Brewing News

The first ever Beer Bloggers Conference has been announced for Boulder, CO, the weekend of Nov 5-7. The event is put on by the same group that orchestrates the widely popular Wine Bloggers Conference. The conference will feature keynote speakers from the industry, content sessions TBA and excursions to local breweries for a tasting and discussion with Boulder’s finest brewers.

According to the official website, attendees can join from all across the beer blogging spectrum, including “Citizen Bloggers” who discuss and review beer, “Industry Bloggers” who represent a brewery or beer industry business and also anyone in the beer industry interested in learning more about new media and how their brand is portrayed in the digital arena. Only 150 tickets are being made available, though I have to believe that high demand will push that up just a bit higher. The cost is $95 for a “Citizen Blogger”, $195 for “Industry Bloggers” and $295 for non-blogger participants from the industry or otherwise.

I only follow a few beer bloggers but here is a rundown of my favorites:

• The Beer Wench – The Wench speaks in the third-person, writes passionate reviews of her favorite brews and loves Ohio State football. Buckeye football alone is enough for kudos but she gets extra points for the other two facts.
• Here For The Beer -  I enjoy the layout of this site and they focus more on breweries, beer festivals and related beer topics. I also dig the focus on video content.
• Mike’s Brew Review – This dude from Minnesota runs a decent beer review site with video content (again, bonus points for video) focusing on his personal picks and, in one of my favorite posts, a guide to craft beers in Japan.
• Lost in the Beer Aisle – Aside from having a clever name, this guy gives a fun spin to beer reviews, even if he does use Blogger.
• 100 Beers 300 Days – This ambitious girl’s goal is to tackle 100 different Belgian-style ales in 30 days and blog about it. Looking at her detailed reviews, she certainly knows her beer. I’ve only tried a few on her list and am jealous at the sampling. Perhaps I’m not trying hard enough in this drinking hobby of mine.

While this site is more about home brewing than beer reviewing, I feel it worthwhile to promote this grass roots industry of ours in whatever form it takes. Check out the beer bloggers above and attend out the Beer Bloggers Conference in Colorado if you have the chance.

Homebrewers around the country gather to brew selected beer styles on National Homebrew Day as part of the American Homebrewers Association’s  ”Big Brew Day“.  This most worthy of national holidays finds home brewers testing their chops on 3 chosen recipes for this year: (1) American Craft Beer Wheat, (2) Scottish Export 80 Shilling and (3) Rocktoberfest.

According to the American Homebrewers Association, last year was the most successful yet with “more than 5,000 people celebrated National Homebrew Day brewing over 13,000 gallons at 342 sites on six continents worldwide. Sites were registered in 47 states and Puerto Rico, as well as Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, England, Israel, Kenya, The Netherlands, Russia, and Switzerland.” This is up from 10,500 gallons and 4,000 participants in 2008, so we hope the trend continues.

We have never tried our hands at a Scottish Export 80 Shilling (I’m thinking Belhaven’s Scottish Ale or Sam Adams Scotch Ale) and I’ve never honestly heard of a Rocktoberfest (similar to an Oktoberfest, I’m guessing) but currently have a wheat ale ready to bottle in the basement. The guys at DrinkHomeBrew.com were unable to participate in this most holy of holy days but raise our glasses to the growing movement of home brewers and craft beer drinkers. Cheers!

For those who home brew the reasons to home brew are obvious. But for those not as familiar, here are 3 core reasons.

1. Fizzy yellow beer is for wussies – Stone Brewing

2. Cost of beer

3. Satisfaction of drinking your own creation

FIZZY YELLOW BEER IS FOR WUSSIES

Why is fizzy yellow beer for wussies? The reason is because the popular American Pilsners/Lagars all taste the same. There is very little flavor / recipe distinction between the different beers. Don’t believe me, check this out. Recently, 8 friends (including myself) tested this theory. We poured Miller Light, Coors, Beast Light, Bud Light, and Natural Light into clear cups – so not even a blind taste test. One of us was able to get 3 out of 5. Beyond that, no one got more than one right. A few of us could tell Miller Light as it is a little less sweet. The Strand Brewers Club in LA Country found similar results. Check out the Beer Hacker’s Results – PBR is the winner. The reason all these beers taste the same is because the hop flavor is very muted, the malt flavor is extremely light, and they use corn and rice adjuncts in place of malt to provide the alcohol to the beer. Triple hopped my ass. The folks over at Home Brew Talk have pretty good discussion going on here.

So 2 questions for you?

1. Why drink beer that mutes the flavor of the core ingredients that make up beer?

2. Why “spend up” and buy Miller Light, Coors, and Bud Light over Beast Light, Natural Light, and PBR if the taste is indistinguishable.

COST OF BEER

Considering equipment a sunk cost, it is just as cheap to brew a quality home brew as it is to buy Beast Light or Natural Light. We just spent $26 to make 48 bottles of Rye Pale Ale. Two cases of Natural Light will run you the same.

