Brew #5 – Vanilla Kolsch

Yeah… It’s been a while. Didn’t brew all summer, but I’m picking back up. This is the review/writeup for the Vanilla Kolsch I bottled in June.

I ordered a standard Kolsch kit from Northern Brewer but added vanilla beans into the secondary. I have no idea how I came up with the idea for vanilla in a Kolsch, but it seemed like a good plan. I researched the different ways to add the vanilla, and the two main choices I had to make were 1- vanilla beans vs. vanilla extract, and 2- add directly to the secondary vs. create an extract by adding vanilla beans to some alcohol, then add this potion. By soaking the vanilla beans in alcohol, more of the oils can be extracted and tasted. I decided to use raw beans and soak them in vodka (the closest you can get to neutral alcohol easily). By the way… vanilla beans are real expensive. Who knew?

After combining this potion of vanilla beans, pods, and vodka, I let it sit for several days as the vodka absorbed the oils of the vanilla. After a few hours, it smelled awesome. When it was ready, I added this directly to the secondary fermenter with the beer. Interestingly enough, at this point it has become a fortified beer, due to the addition of vodka. It also bumped the ABV up. I did the calculation, and by adding 4 oz of 50% ABV vodka to the beer, I increased the ABV by 0.3%, making it 6.3%.

This was also the first time I used the wort chiller my brother gave to me for Christmas. I didn’t get a picture of it, but this is it in use on my roommate’s Belgian with some Coriander floaters.

Wort chillers are a really genius way of cooling the wort. The amount of time it takes for the wort to cool is very critical, because it is during this cooling where infection is most likely. Previous to this, I’ve been just filling the sink with cold water and ice and letting convection do its thing. This is a slow and arduous process, and could take up to an hour or so to cool the wort to 80 degrees (where you can aerate and add the yeast to the wort). The type of chiller I have is called an immersion chiller, and just like it sounds like, you immerse it in the hot wort at the end of the boil. It is a coil of copper hose that can be connected to a faucet. Cold water runs into the top of the copper hose and at the bottom it runs up and out of the pot. There is no physical contact between the cold water and the wort, but because of the massive heat differential and the thermal conductivity of the copper, the wort is rapidly cooled within about 15 minutes.

The final product was a mild, sweet, spritzy and easy to drink beer. It was not overwhelmingly vanilla-y, which I feared may happen. It had a pleasant vanilla aroma, almost like a cream soda. Sadly, this one is almost all gone.

New stuff! Kegs! New brew coming!

Just Bottled…

My latest brew, the Vanilla Kolsch that has taken me months to make. I will post more pictures and stats and whatever in 2 weeks time.

Brew #4 – Peach Hefeweizen

This brew was a couple firsts for me:
1- First time I’d used a yeast smack pack
2- First time I’d added the malt late in the boil for a different color
3- First time I’d used a flavor extract
4- First time I’d given away a whole batch!

This batch was bought to be made for a friend of mine from high school, so I really shouldn’t have done so many firsts as a give-away beer.  The biggest mistake I made was using peach extract.  I had no idea how much to put it, and since the bottle stated I could use the whole thing for a 5 gallon batch, I just poured it all in.  It ended up sickeningly sweet.  Maybe the girl I gave it to liked it. Who knows, because people are usually so nice about homebrews.  ”WOW this is awesome! You made it yourself?” is a common response, even to a shitty brew.

Anyway, continuing on.  This is a basic Hefeweizen kit from Northern Brewer.  I bought the Activator smack pack, since my brother always raved about them to me.  It is a rather neat idea, because you know for sure that your yeast is alive and kickin, while you can never really be sure with dry yeast or the vial (at least to this extent):

Usually I don’t take this many pictures for a brew, but I took a lot more so that I could show my friend the process.  As I said earlier, I have never added malt extract late in the brew before this.  I had read about it online a few times, but the consensus was that the time you added it generally only affects the color.  The longer it is in the boil, the darker it is.  Since I was trying to shoot for a girly beer, so I opted to make it as light as possible.  I can’t remember if I added Irish Moss, though.

