Since we have a brewery setup that requires us to brew outdoors, and since that setup really is NOT optimized for cold weather, Bamf Beer breaks in the winter to regroup and plan for the upcoming brewing season.
Our last brew was the Bamf Porter, and we brewed that only like a week or two after the Hefeweizen. September was a busy month. On October 21st, we had the first annual Oktoberfest, and it went well. We unloaded a decent bit of our homebrew, and had our fill of German food. Nobody there was German, but how can you say no to sausage and kraut? A good time was had by all.
Shortly after, I received a ThruMometer for my birthday, which is a great complement to our wort chiller. We’ll be able to see the temperature of the wort as it leaves the chiller and adjust the pressure of the water coming from the hose to get just the right temp for our yeast. That has been the only addition to our setup.
There will be little tweaks to our procedure, though – and that doesn’t involve any new equipment. We found on our last couple of batches that we missed our original gravity pretty significantly. Turns out it didn’t matter much for the last two beers because they were heavy enough anyway that the resulting beer was perfectly drinkable. We hadn’t left the ballpark, but we were off.
We attributed this to a couple of things. First, we should be pulling more from our mash tun. We were using markers on our boiler (another keg) that we thought were halfway marks. Well, they weren’t halfway marks. Important lesson: Everything needs to be measured and marked by the brewers. The second thing is we need to either boil longer or more vigorously. We really don’t seem to lose very much volume during our boil at *all*. The only notable volume loss is when we leave the boiler, and that’s because we haven’t been really working at getting the maximum amount of wort out of the boiler.
We’ll get there. In the meantime, the beer is great. We’d just like to be able to hit our mark with a little more accurracy.
If time allows, maybe we’ll brew something simple some time in the coming weeks. We’ll let you know if it actually happens 
I have a sort of need to brew. I love a challenge. I love to solve problems. I love that brewing forces you into positions that you don’t plan for, and forces you to think and act in the moment to solve problems, or face losing the prized result: happily fermenting beer peacefully but busily percolating away in the basement.
There are risks involved, to be sure. You could be scalded by boiling water or wort; you could have a boilover; you could come face to face with a stuck sparge. Matt and I have seen all of this and more. And lest you think you’re out of the woods when the brew day is done, let me remind you that the fermentation process kicks off a non-trivial amount of pressure as the yeast produce CO2 gases. A clogged blowoff tube could potentially result in a rather colorful display of hop and yeast residues on your ceiling. This risk becomes all the more tragic if you bottle your beer and apply too much priming sugar, or bottle too early, which could result in nothing short of an explosion of beer and glass shrapnel (which is why we put beer that is conditioning in bottles in closed boxes).
We’ve lost one batch. We’ve run into situations that have forced us to move from a well-oiled, pump-driven system to all-gravity in minutes, and at a moments notice. We’ve had to get creative with on-the-fly fabrication. Matt and I have also had to team up and think fast to avoid disaster. This sometimes means you have to take the best idea that comes up first if you can’t see it leading to utter catastrophe. You can’t always study a problem. It has to get solved. If you’re slower that day, too damn bad. Hang your ego at the door.
I can’t say I’d never want to do a full-blown all-grain batch by myself. At some point, every budding pilot yearns for his first solo flight. Matt got me into brewing, and taught me a lot. He also pointed me to some good reading material. I’ve learned tons of stuff on the internet, from websites, and, now, podcasts. Though I’d like to do a “solo flight” of my own some day, I’m in no rush. I like having a teammate to bounce ideas off of, and to learn from. For all I know, Matt could pack up and move to Philly or Vermont one day, so when that day comes, I’ll have my solo flight.
I only discovered beer on the internet within the last 6 months or so. It’s only from people on forums that I learned that a lot of people brew because it’s cheaper than buying beer. This shocked the hell out of me, because the investment in the home brewery has the potential to become fairly hefty. We’ve had a bit of luck in acquiring some of our equipment, and we’ve fabricated a lot of stuff ourselves. The money we saved we eventually used to buy a pump, a kick ass wort chiller, and a sizeable amount of 3/8″ ID food-safe, high-temperature plastic tubing.
We still don’t get deep into the science of brewing. We know enough to get by, and we have references for the rest. We’re not guys that you’re going to have long conversations with about the intricacies of how a step mash can help enzyme x break down long protein chain y, even with highly modified malts. We’re not chemists. We’ve been exposed to the stuff, but just enough so that if something pops up that seems off, we can recall having read something about it once. We don’t plan our beer around chemistry. We plan our beers around what we like, or what we find interesting.
In the end, I say, “Just Brew It”. Don’t let anyone say that you absolutely must do anything in any particular way. Take anything you read or hear with a grain of salt, because your tongue and/or your experience could very well prove all of it wrong. “Musts” in home brewing are exceedingly rare. Here are the ones I can think of:
- You absolutely must maintain a sanitary brewery, and know about sanitation (which sanitizers are safe to use on what metals, and how to use them, etc). Bad sanitation makes for bad beer.
