Let's get it started, in here

New times, new posts, new awesomeness. Everyone, sorry for the hiatus, things happen, you know.

So, back to starting your own brewery, the brewing industry, homebrewing, and all stops in between!

Expect a book review this week--I'll drop a hint, it's The Beer Guide, built from input provided by RateBeer.com's member base.

Good lord, look at the reading list I have to catch up on...

I have been so busy at work that I haven't had any time to take a break, even just a five minute one, to catch up on any of my beer reading. Here's my back log:

• Ale Street News: 10-11 2007
  
• Beer Advocate: October 2007
  
• Mid-Atlantic Brewing News: October/November 2007
  
• Zymurgy: November/December 2007
  
• Beer: November/December 2007
  
• Great Lakes Brewing News: Best if read by Oct/Nov 2007
  
• Brew Your Own: December 2007
  
• Beers of the World: December 2007
  
• Draft: November/December 2007
  
• Beer Advocate: November 2007
  
• Brew Your Own Magazine: January/February 2008
  
• All About Beer: January 2008
  

Phew...quite the list. And me, being "Mister Anal-retentive", I have to read every single word in any book or any magazine that I lay my hands on. I even use the carpet bombs as bookmarks.

I'll let you know if I can ever catch up.

Hops Shortage = Increased Prices?!?

A friend sent me an article from National Public Radio (NPR) titled - Hops Shortage Likely to Boost Price of Beer.

To sum it up - due to really bad weather in Europe; decreased hops production here, in the US; and an increase in the price of barley, due to farmers switching to raising corn crops for ethanol production (more money to be made with that) we could be looking to have a price increase anywhere between 20 to 80 percent for hops. How wild is that?

This will hit fellow homebrewers hard and the microbrewers even harder, due to the quantity of specialty hops they use. Soooo long double and triple IPAs.

Maryland Brewer's Oktoberfest Tomorrow!

Where are you going to be tomorrow? You better be in Timonium! That is where the Maryland Brewer's Oktoberfest is going to be!

Judging results for the homebrew competition will be at 12:30 PM sharp! If you can't make it, keep me in your thoughts, as the American IPA I brewed - Right Lane Closed - was one of the contenders!

I'll post the results and the other offerings of the day in the next post.

(By the way, DuClaw is going to be showing Colossus tomorrow, it's offical.)

The Buffalo Brewpub

We went to The Buffalo Brewpub as a birthday surprise from Rachel to me. It had a very homey feel, you were able to seat yourself and service was prompt. Our waitress asked what we would like to drink and I asked for a sampler of there beer. She told us they did not have a flight of beer; however, she could bring individual samples over and they'd be about $1.75/each (actually $1.00/each). I told her that was fine and she brought back their Buffalo Lager (a Helles), a pale ale, a red ale, Nickel City dark, and oatmeal stout.

On with the show...

I started with the Helles, which had a rather fruity smell and some corn-like taste. I don't know if this was traces of DMS, but I did not like it.

Next, I went with the pale ale. It smelled, looked, and tasted just like caramel and imparted no noticeable hop aroma or taste.

The "brown", I mean red, which was the same color as the pale ale, but had zero flavor. I have no idea what this beer was about. And still don't.

My next stop on this flavor "adventure" was actually the oatmeal stout. Okay, not smooth or velvety, it did have a nice head and decent retention and that's about it. They could have done soooo much more with this beer! Give it some Crystal 120 malt! Some Melanoidin malt!

And we end with the dark. So, this beer and the oatmeal stout shared the same level of color, until held against the light. Both had deep, deep garnet highlights, but the dark was a notch or two lighter. (Why wasn't that damn stout opaque.) When I sniffed it for the first time, I picked up some dark fruit notes - like prunes and dates - that had been heated in a saute pan. However, the taste... the taste... GEEZ , LOUISE! How much roasty, burned funky flavor can you cram in a beer? I don't know, but I can tell you that this beer could probably reign supreme in that category. Icky, icky.

To add insult to injury, they did not include their seasonal offering - an Oktoberfest - in the flight; which is okay as I didn't have room for it anyway.

