BamfBeer Blog

So, as per our usual procedure, Matt put together the recipe for this one, and it looks really good. Also, the little bits of the wort we tasted as it was going into the fermentator were promising!

Here’s the all-grain, 6.5 gallon recipe, followed by a play-by-play of our brew day.
5lb American two-row pale malt

1lb German roasted wheat

8lb German wheat

1.75oz Hallertauer pellet hops

0.75oz Simcoe hops

German Wheat Yeast (smack pack)

The actual step-by-step instructions differ a bit (as you’ll see) with how our day went. Here’s the step-by-step:

mash in with 3.5 gallons @ 130F - rest for 30 min.

raise to 150 with 1.75 gallons @ 200F, rest for 30 min

raise to 158F with 3.5 gallons @ 200F, rest for 10 min.
approx 1.4 gallons will be absorbed by grains

sparge to collect 8.5 gallons.
So there’s the target step-by-step. But, as we all know, stuff happens when you’re homebrewing, decisions get made on-the-fly, new ideas are tested live, things go wrong, times draw out, and all that stuff. So here’s our actual play-by-play.
11:38am Strike 3.5 gal @ 130F
11:42 measured mash @ 122F. Perfect!
~11:56 added 1.8 gal @ 212F

11:59 measured mash @ 149F target is 152F. Turns out the formula we used to figure out how much water to add and at what temperature to get to our target was off. We used 130F as the starting temp instead of the 122F that was the actual starting point.
12:04 We put the mash tun on the burner after measuring mash @ 146.
12:13 took mash off burner reading 150F, put on lid. Hopefully thermometer reads ~152F in two mins.
12:15 reading ~148F.
12:16 put it back on the burner
12:19 took mash off burner, reading ~153.
12:26 mash measuring 153F
12:32 mash measuring 152F
12:51 mash measuring 152F
1:05  now heating water to 170F to sparge with. Mash tun and HLT in place. Since the pump is working well, we used it to recirculate the wort through the mash and set the grain bed. Worked like a charm!
1:52 sparging. Still got a couple gallons to go. Had a leak in the new water tank. Actually, I caused it. I stepped on a hose that was connected to the valve, and it pulled loose. Sparge arm is working well! Pump could probably use a little more downward push from the water tank, but all’s well.
If you’re thinking “Man, that’s a long ass rest at 152″, we thought that too. Then we figured “so what?”. We’ve never been all stressed about long mash rests. The red ale had a long rest too while we had to revert to an all-gravity system when our pump failed. That beer came out beautifully. During all this time, we actually converted a keg into a water boiler to replace the turkey fryer pot we used to use. It actually made things a whole lot easier, and we decided that it was worth the extra mash time. The leak was fixed a few minutes later, and we moved on.

2:08 …and the water tank sprung *another* leak, so we transfered the remaining sparge water (about 3 gallons) into our old 7gal water pot and we just now poured the rest of the water over the bed. Still running clear, and looks like we should be fine. The fittings on the water boiler didn’t get put together quite right because the hole we drilled for them was actually too small. There were about two threads that never came through the hole that we totally didn’t notice until the leak happened. It’ll be fixed for next time. No big deal.
2:11 started boiling the wort. Just now lit the burner. We drew off about 8.25/8.5 gallons of wort.
2:40 We have boiling wort! Added 1 oz 3.7% hellertauer. Almost boiled over before we even added the hops!
3:25 Added .5 oz hallertauer and .25oz 12% simco hops
3:35 added .5oz simco and .25oz hallertauer
3:40 pot is off the fire. Hooked the HLT up to the pump, then the out side of the pump to the wort chiller. We wanted to move the wort through the chiller faster this time, becase last time we just used gravity, and the wort actually got *too* cool! Moving the wort faster worked perfectly. A gravity reading on the out side of the wort chiller read 1.048.
By 4:00, the beer was happily fermenting in the basement.

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OK, so I bottled the red ale today. 5 gallons filled 26 22-ounce bottles. There was a little left at the bottom, of course, but 26 bottles is just short of the 29 22-ounce bottles that would spell perfection for a 5-gallon batch.

We were supposed to brew this weekend, but we postponed it due to Father’s Day. We have yet to actually set up a firm date for rescheduling, but that will get done after this weekends festivities are over.

