FloorBeer: A Concept

With a name like that, you must be wondering what I'm talking about. From the sound of it, you might be thinking "Beer spilled on the floor? beer fermented on the floor?" neither of those sounds particularly good, do they? Well, let me explain.

One of the perks of working at a home-brew supply store is the access to products that can no longer be sold because they are defective, expired, or you simply don't know what they are. Take our self-serve grain room, for example. After a busy day of sales, it is not uncommon to come across a small amount of grain left over in a bucket, sitting on the table, with no customers around to identify it. While most people would approach such a find with distaste of their customer's wasteful practices, I see an opportunity.

Now fast-forward 2 weeks. By now I've accumulated enough "floor grain" (though if the grain ends up on the floor, I don't actually take it) that I have the beginnings of a working grain bill for a 5 gallon batch. Take apart an all-grain kit that was never picked up, mix and match some ingredients, grab a few vials of expired yeast and BAM! You've got a beer to brew!

Will it taste awful? Quite possibly. Can I ever repeat it? Heavens no! But hey! This is home-brew, and on the 5 gallon scale we have room for random experimentation.

Stay tuned for floor beer stories and recipes in future posts!

Cheers,

-Richard

Brew a Light Beer? WHY?!?!

That question is what I had asked myself as soon as I discovered beers that were *not* light. Well, my class at UC Davis finally gave me a good answer to that question.

As with any good discussion of beer, a lot of unpleasant comments were made in reference to the most popular beers in this country during our class: Bud, Coors, and Miller. But the discussion took a turn that I did not expect. Our prof, Michael Ramsey, surprised us by commenting, "Say what you will about light beers, but try to brew one yourself and you'll find quite a challenge." He reasoned that brewing a beer with hardly any flavor is much more difficult than brewing one that is over-hopped, over-malted, or that is loaded with fruit or spices. "You have fewer flavors to hide your mistakes behind," he told us.

Well, I decided to take up his challenge and see how good my brewing, fermentation, and sanitation is. Today I brewed Morebeer's American Light Ale kit (from extract) at the shop.

First thing's first, I did a started of White Labs: California Ale Yeast (WLP001) to get the yeast culture awake and ready to go for pitching.

Then came brew day (another day I have been paid to brew). We were at a full boil by noon and well under way.

After some light hop additions and a good vigorous boil, it was time to cool the beer. Our immersion chiller works wonders for this process! And you can use the water for your cleaner, rinse, and sanitizer.

Finally I took a gravity (1.042: definitely on the lower end) and pitched in the yeast.

Lag time was about 35 seconds and it took off like a bat out of hell! I'm guessing the beer will finish faster than any other I've done before. This test will hopefully show where the mistakes I'm making are (assuming I'm making mistakes) and will tell me what I need to work on to make cleaner, better beer.

Thanks for reading!

-Richard

Update: 5/7/2012

Well,

LOTS has happened since our last update. Phil and I have brewed so many beers now that we've started to loose track!

There's been the:
Red (more like amber) Ale
Citra Pale Ale
Cardamom Blonde
Columbus IIPA
Black IPA
Hazelnut Brown Ale
Rye Beer
Plus many more!

Now we're 4 batches deep in bottling and have almost no time to do it...I guess that's the consequence of working too hard.

Recently I scored a job working at the local homebrew supply store in Los Altos, CA: www.morebeer.com which has been an amazing learning experience! I even had the pleasure of using their 10 gallon system to brew up a second version of our Black IPA (it's really, really good).

I also recently attended the "Going Beyond the Kit" brewing class at Sudwerks (through UC Davis Extensions) in Davis, CA and learned that I have way more questions about brewing than I had answers. Good thing too because I'm going back for the "Intensive Brewing Science for Practical Brewing" course in June.

Pictures at the end of the post. If you want to see anything in particular, post it in the comments and we'll make it happen.

Cheers, gentle readers!

-Richard

Mashing Out

Hops + Yeast

Boiling up the Wort. We're doing it wrong here though...this pot should be uncovered

The 10 Gallon brewing system that I get to use at work.

4 fermentations going at once is not too much...is it?

Oatmeal Stout!

We're almost brewing too fast to keep up with the blogging! Last week we racked the IPA into secondary fermentation (more about racking in another post), got our kegs ready for the Octoberfest, made some beer grains bread, and brewed our first stout. Overall, I'd say that sounds like a pretty good week!

