Mai - Home Brew Digest

Mai
The Birmingham Brewmasters
Styles for the coming year:
Officers:
January
American lager
Scott Harville, President
February
Porter
Bill Plott, Vice President
March
Stout
John Rhymes, Webmaster
April
Hops "R" Us
Todd Darroch, Treasurer
May
Send in the Clones
Bob Nelson, Member at Large
June
Wheat
Tracy P. Hamilton, Secretary and
Newsletter
July
Pilsner
August
Iron Brewers
September
Meading
October
What else?
November
Spice, pumpkin and weird
December
Heavy
As a member of the Brewmasters, you may
be interested in signing up for the listbot,
AKA mail exploder, remailer, whatever. See
the
Web page www.bham.net/brew/masters.html
Birmingham Brewmasters
C/o Tracy P. Hamilton
2541 Dunmore Dr.
Hoover, AL 35226
A synopsis of the April meeting (delayed 2 weeks):
Comments by secretary TPH in (italics)
Style of the Month - Hops R Us
1. Deschutes Porter clone - Doug McCullough (crisp, dry)
2. Everybody says they need a Budweiser - thought you would never read that, eh? Ray passed
out Bud because it was the only known commercial megabrew with a known IBU - 11. We
added iso-alpha acid extract to raise the IBU untill we felt it matched the same bitterness as a
spiked unknown. There was some error introduced by the fact that the droppers held about
30 drops per milliliter, and said 20. As for myself, I did 10 drops which in 3 oz. should have
been roughly an increase of 12 IBU. Not bitter enough. Add 10 more to get 35 IBU. Maybe
the same. Add 10 more to get 47 IBU. Definitely more bitter. I chose 35, and did not try to
zero in anymore. Spiked beer was 42 IBU. Remarkable how "Budweisery" it still was. We
then used Hop oil for a flavor and aroma experiment. The Bud because fairly decent once
you add both iso-alpha acid extract and hop oil extract.
3. President has no bottle opener - an impeachable offense!
4. Wild Goose IPA - Scott Harville
5. Discussion on "What does hoppy mean to you?" (aroma, bitter, flavor?)
6. Goose Island IPA - Gene Hopper (great nose - both hops and malt)
7. Cascade Boat Ride to Hell - Jason Holifield (new guy - welcome!)
8. "Guess the Malt" Pale ale - Ray Statham (did it ever get guessed?)
9. Styrian Golding Pale Ale - Bill Kehrwald (moving to Bowling Green)
10. Pale Ale - Todd Darroch (very young!)
11. Cascade Hell - Bob Nelson (a bit citrusy, but tasty)
12. Anchor Liberty - Scott Harville
13. SNPA clone with Nugget instead of Perle (quite different from SNPA) - TPH
14. Sweetwater IPA - TPH
15. Drawing - woohoo! TPH wins again!
16. Amber - Bob Nelson
17. Sam Adams - Jason Holifield
18. Meeting ends - I know Kim Thomson brought something
A synopsis of the Planning (such as it was) meeting for May:
Comments by secretary TPH in (italics)
Style of the Month - Send in the Clones
1. Merlot from Scott Moneer via Kim Thomson
2. "Meet Joe Black" IPA - Joe Black via Kim Thomson
3. Dark Old World Pilsner - Kim Thomson
4. Ayinger Dunkel - malty, dark lager!
5. Red Hook Nut Brown - Scott Harville
6. 3 year old spice beer - Francis Taylor's first one, very nice
7. Cherry Wheat - Jason Holifield
8. Dead Guy Ale - Ray Statham
9. Pony Express Rattlesnake - Francis Taylor
10. Porter - Kim Thomson
11. Sudwerk Marzen - Francis Taylor
12. Stout - Bill Kehrwald (high octane!)
13. Boulevard Ten Penny Ale - Francis Taylor
14. Old World Pilsner - Jason Holifield (not the dark version)
A little planning occurred. We discussed kind of how Ray would run the Clones contest, which
worked out OK.
People noted that May 5 was Cinco de Mayo, and Derby Day, and National Home Brew day al at
once.
There will be a club get together at Kim's. Time TBA, probably noon or so. Info will go out on
the listbot soon.
June event - Crouching Tiger, Homebrew Raffle
June Agenda - All the wheat you can stand
How Homebrew Became Homebrew Again
by Fred Eckhardt
At the beginning of our country's history, European colonists drank water only under duress. They had no way of
knowing that water could even be safe to drink. In any case, water, as the main element in brewing beer, obviously
had a more divine purpose than drinking and bathing. The early European colonists set brewing beer as one of their
priorities. Naturally, it was "home" brewed, because where would you expect to find a brewery in this land?