I will give The Buffalo Brewpub kudos on the guest beer selection - somewhere around 25 taps. I wanted to try the Rohrbach Scotch Ale, a local, but again, had no room.

I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but coming from a out-of-towner, I wasn't super impressed.

The race to 1000 hits is on!

Hey everybody,

As the title suggests, the race is on to 1000 hits. What does this mean to you, in cyberspace? Well, in the short-term it means you get to vote for the next style to be brewed! Go ahead and participate in the poll I have set up on the right ---->

Votes will be tallied at midnight, September 30th. Barring any extra-worldly event, the beer will be brewed on the first weekend of October. I tried to pick out some decent fall styles. Since I don't have a lager setup (but Christmas is just around the corner. Hint, hint, honey!), we'll have to stick with ales. I think ales complement the changing, colder weather just a little bit better than lagers, anyway.

Also, I will be keeping track of the visitor log. Lucky number 1000 might get something special. (You'll probably never turn down free beer, right?)

Nick

How about a tall, cool glass of water?

Our water is city water, and even for being in a rural part of our state, it's not the greatest stuff on Earth. To me, it tastes a little tinny, and sometimes gets what I call a beef bullion smell to it that really turns me off. Thank heavens for companies like Brita and PUR! The only problem is, those systems cost mucho dinero for replacement water filters and they are notoriously slow. I could opt to have a system installed in my sink that filters it as it comes out of the tap, but that too costs big bucks. That's when I found a neat article in a recent issue of BYO (Jan/Feb 07). Someone submitted a how-to on creating your own high-flow, high capacity water filter. Stuff of sheer genius! I built it according to spec and must say that I am thoroughly impressed with the simple, $40 setup.

Parts required:
1 2" 90-degree PVC elbow joint
2 2" x 1/2" PVC bushing adapters
1 2" x 3" PVC coupling
1 1/2" male thread x 5/8" hose barb, brass
1 1/2" male thread x 1/2" hose barb, brass
1 universal dishwasher snap adapter
various length of 5/8" vinyl tubing
1 Culligan WHR-140 in-line water filter
teflon (plumbing) tape



It's a super-easy build. First, everything should be thoroughly cleaned with hot soap and water (except for the water filter and tape, of course).

Next, slide the water filter into the smaller diameter end of the elbow joint. The unit won't go in all the way, which is no problem for this build.


Take the coupling and put it over the end that you just installed the water filter in; then install the bushing adapters into each side of the elbow joint.

Wrap a lot of tape around the brass bulkheads and screw them into the bushing adapters. (5/8" bulkhead on the inlet side, the side with the water filter.)

Attach your vinyl tubing and dishwasher adapter (so it can attach to the kitchen faucet) and prime your Culligan water filter. It says to run water through it until you get a steady stream. I found this took about 5 minutes, but due to the age of your filter, YMMV (your mileage may vary).

The filter itself is rated at 10,000 gallons, and cost $10 from Ace Hardware. This was a super-simple and fast build up - it's well worth the investment!

Complete setup

Beer Reviews

Duvel, Belgian Golden Ale
Best Before: 03/09

This was everything I came to expect and more. However, note that this must be poured extremely slow! I cannot emphasize this enough. It was a pale, straw-yellow color with a big, fluffy & crisp head. The foamy head had excellent retention and lacing. It sat in the glass with tiny champagne-like bubbles and a very clean, refreshing finish.

Grade: A-

---

Stoudt's Mai Bock
Best Before: ?

The first few sniffs delivers some raisins and plums, maybe even prunes... The tasted brings a sweet malt on the back of the tongue with hops showing their face on the front and sides of the tongue. The overall taste verifies it all. One kind of nagging issue is the easy detection of alcohol on this brew - at 7% it's not DFH 120 Minute, but it's very noticeable. This beer has a wonderful red/orange color with a dash of caramel.

Grade: B

P.S. I got some coffee on the finish and lacing on my glass like a champ. As the beer warms up a little bit, it sweetened up. If I didn't all ready give this a grade, I'd bump it up to B+.

