A lot of home brewers are familiar with the term “Noble Hops” which refers to four variety of continental European hops originally grown in Central Europe.  The four hop varieties are Terrnanger, Spalt, Hallertauer and Saaz.  This week we take a look at these popular hops and character in detail.

Noble Hops

The four traditional varieties of noble hops are properly characterized as aroma hops as they have relatively low alpha bitterness, but are highly aromatic.  They are widely used in traditional continental beer styles including Bohemian Pilsner, Oktoberfest/Marzen, Dunkel, many Wheat/Weizen beers and other lagers.  They generally do not store well.

From a hop analysis view, these hops have high amounts of the hop oil humulene.  Humulene is a fragrance often used in the perfume industry with an aroma that has a robust earthy, woody and herbal character.  Oxidation, heat and light rapidly break down humulene, which is why noble hops are susceptible to degradation if not properly stored.  Relatively low alpha acid levels (generally 3-5.5%) add aroma and bitterness without becoming harsh.  The low amounts of harsher tasting beta acids (lupulone, adlupulone and colupulone) contribute to the desirable flavor of noble hops.  Many also have a slightly spicy finish which adds to the character of beers like Pilsner.

Since growing soil and conditions have a large effect on the finished hops, many brewers consider only noble hop varieties grown within their traditional region to be true “noble hops”.  Therefore a Tettnanger hop grown outside of the Tettnang region of Germany would not be considered a true “noble hop”,

The Four Noble Hop Varieties

• Tettnanger (Tettnang) - A hops from Tettnang, which is a small town in Southern Baden-Wurttemberg Germany.  It has a mild, slightly spicy, floral character and is genetically similar to Saaz grown in the Czech republic.  It is highly valued as both an aroma and flavor hops and is exported worldwide for use in Belgian ales, French ales, Bocks, Lagers, Pilsners and Wheat beers.  Substitutes include Saaz and Fuggles.
• Saaz - Saaz is a hops traditionally grown in Bohemia and the modern day Czech Republic where it accounts for nearly 2/3 of hop production in the region.  It is named after the Czech city of Zatek, which in German is Saaz.  It has a distinct flavor that is mild, earthy yet spicy.  It is the definitive hops used in Pilsner Urquell and Budvar, which are the basis for almost all of the most popular American lagers.  However Saaz is also widely used in all types of lagers, pale ales, wheat beers, and many continential styles.  Its closest substitute is a hop called Sladek, thought often Tettnanger, Lublin, Ultra or Sterling may be used.
• Spalt (Spalter) – A traditional hop from the Spalter region of Germany south of Neuremberg.  It is grown in a fairly small acreage and not as widely distributed as other noble hops making it somewhat difficult for home brewers to obtain.  It provides a mild, slightly spicy flavor with a strong noble hop aroma.  Note that Spalt is not the same as the more widely distributed “Spalt Select” which is actually a descendent of Hallertauer Mittelfruh.  Spalt is used in many traditional German styles including Bocks, Alts, Lagers, Pilsners and Munich Helles.  Substitutions include Saaz, Tettnanger.
• Halltertau (Hallertauer Mittelfruh) – Named after the Hallertau (Halledau) region in central Bavaria, it was widely grown in Bavaria until the late 1970′s when it was largely replaced by the Hersbrucker variety.  A fungi called verticillium ravaged the Hallertau hop crop at that time.  You will often see Hersbrucker sold as “Hallertauer Hersbrucker” though it is actually a Hersbrucker variety.  Later Hallertauer Gold and Hallertauer Tradition variants (Also Hallertauer “Magnum, Merkir and Taurus”) were developed from Hallertau that were more disease resistant.  The hop has a highly floral character, slightly earthy but without a very strong spicy flavor.  It is used in both German and American lagers, and is known as a key flavor/aroma hops for Sam Adams Boston Lager.  Substitutes include Hersbrucker, Mt Hood and Liberty.

The “Nearly Noble” Hops

In addition to the four hops listed above (and their variants), you will often hear of other hops occasionally listed as noble hops.  These include English Fuggles, East Kent Golding, (Hallertauer) Hersbrucker, and Styrian Goldings (a Fuggle variant).  While none of these are actually true noble hops, they share many of the noble hop characteristics of being highly aromatic and having low alpha acid.

Also due to the pressured of land usage in Central Europe, diseases and pests and the move of many commercial brewers towards high yield, high alpha hops (for hop extract), the supply of true noble hops has been steadily decreasing for decades.  Growers are instead producing hybrids or variants such as Liberty (a cross of Hallertauer Mittlefruh with a disease resistant US hop) or Mt Hood (a higher alpha acid hybrid).  Variants of the nearly noble hops above such as Willamette (derived from Fuggles) are also widely grown in the United States.

Thanks for joining me on the BeerSmith blog.  If you would like weekly articles delivered to your inbox, sign up for the BeerSmith newsletter.  Also check out the BeerSmith Podcast which is published every other week and available as a subscription on iTunes.

• Brewing German Altbier Recipes
• Dry Hopping: Enhanced Hops Aroma
• Baltic Porter Recipes – Beer Styles
• Brewing a Kolsch Beer Recipe: Beer Styles
• Scotch Ale Recipes: Beer Styles

Dark grains are perhaps some of the most interesting ingredients for home brewing beer – they offer an explosion of flavor and color.  This week, I step off the beaten path and explore some alternative ways to use dark grains when brewing beer.

After last week’s podcast interview with Gordon Strong, I was revisiting some sections in his new book Brewing Better Beer (Amazon link), when I came across a discussion of dark grains that sparked this week’s topic.  Gordon refers also to a paper on steeping dark malts from Mary Anne Gruber of Briess Malting, and much of the material presented here is summarized from his book.

What’s Different about Dark Malts

For the purpose of this article, I will use the term dark malts to refer to roasted grains and malts such as Chocolate, Black Patent and Roasted (Black) Barley.  One could also include very dark roasted specialty malts such as Chocolate Wheat, Carafa, and Special B.

What is unique to these malts is that they have been roasted to the point that they have no diastatic enzymes and also that whatever fermentable sugars are present in the malt have already been broken down during the roasting process.  As a result they do not actually need to be mashed.  Steeping these malts is sufficient to release their flavor and remaining sugars.

If you understand this basic fact, you can now treat them (to borrow from Gordon Strong’s analogy) like coffee.  Whether you mash the dark grains or steep them in some other stage, the character of the dark malt flavor is driven more by the steeping time (assuming the water is sufficiently hot) than anything else.  Also, like coffee grains, if you steep your grains for a long time you will get a more acidic and bitter flavor profile.

Mashing Dark Grains

Most all grain brewers mill and mash their dark grains with the rest of their grains.  As many mashes last 60-90 minutes, this can lead to a more acidic and bitter flavor profile and in some extreme cases even an astringency (used tea bag) flavor.  Think for a moment of what would happen if you steeped coffee for 90 minutes to brew your morning cup.  This bitterness is accentuated if the pH of the mash has not been adjusted to the correct level (pH too high).

To be fair, mashing dark grains can be a plus in many styles.  Dark grains are acidic, and do play an important role in lowering the pH of the mash for many styles.  This lowering of the pH (5.2 is ideal for the mash) reduces the astringency and creates a much better beer overall.   Also bitterness from the grains is an important flavor component in many styles such as Porters, Schwarzbier and Stouts.

Adding Dark Grains to the Vorlauf (Recirculating)

The vorlauf is the recirculated wort typically drawn at the start of the sparge – usually the first few quarts of runoff for a home brewer.    This first runnings is then recirculated back to the top of the grain bed as it typically contains a high percentage of grain particles.  In this variation, one does not mash the darkest grains, but instead steeps them in the vorlauf at the start of the sparge process and then recirculates the steeped wort back through the mash tun.

The advantage of this method is that is avoids the long hot steep of the mash, and the dark wort from the vorlauf is recirculated through the mash tun again further reducing astringency.  However, since the resulting wort is still boiled for an extended time it can still result in some harshness particularly for styles where the bitter profile of dark grains is undesirable.

 Steeping Dark Grains

A third method is to steep dark grains separate from the mash, and then mix the resulting “grain tea” after the boil.  This is perhaps the most innovative of methods as it allows you to very finely crush the grains like coffee (they no longer need to be mashed), and also to vary the water used, steep time and temperature to achieve a desired flavor profile.  I liken this method to making a dark grain coffee or dark grain tea where you decide precisely how it is brewed.

Mr Strong recommends a water to grain ratio of 2 quarts per pound of grain for steeping.  There are three basic options: hot steeping, cold steeping, and boiling.

Hot steeping is much like making coffee.  The finely ground grains are mixed with hot water in the 165 F (74 C) range and steeped for 5-10 minutes (depending on profile use) and then strained with a coffee filter or kitchen strainer.  The dark extract is then chilled and added to the fermenter at the start of fermentation.

Cold steeping is akin to making cold brewed iced tea or cold steeped coffee.  In this case the grains are mixed at room temperature and left to steep for a day or more, before adding them to the fermenter.  In most cases this results in a milder flavor than hot steeping – like cold coffee.  If possible, consider boiling the water ahead of time for a short period to sterilize it and also remove oxygen before cooling and adding the grains.  NOTE: I recommend pasteurizing the cold steeped tea at 170 F for 10 minutes after you have steeped it to prevent possible infection or bacteria from the grains if you plan to add the tea directly to the fermenter.

A final option is to perform a short boil and add the grains at the end of the boil (tpypically 5-10 minutes before the end of the boil).  This is often done by simply adding the grains at the end of the regular wort boil rather than creating a separate boil.

The bottom line is that because of the nature of dark roasted grains, they need not be mashed and therefore can be added at any point in the brewing process prior to fermentation.   Steeping dark grains separately from the mash will generally result in less acidity, astringency and a little less color.  While a dark roasted bitter coffee flavor may be desirable for certain styles such as Stouts, Scwarzbier and Porter, steeping the dark grains separately may be an ideal solution for those brewing milder styles.  The techniques outlined above also provide more flexibility to precisely control the flavor and color that dark grains add to the beer.

Thanks for joining me on the BeerSmith blog!  Please subscribe to the newsletter or podcast on iTunes for more articles and sessions on home brewing!

• Steeping Grains for Extract Beer Brewing
• Schwarzbier Recipes – German Black Beer
• Malt Extract Beer Brewing
• Sweet Stout and Milk Stout Recipes
• Converting All Grain Recipes to Malt Extract

Many people have written the past few months asking that I put together a collection of tips for BeerSmith 2.  I launched BeerSmith 2 in June and it has been very popular with both new and existing brewers.  So this week I present a set of 10 tips for making the most of BeerSmith 2.

1. Build Your Own Equipment Profile – If I had to pick one item that causes the most trouble for new users it is creating that first equipment profile to match their specific equipment.  In BeerSmith, the equipment profile defines how large your equipment is, what its efficiency and losses look like and what your target batch and boil sizes are.  Having accurate numbers in this profile drives all of the calculations to estimate recipe bitterness, gravity, color, etc… so it is very important!  Here’s an article and video tutorial on building a custom profile.
2. Hold the Shift Key to Open a New Window – BeerSmith 2 users love the new tabbed interface, but if you hold down the shift key when opening a new recipe or tool you can make that tool or recipe appear in a separate window.  This is great for doing side-by-side comparisons or working on large screens.
3. Enter Units in Any Field – BeerSmith 2 has a unit converter built into every field.  So if you enter “3 kg” in a field as a grain weight the program will convert your 3 kilograms to pounds.  Enter “85 C” in as your temperature and the program will convert it to Fahrenheit.   You can even enter complex weights like “3 lb 5 oz” and BeerSmith will convert it to the equivalent decimal weight.  You can also change default units used by the program from the Units tab on the Options command.
4. Grab some Add-Ons – The new add-on button lets you download new ingredients and recipes directly from the internet in just a few seconds.  We have a large number of vendor specific grains, as well as a growing number of recipe packs you can download with the click of a button.  If you want to create your own recipe pack or ingredient add-on (a great way to promote your site or brand!) just use the Contact-Us button and I can help you get your add-on listed.
5. Try The New Water Profile Tool – The new water profile tool makes it really easy to adjust your local water profile to match waters from around the world.  Open the tool, select your local water as the base, and pick a target profile.  Next click on the “Calculate Best Additions” and BeerSmith 2 will automatically calculate the amount of each water minerals needed to best match the target water profile.  If your local profile is too high in minerals, you can dilute it with some bottled water to make a softer profile.
6. Take Any Recipe and Use It as Your Own – Once you have an accurate equipment profile for your setup, you can take any recipe off the internet or from our add-on recipe packs and scale it to match your own equipment profile for immediate brewing.  Open the recipe you want to work with, select the “Scale Recipe” command and select your personal equipment profile as the new one.  This will adjust all of the grains, hops and other ingredients to match your equipment settings and batch size.
7. Try the New Yeast Starter Features – BeerSmith 2 has a new yeast starter standalone tool as well as a yeast starter tab embedded in each recipe that lets you estimate the starter size needed for liquid yeast based on age of the yeast and yeast packs used.  If you have never been big on yeast starters, you really should give it a try as pitching at the proper yeast concentration can really improve your fermentation.
8. Spend a Few Minutes with the Video Tutorials – For BeerSmith 2 I created a good set of video tutorials to demonstrate some of the most used features of BeerSmith 2.  So if you don’t know where to start, or perhaps want to know how to use a more advanced feature check out the video tutorials.
9. Customize your Design View – In the main recipe design tab for any open recipe you can adjust the fields displayed while working on your recipes.  Use the “Select Fields” button in the bottom-right quadrant of the design tab to pick which fields you want to show.  There are over 100 available.
10. Keep Up to Date – I’m constantly improving BeerSmith – with formal releases from the main BeerSmith download page every month or two.  Also I frequently post open beta versions of upcoming features to the BeerSmith discussion forum before they are published as formal releases.  You can view the version of BeerSmith from your Help->About command (at writing, the latest build is 2.0.48) at any time and check for updates using the “Check for Updates” command on the Help menu.

One final tip – you can use the “+-” button next to the image of a beer glass to add your own thumbnail picture of your brew after you brew it.  If you don’t have your copy of BeerSmith 2 you can grab it from our download page and try it free for 21 days.  Thanks again for joining me and please subscribe if you want regular delivery of beer brewing articles to your inbox.

• BeerSmith Software Video Tutorials
• BeerSmith 2.0 – A First Look
• Ten Reasons to use Beer Brewing Software
• BeerSmith Hops and Yeast Updates
• Countdown to BeerSmith 2 – 10 June Launch!

Parti-Gyle brewing is a method for making more than one batch of beer from a single all grain mash.  It offers tremendous flexibility since you can brew two beers of different gravities, and also add different hops and yeast to create distinct beers from one brewing session.

History

Parti-Gyle brewing is not a new method.  The method goes back hundreds of years, and many modern sub-styles are examples of light and heavy versions made from a single mash.  Examples include the various weights of English and Scotch Ale, various grades of Bock, and even variations of Trappist ales.  In the 1700′s and 1800′s it was very common to create a strong beer from the first runnings of the mash and a lighter common beer from the second runnings of a mash.

The Parti-Gyle Method

The standard method for Parti-Gyle brewing is to make two beers from a single mash.  Typically a fairly high gravity beer is made from the “first runnings” of the mash, and the second runnings are boiled separately to make a lighter beer.  Often different hop additions, boil additions and yeast are used to create distinct styles from the two runnings depending on the brewer’s preference.

Estimating the Gravity of Each Beer

When designing a parti-gyle beer, one is usually concerned with gravity and color of the two beers being created.   This is important for determining how much grain is required for each beer and also how much liquid to run through each to achieve a target boil gravity.  The rule of thumb for an average mash is that 2/3 of the gravity potential is in the first 1/2 of the runnings.  This is due to the fact that most of the high gravity wort comes in the first third of the lauter.

One common parti-gyle split is 1/3 volume for the first runnings and 2/3 volume for the second which results in a first batch of beer that has twice the points that the second batch will have.  So for example if the total mash had an estimated original gravity of 1.060, we would expect the first 1/3 to have a gravity of 1.090 and the second to have a gravity of half the points or 1.045.

For a 50-50 split by volume, with half of the wort in each batch we get a roughly 58% of the gravity points in the first batch.  So a 1.060 overall batch OG would translate to a 1.070 first runnings and 1.050 second runnings, with both of equal size.

Estimating OG for Split Batches

To perform these calculations yourself, start with the OG estimate of the mash runnings using conventional methods.  This can be done using the method described here, except you use the mash efficiency and total lauter volume instead of the overall brewhouse efficiency and overall batch volume to get your mash OG estimate.

Once you have the OG estimate for the overall batch, get the number of points by subtracting one and multiplying by 1000, so 1.060 becomes 60 points.  Next we use the following to calculate the final number of points in this fraction:

Number_points_ runnings = (Tot_points * Points_fraction / fractional_volume)

So if we look at a 1.060 total gravity estimate with a 1/3-2/3 volume split which has half the points in each runnings we get 60 points, 0.5 as the points_fraction and 1/3 or 0.333 as the fractional volume:

Number_points_runnings = (60 * 0.50 / 0.333) = 90 points or a gravity of 1.090

The second runnings of 2/3 is:

Number_points_runnings2 = (60*0.50 / 0.666) = 45 points or 1.045 gravity

Using the same equation, you can come up with an accurate estimate for the gravity of each of the runnings based on the original gravity of the overall batch.

Color Considerations

It should be no surprise that the color of the two batches in a parti-gyle will be darker for the first runnings and lighter for the second in most cases.  Calculating the actual color for a regular beer is described here, and is based on the Malt Color Units (MCUs) which are simply the sum of the pounds of malt times their color for all grains in a batch.

Looking at the examples above – a 50-50 volume split has about 2/3 of the gravity in the first runnings and 1/3 in the second runnings.  The malt color units follow, so about 2/3 of the MCUs will be in the first running and 1/3 in the second.  So if you calculate the overall Malt Color Units for the total batch (sum of the pounds of malt times color of each malt), you can multiply it by 2/3 or 1/3 for each running and then apply the Morey equation to get the color estimate for each of the runnings.  Here the OG_FRACTION refers to the 2/3-1/3 OG split so you would apply 2/3 to the first runnings and 1/3 to the second:

SRM_color = 1.4922 * ((MCU * OG_FRACTION) ** 0.6859)

Since the Morey equation is not linear, you will see a larger color difference for a parti-gyle beer when working with lighter beers.  So for a very light beer and a 50-50 volume split, the first runnings will be almost twice as dark as the second runnings.  However as the beer gets darker the difference will be smaller – to the point where the second runnings of a Stout beer might have no perceivable difference in color from the first.

After the Mash

Once you have mashed your parti-gyle beer and taken the two runnings, the rest of the brewing process is the same as with any other beer.  Obviously the two runnings are boiled separately so you either need two boil pots and heat sources or a sterile way to store one of the runnings for a few hours while you boil the other.

One of the great features of part-gyle brewing is the ability to change the character of the beer in the boil and fermentation.  By adding different hop additions, yeast, spices or steeping additional grains prior to the boil (much like an extract brew) you can dramatically change the character of the two beers produced.  With a little imagination you really can create two distinctly different beer styles from a single brewing session.

For design purposes it is usually best to treat the two runnings as separate beers at this point, and the usual rules for estimating bitterness, final gravity and fermentation apply.  The design possibilities are nearly endless.  You could create a strong ale and bitter, a wheat bock and weizen, a brown and pale and many other combinations from a single mash.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s article and decide to make your own parti-gyle brew in the future.  Thanks for dropping by, and please subscribe to my blog or podcast for more great articles and sessions on brewing beer.

