Question about kits and how I learned to love Cider

First off, we were at a party last night and a friend was asking about the kits we keep referring to.  While there are kits that contain all the equipment you need from companies like the Brooklyn Brewing Company, the kits we are usually referring to only contain the ingredients meant for that style of beer.  What happens is we go to the homebrewing store and tell them what style of beer we are hoping to make, and they go and find the appropriate "kit" which is a plastic baggy filled with all of the ingredients anyone making a classic style of that beer would use and prepackage it.

In that same store it is possible to get however much you want of any grain, hops, or yeast, but the kits are meant to make it easier for you so you don't have to do all that work for the same effect.  That being said, we are planning out our first experimental recipe in which I have been looking up where to get local barley and hops.  Our plan is to make a beer using 100% local ingredients, though we're still figuring out what sort of beer style it will be.

Now, last week we brewed an American Wheat beer.  We specify that because Hefeweizen requires specific breed of wheat and yeast apparently to be considered a true Hefeweizen.  The wheat was very strange as it was ONLY the wheat and some hops.  The wheat itself is unlike the barley we've used in the past as the wheat is crushed into a powder which we dumped into the water directly.  We put hops in for bittering but there were no aroma hops to add so it was a very simple brew.  After placing it in the fermenter, a few days later, we discovered the yeast was having high production of CO2 so Kristi had to do damage control for the beer to ensure the sanitizer didn't get blasted out of the plug and cause the beer to get infected.

This week we transferred the wheat beer to a secondary fermenter, but we also bottled our Cider.  I did my usual tasting for both beers.  The wheat was interesting and Kristi and I are excited to see what it's like in a few weeks after it's been bottled for a bit.  The Cider, however, blew me away.  I'm not generally a fan of Ciders, mainly because they're generally very sweet and I'm not fond of most sweet things.  What Kristi did to convince me to make this Cider was to inform me that a traditional English Cider is more dry than sweet, so I was interested to see what it was like.  The Cider has been fermenting for a few weeks now and it's already tasting great, with a hint of tart that I find pleasing.  I can only imagine what it's going to taste like when it's all done.  The most important detail is that it should be completely ready by the end of May when friends from out of town show up.  Most of those friends don't like beer, but love cider so we think this should be popular.  Tomorrow we look to brew a Red Kolsch, and as I've never had one before I'm interested to see how that turns out.

Edit: Forgot to mention we used local honey instead of sugar for bottling the cider.  We think it will give an interesting after taste as we've found using honey doesn't make what you brewed sweeter, but gives it an interesting character instead.

Learning with Cider

This is a rather brief post as Ciders apparently don't have much to them.  Kristi spoke to some of the guys at the homebrewing store and they informed her that for a cider you really only need to get Frozen concentrate apple juice as it won't make a difference.  She got 6 containers and put it into the pot, and we put the normal amount of water in.  As a note, we usually put in 6 gallons to account for evaporation, but with ciders you aren't quite boiling so we ended up with too much cider at the end but we're making due.  We heated the cider to 185 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes.  Once we were done we cooled it down and put it into the fermentor with the yeast.

That's it, that's all there is to a cider.  The major part is that it takes FOREVER to ferment.  So much so that Kristi and I were getting worried it wasn't quite working as we didn't see much activity.  I stopped by the homebrewing shop and they said it's a slow fermentation and gave me some nutrients to use to help the yeast feed more as they don't get much out of a cider apparently.  It should take a few months of fermenting and then bottling and fermenting that in the bottle for a few months more.  I'm still trying to get a straight answer about how long it takes as Kristi was told quick fermentation in the fermentor and months in the bottles, and someone else told me months in the fermentor and months more in the bottle.  So we'll see, but it probably won't be as good as we were hoping for since we were having this confusion.  Still, those that enjoy ciders will likely still enjoy them, but I'm going to keep some to the side to ferment longer as I really prefer a dry cider.

Long Break, Quick Update

We've been rather busy lately so it's been hard to get around to actually updating the blog.  At this point Kristi has already brewed her 1gal Belgian Ale, added the Orange zest (the outer part of an orange peel) and we've now bottled the Belgian Ale AND Irish Red both.  We've learned a lot from previous experiences and made some improvements.