Homebrew was the ordinary beer of that era. The colonists came prepared with stores of malt with which to brew.
As time went on, homebrewing became less necessary; commercial brewers began taking over most of the brewing
in this country. Making beer at home was complicated, and as more commercial brewers established themselves,
homebrewing became unnecessary. Fewer and fewer practitioners remained; by the time Prohibition became the law
of the land, few folks had any idea how to go about brewing at home.
Prohibition
By the 1870s, the Anti-Saloon League began to be successful in its efforts to bring about national prohibition. That
dire circumstance was eventually assured, across the country, with the help of World War I. America's finest beer
drinkers had been sent to fight in Europe, where they could neither complain nor vote.
In 1919, with Prohibition the new law of the land, ordinary citizens had no recourse but to brew their own alcoholic
beverages or to buy them on the black market. Smuggling booze became a grand enterprise. As for brewing beer at
home, it was at first impractical. Where does one buy malted barley? Even if the knowledge and the equipment to
brew at home were available, the task could not have been easy. It was much simpler to build a still and distill
whatever pitiful alcoholic beverage could be produced from sugar and fruit.
The brewing industry came to the rescue, even in those dire times, with the production of commercial beer wort that
one could purchase and take home. These 5-gallon cans of beer wort came with instructions to the effect: "Do not
add yeast to this, and do not keep in a warm place, and when it quits bubbling, do not bottle with a teaspoon of sugar
in each quart bottle, because if you do, you will have beer, and that is illegal."
Of course, the feds soon put an end to that. So the brewers began to make concentrated hop-flavored malt syrup.
These malt syrups were offered for "bread-making." The brewers used the same equipment for malt concentration
that they had developed to take the alcohol out of beer when they brewed what was at that time euphemistically
called "near beer."
This turned out to be a great step forward for booze lovers but a massive step backward for beer lovers. The hopflavored malt extract could be augmented by three or four volumes of sugar and water to make a large amount of
beer. The resulting beverage was rather pathetic, but it had enough alcohol, it was cheap, and it was indeed "beer."
My stepfather was one such brewer. His recipe for 10 gallons called for a 3-pound can of Blue Ribbon Hop Flavored
Malt Extract, 10 pounds of sugar, water and a cube of Fleishman's Yeast. It was fermented in a beautiful old 12gallon crock behind the stove in my mother's kitchen. Then there was the fact that my father wasn't very good at
measuring sugar for his quart bottles, so from time to time one or two would explode -- a common occurrence
among Prohibition homebrewers.
His stuff had a tart, not entirely unpleasant flavor with a good alcohol content. It was the very model of Prohibition
homebrew, and with sugar at 5¢ a pound, my stepfather's beer cost him less than a penny a quart during Prohibition
and only 2¢ a quart in the late '40s, when my friends and I consumed most of his production. In 1950, after I left
home for the Korean War, he quit brewing. None of his beer was of such quality that one would rush to imbibe,
except under the most dire of circumstances (like being in college).
The Beginnings of Modern Homebrewing
During World War II, I made the acquaintance of Marines who brewed various alcohol concoctions that they then
distilled in the fashion of Prohibition-era distillers. Pretty nasty stuff, but their makers were among the most revered
of people in the Pacific Islands, where they practiced their art.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), I began to wonder what I'd do if I survived any nuclear conflict. I came to
the conclusion that people who could make alcoholic beverages would always be welcome in a world that survived
such a holocaust. I set about learning the genteel arts of fermentation, beginning with wine. I knew that real beer was
impossible to make at home.
Or was it? In 1968 I journeyed to San Francisco to visit a friend who had moved there. He took me to The Olde
Spaghetti Factory up on Green Street, near the Barbary Coast. There he introduced me to San Francisco and Anchor
Steam beer on tap. While we were drinking that lovely brew, the best beer I had ever tasted, he made a passing
remark. "This beer," he said, "tastes just like 'homebrew.'" He was buying, so I kept my big mouth shut, but I knew
for a fact this was like no homebrew-tasting beer I'd ever tasted, and I was fairly certain he'd never even tasted
homebrew. However, it made me think: Could one really brew a beer like that at home?
It wasn't until 1969 that I got around to investigating the possibility of brewing decent beer at home. Amateur beer,
not homebrew, was what I wanted to make, but the recipes I found were very much like those of my stepfather.