• Multiplying Your Home Brewed Beer – BSHB Podcast #5
• Brewhouse Efficiency for All Grain Beer Brewing
• How to Batch Sparge: A Guide for Batch Sparging and No Sparge
• Beer Color: Understanding SRM, Lovibond and EBC
• How to Brew Big – Making High Gravity Beers

With the emphasis of many intermediate and advanced home brewers on larger and more complex brewing systems, many of us who have brewed for years (over 24 years in my case) have started turning back to smaller, simpler beer brewing.  The trend is far from universal, but I’ve found even friends with brewing systems that cost 10′s of thousands of dollars occasionally enjoy making a simple 5 gallon batch of beer using traditional methods and equipment.  [Aside: If you have never made your own beer, you can start with a simple extract based batch here]

Another factor at work here is the realization that pumps, whirlpool chillers, RIMS, and HERMS systems are not necessary to brew great beer.  The automation can make some steps easier and more consistent – especially for large batches, but some amazing award winning beers have been made with nothing more than a picnic cooler and large pot.

The other challenge many brewers face is the lack of time.  Jobs, kids, longer hours and the diminishing line between work time and play time eat into our brewing time.  We are blessed, as beer brewing in itself does not have to take a lot of time – but one is pressured to get the most of the precious hours spent brewing.

There is certainly nothing wrong with taking the entire day to brew 25 gallons of beer on your giant home-built brewhouse, but sometimes it is also fun to go back and brew a simple beer in a small batch.  So this week I’ll take you back and share some of the lessons learned in an attempt to simplify my all grain beer brewing and get back to basics:

• Five Gallons is Great – It is fun to play with 10-20+ gallon brewing systems, but time, space and other considerations make dealing with 5 gallons the easiest (you can still lift the fermenter or pot easily) and fastest.  The time spent in setup, brewing and particularly cleanup is all less with a small 5 gallon system.  The equipment is light, easy to handle and easy to clean.  Also a 5 gallon batch is a great test size to perfect a recipe before moving to a larger brewing system.
•  Keep the Grain Bill Simple – Many beginners tend to think that adding as many types of grains as possible will somehow enhance the beer.  The truth is that many great commercial beers are made with pale malt and perhaps one or two other malts.  If you do some research into beer styles, you will find that it is rare that more than 2-3 specialty grains are needed to make even complex beer styles.
• A Single Infusion is Good Enough – Yes, I’ve played with decoction, multi-step infusion, mash-outs and other exotic mash profiles, but for beers that don’t have exotic cereals or adjuncts added (which is about 97% of all beers), a single infusion mash is good enough – so keep it simple.
• Overlap the Tasks to Save Time – Sometimes I have only the evening to brew beer, and have brewed  full all grain batches in as little as three hours.  The key is to overlap the tasks as much as possible.  For example, I will heat my mash water, and while it is heating I’ll crush the grains.  Once the infusion mash has been started, I’ll measure and lay out all of the equipment and ingredients for the sparge and boil.  When the boil is on, I’ll be cleaning the chiller and getting my fermenter sanitized.  In every step, I try to make sure I’m prepping for the next step or cleaning the equipment I’m finished with so I can save time.
• Two Hop Additions Is Enough – For most beer styles, a single bittering hop addition and a single aroma addition is often enough.  The fact is that most aromatic hop oils boil off in less than 10 minutes, so if you want to preserve aromatics keep the boil time short for those additions.  For example, I will often add a bitterness hop addition at the beginning of the boil and a second addition the last 5 minutes to preserve aroma.
• You Don’t Need Fancy Equipment – More equipment means more setup time and more cleaning after you are done.  For all grain infusion mashing, often a 5 gallon water cooler and large pot is sufficient.   Extract beers require even less equipment.  If you want to keep it even simpler, consider Brew-In-A-Bag (article, podcast) which requires only a single large pot and one large grain bag to brew great all-grain beer.  Formulating a good recipe, and following a good process when brewing will affect the quality of your beer more than the latest brewing widget.

Brewing beer on a fancy recirculating mash system is fun, but occasionally its also fun to get back to basics and brew a few gallons the old fashioned way.  Even for large systems, simplifying your recipes and processes can save you time and money without sacrificing on quality.  So get back to basics!

Thanks for joining me on the BeerSmith blog – please subscribe if you want go get great beer brewing articles mailed to you every week.

• All Grain Beer Brewing With An Infusion Mash Setup
• RIMS and HERMS – Recirculating Infusion Mash Systems for Beer
• Brew in a Bag (BIAB) All Grain Beer Brewing
• Brew in a Bag (BIAB) Down Under – BeerSmith Podcast 10
• Infusion Mashing and Decoction for Brewing Beer

Recirculating mash systems such as RIMS (Recirculating Infusion Mash System) and HERMS (Heat Exchanged Recirculating Mash Systems) are advanced beer brewing systems that use a pump and heating element to maintain a stable mash temperature during brewing.  RIMS and HERMS are the two most popular, though many other systems exist.  So this week, we take a look at these more brewing systems and how they differ from simple infusion mashing.

Infusion Mashing vs RIMS/HERMS

Most brewers switching to all grain start with a simple infusion mash system – made of some kind of cooler with a filter screen or tubes added to create an insulated mash tun.  Another all grain setup gaining in popularity for first time brewers is Brew-in-a-Bag (BIAB) (podcast).  Both of these systems offer simplicity at a reasonable cost, and both give you a method to maintain a steady temperature during the mashing process.  The cooler retains heat, and for BIAB you can apply heat directly to the kettle.

The limitations of the simple cooler or BIAB setup become apparent when you try to work with much larger home brew systems.  While its relatively easy to transfer 5-6 gallons of hot wort by dumping or siphoning it, or manage 10 lbs of grain in a bag, brewing at larger scales of 10, 15 or 20 gallons starts to make transferring large quantities of hot wort and grain by lifting very difficult.  Also its difficult to find coolers large enough to support these batches.

As one scales up to larger brewing systems, pumping wort and water around becomes a necessity for most brewers, and most sophisticated all grain setups use three large vessels – one for the mash, one for the boil and one for hot water used during the infusion and lauter.  Large converted Sanke kegs with the tops cut off are common, though many also use high end stainless steel pots.  Pumps are used to transfer wort and water between the various components.

Recirculating Mash Systems

If we consider the problem of keeping a large 15-20 gallon stainless steel mash tun at a constant temperature for the an average 60 minute mash, other problems arise.  First, most stainless vessels are not insulated, and conduct heat relatively well.  The old technique of heating an infusion and letting it sit in the cooler we used for smaller batches might not work as well in our large stainless pot or converted keg.  A second problem is that the larger volume is more likely to develop hot and cool spots in the mash tun over time – again making it difficult to achieve a consistent temperature across the entire grain bed.

A recirculating mash system addresses both of these problems using the pump mentioned earlier.  Rather than infusing hot water and letting the mash tun slowly cool, a recirculating system uses a pump to constantly recirculate and heat the water to maintain temperature and also avoid hot spots.   Typically a controller is used to turn on and off the heat source in the pump line to maintain a constant mash temperature.

This provides the following benefits:

• The temperature can be maintained very close to the target temperature even in an uninsulated metal mash tun – particularly if you use an electronic controller.  Often the mash temperature can be controlled much more precisely than a typical infusion cooler.
• Hot spots in the mash are minimized as there is a slow steady flow through the tun
• The constant recirculation of the mash results in very clean wort during the lauter
• Overall the mash is more consistent and repeatable for large batches than a non-recirculating infusion.  Repeatability is important when working with large home brewing systems or advanced systems that may serve as pilot batches for commercial microbrewers.

The recirculating mash systems (RIMS/HERMS) vary in how they heat the recirculating wort.

• A RIMS system uses direct heat on the tube to heat the wort as it is recirculated.  The heat source may be electric or gas, but the wort is heated as it passes through the tube and is pumped during recirculation.  The pump keeps the wort moving through the tube at a steady rate to avoid scorching it.  The pump must run continuously during the mash when heating, though the heater itself is often cycled on and off to control temperature.  A risk with the RIMS system is scorching the wort if the pump fails for some reason.
• In a HERMS system the wort is passed through a heat exchanger.  The most common type of heat exchanger is an immersion setup (much like an immersion chiller) where a coil of copper tubing is immersed in a hot liquor tun.  In this type of setup the hot liquor tun is often kept at a constant temperature slightly above the target mash temperature and the pump is cycled on and off to maintain the temperature of the mash.

Which one best fits your needs is up to you.  Often a RIMS system is easier to physically construct, but you need a variable heat source (one that can be turned on and off).  A HERMS system requires more equipment (often a coil immersed in a large pot) but can be regulated by simply turning the pump on and off.  Both offer similar overall performance for the advanced brewer.

If you want to build a RIMS or HERMS system of your own, More Beer (a BeerSmith sponsor) has a wide selection of pumps, kettles, and brewing sculptures to help you assemble your ideal system.

Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith home brewing blog.  Please sign up for my newsletter to get weekly articles on home brewing delivered to your inbox, or give our podcast a listen using the podcast link above.

• Beer Brewing Equipment with John Blichmann – BeerSmith Podcast 28
• Partial Mashing
• Simple Beer Brewing
• All Grain Beer Brewing With An Infusion Mash Setup
• Infusion Mashing and Decoction for Brewing Beer

This week we take a look at the science behind designing a good draft beer system for your kegged homebrew.   Everyone loves draft beer, and I consider my keg system to be one of the best purchases I’ve made in my brewing career.  Kegging makes everything easier, and if you want to start kegging, please read my earlier article on how to keg.  This week we’re going to look at the more advanced topic of balancing your keg lines.

In my previous article we covered how the temperature of the beer and carbonation level desired in volumes of CO2 drives the overall carbonation pressure – a number you can also calculate easily using BeerSmith.   You will need to know your keg pressure as a starting point for designing your overall system.  However this is not the complete story – as the lines of your keg play a very important role.  In general the longer your keg lines are, the lower the serving pressure at the tap.  If the tap pressure is too high or too low, the overall system is said to be out of balance and your beer will either foam or be flat.

Line Resistance is Not Futile

So how does one design a draft beer system to maintain proper balance at the tap?  The pressure drop depends on resistance in the beer line.  Beer lines have two types of resistance – one due to elevation change (i.e. the keg being higher or lower than the tap), and a second due to the beer lines themselves which generate friction as the beer flows through the lines.

Lets look at resistance first to keep things simple.  Here are some sample resistance ratings for various popular beer lines:

• 3/16″ ID  vinyl tubing = 3 psi/ft
• 1/4″ ID vinyl tubing = 0.85 psi/ft
• 3/16″ ID Polyethylene tubing = 2.2 psi/ft
• 1/4″ ID Polyethylene tubing = 0.5 psi/ft
• 3/8″ OD Stainless tubing = 0.2 psi/ft
• 5/16″ OD Stainless tubing = 0.5 psi/ft
• 1/4″ OD Stainless tubing = 2 psi/ft

Generally plastic tube of smaller than 3/16″ ID is not recommended – it provides too much resistance for practical use!

So now that we have the resistance factors how to we go about designing a keg system that is in balance?  For the purpose of our example lets assume that you have pressurized your kegging system at a nominal 12 psi, which at a 40F refrigerator temperature represents a mid range carbonation level of about 2.5 volumes of CO2 – typical for an average American or European beer.

At the tap end of our balanced keg system we want a slight positive pressure to push the beer out, but not enough to foam.  Generally this would be between less than 1 psi.  So let’s target a tap end pressure of 1 psi.  The math from here is pretty easy to calculate the balanced line length (L):

• L = (keg_pressure – 1 psi) / Resistance

So starting with our example of 12 psi keg pressure, and some typical 3/16″ vinyl keg tubing (which loses 3 lb/ft) we get L= (12-1)/3 which is 3.66 feet.  So a 12 psi kegging system would provide 1 psi of pressure at the tap with 3.66 feet of tubing.

Note that some authors leave out the 1 psi tap pressure (i.e. use zero tap pressure) and simplify the equation to L= (keg_pressure/Resistance) which makes the math even easier (the simplified equation would give you 4 feet of tubing vs 3.66 ft).  The truth is that you can target anywhere between zero and 1 psi at the tap and still be in balance – the difference is relatively small, though a slight positive keg pressure will give you a better flow rate.

The four foot example with 3/16″ ID vinyl is great if we only have a few feet to go (i.e. in a fridge) but what if one needs to go further?  A simple switch to 1/4″ ID vinyl tubing will get us there – looking at the same 12 psi keg system we get: L = (12-1)/0.85 = 12.9 feet.  So with the larger tubing we can deliver our beer to just under 13 feet.  For other applications we can consider polyethylene or stainless.  However if going a long distance one needs to also consider refrigeration – as you don’t want a large volume of warm beer in the lines.

Beer Line Length and Elevation

Changes in elevation also come into play if you design a more complex serving system.  The rule of thumb is that your beer loses 0.5 psi/foot of elevation gain.  So if your tap is 1 foot higher than the keg it loses 0.5 psi, and conversely if it is lower than the keg it will gain 0.5 psi per foot of elevation.

So if we roll this into our equation, we get the following for a given height (Height – in feet) of the tap above the keg itself:

• L = (keg_pressure – 1 – (Height/2)) / Resistance

So lets go back to our original example of a 12 psi keg pressure, 3/16″ ID vinyl tubing and this time put the tap 2 feet above the keg itself.  We get L=(12-1-(2/2))/3 which is 10/3 or a line length of 3.33 feet.

Another example with longer lines: 12 psi keg pressure, 1/4″ ID vinyl and a tap four feet above the keg gives: L=(12-1-(4/2)/0.85 which is 9/0.85 or 10.6 feet of line length.

Thanks!

Using the above equations, it is pretty easy to calculate the ideal line lengths for a given keg system operating at pressure.  Hopefully this will help you properly balance your own keg system for home use.  I intend to roll the line length calculator into a future update for BeerSmith.  I hope you enjoyed this short article on balancing your kegging system.  Thank you for joining me on the BeerSmith blog – and please subscribe to my newsletter or give my home brewing software a spin for some great ways to improve your homebrewing.

• How to Keg Homebrew Beer
• The Beer Gun and Counter Pressure Fillers: Bottling Beer
• Chilling Your Brew: Building an Immersion Chiller
• Beer Brewing Equipment with John Blichmann – BeerSmith Podcast 28
• RIMS and HERMS – Recirculating Infusion Mash Systems for Beer

A hydrometer is one of the simplest tools a home brewers has at their disposal, but also an important one so I thought I would spend a few moments this week discussing how to properly use a hydrometer and also how to adjust your hydrometer readings for temperature.  Most brewers rely on a hydrometer to determine their original and final gravity, and more advanced users will also track mash gravity and end of fermentation gravity.

What is a Hydrometer

A hydrometer is a very simple device that looks like a large thermometer.  When you immerse it in wort or finished beer it sinks to a varying degree depending on how dense the wort is and provides a reading of the specific gravity.  Most hydrometers used by home brewers are scaled for specific gravity readings, which is technically a unitless measure that generally ranges from 1.000 for water to 1.100 or higher for high gravity barley wines.  An average beer might have a starting gravity between 1.040 and 1.050 and a final gravity around 1.010.

The reason specific gravity is unitless is that is is simply a measure of the density of the liquid relative to water – so 1.000 would be the density of distilled water, and most wort or beer has a gravity slightly above that of water (1-10% higher actually).  To calculate the specific gravity of a liquid sample with known density, we just divide its density by the density of water – that is the specific gravity value.

Many professional brewers use hydrometers that measure in degrees Plato, which is another density system developed by Bohemian scientist Karl Balling in 1843 and later improved by Fritz Plato.  This scale is a measure of density relative relative to the percent sucrose in the water, so a reading of 11 degrees plato would be equivalent in density to water with 11% sucrose dissolved in it.

Converting from plato to specific gravity is not strictly linear, but most brewers use the approximation of 1 degree plato = 4 points specific gravity, so 12 degrees plato would correspond to 48 points of specific gravity, or a measure of 1.048 approximately.  For significantly larger values the approximation starts to drift off, so its best to use a calculator at that point (such as the one in BeerSmith).

Actually Using a Hydrometer

Use of a hydrometer is a pretty simple affair.  You typically remove a small amount of sample wort, place it in a clear sample cylinder and then immerse the hydrometer in the liquid.  Read the gravity reading from the scale on the hydrometer where it crosses the water-air boundary.  There will be a slight curve along the water-air line (called the meniscus), so if you want to be really accurate you should take the reading at the lowest point in that air-water curve (the bottom of the meniscus).

One final cautionary note – many beginners tend to take the sample in the tube that the hydrometer was sold in.  You need to be a bit cautious when doing so as the tube is quite small and the hydrometer will sometimes stick to the side a bit which could give you an inaccurate reading.  Ideally you want it floating freely in the wort, which is why more advanced brewers will purchase a small sample vessel or use another vessel to hold the sample.

Adjusting for Temperature

Hydrometers are all calibrated to be accurate at a standard temperature.  For most home brewing hydrometers, the calibration temperature is 60F (20C), though a few laboratory hydrometers are calibrated to a different temperature (usually 68F/20C).   The calibration temperature is usually printed on the scale of your hydrometer in really small letters.

Manufacturers calibrate the hydrometer to be accurate at their calibration temperature, and its often a good idea to validate that by cooling a sample of distilled water to that calibration temperature and verifying that your hydrometer reads 1.000.

If you use your hydrometer at another temperature other than the calibration temperature you should add or subtract a small adjustment to get an accurate reading.  In practice, if you are working near room temperature the adjustment is relatively small (typically one point).  However when you measure hot wort (such as wort coming from the mash tun or boiler) the difference can be significant and you should adjust your hydrometer for the calibration temperature.

The formula I use in BeerSmith is:

sg = sg_measured + sg_measured * (1.628E-5 * (tc – t) – 5.85E-6 * (tc*tc – t*t) + 1.532E-8 (tc*tc*tc – t*t*t))

where sg_measured is the measured value, tc is the calibration temperature and t is the temperature (both in celsuis the sample was measured at.  This gives a pretty accurate measure, but its not much fun to calculate by hand, so there is a hydrometer calculation tool in BeerSmith to do this adjustment for you.

Thanks for visiting the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  I hope you will subscribe for regular articles, and hope you have a great week!

• Calibrating your Home Brewing Equipment
• How to Use a Refractometer, Brix and Beer Brewing
• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 1
• Brewhouse Efficiency for All Grain Beer Brewing
• Krausening Home Brewed Beer

This week marks the third anniversary of the BeerSmith blog, which started on 14 Feb 2008.  I thought I would mark the event by talking a bit about recent changes and also provide you a few of my favorite posts from the last year.