For bottling the Irish Red in particular we used two fermenters, moving from a first to a second after some time, then for bottling we moved to the bottling bucket which has a spigot at the bottom.  One of the differences this time around is that Kristi found out about a "bottling wand" and got us one.  Basically, it's a wand you attach to a tube which is attached to the spigot but it does not let any beer out until it presses against a surface.  This is useful because it means we can place it in the bottles directly at the bottom, it makes it so it doesn't really foam at all, we get a consistent amount with every bottle because of stopping when it reaches the top, and it speeds up the process since we don't have to turn the spigot on or off or have anyone pumping.

This made the bottling process so much easier to the point that having a third person no longer feels necessary.  Kristi was able to pump out the filled bottles while I capped them and placed them to the side.  We've found it does a better job of keeping a lot of the useless dead yeast out of the bottles as well, though we ensured keeping some live yeast so it could continue to ferment properly in the bottle.  Which brings me to the next point.

We found with the Kolsch's that we had an inconsistency in the amount of final carbonation that had occurred.  Much of this had to do with how we mixed the sugar in before the bottling process, which we corrected with the Irish Reds by slowly pouring it in as we filled the bucket with beer.  This meant some Kolsch's were very carbonated by the end, and some were not very carbonated.  Fortunately, it seems time has solved that problem for the rest of the Kolsch's after we put them aside for a few weeks before having more.  Now the bottles seem to be better fermented.  But back to the Irish Red and Belgian Ale bottlings.

When we were bottling the Irish Red I tried a taste in my tasting glass and found that it had a strange, yet pleasing, oak taste.  According to Kristi, that oak taste is actually a specific trait to the Irish yeast we had used and is commonly used by homebrewers for just that reason.  I'm keeping it in mind for an experiment I may do in the future.  As for the Belgian Ale, when tasting I found the zest was extremely strong in it, but Kristi has learned that fermenting beers with fruit and ciders both require some aging in the bottle to mellow out the flavors.  Because of this we are waiting about a month after bottling the Belgian Ale to actually try it, but this is also good to know as tonight we plan on brewing our first cider.  I'll try to post an update tomorrow as to the process for Ciders, but what I will tell you is that you keep it in the fermenter for about a week before bottling it.  We've been told it's best to keep it in there for months so we are hoping to have it ready by late May when we expect to see a bunch of friends from out of town.  Wish us luck.

We are both huge Game of Thrones fan.  I love this t-shirt:

Personally I think it should be an ice bock and not a winter ale.

Irish Red in time for St. Patrick's Day

On Thursday, Kristi and I brewed our Irish Red beer in the hopes that we could have it ready before St. Patrick's Day.  For the most part, the brewing process was exactly the same as the Kolsch but with some minor differences.  This time, there were 5 different grains to add to the beer with there being a net total of grains being more than the amount of grains we used for the Kolsch.  The grains used were:

1 lb Crystal 120L

8 oz Abbey

8 oz Caramunich

2 oz Black Roasted

2 oz Special B

The Black Roasted in particular were very dark and I suspect had a lot to do with the near instant darkening of the brew as it warmed up with the grains within.  The hops were, of course, different as we used Northern Brewer hops for bittering and Willamette hops for aroma, still boiling aroma hops for only a minute.

I think we are getting the brewing down better as we actually saw a good wort develop at one point into the brewing.  This was a bit exciting for me (Kristi was out getting some more supplies so she missed it) as we never really got a good look at the wort with the Kolsch.  We then chilled it in an ice bath in the sink (though we are looking into making our own wort chiller so we don't have to worry about carrying a steaming hot 5 gallons of liquid).  We then placed the beer into the fermenter when we were done.

Kristi wanted to try doing a starter batch for the yeast (her background is in Biology so this was easy for her, but I imagine this should be rather simple to anyone that reads the basics of how this works).  What Kristi did was take about a gallon of the beer and place it in our small carboy and placed the yeast into this container and sealed it and the fermenter.  She let the yeast do its job and the next day she place that batch into the fermenter.  The reason she did this was for several reasons.  One, the beer in the fermenter was still very hot and we were worried the yeast had been out too long and not enough yeast would survive to do its job properly.  Two, the smaller volume means there would be "faster communication between the yeast" as Kristi put it.  What this means I'm still not entirely certain, but essentially the yeast grows faster when it has a more dense population.  Because of this, the smaller carboy means a whole lot more yeast to introduce to the fermenter when we added it the next night.  At this time it wasn't showing a whole lot of activity, but we were also informed we may have to wait until next week before we see a great deal more activity.

