Beer: I Built a Hop Spider

So this weekend I randomly decided to build a hop spider. I was watching a video by Chop & Brew about a beer they brewed and aged it in a Woodinville Whiskey Rye Barrel. I noticed they were using one in the video. It seems like a neat idea for an easier cleanup. So I looked up how to do it here and made a trip to Lowe's to pickup some supplies. After posting on reddit, it seems like most people prefer the stainless steel option. The PVC I bought seems to be extremely tough and durable so we'll see. The heat distortion temperature of PVC is 197.6°F and most boils are 210°F+. Since it'll be above the boil, I'm hoping the wort vapor won't be too bad.  

The wife and I wanted to start up an online store selling random stuff we make and I've decided this is going to be my first item. I know a lot of people brewing are the DIY type, but some people may not have the tools or means to do so. I'm not looking to profit, but to help a fellow brewer out! More to come on the new store we're opening!!

Beer: Discussion with Q&A from John Kimmich of The Alchemist

From time to time during my endless research into homebrewing I come across a gem like this:

This discussion with Q&A from John Kimmich is extremely informative. You also can get a good background into The Alchemist's Heady Topper. Also go check out Chop & Brew by Chip Walton. A great find and I can't wait to watch the rest of his videos!

Beer: New Techniques During Brew Day

I have been on the journey to brew the best IPA I can ever since I started brewing. Which is actually not too long ago. Last year around this time I was brewing 1.5 gallon stove top brews and adding 3.5 gallons of tap water to make 5 gallons. In this short amount of time I have already jumped to all-grain brewing. Can you imagine what I will be doing next year? I can't.

This next brew we are calling The New England 1020. It's going to be a what I call them a "New England IPA". Not as bitter and more aromatic. I get to experiment with techniques I've never used before. I am going to be using a HopShot which is a hop extract to add some bittering elements without adding too much flavor of the hop. Next I am going to be whirlpooling at 180°F with the addition of hops. This is going to (hopefully) create a blast of aroma in the face. I also just picked up this yeast strain which is a Conan clone. 

I will definitely try to take a lot of pictures and update as soon as I can! I have trouble taking pictures because I am having too much fun the whole time. Yesterday I finished up the labels on the Apple Pie Ale and took a few nice pictures. Here they are! 

Beer: Apple Pie Ale Bottling (Update)

We bottled the Apple Pie Ale this weekend. It tasted absolutely amazing. Extremely well rounded with hints of apple, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and bready notes. Although we wanted it at about 8%, I think having it at 5.8% is actually better. Makes it very drinkable at any time. Also we were surprised at the clarity. You can see right through it!

While all this was going on I was preparing a chicken stock for Thanksgiving. I slowly simmered it for about 6 hours and then strained it. Simple recipe of celery, carrots, onion, parsley, salt, and pepper. 

Kyle did a little photoshoot with the Scotch Stout and The Quadrupel. I have to say it came out looking awesome! 

Beer: Hoppy Brown (Disaster) Ale

A while ago I tried a beer by Banner Beer Company called "Run to Equinox". What is it? A hoppy brown ale. It was pretty good. It didn't blow me away, but it was pretty good. So what did I do? Go on the search for some more hoppy brown ales. The search was, well, not that successful. The only other that I found in the area was Smuttynose's "Durty" which is now called "Mud Season". So what does a homebrewer do if they cannot find the beer they want to drink? Find or formulate a recipe and brew it.

After much research, everyone seemed to base their recipe off of Janet's Hoppy Brown Ale. Must be good then right? So I did the same thing. Tweaked a couple of things but overall kept it close to the same.

We called it the "Hoppy Brown Disaster" because pretty much every step of the way, something went wrong. When draining into the fermentation bucket, the hops blocked the drainage. When fermenting, the temperature somehow jumped to 82°F even thought it was cool out. When transferring from secondary to the bottling bucket, the hops clogged and broke the auto-siphon wand. You get where I'm going. It was a disaster. Other than the fruity esters from the high temps, it came out great! 

The only difference from this recipe and the final is that the OG was 1.069 and the FG was at about 1.009 after the yeast went insane cause of the high temperature. So the final ABV was around 7.9%. I was okay with that. I also decided to use whole cone dried hops last minute to try them out. Needless to say, I wasn't a huge fan because I didn't account for water consumption. You live and learn!

