HOMEBREW Digest #4565 Mon 26 July 2004


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


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


***************************************************************
       THIS YEAR'S HOME BREW DIGEST BROUGHT TO YOU BY: 

                  Beer, Beer, and More Beer
      Visit http://morebeer.com to show your appreciation!

    Support those who support you! Visit our sponsor's site!
********** Also visit http://hbd.org/hbdsponsors.html *********


Contents:
  Dry hopping and Brewer's Handbook ("Dave Burley")
  Bourbon Barrel Solera Ale (Barleywine): Walk-in cooler (Steve Jones)
  We've been robbed ("Lee and Ant Hayes")
  Yeast Experiments ("Petr Otahal")
  Probe#2 away, sir... (Pat Babcock)
  Duplicate HBD This Morning??? (Pat Babcock)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The HBD Logo Store is now open! * * http://www.hbd.org/store.html * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Suppport this service: http://hbd.org/donate.shtml * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Beer is our obsession and we're late for therapy! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * July is MICHIGAN Beer Month!!! Drink Michigan Beer! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Send articles for __publication_only__ to post@hbd.org If your e-mail account is being deleted, please unsubscribe first!! To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE send an e-mail message with the word "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" to request@hbd.org FROM THE E-MAIL ACCOUNT YOU WISH TO HAVE SUBSCRIBED OR UNSUBSCRIBED!!!** IF YOU HAVE SPAM-PROOFED your e-mail address, you cannot subscribe to the digest as we cannot reach you. We will not correct your address for the automation - that's your job. HAVING TROUBLE posting, subscribing or unsusubscribing? See the HBD FAQ at http://hbd.org. LOOKING TO BUY OR SELL USED EQUIPMENT? Please do not post about it here. Go instead to http://homebrewfleamarket.com and post a free ad there. The HBD is a copyrighted document. The compilation is copyright HBD.ORG. Individual postings are copyright by their authors. ASK before reproducing and you'll rarely have trouble. Digest content cannot be reproduced by any means for sale or profit. More information is available by sending the word "info" to req@hbd.org or read the HBD FAQ at http://hbd.org. JANITORs on duty: Pat Babcock (janitor@hbd.org), Jason Henning, and Spencer Thomas
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 05:51:36 -0400 From: "Dave Burley" <Dave_Burley at charter.net> Subject: Dry hopping and Brewer's Handbook Brewsters: Bob Devine provided a reference to Goldammer's Brewer's Handbook http://www.beer-brewing.com/index.htm and here's what Goldammer says: "Dry Hopping Dry hopping is the process of adding hops to the primary fermenter, the maturation tank, or the casked beer to increase the aroma and hop character of the finished beer. Some brewers believe dry hopping should not be done during primary fermentation because of the risk of contaminating the beer with microorganisms. Dry hopping adds no bitterness to the beer, and any lingering bitterness will dissipate in a few weeks. This is because alpha acids are only slightly soluble in cold beer. It should also be mentioned that a beer that has been dry hopped is also usually late hopped in the kettle. British brewers use this method to give a special hop character to cask-conditioned ales." BTW. I have always sunk my dry hopping bag with several marbles and never had a problem of clogging and I have never removed the bag before keg's end due to experiencing a funky flavor. Dave King has experienced clogging due to the hop bag so he floats his hop bag with a small bottle and fishes his hop bag out after a few weeks to prevent a funky "decomposed" taste. In my case, I have never had a problem with clogging. Perhaps the use of several marbles prevents a tight fit and the bag getting sucked up into the outlet and perhaps the quick boil prevents the hops from decomposing. I guess we never know how lucky we are! Although Dave also treats his hops this way, by boiling them briefly, so perhaps it is the type of hops. I can only comment about Goldings and Fuggles in my dry hopping procedures as I doubt I ever tried anything else. Keep on Brewin' Dave Burley Keep on Brewin' Dave Burley Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:20:14 -0400 From: Steve Jones <stjones1 at chartertn.net> Subject: Bourbon Barrel Solera Ale (Barleywine): Walk-in cooler Hi all, Some may remember that I mentioned this club project a few months ago. Well, we finally got together yesterday and filled our barrel. Here are a few details of what we did: 1. Bought the barrel the day after it was emptied. 2. Ensuring that the bung was tight, we wrapped a furniture blanket around the barrel and kept the blanket wet to keep the barrel from drying out (about 3 weeks) 3. After building a stand on casters, we opened it up and filled it with charcoal filtered water, then tightly re- bunged. (about 6 weeks) 4. Drained the water and filled it with 9 kegs of barleywine (after sampling each for a thumbs up), leaving about 15 gallons of head space. The water had a nice bourbon character to it, sort of like the melted ice in the bourbon glass the morning after. No discernable off-taste in the water. 