While getting supplies, Kristi also found out it is best to get a second fermenter to transfer to at one point as it helps with minimizing how much dead yeast you have in your batch.  So at this point we have two fermenters and a bottling bucket to switch between, all before we get to the actual bottling process.  The bottling bucket has a spigot at the bottom so that all we have to do is turn it on and keep the container as unexposed as possible to oxidation and anything falling into our batch.

Tonight we will be finally starting our Belgian Blonde Kristi got for her birthday to make and that should make enough for the carboy itself, so we will not need to worry about doubling up on equipment.  Kristi and I are hoping to use this as an opportunity to play with adding other flavorings to the beer and we'll add more on that when we get to that point.  As the brewing process will not likely be that involved we will probably skip it this time.

Taking time to thank other Breweries for their bottles

So, while Kristi and I prepare for our brewing tonight I thought I would post about our bottling of the Kolsch beer.  While preparing for bottling we found it is considered better if you transfer the beer to another bucket for bottling.  From what we could tell this was done to minimize the amount of dead yeast you might be transferring to the bottles.  Fortunately, we already had a giant bucket that we were using for sanitizing items so it was mostly cleaned anyways and Kristi finished cleaning it up.  We then moved the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket, but keeping in mind that the instructions pointed out how important time was as a factor as we wanted to keep its exposure to oxygen down to a minimum.

Before we could start the bottling process, however, we needed to prepare the corn sugar we were using to add carbonation to the beer.  You may recall in a previous post that we were using sugar pellets before for carbonation, but this batch had a pouch of corn sugar instead.  In this case, we had to prepare the sugar ahead of time by boiling it in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes.  Kristi pointed out we should wait until the water is boiling before adding the sugar so as to ensure we do not accidentally caremelize the sugar and therefor make it useless.  After we were done preparing it and we transferred enough beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket until it filled about 2 inches from the bottom, at which point we mixed in the sugar mixture, then continued filling up more.  The reason for this sugar is that it creates a second fermentation in the bottle with what yeast is still alive, breaking down more sugars into alcohol, but the byproduct to fermentation is CO2, which is where we get our carbonation from.  I have been finding it interesting every time we observe some part of the process and consider how they must have brewed beer long ago to gain any of these traits.  I imagine they kept the fermenting beer in a closed container and it naturally became carbonated and they didn't understand why.  In any case, we moved on from this point to getting ready for the bottling itself.

We started bottling by pumping all of the beer into the bottles and found placing the tube all the way in worked best as that meant it would continue pumping more beer in within and keep foaming down to a minimum.  We tried to move quickly to keep the oxidation to a minimum, but we quickly discovered as we neared the end of our bottles that we didn't have nearly enough bottles to hold the 5 gallons of beer.  Our solution was to use the many growlers and bottles we had kept from other breweries, though mostly Speakeasy, in order to make up the difference.  So Kristi quickly rinsed them out and used sanitizer on them so that we could use them.  This ended up saving the day, but we also had to move quickly to cap all the beers we had bottled.  This is where having a third person would really come in handy, especially considering a Kolsch especially doesn't do well with oxidation.

For those who are not aware, a Kolsch is typically served in a smaller glass than you traditionally find with other German beers.  The exact reasons as to why this is are not clear to Kristi or myself, but we suspect it has to do with the use of lager yeast in an ale process, which means yeast that generally works best in colder temperatures being exposed to warmer temperatures and therefore something involving the yeast may be more unstable and susceptible to breaking down.  Hopefully I can find some information on the subject, but so far I have not.  Now we just have to wait about 2 weeks until we can try the beer and see how it went.

First batch of IPA a success

While at a friend's house for a celebration, we took out our bottles of IPA for everyone to try.  Everyone opened them up and tried them (I put mine in a glass because I can be a bit of a snob at times).  We had previously apologized to everyone for our IPA as we expected it to be bad the first time around, but much to our surprise everyone liked it.

The beer was not too hoppy, but as the kit we had used previously from the Brooklyn Brewing Company did not have a clarifier tablet so the beer came out unfiltered.  I am not aware if this is always how you unfilter a beer or whether most brewing companies use a different process and it's something Kristi and I will need to look into.

Next up we're looking into making an Irish Red in preparation for St. Patrick's Day in our 5 gal fermenter, but Kristi wanted to use the 1 gal carboy to ferment a Belgian with her own recipe.  Now, the Belgian is actually using a kit that was given to her for her birthday, but she is planning on adding other ingredients to use it to experiment with diverging from the norm.  We'll probably be starting this on Sunday, but next Tuesday we start bottling our Kolsch and may be able to brew our Irish Red that very night as well.