It has been a big year for BeerSmith and the blog this past year.  Some of the big changes over the last year include:

• Started up the BeerSmith email list last April, which now has well over 4,500 active subscribers (in addition to our 6000+ RSS subscribers)
• Quit my day job last July to focus on primarily on BeerSmith for the last 6 months
• Redesigned the BeerSmith blog in late September to give it a much cleaner look
• Launched the book Home Brewing with BeerSmith in late October – now in print on Amazon and the Kindle
• Started the BeerSmith podcast, which was featured in iTunes New and Notable
• Cleaned up the BrewPoll.com news site and gave it a fresh start
• The discussion forum continues to grow – now over 17,000 posts from 7,300 members
• The combined BeerSmith sites had over 1 million unique visitors in calendar year 2010
• I’m about to start testing on the next version of BeerSmith, which will be a available for PC and Mac in a few months

Some Notable Posts from Year 3

To mark the occasion, I thought I would include a few of my favorite posts/podcasts from the past year:

• Beer Bloggers and 365 Beers – Yes it was only episode 2, but this one made it to the front page of iTunes new/notable
• Five Ways to Save Money Brewing – A few ways to pinch pennies for the homebrewer
• Schwarzbier Recipes – German Black Beer – I’ve always been partial to darker beers
• Brewing Big – High Gravity Beers – Some thoughts on making the biggest beers
• Yeast Starters Part 1 (and Part 2) – More than I ever thought I would know about yeast viability and starters
• Brewing Fruit Beers (two parts) – How to mix beers and various fruits
• John Palmer – Home Brewing Celebrity – Podcast interview with the top brewing author John Palmer
• Russian and Imperial Stout Recipes – The “English” style of “Russian” Imperial Stout
• The BeerSmith Home Brewing book release – A collection of some of my best brewing articles in print
• Trappist Dubbel and Tripel Beer Recipes – Who does not love Belgian beer?
• Aluminum vs Stainless?  Best Brewing Pots – This seemed to be an endless topic of discussion on many forums

It goes without saying that none of this would be possible without your continued support – both your direct financial support and also the tons of community support you all provide.

Thank you for continuing to support the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog – and have a great week!

[Editors note on image: The cake is a lie!]

• John Palmer – The Home Brewing Celebrity – BSHB Podcast Ep 3
• Irish Stout Recipes with John Palmer – BeerSmith Podcast 11
• Russian Imperial Stout Recipes
• Beer Brewing Equipment with John Blichmann – BeerSmith Podcast 28
• Chris White on Yeast and His New Book – BSHB Podcast #4

This week, I take a look at calories in your home brewed beer, how to calculate them and where they come from.  With superbowl weekend upon us, the subject of how many calories are in your homebrew may be moot given the mountains of beer and snacks likely to be consumed on Sunday afternoon, but for those of you who are calorie or carbohydrate conscious, read on.

Calorie Counting

I’ll start with the good news first – an average 12oz commercial beer has slightly less calories than a comparable soda or even a glass of juice.  An average American lager (say Budweiser at 5% ABV) has about 145 calories for 12 oz.  A Coke classic runs about 155 calories for a 12 oz can and orange juice is about 184 calories.

If you drink light beer, they generally run from 100-112 calories per 12 oz and have slightly less alcohol (average of about 4.2% alcohol), placing them well below regular sodas or juice.  Premium beers run a bit heavier – a Sam Adams Lager or Boston Ale has about 160 calories and high alcohol beers like New Belgium Trippel (7.8% alcohol) contain 215 calories in a single 12oz serving.

Where Do The Calories Come From?

Not surprisingly the calories in beer comes from alcohol and carbohydrates – both from the malted barley (or other grains) used to brew beer.  During fermentation, yeast breaks down the simple carbohydrates and converts them into ethanol (ethyl alcohol).  The longer chains of carbohydrates that the yeast cannot break down remain in the finished beer, contributing additional calories.  Full bodied and all malt beers tend to have more residual carbohydrates.  Roughly 60% of the calories in an average beer come from alcohol and 40% from residual carbohydrates.

Despite the term “beer belly”, very little of the alcohol you consume is converted into fat.  In fact, your liver converts most of the alcohol into acetate which is then released into your bloodstream and consumed directly to produce energy.  The bad part is that when your body is burning alcohol/acetate, it is not burning fat, so you will tend to retain the fat you already have, plus your body may convert some of the residual carbs from the beer into fat.

Adding to the effect is the fact that alcohol tends to be an appetite enhancer – so if you drink a lot you will likely eat more than you would with water or even other carbohydrate drinks.  Not that all news is bad – in fact several studies have found that drinking in moderation (1-2 drinks a day) can actually have a positive effect on overall health if combined with a healthy diet and exercise.  However, clearly moderation is the key.

Calculating Calories

Calorie conscious brewers can estimate the number of calories in 12oz of homebrewed beer from the starting (OG) and ending (FG) gravities.  BeerSmith also will show you the calories if you use the Alcohol/Attenuation tool.

• Calorie_from_alcohol = 1881.22 * FG * (OG-FG)/(1.775-OG)
• Calories_from_carbs = 3550.0 * FG * ((0.1808 * OG) + (0.8192 * FG) – 1.0004)
• Total calories – just add the Calories_from_alcohol to Calories_from_carbs

So lets look at a sample beer with a OG of 1.048 and a FG of 1.010 which has 4.9% alcohol by volume.  Running the numbers above, we get 99 calories from alcohol and 59 calories from carbohydrates, for a total of 158 calories.  Most beers have calorie counts in this range – with the bulk of calories coming from alcohol and not carbohydrates.

Light and low-carb beers tend to be made at lower alcohol levels, and also have less malt and more adjuncts (corn, rice, etc) to reduce residual carbohydrates.  Essentially light beer makers attack the problem on both sides – by cutting the alcohol levels and also cutting the residual carbs.  Corn, rice and other non-barley adjuncts tent to ferment more fully leaving less residual carbs.  The tradeoff is that the body of the beer comes from the residual carbs, so light beers made with more rice will generally have less body than barley malt beers.  However, in very light bodied styles like American Pilsner, the effect is less noticed than it would be in a low-cal Porter or Pale Ale.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s article on calories and beer.  Thank you for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Please subscribe to the newsletter for weekly articles on home brewing, and have a great home brewing week!

• Making Full Bodied Beer at Home
• Troubleshooting Homebrewed Beer
• Brewing Fruit Beers at Home Part 2 of 2
• The Advantages of Home Brewed Beer
• Old Ale Recipes – Stock Ale and Winter Warmers

This week, I take a look at how to calculate the appropriate starter size for home brewing beer with liquid yeast.  In part 1 of this in-depth series on yeast, I covered how you can calculate the required pitching rate (number of yeast cells needed) for a given batch of beer, understanding the viability of yeast over time, and also how to hydrate and use dry yeast.  This week, I’ll finish the detailed calculations for liquid yeast as well as provide a summary on how to do the entire end-to-end calculation.

When We Last Left Our Yeast…

I ended part 1 on yeast starters explaining that all liquid starters are not created equally.  The growth rate of the yeast (number of ending cells divided by the number of starting cells) varies depending on the pitching rate of the yeast.  In fact if we pitch a typical liquid yeast package (vial or large smack pack) of 100 billion cells into starters of varying size we get the graph to the right.  This is extracted from “Yeast, A Practical Guide” by Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff.

What this shows is that 100 billion cells pitched into a 2 liter starter will only grow to a bit over 200 billion cells (growth rate of 2.05), while the same 100 billion cells in a 20 liter (5+ gallon) starter will grow to about 600 billion cells (growth rate of 6.0).   However, a 20 liter starter is essentially no starter at all if your batch of beer is only 20 liters.

In part 1, I covered how to calculate the ideal number of cells needed for an average batch of beer.  A sample 5.25 gallon ale at 1.048 gravity needed about 177 billion yeast cells.  So using the graph at the right, a 100 billion cell packet pitched into a starter of just over a liter would be sufficient for this beer.  However, if we factor in viability (the aging of the yeast which was also covered in part 1), a larger starter of 2-3 liters is needed, since we won’t be starting with a fully viable 100 billion cell yeast package.

Since you don’t want your starter to be so huge it is a major fraction of your beer, the practical range most home brewers operate in is really on the left end of this graph – typically 1-4 liters for a five gallon batch.  This means that in most cases, you will not achieve a growth rate above 3.0 for your starter unless you use a multi-stage starter.

Yeast Growth vs Starting Population

The above graph is great if you always pitch a 100 billion cell starter and are always brewing a 5.25 gallon batch, but often this is not the case.  To generalize the above graph, we need to use it with larger or smaller starters and batch sizes.

It turns out this is not hard to do – since yeast growth depends primarily on the starting population and amount of wort available.  To calculate starter size for the generic case we need to introduce a new term called the “inoculation rate”.

The amount of yeast per unit volume you start with is called the “inoculation rate”.  Inoculation rate is typically expressed as millions of cells per milliliter of wort.  For example, a 100 billion cell yeast pack in 2 liters of wort would work out to 50 mil/ml (50 million cells per milliliter).  Inoculation rate is really easy to calculate, since you just take the starting number of cells and divide by the size of your starter.  The math gets easy when you realize that 1 billion cells into a liter is the same as 1 million cells per milliliter.

So if we look at growth as a function of inoculation rate (see graph), we can see the same effect as described earlier – high growth only occurs in starters with relatively low inoculation rates.  Since most homebrewers are using a 100 billion cell starter in 1-4 liters of wort (inoculation rates above 25 mil/ml) – we’re basically working on the left end of the graph at growth rates below 3.

How Many Yeast Packets Do I Need?

In practice, very large starters are often not desirable for the homebrewer so often you need to start with more than one vial/pack of liquid yeast in a batch. Doing this limits the growth rate needed so you don’t end up with a starter that is almost as big as your beer batch itself.

For example, lets look at making the same 5 gallon batch from a single small size (not the large one) Wyeast smack pack.  Assuming the package is new (100% viable with 18 billion cells), the 5 gallon batch which we calculated needed 177 billion cells would give us a growth rate of 177/18 = 9.83.  No matter how large a single starter is we are not going to get a growth factor greater than 6.0.

The alternative is to use two small smack packs in the starter which gives us 177/(2*18) = 4.91 growth.  However, this is still a huge starter – since looking up a 4.91 growth on the chart gives us a starter size of nearly 4 gallons (15 liters) to make a 5 gallon beer.  Clearly this won’t work either.

In practice, you need to limit the growth of the starter generally to less than a factor of 3.0 so you don’t make a starter that is almost as large as your finished beer.  You can do this by upping the number of packets each time your required growth goes over 3.0.  So in the above example, moving to three small smack packs gives us a required growth of 177/(3*18) = 3.2 growth and four small smack packs gives 177/(4*18) = 2.45 growth.  So four small packets would be needed with (from the chart) a starter of approximately 3.5 liters.

Knowing this now, its usually best to calculate the number of packets first, adjusting the growth rate needed, and then calculating the actual starter size.

Putting it All Together – How to Calculate Liquid Yeast Starter Size

Here’s a summary of the entire yeast starter calculation from end to end as a step-by-step process:

1. Calculate the total number of yeast cells needed for your batch based on the starting gravity and volume of your batch.  It is typically expressed in billions of cells – and recommended you pitch 0.75 million cells per milliliter per degree plato for ales, 1.5 mil/ml-P for lagers and 1.0 mil/ml-P for hybrids.  If you are not used to working in plato and milliliters, the english equivalents would be (approximately): 0.71 billion cells per gallon per point of specific gravity for an ale, 1.42 bil/gal-point for a lager and 0.948 bil/gal-point for a hybrid.  A sample 1.050 gravity, beer would have 50 gravity points and for a 5 gallon batch need -> 1.42 x  50  x 5= 355 billion cells.
2. Calculate the Viability of Your Yeast Packs – As covered in part 1, Wyeast and White labs large tubes/packs have a little over 100 billion cells when new, and the small Wyeast pack has about 18-20 billion cells.  However, these packages lose about 20% of their cells per month of aging.  So a 100 billion pack/vial would only have about half of its cells (51 billion) viable after three months.
3. Calculate the Growth Rate Needed – Divide the total number of yeast cells needed by the number of viable cells in your yeast pack.  So if you are brewing the lager mentioned above which needs 355 billion cells from a single pack of yeast that is one month old (which has about 80 billion cells), the growth rate needed is 355/80 which is 4.4.
4. Decide if You Need More Packs or a Multi-Step Starter – If you need to achieve a growth rate above 3.0, it is probably time to look at adding more yeast packs to your starter or creating a multi-step starter.  The reason is that beyond a growth rate of 3.0, the starter sizes start to get very large relative to the size of your batch of beer.  In the example we just mentioned (growth rate of 4.4) you would need to have a starter of well over 10 liters (almost 3 gallons) to get that growth level in our 5 gallon batch.  Buying a second yeast pack would cut the growth rate needed down to a more manageable level of 2.2.
5. Look Up the Innoculation Rate – Now that we know the growth rate needed, and have adjusted it down a bit (to less than 3.0) if needed, we can determine what our initial inoculation rate should be.  The easy way to do this is by looking at the graph above and work backwards.  Find your desired growth rate on the Y axis, and then look up the needed inoculation rate on the X axis.  For example if we need a growth rate of 2.2, the inoculation rate is approximately 50 mil/ml.
6. Find the Starter Size – Since we know how many total yeast cells we are using for our starter based on the viability and number of yeast packs, and we have the inoculation rate, we can just divide the two to get the starter size.  Divide the number of viable cells in your yeast pack by the inoculation rate to get the starter size.  For the example we’ve been tracking, we decided in step 4 to use two starter yeast packs, each with 80 million viable cells for a total of 160 million cells.  We found our inoculation rate from step 5 would be 50 mil/ml (which is also 50 billion cells/liter).  Dividing the two we get 160/50 which is 3.2 liters – so a 3.2 liter starter is ideal here.
7. Create the Starter – Once you have the size, you need only create the starter itself.  An ideal starting gravity for your yeast starter is 1.036 (9 plato).  To create the starter, just open BeerSmith (or your favorite tool), create a blank recipe with the starter size, and add enough dry malt extract to reach a starting gravity of 1.036 for your starter.  If you don’t have the tool handy, a good rule of thumb is about 0.2 lb of dry malt extract per quart of starter (or 90 grams/liter).

The whole process is a bit complex, which is why I’ve added a separate calculator to the upcoming version of BeerSmith to make it much easier.  Thank you for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog – I hope you will subscribe for more great articles, and have a great week!

• Yeast Starters for Home Brewing Beer – Part 1
• Making a Yeast Starter for your Home Brew Beer
• How to Batch Sparge: A Guide for Batch Sparging and No Sparge
• Ten BeerSmith 2 Brewing Software Tips
• How to Keg Homebrew Beer

Most brewers understand that yeast starters are important for making your beer.  If you pitch the proper quantity of yeast, your beer will ferment fully and give you a clean finish. Some time back, I wrote an article on how to create a basic yeast starter, but that only touched briefly on the important topic of starter size.  This week I dive in with an in-depth overview of yeast starters, how to properly size them and how to best use them.

Using too little yeast (under-pitching) will result in a diaceytl flavor (butterscotch) in your finished beer as well as high finishing gravities.  While far less common, over-pitching (too much yeast) can also result in off flavors as the yeast will run out of sugar before it completes a full fermentation cycle.

Recently I had Chris White from White Labs as a guest on the BeerSmith podcast, and read his excellent book Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation (Brewing Elements Series)(Amazon Aff Link).  I also did quite a bit of research while developing a yeast starter tool for the next version of BeerSmith.  In both cases, I learned a lot about yeast starters and how to properly calculate and size them.  I thought I might share this knowledge with you.

The Pitching Rate – How Much Yeast Do I Need?

The amount of yeast you need (called the pitching rate) varies depending on the type of yeast you are using.  Most sources quote 1 million yeast cells per milliliter per degree plato for an average beer.  A more accurate figure from Dave Miller is 0.75 million/ml-P for ales, 1.5 million/ml-P for lager and 1.0 milion/ml-P for hybrid yeasts.  To calculate the number of yeast cells you need overall, you simply multiply the pitching rate by the volume of the beer (in ml) and gravity of the beer (in plato) to get the number of live cells you need to pitch.

So for a sample ale of 5.25 gallons and 1.048 gravity – the number (if you do the math converting to ml and plato) is 177 billion cells.  So if you pitch a starter with 177 billion cells, you will have a proper amount of yeast for fermenting the beer.

Liquid and Dry Yeast Pack Size

Knowing how many yeast cells you need for a given batch provides a starting point, but next you need to figure out how to meet that need.  Most home brewers use commercial liquid or dry yeast packets to prime their starter.

The two primary liquid yeast providers in the US are White labs and Wyeast.  White labs yeast comes in vials that contain from 80-120 billion cells each, with an average of about 100 billion cells for a fresh  vial.  Wyeast labs come in large and small smack packs.  The large pack is comparable to the vials, with about 100 billion cells per smack pack.  The small smack pack has considerably less – about 18-20 billion cells per pack.

Since even the 100 billion packs/vials are less than the 177 billion cells we calculated for a moderate ale, this means that most 5 gallon batches would benefit from a starter.

Dry yeast packets (Danstar, DCL SafeAle and others), which are considerably denser, contain about 18 billion yeast cells per gram.  Dry yeast packets come in small and large packet sizes of 5 grams and 11.5 grams.  Running the numbers, the 5 gram packet contains about 90 billion yeast cells and the 11.5 gram packet contains 207 billion yeast cells.

Viability

The figures above are for fresh liquid or dry yeast packets.  Unfortunately both dry and liquid yeast cells do die off as they are stored, making older yeast less effective.  The percentage of live yeast in a sample is called its viability – a brand new packet is 100% viable, but loses viability over time.  The effect is much more pronounced for liquid yeast than dry yeast.

Dry yeast has a long shelf life.  If stored at room temperature it loses only about 20% of its viability per year (<2% per month), and if refrigerated it only loses 4% per year.  So if you refrigerate your dry yeast it will last many years.

Liquid yeast, which must be refrigerated, has a much shorter shelf life.  Wyeast lists their shelf life at 5-6 months while White labs recommends 4 months.  White labs on their web site says that after 30 days, their vials have 75-85% viability, which is a loss of about 20% of viability in the first month.  If we compound this loss (20% per month), this means that the viability of liquid yeast follows this progression:

• 1 month – 80% viable
• 2 months – 64% viable
• 3 months – 51% viable
• 4 months – 41% viable
• 5 months – 33% viable
• 6 months – 26% viable

Now even at 6 months, with 26% viability you can make a suitable starter, but you need to take into account the viability of liquid yeast when calculating the starter size.

Dry Yeast

Dry yeast does not by itself need a starter, as long as you pitch enough packets of yeast.  Generally all that is needed is that you hydrate the yeast with warm water for about 20 minutes before pitching.  Use lukewarm water at 105F (41C) in the amount of 10 ml per gram of yeast.  This works out to 50 ml (1.7 oz) of water per 5 gram packet or 115 ml (3.9 oz) per large dry packet.

If you are using dry yeast as the seed for a starter to step up for a larger starter, hydrate it as usual and then add the yeast to the starter.  As above, the 5 gram packet contains about 90 billion yeast cells and the 11.5 gram packet contains 207 billion yeast cells.  Age is seldom a significant factor unless the yeast is over a year old or has not been stored properly.

Liquid Yeast

Liquid yeast, due to both the cell count and viability lost as it ages, often does require a starter.  To figure out how large the starter needs to be, you first want to calculate the number of packets needed.  Generally the way to start is by calculating how many viable yeast cells you have in your vials or packets.  This is done by multiplying the starting yeast cells for a packet by the viability (use the table above).  So if you have a White labs vial that was manufactured 2 months ago, you will have 100 billion x 64% which is 64 billion cells per vial.

Next calculate the growth in cells needed.  The beer in the earlier example (5.25 gallons of ale wort at 1.048) requires 177 billion cells.  If we were to use 1 vial of 2 month old ale yeast at 64 billion cells, we would calculate the growth at 177 billion divided by 64 billion = 2.77 — meaning that we need to expand the yeast 2.77 times to get to our target population.

