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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
  Prickly Pear Beer recipe ("Braam Greyling")
  Re: Hefeweizen Yeast / Fire Marshall ("Gregor Zellmann")
  Final Gravity Problems with Extract Based Wheat Beer and 3068 (Luke Enriquez)
  Weizen (Randy Ricchi)
  finishing welds (Marc Sedam)
  Pig's Ear Brown Ale (Bob Pelletier)
  dry yeast matters. ("Dr. Pivo")
  Re: finishing welds (John Palmer)
  Hop lineage chart (Marc Sedam)
  radler and lemonade (Brian Myers)
  RE: recipe formulation (Brian Lundeen)
  Re:Hefe Weizen Yeast ("Mark E. Hogenmiller")
  hobby survey (Jay Pfaffman)


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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 09:48:13 +0200
From: "Braam Greyling" <braam.greyling at azoteq.com>
Subject: Prickly Pear Beer recipe

Bill Tobler asks for a recipe...

Bill, 

Ill try to get it. Will have to speak to the brewer first. 

Regards

Braam



- ------------------------------

Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 06:29:23 -0600
From: Bill Tobler <wctobler at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: RE:  Prickly Pear Beer

Hey Braam,
   How about a recipe?  We have plenty of prickly pears down here 
in
   Texas.

Thanks,

Bill Tobler
Lake Jackson, TX
(1129.7, 219.9) Apparent Rennerian




- ------------------------------
Braam Greyling
Snr. Design Engineer
Azoteq(Pty)Ltd
Tel +27 21 8630033  Fax +27 21 8631512



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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 09:55:43 +0100
From: "Gregor Zellmann" <gregor at blinx.de>
Subject: Re: Hefeweizen Yeast / Fire Marshall

Len Safhay asked about reculturing yeast from a Schneider Weisse bottle:

Len, I did reculture from Schneider bottles twice and made great Hefeweizens
with that. Seems to work with the bottles that are sold in Germany. I have
no information about the bottle conditioning yeast this brewery is using for
their export beers.

Steve Alexander wrote about 5th floor brewing:

> Yow !  How do you heat a sanke boiler in a 5th floor flat ?  You and Larry
> Maxwell deserve some sort of citation - perhaps from the fire marshall.

I don't mash and boil indoors. No need to, as I have a nice, big enough (10
square meters) roof terrace. ...and a lift to bring the full fermenters to
the basement. I would definitely not brew 50 litre batches in _my_ living
room.

greetings from Berlin

Gregor Zellmann

[4247.6, 43.4] Apparent Rennerian



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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 23:40:15 +1100
From: Luke Enriquez <wenrique at bigpond.net.au>
Subject: Final Gravity Problems with Extract Based Wheat Beer and 3068

Hi People,

Well, once again I am having problems with Wyeast 3068 or something
that manifests itself with this yeast. I searched the archives and found 
that several others have had the same problem as myself, but I have 
found very little in the way of suggestions. Subsequently, I would really 
appreciated input from those with experience.

I brewed a batch of wheat beer, using Coopers liquid malt extract
(in cans). Batch size was 21 liters, malt extract was 3.4kgs, with
SG of 1.047. I noticed extract was darker than normal.
Yeast starter was 2 liters of 3068 (which was 2 weeks
old from manufacturing date). Fermentation temp was 22 deg celcius.
Activity for first 3 days was furious with a lot of banana ester given off.
This settled down after 3 days to quieter activity
with a yeast cake remaining on top of the beer (as mentiontioned
by others as a characteristic of 3068). Racked into secondary 
after 7 days, gravity was 1.018. This sounds too high, especially 
from a SG of only 1.047.

I spoke to the owner from where I purchased the malt extract, and 
he mentioned that the liquid malt was not an item that was sold 
often, subsequently the malt might be up to 4 months old (hence
the darkening). However, he assured me the flavour might
change but the fermentability would not. He also mentioned that
a FG of 1.020 was not unusal for wheat beers.

Being suspucious I decided to try again, and use the yeast left 
over from the first batch. This time, I used a wheat malt extract
sold in a plastic tub (I could actually inspect the colour, which
was slightly darker than the light malt extract) and some light 
malt extract. Amounts were 2kgs of wheat, 1kg of light and 
1kg of glucose. Batch size was larger, but SG was 1.048.
This is now fermenting away and in a week I should know if
the FG is the same.