The fermentation process was pretty normal, except for the SUPER vigorous fermentation in the first few days, though it might have just been caused by the heat in my apartment.  Normally, I just use a bubbler airlock (the goofy looking liquid-filled thing on top of the bucket).  You fill one of these up with sanitizer, and it allows CO2 to escape from the high-pressure environment inside the fermenter, but does not allow air to enter it.  In the off chance that some of the sanitizer gets sucked in (pressure anomalies, the fermenter gets shaken, etc) it is just sanitized water, so it’s no big deal.  On this particular beer, the fermentation was so vigorous that the krausen/bubbles filled all of the empty space in the bucket and then overflowed into the airlock, eventually spilling out onto the floor.  At this point, I made what is called a blow-off hose.  Instead of a small airlock on top of the bucket, I stuck a hose in it.  This hose led into a jug of sanitizer, with plenty of extra space to fill up with the aftermath of the vigorous fermentation.

*Picture from John Palmer's "How To Brew"

The peach extract was added in to the bottling bucket along with the priming sugar, then the beer is racked on top of it.  Pretty straightforward.  If I could go back and redo this beer, I would have bought a couple pounds of peaches and added them into the secondary for a more natural flavor.  I will probably avoid these flavor extracts from now on… Sorry Kelsey.

Jerkin’

I love food. I love meat, especially.  Beef jerky is one of the oldest forms of preservation known to man.

The word “jerky” comes from a Quechua word charqui.  It is pretty simple and requires nothing more than an oven and a fan.

Fortunately for me, my mom gave me her old dehydrator that she has had since before I was born.  A dehydrator is essentially a small oven with trays and a fan that blows from the back.  On many dehydrators, especially older models like mine, the thermostat only goes up to 145 degrees.  The FDA says that while making jerky, to eliminate food-borne bacteria and parasites, you must bring cow meat up to 165 degrees for several minutes.  Other types of meat require different temperatures.

When choosing meat for anything but jerky, you typically want to buy a cut with marbleization.  This is the striped appearance of fat distributed throughout the cut, as opposed to a large chunk of gristle on the ends.  When making jerky, on the other hand, you want a lean cut without marbleized fat.  This allows you to easily trim off the excess fat on the cut.  I’m not sure what the best cut is, but one time I went to the butcher and asked what cut would be good for jerky, and he told me London Broil.  So I always keep an eye out for sale on London Broil.  I always ask the butcher to cut it into strips of about 1/4″ thickness.  If you do it yourself, freezing the meat before hand makes this significantly easier.  I usually cut the strips in half afterward to make smaller pieces.

I call this.... Meat Mountain.

Next, you must cure the meat.  At the same time, you can also use the curing brine to flavor the meat.  You must use a good amount of salt, and then you can add many things, such as: barbeque sauce, sugar, brown sugar, lemon juice, any spice, pineapple, teriyaki sauce, soy sauce, mustard, and many other things.  There are lots of recipes you can find online.  Usually I just wing it, but it is critical to use enough salt.  The general rule my jerky book tells me is 1 teaspoon of salt per pound of uncooked meat.  I usually make the curing brine and put it in a large Ziploc along with all the meat cuts.  Shake it up and put it in the fridge for 24 hours, mixing occasionally.  I didn’t have any large Ziploc bags so I just used a casserole dish and stirred it a lot.

After waiting the 24 hours, I preheat my oven to 170ish and put the meat in there for about 10 minutes, until the meat has reached 165.  Luckily, since they are very thin, they heat up very quickly.  After being in the oven, you can put them on your drying trays and fire up the dehydrator.  It usually takes roughly 4 hours.  Sit back and wait while your kitchen starts to smell delicious.

After being heated up in the oven, before being dehydrated

You can check the doneness of your jerky by letting a piece cool, and then bending it. It should crack but not break.  You are done.  Enjoy your jerky.  I usually put it in the fridge so it lasts even longer.

Mmmm... jerky.

Graphical Representation of Time

People always ask me if making beer takes a long time.  The answer I give them is usually something like “Well, it takes about 5 weeks. But during those weeks, most of the days you do pretty much nothing.”  So I made this graph:

Day 1 is brew day.  Day 8 is when you rack (transfer) your beer to the secondary fermenter.  Day 22 is bottling day.  Every other day, you spend anywhere between 0 and 2 minutes per day, usually just checking the temperature or watching the airlock bubbles.

Now obviously, this is for an average 5-week extract brew.  There are some that can take up to a whole year, and even longer for things like mead.

Also, right now I’ve got a Kolsch in the primary that you’ll see in a few weeks.

