I’m finally done with school so I decided I would spend my first free weekend, in a long time, brewing. I recently downloaded the iBrew app for my iPad. There is going to be a learning curve for this program, but I am liking it so far. I also got a vial of Cry Havoc as part of my order for my Pliny clone (they call it Santa Rosa)- which still hasn’t come in as of now. It’s been over a month now and I’m working with Homebrewer’s Outpost on it – might be another month, which sucks because I wanted to brew it for a couple going away gatherings. I was looking around for something to make with this yeast (Cry Havoc that is) that sounded good enough to drink. I thumbed through iBrew’s extensive collection of free recipes that come with the app and the Northern Brewer 1800 recipe jumped out at me. It didn’t hurt that I saw a podcast from BrewingTV that had this beer featured. It seemed good enough to use up this yeast. So that’s exactly what I did.

I started the day before with a standard yeast starter – 1.040ish and about 1.5 liters. It took off like a champ and smelled very nice when I pitched it. Brewday was pretty good. Of course I used a different scale and didn’t take into account the variances it might impose. I think it was off a little bit. I adjusted the grain bill a bit since Maris Otter is pretty hard to come by in Germany – I’ll list it below. It might not turn out good and will have to tweak it to my liking. I was aiming for six gallons in the fermenter, but lost a lot to the over half a pound of hops. There is the typical dead space in my tun, and kettle that added to the loss. I got about five gallons at just over 1.086, so I added about a gallon of boiled and cooled water. Ended up with six gallons just over 1.066. Hmm. I’ll have to dial in this system a little better. Maybe go back to my old scale, or at the least calibrate the new one. The new one does work pretty good for packages though. They are always very close to what the postal scale says – at the post office. Although I think I am messing up some calculations or volumes along the way. I take decent notes, but will definitely make a point to take better ones. It will be a lot easier once I get back to all of my equipment back in the States. But I’ll be building a new system once I’m back and will be at square one again.

I will also try to get some better, thorough, pictures of the process. It’s hard to take pictures and brew all at the same time. I didn’t get any of the steps making the starter, but there are plenty of good tutorials on the web for that already. I don’t think I can make anything that will add to what is out there, but maybe I’ll make a video anyway. Here is a picture of the starter after pitching the vial into it about 12 hours earlier.

A very uneventful brewday. I didn’t have any major mishaps as I usually do. No valves left open and no kids running around the flames the entire time. The only part that was off was the measurements. I’m really not sure they are off until I compare measuring devices though. I’m in the Czech Republic right now so I can’t really do that now. Will be a couple weeks until I can get those ironed out. And the day before I left my Pliny clone came in. So that will be the next beer made. Immediately upon my return and having a spare six hours or so to do it. Might have to take a day off to get that done.

A lot of stuff I need to use up before we check out of Europe in a little over a year. It’s hard to keep brewing when there are so many beers to choose from over here. Not to mention it is way cheaper just to buy the beers that I usually try to brew. But I’m making more American style beers over here since they are harder to get. Even those styles are making a bigger presence over here now, and they are pretty decent.

Recipe (available in BeerSmith2 format on request):

15 lbs 9.6oz Belgian Pale Malt

14.1 oz Munich Malt

4 oz Biscuit Malt

2 oz EKG for 60 minutes

2.5 oz EKG for 15 minutes

7.5 oz (yes, 7.5 OUNCES) Fuggles for 15 minutes

4 oz Dark Candy sugar for 15 minutes

Whirlfloc for 15 minutes

Mashed at ~152 for one hour. Standard single infusion and sparge. I don’t mashout, although I have in the past. I just don’t have the equipment for it. It’s not because I don’t believe in it, I do.  It kind of ends up being about a 1.5 – 2 hour mash because of this. I runoff slow, about a quart a minute. Vorlauf until clear, this one cleared in the first quart and a half. Nice dark coppery color. I stopped collecting right about 1.024 as I thought I had enough. Again, a miscalculation as I was using my new brewpot for the second time and forgot to mark it for volume. A one hour boil. After collecting I had just around 1.086 as I said above. I added a gallon of boiled water and ran it through the chiller into the bucket. Shook that for a bit and added yeast, the whole volume of starter. Shook again. I usually oxygenate but didn’t even try getting that stuff shipped over here. After all that I got just under 6 gallons at around 1.066. A little short of what I projected, but it won’t hurt it that much. It was put into my basement to ferment, but I found it too cold – around 60F – so I moved it upstairs to around 70F. It is just over a week in primary now – I brewed it on the 24th of March. It will sit there until I get back from Czech and Hungary, which equates to just at 3 weeks in primary.

I secondary, so I’ll move it to glass when I get back. I know there is a lot of argument over whether this is good or not, but I have done it this way for over 20 years and have never had a bad beer. I tried, a couple of times, only doing a primary and had off-flavors. Whether this was solely due to the beer on the yeast that long or not is not known by me. Until I can get back to all of my equipment in America I won’t be able to do enough testing to decide. I usually move the beer from vessel to vessel under pressure so I don’t even have oxygen hitting the beer. But I don’t have that luxury over here, and didn’t have all that equipment my first few years brewing. And still I have never had a batch go bad from the minuscule amount of oxygen that did contact the beer. I’m not here to sway people to one side or the other, just letting others know that I have never had an issue. Of course, following good sanitation is also key.

Up next will be the Pliny clone. I’m excited to see how close it is. It’s almost a pound of hops for a 5 gallon batch. Not that this one didn’t come close, but it’s really two separate types of beer. Well, back to vacationing.

Na zdraví