Oktoberfest with a Single Decoction Mash

Oktoberfest is more than just the name of a beer.  It's the name given to a 16 day festival held annually in Munich, Bavaria, Germany running from late September to the first week of October.  The festival is a German national holiday that started around 1810.  Since the 1960's it has grown to be a world-wide festival that is known for the large quantity of beer served and attire worn.  Only beer conforming to the Reinheitsgebot (old beer purity law) is allowed to be served at the festival with a minimum alcohol content of 6%.  As one might think there are many problems every year with young people underestimating the amount of "high octane" beer they can handle without passing out.  Locals have a name for these patrons "Bierleichen" (German for "beer corpses").

Bierleichen

    So it's traditionally around that time to brew an Oktoberfest so that it will have time to lager and be ready mid to late September.  I've brewed this style one time previously, which in my opinion didn't turn out well.  It was drinkable but I tried a multi-step infusion mash and missed my numbers resulting in a light bodied beer were as this style should have a heavy body.  I decided to try a decoction mash on this brew in order to make sure I got that heavy body and malt presence I need in this beer.

Single Decoction Mash Schedule

Modern malted grains are so well modified that a decoction mash is really no longer necessary.  Thus I decided to go with a step infusion from the protein rest to the saccrification rest and then a single decoction to mash-out.  I heated 3gals to strike of 149*F and hit my target of 133*F (Hit high and came down fast though).  

Protein Rest at 133*F

My brewing software had shown to use a 1.5 gal infusion at 212*F to raise the mash temp into saccrificaiton at 155*F, but that ended up being way off and took me up to only 148.  So I quickly boiled a couple of quarts of water to add to the mash.  That took me up around 158 and fell to 155.  I'm a little nervous because I believe this is the very thing that killed the body in my last oktoberfest.  So I may need to start adding a buffer amount to my infusions and slowly add to temp (a ball valve on my liquor tank might help here).   

Removing the thick part of the decoction

I kept the mash at 155*F for 45 mins in order for conversion to take place.  About 30 mins into that process I drained off about 2 gals of the mash into a separate pot then used a strainer to gather the thick part of the decoction I needed, then proceeded to boil the decoction.  

Boiling the decoction

I kept the decoction boiling for 30mins, continually stirring, as not to scorch the grains.  The decoction then slowly got added back to the mash to hit mash-out temp of 168*F.  From there I drained the mash-tun and got my first ever stuck mash!  I got my grains from the local home-brew shop in NLR (first time to use them).  So the milling might have been a little more fine on the grains or possibly the decoction turned the grains mushy and clogged up the grain bed?

I unstuck the mash by using my paddle and gently stirring/scraping the false bottom of my mash-tun in order to minimize the small amount of grain that might get through and into the boil.  The sparge also stuck and I had to employ the same trick there as well.  For a stuck sparge and a decoction mash, I surprisingly didn't get that great eff. that I was expecting (73%).  I ended up having to increase the boil time to a little over 90 mins in order to hit the gravity numbers I wanted to hit.  So I ended up with exactly 5 gals (with trub) at 1.055 OG.    

I pitched a 2qt starter that I started 3 days earlier along with a second vile of yeast.  This may have been over kill but this is a larger lager so it needs lots of yeast.  12 hours later and we have fermentation!

Spent Grain Dog Biscuits

I don't have dogs but I have a lot of friends who do. So I decided to try out a recipe I found for making dog biscuits out of my spent grains.  For my first test batch I used the grains from this brew.

Harvest Moon IPA

This month I decided that I haven't brewed a good regular IPA in a while.  Most of the time when I brew something like an IPA I end up brewing a IIPA or a black IIPA.  So I decided that I would take my favorite pale ale recipe and flip it into an IPA by just turning up the hop profile.  This recipe features orange zest and coriander which, pairs nicely with the citrus bite from the cascade and centennial hops.  with all the hops and orange zest it does end up as a cloudy beer with a little bit of chill haze but the taste is great.  I actually have the recipe for the pale ale version of this up in the recipes section here.  Previous versions of this pale ale have been a partial mash recipe but I tweaked the recipe to all-grain for this brew.