This means our starter needs to grow 2.77 times, from about 64 billion cells to about 177 billion cells in order to create the proper pitching rate for our finished beer.  The next step is to figure out how large a starter we need to create to achieve this growth.  One might think this is a straightforward calculation, but it turns out that the growth of yeast is not linear – it depends on how many yeast cells you have to start with.

The graph to the right, extracted from a table in Chris White’s yeast book, shows the growth rate from an experiment with a 100 billion cell vial of yeast added to starters of varying size.  Obviously if you start with a very small starter, and a lot of yeast there is not much sugar to support growth and the growth rate remains low.  At the other end of the spectrum, if you pitch a relatively small amount of yeast into a large starter (approaching 20 liters) you get high growth.

However, growth rate peaks out at around 6.0, so pitching 100 billion cells is not going to get you much more than 600 billion cells total (6x growth rate), no matter how large the starter is.

Starter Size Coming in Part 2

This week I covered how to calculate the number of yeast cells for a given batch as well as the viability of liquid and dry yeasts.  I also explained how to calculate the number of dry yeast packs needed and how to hydrate those.  We started to look at growth rates for liquid yeast starters, a topic which I’ll continue in part two.  I’ll also take a closer look at the above graph and how it helps us calculating the actual starter size for a liquid yeast sample in part two.

Thank you for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Hopefully you have subscribed to receive more articles and also are listening to the new BeerSmith podcast.  Also I wanted to thank you very much for your support this year and wish you a very happy holiday season as we close out 2010.

• Yeast Starters for Home Brewing Beer Part 2
• Making a Yeast Starter for your Home Brew Beer
• Beer Yeast, Fermentation, and Home Brewing
• An Interview White Labs Yeast President Chris White
• Ten BeerSmith 2 Brewing Software Tips

I relaunched the BrewPoll Home Brewing and Craft Beer News site after a major overhaul of the site this week.  BrewPoll is a social media site for beer fans where you can share your favorite sites and stories about home brewing, craft beer, and general beer brewing news.  The upgraded site is running a new generation of software and has a much cleaner look, and a lot less spam.  I hope the new site will attract beer and brewing fans who enjoy learning the latest in beer and home brewing news.

What is BrewPoll?

BrewPoll is a “digg-like” social site where you can submit you own stories or bookmarks to your favorite web sites and resources.  It is intended for beer lovers as well as home brewers to share news, stories, tips, and useful resources.

New stories initially go to the “upcoming news” page where they are voted on.  Once a story gets a few votes, it is promoted to the “published news” page where it appears on the front page and in our RSS feed.  You don’t need an account to vote on the site – just click on the vote buttons.  To submit a story, you do need to create an account, but that can easily be done by clicking on the “Register” button in the top right of the site.

Good News For Bloggers and Website Owners

While it may take some time to build up traffic again for BrewPoll, the site does offer some advantages if you own a beer or brewing website.  In addition to the direct traffic from BrewPoll visitors, BrewPoll itself is a page-rank 3 website with what is called “do-follow” links.  So if your story gets published on the front page, you get a page-rank 3 link back to your site or story, which will help you with search engine optimization and web site authority for sites like Google.  Google loves backlinks.

Some blogs also republish our RSS feed on their site or sidebar, so your stories may be featured there as well.

Why The Changes?

I launched BrewPoll two years ago, and while it did well at first, I had major problems with spamming particularly in the last year.  Because BrewPoll does draw a moderate amount of traffic and is a page-rank 3 site in Google, it became a popular site for spammers creating backlinks for various unseemly products.  Unfortunately, it reached a point where I was unable to keep up with a number of automated bots attacking the site, particularly on the upcoming page.

So this Fall I took the site down for several weeks so I could delete as much of the spam as possible, upgrade the software to integrate multiple layers of protection and then relaunch the site.  Most importantly, I put in a manual moderation system so all stories are moderated before they appear in the “upcoming stories” page.

Submit and Vote on Your Favorite Story, Tip or Web Site Here

Visit BrewPoll.com – and don’t forget to vote on the Upcoming News as well as your favorite Published stories to push them to the top.  I welcome your submissions as well as long as they are related to beer or brewing.

Thank you for visiting the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog - Have a great brewing week!

• New BrewPoll Home Brewing and Craft Beer News Site
• Home Brewing Social Sites: Beer and Web 2.0
• One Year of The BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog
• The BeerSmith Homebrewing Blog – Third Anniversary
• Home Brewing with BeerSmith Book – Its Released!

Refractometers are widely used in the wine and beer industry by to track fermentation, but less commonly used by home brewers.  However, if used properly a refractometer can be a great tool to track specific gravity in place of or to supplement your hydrometer.  This week, I take a look at refractometers, how they work and how an average home brewer can use one.  I’m going to use BeerSmith as the refractometer conversion tool, as the hand calculations are fairly complex and could occupy another entire article.

How a Refractometer Works

A refractometer is an optical device that, like a hydrometer, measures the specific gravity of your beer or wort.  It does so by sampling a small amount of liquid, and looking at its optically.  The main advantage over a hydrometer is the small sample size needed – typically only a few drops.

If you start with a glass of clear water, you will notice that the water and glass bend the light passing through it in a certain way.  The bending of the light by the water is called refraction.  Light bends to different degrees as it passes through different substances.  This is the same effect that glasses lenses in eyeglasses are based upon – the lenses bend the light allowing glasses to adjust the focus of an image and make it clearer to your eyes.

If you add sugar to your glass of water, the light will bend more.  The refractometer takes advantage of this effect to measure the amount of bending (refraction) which indicates the amount of sugar in the sample.  Most refractometers use a prism and a light source to illuminate the sample.  On inexpensive refractometers, you hold the instrument up to a natural light source.  More expensive models have internal light sources.

Most brewing refractometers measure samples in Brix, which is a scale used to measure specific gravity primarily by wine makers.  Some also use a Refractive Index (RI) scale.  Both the Brix and RI indexes need to be converted to standard specific gravity or Plato scales using a formula, as wort does not have the same reflective properties as plain sugar water.

Calibrating Your Refractometer

Before you use a refractometer, it needs to be calibrated.  Most refractometers are calibrated by using a sample of distilled water.  You lift up the daylight (sample plate), and add a few drops of distilled water.  Close the daylight plate and allow the water to spread across the sample plate.  Make sure there are no bubbles.  Refractometers are temperature sensitive, so allow the sample to reach room temperature unless you have a model that automatically compensates for temperature.

Hold the refractometer up to natural light and take a reading.  Most refractometers have a calibration knob or screw that will let you adjust the zero setting.  What you want to do now is adjust the refractometer so it reads zero with distilled water in it.  This may take a few tries.  If you can’t zero it out or it is not adjustable, you can handle the adjustment using BeerSmith (see the calibration items under the refractometer tool).

If you want an accurate reading, you should also calibrate the refractometer using a wort sample that has a known specific gravity.  You can do this calibration by mixing up a small amount of dry malt extract with water, then take an accurate hydrometer reading and also refractometer reading and enter both readings into the BeerSmith refractometer tool (use the “calibrate refractometer settings” button).

Using Your Refractometer when Beer Brewing

Using the refractometer is very similar to what you just did when calibrating it.  Open the sample plate, make sure it is clean and dry, then add a few drops of your wort.  Again, if the wort is hot allow it to cool to room temperature first (ideally 68F).  Close the sample plate, check for bubbles, and then hold the refractometer up to a natural light source.

Reading the refractometer is easy – just take the reading directly from the sight scale.  The reading you take will most likely be in percent/degrees Brix or RI.

Refractometer Limitations when Brewing Beer

Here’s where some people get disappointed when using a refractometer.  Refractometers are calibrated to measure the amount of sugar (sucrose) in a clear sample of water.  The sugar in barley beer (maltose) is a different animal.  Therefore some adjustment needs to be made to take into account the fact that we’re measuring colored maltose and not clear sucrose.  You can’t just use the measurement you made with the refractometer.

Converting the Brix measurement to a specific gravity or Plato measurement made on a sample of unfermented wort is a moderately complex calculation which requires a spreadsheet or a tool like BeerSmith.  However, there is yet another complication: once the wort starts fermenting alcohol is produced, and the alcohol changes the overall equation yet again.

In practice, this means that in order to calculate the true gravity of a fermenting or fully fermented beer, you need not only the current refractometer reading, but also the starting gravity.  So if you are using a refractometer, it is critically important you record the starting gravity of the wort before fermentation if you want to calculate a mid-fermentation or final gravity for your beer.

Converting  Brix to Specific Gravity or Plato with BeerSmith

Now that we’ve calibrated your refractometer, and understand the limitation, open up the Refractometer tool in BeerSmith.  Assuming this is your original gravity reading for unfermented wort, select the “Unfermented Wort Gravity” calculation at the top and enter your Brix (or RI) reading from the refractometer.   The “corrected gravity” will show your original gravity for the beer.

Once you have your original gravity and the wort is fermenting, you can take additional readings.  In this case use the “Fermenting Wort Gravity” calculation in the tool and enter both your Brix refractometer reading and the original gravity.  The corrected gravity will show your current adjusted reading.

There is a third calculation in BeerSmith, called “Finished Beer ABV/OG” which lets you back out the original gravity of the beer if you forgot to measure it in the first place.  In this case you need to take a final gravity measurement with both the refractometer and an accurate hydrometer, and enter those readings to get the original gravity.

Thank you for joining me on the BeerSmith blog.  Check out my weekly newsletter and new book if you want to read some of the dozens of articles I’ve written on home brewing.

• Using a Hydrometer for Beer Brewing
• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 1
• Calibrating your Home Brewing Equipment
• Krausening Home Brewed Beer
• Brewhouse Efficiency for All Grain Beer Brewing

I’ll keep this post short as I’ve already talked quite a bit about my new book that was just released.  Its a collection of about 75 of the best articles on home brewing techniques and beer styles from the BeerSmith home brewing blog that will be available in paperback format and on the Kindle next Wednesday – the 27th of October.

What I have also done is offered everyone a free chapter from the book (Chapter 3, in PDF format) to anyone who subscribes to my mailing list.  You can sign up for the email newsletter by entering your email and name into the form along the right sidebar of the BeerSmith blog, or at this subscription page.  Its free to subscribe and you can unsubscribe at any time.  If you are already getting my newsletter, then you should have received an email a day or two ago with the download link.

I’m offering a limited discount on the book to my newsletter subscribers who order the paperback version through the Createspace link (sorry, the discount is only on this version as I can’t set up discounts on the other stores).  I’ll send out the discount code for that on Wednesday morning.

If you want to learn more about the book, you can visit the main page here.  Also if you have a twitter account, you can help me out by tweeting this book page using the “Retweet button” on the page.

Thanks! — Brad Smith

• The Home Brewing with BeerSmith Book is Out
• Barley Crusher Giveaway Reminder – Closes Sep 15th
• The BeerSmith Home Brewing Guide
• Win a Barley Crusher! – BeerSmith Drawing
• Who Won the Barley Crusher? Giving Another One Away!

Compared to some buying quality commercial beer, home brewing is still relatively inexpensive, but hop and malt prices have risen the last few years as a result of the hop shortage and shortage for certain malts.  In addition the global recession has put some pressure on many homebrewers.  This week I’ll give you 5 tips on how to save a few dollars home brewing.

Buy in Bulk or Join a Group Buy

One of the simplest ways to save money on your ingredients is to buy in bulk.  If you are an all grain brewer, you can buy 50lb bags of pale malt locally for less than half of what it would cost if you bought it by the pound.  A 50 lb bag of pale malt goes a long way – usually 10-12 batches.

You can do the same with specialty grains and hops.  Hops by the pound is available from mail order houses for less than half the cost of retail hops by the ounce.  Many stores offer you a substantial discount if you purchase hops by the pound.

What if you don’t need 50lbs of black patent malt or an entire pound of BC Goldings hops?  Contact your local homebrew club or some brewing friends and do a group buy.  Buy several pounds of hops and a few bags of commonly used specialty grains and divide them up.  One of the best suppliers for large bags of grains is your local homebrew store – many of these sell 50lb bags of grains and also bulk hops.  If they don’t have a 50lb specialty bag of grain, they can often special order it for you with their next order and save on shipping.

Cut Down on the Hops

Another money saving strategy is to reduce the hops you are using.  A few years back when the hop crisis first hit and hop prices doubled and tripled overnight, I wrote an article on 10 Tips for Surviving the Hops Shortage.  It contains some great tips for reducing your hop usage without sacrificing the taste or quality of your beer.

Little things like using a full batch boil, boiling your bittering hops a bit longer or using higher alpha hops for bittering can save money over time on your hop bill.    Take a look at that article if you want some creative suggestions.  Another offshoot I enjoy is growing hops at home.

Wash and Reuse Your Yeast

Liquid yeast (and the recent crop of high quality dry yeasts) have significantly increased the quality of home brewed beers, but they are not inexpensive.  Next to malt grains, it is usually the most expensive component that goes into your home brewed beer.

One instant way to save money is to wash your yeast and reuse it for another batch.  Washing yeast is a process that lets you save yeast from one batch and store it safely in your refrigerator to use it on another batch.  Done properly, you can save yeast for several months using this technique.

Build Your Own Equipment

Instead of buying your brewing equipment from the store, consider making your own.  Brewers are a pretty creative bunch and beer brewing gives you the opportunity to experiment with all kinds of interesting containers, pipes, pumps and other toys.  Examples include making your own mash tun, building a chiller or making a hop back.

Go All Grain

Switching to all grain is another way to save money.  All grain batches can be brewed at prices generally 30% less than extract beers.   If you buy grains in bulk you can save even more.  Grains cost less than extract, and you achieve higher hop utilization with a full batch boil, reducing your hop usage.

Brewing all grain does require an equipment investment up front, but if you are a frequent brewer you will pay for it in the long run.  Also, brewing all grain gives you additional control over the brewing process and the ability to use a full range of specialty grains including some that must be mashed.

Those are the money saving tips for this week.  I have some great new stuff coming soon including a collection of my blog articles in book form – look for it next month.  Thank you for joining the BeerSmith blog - and please subscribe if you want to get regular weekly articles like this delivered to your inbox for free.

• Brewing on a Budget with Chris Graham – BSHB Podcast 19
• Partial Mashing
• Simple Beer Brewing
• Malting Barley Grain at Home
• Ten Top Tips for Home Brewing Beer

Last week in part one of this series, we covered how to calculate apparent attenuation and what the difference is between real and apparent extract.  This week we’ll take a look at apparent and real attenuation, and how to use attenuation in designing beer recipes.

Apparent vs Real Attenuation

Now that we understand real-extract, what is the difference between real and apparent attenuation?  Well real attenuation is nothing more than the attenuation calculated using the real extract instead of the apparent extract.  Real attenuation is the actual attenuation of the beer during fermentation, accounting for the fact that the hydrometer reading was skewed when measuring the apparent attenuation (FG).

So which is right?  Well obviously the real attenuation gives the accurate number for the percentage of extract in the wort that actually fermented.  However, by convention, if you hear a brewer talking about the attenuation of their beer they are almost always talking about the apparent attenuation of their beer.  Why?  Because it is easier to measure the apparent extract (FG) of your beer, and its easier to calculate the apparent attenuation.  Brewers like to brew more than they like to use calculators so they will quote apparent attenuation first.

Using Attenuation in Recipe Design

Yeast suppliers provide apparent attenuation ranges for their beer in their data sheets, so you can look up apparent attenuation ranges for your favorite yeast.  Generally yeasts with higher attenuation will produce a drier, cleaner, less malty finish.

However you may also notice that high attenuation yeasts almost always have lower flocculation (flocculation refers to how quickly the yeast falls out of the beer).  There is a reason for this – high flocculation yeasts will start to drop to the bottom of the fermenter before they have had a chance to consume all of the fermentable sugars, leaving a sweeter, more full bodied beer.  So looking at both attenuation and flocculation is important depending on the style you are brewing and how much time you have to age it.

High attenuation yeasts (with low flocculation) will give you that dry, clean, fully fermented finish, but they may take a long time to clear completely unless you use fining agents.  Low attenuation yeasts (high flocculation) will result in a fuller bodied, more complex beer as they may not fully ferment complex sugars, but they will clear more quickly.

If you survey yeast data sheets, you will also notice that lagers almost always have a higher average attenuation than ales.  This is a fundamental difference between the ale and lager yeasts – ale yeasts can not fully ferment some forms of maltose sugar (specifically maltotriose), while lager yeasts can.  This is why many lager yeasts product a higher attenuation beer with few esters and a cleaner finish.

Selecting the right yeast with appropriate attenuation to match you beer style is important.  Don’t use a high attenuation yeast if you are brewing a complex English ale.  Similarly a low attenuation yeast would be a poor choice for a clean style like a Bavarian Pilsner.

Troubleshooting

I find that occasionally I have low attenuation for a batch – even lower than I would expect from a given yeast – indicating incomplete fermentation.  The causes for this can be varied.  Low attenuation is a common problem with many extract beers.  Often it is an indication of using old or partially oxidized malts or poor quality yeast – try to get the freshest malt extract you can buy.

For all grain brewers, low attenuation can sometimes be caused by incomplete conversion during the mash.  Other common causes include not pitching sufficient yeast (i.e. not using a starter), not maintaining proper temperature during fermentation, and poor aeration of the wort before fermentation.  When I find a finished batch with low attenuation, I like to go back and look at my brewing process to try to determine where I went wrong.

Thank you for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly brewing newsletter, and have a great brewing week!

• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 1
• Beer Yeast, Fermentation, and Home Brewing
• Brewing Fruit Beers at Home Part 2 of 2
• Brewing German Altbier Recipes
• Making Full Bodied Beer at Home

Just a quick reminder that there is only a week left (we close out September 15th 2010) if you want to participate in the drawing for a Barley Crusher.  I announced this a few months back, but I’ll be giving away a 7lb Barley Crusher to a person selected at random from our active email subscribers.  To qualify you need to be subscribed to the BeerSmith newsletter or blog via email.  Unfortunately I cannot include RSS subscribers, primarily because there is no way to get in contact with them.  Also, I will filter out duplicate emails, so please only subscribe once.

Here is the link to subscribe to our newsletter, which qualifies you for the drawing.  Also here is the original article describing the drawing terms and rules.

Thank you again for your continued support!

• Win a Barley Crusher! – BeerSmith Drawing
• Who Won the Barley Crusher? Giving Another One Away!
• The BeerSmith Homebrewing Blog – Third Anniversary
• The Barley Crusher Malt Grain Mill Review
• Avoiding a Stuck Sparge for All Grain Beer

Attenuation is a term often thrown around by home brewers at parties to impress non-brewers, but understanding the different forms of real and apparent extract and attenuation can help beginning and advanced home brewers alike.  So in this two part series on the BeerSmith blog we take a look at beer attenuation in all of its various forms, and how you can use it in recipe design.

What is Attenuation?

So you are at a party looking to impress the non-brewing muggles, but instead a brewing geek comes up and starts talking about original extracts, apparent extracts, and ABVs.  Here’s how to tell if he really knows what he’s talking about:

Attenuation is nothing more than the percentage of the original extract that has been converted via fermentation to CO2 and alcohol (and a few lesser compounds like esters in small quantities).  Recall that the basic brewing process for all grain starts with the mashing process, which converts your barley grain into sugary wort.  If you are an extract brewer, then you just start with sugary wort syrup.

