When Philly Beer Week first kicked off with the Craft Beer Fest at the Navy Yard, I remember thinking, “WOW!  This has got to be one of the greatest things ever!  There should be beer week every month!”  But just as Tom Hanks learned in Big, be careful what you wish for, because it just might happen.  Don’t get me wrong: if the event sells out every time, why not offer it more frequently?  But now that we’re up to what—4 festivals a year?—it’s getting a little tiresome and EXPENSIVE.  Ticket prices have gone up (not much), and the novelty has gone down.  There’s now the Winter Beer Fest, the Craft Beer Fest (in March, which is no longer Beer Week), another Fest for Beer Week in June, the various Oktoberfest events, etc, there’s just too much to drink and too little time to appreciate it.

Bryan at the Brew Lounge quotes Jennie Hatton’s prediction for more than 1000 events at this year’s Beer Week.  Yes, it’s great that people are excited about good beer.  But with Beer Week turning into your standard chug-and-run-to-the-next-event format (like the Erin Express, but with better beer), it’s hard to get as excited about it.

How to remedy this situation?  Plan events outside of beer week!  Such as…

The Home Brew Brunch
Hawthornes Cafe (11th and Fitzwater) @ Noon, January 23rd

We’ve set up a brunch with the new beer café, Hawthornes.  If you haven’t been there yet, Chris (of Bella Vista Beer Dist. fame) and his fiancée Heather have opened a cozy tasting room complete with food, huge bottle selection, and a growler station (with an impressive list of options).  Come join us on Saturday, January 23rd at noon to share and sample home brews.  Space is limited, so leave a comment if you’re coming.  Feel free to stop by to taste a few sips and say hi if you don’t have anything brewed.  Feel free to send this info to any other home brewers you know.

We had a great brew last weekend—our holiday porter is bubbling away, and it smells fantastic.  I’m really excited to see how it turns out (although I can’t think of any brew I haven’t been excited to taste).  We had a few helping hands—Helene, Ant, Katie, and Cederic (some names have been changed to protect their top secret identities).  Helene is quite a beer connoisseur, but had never brewed before.  Ant’s always up for a few beers, and Katie was taking Cederic on a tour of Philly before he has to head home to redacted.

Other than the hop bag coming undone and spilling hops into the boiling wort, the whole brew went according to plan.  Temperatures were held, the cooling was quick, and Garrett Oliver’s extra yeast suggestion worked… too well.  The next morning, I came down to find a stream of wort leading away from the carboy.  The escaping gases foamed up, causing wort to clog the holes on the airlock.  After building up some pressure, the cap of the airlock went flying (I still can’t find it) and a geyser of beer shot up (scrubbing the ceiling is not fun).  Next time, I’ll leave the cap off of the airlock…

Becky and I finally made it over to Hawthornes Cafe for dinner, and it was great.  I thought the food prices were a little high at first, but then I saw the portions.  We talked to the owners, Chris and Heather, about a homebrew brunch some time in the next few months.  Anybody else up for swapping a few beers on a cold Saturday morning?

And another thing—I’ve really been enjoying the newest local beer mag to hit, Philly Beer Scene.  Anybody else reading it?  I liked the beer tasting they had a Raw Dawgs Saloon in South Philly—might have to hit that place up soon.

Garrett Oliver recently came to Philly for a night of debauchery high-brow discussion.  A bunch of us met up at Bishop’s Collar, and after Garrett finished mixing some beer concoctions behind the bar, we figured we could pick up a few tips.

We learned that he has a new beer encyclopedia in the works, covering all aspects of beer.  How such a thing could exist and not have to be split into 8 volumes is as-of-yet beyond me.  But if anyone is able to make such a thing not only readable, but enjoyable, it’s him.

We were also able to glean a very important tip from him.  Joe asked, “If there was one thing you could tell all home-brewers that would make a definite difference in their brewing attempts, what would it be?”  Garrett didn’t even blink: more yeast.  He asked if we use liquid yeast (sure), if we’ve ever run into the situation where we ever waited more than a day for the yeast to start bubbling away (yes!), and if we ever notice off-flavors in those batches (umm, yeah).  He said that if his batches aren’t bubbling away after 12 hours, he starts sweating.  There are two good reasons behind this (the 12 hour mark, not the sweating).  Pitching too little yeast puts the yeast into “reproduction mode” first, where they have to multiply to achieve sustainable numbers.  He said this produces a lot of esters that you may not want in your beer.  Also, it gives other bacteria a head start, creating even more chances for those tongue-twisting off-flavors to occur.  He said that the amount that most home brewers pitch is between a quarter to a third of what big-time brewers use.

His recommendation?  Buy two pouches of the liquid yeast and pitch them both at the same time.  A yeast starter would work too, but if you’re brewing on short notice (as we often are) two pouches should be sufficient.

Which reminds me…  We’re brewing this weekend, so if I’m going to get that starter going, I’d better go buy some yeast.

Yes, it’s true.  I’m horrible at remembering to blog.  But can you blame me?  Sure.

Truth be told, I haven’t been feeling very beery lately, since our last batch has yet to carbonate.  I had a friend try it, and even after explaining the situation to him, his response was, “Where’s the body?!”  Beer without carbonation equals sweet alcohol water.  Considering how many batches we have done that have gotten their fizz on, what was different about this one (we keep asking ourselves)?  It’s not that this one has absolutely no carbonation, but it’s way less than I’d like to see.  We’re talking a "sck” when opening a bottle as opposed to a “sckxxxxxxx”.