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Ok, so the new March 809 series pump arrived to replace the busted one, and Matt and I tested it last night. It works!

It seems to pump at less pressure than I had imagined, but we’ll still need to slow it down if we use it for sparging (which we’d like to do). We have a Phil’s Sparge Arm, and this would put too much water in at too fast a rate. Anyway, the important thing is that it works just fine, and will ease a lot of our processes. Anyone with tips on setting up a March 809 series pump in a homebrewing application, send info or links - we’d love to see your setup!
In other news, we’ve settled on a brew date of June 17th for our next beer… an ESB. We still haven’t settled on a recipe yet, but that’ll probably be more or less settled on this weekend, and then written up and purchased next week.

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So we went out to a place we like to go occasionally, specifically because of the beer selection. It’s called Isaac Newton’s, and it’s in Newtown, PA. The reason we like to go there is not so much the selection of beers, but the selection of beers *on tap*. Every time we go there, we find at least 2 or 3 beers on their tap list that we’ve either never seen, or never seen on tap.

On this last trip, Matt found a new beer friend in a beer called “Ephemere”. It has coloring similar somewhat to a wheat beer, but it had absolutely no head to speak of. The aroma was very strong of green apples, but the flavor seemed to both Matt and I less like a fruity overtone that comes from fruit, and more like a fruit overtone thrown off by yeast. What was odd was that it was very enjoyable, in spite of looking like headless pasta water! Matt had several of these, and it never seemed to get old.

I moved on to a beer that my wife picked out called Avery Karma, which is just an awesome beer. Deep copper in color with a modest head, Karma is a Belgian-style beer brewed in the US. Though I don’t dislike Belgian ales, there generally seem to be too many varied flavors in Belgian ales for me to generalize and say “I like Belgian ales”. I guess maybe I don’t go out of my way to become a Belgian beer snob who knows the flavor profile of every Belgian ever brewed. I like this Belgian-style one a lot, though. It’s described on Avery’s web site as “estery” and “fruity”. I found the aroma to be as spicy as it was fruity, and tasting it, it seemed to have a bit of a warming effect, which seemed unusual to me. I’m no professional beer taster, but in my experience, warming happens when there is either a good bit of alcohol, or a distinct lack of body. This beer has a very nice medium body - excellent mouthfeel overall, I’d say, and it’s only 5.2% alcohol by volume (ABV). I really want to say it has a “bold” body, though I don’t know if that’s a term that’s used. Not heavy, but it makes its presence known.

So, those were our beer adventures for this past weekend.

Last week (I forgot to write and mention), I picked up one of those brewer’s 12 pack sampler cases, where microbreweries put 3 or 4 of their best beers (presumably) into a pack for sampling. I’ve never purchased one of these that I can remember, but this one looked good, and I gave it a shot. It’s from Troegs Brewery in Harrisburg, PA. I’ve tried their Brown Ale, Pale Ale, Wheat, and Amber Ale, and all are good beers that I would drink again. I found the brown just a bit on the ho-hum side, but I’ve had more than one voluntarily, and I wouldn’t call it a bad beer - I just like more bold flavors. The amber ale is very good, as is the wheat. Overall, I honestly can’t say that any of the beers knocked me out like the Avery Karma I had this weekend, but if there was a cooler of any of these Troegs beers at a party or barbecue, I would absolutely not hesitate to grab one. One thing I like a lot about Troegs is that their philosophy is just about exactly the same as ours. To quote their website

“We aren’t concerned with making beer to a particular style, as much as we want to create a quality beer that we like to drink—that’s what is really important.”

Amen, brother.

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Well, we don’t actually have a brew date yet. I’m thinking June 17th, which leaves us only about two weeks to get a bunch of stuff done.

First and foremost, northernbrewer is sending us a new March 809 pump, because the last one was a lemon. This time, the plan is to actually test the pump *before* brew day, so we’re not performing acrobatics to revert to an all-gravity setup before the mash dies on us.

Matt’s been talking about putting together a steam injection system using plans we’ve seen online. I personally don’t care if we use one of these for the next batch (a bitter) but it would be nice to have for batches where we’re using less highly modified malts that would really benefit from or maybe *require* a step mash.