Original Gravity:

1.068

Final Gravity:

1.016

ABV (standard):

6.89%

IBU (tinseth):

81.92

SRM (morey):

30.84

Fermentables

Amount	Fermentable	PPG	°L	Bill %
10 lb	American - Pale 2-Row	37	1.8	64.5%
1 lb	American - Caramel / Crystal 40L	34	40	6.5%
1 lb	American - Chocolate	29	350	6.5%
1 lb	American - Wheat	38	1.8	6.5%
1 lb	German - Carapils	35	1.3	6.5%
1 lb	Rice Hulls	0	0	6.5%
0.5 lb	American - Smoked Malt	37	5	3.2%
15.5 lb	Total

Hops

Amount	Variety	Type	AA	Use	Time	IBU
1 oz	Northern Brewer	Pellet	7.8	Mash		5.78
0.5 oz	Centennial	Pellet	10	Boil	60 min	18.59
1 oz	Northern Brewer	Pellet	7.8	Boil	60 min	29
1 oz	Northern Brewer	Pellet	7.8	Boil	15 min	14.39
1.5 oz	Cascade	Pellet	7	Boil	10 min	14.15
1.5 oz	Cascade	Pellet	7	Boil	0 min
1.5 oz	Centennial	Pellet	10	Dry Hop	7 days

Mash Guidelines

Amount	Description	Type	Temp	Time
4.5 gal	Brings it to 150F	Sparge	165 F	60 min
3.5 gal	Brings it to 175F	Sparge	212 F	10 min
Starting Mash Thickness: 1.5 qt/lb

Other Ingredients

Amount	Name	Type	Use	Time
1 tsp	Gypsum	Water Agt	Boil	60 min

Yeast

Danstar - Nottingham Ale Yeast

Attenuation (avg): 77% Flocculation: High Optimum Temp: 57 - 70 °F Starter: No Fermentation Temp: 72 °F Pitch Rate: 0.35 (M cells / ml / ° P) 110 B cells required

Beer: Northern Pale Ale

Last year my friends and I were at the brew store. I don't quite remember how it happened but Phil got a whiff of a specific hop called Northern Brewer and his face lit up like a little kid in a candy store. "We must brew a beer with this hop" he says. So, I came up with an extract recipe and we brewed, transferred, and bottled. It was a very drinkable pale ale that was almost an IPA. People that didn't like IPA's seemed to like it because of how light it was.

I entered it into a competition and got some great feedback on it's flaws and weaknesses. Surprisingly it got a 27 out of a 50 which I thought was very modest.

With these improvements, which included adding more hops to balance the overall malt heaviness, I tweaked the recipe. This time it was an all-grain recipe. We were very excited to rebrew this one. 

The new one definitely had way more flavor and was more well rounded than the extract recipe. Success! It is a really good mild West Coast IPA. There is a great grapefruit taste and overall citrusy. But for some reason, I just wasn't satisfied. We're not on the West Coast. I feel like being over here, I wanted to brew the what I call it "New England IPA". This great wave of IPA's coming through here is incredible. 3 notable mentions include: Tree House Brewing Co. - Julius, Hill Farmstead Brewery - Abner, and The Alchemist - Heady Topper. Recipe and brew day coming soon for that one!

So, overall... GREAT IPA. Below will be the recipe so you can give it a shot! It's a solid 6% as well. Cheers, and good luck! 

Original Gravity:

1.065

Final Gravity:

1.018

ABV (standard):

6.19%

IBU (tinseth):

68.03

SRM (morey):

6.81

Fermentables

Amount	Fermentable	PPG	°L	Bill %
11 lb	American - Pale 2-Row	37	1.8	80%
1 lb	American - Vienna	35	4	7.3%
0.5 lb	German - Carapils	35	1.3	3.6%
1 lb	American - Caramel / Crystal 20L	35	20	7.3%
4 oz	American - Smoked Malt	37	5	1.8%
13.75 lb	Total

Hops

Amount	Variety	Type	AA	Use	Time	IBU
1 oz	Northern Brewer	Pellet	7.8	Boil	60 min	29.55
0.5 oz	Cascade	Pellet	7	Boil	30 min	10.19
1 oz	Northern Brewer	Pellet	7.8	Boil	30 min	22.71
0.5 oz	Cascade	Pellet	7	Boil	5 min	2.64
0.5 oz	Northern Brewer	Pellet	7.8	Boil	5 min	2.95
0.5 oz	Northern Brewer	Pellet	7.8	Dry Hop	7 days

Mash Guidelines

Amount	Description	Type	Temp	Time
5.2 gal	To bring up to 152F	Sparge	165 F	60 min
3.6 gal	To bring up to 175F	Sparge	212 F	10 min
Starting Mash Thickness: 1.5 qt/lb

Other Ingredients

Amount	Name	Type	Use	Time
1 tsp	Gypsum	Water Agt	Boil	60 min
1 each	Whirfloc	Water Agt	Boil	15 min

Yeast

Fermentis / Safale - American Ale Yeast US-05

Attenuation (avg): 72% Flocculation: Medium Optimum Temp: 59 - 75 °F Starter: No Fermentation Temp: 68 °F Pitch Rate: 0.35 (M cells / ml / ° P) 105 B cells required

Notes

$35.20

Bring first mashing in to 175F and let sit in tun to warm it up. Wait 10 minutes or so until it is at 165F and dough in.