Possible Problems

• We added the water and dried malt extract right off of the stove.  It went in when we had about a 2 gallons of the wort in the bottling bucket, with 3 still to go.  Even if the heat killed whatever yeast was in that 2 gallons, the next 3 should have brought the temperature down.
• There wasn’t enough yeast left alive to carbonate.  But the heat and additional sugars should have brought them out of hibernation.
• Too much alcohol!  Even with the extra sugar water, the yeast were suffocated in their own excrement (thanks Kurt Vonnegut!)
• Improper sterilization.  Always a possibility, and there’s no way to know exactly how it happened.
• Time!  We just need to wait.

Possible Solutions

• Pour all of the bottles into a soda keg and pressurize with CO2.  After a day or two, we’ll have beer!
• Distill the beer and make whiskey.
• Suck it up and drink it as-is.

My guess is that we have too much alcohol for the yeast to quickly carbonate the beer, but given enough time, it will be good.  Of course, the problem with time is that you have to give it, well, time.  I guess I can use that time to catch up on my blogging…

Cheers!

We had a great time brewing the IPA on May 2nd!  A handful of people told me they wanted to come see the process, but when the grains went into the water, it was just me, Joe, and Ben watching the clock for the next ingredient to add.  Sandip was there for emotional support, but I get the impression he’s more interested in the final product…  If you’re interested in learning to make beer, come join us the next time!  It beats paying for classes or learning the hard way.

Here’s the recipe we used.  It’s based on the Yippee IPA from my favorite recipe book, the Homebrew’s Recipe Guide.  We went with all light malt extract instead of half-amber/half-light, added 2 lbs of honey, and messed with the hops a little lot.  This was the first brew that our cooling coil worked as expected, taking less than half an hour to get the temperatures down.  Not too shabby for $20 worth of copper tubing.  I collected the waste water and brought it right outside to water the grass, and all of our spent grains and hops went right into the compost pile.  No waste brewing!

It’s been in the carboy for just over a week now, and CO2 is still bubbling out slowly.  This weekend, we’ll be reracking it onto more hops and letting that sit for another week before bottling it up.  I had a smaller 1 gallon batch with some special ingredients that I put into growlers last night, and after a quick taste, it’s definitely what we were going for.  We’ll see how the big batch turns out soon enough!  Stay tuned for our next brew—we have to try another fruit beer for summer, since our last attempt, a cranberry wheat, left much to be desired.

If you have the book, take a look on page 56 for Ed’s Honey Oatmeal Stout.  We followed this recipe excepting the following items:

• Instead of Liberty hops for aroma, George suggested Mt. Rainier — more alpha acids with the same flavor.  Who are we to argue?!  Just by smelling these malts, you can tell it’s going to need some serious balancing.
• George didn’t have any black patent malt at the moment, but set us up with some dehusked Carafa instead.  The dehusking removes some bitterness, tasting mellower and smoother than whole grains.
• Grains went in at 175°F instead of 155°F, but with the heat off.  By the time the half hour soak was up, the temp was down to 160°F.  My excuse theory is that over any range of temperatures, a wider flavor profile will be extracted than if it was held constant at one temperature…
• We used buckwheat honey from a farm in Gardners, PA—always good to use local honey if you can.  Thanks Ben!
• The recipe called for 1.5oz of cascade hops for bittering, but we used 1oz of cascade and 0.5oz of centennial that I found in the freezer.  They’re only three months old and still smelled great.

Sampling a little of the wort immediately brought back tastes of Sam Smith’s Oatmeal Stout, and a little Big Black Voodoo Daddy.  Sweet, dark, but not overly focused on chocolate notes.  I tried eating some of the sweet, sludgy oatmeal, but the intensely astringent hoppy bitterness made it impossible to stand for more than 2 seconds.

Even though the book has a complete guide on using Starters for high-gravity beers directly above the recipe we used, we didn’t do it.  So, I immediately blamed myself when I looked at it on the morning of day 2 only to find the whole bottle completely still.  I asked my beerologist, Ed, who immediately suggested the starter.  He also said that dropping a sterilized aquarium air stone with a pump into the wort can give the yeast the oxygen they need to reproduce to numbers high enough for complete fermentation.

Luckily, Monday night brought me home to find a thick foam on the surface and an airlock bubbling away.  We’ll see if it’s enough…

Notes for next time

• Use a starter.  By thinking ahead 2 or 3 days, you’ll have enough yeast to immediately drown out any undesirable organisms that would create off-flavors.  I also won’t spend the next day wondering if we wasted $70 because it’s not bubbling yet.
• Plan & measure.  We measured every ingredient except the water, and didn’t account for the volume lost boiling the grains and oatmeal.  We should do a gallon extra (especially with our awesome new 7.5 gallon brew kettle—thanks Joe!) and rack it into a gallon carboy.  Then, hold that carboy at a different temperature.  See how it compares with the big batch…
• Strain properly.  We need a bigger funnel and cheesecloth.  How big do they make ‘em?

How will it turn out?  Only time will tell.  Two weeks, to be exact.