We actually still need to develop a recipe! This one isn’t very difficult, but we need to do it so that we can plan out the day, and put together a grain bill. Don’t forget that we still need to go get the grains at some point.

We want to get the kegs professionally cut by a welder. If you don’t see why, you haven’t seen the pictures of my handy work.

We need to buy a couple more fittings so that some of the hacks we had put in place can be handled a little more smoothly and without having to think much about them on brew day. For example, we were missing a connection for the spigot coming off of the mash tun. In the end, we stuck a hose into a stopper, and stuck the stopper into the spigot, and it worked, but it’s not ideal.

Also, Matt got his hands on a utility cart made of angle iron that we want to use to create a sort of “brewery on wheels”, so we can wheel everything out on the cart, hook up the propane tank, and go to town, and then wheel it all back into the garage at the end of the day. There’s a wee bit of fabrication to take care of, but it’s damn near perfect for what we need, and it was being thrown out, so it’s free, which goes nicely with yet another Bamf motto: “If it’s free, it’s for me!”

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Well, we’re boiling the wort as I type this. It’s been a rough road to get to the boil, truthfully.

The main problem is that our pump was bad. We ordered a March pump from Northern Brewer, and it just didn’t do anything at all. Nothing. I called NB support, and lo and behold, the guy knew a thing or two about the product! We went through a quick test while I was on the phone with him, and told him about our setup and stuff, and in the end, it couldn’t be determined that we had done anything wrong, and our pump test failed, so he said he’d send out a new pump along with a shipping label so we could send the old pump back. Perfect! You can’t always expect every single product shipped to be perfect, but when a problem arises, this is how it should be handled.

So we had to quickly revert to an all-gravity system. We whipped out the tables and chairs, and an extra 5-gallon bucket to sparge with, and we were on our way.

I’ll say this: the one new part of the system that worked pretty much flawlessly was Phil’s Sparge Arm. I feel a little jipped because we could’ve probably come up with a similar solution for about half the price, but hey, now we don’t have to do that, and the thing works. The nice part, too, is that we can easily replace pretty much anything on it that ever breaks.

The other thing we learned today is that, when you’re doing 5-6 gallon batches using all-grain setups, you really need to develop your *own* recipe and step-by-step. We wanted to keep things simple on the first brew of the season, so we went with a recipe and step-by-step from a magazine. Bad move. They made all kinds of assumptions about our ingredients and our setup that just weren’t true. For example, we have a single mash/lauter tun, and we don’t heat our mash on the burner. For another, our hops, though they were the same name, had 9.3% acid, not 8%. I don’t fault the magazine — they can’t account for every possible variable. It’s just another lesson learned. We’ve never really gone by a recipe out of a magazine or off the ‘net before.

More later.

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Ok, so here’s the thing. We want a new wort chiller. We have one now - a counterflow system that Matt built with his bare hands. I think it’s pretty cool, but truthfully, it doesn’t quite get us in the temperature range we want. So, the goal is to come up with a solution to the problem of getting 212-degree wort down into the 70-75-degree range in as little time as possible.

So, each of us reads up on thermodynamics, we talk to engineers who are supposed to know this stuff, we look at how the products that are out there work, and we treat the whole experiment as a meritocracy: that which does the best job wins.

As is usual with Bamf, we consider something to “work best” when it requires the least amount of work on our part while still getting the job done. Laziness must be factored into the decision. If it cools 5 gallons of wort to 70 degrees in less than 10 minutes, that’s great…. unless it means Matt and I turning a handcrank, reloading ice, and hiring 40 women with pottery on their heads to run down to the river for water.

So we tossed around ideas for engineering a wort cooling system based on plate chillers we’ve seen online. This is a non-trivial engineering problem. A neighbor pointed us to a site that sells chillers for aquatic systems. No go, but some good ideas were there too. We mucked with the problem and wasted lots of paper and ink on the issue for about two weeks.

Then it happened. Finally, a catalyst made its way into the decision making process. Something that made the decision so easy it practically made itself. The efficiency with which this all took place is not to be believed. From the discovery to the decision took all of 20 seconds - perhaps less. Are you ready? Here it is:

Matt needed a place to keep his Harley.

So here’s the entire Bamf decision making process as it was played out in this case, in its entirety:

Matt: Dude, I’ll give you $30 a month to store my bike in your garage.