So, can anyone guess as to what I am doing wrong? Should wheat
malt extract be this unfermentable? Does 3068 not work so well
with extracts? Could my very soft Melbourne water not have 
the right chemicals for this yeast? Is 23 deg cel so high, that the
yeast quits prematurely? Should I become suspicious of the 
malt extract and find another source or use dry malt extract.

Sorry for so many questions, but I love my wheat beer, I dont
have the time to do a full mash, but I wanted a nice summer
drinking beer that was around 1.010. 

Thanks
Luke




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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 08:05:41 -0500
From: Randy Ricchi <rricchi at ccisd.k12.mi.us>
Subject: Weizen

Len Safhay asks about the yeast used to bottle Schneider-weisse.

I believe Schneider is the only German Hefe-weizen that has the actual
fermentation strain in the bottle. Schneider actually used to have a
contest where you would ferment a weizen with the yeast from their
bottle.

One thing, it's a multi-strain yeast, though your beer may not taste
exactly like Schneiders, it will be an authentic bavarian weizen.



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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 09:01:55 -0500
From: Marc Sedam <marc_sedam at unc.edu>
Subject: finishing welds

Hey all,

A gracious member of my HB club made arrangements to weld
the top of a corny in place of the spear on a Sankey keg.
This "sankorny" keg looks great, but the interior welds are
quite rough (not surprising) and need a bit o' smoothing.  I
love the sankorny but would like to make the welds less
likely to harbor bugs and beasties when I ferment.  Sooo....

What can I do to smooth out the welds and approach "sanitary
welding" status.  I have a Dremel, but that's about it.
Perhaps Mr. Palmer will join in?

Cheers!
Marc

- --

Marc Sedam
Chapel Hill, NC



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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 10:40:12 -0500
From: Bob Pelletier <rp at ihrsa.org>
Subject: Pig's Ear Brown Ale 

I tried a Pigs ear( Southern NH)  Brown ale this week end it was fantastic
and I would like to try to recreate it.  Any one have any Ideas?  It was
more chocolaty than New Castle.





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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 16:35:15 +0100
From: "Dr. Pivo" <dp at pivo.w.se>
Subject: dry yeast matters.

Phil Yates writes:


>  For all the years I have used nothing but
> liquid yeast cultures, I suspect a revolution in dry yeast production has
> been going on.
>

Indeed there has.  One that has been largely ignored by the most vocal
aspects of the homebrewing community.

Most people will be inclined to agree that there have been fine dry ale
yeasts about for quite some time, but the traditional view was that you
just couldn't make a dry lager that could produce "clean" flavours.

This has actually not been the case for some time, and in fact even the
old historical geographical boundaries of yeast production have
dissolved as well.

I have visited a very traditional ale brewery in England (high on the
CAMRA "approved" list) that uses a dry ale yeast..... that comes from
Germany!

I have also been at a large Swedish lager brewery that uses a dry lager
yeast......that comes from England!

So go figure!

At any rate, no large commercial lager brewery is about to use a yeast
that casts funky flavours.

The amasing thing was that while knowing and following this trend within
the industry, I was also continually seeing the "dry vs. liquid" debates
fluttering past my computer screen, and the repeated admonitions that
the dry stuff just couldn't measure up to "the real thing".

My take on this is the same as it always has been.

Which is the best yeast?

The one YOU understand best.

I view this as... different strains have different susceptability  to
variation according to temperature, pitching rate, degree and timing of
oxygenation, and (is he really going to say it?), yes.... fermenter
geometry.

Some are more easily perturbed than others, and this is where the fun
begins.... looking for the flavours you can wrangle out of a particular
strain.

The dry lager yeast I have been using the last few years (Saflager s189)
is INCREDIBLY stable.

In fact, it's a sort of "no brainer". It seems to produce the same clean
flavour within some extremely wide ranges of abuse.

In this sense, it is for me a "less interesting" yeast.... but it sure
makes life simple when you don't have time for playing around!