You boil the sugary wort, cool it, add some yeast, and fermentation starts.  During fermentation a portion of the sugary wort is converted to alcohol (primarily ethanol).  That portion of the sugar, expressed as a percentage, is the attenuation of the beer.   Apparent attenuation is very easy to calculate as follows:

Apparent_Attenuation_in_% = 100 * (OG – FG)/(OG – 1.0)

where OG is your original gravity and FG is your final gravity.  So if you have a beer with an original gravity of 1.050 and it finishes with a gravity of 1.010, the math works out to be  100*(1.050-1.010)/(1.050 – 1.000) which is exactly 80%.  So for this example, 80% of the available extract in the wort fermented to become alcohol and CO2.

What is Apparent Extract and Real Extract?

The gravity of beer is most often measured using hydrometers.  However, hydrometers are calibrated to measure the sugar content of a solution of water.  Finished beer, however, contains alcohol (ethanol) which skews the hydrometer reading because alcohol is less dense than water.  Therefore, a hydrometer reading taken on finished beer will show lower (less extract content) than the beer actually contains.

Apparent extract (often written as AE) is the measured hydrometer reading for the finished beer, usually expressed in degrees plato by professional brewers.  For a homebrewer, this is the same as your final gravity (FG), but convert it from a specific gravity to degrees plato if you want to sound like the pros.  To  do a rough Plato calculation in your head, one degree plato is approximately 4 points of specific gravity, so a finished beer with a specific gravity of 1.012 (1.012 is “12″ points) is approximately 3 degrees plato.  If you want an exact calculation you can use a tool like BeerSmith or an online converter.

Real extract (often written as RE) is the real extract content of the finished beer, accounting for the actual alcohol content and imperfect nature of hydrometers.  Real extract can be calculated from the starting gravity and apparent extract (final gravity) as follows:

Real_extract = 0.188 * Original_extract + 0.8192 * Apparent_extract

where Real_extract, Original_extract (which is just your OG) and Apparent_extract (your FG) are all in degrees plato.

Now you know enough to be dangerous at dinner parties.  Please join us next week for part two of this article, where we explore real attenuation, and also how to make proper use of attenuation when designing your own beer recipes.  Thank you for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly brewing newsletter, and have a great brewing week!

• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 2
• Using a Hydrometer for Beer Brewing
• How to Use a Refractometer, Brix and Beer Brewing
• Beer Yeast, Fermentation, and Home Brewing
• Malt Extract Beer Brewing

Almost all commercial brewers filter their beer to rapidly improve flavor and clarity.  Yet few home brewers filter their beer, either because they lack the equipment or prefer the raw flavor of unfiltered beer.  However filtering is a good option for intermediate to advanced brewers who want crystal clear, smooth flavored beer.

Why Filter?

Filtering removes yeast, tannins and some large proteins from the beer that contribute both to off flavors and haze.  While many of these impurities will eventually precipitate out of the beer through lagering and aging, filtering accelerates the process by removing them in minutes instead of weeks or months.  This is a big reason why commercial brewers use filters – time is money and it is much cheaper for them to filter the beer than store it for weeks or months.

Filtering also has the advantage that it can remove very small impurities from the beer – even those that would not fall out of suspension in the natural aging process.  Filters can remove particles as small as 1 micron or even smaller.  This can result in a cleaner flavor and much better clarity than is possible with natural aging.

A question many new brewers ask is if they can filter their beer to eliminate the sediment in the bottom of the bottles?  The answer is unfortunately no, unless you have some kind of kegging/carbonation system.  Filtering the beer removes the yeast from it, so if you filter and then bottle with priming sugar you will just get flat beer.

The only way to filter and bottle beer is to filter your beer into a keg, then artificially carbonate it, and then bottle it from the keg using a counter-pressure bottle filler or beer gun.  Also having a pressurized keg makes it much easier to use an inline filter, as gravity works very slowly with typical beer filters.

Choosing a Filter

First, you need to choose a filter size.  The filter should be fine enough to filter out tannins and yeast cells, but not too fine or it could alter the flavor of your finished beer.  Around 1 micron is the sweet spot for filter size – smaller than 0.5 microns and you risk filtering out some flavor, while larger ones (5 micron and up) may leave yeast in the beer.  To filter out bacteria which some commercial brewers do for shelf stability, you need to go to 0.3 microns or below.  I don’t recommend going below 0.5 microns for home brewing.

Another factor when choosing filter size is how fast your filter may clog.  Many commercial brewers actually use a two stage filter.  They start with a 5 micron filter to eliminate the large particles and then use a smaller 0.5 micron filter inline as a second stage to filter small particles.  If you have a large budget you can do the same, but for a single filter 1 micron is fine.

The most popular beer filters are inline canister filters with a replaceable filter element.  These are inexpensive and work well if you have high quality filter cartridges.  Some wine filters come in a plate format which offers a larger surface area that is less prone to clogging.  I do not recommend using household water filters as these are slow and prone to clogging.  Purchase a filter designed for use with beer and change your filter often as the small inline filters clog quickly.

Filtering Your Homebrew

Despite the fact that filtering can be used to accelerate the aging of your beer, you don’t want to filter your home brewed beer too early.  Some important chemical changes take place during the later phases of fermentation and early aging.  If you halt these too early by filtering you will end up with poor flavor balance.  Commercial brewers use a additives and techniques that allow them to filter earlier.

Allow the beer to fully complete fermentation and then sit in the secondary for at least 2-3 weeks before filtering, then move it to your keg.  The filtering process is very simple if you use two kegs.  Place your inline filter in between the full and empty kegs and use low CO2 pressure to transfer the beer from one keg to the other through the filter.

Once the filtering/transfer is complete, close the top on the second keg, purge the air from the top several times and you can refrigerate and force carbonate it as you normally would with any keg.

Filtering home brewed beers is not always required or even desired, but when you want that extra bit of clarity and clean finish it is a nice alternative.  Do you have thoughts or experience with filtering?  Leave a comment below.  Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Subscribe for more articles as well as the latest news on my upcoming brewing book and other BeerSmith products.

• How to Brew Beer – 5 Steps for Making Beer at Home – Part 3
• How to Brew Beer: 5 Steps for Making Beer at Home – Part 1
• Avoiding a Stuck Sparge for All Grain Beer
• 6 Tips for Crystal Clear Home Brewed Beer
• Aeration for Home Brewing Beer

A perpetual debate among home brewers and on various discussion forums is the merits of aluminum vs stainless steel pots for brewing beer.  This week we look at the pros and cons of each to help you make your own educated decision on your next beer brewing pot.

Aluminum Pot Pros and Cons

Aluminum pots are widely available and inexpensive because aluminum cookware is widely used for preparing foods.  Inexpensive Turkey pots in the 36 quart range can be found at your local Walmart, particularly right after Thanksgiving at great prices.  Aluminum pots cost considerably less than stainless steel – often half as much.  Aluminum is a better conductor of heat than steel, so your pot will come to a boil faster and also cool down faster after you are done boiling.

The only major disadvantage of aluminum is that it will oxidize, so you can’t use oxygen-based or caustic cleaners such as Oxyclean.  This is the major reason why professional brewing equipment is made of stainless steel and not aluminum – the stainless steel is easier to clean with caustic cleaning agents.    Also, over time aluminum will get an oxide layer over it which can discolor the aluminum and give it a grey tone.  This is not a cause for concern – the layer of aluminum oxide actually protects the pot, but it is not as pretty as stainless steel.

I feel it is important to address a number of myths about aluminum.  First, aluminum pots are not linked to Alzheimer’s disease.  A number of medical studies since the 1970′s have found zero link between Alzheimer’s and the use of aluminum.  Keep in mind that every day you drink soda from aluminum cans (though most are lined) and eat food prepared in aluminum cookware – it is safe.

A second myth is that aluminum will react with acidic content of the wort and either add off flavors or eat away at your pot.  This is also untrue – water has a pH of7.0, your wort has a pH of around 5.2, while spaghetti sauce can run as low as 4.6 and the most acidic diet sodas you drink run as low as 2.5.  For comparison, battery acid has a pH of 1.0.  Your wort is simply not acidic enough to react with your aluminum pot.

Stainless Steel

Stainless steel pots are the “Cadillac” of brewing pots, with designer pots running into the many hundreds of dollars in price.  They are more expensive than comparable aluminum pots, but are a favorite of serious brewers.  Stainless steel will remain shiny, as the passive oxide layer is not visible – so its easy to tell when your stainless pot is truly clean.

An advantage of stainless steel is that you can use oxygenated cleaners on it, which makes it a favorite with professional brewers who need to clean large vats.  You should avoid long term exposure to bleach based cleaners as these can pit your stainless steel pots and vessels.

Stainless steel is stronger than the softer aluminum metal, so it is less prone to denting and scratching for a comparable wall thickness.  However, you are unlikely to outlive a well made stainless or aluminum pot in either case.  Stainless has a strongly bonded oxide layer, so it is less susceptible to attack by acids, though again the acidity of wort is not a concern for either metal.

The major disadvantage of stainless steel is that it does not conduct heat as well as aluminum, which means a longer time to reach boil and also longer cooling times after the boil.

Which to Choose?

If you select a well made heavy-duty pot, large enough for a full boils that is heavy and conducts heat well, you can’t go wrong with either stainless or aluminum.  I look for a heavy pot with thick walls as it will conduct heat better and also hold up well to the occasional nicks and dings.  An ideal pot has a diameter approximately equal to its height.  A well made aluminum or stainless steel pot will likely last a lifetime.

If you are a brewer on a budget, you can’t ignore the large price advantage of aluminum – often it costs half as much for a comparable pot.  Stainless steel has a “cool factor”, but it also has a price associated with being cool.  Now I personally use stainless steel, but I’ve also been brewing for 25 years and started out using a cheap kitchen pot.

Do you have your own thoughts?  Leave us a comment below. If you want to support us, you might want to consider a pot from Adventures in Homebrewing, a BeerSmith Supporter here.   Thank you for reading this week’s BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog, and don’t hesitate to subscribe if you want more great brewing articles on a regular basis.

• RIMS and HERMS – Recirculating Infusion Mash Systems for Beer
• Beer Brewing Equipment with John Blichmann – BeerSmith Podcast 28
• Cleaning and Sanitation for Beer Brewing
• Ten Top Tips for Home Brewing Beer
• How to Brew Beer – 5 Steps for Making Beer at Home – Part 2

Professional brewers will tell you that consistency is the the key to great beer.  Most competitive home brewers are religious in their measurements and processes to ensure consistently great beer.  However, most homebrewers take their measurements at face value without bothering to calibrate them.  This week we look at how to calibrate your equipment to make sure you have accurate measurements.

Hydrometers

Accurate hydrometer readings are important for measuring your original gravity, understanding your brewhouse efficiency, and determining when fermentation is complete.  Unfortunately some inexpensive brewing hydrometers are not very accurate.

The standard hydrometer is calibrated to read 1.000 when it is placed in distilled water at 60F (15.6 C).  Some laboratory hydrometers are also calibrated to 68F, but these are rare.  You can usually find the calibration temperature in small letters in the corner of the hydrometer scale.

To test your hydrometer, you need some distilled water in your sample tube or a vessel large enough to float the hydrometer.  Place the water sample in your refrigerator until you reach the calibration temperature of 60F.  Then immerse the hydrometer, shake off any bubbles from the hydrometer surface and take the reading.

To read the hydometer properly, you should get your eye at the same level at the water, and find the line where the air and water meet.  If your hydrometer reads precisely 1.000, you have a calibrated hydrometer.  Otherwise you will need to write down the value and subtract the difference from future readings.  For example, if your hydrometer reads 1.002, you will need to subtract the difference (.002) from future readings when using this hydrometer.

Thermometers

Accurate thermometers are important, especially during the mashing process when accurate temperatures are critical.  Again, many inexpensive brewing thermometers can be off by several degrees.  Fortunately thermometers are also easy to calibrate, using the same distilled water you had for your hydrometer calibration.

Start by freezing some distilled water in a cup.  Then break up the ice into chunks and immerse it in some distilled water.  Let it sit for at least 8-10 minutes to reach equilibrium and then drop the thermometer in and read the temperature.  If your thermometer is at 32 F (0 C), you have a properly calibrated thermometer.  If it is high or low, you will again need to make an adjustment by that amount every time you use the thermometer.

Vessels

Knowing at a glance the volume of your vessels (boil pots, fermenters, mash tuns) makes brewing much easier and more accurate.  If your vessel does not have its own marks on it, you can add your own by using a smaller measuring vessel to accurately measure volumes.  You can start with a large measuring cup or gradated water bottle to measure quarts or liters.  If you don’t have a quart/liter size measure, start with a small measuring cup and disposable 2 liter soda bottle and make your own quart or liter measure by filling the bottle using the measuring cup and marking the outside of it with a permanent marker.

Once you have your quart or liter measure, you can fill your larger fermenter or boil pot slowly and accurately to create your measuring marks.  For a plastic vessel, you can mark the outside of it using a permanent pen.  For a metal vessel you can score or etch it.  If you don’t have an easy way to mark the vessel, you can create a dip stick from a small dowel and mark volumes with notches on it.  Some brewers even notch their large spoons.

Consistency is critical for great beer, so take a few minutes to calibrate your equipment up front.  Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith home brewing blog and don’t hesitate to subscribe if you want to receive more of my articles on homebrewing for free.

• Using a Hydrometer for Beer Brewing
• How to Use a Refractometer, Brix and Beer Brewing
• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 1
• Making a Yeast Starter for your Home Brew Beer
• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 2

Have you ever had a problem with finely crushed malt creating a stuck sparge when home brewing?  This week we look at how wet and conditioned milling can help reduce the chance of a stuck sparge by creating a more porus grain bed.

Why Wet Mill?

I knew little about wet milling or its variants until a recent article (Mar-Apr 2010, BYO Magazine) highlighted the technique.  While rarely used in the US, this technique attempts to raise the moisture content of the grain by 20-30% using steam or a hot spray of water.

The wet grain is then run through your malt mill at a narrower than usual gap to split the interior from the grain husk.  Done properly, you will get larger segments of intact grain husk.  The advantage is a more porus grain bed without the dusty grain particles produced by dry milling.  This can make a stuck sparge less likely.

Conditioned Milling

I do not recommend trying this unless you have a two roller grain mill such as the Barley Crusher, as other types of grain mills could get gummed up by the wet grains.  Even then, one must be careful not to overexpose the grains, as grains that are two wet will gum up the mill.

Pure wet milling is difficult to duplicate in a home environment, but two practical conditioned milling options exist for the homebrewer.  One is to use a short exposure to steam, while the second method requires spraying with hot water for a short period of time.

The steam options requires a large pot of boiling water and a false bottom.  Put the grains in a large grain bag and set it aside.  Then bring the pot to a boil.  Once you had a strong boil going, place the bag over the steam rising from it for about a minute and a half.  Then pulled the bag out, stir  it a bit and quickly mill it.

A second option, described in the BYO article, involves sprinkling hot water at 158F over the grains.  Here it is best to treat a smaller amount of grain at a time over a lauter tun or false bottom, so the spray can reach all of the grains.  Heat water to 158F and put it in a spray bottle or watering can, and lightly spray the grains for 60 seconds, allowing excess water to drop off.  Allow the malt to sit for a minute or two to absorb as much water as possible and then mill it.  Reportedly this technique results in a slightly higher water content than steaming.

The milling itself should be straightforward, but start as quickly as possible.  Set the malt mill at a slightly narrower gap than normal, and proceed to mill.  If the mill starts to get gummed up with wet grain, then stop as you have probably gone too far with the water.  You want the husks to come out slightly wet and intact, but the inside of the grains to be largely dry.  If too wet, let the grains dry for a a bit before proceeding.

If you compare some dry milled malt to the conditioned malt you should see a marked difference particularly in the larger pieces of husk and reduced amount of grain dust.   I will note that this is not a technique you should need for every batch.  A properly set malt mill should produce a great dry mill crush and normal sparge for most beers.  However, if you are brewing a beer with a lot of sticky adjuncts such as wheats, unmalted barley, etc, you may want to consider giving this a try.

Run some dry malt through your mill at the end to help clean up any mess you have left, and then dry the entire mill.  Its best not to leave gobs of wet malt sitting on your steel rollers.

Thanks for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  If you don’t have a high quality malt mill you may want to check out the Barley Crusher, and don’t hesitate to subscribe to our newsletter for regular delivery of our best articles.

• Avoiding a Stuck Sparge for All Grain Beer
• 5 Ways to Improve your All Grain Beer Efficiency
• The Barley Crusher Malt Grain Mill Review
• Win a Barley Crusher! – BeerSmith Drawing
• Who Won the Barley Crusher? Giving Another One Away!

This week it is a distinct pleasure to feature Chris White, the President of White Labs Inc – one of the world’s premiere providers of brewing yeast for both commercial and home brewers.  White labs is a pioneer in providing commercial quality yeasts to home brewers.

1.  When and how did you get started in brewing beer?

I was in college at UC Davis in the late 80’s, and one of my roommates made a beer in our kitchen.  He left the beer sitting for months in the carboy, so finally another roommate mine, Pete (now a veterinarian), and I bottled and drank it.  We soon decided to try home brewing on our own.  Thanks Pete for helping me to start home brewing!

2.  You started White Labs in 1995 – what made you decide to start the business?

I moved to San Diego in 1991 for graduate school.  I had stored my homebrewing equipment in a closet until I went into a shop that had just opened, Homebrew Mart.  Visiting the shop sparked my interest again and I started homebrewing with Yuseff Cherney, the first employee of the store and now Head Brewer of Ballast Point Brewing.  One day he mentioned the need for liquid yeast that is ready the day homebrewers come into the shop.  I was doing my graduate thesis in a yeast lab, so I started to make yeast for our personal homebrew, and soon began making yeast for customers of Homebrew Mart.  I decided to start White Labs soon there after.

3. In the 1990′s we saw a huge increase in the quality of ingredients available to the home brewer.  How did the widespread availability of liquid yeast change homebrewing?

I think that liquid yeast allowed homebrewers to make a great commercial quality beer and it also gave them the opportunity to try to make beers they really liked as well as experiment with styles from around the world.  I know when I was homebrewing actively, before White Labs, the different yeast strain options kept me excited with the hobby.

4.  You pioneered the introduction of prepackaged yeast vials for homebrewers – what are some of the advantages of this system?

We wanted to make a quantity of yeast that homebrewers could use the day they bought it from the homebrew store.  It took a lot of work and a lot of yeast it get it dialed in, you need a lot of yeast in a packaged vial to properly start a 5 gallon homebrew batch.  The goal was to achieve a lag phase of approximately 12 hours, this way home brewers would have a short lag time, and if they wanted to do a starter or a larger size, it is easy to build up further from a large starting size.  Another advantage was to have a variety of strains available to choose from in the store and the convenience of having the product ready to go when you are ready to brew.

5.  You also sell professional beer and wine yeasts – what are the differences between your professional and homebrewing line?

Most of the yeast we produce goes to commercial breweries, but the yeast cultures are exactly the same.  There are advantages for both the homebrewer and commercial brewer.  The homebrewer gets the same high quality yeast that has been designed to fit the fermentation standards of a commercial brewery.  The commercial brewer gets the benefit of the multiple strains we produce from the homebrewer.  We package approximately 50 strains for the homebrewer.  Commercial breweries regularly buy about 20 of these.  We start new cultures from slants every 2 days, this keeps fresh yeast in the pipeline for their 3-week production cycle.  When commercial brewers want the other strains, it is easy for us to start them.

6.  What are some of the changes in homebrewing you have seen since you started?

I think homebrewing has become a real American hobby.  When I started, most of the books were foreign, usually from the UK.  The focus was not so much on crafting great quality beer, and it was also difficult because of the availability ingredients.  Now home brewers in the US have really made it a distinct hobby, and produced a demand for high quality ingredients and revolutionized home brew equipment.  Homebrews are getting better all the time, it’s pretty amazing that a beer of commercial quality can be at home.

