Archive for February, 2010
The Battle For Highest Alcohol Brew
Feb 24th
Your typical craft beer might have more ABV (Alcohol By Volume) than the watered-down pint that’s on happy hour special for $2, but the point isn’t usually about getting wrecked faster, it’s about the alcohol lending an extra bite to your hoppy home brew. Some brewers see this as a challenge and try to push the alcohol limit beyond what a typical beer can (and probably should) hold. Let’s find out how they do it.
The Scottish brewery Brew Dog announced last November they had created Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a beer with 32% ABV, the highest amount ever attained. Later that same day, German brewery Schorschbräu announced a beer with 40% ABV. The first ever Scotland/Duetschland war was launched! The latest installments have Brew Dog regaining the title with its 41% “Sink the Bismark!” with Schorschbräu quickly announcing they plan to create a 45% brew in the coming months.
Extra Yeast, Extra Fermentation
If you are brewing a barley wine or imperial porter, you can take a few steps to get that extra kick up to 18% or 20% ABV. Extra yeast, extra nutrients, extra fermentation. No voodoo involved, just chemistry. The basic idea is to create a “yeast starter” of boiled malt and water, pitching your yeast in this mini fermenter to get ready for the big show. Once your wort is cooled, it will need extra O2 using an oxygen stone or some extra vigorous stirring. We’ve got lots of yeast to fit and need some oxygen in there. The extra yeast and extra O2 do their fermentation thing, and, once they’re finished, you add champagne yeast, which can tolerate up to 17% ABV levels. Let that bad boy ferment for around six months or longer and, fingers crossed, you’ve got yourself a brew with a bite.
Going the extra mile … and do we really call it beer at this point?
So how do we go beyond the 17% that champagne yeast allows? I only know part of the story, so this certainly isn’t an authoritative guide on reaching the upper-echelons of ABV. Please add comments to this post if you can fill in some of the blanks here. It sounds like the extra mile on ABV isn’t accounted for by more fermentation so much as freezing the beer to separate the alcohol from the water (lower freezing point on alcohol, you’ll remember) and then removing some of the ice that forms. In this video from BrewDog, they super-chill the liquid and decant the concentrated alcohol from the water multiple times to get that 32% ABV.
So at what point does beer become liquor? Typical vodka or whiskey holds around 40% ABV so I would say we have reached and are starting to surpass that benchmark. Since both liquor and beer are made from a grain mash, and the Brew Dog method certainly involves similar distillation methods to achieve their ABV, I would say the only substantive difference is the addition of malt and unique strains of yeast.
The Homebrewer’s Challenge
Home brewers have a new challenge with these extreme brews. A quick tour of the Interwebs finds ryanbrews.blogspot.com trying his hand at a 20% Imperial Stout. No word on how the brew turned out but he certainly gets points for ambition. We might have to borrow that recipe and push into the upper echelons of extreme ABV ourselves …
The Role of Yeast in Home Brewing
Feb 18th
The driving factor behind fermentation and the very existence of beer itself is due to yeast. You owe every beer ever enjoyed to the asexual reproduction of a fungus.
But this isn’t just any old fungus, we’re talking Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a very particular type and not to be confused with mushrooms, baking bread, or causing infections. The main idea here is that yeast does not require oxygen to exist but instead metabolizes simple sugars in a process known as fermentation and reproduces itself by “budding” off daughter cells.
The two main types of brewer’s yeast are “ale yeast” and “lager yeast”, which ferment under different conditions and have a large impact on the eventual taste of your home brew. Ale yeast is conveniently named because of the types of home brew you can expect using this strain. This yeast ferments best at warmer temperatures (68-73 F) while Lager yeast instead prefers cooler temperatures and requires more time. We experienced the importance of temperature first hand when our English Brown Ale fermented in colder temperatures than ale yeast requires. The result was low ABV and an off-tasting beer.
Yeast is introduced to your finished (and cooled) wort by pitching it, which really is just a fancy term for “stir up the wort real good and add the yeast.” Yeast can be added dry from the package, as the directions usually indicate, though the proper method is to rehydrate in a solution of boiled water. This “wakes up” the yeast and gets it ready for the feeding frenzy. Just for a bit of scope, we’re talking billions of yeast cells here. Once they have a few weeks to feed and multiply, that number can almost double.