That’s pretty much it. The all-grain process can be performed in any number of ways. You can go off in various different directions: HERMS, RIMS, batch sparge, fly sparge, plate chiller, immersion chiller, PIDs, pumps, gravity, control panels, open fermentation… there’s an endless number of choices. No matter which way you choose to perform any specific task, the process is pretty forgiving, and you’re really not very likely to make undrinkable beer as long as you keep it sanitary.
We’ve made less-than-wonderful beer. We’ve fermented at temperatures that were too warm, we’ve mismeasured our runoff and unknowingly diluted our wort, we’ve missed every missable mash temperature, pH reading, gravity reading… any reading, we’ve had sparge water that was too hot, we’ve had hot-side aeration… we’ve had issues. The beer is always drinkable.
It’s when you start getting fussy about your target that things get trickier. “I want drinkable beer” is a fine goal. The minute you achieve that, though, you’re gonna move right into “I want a red ale with an OG of 1.047 and an SRM of 40, and I want it to taste something like this great red ale I had 2 years ago in New Hampshire, which had nuttiness, but a backdrop of fruity esters.” At that point, you will probably find yourself researching how to get fruity esters and nuttiness into your beer, you’ll learn about yeast and its effect on flavor, how fermentation temperature affects the yeast and the flavors it produces, and how to emphasize nuttiness over sweet or roasty malt flavors. Next thing you know, you know a little bit about how to craft a beer.
But for now, just brew it. Keep things as simple as you possibly can. Go as cheap as you can on everything when you start out, because your process and your brewery should evolve together. Don’t go buying a pump until you have a specific problem area that the pump can be applied to in your current setup without interrupting your entire brewery. You can brew award-winning beer without a pump, without a plate chiller, without conical fermenters.
Get a Coleman cooler, some pvc or copper tubing to make a false bottom with, and your mash/lauter tun is just about finished. Sparge arm? Forget it. Just take a large bowl, turn it upside-down on the grain bed (wash it first), and dump the sparge water onto the bowl. It’ll spray out just like a sparge arm. You can make a counterflow chiller out of a garden hose and copper tubing from Home Depot, or you can invest in some ice, put it in your bathtub, and put your kettle in there to cool to yeast pitching temperature. Fermenter? If you can’t find a glass carboy, go to a deli and ask them to save you a couple of those 5-gallon food-safe buckets that pickles come in. They can save the lids, too. At that point, everything else you’d need that I can think of will fit in a grocery bag. Things like airlocks, stoppers, and little cheap things that just make your life easier (I’d hate to have to fabricate a stopper or an airlock).
If you’re thinking about brewing, I hope you do it. I hope you do it all-grain, too. I’ve never done a batch using extract, because I just never learned that way. Matt was more experienced and taught me all-grain from the beginning. It’s only as hard as you make it. Admittedly, we’re getting to where things get a little harder, but only after mucking with the coleman cooler and counterflow chiller for enough batches to know that this was a hobby that we loved enough to warrant additional investment and commitment.
Best of luck. See you on the forums 
brian.
technorati tags:rants
Blogged with Flock
Matt sent me this email today with a new label graphic. He’s a good graphic artist, and he’s been playing with InkScape lately on his Mac, which I guess is working out pretty well. Here’s the new “generic” label – flavor-specific ones to follow:
The original recipe was based on Papazian’s 5-gallon recipe for “Silver Dollar Porter”, modified for a 6.5 gallon batch size.
Here’s the *original* recipe and mash schedule for 6.5 gallons.
10.4 lb 2-row
1.3 lbs munich
0.65 lb crystal
0.65 lb black
0.65 lb chocolate
1.2 oz perle hops (60 minutes)
.5 oz cascade (60 min)
.75 oz cascade (5 min)
20 minutes @ 122F, 20 minutes @ 150F, 20 minutes @ 158F, mash out @ 170F
Now, here are the actual amounts and times we used.
11lb two-row
1.5lb Munich
.75lb each of black patent, chocolate, and crystal 80L
.5oz Cascade and 1.2 oz Perle hops for 60 minutes
.75oz Cascade for 5 minutes.
Our mash schedule went to hell in a handbasket, unfortunately. Our initial strike temperature was supposed to be 122F. Using ~14lb of grain, we figured we should strike with 3.5 gallons at 135F. That part worked perfectly.
Next, we needed to get to 150F. Our calculations told us to add 3 gallons of water @ 212F (boiling). This only got us to 142. If someone can justify that using our numbers, send mail to bkjones ~at~ gmail. After adding something in the area of 4 gallons of boiling water, we got to 150F. This was a TON more water than we expected to add, and we were unsure what to do because we were supposed to also perform a starch conversion at 158F.
