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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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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)


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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



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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





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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)


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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)



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