7.  What sets White Labs apart?

Our goal is to be become the best yeast production company in the world.  With everything we do, we ask ourselves “Are we being the best we can be?”, and use that to make decisions and to constantly push ourselves to be the best.  We are also always on the look out for new ways to improve yeast and fermentation, so we add new products and testing as often as we can and have a lot of fun doing it.  White Labs is not a typical lab, our team is really passionate about what they do, if someone doesn’t like beer or brewing, they won’t enjoy working at White Labs.

8. What advice would you offer to homebrewers looking to improve their next beer?

Experiment and be consistent.  It is great to experiment, that is what makes home brewing so much fun, but also do things to improve your consistency.  That is what makes you a better brewer.  Use a scale to weigh out your ingredients.  Measure and record the volumes and temperatures.  Learn more about fermentation at look at yeast with a microscope.  Adding some laboratory methods can be fun and can really improve your brews!

9.  Where do you see homebrewing going in the near future?

I think homebrewing will keep growing and improving, many new people are starting to homebrew every year.  We need to continue teaching them how to make great beer, and in turn learn from their new ideas.  Home brewers are always creating new equipment and pushing the envelope of beer styles.  It’s a great community and I’m excited for the future.

10.  Is there anything else you would like to add?

My first brewing book was Charlie Papazian’s classic, “The Complete Joy of Home Brewing.”  The humor in that book was great for me as a beginner and I continue to suggest it to everyone who has an interest in homebrewing.

I would like to personally thank Chris White for taking time out of his very busy schedule to interview with us here on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Thanks for joining us and don’t hesitate to subscribe for more great brewing articles.

• Chris White on Yeast and His New Book – BSHB Podcast #4
• Beer Yeast, Fermentation, and Home Brewing
• Making a Yeast Starter for your Home Brew Beer
• An Interview with Dan Listermann (of Phil’s fame)
• Yeast Starters for Home Brewing Beer – Part 1

One perpetual debate among home brewers is the relative advantages of glass vs plastic fermenting vessels for making beer.  Most beginner home brew kits come with a large plastic pail with a plastic top.  However many advanced brewers swear by the advantages of the classic 5 gallon glass carboy.  So who is right?  This week we take a look at them side by side.

The Plastic Fermentation Vessel (aka Bucket)

Most brewers start fermenting in a 5 gallon food grade plastic bucket.  These buckets are cheap, durable and relatively easy to clean.  However the plastic bucket has both advantages and disadvantages:

• The plastic bucket is easy to clean – since the entire top comes off, you can reach in and scrub any grime off in a few minutes
• Plastic is durable – if you do drop the bucket it is unlikely it will break, and they do last a long time
• Plastic is harder to sanitize completely – over time it does get small scratches on the inside which can be a haven for bacteria and germs, which is why most brewers recommend replacing plastic buckets after a year or two
• Plastic is not suitable for long term storage of beer (i.e. months), as it is permeable to air
• Many plastic buckets have a poor seal between the bucket and cover – which can result in air being introduced as well as the brewer thinking fermentation is done prematurely (as the airlock has stopped bubbling due to the leaks)

The Glass Carboy

In the other corner, we have the 5 gallon glass carboy.  A carboy is a large water bottle made of real glass, and usually comes in either a 5 gallon or 6.5 gallon size.  Glass carboys are obviously far less durable, but are the favorite of many advanced brewers.  Some advantages/disadvantages include:

• Impermeable to Air – Air cannot penetrate the glass, so you can leave your fermented beer in a glass carboy for months without worrying about it being spoiled by aeration.  Also you don’t have to worry about leaks through the top as a proper stopper will form an air-tight seal.
• Easy to Sanitize – Glass will not pit or scratch like plastic, so you don’t have to worry about scratches creating havens for bacteria.  Further, as the glass is transparent it is pretty easy to see if it is completely clean.
• You can Watch Your Brew – While not a huge deal, many brewers like being able to see the beer as it is fermenting to get an idea of the size of the Krausen layer, how active the fermentation is and how much sediment has formed.
• Harder to Clean – After fermentation is complete and you have transferred or bottled your beer, it can be harder to clean a glass carboy than a plastic bucket.  You need a large bottle brush to do it properly and even then you may find some areas are more difficult to reach with the brush than others.
• Easy to Break – I’ve broken at least three carboys inadvertently, though thankfully I have not yet broken a full one.  However, carboys are difficult to lift and maneuver, and will shatter if you bump them against any solid surface.  Breaking a full carboy can be a safety hazard as well as a huge mess.  I try to arrange my brewing setup so I move my carboys as little as possible once they are full.
• More Expensive – Carboys are more expensive than plastic fermentation buckets, and you also need to consider that you may break a few during your brewing career.

The Bottom Line

So which is best?  I personally use glass carboys for both stages of my fermentation, and have for the last 15+ years.  Why?  I had some bad experiences early on when I thought my fermentation was complete, but instead found I merely had a leaky seal on my plastic bucket.  In addition, I like the security of seeing my beer ferment, knowing the fermenter is completely clean and sanitized and knowing I can leave the beer in the secondary as long as I want (sometimes I get busy) while still maintaining a seal.  However, the choice, as always, is yours!

Subscribe to our newsletter for a lot of great brewing articles (it costs nothing), and leave a comment below if you have your own thoughts on this subject.  Thanks for joining us again on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.

• Ten Top Tips for Home Brewing Beer
• Better Beer with The Burton Union Blow-off Method
• How to Brew Beer – 5 Steps for Making Beer at Home – Part 3
• 5 Home Brewing Tips to Avoid the Dreaded Bottle Bomb
• How to Brew Beer: 5 Steps for Making Beer at Home – Part 1

Want to brew the biggest beers and barley wines?  Looking for high gravity ales?  This week we take a look at how to brew the biggest beers.  I’m talking barley wines, imperials, high end scotch ale and other highly alcoholic brews.

Planning your Big Beer

High gravity ales start out with a bit of planning.  Homebrewing big beers is not the same as brewing regular ones.  For starters, high gravity ales need malt, and lots of it.  Use a tool like BeerSmith to adjust your original gravity to match the style you’re brewing.

If you are brewing with malt extract, you may need 50-100% more base malt than you usually use.  Adjust your recipe to match the desired gravity.

For all grain brewers the situation is more complex.   Scaling up the amount of grain used while keeping the batch size the same results in lower batch efficiency.  This is because you are sparging with proportionally less water per pound of grain.  Where you may get a 72% brewhouse efficiency with a regular beer,  your high gravity ale may achieve only 60%.

As a result you need to lower your estimated brewhouse efficiency when estimating the original gravity of your beer.   This means you will need more grain than you would get by just scaling up a regular gravity beer.

Beer Balance

A second factor to consider when designing your big beer is balance.  Here the bitterness ratio which is the ratio between the original gravity of the beer and IBUs of bitterness, becomes very important.  As you add more malt to make your beer big, you need to add proportionally more hops to balance the beer.  Otherwise the big malt will dominate your beer, making it too sweet to drink.

To offset this, you need to calculate the bitterness ratio of your beer and compare it to the average bitterness ratio for your desired style.  Big beers need big hops – its not unusual to have 50, 75 or even 100 IBUs for a big beer or barley wine.

Big Beer Yeast

While you may be tempted to toss any yeast into your big beer, many common ale and lager yeasts do not have the tolerance for very high concentrations of alcohol, which could result in a stuck or incomplete fermentation.  If you are brewing big, pick a yeast strain that is specifically designed for high gravity beer.  Many big beer brewers even use multiple yeast strains or champagne yeast.

When adding yeast, be sure to use a big yeast starter.  Since you have so much malt in the wort, its critical to have a robust population of active yeast to ferment your big beer.  Since there is so much malt to consume, you can afford to go proportionally larger on your yeast starter than you would with a regular beer.

Big Beer Brewing

Some additional concerns come into play when you actually brew your beer.  First, if brewing all grain, you need to calculate how much space you need for your mash.  The 5 gallon igloo coolers used by most home brewers can only accept a limited amount of malt – typically topping out at around 13lbs of grain, even with a relatively low water to grain ratio.  If you are going big, you may need a bigger mash tun.

Since you will be mashing and sparging with less water than a normal batch it is important to maximize your efficiency with the grain and water you have.  Draining the mash tun slowly and sparging slowly will help your efficiency.

A variation on big beer brewing, called parti-gyle brewing is worth mentioning here.  This technique lets you brew two beers from a single mash.  After the main high gravity wort is drawn from the mash tun, additional sparge water is added and a second batch of wort, with lower gravity, is drawn off and brewed alongside the main ale.  For some very high gravity ales, you can even make a third, very light beer from the third runnings off a single mash tun.

Fermenting a big beer can take much longer than a normal beer.  As the alcoholic content goes up, the fermentation tends to slow, so careful monitoring of the gravity is important as well as good old patience.   You may not need as much sugar to carbonate your beer, as there will likely be some residual unfermented sugars in the beer itself.

It can take much longer to condition a high gravity batch.  Some barley wines are aged a year or even two years before reaching peak flavor.  However, high gravity beers tend to improve greatly with age much like a fine wine.

Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Give BeerSmith a try if you want to design fantastic recipes at home, and subscribe to our newsletter today for regular delivery of our best home brewing articles.

• Brewhouse Efficiency for All Grain Beer Brewing
• Balancing your Beer with the Bitterness Ratio
• Parti-Gyle Brewing – Two Beers from One Mash
• Brew in a Bag (BIAB) All Grain Beer Brewing
• How to Batch Sparge: A Guide for Batch Sparging and No Sparge

This week on the BeerSmith Blog we feature an interview with fellow beer blogger Al from Hop Talk.  Hop Talk is one of the more popular beer blogs on the internet.  Hop Talk covers microbrews, the brewing industry and beer news.  While Al occasionally touches on home brewing as well, the focus is often on the broader beer industry.  Al also recently featured his “beer of the day” blog entry where he drank 365 different beers over the period of a year and blogged about it.  We’re happy to feature an interview with Al here today.

1.  How did you get started brewing?

My buddy Ron (who writes some of the content for Hop Talk) started doing it and it intrigued me. Then my wife got me a brewing kit for my 30th birthday (boy, that was a long time ago) and so I started dabbling in it.  I don’t do it often enough to consider myself a homebrewer, though.  Fortunately the folks in Frederick’s Original Ale Makers don’t require any sort of minimum output. When I do get to brew, though, I enjoy it.

2. Hop Talk is one of the most popular beer blogs, what made you decide to start it?

I could talk for hours about beer. I finally decided that I needed an outlet to express myself. Blogging seemed like the logical thing to do.

3. What kind of stories and posts do you focus on?

It varies. While I like the mechanics of brewing, it can get awfully technical and others can discuss it with more knowledge. I like to look at the sociable aspects of beer, at how it can enhance the interactions between two or more people. That said, I’m also interested when some medical study or other determines that some aspect of beer is good (or bad) for you and I’ve become much more interested in the dynamic between “craft” brewers and the big boys.

4. Many bloggers lose motivation after a year or two – how do you maintain focus?

Sheer stubbornness? Well, not entirely. For one, I have a supportive spouse who lets me spend a few hours a week drinking and writing about beer. For another, I simply haven’t run out of things to say. Then, of course, I keep seeing my RSS subscriber and Twitter follower numbers keep going up, and that provides further motivation. I mean, these people are taking time to read what it is I’m writing; I don’t want to let them down.

5.  Where do you find your best material?

Honestly, my best stuff is what comes out of my own head. I’m a voracious reader and I subscribe to more beer blogs than I really should, not to mention the news alerts I’m subscribed to. I find a LOT of good stuff there, of course, and I’m always pleasantly surprised to find something in the mainstream media that sheds a positive light on beer, but if I’m honest with myself my best articles are from a nugget that popped unbidden into my consciousness and wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d written it.

Now, if only I could do that at will.

6. The BeerSmith blog is primarily focused on homebrewers.  What advice do you have for fellow brewers?

Join a homebrewing club! I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered a group of people so entirely knowledgeable on a subject and so friendly at the same time. Collectively, they can seemingly answer any brewing question I might have and have not ever turned their noses up at the output of a simple extract-brewer like me.

7.  You posted a “beer a day” in 2009 – tell us about that experience.

It was hard! I never, ever, thought in my adult life that I would not look forward to having a beer every day. Then there is the weight I gained.  On the plus side, because I needed to have a unique beer every day I had to get out of my comfort zone and try styles and brewers that I’d normally skip. I discovered a few of each that I rather liked.

8.  What are some of your favorite posts?

The Personal Finance Advice blog posted a “how to save money on beer” article that was obviously written from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care a whit for taste and just wants to save a buck. I posted “Tips for saving on beer” in response.
(There’s also my guest blog article for them: “Life Is Far Too Short To Drink Cheap Beer – 10 Ways To Maximize Your Beer Value“)

Another one is my riff on “life is a journey not a destination” as it pertains to beer and my maturation as a beer fan “Beer is a journey not a destination“.   Then there is “The unofficial Hop Talk beer rating system“. That came about from a rather spirited discussion amongst what I now call “The Hop Talk Advisory Panel”.

9.  You wrote a BrewPoll.com plugin for wordpress – how did you jump from blogging to writing plugins?

I’m a ColdFusion developer by profession. When the code for adding the BrewPoll vote button came out, I found a plugin that did nearly the same thing and simply modified it with the BrewPoll code. I’m no plugin writer, although it’s something I might explore in the future.

10. Do you have anything else you would like to add?

When you get together with your friends, take time to choose a beer appropriate to the location, season, food and activity you’ll be doing. Then, forget about the beer and enjoy the time you spend with your friends. Such moments are all-too-fleeting.

Thanks for the opportunity to share.

Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Be sure to subscribe for regular delivery by mail, and give our software BeerSmith a try if you have not already done so.

• Beer Bloggers and 365 Beers-BSHB Podcast Episode 2
• Home Brewing Social Sites: Beer and Web 2.0
• An Interview with Brewing Author Randy Mosher
• An Interview with Brewing Author John Palmer
• Judging Beer with Grandmaster Gordon Strong – BSHB Podcast #6

This week we rejoin with part two of our series on homebrewing fruit beers.  In last week’s article we provided an overview of brewing with fruit and the characteristics of some of the better fruits to use in beer.  This week we will cover designing fruit beer recipes and also the physical process of home brewing with fruit.

Designing a Fruit Beer

Home brewing beer with fruit involves a little bit of art and a bit of science.  Fruit beers are generally formulated to be light tasting, light bodied, and also lightly hopped.  The reason for this is simple – most fruits lose a lot of there flavor during fermentation, and a strong malt or hops flavor will tent to overpower the subtle fruit flavors, making the fruit undetectable in the finished beer.  A lightly hopped wheat beer as the base beer is often a good choice, though properly balanced cherries or raspberries can sometimes come through in maltier beers.

For hops, I generally prefer low alpha bittering hops, often with a single boil addition.  This minimizes hop aroma and flavor which allows the fruit aroma and flavor to bleed through.  Noble hops are also a good choice.

For yeast, I’ve had the greatest success with clean finishing, high attenuation yeasts.  This is not to say you could not try a more complex yeast, but low flocculation, low attenuation yeasts generally take longer to fully ferment the complex sugars in the fruit, and the complex flavors of the yeast don’t always complement the fruit flavor itself.  Also the low flocculation yeasts create more clarity problems – which you will see shortly is already an issue with most fruit beers.

Another factor to consider when brewing with fruit is that most fruits have a substantial portion of fermentable sugar in them.  If you are adding 1-3 lbs of fruit per gallon, this will have a substantial effect on the alcohol content of the finished beer.  If you make a high gravity base beer to start, then add the fruit you will have a highly alcoholic beer (too much warmth) that can easily become unbalanced.  You need to take into account the specific gravity added by the fruit as well as malts, then hop appropriately to achieve the proper balance between bitterness and sweetness.

Homebrewing with Fruits

Most authors recommend that you freeze whole fruit once and thaw it before adding it to the beer.  Freezing fruit breaks open the cell walls, allowing more flavor and aroma to permeate the beer.  Thaw it before use, however, to avoid shocking the yeast in your beer with a sudden change of temperature.

Add the fruit to the secondary fermenter if at all possible.  Since whole fruit in particular contains a lot of microbes and bacteria, adding fruit too early in the fermentation process can lead to infection.  By the time your beer is in the secondary fermenter, it has a higher alcoholic content, is more acidic and also nutrient depleted but yeast rich, all of which serve as a guard against potential infection.

One cautionary note when working with glass carboys as secondaries – adding fruit to your beer will cause rapid and vigorous fermentation, which requires several gallons of headspace above the beer.  If you are fermenting in a closed container such as a carboy, be sure you have adequate headspace and ventilation to prevent the bubbling trub from blocking your airlock which could make a bomb out of your glass carboy.

Juices and concentrates can also be used much like you would use the whole fruit – adding them to the secondary.  Adjustments must be made for concentration however – obviously concentrated fruit juice contains more flavor/fermentables than thinned juice.

Fruit flavor extracts or artificial flavor additives contain no fermentable sugars, so these may be added directly to the beer just before bottling.  In general, fruit flavor extracts are great at providing a burst of fruity flavor with minimum fuss but also produce a somewhat flat narrow flavor profile compared to real fruit.  One advantage of flavor extracts, however, is that you can flavor to taste when bottling by adding a little extract at a time and then tasting the beer to meet your needs.

Beer clarity can be a significant problem when brewing with fruits.  Most fruits contain pectins, carbohydrates and  proteins that contribute to haze or cloudiness in the finished beer.  I recommend the use of some kind of fining agent when brewing with fruit, and best results may be achieved if you use a combination of methods to achieve better clarity.

Aging is another issue that one must deal with when working with fruit beers.  Fruits contain many complex sugars that frequently ferment out over a long timeframe.   For bottle conditioned beers this can be a significant problem for the bottle that was perfectly carbonated a month or two after bottling may be an overcarbonated gusher a month or two later.  Obviously kegging fruit beer avoids this problem.

The second aging issue is that the flavor profile of fruit beer will inevitably change over time as these complex sugars ferment.  Young fruit beers may have a poor flavor profile due to unfermentables as well as the pectins, proteins and other complex fruit materials in the beer.  At some point the flavor of the beer will definitely peak, but for some fruit beers this can take six months to even a year or more.  One must be patient with fruit beer.  Finally, as the fruit continues to change you may see a dropoff in quality once the beer is past its peak.

Brewing with fruit is a complex, challenging task that is not for the weak at heart!  However a properly balanced fruit beer can be a refreshing reward for the adventurous brewer.  Thanks for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog and don’t hesitate to subscribe or tweet this article if you enjoyed it.

• Brewing Fruit Beers at Home Part 1 of 2
• Brewing Beer with Honey
• Making Full Bodied Beer at Home
• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 2
• Beer Yeast, Fermentation, and Home Brewing

Brewing fruit beer is not for everyone, but a properly balanced fruit beer can be light and refreshing on a hot summer day.  This is part one of our two part series on brewing fruit beer.  Beers that include fruit vary widely in taste, style and strength.  Whatever the style, a properly balanced fruit beer should not betray the underlying beer – fruit beer is beer with a touch of fruit flavor and not a wine cooler!

History

According to Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing book, fruit beer is a relatively modern invention of the 20th century.  He notes that ancient Egyptians referred to the use of dates and pomegranates, but only a few passing references can be found for fruit in intervening years until the 1930′s.  Many of the most famous Belgian fruit beers like Kriek started at that time, with Framboise to follow 20 years later.