Even poor wine was better than such beer, and I could make that at home easily.
Still, the project kept nagging at me. The books I found on the subject were all British, and they spoke of such
nonsense as mild and bitter, porter and stout. I was interested in lager beer, not ale. This was America, not Britain.
There was no book on brewing lager beer out there. I finally decided to brew a batch of beer to see what might
result. I had found a Wine Art outlet near my home. Wine Art was a Canadian franchise company established by
Stan Anderson in Vancouver, B.C. He had taught the proprietress, Ann McCallum, and her husband, Jack, the
simple recipes needed, and had supplied the products and equipment necessary to make fairly good fruit and grape
wines. I asked Ann if she had a "lager" beer recipe.
The recipe she presented was quite different from the ones I had become familiar with. Of course there was malt
extract, but Wine Art didn't even carry the dread Blue Ribbon brand. Instead, they offered British and Canadian malt
extracts, with and without hops. The recipe called for one 2-1/2-pound can of plain malt extract, four pounds of corn
sugar, 2 ounces of American boiling hops, half an ounce of Kent finishing hops -- East Kent Goldings from England
-- and German Vierka dried yeast.
More important was the procedure. One boiled the malt extract with water and hops and used an open plastic
primary fermenter, a closed glass 6-gallon secondary fermenter topped with a fermentation lock (to actually "lager"
the beer) and one further refinement: a cup of corn sugar to be added as syrup at bottling time. No more exploding
bottles!
Moreover, Ann assured me, the secondary ferment would make this beer a wonderful brew, not at all like that
Prohibition swill my father had made. It was a complex recipe, written by Wine Art's founder, Canadian Stan
Anderson. I waded through it as I brewed that beer, making copious notes along the way: OG was 1.041, the date
was September 3, 1969. The beer was ready to drink on the 27th of September. I calculated the alcohol to be 5.9%
by volume. The cost was 18¢ a quart. The recipe was designed to produce "Canadian" lager beer. I knew I didn't
want to brew "ale," as I'd had my fill of Rainier Ale -- the infamous Seattle "green death."
The beer I made was fairly good but still not what I'd had in mind; it still tasted like "homebrew." There was a grain
of hope here. A closer reading of the recipe suggested another possibility: using TWO CANS of malt extract with
very little sugar (for bottling). Moreover, the Vierka yeast packet also had a recipe, and that too called for double
malt extract content. This seemed to offer the possibility of greater and more authentic "lager" flavor (at that time I
didn't realize that the lager beer of my acquaintance had "less," not "more," flavor).
There was one problem: the recipe was very poorly written and difficult to follow. I rewrote it and tried a second
batch. This was an "all-malt" beer, except for the cup of corn sugar (as syrup) at bottling, for carbonation. At that
time I had no concept of "all-malt" brewing, but the cost had gone up to 21¢ a quart.
That second batch was a grand improvement over the first. It tasted more like good beer. The recipe also allowed for
the addition of various grain malts, before and after boiling the wort, but I wasn't ready for that refinement just yet.
To be continued...
Recipes from the Clone-Off
Guinness a la Skotrat - brewed by Bill Freeman
10.50 gallons
9.0 lbs 2-row Pale (UK)
5.0 lbs flaked barley
1.75 lbs roast barley
1.75 oz bullion whole 9.3% alpha acid, 34.7 IBU, boil time 60 min
Wyeast 1084 Irish ale yeast
mash 90 min at 150 F
mashout 10 min at 168 F
sparge 70 min at 170 F
anticipated preboil gravity 1.034
anticipated OG 1.039
let 1 liter of work sour during whole fermentation, boil, split between two 5 gallon fermenters
This batch Bill put 1.5 tsp of 88% lactic acid in the keg. The tang was certainly noticeable.
My beer was somewhat more residual sweet, although pretty damned good. It had the same
basic recipes, but with the following recipe (guesstimated):
9.0 lbs 2-row, 1.0 lbs flake barley, 6.0 oz of roast, 12.0 oz of chocolate (2.25 oz of centinnial
hops 3.7% pellets - this has the most uncertainty)
mash 2 hrs at 150 F, boil down to 5.5 gallons, cool, pitch Safale O4 ale yeast by accident,
send spouse to Alabrew for more O4 for the Nugget bittered SNPA, pitch Whitelabs pitchable
Irish Ale yeast
Doug's beer won, but it was the Deschutes Porter clone.
Important announcements!
Next meeting will be al fresco at Alabrew!
Planning meeting will be at Tracy Hamilton's house the last Wednesday of
May