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Pick the Correct Size Secondary Fermenter

Oxygen is the enemy of beer after fermentation. The main cause of oxidation in beer is exposure to oxygen when racking or bottling. Another culprit is the head space in the secondary fermenter. Make sure to use the smallest size secondary fermenter possible as not to expose the beer to oxygen in the head space. For example a typical 5 gallon batch should use a 6.5 gallon carboy or bucket as the primary fermenter, then a 5 gallon carboy as the secondary. There will be almost no head space in the secondary if done correctly.

Rules of thumb:

• Head space is needed in the primary, since there will be a lot of foam during the krausen phase of fermentation. Oxygen in the head space is not an issue during primary fermentation because it will be replaced by CO2 when fermentation kicks off and any dissolved oxygen will be utilized by the yeast. Some will also be pushed out through the air lock with the escaping CO2.
• Head space is bad in the secondary. Since the beer is fermenting slowly, it will take longer to push oxygen in the head space out through the air lock. This means most of the oxygen in the head space is getting into the beer and causing harmful effects.

Why is oxygen harmful in the secondary?

Oxygen (O2) is a reactive molecule. During primary fermentation the yeast use oxygen quickly as part of the metabolic reaction that produces alcohol. Inside the secondary the yeast metabolism has settled down greatly. This leaves any newly introduced oxygen free to interact with larger desirable molecules responsible for flavor and bittering. When the oxygen hits these molecules it splits them apart making for undesirable byproducts in the beer. Wet paper bag or cardboard taste is generally the telling sign of oxidized beer.

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Lagering At Home Video

This video shows you what an in home lagering setup looks like. Also includes a look at corny kegs and the temperature controller needed for fermentation of a lager.

The beer being fermented is a Munich Helles!

Posted in Brewing, Kegging and CO2, Lagering | No Comments »

Money Saving Tips – Hops Utilization Factor

Minimizing costs and maximizing beer is a wonderful thing to put into practice. This post discusses the idea of getting more bittering potential from hops. With hops going for $32/pound this is worth paying attention to.

Alpha acids in hops are isomerized into bitter flavors during the boil.  The utilization factor is a number that expresses how easily and completely this process takes place.  Higher utilization translates into a higher amount of international bittering units (IBUs). The utilization factor decreases as the boil gravity increases. This means the more sugary your wort is, the less bittering you will get per ounce of hops.   Therefore by lowering the gravity of the boil it is possible to stretch hops bittering quality.

This tip really only applies to extract brewers who are able to add fermentable sugars in a more flexible manner than all-grain brewers who need a full wort boil. All grain brewers do not suffer from such setbacks in hops utilization because their wort boil gravity is essentially what the original gravity of the recipe is. Most extract books say to add all the dry/liquid malt extract at the start of the boil to 3 gallons of water, then dilute to five gallons afterwards. This hurts the hops bittering potential!

The basic procedure to get your wort gravity down is to use half of your extract for the entire boil at the time the bittering hops are added.  With 15 minutes to go (usually after 45 minutes of boiling), add the rest of the extract to bring up the gravity to where the recipe calls for. This will sanitize the extract and sufficiently integrate it into the wort before cooling.

You can see this in action by playing with this website’s IBU calculator.

Let’s consider an example: a simple lager with 2 oz of Hallertauer hops, Alpha Acid rating of 3.9, boiled for 60 minutes, no other hops additions.

In the case of an extract batch with an original gravity of 1.055 for a 5 gallon batch, but only boiling 3 gallons, we get 18.53 IBU’s.

If we tell the calculator the boil gravity was only 1.028 (half the sugars), we get an IBU rating of 27!  For calculation purposes we get close to what we would see with a full wort boil (enter 5 gallons for boil size and 1.055 for gravity) and it comes out to around 25.

A 38% increase in hops bittering potential is pretty good. That translates into a 38% savings in the cost of our bittering hops. It also means more bitter beer which a lot of home brewers really like – including the author!

Note: this practice may throw off the style of beer your batch fits into by boosting bitterness beyond where it needs to be. It will also allow you to make your next IPA much more bitter for the money.  IPAs are particularly expensive to make these days because they call for 2x-3x hops, and about half of that is for bittering.

Posted in Brewing, Economics of Brewing | 2 Comments »

Halloween brew

This is pretty spooky looking. Shine a flashlight through all the gunk that builds up on the inside of the carboy when fermenting a dark or high gravity beer!

Whoo-hahahaah!

If you don’t wash it out after racking I bet it gets even spookier!

Speaking of spooky, I’ve been thinking about some ingredients people used in the past, like dandelion for bittering. That sounds like a witch’s brew. I could be wrong but that *might* be the reason why they don’t make it in today’s time.

I’m going to try a cranberry mead in a week, that should be more in line with my personal taste. I’ll let you know how it goes!

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Homebrewing for Dummies – by Marty Nachel

Homebrewing for Dummies – by Marty Nachel
A Reference for the Rest of Us!