Brian: Dude, just buy the plate chiller and we’ll call it even for 6 months.

Matt: Deal.

And that’s it. No engineering, no crazy fabrication. Done.

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Ok, so the first brew of the new season is scheduled for May 28th, 2006. We’re brewing a Red Ale. We got a recipe from a magazine I had laying around, but of course, it’s a guideline (as usual). We’re following it more closely than usual, because we haven’t brewed in a while, so we wanna play it safe the first time out to avoid wasting the first 5 gallons of beer of the season. After that, of course, all bets are off, and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled program of sheer reckless abandon, which has, in the past, produced some really good beer.

The holdup in brewing has been a planned equipment upgrade. Our setup is slightly fancier now, all owing to our complete and total laziness. Matt and I are not fond of lugging 50 lb. vessels of boiling stuff around the back yard. We’ve purchased a pump, so that now instead of having to make sure this vessel is above that one, we can just pump the wort from one vessel to the other.

We’ve also replaced an old Coleman cooler chest with a stainless steel keg for our mash/lauter tun, and we’ve purchased an ABT false bottom for the keg. So now every vessel in our setup is a stainless steel keg, which is nice. It’ll be a little easier to clean, easier to move if we need to, and it can be repurposed to do just about anything, because you can apply heat directly to a steel keg. It’s not recommended that you do that with plastic Coleman cooler chest, for those who are wondering
One thing that might also happen before we brew is a conversion of a pressure cooker into a simple steam injection system, which would allow us to do step mashing without fiddling with the water in the boil kettle. It could simplify stuff, or it could get us both injured. We’ll keep you posted…. I hope.

We’ve tossed around a bunch of other ideas, too, but most are kind of boring. We want to build a stand, we might want another burner, which means we won’t build the stand out of 2×4s, for example. By the way, it’s bad to install burners into wooden structures. This is why your typical gas stove is made of metal and not wood.

This reminds me that we should probably make the following disclaimer (which will appear on future articles on the site):
“We at Bamf Beer claim no responsibility for our dumbass ideas and moronic actions. Use at your own discretion”

That was Matt’s take, which is probably a lot more useful than mine, which was:

“We are momos. Don’t do any of this”.

If you have a good disclaimer idea, let us know.

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bamf beer is a hobby. My buddy Matt and I, many years ago, while we were still teenagers, somehow discovered that drinking beer was about more than just getting loopy and projectile vomiting. I don’t know how this happened. We may well have been sloshed when we realized that there was some kind of weird Zen thing about beer. We grew to appreciate different kinds of beers, in part because we found that the fancier the beer we walked to the liquor store counter with, the less likely the guy behind the counter was gonna card us. Those “fancy” beers were just real ales, stouts, and lagers, as opposed to the crappy, cheap, wannabe, watered down crap most of America seems to drink. We discovered a whole world of flavors in beer. Floral aromas, chocolate overtones, nutty undertones, a touch of coffee here, a hint of citrus there. Before you knew it, we were hooked, and we began to brew.

Actually, Matt began to brew. I was a little intimidated by the whole process. Matt was more daring, and put out the first batch in his mom’s kitchen using (if memory serves) canned malt extract. I believe this same batch, or the one that followed, wound up on the ceiling of Matt’s bedroom. The stories started there, and have just kept getting better.

We haven’t used canned malt extract since those first experimental batches, after which we switched to an all-grain process. We haven’t looked back.

The beers we tend to come up with usually reflect our brewing process, and are usually not exactly what we set out to create. Since we’re more Zen and less science, we tend to debate the merits of things like adding hops in the last 10 minutes of the boil vs. letting the malty sweetness stand firm. I’m a hop-head. Matt’s more of a renaissance beer drinker. I’m a little more paranoid, while Matt’s a little more relaxed. Matt’s the chemist of the team, while I’m a high-level concept person. There are a lot of these complementary personality traits that I think make for interesting observation, a good laugh, and perfectly balanced beer.

So anyway, this site is here to hold our notes, our recipes, our compromises… basically, our beer journal. If we ever figure out how to post pictures in WordPress, we’ll add those, too.

Our first brew of the year is scheduled, tentatively, for May 27th, 2006. Check back after then and see how we did!

Brian.

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