Fruit beers, like many styles, have enjoyed a resurgence with the microbrewery explosion the last 20 years in the United States.  Wheat based fruit beers, in particular, have become popular enough to even be adopted by major US breweries.

Many of these beers contain no actual fruit.  Instead they brew a light wheat beer and add artificial fruit flavorings to provide a touch of fruit.  Home brewers can do the same thing by purchasing fruit flavoring from a homebrew supply shop and adding an appropriate amount to their beers.  Some commercial brews also use fruit extract.  This works well for fruits like raspberry and apricots that maintain their flavor after fermentation.

Fruit to Use in Beer

Some fruits fair much better in beer than others.  Fruits like uncooked blueberry and peach tend to lost much of their flavor when used in beer.  Others like apricot and raspberry hold up well, while cherries fare well but often require extensive aging.

Here are a few popular fruits to consider for fruit beer:

• Cherries – Traditionally used in many Belgian beers.  Ripe, sour cherries are best as they blend well with the malt flavors.  Generally a lot of cherry is needed, as much as 2-4 lbs per gallon of beer, which is why many cherry based Belgian beers are expensive.  Also, cherry beers sometimes need extensive aging.
• Peaches – Peach is one fruit that fades when used in beer.  Apricot is a good substitute that creates a flavor similar to peach in the finished beer.  Peach flavoring is also a possibility if you are determined to have peach.
• Blueberry – Another fruit that does not hold up well in beer.  Some brewers claim that cooked blueberry holds up better than uncooked.
• Raspberry – Raspberry is one of the best fruits to use with beer.  The flavor and aroma hold up well to fermentation, and come through well in the finished beer.  The flavor is strong even at a rate of 0.5-1 lb per gallon, making raspberry a favorite of commercial beer brewers.
• Blackberry – Blackberry, like raspberry, is another great fruit to use in beer.  However, they do not come through as intensely as raspberry, requiring a larger usage rate of 1-3+ pounds per gallon.  The color also carries over well to the finished beer.
• Strawberries – Strawberry is generally a poor choice.  The flavor, aroma and color fade quickly.  If you are going to use strawberry you need fully ripe berries, must use a lot of them (2-5 lb per gallon) and you must drink the beer as young as possible as the flavor and aroma will be gone before you know it.
• Apricots – Much better than peaches, but produce a peach like flavor in the finished beer.  If you want peach flavor, use apricots at a rate of 1.5-4 pounds per gallon.  Apricot extract also produces good results.
• Apples – Produce only a mild flavoring.  Generally apples are best used with meads and hard cider as they tend to be acidic in flavor.
• Other Fruits – A variety of other fruits are less commonly used in beers and meads to include pears, dates, bananas, plums, mangos, pomegranate, etc…  Most of these fruits produce only a mild flavor and aroma, though they add considerable fermentable sugars.  I’ve had some success with passionfruit and mangos, which both have strong aroma and flavor.

Hopefully you now have some idea of which fruits are better to use in your fruit beer.  I find that apricots and raspberries produce some of the finest results.  In part two of this article next week we will cover the finer points of designing a fruit beer recipe and the physical process of brewing and aging your fruit beer.  Thanks for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog and don’t hesitate to subscribe or tweet this article if you enjoyed it.

• Brewing Fruit Beers at Home Part 2 of 2
• Yeast Starters for Home Brewing Beer Part 2
• Seasonal Beer Brewing
• Russian Imperial Stout Recipes
• Brewing Hops Storage: Preserving Precious Hops

Krausening is a traditional German method for carbonating beers without using sugars or other adjuncts.  Instead actively fermenting malt wort is added to the fermented beer to provide the malted sugars needed for carbonation.

The History of Krausening

The “Reinheitsgebot”, or German purity law, originated in Bavaria in 1516.  It specifies that beer may only be made from the three basic ingredients: malt, hops, and water.  Interestingly yeast was left out of the original law as it was unknown until Louis Pasteur discovered microorganisms in the late 1800′s.  It was recently replaced by the “Biergesetz” in 1993, which also allows the use of malted wheat and cane sugar, though the term “Reinheitsgebot” is more commonly used.

Since sugars were not allowed in beer, malt wort was used instead.  Krausening was widely used in Germany particularly for lagers.  Many lagers are cold fermented and aged, often causing the yeast to go dormant.  By adding actively fermenting wort for carbonation the lager could be properly carbonated.  Krausening was less commonly used in Kolsch or Alt, as these ales were fermented at warmer temperatures leaving active yeast.

Krausening

In a brewery, krausening would be done with fresh wort taken from the most recent batch made.  For the homebrewer, Krausening is most often done with a small amount of wort made from dry malt extract.  Alternately you can use a fresh batch of wort or keep some wort in a sterile container in the refrigerator from your last batch.

A key question is how much wort to use for proper carbonation?  A good rule of thumb is that you should add enough wort to raise the gravity of the beer three points.  For simplicty you can try the following formula from the Home Brewing Wiki:

Quarts_of_wort = (12 x Gallons_of_beer) / ((Specific_gravity_wort – 1.0) * 1000)

For example, if the krausening addition of wort (also called gyle) has a specific gravity of 1.060, and we’re krausening 5 gallons of beer, the result would be (12 x 5)/((1.060-1)*1000) which works out to exactly one quart of wort we add at bottling.

Traditionally, the krausening addition is added at the most active point of fermentation.  Ideally you should add yeast to your krausen and monitor it for active fermentation, but try to catch it before a lot of the malt sugars have been consumed.  You need to measure the specific gravity of the krausening addition and do the above calculation before adding it to the wort to get the appropriate amount.

After you add the krausening wort, you can bottle or keg your beer and naturally carbonate it just as you would if you were with sugar carbonation.  Store your beer in a cool, dark place for a week or two to allow it to carbonate and then lager or age as desired.

Krausening is a great way to add some variety to your beer brewing techniques, and assure that your beer is made from pure barley malt.  Thanks again for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Please subscribe or retweet this article if you enjoyed it!  Have a great brewing week!

• How to Use a Refractometer, Brix and Beer Brewing
• Mashing for All Grain Beer Brewing
• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 1
• Apparent and Real Attenuation for Beer Brewers – Part 2
• Making a Yeast Starter for your Home Brew Beer

This week we feature an interview with Randy Mosher, author of the books “Brewer’s Companion”, “Tasting Beer”, and my personal favorite “Radical Brewing“.  Randy is an accomplished long time brewer (27+ years) who was in on some of the early days of the homebrewing resurgence in the 1980′s and 1990′s.  Randy is also an accomplished graphic artist who created most of the graphic art in his books.  I would like to thank him for taking the time to do this interview!

How did you get started in homebrewing?

Like most people, got interested in the flavors of decent beer, although there wasn’t much of it around. I started to drink beer in 1970, pretty much the low point of good beer in this country, but when we did find some weird import we were all over it–if we had the money. By 1983, a friend named Ray Spangler and I finally stopped talking about it and ordered a kit, with we promptly made an ungodly awful concoction, which we drank anyway. Second batch was worse, but batch three was almost palatable. By batch eight, we had switched to all-grain and were poring over the ponderous professional brewing tomes we’d checked out of the library, and then, well, we never really looked back. Ray, BTW, won AHA Homebrewer of the Year in 1989, so eventually we made some pretty tasty brews.

You are one of the best known brewing authors.  How many books have you written and how did you get started writing?

Three books as of right now.   So, we’re brewing along, and I started to feel the need to keep track of things, so I cooked up a recipe sheet. Well, all those little spaces needed information–gravity, hop bitterness, etc–and so I made up some quick reference charts to aid with that. Then hop bitterness prediction, water treatment, and so on. Before long, I had a pile of stuff in my three-ring binder. Somehow Charlie Finkel of Merchant Du Vin got hold of me, and we hit it off, and he generously offered to publish the book through his homebrew business, Liberty Malt and Supply, in Seattle.

Radical brewing is a really unique brewing book with an eclectic style, and one of my favorites.  Where did you find the inspiration for it?

I noticed you are a graphics artist.  Did you do the graphics work on your books?

What advice would you give to experienced brewers looking to do something new?

Tasting Beer is another interesting book.  What made you move from books on brewing to a book on beer styles?

Just wanting to move to a larger audience. I’d been teaching a class for Siebel Institute called the “Professional Beer Styles and Tastings” class, and as I got this huge outline together, it just started looking like a book. Sam Calagione was kind enough to hook me up with his literary agent, and we’ve been conspiring ever since. It’s only 1/3 about beer styles. The rest of the book helps you understand what’s in the glass, how it got there, and how to get the most out of every little drop. It’s about becoming a connoisseur–or as we usually say, Beer Geek.

How has homebrewing evolved since you started?

The answer should be obvious if you just know that we started with basically nothing, and now, just look around. But now, even with all this wondrousness,  it’s really about ingenuity, creativity, self-expression. Oh, and making a beer to drink that no one’s ever tasted before.

Where do you see the hobby going in the future?

Homebrewing already went somewhere. It’s called craft brewing. It’s my hope that the tremendous relationship of pro and amateur brewers, based on mutual respect and human-to-human fellowship will continue, no matter what else. My far-out dream? A licensed cooperative brewery, a kind of a big open clubhouse where people can sign up to use the equipment and then enjoy other brewers beers at the end of the day.

Brewers Companion was focused on the beginner – any advice for homebrewers who have just started?

Be brave, be bold, dream big, and pay attention to the details, because they matter like crazy. And remember, beer is one of the defining acts of civilization.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I need a beer!

Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog, and thanks again to Randy Mosher for agreeing to do this interview.  Please don’t hesitate to subscribe or tweet this article if you enjoyed it, and have a great home brewing week.

• Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher – Book Review
• Designing Beer with Randy Mosher – BeerSmith Podcast 30
• Beyond Barley Brewing – BeerSmith Podcast #13
• An Interview with Brewing Author John Palmer
• An Interview White Labs Yeast President Chris White

This week we are honored to feature an interview with Gordon Strong, the current Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) President, as well as the world’s only Grand Master Level V Beer Judge.  Gordon is also an accomplished home brewer, who won the 2009 Ninkasi award as the American Homebrewer’s Association Winningest Brewer.  I would like to sincerely thank Gordon for taking time to do this interview.

How did you get started in home brewing beer?

Two old college friends of mine got me interested in craft beer and homebrewing in the early to mid 1990s. I tried their beer and liked it, and then naturally asked them what was involved. They loaned me some books, I bought a kit, and just started. My first efforts turned out very well, and I actually won BOS at the Ohio State Fair with my 5^th batch of beer. That was all the encouragement I needed.

You won the coveted Ninkasi award at the 2009 AHA competition for being the “winningest brewer” at the National Homebrew Competition. This was your second win (you won in 2008) – how did you do it?

It was a great honor. I knew I had to “bring it” if I was going to defend my title on Jamil’s home turf. So I first set out to have as many different beers ready as possible. Then I carefully judged them as if I were one of the competition judges. I only sent my best efforts, and I tweaked some of the entries to make them fit the style better. I then repeated this process for the second round, including rebrewing some of the styles that I thought wouldn’t hold up as well (such as the hefeweizen). Finally, I just was lucky in getting judges that liked my beers. Competing is a real crap-shoot, and some days you just get lucky. I had one in three beers place in both the first and second rounds.

You have been a freelance writer for several years on both Zymurgy and BYO – how did you get started in writing about homebrewing?

It’s a natural extension of talking about beer. I just put the conversations I have with brewers and judges into writing. I think I started by trying to give presentations at conferences, such as the AHA NHC and MCAB. I also did a lot of writing for the BJCP when preparing the style guidelines. I also had been fairly active in online forums. Finally, I was technical editor for both Radical Brewing and Wild Brews, and contributed to Brew Like a Monk. It certainly helps for editors to see that you can meet deadlines and express yourself well. Then I guess I just had gotten enough name recognition and exposure through my work with the BJCP and the AHA Governing Committee that the work started rolling in. I recently signed a contract with Brewers Publications to develop an advanced all-grain brewing book, tentatively called Brew Better Beer. That’s my major project at the moment.

You are the current BJCP President. Many brewers are familiar with the BJCP style guide, but tell us a little about the BJCP and beer judge certification.

The BJCP is the principal certifying body for homebrew judges in North America, and is becoming known for the same in other countries (Australia, South Africa, Argentina). We administer beer and mead judge exams, sanction competitions, develop style guidelines and competition materials, develop training and education materials, and track judge progress through a ranking system.

Judges must pass a three-hour written and tasting exam, which is very rigorous. The exam score, combined with experience points gained by judging in competitions, helps determine judge’s rank. The ranking system includes ranks for Apprentice, Recognized, Certified, National, Master and Grand Master judges. Higher ranks are earned through higher exam scores, more practical experience, and in the case of Grand Master ranks, service to the BJCP.

You are a Grand Master BJCP certified judge – what does it take to get into beer judging?

I’m currently the only Grand Master V judge. Each Grand Master rank involves doing everything you needed to do to get the first Grand Master rank again – getting 100 experience points, 50 of which must have come through judging (judges generally get one experience point per competition), grading 50 exams, and continuing to perform service for the BJCP (such as administering exams, grading exams, holding BJCP office, or teaching training courses).

Anyone can be a beer judge. To be a member of the BJCP, one just has to take the BJCP exam. However, to do well as a judge, you need to study hard and do well on the exam. Then you need a lot of practical experience judging in competitions.

How does one get to Grand Master level V?

You have to score a 90 on the exam, which is something only 3% or so of examinees achieve. Then you have to get 500 experience points, 250 of which come through judging. Grading 250 exams and performing additional years of service towards the BJCP are also requirements. I’ve been a judge since 1997, so it took me about a dozen years to get there. It’s not something you can get through casual effort; you have to be deeply involved in judging for a long period of time.

How does the BJCP scoring system work in competition?

Beers are scored on a 50 point scale, with 12 points going for aroma, 3 for appearance, 20 for flavor, 5 for mouthfeel, and 10 for overall impression. A good beer will score over 30, while a great beer will be in the 40s. A perfect score is rare, indeed, since it’s almost impossible to hit a style perfectly, have no defects, and be perfectly fresh.

Teams of judges individually assess a beer, coming up with their own scores and detailed comments on their perceptions. The judges discuss the beer and come up with a consensus score, which is used to determine the winner of an individual flight of beers. The category winners are then judged in a best-of-show round that will determine the overall champion of the competition.

What do you look for when judging a great beer?

First of all, it needs to be well-crafted and showing the brewer’s art. It must be properly fermented, not have any technical flaws, and be fresh. All beers are judged against style guidelines, which are a reference for individual beer styles. A great beer must capture the essence of the particular style, having great balance and flavor, and generally standing up against the best commercial examples. In summary, a great beer must hit the style well, be free of flaws, and be fresh.

What would a first time competitor expect going into their first BJCP judged competition?

It’s an eye-opening experience. An entrant should receive at least two scoresheets for every beer they entered, each with a detailed evaluation of the beer and a score. The evaluation should describe what the judges perceived, and how well they feel it fit the style. If they detected any flaws, they may offer feedback on possible courses of action to improve the beer. If you beer placed in the top three for your flight, expect a medal or ribbon. The competition standings should show who won medals, and who won best of show. Some competitions will show scores, so you might get an idea of where you placed relative to other entrants in your category.

Judging can be quite variable, so entrants should submit their beers to multiple competitions to get a better sampling of opinion from judges. Remember that judging is subjective and not all judges will perceive the same things. So you’ll probably also be surprised to see differing opinions and assessments. Use them as data points, and compare them against your own impressions.

Any advice for competitive homebrewers?

Learn to be a beer judge. Understand what the judges are looking for, and then try to provide it. Understand competition mechanics. Then try to make the best beer you possibly can. When brewing for competition, pay careful attention to hitting the style. Not just the numbers, but the overall balance and impression. Taste your beer before sending it. Don’t send losers. Read the feedback carefully, and decide why your beer was scored the way it was. When rebrewing your beer, take the feedback into account and try to correct any mistakes. Try to give the judges what they want, and you’ll be ahead of the game.

Does one have to iterate several times to create an award winning beer?

No. Like I said, I won best of show with the fifth beer I ever made. You don’t have to iterate, but that means that you’ll have to start with good technique and a good recipe. If you plan your recipe wisely to fit the style guidelines and understand how to use ingredients and processes to get a certain outcome, then you should be able to make award-winning beers the first time. In many competitions, all you have to do is come up with a reasonably tasting beer that isn’t infected and superficially meets the style guidelines. In more competitive competitions, you’ll have to pay more careful attention to the style definitions and be sure your beer is fresh and tasty.

Where do you see the BJCP going as an organization?

We continue to expand at a growing rate. We had a record year in 2009 in terms of the number of people taking the exam and the number of competitions sanctioned. The hobby is becoming more popular, and more people want to be BJCP judges. I think it’s a good reflection on the organization to see demand this strong.

I’m also very pleased that other countries are asking to form local chapters. Australia has been a very successful story for us; we’re approaching 100 judges there with over a dozen competitions a year. We’ve had inquiries from Japan, Germany and England as well. To see that people in other countries are recognizing the value of our brand and the legitimacy of our guidelines and methods is a strong endorsement.

I see the BJCP continuing to grow both domestically and internationally, with more educational opportunities and resources being made available to our members. We continue to look for more programs to fund, such as providing sensory training kits to our members. We launched a mead judge program last year; we hope to do the same with cider in the future.

Our goal is to have the BJCP recognized throughout the world as the premier beer judge organization, to have our style guidelines and classification system adopted uniformly, and to provide the best training and education materials for anyone interested in evaluating beer.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I would like to encourage your readers to train to become BJCP judges and to join the American Homebrewers Association. Those two organizations do help you become a better brewer and judge. Come to the AHA National Homebrew Conference – it’s the best beer event of the year. I’ll also add a plug for The Brewing Network, which I feel is one of the best sources of online information on all things brewing. Get involved, have fun, and if you see me at a beer event, feel free to come up and introduce yourself. You get much more out of the hobby if you are actively involved. Most brewers and judges are great people who like to have a good time and talk with people with a passion for this hobby. You learn so much more through the relationships you build, so be sure to get involved and meet new people.

=> Thank you (and Gordon!) for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  If you enjoyed this week’s article don’t hesitate to subscribe for regular email delivery, retweet or bookmark us somewhere.  Have a great brewing week!

• Judging Beer with Grandmaster Gordon Strong – BSHB Podcast #6
• Judging Beer for Homebrewers
• New BJCP 2008 Style Guide and BeerSmith Batch Sparging Release
• An Interview with Brewer Dan Morey
• National Homebrewers Conference Preview – BSHB Podcast 12

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the basic principles of beer recipes design are often misunderstood and rarely well articulated.  This week we’re going to look at how you can design a great beer recipes at home using a tried and true process. What follows is an what I consider an overview of the essence of beer recipe design.

Starting a New Recipe

When I build a new beer recipe, I almost always start by picking a target beer style.  This is not to say that the style defines the whole beer as there is plenty of room for interpretation and creativity, but by starting with a beer style, you establish the baseline for the beer you are going to brew.

A good starting reference is the BJCP style guidelines.   Organized by the Beer Judge Certification Program, the style guideline provides detailed specifications and suggested ingredients for nearly 100 different styles of beer.  So if you want to brew an Irish Stout, or Bavarian Weisse, this is a good place to start.  These guidelines also provide ranges for average bitterness, color and original gravity for the beer which can help you achieve the appropriate balance for the beer.