My strike temp was 167.28F to hit a mash in at 153F.  I held the mash at that temp for 60mins while collecting and heating the sparge water.  I didn't really document a lot of pictures through this brew.

    After recirculating and collecting runoff from the mash and the sparge, I ended up with 8.25gal of wort set to boil down to 5.5-6gals.  After the boil and cool down I noticed that I forgot the last 10 min addition of orange zest and coriander.  So I quickly went to work boiling about a quart of water with some DME (in order to not drop the OG too much) and boiled the orange zest and coriander in a separate wort, cooled then added it to the rest in the fermenter.

    Turns out I had fairly lousy eff. on this batch (around 59%).  So I made a note on my recipe to up the base malt for next time.  In fact I ended up being so off on my numbers that I actually feed the fermenter a 12oz dextrose addition which adjusted my OG and made my  FG go a little lower (1.010).  I'll have to see but I think the lower FG shouldn't hurt and might give the beer a nice dry finish.

Newcastle Brown Ale Clone... (Or Something Close)

Even though Newcastle wouldn't pass the reinheitsgebot (because it is brewed with some level of the corn) it is still one of my favorite commercial brown ales.  I found a clone recipe on the forms for this beer and decided I wanted to try it out.  http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f67/aberdeen-brown-ale-newcastle-clone-ag-36912/.  The real Newcastle is a blended beer crafted by brewing two different beers and combining them in a 60/40 ratio.  BierMuncher got the recipes for the two blends from an issue of BYO and blended the ingredients down to a single recipe.  From his comments, it sounds like he got close to a clone by doing this.  Since I was going to be dealing with liquid yeast on this one (Wyeast - 1099), I made a 1 quart starter.  I bought 2 smack packs and used one for the starter and pitched the other on brew day.

 My mash-in took a strike temp of 168.5*F to reach a mash-in temp of 154*F and a 1.1 qt/lb mash thickness.

I heated up my sparge water to a little over 170*F in order to heat the grain bed up to a mash-out of 170*F.  My sparge thickness was 2 qt/lb, which brought the water level to the top of the mash tun.  

After run-off from the mash and sparge, ended up collecting about 8.25 gals or wort.  Plan was to hit around 8 gals and boil down to around 5.5 gals to leave 0.5 gal of trub.

After the boil I added the last of the hops and cooled down to 70*F in 15mins.  Over all easy brew day... Hit my numbers without any road blocks or problems. I did take this opportunity to calibrate my hydrometer and the refractometer that I got from my loving wife for Christmas.  

Using distilled water I found out that my hydrometer I have been using for years is off by 4 gravity points!  While my new refractometer is spot on and thanks to some calculations I found online I can completely replace my hydrometer with my refractometer.  With the O.G. at 1.055 that should put us right around 5% ABV.  

This was one of the fastest fermentation times I have ever seen!  I brewed this on a Saturday and it was finished by Monday afternoon.  I took a gravity reading and got 1.020, which was a little high for what I wanted.  So I pitched some amylase enzyme and over the course of next few days, took it down to 1.014 which was right in line with what I wanted.  

Honey Wheat Ale... Ale's What Cures Ya!

     It's been awhile since I last brewed because I've been reserving my beer budget for the kegerator bar build that I just finished.  I knew that in my next brew I wanted to do a honey beer and something with a fairly fast grain-to-glass time.  I felt that my founding fathers ale had a solid wheat base that would probably pair nicely with honey.  So I pulled up the old recipe and went to work putting honey with it.

Brice stirring the mash.  Target temp was 153

I decided to leave the grain profile the same but change the hop profile.  In fact I thought I might experiment by pairing honey wheat grain bill with more of a pale ale hop profile.  Since one of my favorite hops is centennial I wanted to use that.  However, austinhomebrew.com didn't have any centennial or cascade so I ended up settling with a new type of hop I haven't tried before called Zythos.