On the stability note... I gave the used sludge from a brew to a local
brewer, and he is in his THIRD year of brewing from the same yeast....
no odd flavours, no "petite mutants".

He does have an odd perpetuation style.... he brews in "pairs".  He
generates up his saved yeast and pitches it into a brew. When it comes
to high krauzen, he brews again and adds krauzen from the first.   He
then always saves the yeast from the second brew.  He believes that it
is this krauzen harvesting and perpetuation that keeps it in good form.

I don't know if that's the explanation., but I do know he still makes
wonderful lagers using the same culture in his third year!  This sort of
jumps in the face of the traditional 4-6 generations thing.

In short, this particular dry lager (excepting it's incredible reticence
to cast any odd flavours at all) behaves in every manner like any liquid
lager yeast I've ever used, with one small exception.

If you let it quit.... it is a real bugger to kick back into life.

Where I would think nothing of saving a liquid "sludge" in the
refrigerator for a couple of weeks and then pitching it right into a new
wort, with this stuff you better plan on a few extra days to shake it
back into action.

Let it sit a month, and you might seriously think about starting again,
unless you want to wash it and feed it for about 3 generations.

At any rate, since this hydra of a yeast seems to chug right along no
matter what I do to it, I'm presently doing an old "pilsner urquell"
trick, where they forced a lag time by dropping the primary to 4C
initially.

One way or the other, I'm gon'na figure out some way to make this yeast
yell "Uncle" .

Dr. Pivo




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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 09:51:25 -0800
From: John Palmer <jjpalmer at gte.net>
Subject: Re: finishing welds

There are two issues with grinding welds inside a keg: accessibility and 
contamination. A dremel with a coarse grinding bit should work pretty well, 
though I hope you don't burn out your dremel like I have done. The main 
problem is contamination of the interior with iron filings. The filings 
will cause rust wherever they land if they are not removed. So, for one 
thing, I recommend putting a towel in the bottom of the keg to catch most 
of them.  Obviously, you need to rinse the rest out, but that is a problem 
in itself because as soon as those particle contact water, they WILL rust.
Marc, seeing as how you are near a university, try to get ahold of citric 
acid. Actually there are probably citric acid type cleaners at Home Despot, 
but I was thinking of the pure stuff since it will be stronger. Citric Acid 
will dissolve the iron and clean up any rust that may be present.  There is 
a commercial product called CitriSurf that we use here at work for 
repassivating. Heck you might even try fresh squeezed lemons... You can 
always use Straight A or PBW to clean the keg out afterwards after the acid 
has done its job.

Meanwhile, the smoothed weld will need to be repassivated. That is the easy 
part, use an oxalic acid based stainless steel cleanser and a green scrubby 
to clean the weldment, rinse and dry and you should be good to go.
Cheers,
John
At 09:01 AM 2/25/2002 -0500, Marc Sedam wrote:
>Hey all,
>
>A gracious member of my HB club made arrangements to weld
>the top of a corny in place of the spear on a Sankey keg.
>This "sankorny" keg looks great, but the interior welds are
>quite rough (not surprising) and need a bit o' smoothing.  I
>love the sankorny but would like to make the welds less
>likely to harbor bugs and beasties when I ferment.  Sooo....
>
>What can I do to smooth out the welds and approach "sanitary
>welding" status.  I have a Dremel, but that's about it.
>Perhaps Mr. Palmer will join in?
>
>Cheers!
>Marc
>
>--
>
>Marc Sedam
>Chapel Hill, NC

John Palmer
Monrovia, CA

How To Brew - the online book
http://www.howtobrew.com/sitemap.html
Homepage
http://www.realbeer.com/jjpalmer

Let there be Peace on Earth.



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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 12:53:21 -0500
From: Marc Sedam <marc_sedam at unc.edu>
Subject: Hop lineage chart

Thanks to the benefits of modern genomics, we finally
have...hop lineage mapping!

http://www.stmlf.bayern.de/lbp/info/ho/hopfenstamm.pdf

There are English translations for all of the figures.

- --

Marc Sedam
Chapel Hill, NC



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Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 08:33:11 +1300
From: Brian Myers <BrianM at AdvantageGroup.co.nz>
Subject: radler and lemonade

I really don't know anything about radlers, but it
might interest you to know that the word "lemonade"
is interpreted differently in various places.