Carboy and bottling update

Sorry it's taken me 8012 years to get this uploaded, but here goes our carboy (secondary fermentation vessel) and bottling days extravaganza!

March 24, 2007 - Enter the carboy
So, this is actually quite simple. Get a good siphon going from the primary and let her rip! Just make sure that the carboy is nice and clean and sanitized!


Mmmm, yeasty goodness


I wrapped the carboy in some beach towels to keep it at as constant a temperature as I could, and to block out any light, slapped my bung and airlock on it and let it sit for a week. (UV radiation, is what actually produces the "skunk" in beer. So, a nice crystal clear carboy would allow all of that through.)

---

April 1, 2007 - I'm no fool when it comes to bottlin' my life away
This too is pretty easy. Overnight I had cleaned and sanitized two cases of 12 oz bottles to make my life pain-free. Until I dropped an empty bottle, neck first, on my foot. Joy.

Moving on, one must carefully transfer the beer from the carboy to the bottling bucket - might I suggest a siphon, again? This time, I broke part of my racking cane connecting the tubing to it. Still usable though. Joy.



Moving on, I boiled 2 cups of water and 5 oz of corn sugar to act as a primer for the left over yeast in the beer. This will allow the yeast to feed and to carbonate the beer once bottled. Pour that in the mix in the bottling bucket full of beer, attach the bottling wand to some more tubing, connect that to the bottling bucket and let her go! Weee!


Capping is actually a pretty fun thing to do, with two people you can roll through two cases in about 10 minutes.

I figure a week or two for conditioning and we'll see what we have. Maybe a rite of Spring fest will be in order...

St. Patrick's Day Brew-Ha-Ha

Hey all,

I promised you pics of the brewing process while making the American Pale Ale that you all voted on. Here we go!

First, I started on Friday night making a starter. The purpose of a starter is to generate more yeast cells so you have an ample amount when you make your big batch of beer. A starter is a super-small batch of beer (1 or 2 quarts) that is made by boiling some water and dried malt extract together for 15 minutes. After that, you cool it down to about 70 deg. F. and add your yeast to the mix and shake it all up. The shaking aerates the beer, which is the fuel necessary for the yeast to convert sugar to alcohol. Here's a pic of what it looks like when it is all said and done:



This sits out for about 12-18 hours at room temperature, until you are ready to "pitch" it. (Pitch means to pour in the wort [pronounced wert], which is described below...)

Now it's time to jump into business! Let me disclose this first: brewing is 90% being a janitor and 10% making a product. CLEAN, SANITARY CONDITIONS ARE AN ABSOLUTE MUST!!!


Mmm...clean

...on with the show.

First, we start off by putting our grains into a grain bag and tying it off. I chose a pale malt as my base (and the majority of brewers big and small do the same) and chose a nice crystal malt as my specialty malt to add color and a caramel/roasty flavor. That was set aside and I brought 9 and 1/3 quarts of water up to 166 deg. F. This was for my "partial mash", which, this weekend, was a first for me.

Mashing is best defined as: the reaction between enzymes and starch which produces fermentable sugars from malted barley. [Moore, 65]

After the water was up to temperture, I poured it into the ultra-high tech, specialized partial masher - a $15 Rubbermaid™ 5 gallon cooler.



I let that sit for about 45 minutes with the cap securely fastened and wrapped in dish towels to conserve heat. In the mean time, I brought another 4 and 2/3 cups of water up to 180 deg. F. Once the water was getting on a roll, I performed the process of taking my sweet liquor from the coo...err, partial masher and poured it into my brewpot (carefully, no splashing!) and then put that back into the cooler (again, no splashing). This acts as a quick way to filter out big chunks of malt. As the liquid flows through the grain bed, the grains set and capture the big stuff so you can get a pretty clear wort before the big boil. (I kind of cheated on the last go-round as you can see in the pic below. I used a funnel with an ultra-fine strainer inside as a secondary filter.)



I took the additional water I heated and poured it over the grains as well. This acts as a poor-man's sparging. Sparging is where you take some water and sprinkle it over the grains to give them a final washing.