Recirculating the run-off

I started the boil at 8.5 gals and boiled down to a little under 6 gals.  I pulled off 5.5 gals to leave ~.5 gal of trub.  I ended up forgetting to drop in the whirlfloc tablet during the last 15 mins of the boil but since it is a wheat beer the final product will be cloudy enough that it wouldn't have mattered.

Rapi-Kool Paddle in action

Cooling went very fast with the new addition to my cooling setup (Rapid Cool Paddle).  The OG was 1.070 with a overall eff of 85%.

Hop butt...

12 hours later I had vigorous fermentation...  FG came in around 1.012 for a total ABV of 7.6%.

After tasting I have to say I like the results (still a little young) but with as much hops as I added to the brew I expected a much more hop presence than I have.  With these results I will probably not brew with Zythos again or at least not for an aroma or flavoring hop.

Three Weeks Later from the keg...

Southern Sweet Hard Cider Brew

About a week or so after brewing this I still hadn't got my fill for brewing for the month. So I decided to re-brew my southern sweet hard cider that has been pretty popular.  It's a very simple recipe.  The trick is that in order to back sweeten you have to stabilize the cider (halt fermentation).

Southern Sweet Hard Cider Ingredients

There are a few difference ways to do this.  You can chemically stabilize the cider using K-Sorbate and K-Meta-Bisulphite.  You can also use pasteurizing methods.  Keeping in mind some people have sulphite allergies.  I instead choose to keg my cider.  That way since my kegerator is <40*f the cider will not pick up and ferment any further after back sweetening.

The catch is that if I bottle off the keg the bottles need to say cold. If the bottles warm up to room temp they could explode.  Cider seems to take a lot longer to ferment than beer.  So it will probably be 2-3 weeks before I'm ready to keg and back-sweeten.

New Kegerator Build

After drooling over kegerator builds I had seen on homebrewtalk.com and other places, I finally decided to pull the trigger on my plans to build one of my own.  

So I bought a old  15 cft. Gibson chest freezer for $100 and me and my father built a coffin style bar casing around the freezer.  I'll eventually post some pictures showing the build process start to finish but for now I thought I would just post some pictures of the finished product.

As you can see the chest freezer lid is bolted to lid of the build.  I can fit 6 kegs and a C02 tank in this chest freezer (hints the 6 taps).  And Yes... If you were wondering, the top is tiled with granite tiles and it is very heavy.  The base of the build provides just enough height to ensure that the freezer seal is not overly pressed by the weight of the top.  If you look at the picture to the left you can see I added pressurized gas support lifts to the lid in order to cut down on the weight of the lift.

The coffin box was designed with future access in mind.  I have a small fan to circulate cold air from the chest freezer cabin into the coffin around the taps and back.  This is to help with the temperature differential between the beer in the keg and the beer coming out of the tap.  If there is not proper circulation between the coffin and the freezer every first pour would be foamy until line cooled.

Clone Brew: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Sierra Nevada happens to be one of my favorite breweries and their Pale Ale is one of my favorite beers.  I found a clone recipe in an issue of Brew your own magazine about a year ago and brewed it up.  It was very close if not spot on.  So I decided I wanted to re-brew this awesome and surprisingly simple pale ale.  After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!  Their site gives a vague recipe for their pale ale showing 2 malts (2-Row & Caramel) and 3 hops (Magnum, Perle & Cascade).  Which falls right in line from the clone recipe that I have:

          10.0 lb 2-Row Brewers Malt

          1 lb Crystal Malt 60°L

          0.5 oz Magnum (14.5%) - added during boil, boiled 60 min

          0.5 oz Perle (8.3%) - added during boil, boiled 30 min

          1.0 oz Cascade (5.5%) - added during boil, boiled 10 min

          2.0 oz Cascade (5.5%) - steeped after boil

          1.0 oz Cascade (5.5%) - added dry to secondary fermenter

I started this brew after work.  So I didn't get started even collecting the brew water until 5:00.  Which is why it was dark before I even started the boil.  Even so this brew-day was about 5-5.5 hours long.  My strike temp was 170*F to hit a target mash temp of 153*F for a 90 min mash.