So, the more important question you’re asking is: How does this fungus give me a buzz when I drink beer? Let’s imagine our bucket of boiled wort sitting in the basement with billions of yeast cells recently pitched. The yeast are pretty happy with the temperature, they’re darn hungry, and they start feasting on the simple sugars (glucose + maltose) in our bucket and release carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol as waste products. Other chemicals are released as well depending on the conditions but CO2 and alcohol are a definite. You can later measure the amount of alcohol with close precision using a hydrometer, which compares liquid density before and after fermentation.
So, all of this really boils down to a fungus eating a great meal and passing gas.
Beer Growlers For Home Brew
Feb 15th
Beer growlers are an affordable and easy way to share home brew fresh from your keg. As the craft beer industry grows, small breweries are also viewing growlers as an economical means of distributing product to customers.
Growlers are typically 64 ounce glass containers, in all shapes and sizes, and have been around for years as a means of taking beer home from the bar before bottled distribution was widespread. Going back to the late 19th century, children would be sent out to the bar with a large pail to bring home the brew, causing bar owners to complain that business was ruined and prohibition advocates to lament the demoralization of the household. Growlers come in all shapes, sizes, and decorations, with a good variety seen in these examples from The Brew Lounge.
According to the New York Times story “Growlers, the New Old Beer Conveyance“, beer growlers are back in fashion around Brooklyn, where local breweries (and even Whole Foods) offer a variety of beer straight from the keg and into your growler. The secret to preserving the freshness, says Shane Welch of Sixpoint Craft Ales in Brooklyn, is to fill the container with beer almost to the top. It’s the oxygen left inside the container that can quickly turn your beer stale within hours. He recommends filling bottles with a plastic hose under pressure to avoid trapping oxygen in the growler.
For those who prefer to keg their home brew instead of bottling, growlers might provide a convenient way of transporting that hard earned liquid gold to another location or sharing home brew as a gift.
Decemberists Drink Home Brew
Feb 11th
When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I now know how to answer. I want to play music in a cool band, live out West, and drink homebrew made with local hops. Decemberists bassist Nate Query does just that. Check out the video as Nate shares a Pale Ale Home Brew with fellow band mates. Lead singer Colin Meloy suggests Nate try a Malt Liquor next. Maybe Nate should infuse some local Cascade hops into a malt liquor recipe for an extra kick. Nice video from those cool cats at Current TV.
How a Hydrometer Works
Feb 8th
An essential piece of equipment in your home brewing arsenal is a hydrometer, which helps determine the final alcohol content in that batch of carefully crafted home brew.
A hydrometer measures the density of a liquid, which, in the case of home brewing, helps us determine the alcohol percentage by volume. The easiest way to think about a hydrometer is to imagine a large swimming pool. You slip into the water and allow yourself to float freely, waiting until the water comes to rest probably around your chin. The density of the water is what holds you afloat at a certain level. NOW, imagine floating in a swimming pool of salt water instead. The density of salt water is slightly higher and you might float a few inches more above the water.
So let’s get out of the swimming pool and back to home brewing. In our example, you are the human hydrometer and the swimming pool is a large batch of home brew. Now doesn’t that sound nice. I digress.
Water has a specific gravity of 1.0; any amount above this indicates denser liquid and amounts below indicate less dense liquid. When you boil and create the wort (pronounced ‘wert’), the liquid is now full of sugar extracted from the malted grains and has a slightly higher specific gravity, which we call “original gravity“, usually in the range of 1.035 to 1.060. It is important to note that 60 degrees is the ideal temperature at which to take this reading since liquid density can fluctuate based on temperate. Think of a thick maple syrup at room temperature compared with a thinner consistency when warmed up. Below we will explain how to account for hydrometer readings at different temperatures. You might also want to use a thin testing tube (seen in the image to the left) to avoid accidental contamination (do not pour the liquid back into the bucket).
Save this “original gravity” number and then pitch the yeast into the wort and let chemistry take over. You can tell from the bubbling airlock that the yeast is consuming the sugars and converting them into two wonderful byproducts: CO2 and alcohol. That CO2 is what you have been hearing activate the airlock. All this yeast activity has converted much of the sugar to alcohol, thereby lowering the density of the liquid since alcohol itself has a lower density. Before adding priming sugar and bottling is when you take another hydrometer reading, called “final gravity“, to determine the change in density, which usually falls between 1.015 and 1.005. Let’s use the below example from our recent India Pale Ale partial mash to illustrate the calculations involved.
