A couple quick website updates and a comment on the “new” homebrew-restricting OLCC’ law should do it for today.
Eugene Beer Directory When I posted my Eugene Beer Directory a few weeks ago, Bill and Jack were quick to point out that the Beer Mapping Project had most of the information I was looking for.
Now, Beer Mapping is a great tool, but it doesn’t have everything I want, and the information it does have takes a few mouse clicks and page loads to get at. Not knocking their design or anything; it is perfect for what they are trying to accomplish, but I want something that is more take-out menu than interactive map. And I think I am getting closer.
If you take a look at the Directory (tab at the top of the page), it now has much more information that when I started, including hours and prices. Please excuse the general ugliness; I am working on a style sheet that will display correctly in IE7, IE8, Firefox and Chrome, but until it is finished, you get drab gray boxes.
Bottleshops and an Event Calendar are next on my list of things to add. I will also probably embed a Beer Mapping Project map at some point. I fiddled around with their Wordpress widget a little, but I think I will end up using their API directly instead.
Beer Test Looking back even further (March), I coded up a simple Beer Test; a starting point for an eventual Android App. At launch, it provided a BJCP style and asked you to correctly choose the ABV, IBU or SRM range from a list of 5 possible answers.
For phase two, I was going to include correctly matching BJCP aroma, appearance, flavor, mouthfeel, overall impression, comments and ingredients descriptions. This proved to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. Many of the descriptions reference the style within them, either directly (Export Stout), or indirectly (Stouts). This made about half of the questions dead giveaways. I tried to solve the problem programmatically, scanning the description as it was chosen and masking all occurrences of the style name. This worked for direct references, but not indirect ones. Next, I tried a static black list, but it filtered the descriptions too much; removing the word Stout from the comments description of a Robust Porter and the like. After several attempts, I arrived at the conclusion that I am just going to have to create a new table of modified BJCP descriptions, edited on a case by case basis.
In the mean time, I tied the Beer Test into the database used for my Beer App. Beer and brewery matching questions are now part of the rotation. I have set up the code that chooses beers to pick only those that are available year-round and have unique names, so there is no chance you will be given ”Summer Ale” and five breweries that all produce a beer under that name. I’ll warn that the beer matching is still far from perfect. I still need to put some filtering in place to keep obvious things like “Full Sail Amber” out of the list.
By tapping into the Beer App database, I will be able to expand the possible questions, like match a brewery to the correct state or pick which beer is a winter seasonal. I will also be changing the test from its current open format to a finite length, providing a score at the end. Until then, the current test can be accessed from the Beer Test tab at the top of the page. I will mention that my host is pretty laggy today, so it may take a couple seconds to load a new question after pressing the “play again” button.
OLCC’s “New” Law
ORS 471.403 “No person shall brew, ferment, distill, blend or rectify any alcoholic liquor unless licensed so to do by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. However, the Liquor Control Act does not apply to the making or keeping of naturally fermented wines and fruit juices or beer in the home, for home consumption and not for sale.”
This law was reinterpreted this week to mean that homebrew can only be consumed at the site it was crafted; effectively making everything from homebrew competitions to taking a beer you made to your buddy’s house illegal. While this probably isn’t going to hinder any summer cookouts, it does stop dead any organized competitions that want to keep things legit. It also creates a problem for homebrew clubs that meet at breweries and don’t want to put their hosts in the OLCC crosshairs.
Already the Oregon State Fair has cancelled this year’s beer and wine competitions and the Oregon Brew Crew has posted a notice not to bring homebrew to the next club meeting at Widmer. I am going to try to get a hold of someone from the Cascade Brewers Society to see if they plan to issue a similar restriction at their monthly Eugene City Brewery meetings.
Lisa has links for contacting state representatives, senators and the OLCC. And at the end of Jeff’s post, you can find the Facebook group set up to protest the “new” law.
Well, as usual, this turned out much longer than I had originally intended. I need to learn to stop using the word “quick” in the opening sentence.
Last week I brewed my first sour mash beer, a Belgian Pale. Before we start; yes, Belgian Pales are not traditionally sour. This bastard recipe actually began life as a clone of Russian River’s Redemption; one of the few commercially brewed Belgian Singles of Enkels. Vinnie Cilurzo (RR Brewmaster) had graciously provided the following recipe to a member of Homebrewtalk.com:
Bittered with Styrian Golding Finished with Sterling
OG 1.052 TG 1.012
Abbey ale yeast white labs
I hope this helps
Looking over Vinnie’s recipe, I got to thinking that a tart, fruitier version of Redemption sounded damn good. And provided a damn good excuse to try a sour mash.