10 more gallons will be added in about 2-3 weeks before drawing off 3 gallons for our campout. This will be a Solera ale in that it will remain in the barrel forever, drawing off approximately 15 gallons per year for 1: bottling a case for future vertical tastings; 2: drawing off 3 gallons 2 times a year for club events; 3: drawing off 1 1/2 liters every month for quick-carbbing and taking to the meeting. Once or twice a year the barrel will be topped off with an additional 10-15 gallons. I was wondering about dry-hopping this puppy - should I dry hop the whole batch in the barrel, or when I pull it off into a corny? If I do the batch, how much should I use, and would it still have the dry-hop character after 6 months, or a year? Would repeated whole-barrel dry hopping (after adding fresh barleywine) have a detrimental effect? Hopefully I can talk some of our members into coming to Baltimore for the NHC next June and doing a stint in the hospitality suite. We would definitely bring a keg of this brew. - ------------------------------ And it seems that Dave Burley has me confused with Jim Bermingham - I'm the one that built the walk-in. Dave says it won't work - that the AC unit will burn up. But Skotrat ran one for over 2 years at 38F with no trouble, so I think it will work. Forrest, are you out there? I don't think anyone here has seen a post from you in over a year. And Dave, I was not wondering why I can't get it below 55 - only describing the trouble I had trying to adjust the internal controller. I set the internal controller to minumum (with the tiny adjustment screw inside it) which would cause it to run continuously, so I plugged it into a Johnson controller set at 46F. It works like a charm. A full description of the design details and a couple of pics are at http://hbd.org/franklin/public_html/members/sj/walkin.html. Steve Jones, Johnson City, TN State of Franklin Homebrewers (http://hbd.org/franklin) [421.8 mi, 168.5 deg] AR Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 22:58:35 +0200 From: "Lee and Ant Hayes" <anleo at worldonline.co.za> Subject: We've been robbed Tonight our BJCP study group tasted two Pilsner Urquell's. The first had a sell by date of 2001 and the second 2004. The 2004 beer was sweet compared with the 2001 version, and had far less hop character. Bitterness and maltiness were about the same, but the 2001 beer was far more complex. SAB claim to have merely standardised the process, but based on our experience tonight, I am sure that they have changed the hopping schedule, and that we are poorer for it. Ant Hayes Johannesburg Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 10:03:23 +1000 (EST) From: "Petr Otahal" <petr.otahal at aardvark.net.au> Subject: Yeast Experiments Dear Brewers, I already posted this on another forum so please bear with me if you are seeing a repeat. A couple of weeks back I got together with a fellow brewer and microbiologist to brew up a bit of a yeast experiment, and I would like to share some of the observations from the culturing of the yeast and the subsequent fermenations. On Sunday 18th July we brewed 45L of American Pale Ale wort (OG 1.050) and split the wort between three yeasts, American Ale 1056, Irish Ale 1084, and ESB 1968. All the fermenters were then put into the same temperature controlled chamber at 18C. The yeasts were cultured up during the previous week from slants and the starters were constantly aerated with sterile filtered air. The initial inoculation, on Tuesday morning (13th July) was from a slant into 100mL of 1.040 sterile wort (no hops) this gave cell densities of: 3million/mL for the 1056, 4.3m/mL for the 1084, and 3.7m/mL for the 1968 The temperature was initially a bit cold at 17C but the cultures were put into a 22C water bath a few hours after inoculation and remained there until today. About 24hrs later (Wednesday morning) they were diluted five-fold with fresh 1.040 wort (ie 400mL wort added) and the cel densities of the diluted cultures were: 1056, 33m/mL 1084, 90m/mL 1968, 68m/mL At about 46hrs since inocculation (Thursday morning) more wort was added to make the final volume about 1.4L with the following densities after dilution: 1056, 90m/mL 1084, 135m/mL 1968, 165m/mL (this one had really hit its straps or the previous reading was in error) At about 56hrs (Thursday evening) the air was turned off and the densities were: 1056, 140m/mL 1084, 170m/mL 1968, 200m/mL The yeast was allowed to settle until today (Sunday) and the wort was decanted off prior to pitching each slurry into 15L of OG 1.050 American Pale Ale wort. A sample of the decanted starter "beer" was taken to see how much yeast remained in suspension and the results are: 1056, 3.8million cells/ml (lost 2.7% in decanting) 1084, 920 000cells/ml (lost 0.5%) 1968, 330 000 cells/ml (lost 0.15%) For the three 15L batches this amounts to pitching rates of : 1056, 12.2m cells/ml (slightly underpitched) 1084, 15.2m cells/ml 1968, 18m cells/ml At pitching the 1056 was still fermenting very slowly but most of the yeast had settled into a nice cream coloured yeast cake, as expected being he least flocculant of the three it still had a fair bit of yeast in suspension. The other two 1084 and 1968 had both completely finished, but still looked pretty cloudy. The fermented starter worts all tasted quite good, there were high levels of acetaldehyde in all of them but apart from that I would have no problem pitching them into the batch, and next time probably will. The three days settling time was obviously enough