- Original Gravity measured after cooling wort: 1.064
- However, the wort temperature was 70 degrees, 10 degrees above the ideal 60 degree mark
- Original Gravity adjusted to 1.0652 (easy calculator found here – Hydrometer Temperature Adjustment)
- Final Gravity reading before adding priming sugar and bottling – 1.025
- Gravity delta (change) is 0.0402
- Multiply this delta by 131 (a constant amount) and you have an estimated 5.27% ABV (Alcohol By Volume)
Cincy Winter Beer Fest 2010
Feb 5th
The third annual Cincy Winter Beer Fest was a resounding success, with tickets selling out a few days in advance and crowds of attendees packing the ballroom at downtown’s Hyatt Regency.
We found ourselves with VIP tickets and were able to start sampling 2 hours early, which proved to be a benefit more in avoiding the crowds than anything. Once the doors were thrown wide open, the total attendance of around 3,000 filled the ballroom to the walls. But everyone was there for a good cause — to sample and enjoy some great regional brews.
Not surprisingly, many of the volunteers working the event were home brewers themselves. They were eager to discuss not only the beer they were serving but also their own home brewing experiences. The lady at the Founder’s table even spoke about taking a “Beer-cation” roadtrip to Michigan breweries the previous summer. I’m thinking we should do the same out in San Diego county. The Cincinnati Malt Infusers club gave a home brewing demonstration in the side ballroom, explaining the necessary brewing ingredients and science behind fermentation. They are one of the local home brewing organizations, with the Bloatarian Brewing League being the other larger group in town.
After much debate and soul searching, we came upon our top 3 beers of the evening.
- Founders “Breakfast Stout” – Hailing from Grand Rapids, MI, this creamy stout has hints of chocolate and coffee, while still maintaining a smoothness for its high 8.3% ABV
- Southern Tier “Unearthly IPA” – With a festival full of hoppy IPA’s, it was hard for a bitter beer to get notice, but Southern Tier has a great brew that packs a punch at 9.8% ABV but maintains a smooth finish without overpowering your palette.
- Flying Dog “Double Dog Double Pale Ale” – With all those “doubles” in there, you would think this one would knock you on the ground. Actually a nice balance of sweet maltiness and bitter hops.
Hop Prices Affect Home Brewing Costs
Feb 1st
“We are, in my opinion, in trouble.” Hop Union, November 2007
The cost of raw materials to brew beer is affected by agricultural output and prevailing market conditions. The beer brewing community came to learn of this volatility during the hop crises of the past few years.
The core ingredients to brew beer are water, grains, hops, and yeast. Assuming the cost of water is negligible, and most yeast is grown in a lab with reliable inventory, the cost of goods at play then falls upon grains and hops.
Near the end of 2007, the worldwide palette was becoming more accustomed to hoppy beers with complex flavors and beer brewers were buying up more of the hops necessary to achieve aromatic bitterness in their brew. Hops were relatively cheap and brewing life was good. On the supply side of things, however, growers were scaling back their hop planting due to the low market cost their crop brought AND adverse weather in Europe seriously depleted annual yield.
Common hops were up around 20% in price and specialty hops, like those Noble Hops so named for their supremacy in the hops world, were up 80%. The larger breweries were somewhat insulated from this crisis since they typically buy up their annual hops supply at a set rate, but craft breweries had to scramble to find the ingredients they needed. Some of the larger craft brewers fortunate enough to have set pricing, such as Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada, helped out the craft brewing industry by offering to sell some of their excess inventory at a reasonable rate.
The numbers alone, according to a Hop Union statement in November 2007, tell the story of how difficult the situation was:
World acreage:
- 1986: 215,600
- 1992: 236,000
- 2006: 123,000
Most importantly, at least according to DrinkHomeBrew.com, was the impact on the common home brewer. Your average John Homebrew couldn’t get his hands on Cascade hops for that awesome Pale Ale he was whipping up, or the Amarillo hops for that summer IPA. Dark days indeed, friends.
AND NOW THE GOOD NEWS! The hop crop yield for 2010 was back on track and price inflation is starting to ease up. Home brewers and craft brewers alike have access again to decently priced hops and the great brew continues. Lesson learned – home brewing is part of a giant global supply chain that can bring down the hammer when it needs to.