For those of you unfamiliar with sour mash techniques, HERE is a great description from Dave Green at BYO.
My plan was to mash a pound of 2-row in a thermos and leave it to sour for a few days. I had to scale this back some when I found out that my thermos wouldn’t even hold the pound of dry grain. I ended up mashing about half a pound of 2-row in three cups of water; filling the “tun” to the brim. After letting the mash temp drop to 120°(F), I stirred in an ounce or so of crushed grain and sealed up the thermos…then promptly forgot about it on the kitchen counter.
When my wife and I came home from work the next day, the sour mash had our kitchen smelling horrendous; a mix of bad (or good?) cheese and locker room. I was persuaded to relocate the thermos to the garage. After the first day, the odor actually started to die down. After two days, it was no longer offensive, smelling remarkably close to over-ripe nectarines. I went ahead and ventured a taste. It was cleanly sour; time to brew.
I mashed my main grain bill for an hour at 151°(F). After conversion, I added my sour mash to the main tun and let it sit for 15 minutes before bringing the mash up to 170°(F) and sparging. A sample of the initial running tasted slightly sour; so far so good.
The picture above shows my attempt at multitasking. While sparging, I was sampling the Scottish 70/- I brewed last month and washing some peas I picked from my garden.
I ended up with 5.25 gallons of wort at 1.052. I pitched a 1.5 qt starter of Wyeast 1388 Belgian Strong Ale (Duvel), washed from the Belgian IPA I brewed back in December. Taking into account the extra half pound of grain that was used in the main mash, my actual efficiency ended up at 71%.
I just pulled a hydro sample today (day 6) and the beer is down to 1.014. The sample had a hint of sourness, but still quite a bit of yeast bite. I’ll give the beer a few more days to clean up before racking to a secondary. With the highly attenuative yeast and the low mash temps, I expect this brew to finish dry, under 1.010. When I do make the move to secondary, I plan to rack a gallon into a separate vessel, on top of some apricots. Depending on how the two brews develop, they will either be blended back together, or bottled separately.
While writing my “The State of Beer in Eugene” post last week, I realized that there wasn’t a tidy collection of information on Eugene area breweries and brewpubs anywhere on the interwebs. Sure, you can sift through the pages (and ads) on sites like Ratebeer, but I was looking for something more along the lines of a cheat sheet. Since what I was looking for didn’t exist, I went ahead and created it. If you direct your attention to the series of tabs across the top of this page, you will now see one labeled, “Eugene Beer Directory.”
The directory is a work in progress; I am currently trying to collect the bits that are missing. If there is any other information you would like to see included, let me know in this post (to keep things clean, I have comments turned off on the Directory’s page). I was thinking prices might be nice and maybe some other general information like brewmaster or year established. Once the directory is complete, I will also create a PDF that can be printed and used as reference for people visiting the area.
Tuesday night I attempted to brew an “old-fashioned” Scottish 70/-. Most commercial Scottish ales are brewed with a generous amount of crystal/caramel malts, but traditionally kettle caramelization was used to create the rich caramel flavor and color. Kettle caramelization occurs during very long boils, when some of the sugars caramelize and become unfermentable. Bridgeport for example, employed an eight hour boil when brewing their Highland Ambush Scotch Ale. Since I was brewing after work, an extended boil was no good. Instead, I decided to simulate the process by collecting the first gallon of wort and boiling the crap out of it in a separate pot; then adding the reduced wort back to the kettle.
While the brew day was an overall success, I did learn a couple important things. First, “old-fashioned” and “traditional” are usually synonymous with “long” and “hard.” This was not a brew I should have started at 6:00 pm, following a full day of work. Second, always double-check your math.
Scottish 70/-
7.0 lbs Maris Otter
13 oz Flaked Barley
3 oz Roasted Barley
My plan was to do a single-infusion mash at 155°F for 60 minutes, then raise the temperature to 170°F and sparge. Since I was going to reduce the first gallon of wort down to about a quart, I figured I would need to start with ~8 gallons of water instead of the usual 7. I like to infuse and sparge with equal amounts of water, so this meant 4 gallons were going into the mash tun along with my grain. This is where my math skills failed me.