SATISFACTION OF DRINKING YOUR OWN CREATION

There is nothing more satisfying than sharing your latest home brew creation with friends. While we have not been able to create a beer as good as a Stone (our IPA and Imperial Stout were good, but still not Stone), I still enjoy drinking and sharing my own beer more than any beer I purchase – with exception to the Oktoberfest we commonly refer to as “Pear Bear“.

Bottom line, you spend a lot of time with your beer. You should know it.

Any home brewer knows the importance of proper cleaning and sanitation, but do you really know the impact those chemicals have on your equipment and beer. When we began our brewing adventures, we were using standard dish washing soap and Easy Clean for sanitizing from LD Carlson. Once we blew through the small container we began using unscented bleach to sanitize. Bleach is cheap and convenient (sitting next to my laundry machine which is next to where we brew).

Most sources in home brew lit (including Palmer & Papizan) make mention of unscented bleach as a good sanitizer as long as it is diluted one tablespoon of bleach to one gallon of water. There are 2 key things to be aware of:

1. The chemical agents in bleach (chlorine, chlorides, hydrochloride) will cause blackening and excessive corrosion to brass, copper, and aluminum. So all you copper mash tuners, beware. For example, the picture to the left is our brass Pipe Hex Bushing adapter that sits in the inside wall of our mash tun. After only two bleach soakings of 30 minutes each, you can already see the noticeable blackening and corrosion. To clean brass soak it in two parts white vinegar to one part hydrogen peroxide and soak for 15 minutes to remove tarnish.

2. Using too much bleach or not rinsing bleach properly can lead to off flavors in your beer or poor head retention. I know that I am too liberal with the bleach and hypothesize this could have contributed to the non-existent head in our last Irish Stout.

Moving forward we will begin cleaning with the percarbonate cleaner PBW from Five Star Chemicals. It will not corrode brass & copper and is recommended for cleaning plastic (fermentation vessels) and copper (Wort chiller we are about to build). More importantly, just purchased Star San for sanitizing – also from Five Star Chemicals. This is a no rinse sanitizer that home brew author John Palmer is a pretty big fan of – click here for more info. In searching online for Star San, I haven’t seen it much cheaper than what Northern Brewer offers it for.

In summary, don’t blame the bleach, blame the brewer. But since I have little trust in the brewer at times, I am going away from bleach.

You may have read our earlier post about building a lauter mash tun and we have since compiled all the parts and photographs into an easy to understand instruction post – Building a Lauter Mash Tun. This is found in the new “How To” section of the site, which we hope to fill later with further instruction as we start to build more equipment (wort chiller up next).

It is very important to note that you should use CPVC piping instead of traditional PVC piping when building the mash tun. This is important because only CPVC can withstand the high temperature of the liquid that will be flowing through the pipes. Regular PVC will leak chemicals into the mash tun liquid, which would make for a bad home brew indeed. Good luck building your own mash tun and let us know if the instructions could be improved at all.

We had a great time learning to mash and hope to take some of the mystery away by detailing our findings (and maybe you can avoid some of the pitfalls we encountered). The maiden brew on our new equipment was a Chocolate Irish Stout that didn’t turn out so great. Low carbonation and alarmingly low ABV. We are still sorting out what exactly went wrong here but the temperature control during mashing was not consistent, which might have caused a lower sugar conversion and thus less fuel for the yeast to consume and turn into ethyl alcohol. Not to be discouraged, we have vowed to drink even more of our Irish brew on St. Patty’s day since we’ll need quite a few to get anything off a 3% ABV.

Go check out the instructions for building a lauter mash tun and please share your feedback if you have ideas on how our design could be improved. Another brew will tell if the low ABV on the Irish Stout was due to poor temperature control or, hopefully not, poor equipment design.

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 …

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.

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.

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.

“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.

A New York times article discusses the rise of craft breweries in America, the many barriers to entry, and the eternal dream to brew, bottle, and sell a truly original home brew.

Beer Connoisseurs Defy Hurdles to Start Breweries – New York Times

As the recession takes its toll on small business owners and future start-ups, beer connoisseurs continue to pursue their passion of brewing unique beers for a consumer base that frequently is turning down the watered-down mainstream lagers in favor of craft beers. The competition from mainstream conglomerates is made all the more difficult by the sheer economies of scale they can command.

Two mergers last year, InBev of Belgium acquiring Anheuser-Busch and SABMiller merging with Molson Coors, paved the way for a brewing landscape where it can be hard for a craft brewery to compete on price, distribution, or marketing. Instead these small companies have emphasized their unique flavors, everyman appeal, and local identity. The success of this approach is seen in the pseudo-craft beer Blue Moon with it’s artistically designed bottles and a conscious downplay of the fact that it is actually owned and brewed by Molson Coors in Golden, CO. The bottle itself claims to be brewed by the “Blue Moon Brewing Company“.

Cincinnati’s own Mt. Carmel Brewing Company is mentioned in the article. Owner Mike Dewey describes how he started the business 4 years ago with a family loan and racked up excessive credit card debt until the company was finally making a profit. High risk but certainly high reward. His wife Kathleen has the final word on the subject:

“It can be very dreamy thinking about starting your own microbrewery,” she said. “But unless you have several million dollars, be prepared for a lot of hard work.”