Once I had all of the wort collected, I brought it to a rolling boil (which took forever!) and added my first round hops for the start of the 60-minute boil.


(The gunk on the side is the hops that have managed to splash up there from the boil.)

I added additional hops at the 15- and 0-minute marks for flavor and aroma, respectively. Also, at the 15 minute mark, I dropped in my new piece of equipment, the immersion chiller. This was to sanitize it for the next step. Cooling the wort.

The immersion chiller is about 25 feet of copper pipe with a garden hose or faucet attachment on one end and a drain tube on the other. You pump cold water from the faucet throught the tube which then exchanges heat from the wort to the copper to the water and goes out of the drain. A normal ice bath for cooling would take around 60 minutes to get the wort down to 70 deg. F. The immersion chiller took 8 minutes. I love that thing!



After the wort was at the right temperature, I transferred it to the fermenting bucket. Then back to the brew kettle. Then back to the fermenting bucket. Then back to the brew kettle. Notice a pattern here? Yeast needs oxygen as a fuel source kind of a like an internal combustion engine in our cars uses air and gasoline to make the car go. The yeast uses O2 and the sugar in the wort to make C2H5OH (ethanol) and CO2 (carbon dioxide). I topped off the fermenter to 5 gallons with some good, bottle water and proceeded to pitch the yeast. Afterwards, I put the top onto the fermenter, made sure it had a good seal and put the air lock on.



And wouldn't you know, just about 24 hours later, the air lock was bubbling like crazy - the yeast was having a party. And in a few weeks, we will too!

- I'll post an update this Friday as I transfer this elixir to the carboy (a big glass bottle) for it's secondary fermentation (allows for a cleaner, "filtered" beer) -

Beer Madness

Hey everyone,

Check this out: it is the Washington Post's 2007 Beer Madness competition; it's setup ala the NCAA Tournament.

Some interesting upsets, like Yuengling taking a dive in the first round to Shiner Bock, from Shiner, Texas. And Budweiser narrowly eliminating Victory Lager. From the field of 32, we're down to the quarterfinals. My bets are on Pete's vs. Rolling Rock and Dogfish Head vs. Dominion in the Final Four. From there, I have Rolling Rock Extra Pale Lager vs. Dominion Ale in the Championship, with R&R taking it!

"33", baby!

BEER MADNESS!

TAKE THE POLL!

Please vote for what should come next out of my mad, mad laboratory...err, kitchen. I have 48 empty bottles yearning for some beer! (It's on the right, in blue.)

I'll close the poll on Thursday, March 1st. And brew the winning beer March 3rd! (I'll shop for the fresh goodies that Friday.)

Oh yeah, I'll get you pics of the complete process as I wreck my kitchen!

Remember, be responsible drinkers! And from Kaiser Wilhelm, "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the world."

EVERY VOTE COUNTS

This has nothing to do with brewing

However, this is one of my most favorite sites of all time:

http://www.castlemagic.com/

Imagine the lagering and cellar potential in one of these bad-boys!

Ahh, if I only had $48K

If I had the money and the space, I would snatch this system right up!

Thinking about starting a BrewPub? Do you like the idea of brewing your beer to sell? Then let MoreBeer! help you to change your lifestyle with our new 5 BBL Brewhouse! Manufactured by DME Systems in Canada, and represented by MoreBeer!, this system could be your ideal solution to your production problems. Since both companies are passionate about both beer AND customer service, you can be assured of World Class Support. Beautifully constructed and engineered with the smallest footprint possible ( 40 x 20 ), this BrewHouse is designed to be both completely functional and eye-catchingly attractive.

(available: http://morebeer.com/product.html?product_id=6337)

From the looks of it, all copper for $48,000 seems like a steal for a 5 bbl system.

Gluten-Free Brewery Planned for Arkansas

This is a very interesting idea. I wonder if it will really take off or not?