Sugar Wash Abomination

I ordered up a kit about a week ago to make a Kolsch, but after assessing the yeast, I realized some had leaked out of a faultily sealed pack.  If I had really been impatient, I could have used whatever yeast was left to create a starter (read about starters in my Belgian Ale post) and then brewed the Kolsch within a day or two.  Instead, I opted to just call Northern Brewer so that they could send me a new pack of yeast, and I could be sure of optimum virility.   I decided that I wanted to do SOMETHING with my half-empty yeast pack.  I chose to create this ABOMINATION:

 

 

Distillers (people who create hard alcohol) often create what is called “sugar wash”.  It is essentially sugar, water, and yeast.  All you need to create ETHANOL.  Usually they will use about 5 gallons of water, 7 lb of sugar, and what is called Turbo Yeast.  This kind of yeast has an alcohol tolerance up to about 22%, while my Kolsch yeast will only go up to 10%.  Distillers will ferment this 22% stuff, and then distill it into roughly 100% ethanol booze (moonshine).  So for every gallon of 22% fermented sugar wash, you will get  roughly one fifth of ~100% abv liquor.

This… is NOT how the pros do it.  Kolsch yeast has a low flocculation.  Flocculation is, essentially, how clear your beer will be.  Low flocculation will cause the yeast to stay suspended in the beer, causing a hazy appearance.  In some beers this is not desired, while in others it is how it has been made traditionally (Hefeweizen, for example).

So not only will this sugar wash only get up to 10% abv, it will also be filled with yeast.  I’m planning to be extremely ghetto about this, and employ coffee filters to remove yeast from suspension.  Last, I have a half vile of apple flavoring extract from a loooong time ago when Chris and I made an apple beer.  I’m going to add that to see if I can pull any sort of semblance of sanity out of this awful creation.  Stay tuned.

It’s a Little Early…

But I can’t wait for St. Patrick’s Day, anyway…

 

Irish Car Bomb…. 2 parts Guinness, 1 shot Bailey’s, 1 shot Jameson.  4 parts awesome.  Bombs away.

I Promise, There’s a New Brew Coming

I need to spell out the latest brew I did, the Peach Hefe I made for Kelsey.  In addition, I’m going to be ordering a new kit soon; a Kolsch from Northern Brewer.

ALSO, I got an immersion wort chiller from my older brother for Christmas, so I’m excited to try that out.

The Most Expensive Drink I’ve Had

My trip to Boston for spring break happened to be during Restaurant Week, which is basically the once-a-year event for broke people to afford going to 5 star restaurants.  For $33, you can get an appetizer, entree, and a dessert.  But don’t buy a drink.  This Rob Roy was $12, which was roughly 36% of my tab for dinner.

Belgian Ale – Brew #3

This brew was my first attempt at using a starter.  Normally, when you aren’t using a starter, you pitch the yeast directly from your yeast packet/vial into the wort (pronounced WERT).  The wort is what you have after the boil, right before it starts fermenting (turning sugars into ethanol).  On an average brew, the practice of pitching directly from the vial is fine.  One of the reasons you would need a starter is if your Original Gravity is above a certain level (around 1.060).

The Original Gravity (OG) is, in essence, the amount of fermentable sugar in your brew BEFORE it starts fermenting.  You measure this using a hydrometer. The hydrometer floats in the liquid, and based on the amount of sugars, will float to a different level.  This is due to the difference in density of water and the fermentables.  A hydrometer in pure water would show a reading of 1.000, while a typical beer’s original gravity is between 1.045 and 1.070.  After the fermentation is complete, you check the gravity (now called the Final Gravity), and by calculating the difference between the two, you can find the alcohol content.  Now, back to my beer.

This Belgian Ale was from Doc’s Cellar.  It, supposedly, had an OG of 1.063, so I decided to make a starter.  Part of the reason it was so high, was because of the added Belgian candy sugar.  The candy sugar bumps up the alcohol content a little, and can add color, but I opted for the clear candy sugar over the dark stuff.

A starter is pretty much just a combination of water, fermentable sugars, and yeast.  In this case, I took a small amount of malt extract and boiled it into some water, waited for it to cool, then added yeast.  The purpose for a starter is to increase the amount of viable yeast cells.  If you dump directly from the package into a high OG beer, the yeast will be strained to ferment all of the sugars.  In the liquid vials of yeast, there are ~100 billion yeast cells.  By creating a starter, you are providing the food and nutrients necessary for yeast propagation, which will increase the amount of yeast cells.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have a single glass bottle that was big enough to create a starter…. except for this one:

I also didn’t take any pictures of this brew in progress.  Bummer.  But, it was pretty good.  It was extremely typical and characteristic of a Belgian ale: banana smell and taste, clove smell, vanilla taste.  I didn’t take a Final Gravity reading, but I’m guessing the %abv is somewhere in the 6.5% – 7% range.