Once cooled down, whirlpool wort to seperate hop particles and trub. Let sit for at least an hour COVERED. Let cold break.

Beer: Belgian Quad Bottling Disaster...

Last night I decided to bottle the Quadrupel that had been sitting in my basement since oh, February maybe? I have been afraid to bottle this because of the yeast and sugar I am adding at bottling, I was afraid of bottle bombs. My buddy Ryan bought bottles for us which was amazing! A while back I went to Strange Brew in Marlborough because I was in the area to look for some corks, a corker, bottle ties, and yeast. I needed some advice because I had never done this before. I asked a million times if this small red corker would do the trick on some Belgian bottles. I was assured over and over that it would...

Fast forward to last night and, well it did not do the trick.

Of course I didn't check to see if it worked before I sanitized EVERYTHING and transferred EVERYTHING to the bottling bucket. I tried my hardest to jam that guy in there and no go. My hands actually have blisters on them today. Well, to be fair I also assembled most of the chairs for our brand new 11 foot dining room table so that may have something to do with it as well. So here I am, freaking out because I don't want my precious beer that had been aging for over 6 months to spoil. Then my wife calmly just says, "Text Pat. He definitely has one". Genius. He also works at Homebrew Emporium over in West Boylston where I get all of my ingredients. The place is amazing. 

I text Pat and get the BEST response ever. 

I drive over to his homestead, pick up the beast and get back to bottling. And when I say beast, I mean beast.

All bottled, corked, and caged. Ready to rock. I can't wait to drink this one.

So moral of the story? Definitely check everything before you get too far ahead. I usually do because I am super OCD when it comes to this type stuff. I wasn't thinking and was very excited to finally get this bottled. Oh well! Crisis averted thanks to Pat! Cheers.

Beer: Tree House Brewing Co.

So, in our quest to create the perfect IPA, what do us brewers do? Research. And what does research entail when you brew beer? Drink beer. Rough life isn't it? The Ourbeer crew and I will be heading over to Tree House Brewing Co. in Monson, MA on Thursday to get our hands on some delightful "Julius". They will also have "Ma" on tap as well which is a Hoppy Amber Ale.

What is Julius? Well it is described by Tree House as:
"(American IPA - 6.8% ABV) - Bursting with pungent American hops, Julius, our American IPA, is loaded with notes of passionfruit, mango, and citrus. A soft, pillowy mouthfeel and rounded bitterness makes Julius very, very easy to drink. You've been warned!"

All I can think about when I see this beauty is, "Would you just look at it?"

The first time I went there with my buddy Senecal, I was blown away. They were extremely humble and you just felt like you were part of something right when you walked through those doors. Yes, the wait is long. But in the end of the day, it is well worth it. I will be writing a follow up post to review and let you know how the excursion went. In the meantime, cheers!

Food: Slow Cooker Pork Chops

I bought pork chops for dinner but really did not have a recipe in mind. I just wanted pork. So last night as I was going to bed I searched for a recipe. I decided I wanted to do something in the crock pot so that I didn't have to do much when I got home. After going through many different kinds of pork chops recipes, I finally found one. Since I didn't have some things and wanted to make it a bit my own, I tweaked it a little like I always do. Here is the recipe!

Total Time: 8 hours 10 minutes
Prep: 10 minutes
Inactive: 8 hours
Cook: 8 hours
Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients
4 thick cut boneless pork chops
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 cups chicken broth
2 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon poultry seasoning
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 tablespoon Kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper

Directions
In a large bowl, whisk together the olive oil, chicken broth, garlic, paprika, garlic powder, poultry seasoning, and basil. Pour into the slow cooker. Cut small slits in each pork chop with the tip of a knife, and season with salt and pepper. Place pork chops into the slow cooker, cover, and cook on low for 8 hours.

Don't forget, relax and have a beer!

Beer: Apple Pie Ale

So this beer holds a very special place in my heart. It was the first beer that I formulated the recipe from scratch by researching how to extract flavors for hours upon hours. As I kept on reading, it seemed like an extremely hard task to get all of these complex flavors to come out properly. Spices in beer is an area that can easily become overpowering and destroy the delectable delicious flavor of beer; the combination of water, malt, hops, and yeast.

One day, along with 2 of my good friends, I decided to just start brewing beer. We started with an IPA kit and then on to a Smokey Porter. They were good, but just like with music, playing covers gets old over time. You want to create something. You want it to be your own. Someone else's recipe isn't as gratifying as YOUR recipe. 