Covers everything from A-Z in brewing. A good text if you only had one book to buy and were a raw beginner. Some of the specialty chapters are worth checking too and go way beyond a what you might expect from a watered down ‘dummies’ book. The chapters on the ingredients in beer, needed equipment, extract brewing, bottling and kegging are good. The emphasis on secondary fermentation is good. I found the all-grain section a little oversimplified, enough information to get started but not enough to get past the basics. A good chunk of the book (100 pages out of about 400) is recipes, with extract and all grain variations on almost every style of beer. Then the book gets interesting and goes into cider and meads, a topic you rarely see. Then it gets even more interesting with a chapter on gluten free brewing (making beer without standard barley or wheat). Also covers green practices in brewing and organic ingredients, judging beer, and beer troubleshooting.

Topics unique to the book:

• Emphasis on secondary fermentation
• Basic intro to all grain brewing
• First Wort Hopping (covered in chapter 12 on all grain brewing)
• Brewing cider at home
• Brewing mead and its sub categories – traditional, melomel (fruit), and others (braggot, metheglin) in dry or sweet variations.
• Brewing green and using organic ingredients
• Gluten free brewing
• Home brew competitions and beer tasting
• Beer quality troubleshooting

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Amarillo and Brown Sugar IPA, 2008

Amarillo hops impart a citrus grapefruit note to the aroma and flavor of the beer they are used in. This IPA recipe highlights the Amarillo hops and creates an IPA that is fairly mellow compared to some of the stronger IPAs.

This recipe is quite complex and deviates a bit from standard recipes. Using 6 pounds of DME, and the brown sugar later, I decided to dilute the primary to 6.5 gallons. Otherwise the beer would have been 6%+ alcohol by volume. This way there is more of it, but lugging the carboy around when it is full is harder.

After three days I added brown sugar directly to the primary fermenter. The sugar was dissolved in near boiling water and cooled before being added. This boosted the SG and darkened the beer slightly. It did not make the beer sweet since it is all eaten by the yeast. Adding sugar during primary fermentation is a trick to boost gravity. The yeast took off when I added the sugar. A blowoff tube was definitely needed.

In the secondary I dry hopped with more Amarillo. The results were awesome, this is one of the best beers I have crafted. Next time I will try a different type of yeast (this is the only thing I would dare change).

Posted in Recipes | 1 Comment »

Orange American Hefeweizen II, 2008

After brewing my first orange hefeweizen about two months ago I wanted to fine tune the recipe.
This time I used sterling hops instead of cascade to reduce the biterness. Some people mentioned it was pretty bitter (not a bad thing for me). I had originally set out to replicate the Eugene City Brewery’s Honey Orange Wheat, I thought that would be the next logical step. I also used half the amount of sweet orange peel. The results are closer, but this beer still has way too much flavor. To replicate ECB’s beer, I would need to cut the hops in half again, and probably cut the orange in half too.

One thing I have noticed about both times using coriander, after about 75 days the flavor really starts to settle down. I think these beers were better when they were the freshest. It could also have been oxygen taint. That said, this beer is ready to drink in about 4 weeks!

I brought a growler jug (64 oz) to a party and it was gone in 45 minutes with people asking for more. It is a beer that non beer drinkers can try a little of and enjoy.

Posted in Recipes | 4 Comments »

German Kolsh Ale, 2008

White labs offers a Klösh yeast for making a German ale. It is not as robust as a lager, this beer is light and a bit sweet. It’s a respectable easy drinking beer. If you want to lighten it up even more (like Budweiser or Coors), try substituting a pound of rice solids in place of a pound of DME. For me, it is so light there is no need to take it further. This is a great beer to brew for your first time. It is very simple with only one hop addition at the beginning.

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The Homebewer’s Answer Book – By Ashton Lewis

The Homebewer’s Answer Book – By Ashton Lewis
Solutions to Every Problem, Answers to Every Question

Pickup this book after you have been brewing for several months to fill in some gaps in your knowledge and open the door to new ideas. The book is compact in size but thick. It is not suitable to read for a raw beginner. It gets into a lot of complicated and advanced areas. I would get it in the first year and refer back to it over the course of your progression from beginner to master. Mainly the book focuses on how to perfect your brewing processes. Every home brewer can get a lot out of this book.

Topics unique to this book:

• Sanitization techniques
• Answers about use of materials in brewing, such as CPVC vs copper pipes, stainless steel vs aluminum, etc
• Dry hopping vs using a hopback
• Brewing with different levels of water hardness
• Reusing yeast and re-pitching rates, yeast considerations for lager beers
• All grain techniques, tradeoffs with different mash schedules, and the basic chemistry involved
• Putting beer on tap using nitrogen (nitro)
• Troubleshooting to improve head stability, chill haze, DMS, etc.
• Troubleshooting with bad batches

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When to use a blowoff tube

For dark beers or beers with a specific gravity greater than 1.060, in my experience, a blow off tube is need to keep from having an overflowing mess.

Here is a picture of a porter that is only 24 hours into fermentation. You can see the amount of gunk on the glass in the head space got up to the airlock. I pitched two cups of slurry from a previous batch of English Pub Bitter and the fermentation took off like a rocket. In five hours the tube was making a tapping noise every couple seconds as it bubbled. The strain is White Labs British Ale Yeast.

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