Choosing the Ingredients

The next step in designing the beer is to pick appropriate ingredients.  Beer is made from malt, hops, water and yeast (occasionally with a few spices).  Before you jump to doing detailed design, do a bit of research to determine what ingredients in each category are typically used your target beer style, and in roughly what proportions.  For proportions, I prefer to work initially in percentages such as 80% pale malt, 15% carmel malt and 5% chocolate malt – this makes it easier to scale things later on.

The BJCP style guide provides some information on typical ingredients used, but often does not have detailed breakouts of proportions.  The BeerSmith Blog Style Articles do provide more detailed information on the history of different beer styles and percentage of ingredients used.  Our recipes page also provides some great examples, as do a number of other online recipe web sites, though one must be careful when using someone else’s recipe as often they are far from the actual beer style.

Another great resource is brewing books – one of my favorites is Ray Daniel’s book Designing Great Beers, which has detailed analysis of percentages of ingredients used in award winning and commercial beer examples.  Finally, you can often find articles or messages for a particular beer style using a simple google search or search on a discussion forum.

The goal of all of your research is to determine ingredients appropriate to the style.  Using the wrong ingredients, or selecting the wrong proportions will result in a beer with the wrong flavor and balance.  You will rarely go wrong using ingredients that are authentic to the style.

Brewing by the Numbers

Once you have your ingredients selected, and have them apportioned in roughly the correct way its time to actually enter the beer into a spreadsheet or program such as BeerSmith, and run the numbers.  This is an important step, which many beginning brewers skip, but if you don’t have the recipe properly adjusted and balanced for your equipment and your settings you will likely end up way off your target style.

The critical parameters to look at as you enter and adjust your ingredients are:

• Original Gravity (OG)– A measure of how much fermentable and unfermentable malt you have added to the beer.  The original gravity typically determines how much potential alcohol you will have in the beer, as well as how malty the beer will be.  The style guideline provides a range for this parameter.
• Bitterness (IBUs) – Bitterness from hops balances the flavor of your beer.  For beer design, you want to estimate your bitterness in International Bitterness Units (IBUs).  Again you want to use the style guideline to determine the appropriate IBU range.
• Color (SRM) – You can estimate the color of your beer from the ingredients used.  Estimating the color is important, as you don’t want your pale ale to be black or your stout to be blonde in color.  Obviously darker malts add color.
• Bitterness Ratio (IBU/GU) – The bitterness ratio gives you a rough measurement of the bitterness to malt balance for the beer.  A hoppy beer will have a high bitterness ratio, while a malty beer will have a low one.  We have a separate article on calculating bitterness ratio as well as the ranges for different styles.
• Final Gravity (FG) – While it is very difficult to accurately predict final gravity ahead of time, I often look at the final gravity for the style to get an idea of the attenuation needed from the yeast.  Attenuation refers to the percentage of sugars consumed by the yeast, and some styles require high attenuation yeast to achieve a smooth clean flavor, while others need low attenuation yeasts for complex flavor.
• Carbonation (Vols) – The carbonation of the beer should match the style.  Carbonation is measured in volumes, where one volume would essentially be a liter of carbon dioxide gas dissolved into a liter of beer.  Fermented beer at room temperature with no additional carbonation contains about 1.0 volumes of CO2.  Authentic English ales are often served with little or no carbonation (1.5-2.0 vols) while many German beers are highly carbonated (up to 3.0 vols).  If you research the style, you can often determine the correct carbonation level for the beer.

Brewing Techniques

After you have the proper ingredients and have balanced the recipe by the numbers, the final step is to look at the techniques needed to brew this style of beer.  Different styles definitely require application of a variety of brewing techniques.  Some of the techniques to consider include:

• Hop Techniques ­– A variety of hop techniques are available, most of which are covered in our article on hop techniques.  Examples include first wort hopping, dry hopping, late hop additions, bittering hops, and use of a hopback.  Different beer styles require different methods to achieve the appropriate balance.
• Mash Techniques – For all grain and partial mash brewers, adjusting your mash temperature is critical to achieving the appropriate body for your beer.  Lower mash temperature during the main conversion step will result in a lower body beer and higher mash temperatures result in more body.  In addition, advanced brewers may want to consider advanced techniques like decoction mashing if appropriate to the style.
• Fermenting, Lagering and Aging – The temperature for fermenting your beer should be appropriate for the yeast and beer you are using.  Yeast manufacturers as well as most brewing software publish appropriate temperature ranges for fermentation of each yeast.   Aging and lagering should also match your target style.

Beer design is clearly one part art, and one part science which is what makes it an interesting and enjoyable hobby.  However, if you do your homework, select quality ingredients, run the numbers and follow good brewing techniques you can make fantastic beer at home using your own recipes.

Thank you again for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  If you enjoyed this article, don’t hesitate to subscribe, tweet, bookmark or vote for our articles on BrewPoll.  Also I recently added a “tip jar” to the left sidebar here.  If you feel the blog provides value, you can make a contribution of any amount.

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This week we look at how to enhance your home brewed beers using a technique called aeration.  Aeration with oxygen is very important for fermenting beer, but needs to be applied at the right time to brew good beer.   Let’s take a look at aeration and how important it is for brewing great beer at home.

Aeration Explained

Lets start with some basic definitions.  Aeration is the injection of oxygen into the wort during the brewing process, usually after boiling and cooling cooling and just prior to fermentation.  The act of boiling wort forces most of the oxygen out of solution.  Unfortunately, as we covered in our article on fermentation and the yeast life cycle, yeast requires a great deal of oxygen during the “lag phase” when it is rapidly multiplying in the wort.  Without enough oxygen, the yeast will fail to reproduce sufficiently, leaving an incomplete fermentation.

Before we get to how to best add more oxygen, lets look at two other important terms.  Another term you may hear is “hot side aeration”, which refers to exessive splashing or aeration of the wort during the boil or before we’ve had a chance to cool the wort down.  The problem with adding oxygen while the wort is hot is that it can oxidize the melanoidins in your beer leading to a stale flavor.  A study by the late George Fix suggests that hot side aeration can occur at temperatures as low as 86F (which is pretty low!), so it is important to cool your wort before aerating it.

A third term, called oxidation is closely related to the first two.  Oxidation occurs when you add oxygen after the lag phase of yeast growth (i.e. later in fermentation, or after the beer has fermented).  In this case, the effect is exactly what is seen when you left your pony keg at college out for a few days with an air pump on it.  The air oxidizes the finished beer, leaving a strong stale flavor.  So you clearly don’t want to introduce oxygen in your beer after lag fermentation has started.

Aerating your Wort

So far we’ve learned that hot side aeration is bad, oxidation is bad, but proper aeration of the cooled wort is good.  Now lets look at how to put this information to good use in our beer.  Yeast needs between 8 and 10 parts per million (ppm) of oxygen to properly reproduce in the lag phase.  A level of 8ppm is achievable using air alone (which is 21% oxygen), but achieving a higher level requires a tank of pure oxygen.

The best time to aerate your wort is as soon as it is cool.  Ideally this can be done during transfer to the fermenter or immediately after transfer to the fermenter.  If you aerate after pitching your wort, do not aerate for long as the lag phase generally starts withing a few hours of pitching the wort.

There are three basic methods for aerating wort:

• Splashing – Splashing the wort around in the fermenter can actually add some oxygen to the solution.  You can achieve the same effect by splashing the wort around during transfer – for example using a cap at the end of the siphon that splashes the wort out the side a bit.  While splashing will not achieve as high an oxygen content as injection, it is a good option for those on a limited budget.  Splashing is far superior to no aeration at all.
• Agitation -Agitation is done by stirring rapidly with a spoon, whisking the wort around with a wisk or rocking the entire fermenter.  Generally a sterilized whisk is best if you have open access to the wort.  Whisk the beer vigorously for several minutes before adding your yeast.  Agitation is a step above splashing, as it generally gets more oxygen into the solution.
• Injection – There are many ways to inject air or oxygen directly into the wort.  The simplest setup involves using an inexpensive aquarium pump with a inline sterile filter.  Note that the filter is needed to prevent bacteria and other organisms from being drawn in with the air.  I also recommend using some kind of carbonation stone or aeration stone at the end of the tube to help diffuse the air.  Care must be taken to sanitize the stone and tube before using it.  A more elaborate injection system would use an actual oxygen bottle and regulator to inject oxygen.  However, even the relatively cheap aquarium pump injection system can achieve the 8 ppm ideal aeration level needed for your wort.

For many years, I used the splashing/agitation system, but for less than $25 you can move up to an aquarium pump, filter and carbonation stone and significantly improve the fermentation of your beer.  I will add a final note – don’t forget the use of a properly sized yeast starter, for without a starter you still risk poor yeast production and subsequent problems in your beer.

Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Don’t hesitate to subscribe, tweet or bookmark this article if you enjoyed it and also check out our BeerSmith Home Brewing Guide for more great articles.

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This week we we feature an interview with brewer Dan Morey.  Dan is the originator of the “Morey equation” for estimating beer color, which is used by BeerSmith and other packages.  Dan is also an active brewer in the Midwest, regular competitor and organizer for this year’s Babble Brew-off.  Thanks again to Dan for taking the time to do this interview.

How did you get into brewing beer at home?

Dan Morey and Friend

I got started in homebrewing back in 1992.  Prior to homebrewing, I had an interest in better beer.  In college, I was drinking the likes of Orval, Young’s Old Nick, Samuel Smith Taddy Porter, Anchor Libery Ale, and Lindemans.  There was plenty of Huber Bock too, those bottles can in handy later!  With plenty of family in Wisconsin, instead of heading south for spring break, I would round up some friends end head north on brewery tours.  After a couple of years of tours, I decided it was time to give homebrewing a try.  How hard could it be?

My first batch was a lager kit, one of those kits in a 3.3 lb can.  The yeast was questionable and it was half sugar.  The result?  Well it was drinkable.  Not bad, not great.  But extract brewing wasn’t for me.  I felt like I was making orange juice from a can of concentrate.  Don’t get me wrong, this hobby is about fun.  So whether you are extract, partial mash, or all-grain, keep what you are doing as long as you are having fun.  So back to the story.  I’d been on several brewery tours and considered myself an above average cook so I took the all-grain plunge.  Who needs books anyways?  Well my first all grain batch was 100% black patent ground to a flour!  Needless to say it didn’t work.  That’s when I decided to get some books and read how it was really done.  The first books I had were Papazian’s New Complete Joy and Byron Burch’s Brewing Quality Beers.  It took about a year, but I finally started making some decent all-grain beers.  I’ve been brewing ever since.

You are famous for the “Morey Equation” for estimating beer color.  How did you come up with the equation?

I got to admit, I was shocked when I found out “real” brewing software was using the “Morey Equation.”  At the time was writing my own brewing software.  The original version was in Quick Basic and was really limited.  I decided wanted something that was executable and had editable databases, so I went to work on transferring it to Turbo Pascal.  One area I was really unhappy with was color estimation.  By using just the MCU value I felt my beers were usually lighter than the prediction.

So, Ray Daniels’ article in the NOV/DEC 1995 Brewing Techniques caught my attention.  At first, I was going to use the three linear approximations:  MCU for the low range, Daniels in the middle range and Mosher at the higher end.  But the idea did not apeal to me.  I didn’t like the ideas of discontinuity in the curve.  So I decided to manipulate the data, so see if I could fit a single curve that approximate the “Z” shaped curve from the assumptions I made.  Turn out I was able to get good correlation, so I wrote Brewing Techniques.  My hope was that either Ray or Randy would apply the same form of curve to the raw data they used to develop their linear models.  Brewing Techniques then contacted me.  Turns out there was a lot of interest this series of articles and they wanted to establish a web depository for all the related responses and they wanted to include my work.

I never really thought it would become so widely accepted.  I think a lot of it was due to Jeffery Donovan having good correlation between the model and the beers he measured.  While the formula was being debated on the HBD, Kyle Druey fit power curves to the color tables published by Daniels and Noonan.  The curve fit for Daniels’ is very similar to the approximation I proposed.  The fit to Noonan’s rose more quickly and started to taper fairly quickly at 15 MCU.  Attached is paper I wrote for my club BABBLE, when they asked me to talk about color.

You wrote a bit for Brewing Techniqies and Zymurgy magazines.  How did you get started writing about home brewing?

Actually, I only had the one letter to the editor that was published by Brewing Techniques.  I have contributed two articles in Zymurgy.  “Maximize your Mash” and “Beyond Barley Wine” both which appeared in 2005.  What I enjoyed about writing is it driven some goal I have had in homebrewing.  Whether it is studying a topic in depth or conducting a series of expirements.  Regardless if the story is for publication or some presentation, it give a focus to the task.  For example, the goal behind “Beyond Barley Wine” was to really understand:  wheat, rye, and oats.  As a judge I find there are still misconceptions concerning wheat and rye among judges and brewers.

So I set out to brew huge beers from 100% malt other than barley so there would be no mistaking the contribution of wheat, rye, or oats.  It was one of the funnest projects I ever did.  I couldn’t quite pull of the rye, I believe I ended up at 86%, but I did achieve 100% with both wheat and oats.  I did my own evaluations and also entered the beers in competitions to get independent feedback so that I could describe the character of these malts.  Besides describing the malts, I wanted to give tips on how to brew with them.  The oat beer was just cool and it got the best comment ever, “Experiments like this is why people should homebrew!”  One project I planned was writing an article on saisons.  Turns out Drew Beechum thought so too and beat me to it.  But it still drove my brewing schedule for that year – to brew a sasion for every season.  One thing I’d still like to try is some simple home test to estimate AA% of homegrown hops.  Perhaps titrated acid or pH of hop tea could reveal a correlation.  I guess if I had to some it up in on word it would be Passion.

I see that you are a regular beer competitor – do you have any advice for fellow brewers who wish to compete?

Aside from good basic cleaning and sanitation, know where you are going and determine how to get there.  Rarely is there a beer you just through together with random ingredients that is a winning beer.  It maybe excellent and interesting, but most categories are about meeting styles.  Volunteer and local events.  Get to know the judges.  Talk to them about beer styles you are interested in.  I’ve judges many competitions from regional to national including a few NHC 2nd rounds.

One thing is clear, there are regional preferences and local preferences.  So if you understand the preferences of the region, your chances of winning are better.  Perhaps one location prefers a certain hop character.  Maybe there is yeast preference.  Do saisons win more often or Belgian pale ales.  These are thing you can learn by volunteering.  Pick styles you are interested in that maybe less popular.  If there are several tables of stouts with a mini-BOS and only one table of porter, you probably have a better chance with porters.  Finally continually improve your technique.  Look for common threads in your feedback.  This should point to real opportunity to improve.

You are the organizer for this year’s Babble Brew-Off.  Can you tell us about the upcoming competition?

This is our seventh year doing the Brew-Off.  It started out in 2004 as the Leap Beer Brew-Off.  In non-leap years, we just use the name BABBLE Brew-Off.  We have grown from 126 entries in our first year to averaging over 220 the last four years.  Entries come from across the nation and we’ve had international entries.  For 2010 we are planning on 31 flights and estimate we’ll have 251 entries.  There will be seperate Best of Shows for Beer and Mead/Cider.  We are fortunate to be able to draw many excellent judges from the Chicago area up through Milwaukee.

This gives a large pool of judges with several National and Master judges available.  Some notable judges we have had:  Jeff Sparrow, Joe Formanek, Dave Norton, and Rodney Kibzey.  What is also great is the number of excellent brewers who compete in this event.  Again the like of Formanek, Kibzey, Michael Shannon, and Dan Schlosser provide excellent competition, it is no easy feet winning.  Some of the things we try to do:

• Get the best judges we can and return results within a week.
• Besides judging feedback, we try to make sure every entrant is given something donated by our sponsors.  Some examples of what we have given out are:  yeast, hops, and cleaning chemicals.  It is our way of saying thank you.
• We try to make sure each flight winner recieves a prize beyond their ribbon.
• We have an Entrant Appreciation Drawing.  One participant will recieve a special prize just for entering.  Each entry qualifies you, so the more you enter, the better chances of winning.  It is another way of saying thank you.

For more information see the BABBLE website  http://www.babblehomebrewers.com (Editors Note: BeerSmith is sponsoring Babble prizes this year)

The Babble Brew-off is part of the Midwest Homebrewer of the Year Circuit – can you tell us how this circuit works?

We joined the Midwest Homebrewer of the Year Circuit back in 2006.  Eligible brewers from the following states are awarded points based on their place of finish:  Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas.  The winner must enter at least 10 different BJCP categories during the yeasr and enter at least four different contests.  Only the highest placing beer per category give the brewer points.  First place is 8, 4 pint for second, and third place is awarded 2 points.  So if someone one second place for a Belgian blond ale, they would be awarded 4 points.  If later they one first place for a dubbel, they would get 8 points, but the 4 points for the previous blond would be dropped since they are both category 18.

Finally, they take the raw score (sum of all the highest category points) and multiply that by the winning percentage.  So while the 4 points for the blond would have been dropped, the ribbon would count towards winning percentage.  Basically the contest is set-up to encourgare brewers to brew a wide variety of styles and it discourages flooding competitions by using the winning percentage.  It also limits the impact of someone have one killer beer and continually re-entering it to rack-up points.  In the end, the overall winner is awarded a trophy and gift certificate from Northern Brewer.  Some notable winners of MWHBoY are:  Ray Daniels, Joe Formanek, Curt Stock and Kris England.

Beer brewing has changed a lot since you and I started brewing beer.  What advice would you have for today’s brewers to make great beer?

Good question.  The basic and simple answer is good cleaning and sanitation practices.  But this has always been true.  One of the biggest changes has been equipment.  Seems like HERM and RIM systems abound today.  A lot of brewers are paying good money for fancy mash system and I just don’t get it.  I’d like one, but that is not the first place I’d invest a large chunk on money if I wanted to brew better beer.  I mean I know people who have dropped $3-5K on these systems.

There is great beer made from all different kinds of wort from 100% extract, to partial mash, and all grain.  What I recommend, when you are ready for a big purchase, invest in temperature control of you fermenters.  Get a frig or freezer with a temperature controller, a brew belt, or a heated and cooled conical.  By controlling the temperature of your fermentation you can do more to affect the quality of the final product.  Hit the correct ester profile, get the right attenuation, limit fusels, have repeatable results.  The best made wort may not make the best beer when fermentation is all over the place.  Focus you efforts on fermentation before worrying about wort.

Why do you brew?

It’s flat out fun!  I’ve been playing around with different suagrs lately.  I was assigned the dark soft candi on team golden strong when the BBB did the candi sugar swap.  I have taken that same basic Belgian golden strong and brewed it several times changing the specialty sugar for each batch.   Besides the dark soft candi, I’ve used regular table sugar, date syrup, grape molasses, and maple syrup.  There is such anticipation each time you open that new beer.  What awaits you?  Is it something wonderful?  The mystery is waiting to be solved, just open the tap.  Homebrewing is an artistic outlet.  Some people paint, others make music or perform, even other may work with hot molten glass or sculpt.  While they inspire and bring enjoyment, I know no other art that embraces all the senses like beer.  I make beer!

Do you have anything you would like to add?

I’m sure I’ve gone too long.  I do have a page on MoreBeer Buzz were I try to keep anything that I think might be interesting or useful to homebrewers:    http://morebeer.ning.com/profile/DanMorey

Once again I would like to thank Dan Morey for taking the time to do today’s interview.  Thank you for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  Please don’t hesitate to subscribe, twitter or bookmark us if you enjoyed this article.

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