runnings) were later recombined, with some candy-sugar syrup added, to make faro. The information I did get was fascinating, to me, at least. The grist is a combination of malted barley and UNMALTED wheat, with proportions ranging from 50%:50% to 65% malt:35% wheat. The malt looks like 2-row, and tasted not fully modified (steely tips), presumably to maximize enzyme content. The hops seem pretty uniformly to be aged 3 years, and in the one bale I had access to smelled like Northern Brewer. The inoculation vessel Michael Jackson writes so lyrically about is nothing more nor less than a coolship, placed in an attic with louvred walls. I've always been suspicious of coolships, as I didn't see how agitation of hot wort in the presence of oxygen could be avoided, but at the Cantillon brewery in Brussels, the pump used to move the wort upstairs from the boiling kettle seems sized to move the wort slowly and gently enough to minimize oxidation. The Cantillon brewery, at 56 Rue Gheude in Anderlecht (a suburb of Brussels) is WELL WORTH SEEING. On Saturdays they offer a tour for BF50 (same price charged by the museum at the brewers' hall, which is not worth the trouble, in my opinion), between 10 AM and 5 PM. Not knowing this, I came wandering in on a Tuesday, and they essentially gave me the run of the place! Friends, it was grand. In that one day I gathered more useful & interesting information than the rest of the trip combined. So, here I am, collating my notes and trying to come up with a test recipe. Another question: in the Memoires de Jef Lambic, he says his father (a mid-19th century lambic brewer) obtained the following yields: "Comme le faro etait fait du melange de ces deux bieres, on en obtenait finalement 460 litres pour cent kilos de froment et d'orge. Il fallait donc 22 kilos de grains pour un hectolitre de faro et 40 kilos de grains pour hectolitre de lambic ..." Can anyone give me a pointer to how I might convert that to an approximate specific gravity? Another approach, it occurs to me, might be to scale the figures given to a 5 gallon batch, and just use his method of handling first runnings & sparge separately, using a rather thin mash. Any suggestions? = Martin A. Lodahl Pac*Bell Minicomputer Operations Support Staff = = malodah at pbmoss.Pacbell.COM Sacramento, CA 916.972.4821 = = If it's good for ancient Druids, runnin' nekkid through the wuids, = = Drinkin' strange fermented fluids, it's good enough for me! 8-) = Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 09:58:22 PST From: mcnally at wsl.dec.com Subject: Enzyme additives After three batches with disturbingly low extraction rates, I've begun to wonder whether the 2-row I'm using is sufficiently diastatic to deal with specialty malts. For example, yesterday's batch was 6 lbs. 2-row, 3 lbs. wheat, and 1 lb. dextrin malt. The OG is about 53; I was shooting for *at least* 60. I know that 6-row is more diastatic, but (according to Dave Miller) it is also higher in polyphenols and other undesirables. As an alternative, I am wondering if anyone has ever used enzymes added from a jar. I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I do know that I've seen little jars at my local homebrew supply labeled "amylase enzyme". Is this some sort of cheap dirty trick? Are there bad side-effects? - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike McNally mcnally at wsl.dec.com Digital Equipment Corporation Western Software Lab Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 90 12:41:08 EST From: cjh at vallance.eng.ileaf.com (Chip Hitchcock) Subject: water analysis I think the Kjeldahl test is useful as a rough measurement of the amount of protein (loose and bacterial) in the water; my recollection is that it excludes nitrates, nitrites, and dissolved ammonia, so what's left is almost entirely in proteins (which average somewhere around 12-14% nitrogen (maximum 19, minimum ~9 for common amino acids). Plate count is a direct bacterial assessment; you slosh a bit of the water around on agar-coated dishes (plates), incubate for a few days, and count the number of colonies (unless you've got overlap, one colony=>one viable bacterium put in the dish). You'll get some bacteria even in drinking water because killing the last ones takes too much (chlorine, ozone, whatever you use as a sterilant). I've forgotten what distinguishing marks are, but there's a way to distinguish coliform colonies (which indicate that the water is contaminated with sewage) from whatever else you'll find; they didn't do that here, hence "total" count. (My recollection is that coliform count is usually a small fraction of the total even in sewage.) I have no idea what the appropriate/typical ranges are for most of these numbers. The best advice if you're using tap water is to boil it vigorously before putting in any of your ingredients; this drives off chlorine (which will ruin the flavor at the usual concentration). If you don't like the results of any of your first few batches, try bottled water and see if it makes a difference you can taste; also, find out what other homebrewers whose results you like do for water. Chip Hitchcock (cjh at ileaf.com) I used to be a chemist, a long time ago.... Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 90 10:22:46 +1300 From: Lloyd Parkes <Lloyd.Parkes at comp.vuw.ac.nz> Subject: Where to go, what to do? Nanoo nanoo, I will be travelling to and around the States late February, early March and I would really like to see some breweries. I will almost certainly be going to L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans and San Antonio. If anybody can suggest other places to see I would be most grateful. I hear that San Antonio has brewery that is listed as a tourist attraction. Can anyone tall me any more about it. Relax, don't worry and have a local brew :-) Lloyd Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 16:35:43 CST From: tamulis at dehn.math.nwu.edu (Andrius Tamulis) Subject: Homebrew digest stack Well, I worked and I worked and I wrote a stack for Hypercard on the Mac that takes these digests and, well, digests them: puts then into a stack for easy retrieval and perusal. A great way to keep all this wonderful information in order. So, if anyone is interested, drop me e-mail at tamulis at math.nwu.edu, I'll send a copy. And to the great grand Digest Gurus: Is this the sort of thing that should be archived in miami? (certainly saves me from comtinually mailing copies) And if (once?) you happen to get a copy, of course bug reports and hints are welcome. It hasn't been tested too well yet. Andrius Tamulis tamulis at math.nwu.edu Return to table of contents
End of HOMEBREW Digest #556, 12/18/90 ************************************* -------
[Prev HBD] [Index] [Next HBD] [Back]
HTML-ized on 06/29/00, by HBD2HTML version 1.2 by K.F.L.
webmaster at hbd.org, KFL, 10/9/96