My notes contain a gap of about an hour at this point, probably due to slight panic setting in, and by the time I got back to my laptop we were boiliing. In the future, I think we’ve resolved to just direct-fire the mash tun, as I’m reading all over the place about brewers with setups identical to ours (round metal false bottom in a Sanke keg) that it works fine without scorching the mash.
Once we got to the boil, everything worked wonderfully. We hit an OG of 1.052 as it went into the fermenter on Sept. 16, and a FG reading today of 1.010. It tastes fantastic, and would appear to be already ready for bottling.
The next batch will be brewed either the last weekend of September, or the first week in October. It’s going to be a robust or “sharp” porter, based on this recipe. The two cool things about this next batch are a) I have personally never brewed a porter (I believe Matt has), and b) we’re brewing a 10-gallon batch, assuming we can get a satisfactory repair done to our new water boiler.
The water boiler, as you might remember, sprung a leak during the brewing of our Hefeweizen. It wasn’t catastrophic or anything, and it should be simple enough to fix. With the fix in place, we have a three-keg brew system, which means we can boil more water and wort, and we can handle larger mashes. We also have a pump and wort chiller, which should make the whole operation not take forever, even for a larger batch.
It will also be less labor intensive than our old system, which relied upon the fact that from my back door, to my deck, to my driveway was three levels of gravity we could work with. Now picture us getting the boiling wort up to my back door (don’t open that!), running the hose for the (counterflow) wort chiller 10 feet, and running another 10 feet to get the wort to the fermenter. Ugh. Now we just have some tubing to hook up. It’s so easy that, coming from our last setup, it’s actually a little uncomfortable. We kept double checking to make sure everything was set up properly. It just seemed too good to be true.
Well, that’s all for now.
Wish us luck!
So here are pics from our brew day last week.
Click on the pics to see descriptions and stuff – Enjoy!
http://flickr.com/photos/bkjones/sets/72157594275146311/
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.
Oh man. Where to start. I guess at the beginning.
We went to buy our ingredients, and the guy didn’t have Kent Goldings, or Challenger hops. He also took *forever* to get our order together. Maybe this was an omen, but we didn’t even blink.
We put our grain into the mash tun, heated the strike water, dumped it into the mash tun, and promptly broke our floating thermometer. Luckily, it wasn’t in the mash, so we grabbed another thermometer, and according to that, we hadn’t met our strike temperature. So we put it up on the burner (our mash tun is a keg, so we can heat it directly), and just at that time, Tash came out with our digital Williams Sonoma thermometer, which worked really well…. and told us that we had surpassed our strike temp!! The first thermometer, we discovered, was stuck and wouldn’t go past 150. Dammit. Oh well. At this point, if that was all that went wrong, we’d consider ourselves lucky.
The mash sat at the proper temperature for the proper amount of time, and then it was time to start the sparge process. We heated up the sparge water, and set things up to pump from the water boiler to the sparge arm, and the pump was useless. We hadn’t set things up the way that I had done in my pump tests, so the pump wasn’t getting a constant gravity feed. We reverted to using gravity to move the sparge water. Even that was really far more difficult than it needed to be. The siphon gods were *really* not with us, and once we *did* get the water moving, one of the stoppers that closes the ends of the Phil’s sparger arm fell off.
Oh yeah, somewhere in there, I was trying to cut a hose for something and sliced my thumb wide open. This put me out of commission for some time, leaving Matt to do a couple of pretty back-breaking things by himself. No bueno.
So there’s water going in and we realize that our false bottom is not connected to the spout, so nothing is able to leave the mash tun. We had to turn it on its side and reconnect it. This was not possible, and so we had to transfer everything to another vessel, field-fabricate and sanitize a proper connection, and then retransfer everything back into the mash tun so we could run off the wort.
We did finally get the wort run off into the hot liquor tank, and we did the boil, and now we’re ready to put it through the wort chiller and into the fermentor. No go. Our racking cane got clogged, the wort chiller got clogged, the tubing got clogged, and we had to restart the siphon so many times that I’m sure Matt and I spit at *least* a gallon of wort on my driveway.
Once the fermenter was about half full, and we looked in to see nothing but hop leaves and about 3 inches of beer left in the HLT, we figured after all of this, we were only going to come out with about 4 gallons of wort, it was probably contaminated from trying to recover from the various clogs, siphoning way too much, etc., it was probably not going to taste right, and so we called it our very first wasted batch.
It’s the kind of brew day that makes you just want to run to the store for your beer. Not a single thing worked right. Absolute misery.