AP Monday December 11, 5:43 pm ET

Gluten-Free Brewery Planned for Arkansas -
Two Businesswomen Plan Brewery to Make
Gluten-Free Beer, a Medical Must-Have for 1 of Them


FAYETTEVILLE,
Ark. (AP) -- A woman affected by a disease that stops her from enjoying wheat products will soon be able to say "beer me" without fear of getting a stomach ache or other illness.

Constance Rieper-Estes and brew master Leigh Nogy plan to open the Dark Hills Brewery, which will produce gluten-free beer.

Rieper-Estes and her son are both celiac, which means they can't eat pasta, bread and other foods that contain gluten.

For Rieper-Estes' marriage reception, Nogy brewed two gluten-free kegs. The beer proved popular and the two women embarked on their business venture to open a brewery in northwest Arkansas. The packaging brewery will be located between the cities of Fayetteville and Springdale.

Gluten is in a family of proteins contained in wheat. Most beer is produced by malting barley, which can leave gluten behind. Dark Hills beer will be brewed from rice containing no glutenous grains.

Rieper-Estes and Nogy held a beer tasting event for investors on Sunday in Fayetteville, ending a six-month effort to sell shares in the brewery and develop interest. The next phase will be to renovate and build the brewery.

The two founders said they plan to distribute the beer in Arkansas for a year to build brand recognition, then try to move into bigger markets.

"We think there is a gold mine for this type of beer," Nogy said.

Dark Hills Brewery: http://www.darkhillsbrewery.com

Link to the article: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/061211/gluten_free_beer.html?.v=1

Small breweries, big beer

Fortune Small Business (FSB) expores the booming business for some Colorado breweries:

By Christopher S. Stewart, FSB Magazine
December 8 2006: 9:50 AM EST

Denver (FSB Magazine) -- Normally, I don't drink beer before 5 on a workday. But it's Tuesday at 3:30, and I'm making an exception. Not because the world is too much - isn't it always? - but because FSB has tasked me with most Americans' dream job: to explore the booming business of American craft brewing.

I've come to Colorado, the second-largest beer-producing state in the
Union. Colorado may be home to Coors (Charts), but connoisseurs of inspired microbrews also know that with 92 small breweries - second to California's 224 and ahead of Washington's 80 - it's a fine place to hop off the slope and hit the tasting rooms.

This is a heady time for boutique beer producers all over the country. After an Internet-style rise and fall in the late 1990s, craft beers are on the climb again, with $4.3 billion in U.S. sales in 2005, a 13 percent lift from a year earlier. (By comparison, mass-market beer sales slipped 1.5 percent over the same period.)

In September the industry held the 25th anniversary of the Great American Beer Festival, the trade's equivalent of the Oscars, and attendance jumped from 29,000 in 2005 to a record 41,000

For the rest of the article see CNNMoney.com

Local beer makers want Floridians to develop a taste for microbreweries

This is a great article I found on Yahoo about educating the market and starting a brewery. This article focuses on Florida but it really could be applied anywhere.

Here is a small snippit

As the small but energetic brewing scene organizes, its players say the region's microbrew market is ripe for new options.
"Now people are starting to recognize what a good beer is," Monkey King co-owner Mark Anderson said.
Though Florida is the state responsible for the Hops microbrewery restaurant chain, which became ubiquitous in the 1990s, it has been relatively slow to embrace the craft beer trend.
But national production of craft beer — a term the industry uses for all-malt beers produced by small, independent and traditional breweries — has grown every year for the past 36 years, reports the Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association, a trade group for craft brewers.
Craft beers raked in $4.3 billion in sales last year, up from $3.8 billion the previous year, and production grew 9 percent, according to the association's figures.
That was double the growth rate for wine and triple the rate for liquor, the association reported.
Craft beer production is on track to grow 13 percent this year, said Paul Gatza, association director.
"We're in a period of pretty rapidly accelerating growth for this segment, and I think that's attributable to consumers changing their tastes," Gatza said. "We've seen that in other food industries. We've seen that in breads and coffees, and cheese is now becoming more of an artisanal product. ... People are going for fuller kinds of products, and they're willing to pay a little more for them."

For the rest of the article please visit this link: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/business/epaper/2006/12/11/a1bz_microbrew_1211.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=6