After going to Rogue Brewery's Valentine's Day beer and chocolate tasting a few years ago (TEN courses of chocolate and beer!!), I became inspired by how well stouts go with dessert. A creamy stout pairs just as well with cookies as a glass of milk. And for those who haven't tried it, a scoop of vanilla ice cream in your stout is a divine dessert! So this year I hope that we can keep ourselves from drinking up the stout we made on Wednesday before my holiday baking spree begins. I'm sure Santa will appreciate a stout with his cookies in place of yet another glass of milk.

The stout contained 11.5 lbs of delicious grains, including oatmeal and a tad bit of chocolate malt for that yummy chocolaty goodness. We decided to make a low IBU stout, opting for creamy, smooth drinkability over heavy bitterness and excessive ABV%. We added a couple ounces of hops to balance out the malts, but not enough to overwhelm the flavor. Lactose was added to the boil for an extra bit of creamy sweetness (milk sugar is unfermentable). Like the IPA we did an infusion mash, this time at 153 degrees F for 60 minutes. From the photos you can see the delicious, dark, stouty color!

The OG was 1.055, with IBUs around 35. The expected alcohol percentage should be 5.5-6%.

Check out the album for some shots of the process.

I also made bread again with the spent-grains. This time it came out even better than the last one, and makes excellent toast! Today we are brewing yet another beer, so there will be more posts to come soon!

Love your beer, it comes out better! (Me infusing the stout with love during the mash).

Yeast + Water + Grains = ??

No, its not just beer! These things also combine to make bread. And when you use your spent grains from brewing they combine to make delicious, awesome, magical bread!

I am by no means an expert baker (or really any kind of baker), but the guilt of throwing away pounds upon pounds of grains after each brew finally convinced me to undertake the project of learning a new fermentation science. I did a little reading about bread making, made a mash-up of a few spent grain bread recipes from around the internet and gave it my best effort. It turns out that making bread is fairly similar to making beer. You add together yeast, water, grains and patience and you get a tasty product that you can be proud of.

I decided to make a denser wheat bread this time using the grains from our recent Octoberfest beer. I threw together all-purpose flour, wheat flour, a couple cups of spent grains ground up in the food processor, yeast, an egg, some milk, sugar and a little salt. Lacking an electric mixer, I made a half recipe this time so I wouldn't be kneading all day. I kneaded the bread by hand for about 10 minutes until it was smooth and pliant and let it rise for 90 minutes. Here the dough is, all nestled into it's bowl waiting to rise- isn't it beautiful??

After it doubled in size I pounded it down, molded it into a loaf on a greased cookie sheet (note to self: need pizza stone) and let it double again before scoring the top and tossing it into the oven for 40 min at 350° F. When it came out, it looked like this:

As my first endeavor into bread making, I am quite proud of my little loaf. It isn't the most beautiful loaf of bread, but it represents the beginning of something beautiful (and man was it tasty!!). With each batch of beer, we can now have as much delicious home baked bread as we can eat! When I have experimented with making a few more loaves and perfect a recipe that is my own, I will be sure to post it here. Stay tuned!

Brewing our first IPA (name to be decided)

Yesterday Philip, Liz, and I got together and brewed our first IPA.

We threw 15.5 lbs of Malted grain into this bad boy, along with a whopping 8 oz of Hops. We made sure to get fresh, whole leaf hops shipped down from Steinbart's in Portland and picked up the rest of what we needed over at MoreBeer in Los Altos. Then it was on to brewing!

We mashed in at 154 degrees F to bring out a good supply of sugars, both fermentable (for that delicious alcohol) and unfermentable (for the body and sweetness in the beer). The color was perfect, the sugars were plentiful, and it was on to the boil!

Rather than bitter up this IPA like most, we put most of our hops in towards the end of the 2-hour boil to try to bring out more aromatics and flavors.

The result should be a beer with a very floral aroma and flavor with a nice strong malt body to back it up. And don't forget the alcohol! Our O.G. was a whopping 1.073 (right on target!). We're hoping to get the alcohol level up to around 8 or 9%

Check out this album to see pictures of our brewing process (and one cute picture of our brewing mascot, Lydian).

Thanks to Liz for taking pictures all day!