I didn't realise it until moving to New Zealand, but
here, "lemonade" means 7-Up or Sprite. In the USA,
lemonade means (usually) a non-carbonated drink made
with lemon and sugar.

Is a radler made with 7-Up, or with US-style lemonade?
or is it something else?

regards,
Brian
Auckland NZ



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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 13:18:50 -0600
From: Brian Lundeen <blundeen at rrc.mb.ca>
Subject: RE: recipe formulation

Jeremy Lenzendorf has some leftovers:

> Wyeast 1098 - British Ale
> 1/4oz - Fuggles hops
> 1oz - Saaz hops
> 1oz - Yakima Kent Goldings hops
> 1oz - Norther Brewer hops
> 1/4-1/2lb Crystal (10L) Malt grains
> 
> Questions I have:  Can I do anything with these, and/or how 
> do I go about
> formulating a recipe?  I have ProMash to help me, but haven't 
> really used it
> yet.

Let's start with the general. If you want to formulate recipes, ProMash is a
great tool but it will not teach you about the various styles of beer and
how to concoct a suitable recipe. For that, run (don't walk) to your nearest
bookstore (or online seller) and get Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers.
Quite simply, the one essential book for every brewer's library.

As to your immediate needs, assuming your goal is to use up all your
ingredients in a beer that is roughly to some sort of style, my best guess
would be an IPA. Your crystal is quite light, and as such may not be quite
right for a bitter, but should be OK for an IPA that's a bit on the light
side colour (yes, coloUr!) wise. Use enough extract to get you up around
1.060-1.065. 

Use the Northern Brewer for bittering with a 60 minute boil. Your Saaz is
not really to style so throw it in for 60 minutes as well. Half your
Goldings can go in with 20 minutes left. Use the other half and the Fuggles
at end of boil, or for dry-hopping, if you like that sort of thing (I
don't). You don't mention your AA levels, but using typical values,
depending on how the hops have been stored, you will likely be in the 40-50
IBU range (assuming a 5 gallon batch size). If that's too bitter for your
tastes, leave out the Saaz and save them for something else.

Of course, this is just one possibility of many. But I think this should
produce a beer that will charm you on the initial sip with its smooth
alcoholic roundness, gaily punctuated by its classic deciduous mulch and
herb garden aromatics, with perhaps a slight phenolic tang showing up at
mid-bottle. ;-)

Cheers
Brian Lundeen
Brewing at [314,829] aka Winnipeg



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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 17:34:39 -0800 (PST)
From: "Mark E. Hogenmiller" <hogenmiller at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re:Hefe Weizen Yeast

In HBD 3874  Len Safhay <cloozoe at optonline.net>
Wrote:

Was going to culture a slant from a bottle of
Schneider Hefe-Weizen, but
was reading in Warner's German Wheat Beer book that
sometimes a
different - Lager - yeast is used for bottle
conditioning. Does anyone
know whether I'd be culturing the primary fermentation
yeast or a
second, bottling specific, strain?


Several Years ago Schneider ran an advertisement for a
Homebrew Contest in which you used the bottle yeast. 
The ad stated that they used the same yeast for both
fermentation and bottling.  I have used it several
times and I find it to be an overall mild Weizen
Yeast, with more subdued clove and banana.

Mark Hogenmiller
Green Tiger Brewery
Burke, VA






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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 18:43:42 -0800
From: Jay Pfaffman <pfaffman at relaxpc.com>
Subject: hobby survey

Hello, brewers.  

I'm a home brewer who's working on a Ph.D. in education and am doing a
survey about what makes hobbies motivating.  If you would be willing
to take a 10-20 minute survey about a hobby of yours, please go to
http://aaalab.Stanford.EDU/survey/ for more information and the survey
itself.  Since I'm a brewer, I've used brewing for all of my examples,
so you might find them interesting.

If you know of other lists where this survey might be of interest,
please feel free to send it on, but the survey ends on March 4.
Please do not forward this message after March 1.

Jay Pfaffman                           pfaffman at relaxpc.com
+1-415-821-7507 (H)                    +1-415-810-2238 (M)
http://relax.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/~pfaffman/



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