*** Matt’s Viewpoint on the “Day that will live in infamy”***
Yeah it was a comedy of errors. In all the years I have brewed I NEVER had a brew day like this and I never lost a batch. I guess it was bound to happen. This whole fiasco really just drives home the fact that we need to do some finalizing features on our system. For one thing we need to put a throughwall ball cock on the hlt to easy use with the pump and have premeasured, cut tubing so we don’t have to do it while brewing. Hence preventing Jonesy (or even myself) slicing off a didgit and looking like a shop teacher with butter knife sharp knives trying to cut foodsafe tubing. Our system is about 90% there and after a few slight additions we will have a lean mean system.
First, we’re brewing the bitter this coming weekend – on Saturday, July 1st. The recipe will be written by Matt tomorrow. Matt generally writes all of the recipes. We occasionally haggle over minor details, but we haven’t made a beer so disgustingly bad that I have any reason to question Matt’s skills In fact, we both like all of our beers….. Including, I’m happy to say, the Red Ale.
The first bottle of Bamf “Sluttypants Irish Redhead” Ale was opened just a couple of hours ago for the first testing. Once we bottle the beer, it’s kept in my basement – not refrigerated. We’ve never used a yeast that required refrigeration, and my basement generally doesn’t ever get to 75F.
This batch yielded 26 22-ounce bottles from a batch that, after it was racked off to a secondary fermenter, was just barely over 5 gallons (it went all the way up the neck of a 5-gallon carboy). There was more spillage than normal during bottling, partly because it was the first bottling of the season, I was doing it alone, and I didn’t have any kind of shutoff valve – I siphoned straight from the carboy to the bottles without an intermediary. I was also kind of conservative and left a bit of beer in the carboy to avoid having a lot of trub wind up in the bottles. Common calculations say 5-gallons should yield 29 22-ounce bottles. We’re 3 bottles short, but they have almost no sediment on the bottom from what I’ve seen so far, and the beer is pretty clear.
It *is* clear. The clearest we’ve ever made. Of course, the beer, being in the bottle for only about a week, and being warm, was a little fizzy. However, once it calmed down, the head retention was excellent, the beer was crisp and tasty, and it had all the flavor I was hoping for.
More than all of this, though, what shocked me was the incredible, incredible mouth feel. I’m not a professional judge, but I want to go look at the beer judge websites just so I can describe the mouth feel. Matt didn’t think it was a big deal. I, for some reason, was floored.
The color was actually darker than I thought it would be, but was deep reddish-brown. I’ll mention again that I was thrilled with the clarity of the beer, being that we didn’t (and don’t, ever) use any kind of clarifying agents in the beer. All we do is filter it back through the grain bed.
This beer might be less impressive for someone who didn’t go through the process of brewing it. Regardless, I really like it a lot, and I’m going to have another one that’s been sitting in the fridge for about a half an hour now.
‘Til next time.
I had occasion to spend some time in New England recently, and my father-in-law Mike found this beer called “St. Peter’s”. He had bought their cream stout, porter, and english ale, and we tried all of them.
I liked the english ale the best. It had a hop flavor to it that I liked, but was kind of annoying to me because I couldn’t place the hops to save my life. They certainly weren’t cascade hops (which I wouldn’t really expect from a UK-brewed english ale), but I didn’t think they were fuggles or goldings or any of the more predictable hops either. It still bugs me that I couldn’t figure out what they were, but I’ve never touted my skills as a beer connoiseuer anyway. I can’t even spell the word. I’m a beer enthusiast, and I can pick out certain hops and some of the more popular grain bill ingredients, but that’s it so far.
Anyway, aside from the hoppiness, the beer is marked by a rather long-lasting, somewhat astringent aftertaste. The only way I know to describe it is that it tastes a lot like a brand new tennis ball smells. It wasn’t a strong enough aftertaste to keep me from drinking several 16.9oz bottles of the stuff, but again, it was the fact that I had no idea what accounted for the flavor that bothered me.
The first porter I tried had absolutely zero carbonation and the flavor and mouthfeel both suffered, presumably as a result of the flatness. I concluded that after trying another one, which had not lost its fizz, and it was pretty good. It’s unusual for me to like a beer that has such a small hop presence, and this isn’t a beer I’d seek out in a liquor store, but it’s not bad.
Cream stouts are not my favorite beers, and the St. Peter’s offering is a well made cream stout that I don’t like for no other reason than because it’s a cream stout, and I don’t really like cream stouts. Occasionally, a well-timed cream stout can make for a nice substitute for “death by chocolate mousse”, and the few times where that substitution has been made in my life, I’ve enjoyed it, and would enjoy this beer in that role. Summertime in New England, however, is not the best time for any cream stout.
In short, I think St. Peter’s brewery makes good beers, and I think that the three covered here are not only excellent representatives of their respective styles, I think they all offer something interesting to the beer enthusiast while still managing not to offend.
That said, I’d like to try some of the more interesting brews they have shown on their website (http://www.stpetersbrewery.co.uk). Grapegruit, Lemon Ginger and Spiced Ale sound particularly interesting.
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