In this 'Yodelayeehoo' Octoberfest without the lederhosen edition
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| EHG-WHN_2009-10.pdf | 923.65 KB |
Welcome all,
We are off to an exciting start to the year. I was thrilled at the turnout at September’s meeting, there were a lot of new faces, and a lot of returning friends. Just
to announce briefly, there ought to be plenty of information available at the next meeting regarding the fall Big Brew, and the word is out that the very first EHG podcast is in pre-production as I write this. We are also expecting Ernie to give us a talk on his attendance at the Great American Beer Festival.
At September’s meeting, I raised the possibility of running the BJCP judging course again this year after a year’s (perfectly normal) hiatus, and there was a moderate response. At October’s meeting, we will be looking for definitely interested participants with cash to deposit. Nothing is firm yet, but it is likely that fees this
year will be similar to last time, a deposit of $100.00, which is partially refundable upon passing the exam. We will be looking for a minimum of 10 people to participate (I will be one of them, seeing as how I want to re-write the tasting portion, and the wife is interested too).
Also, we will be trying to return to a theme beer at each meeting, a habit we have gotten out of, and to that end, here is a list of themes for the year. People can bring what they have, brew to a schedule, or ignore it completely, but I would like to provide a commercial calibration and informal tasting for one of the beers for each month.
Themes:
The final matter is the 100 mile beer. The rules are simple: as much Prairie 2 row from Alix, Alberta as you want to use(99.64 Road Miles), any yeast that
you can culture from a yeast that is either on a slant or in a conditioned bottle that is within 100 miles (excluding the purchase of bottle conditioned commercial beers) and any other ingredient that you can find growing within the 100 mile limit. We have a tasting at the March meeting, and I will be calling for BJCP judged to
volunteer to chose winners and offer feedback. The criteria for judging will be the beer the judges decide is best, but if a style is declared, it will probably
nudge BJCP judges one way or the other if it is on or off style.
Good Luck!
With fewer than 100 days left in the decade and more importantly the in the first half of the 09/10 brewing season, the momentum of EHG is going nowhere
but up. We are seeing a huge presence in our online community at http://ehg.ca. A strong showing in new contributors to the WHN and a number of new initiatives in the Edmonton brewing scene.
This month look forward to our new online venture: podcasting! Check out
www.ehg.ca/homebrewofchampions
for brew cast brilliance. And follow along at the new initiative sponsored by EHG, the Canadian Brewer of the Year award. While its just getting started, http://canadianbreweroftheyear.com will be the place to be seen in 2010.
At the September meeting, I talked to several new members, who are also new brewers, about The Brew House kits as a great way to get started in brewing. So it was time to revisit the article I wrote almost 6 years ago in the November 2003 issue of The Worthouse News with some updates that I've learned over the years. Particularly this past year where other life events kept me from doing other types of brewing and I did a lot more The Brew House kits including an APA that placed first in a club-only competition (which I deferred to a nice wit.)
About the time I had my first sip of beer in the mid 50's (It really was just a sip as my dad wasn't about to give me a full bottle at the early age of 5), TV dinners were becoming a very "hot" item. Mom was able to get a Swanson's TV Dinner out of the frozen section of the grocery store, bring it home, pop it in the oven and 30 minutes later, a hot meal! The big advantage was the convenience of no cooking, no messy pots and minimal cleanup. Of course, the taste wasn't exactly like a home cook meal and often required generous amounts of ketchup and other condiments. TV dinners are still around but they are now "microwavable frozen dinners" that can be more likely called "computer dinners" to eat while sitting in front of the flat screen monitor.
In homebrewing, we are now seeing a brewing version of the old TV dinner with pre-packed wort kits such as The Brew House (http://www.thebrewhouse.com). These kits, packaged like wine kits, just require pouring the wort into a sanitized fermenter, adding some additional water and pitching the supplied dry yeast. After that, it's the usual racking to a secondary if desired and then bottling or kegging. No grinding, mashing, sparging, boiling or toiling to get the wort into the fermenter. From start to finish a brew can be in the fermenter in the same time it took to cook a TV dinner in the oven.
While pre-packaged wort kits make an acceptable brew, there have been comments that they tend to be at the low end of a good tasting brew. So like the old TV dinners, they may require some "enhancements" to improve the taste. But no ketchup please! Instead, a change in yeast, water concentration or hopping can turn a typical beer into a very good beer. While the full strength worts like Manotta's Festa Brew (http://www.magnotta.com/FestaBrew/) are limited in what can be added, the concentrated wort in Brew House kits offer a wider range of flexibility.
You can make the beer following the directions or like those "cake doctor" cookbooks, use the kit as a starting point for another style of beer. As found in canned extract brewing ("kit-n-kilo" as the Aussies call them), just changing from the supplied dry yeast to a good liquid yeast will often enhance the flavour of the beer.