to settle out the 1084 and 1968 and with those two you can decant if you want without losing too many cells. The lag times were reasonably long (around 12hours), I reckon this is from not reactivating the yeast before pitching, but apart from that the fermentation rates were great (pitched and fermented at 18C) and the fermentation was almost completely done at 72hours. Final gravites of the beers at racking on the following Sunday: 1056 (1.007) 1084 (1.007) 1968 (1.009) Some interesting observations: The 1056 had larger cells than the other two and also formed a lot of branched chains of 5-7 cells, where the daughter cells hadn't fully separated from the mother cells. The 1084 was almost opposite in its behavior having very few joined cells (much like a lager yeast), and 1968 was somewhere between the two with only a few joined cells. Hope you found this informative. Cheers Petr Otahal Hobart Tasmania Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 20:45:31 -0400 From: Pat Babcock <pbabcock at brew.hbd.org> Subject: Probe#2 away, sir... Greetings, Beerlings! Take me to your lager... Well! Much progress has been made! As you may recall, the Probe routine is the prototype for the new mailing scheme for the HBD, and Probe #2 went off (almost) without a hitch! First hitch: the address starting with "-" is causing sendmail to think it's a command. I will noodle on the method to see if I can "trick" the system into accepting that address by pre- and appending a quote to the offending address. The other hitch was a foobar from the original list and has been taken care of already. Two bad addresses as opposed by the roughly 10,000 bad addresses generated by the prior method (long story). In any case, I believe that the Probe touches every subscriber. If you didn't get one, you're probably using a spamblocker or an out-of-office reply that is not ignoring hbd.org (the PROBE routine simply deletes your address when it receives your system's reply, by the way). Once I have resolved the issue with the non-RFC-compliant address, the HBD *should* be healed. (And, if I can't resolve it, I'll have to delete the offending address until such time as I can resolve it. Sorry. Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, and all that...) In any case, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it really does not appear to be something looking to run me over this time. On another note, I've retired the janitor address. Far too much spam with far too little meaningful messages - over 20,000 messages were in the janitor mailbox when I threw my hands into the air and retired it. Now, if you mail to Janitor, you'll get an autoresponse stating that the address has been retired, and your mail will quietly go into the dumper. Send your Janitor mail to me instead. And, finally, but not - by far - least in importance: Jason Henning has crawled into The Bunker with Spencer and I to assist in combing the queue for detritus! It is my plan that Jason will also learn of the DARK SIDE of the FORCE, and he and I will RULE the Brewniverse together as FATHER AND S... er, uh... he'll be taking on some of the "meat" of the Digest operations to assist me in the day-to-day. (Sorry. Not a lot of air here under the bridge...) See ya! The Troll Beneath The HBD Bridge (in southeastern Michigan - pbabcock at hbd.org) Return to table of contents
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:50:05 -0400 From: Pat Babcock <pbabcock at brew.hbd.org> Subject: Duplicate HBD This Morning??? Greetings, Beerlings! Take me to your lager... OK. I've solved the -s issue. And I'm now sufficiently versed in ksh and perl to be truly dangerous. This evening/morning, you may be surprised to find an hbd in your mailbox. That's good. You might also be surprised to find TWO hbds in your mailbox. That's good, too. Here's what's going on... I implemented the new mailing routine with this issue. I have not yet decommissioned the old routine - this being because I'm only 75% sure that the new routine will do the job as planned (it's hell, grafting new routines into old, monolithic programs...). If I read the old code properly, the new routine will work within it, and everyone on the list will get their Digest. Once I'm sure that the new routine did not break the Digest, two things will be done: First, the old routine will be removed from the code. Second, the "bulk" precedence will be removed from the HBD since each will be addressed SPECIFICALLY to its recipient, with no worries of exposing the recipients address to those harvesting from mailing lists! This helps in a couple of interesting ways! Each Digest will now be traceable back to the subscriber, meaning that the debouncing routines will be able to remove ALL bouncing subscriptions - not just those that are not aliased and forwarded around the planet. And, the removal of the bulk precedence will remove one more "count" against the HBD in spam filters which use scores to determine the status of the mail. In any case, assuming this is successful, the next time I "touch" the subscription mechanism for the HBD, I'll put more of your subscription under your control, much like the Mailman software does for other off-Digest lists. We're getting there, folks! See ya! The Troll Beneath The HBD Bridge (in SE Michigan - pbabcock at hbd.org) Return to table of contents
[Prev HBD] [Index] [Next HBD] [Back]
HTML-ized on 07/26/04, by HBD2HTML v1.2 by KFL
webmaster@hbd.org, KFL, 10/9/96