In the "Early Days" as I like to refer to it, we just had a stove top pot and were dealing with extracts instead of all-grain. Since then, we have made many upgrades and educated ourselves much more with the art of brewing. So this year I tweaked the recipe a bit to accommodate those changes. We started the day as we usually do, going out and buying way too much beer for the half day we would be brewing. Also, as with tradition we have to eat food that is not even remotely good for us. 

Here is Ryan cutting the apples so that we can pasteurize them.

Once we were done with that, it was time to heat up the water for mashing in. If you'd like to read more about the process here is the link! Once it's heated to the correct temperature, it's time to mash in, or what some refer to  as "doughing in".

Now we wait. Depending on the recipe, there can be many different times for this. We do a simple batch sparge. There are many other ways of doing this, but with the equipment we have, this will suffice. We get an efficiency of about 68-75%, which isn't bad. For this recipe, we'll wait about an hour until we can test for starch conversion. We tested, and everything was going as planned!

Next up, we transfer the now wort to the next cooler we have to calculate how many gallons we got. We were around 4 gallons and we needed about 7. 

Next up is to lauder the wort and we do this with sparging. This way we can get more wort and get us up to the 7 gallons we want. We let that rest for about 10 minutes and then collect the wort again. Meanwhile... this is Ryan, again. This doesn't even portray how beautiful this smell is. 

Now we're ready to start the boil where we add the rest of our ingredients. This recipe calls for a 60 minute boil, but you can go for any amount of time again depending on the recipe. 

Once boiled, we need to cool the wort down to 68-72 degrees so that we can have a happy yeast. We have also recently included doing a longer cold break and whirlpooling to remove the excess trub.

Now that everything has been cooled and the liquid and solids have separated a bit, it is time to transfer the wort to the primary fermentor. We need to create some aeration so that the yeast is again, a happy yeast. No one wants a pesky yeast. After this, we pitch the yeast!

Now we wait about a week for the yeast to convert the sugars to alcohol and we transfer to secondary fermentation for some more clarity. There is much argument over whether this step is necessary but for some reason, I like doing it. I have never encountered infection or any other problems from this.

We didn't run into many issues this brew day. However, the brew store did not give me the 11 pounds of grain I asked for. As I was brewing I could tell that there was definitely not enough grain in the mash tun. Oh well. This just means that the alcohol content will not be the 8.2% I wanted but more around the 5.5% range judging from the 1.055 OG reading we got from the hydrometer. 

Normally people don't release their recipes to people, but I don't care. The slogan we use all the time with our "brewing company" we have is "Ourbeer is your beer" and I intend to keep it that way. So here it is! This is with the 8.2% alcohol version. If you wanna try for a lower ABV, just adjust the grains accordingly. 

Original Gravity:

1.081

Final Gravity:

1.019

ABV (standard):

8.19%

IBU (tinseth):

30.14

SRM (morey):

19.06

Fermentables

Amount	Fermentable	PPG	°L	Bill %
11 lb	American - Pale 2-Row	37	1.8	66.2%
2.5 lb	American - Victory	34	28	15%
0.5 lb	American - Caramel / Crystal 80L	33	80	3%
0.5 lb	American - Carapils (Dextrine Malt)	33	1.8	3%
2.125 lb	Maple Syrup	30	35	12.8%
16.63 lb	Total

Hops

Amount	Variety	Type	AA	Use	Time	IBU
0.5 oz	Calypso	Pellet	13	Boil	60 min	22.12
1 oz	Cluster	Pellet	6.5	Boil	10 min	8.02

Mash Guidelines

Amount	Description	Type	Temp	Time
5.4 gal	Bring to 175 to warm mash tun	Sparge	152 F	60 min
4 gal	Bring to boil	Sparge	172 F	10 min
Starting Mash Thickness: 1.5 qt/lb

Other Ingredients

Amount	Name	Type	Use	Time
1 tsp	Gypsum	Water Agt	Boil	60 min
1 each	Whirlfloc Tablet	Water Agt	Boil	15 min
0.5 tsp	Apple Pie Spice	Spice	Boil	10 min
4 each	Cinnamon	Spice	Boil	10 min
2 each	Vanilla Bean	Spice	Boil	10 min
1 tsp	Vanilla Extract	Spice	Boil	10 min
5 each	Apples	Spice	Primary	0 min

Yeast

Danstar - Nottingham Ale Yeast

Attenuation (avg): 77% Flocculation: High Optimum Temp: 57 - 70 °F Starter: No Fermentation Temp: 72 °F Pitch Rate: 0.5 (M cells / ml / ° P) 185 B cells required

Notes

Pasteurize apples at low temperature until they turn into an apple sauce.