Depending on the labeled style of the kit, the gravity of the Brew House kits is somewhere in the range 1.070-1.080 for 15 litres (4 gal US), so it's a good starting point for several related styles. With some of the kits, reducing the amount of water will change the style to a related higher gravity style. For example, the Pale Ale kit, which normally requires 8 litres of water, without water will give an American Barley Wine styled beer.
Besides changing the water dilution, using different yeasts will bring new flavours and style changes. An undiluted American Premium Lager kit with the Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey yeast became a medal-winning Belgian Golden Strong Ale. Last winter, I did a Cream Ale kit using the Wyeast 2112 California (Common) Lager yeast in a cold 15-16C basement that gave a nice beer.
Changing the yeast and reducing the water is just the beginning. At The Brew House web site are recipes for modifying the kits by adding different yeast, less water, more hops, additional extract (DME, LME) or a partial steep/mash. (http://www.thebrewhouse.com/resource_center/) I've made a few porters using the Pale Ale kit, steeped dark grains and a porter-style yeasts. They also have a nice Russian Imperial Stout recipe with the Munich Dark Lager kit.
With The Brew House kits, I recently rediscovered the value of using a plastic fermenter for the primary instead of a glass carboy that I had been using over the years. When dumping the wort from the box, it foams excessively and even a 23l carboy is too small for all the foam. But not the traditional white 6-7 gallon buckets commonly found in the online brew stores. See the folks at Southside Brew Crew/Winnings Wine Plus for a 32l plastic wine fermenter. An added feature of the plastic wine fermenter is that it already has the volume markings when adding the water. If you also make wine and already have a fermenter, buy another one strictly for beer so there is an off-flavor transfer. I also found there is no need to drill a hole in the lid for a airlock, just leave the lid on loose and treat it like an semi-open fermenter. Of all the batches I've done so far in the buckets, no infection problems.
A kit makes it easy to split into multiple batches to brew two different styles, try out different yeasts or experiment with ingredients as it provides a uniform base style. Since the kit normally makes 23 litres (6 gal US), there are a variety of ways of dividing the batch. I have found it helps to have a sanitized bottling bucket if the kit is to be split into multiple batches. The Brew House kit is packaged at a very low pH to retard spoilage and requires the addition of an acid neutralizer before pitching the yeast. A bottling bucket makes it easy to empty the wort out of the box and mix in "Pack #1". The wort can then be dumped into the different fermenters with additional water, extract, hop tea and yeast.
Besides setting aside the Coopers dry yeast pack for liquid yeast and using a plastic primary fermenter, I no longer bother with racking to a secondary glass carboy. As many homebrewers are finding and as recently published in Brew Your Own magazine, for most beers with good clean yeast, you can leave the beer in the primary fermenter for about two weeks and then bottle or keg. For bottling, I also don't even bother with a bottling bucket and the supplied priming sugar and instead use Cooper's Carbonations Drops or Muntons Carb Tabs right in the bottles.
I've been using The Brew House kits since I moved to Canada 7 years ago. They are a great addition to the brewer's larder for such situations where you want to do a batch of brew and just don't have the few hours it takes to do an extract or all grain brew. For the new brewers, The Brew House Kits are a great means of getting all the brewing techniques down such as sanitation, transfer and packaging beer before moving up to partial or all-grain brewing.
So, when you want some brew but just don’t feel like "cooking", open the box, pitch the yeast, "relax and have a homebrew!"
One of the most challenging and rewarding parts of brewing is that there are many ways to get to the end product. Every recipe is unique, but so is every brewers process; a function of equipment, skill, time and, in some cases, ideology. The beauty of it is that they are all perfectly valid ways to get the job done.
To that end, we are surveying the membership to determine how we collectively brew beer to document some of the many ways our members produce the excellent brews they do.
The basic 12 parts of brewing we're going to cover are:
|
|
In each, we'll give some of the usual concerns and options and provide a description of the personal process of a member of the exec or general membership.
This month: Boil.
Boiling does a lot for your brew. The classic BJCP question asks for at least 5 reasons but there are at least 7 good ones listed in the study guide, not the least of which is to get those yummy hop alpha acids into your beer. But boiling a multi-gallon batch of wort provides a raft of logistical complexities. Please describe how boiling gets done in your brewery. Some things to think about:
This month's response comes from Mark Nesdoly:
I carry my wort outside by myself. However, there’s no way I’d be able to lift 50+ litres of wort onto my stand, so split the runoff 50/50 between my kettle and another pot. Once the kettle is on the stand, I dump in the other half. I always do a full boil.
I boil outside on a propane king cooker, even in the dead of winter. That burner has no trouble boiling a 10 gallon batch when it’s -30C and windy as hell.