Left to Right: First runnings from the mash, Spent Grains

My strike temp was too high.  So when I added the grains I had to add about a pint of cold water to cool it down to my target temp of 153.  From there it held fairly steady for the full 90 mins.  I ended up getting around 75% brew house efficiency on this brew.

Starting the boil and cooling

I collected 8.25 gals of wort from the grains and boiled for 75 mins to end up with 5.25 gals (leaving behind 0.25 gals of trub).  My OG reading was 1.058.  I pitched 2 packs of US-05 re-hydrated dry yeast and placed the fermenter in the fermentation chamber at 65*F.  I'll let primary fermentation go for about a week then transfer to a secondary and add the dry hops. 

Adding oxygen through a aquarium pump and a diffusion stone. 

Active fermentation started within 12 hours after pitching the yeast.

Oatmeal Cream Stout

     I don't think of brewing stouts very often because most people I know don't like them and I'm forced to drink the entire batch myself.  Which is ok... I like stouts but I prefer hoppy ales which is why I tend to brew more beer in that classification.  My favorite stouts are thick creamy rich stouts often sweetened with milk sugar.  The only stout I have made until now was a Java Stout (obviously a stout brewed with coffee).  I debated between brewing a mocha stout with coffee and chocolate or trying my hand at a cream stout.  I finally decided to try brewing a cross between a cream stout and an oatmeal stout (an Oatmeal Cream Stout).

My strike temp was 163.5*F to hit my target mash temp of 153*F and held for 90 mins.  It smelled almost like coffee throughout the house during the mash :).  I accidentally let the strike water cool too much before adding the grains on this batch.  So I had to quickly heat up a quart of boiling water to add to the mash.  That ended up putting my mash a little thicker than I wanted being around 1.44 qts/lb.  

because of rain I ended up starting the boil in the garage.  Started with a very full boil (8.75) because of additional hot water added during the mash to maintain the target temperature.  Ended up boiling for 90 mins and collected 5.5 gals (leaving 0.5gal of trub behind).

During cooling the garage door functioned as a convenient place to place to stick my wired thermometer.  My OG reading came in around 1.064 which puts me at a brew house eff of 80% on this batch.  After cooling the wort down into the lower 70s I whirl-pooled the kettle and drained the wort into the carboy.  Then as normal added oxygen using a diffusion stone and an aquarium pump.

I pitched 2 packs of WYeast - 1084 Irish Ale.  The packs were dated to be about a month old.  Thinking that the yeast should be plenty viable I felt no need for a starter.  After about a few days of fermentation I noticed the air lock had stopped bubbling.  So I took a hydrometer sample and saw evidence of a stuck ferment (hydrometer reading of 1.034).  I quickly took and re-hydrated a package of US-05 dry yeast I had laying around (just for cases such as this) and pitched it in the carboy then gently stirred the yeast cake on the bottom back into solution.  24 hours later I did not see any signs of further fermentation.  So I decided to make a starter out of another package of US-05 and pitch at high krausen.  That seems to have worked.  4 days later I'm at 1.020.  I'll give it another week then bottle carb/condition.

Sanitizing bottles and adding priming sugar solution to bottling bucket

On to bottling... Normally I keg.  So Its been a while since I last bottle conditioned/naturally carbonated a batch.  Since I have a small chest freezer converted into a kegerator, I don't have the space to serve more than 2 kegs at a time.  Unfortunately that leaves me with the task of bottling this entire batch and using priming sugar to carbonate in the bottle.

Transferring beer to bottling bucket and gently stirring to mix in the priming sugar 

Using the Keg and force carbonating is much easier and less time consuming.  So I prefer that method when I can and then bottle off what I need from the keg.  The process for bottling this batch took about 2.5 hours (from sanitation to bottled) as compared to 30 mins. max for a keg setup.

Placed bottling bucket on top of refrigerator to get better gravity flow 

When bottle conditioning/carbonating a priming sugar solution is made with a measured amount of dextrose and water then mixed into solution and bottled.  The yeast will eat the priming sugar and produce C02 which will carbonate the beverage.  So now I will store these bottles at room temp for 2-3 weeks to completely carbonate.