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


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Contents:
  Competition announcement: Dayton beerfest, Sept 10 ("Gordon Strong")
  hops problem ("Randy Scott")
  attenative yeast/bottling & cidery taste ("Fredrik")
  Cloning liquor and mixer in a bottle ("Adam M. Bumpus")


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Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:22:02 -0400
From: "Gordon Strong" <strongg at speakeasy.net>
Subject: Competition announcement: Dayton beerfest, Sept 10

Entries are now being accepted for the 10th Dayton (Ohio) Beerfest.  The
competition will be held on September 10th; entries are due by September
3th.  All details are on our web site:
http://hbd.org/draft/daybeerfest.html.
Quick summary: Easy online entry, no recipe, 2 bottles, $5, any type of
bottles including draft packaging, enter sub-categories as often as you want
(only top-scoring is eligible for prize in a single sub-category).  All 2004
BJCP styles accepted including mead and cider.  Nice wooden plaques
for category winners (ribbons for 2nd/3rd).

Gordon Strong
Dayton Regional Amateur Fermentation Technologists
strongg at earthlink.net 




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Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 13:42:10 -0500
From: "Randy Scott" <ras at rscott.us>
Subject: hops problem

A couple weeks ago I brewed a porter and apparently goofed on the bittering 
hops (I was using whole-leaf hops which may have been too damp, throwing off 
the weight).  There isn't enough hops bitterness to offset the malty 
sweetness.  I figure it's underhopped by maybe 30%.

Is there a way to correct this after the fact?  I was thinking of boiling an 
ounce or so of hops in a couple quarts of water for an hour, cooling, and 
adding it to the beer.  Is this going to work?

It's only the bitterness I'm concerned about; being a porter, the hops 
flavor and aroma are negligible anyway.

thanks
ras





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Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 01:43:44 +0200
From: "Fredrik" <carlsbergerensis at hotmail.com>
Subject: attenative yeast/bottling & cidery taste

Hello all,

Some comments on some previos posts.

> Date: Fri,  5 Aug 2005 15:09:04 -0400
> From: leavitdg at plattsburgh.edu
> Subject: highly attenuative yeasts, and quantity of bottling sugar?
 
> When bottling with a highly attenuative yeast, should one 
> take this into account and use just a touch less corn sugar?
 
No, I don't think so. Relative attenuation refers to the wort which contains a 
range of sugars.When you use mainly "easy" sugars like glucose and sucrose, 
all normal strains (I'm sure there are always odd exceptions) should for all 
practical purposes fully attenuate glucose or sucrose. I have hard to see that 
any differences in the trace residuals are significant to the carbonation level.
 
My guess is something else causes the observed variation in carbonation.
 
> Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 13:51:26 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Ted Teuscher <t_teuscher at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Apple cidery taste
>
> The starter itself smelled very strong of apples when
> I pitched the yeast into the wort (which was also well
> oxygenated). I would like to say it is what John
> Palmer calls "acetalyhde" in his How To Brew brook.
> The beer is also rather cloudy.
>
> What did I do to cause such a strong apple cidery
> smell and taste? None of my other beers have ever had
> this problem. It has been kegged for 2 weeks now and
> not really dissipated at all. The beer is drinkable
> but is overwhelmed by the apple cidery taste.

FWIW Some ideas if it can help...

I don't know for sure what you mean with apple cidery, but the green 
apple like aroma might be acetaldehyde like you mention yourself 
(though IMO acetaldehyde doesn't actually smell *apple* but I can 
appreciate to an extent the association with green fresh apples. But 
I also associate it a bit with "hangover breath".)
 
I find the starter beer that has been aerated, never tastes as 
good as the cleanly fermented beer, I find it to often 
have an excessive acidity to flavour as well as aroma and 
I wouldn't be surprised to find some acetaldehyde in the starter 
beer either. I always decant off this. But if it's truly massive,
I'd personally suspect either some infection or excessive aeration?
 
When aerating the ethanol mixture I think there is also a 
possibiliy for traces of acetobacter to grow to the point 
where they are a problem. I prefer to minimzed this,
and focus on aeration at refeeding to not encourage
aerobic bacteria.

I've exposed finished beer to air a few times as experiments, and 
sometimes it just turns into acetaldehyde, sometimes it turns 
into stale carboard notes, sometimes winey and sometimes all 3. 
Ive gotten acetaldehyde from commercial beer  this way too.
I recall one weissbeer I deliberately staled, and it developed
first acetaldehyde notes, and then some faint funky carboard 
notes.

I've also exposed a moderately attenuated beer to oxygen, and found
as it seems a slight renewal of yeast activity upon aeration. And along
with this sometimes an increased fairly *massive* acetaldehyde aroma. 
In high concentration acetaldehyde is really nasty and irritating gas. 
I did this only a few times and I am not 100% sure wether it's all the 
revived original yeast activity or if there are some bacteria or wild yeast
involved too. I know that it has happend that some bottles have not been
clean and bottling. I just found from microscopic inspection that
yeasts were very abundant, and yes the beer turned cloudy.
I could at lesat conclude in my case, that most of the *visible* haze 
were due to yeast activity, not bacteria. But that doesn't exclude bacteria
in lower levels. If a beer is hazy to the point that you can see if with the 
naked eye and it's because of biological activity, you should be able 
to probe some in a microscope.

Unless you aerated the beer, fermentation performance was abnormal or 
you didn't decant that massively flawed starter (and it stayed even at 
1:20 dilution?), it sounds like you have some some infection?

 /Fredrik



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Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 21:09:45 -0500
From: "Adam M. Bumpus" <adam at bump.us>
Subject: Cloning liquor and mixer in a bottle

By far the easiest way to clone a drink that is made from rum and 
generic 7-up is to mix rum and generic 7-up and pour it into a bottle 
with a funnel. If you want the berry flavored sort you can buy flavored 
syrups in the coffee section at most super markets.

The only reason these are referred to as 'Malt Beverages' is to allow 
them to be treated under beer rules rather than hard liquor rules. This 
usually means favorable tax treatment and greater access to retail outlets.

If you wanted to make Bacardi Silver/Zima/Mike's Hard Something/Smirnoff 
Ice the way that the beverage companies do you would need to start with 
a very high adjunct mash, ferment it with a clean fermenting strain and 
then put it through an activated charcoal filter. If this process yields 
51% of the alcohol in the beverage it's a 'Malt Beverage' and can be 
treated as beer under the law. The remainder comes from what will be 
referred to as natural and/or artificial flavors on the label. It's 
probably a mixture of neutral spirits and a bit of the brand name liquor 
that's on the package.

I'm not saying that these aren't tasty beverages, it's just that the way 
they're produced doesn't resemble making beer in any meaningful way. If 
you were going to do it without concerns about taxation or retail 
availability you probably wouldn't want to go about it in the way that 
the guys who sell the stuff.

Adam

> Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 09:59:47 -0400
> From: "Ken Koppes" <koppeskl at hotmail.com>
> Subject: bacardi silver clone
> 
> My wife likes the Bacardi Silver Malt beverages.  Has anyone had luck with
> making them or know where I could find a recipe for them?



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