I forgot to subtract the water needed to raise me from mash to sparge temperature from the initial 4 gallons; all of it when in with the grain. So, when I opened my 5 gallon tun at the end of the mash, I had no head space to add the boiling water. After twenty minutes of panic, I decided to collect the first gallon or so of wort, bring it to a boil and dump it back into the tun, which got me to 170°F on the dot. Not quite a decoction and not quite double-brewed, but it seemed to work ok.
Once I had my sparging issue sorted, it was time to start the reduction. This is where I ran head first into my next problem. My stove only has one large burner, which was being used for my brew kettle. This meant that the ~5 quarts of wort I collected for the reduction had to struggle to maintain a boil in a pot that was much to large for the burner. About an hour into the main boil, I had only reduced the small pot by about a quart. Twenty minutes later, I was down to three and able to transfer it to a better fitting vessel. In the smaller pot, I was able to get the reduction down to a quart in another ten minutes. This put my total boil time at ~100 minutes. Looking back, I should have just performed the reduction on the large burner, then started the main boil; I guess that makes three things learned.
I ended up with about 5.5 gallons of wort in the fermenter at a starting gravity of 1.043, putting my efficiency around 82%. Previous to this batch, I had been consistently hitting the low 70’s. Unfortunately so much was unique about this brew that I can’t say for sure what caused the spike in efficiency. Perhaps the longer mash time, or possibly recycling the wort as sparge water? Maybe it was just the finer crush I gave the grain and had nothing to do with my process? I suppose the only way to know for sure is to keep brewing.
The beer is fermenting away right now at 68°F. Homebrewtalk is lousy with people swearing that Wyeast 1728 performs best at 60°F, but in a Brew Monkey interview from a few years back, Allen mentions that all Hair of the Dog brews (which use the same yeast) are fermented at 70°F. I’m trying for the subtle, smoky flavor that the yeast is supposedly able to produce, but can’t find much useful information on which end of the range best facilitates this. Any suggestions? If not, I’ll report back my finding in a month or so.
Earlier this year, my wife and I signed up for Winter Green Farm’s Community Farm program. How it works is: we buy a share in the Community Farm, then every week from mid-June to mid-October, we pick up a box of fresh produce; our share. Lately, I’ve been thinking that the same concept could be used to create a Beer Share, thus lessening the cost to home brew. Let’s look at some numbers.
I usually pay around $1.20/lb for base malts and anywhere from $1.50-$2.00/lb for specialty grains. Hops consistently run me $2.00/oz. Yeast is the biggest variable, ranging from $0.00-$8.00, depending on whether I use liquid, dry or re-harvested yeast. This puts my cheapest 5 gallon brews around $20.00 and lands the expensive, heavily-hopped ones a biscuit over $40.00.
Using some bulk prices from Brew Brothers and Hops Direct, and assuming I harvest my own yeast, the price to brew a 5 gallon batch with 12 pounds of grain (75/25 base/specialty) and 2 ounces of hops drops to $11.00; about half the price of my current low. Of course, there is a reason people don’t buy in bulk; variety. I could make a 2-Row/Cascade SMaSH every weekend for less than a ten-spot, but the repetition would have me eating the lead out of my hydrometer in no time.
This is where I think the Community Farm concept could be applied. You could plan out a year of brews, let’s say one per month; crafting recipes that would allow you to efficiently order bulk hops and grains. “Beer Shares” could then be sold; each share entitling its holder to enough ingredients to brew a 5 gallon batch of each month’s beer. Using my patented finger math, I came up with $15.00 per month, or $180.00 per share for a year of brews, including a few high ABV and/or heavily hopped ones. Assuming you have enough people buying in, $15 per month should also be enough to purchase a specialty yeast strain each month and cover the supplies necessary to culture it for the group.
So, that’s my little idea. I’m sure it’s probably already being done somewhere, but my Google-fu wasn’t strong enough to find mention of it. Then again, since there isn’t really a way to make money off from it, maybe not. While a Community Farm is usually a for-profit business, a Beer Share would be strictly a labor of love, or perhaps community service if that term better sells the idea of a garage, piled full of grain sacks to your significant other.
If anyone is interested in exploring the Beer Share concept further or is already doing something similar, let me know. Or, if you would like to see a mock-up year of recipes, I could knock one out. I’m not ready to spearheading a local Beer Share program myself, but I think it is an interesting idea.
