Brew Day: Partial Mashing

Apologies for the lateness of this post.

The partial mash went very well. In a couple weeks, I will be drinking my Steam beer.

Recipe:
~3 lbs of Pale/Gold Malt Extract
1/2 lb of Crystal 40 Malted Barley
2 oz of Maltodextrin powder (non-fermentable sugar that adds body but little to no flavor)
1 oz of Perle pellet hops (3/4 oz boiled for 1 hour, 1/4 oz boiled for 10 minutes)
1 pouch California Lager liquid yeast (made into a starter)
Lots and lots of DC tap water. MMMMM-mmmm


The first thing you do on any brew day is boil a bunch of water. You need boiled water to go in the fermentor, but also to do lots of small little things like rinse off things that need to stay sanitized.



While that's boiling, sanitize all equipment that will touch the wort once it's cool. That means the fermentor, thermometer, stirring spoon (maybe), etc.

Take a gallon of your pre-boiled water and cool it off in a water bath in the sink. It doesn't have to get all the way down to yeast-pitching temp, but you don't want to melt your fermentor, either.

And now, the big new step for a partial mash: Steeping your specialty grain.


There are dozens of kinds of grain that are used in brewing. The variety above is called Crystal 40. It is barley malt that has been kilned at higher temperatures, caramelizing some of the sugars. The number indicates how caramelized/dark it is. Crystal malts range from 20 (very light) to 120 (very dark).


We will steep this grain in 160 degree water for a half hour to extract a bunch of color and flavor. The grain sock is used so that it can be easily removed once steeping is complete.


While steeping, it smelled very sweet and bready. I was also very surprised at how quickly the color of the water changed.

After the grain steeped, brew day proceeded as it usually has for my previous extract batches. We add the Gold Malt Extract syrup:


I added the bulk of the hops at the beginning of the hour long boil. This is the "bittering stage." The alpha acids in the hop isomerize in the hot water, and cut a lot of the malty sweetness of the grain and extract.


Then, with 10 minutes left for the boil, I threw in the last 1/4 oz of hops. This is the "flavor and aroma stage." While the bittering hops' acids are cutting the sweetness, all of the aromatic oils are being boiled away. So in order to have some hoppy taste and smell, we add some hops here at the end of the boil.


Once the boil is over, we quickly chill the wort in a water bath in the sink. Then we pour that chilled wort into the fermentor and add our yeast from the start we made on Wednesday. A lot of liquid had evaporated during the boil, so I added some cooled boiled water to get back up the 2.5 gallon mark.

Give the whole thing a good shake to make sure there's plenty of oxygen for the yeast to party with.

And voila! Our Steam beer is fermenting happily in the Mr. Beer keg. It had a nice, thick kreusen on it by Sunday evening, indicating healthy and vigorous fermentation. Bottling on May 2! Stay tuned!

Dharma Beer

Fans of ABC's LOST know that the Dharma Initiative, a sorta-benevolent-but-still-kinda-shady research organization that was wiped out by The Others, had its own brand of supplies. From peanut butter to whisky, everyone had their Dharma-brand rations.

Memorably discovered by Sawyer, Jin, and Hurley, Dharma also had its own beer. And in anticipation of LOST this evening, I started to think: what kind of beer is this "Dharma Barley-Flavored Drink?"

First, the label offers a few clues: It's 5% alcohol by volume, so it's not a barleywine, doppelbock, or any other extra-strength beer. It's also not on the lower end, say like a Guinness Draft or a Miller Lite. "Barley-flavored" isn't much help, since all but the small category of gluten-free beers use malted barley as a large portion of their grain bill. It doesn't stipulate ale or lager, either.

It comes in both bottles and cans, so it's likely pasteurized and force-carbonated. It's not bottle-conditioned and there are no live yeast in the beer. The bottles are amber-colored, so it is brewed with real hops whose acids can be damaged by exposure to light (this causes "skunking").

Personally, if I were on a tropical island, I'd prefer a crisp, lightly fruity beer like a Corona or a subtle pale ale. A nice tart wheat would be good after a long day of number-entering as well.

Of course, it's probably just your average pale American Lager. In order to entice the most folks onto the island, you'd have to keep it generic and familiar.

Bell's Oberon and the Problem of Hype

So, for some reason, Bell's Brewery in Kalamazoo Michigan has become a popular microbrewery for beer writers to talk up their seasonal releases, especially here in the DC area. Everybody went gaga when their Hopslam (Double IPA) came out in January, even at $16 a six-pack, and now everyone is atwitter with their Oberon Summer Ale, slightly more resonable at $9 for a sixer.

Personally, I don't see it, or taste it. It's certainly drinkable (inside baseball!), but at craft-beer prices, there's a lot more out there that is way better.

I guess for me it comes down to the malt character: it's not there. Maybe the brewmaster's wife ran off with a grain farmer, but in both of their offerings I have bought into the hype for, there is almost none of that bready, toasty, cookie flavor I hold so dear.

Now with the Hopslam, you expect the hops to be agressive, but the only sweetness seems comes from the honey they add. And with the Oberon, the yeast is actually the dominant character: peppery and clove-y. Why bother calling it a wheat beer when you can't taste the wheat at all?

So, when the beer writers in the area treat the next offering from Bell's as the Second Coming, don't buy it or the hype. Let someone else buy it for you.

Iconoclasm!

Ad-beer-tising pt. 2

My post on Miller's "Triple Hopped" ad campaign set the comment boards on fire, so I thought I'd follow up with a discussion of the other macro-brewery's new slogan, Anheuser-Busch's "The Difference is Drinkability."

As the plaid-shirted douche tells us, we should drink Bud Light because of its "drinkability."

Now, to some, calling a beer merely drinkable would be considered a thinly-veiled putdown, but one of the main selling points of "lite" beer has always been that you can drink it all night and still have room for wings and not pass out.

Bud light is low calorie, low alcohol, and low taste, so it's perfect for high-volume quaffing at parties and tailgates. Bring a cooler of Guinness to your next outdoor get-together, and everyone will need a nap after a few.

I'm not one of these beer snobs who says they never drink light beer. It has its place and it's usually cheap and plentiful. Plus, on a really hot day, you're not in the mood to contemplate how the hops play off the dark malts in a nut brown ale, you just want something cold and relaxing.

And so, it is drinkable, and even the best option in some cases. But it's more about what they leave out than what they put in.

"It's Toasted!"

On the AMC series Mad Men, Don Draper is an advertising genius in the early 1960s, who, in the pilot episode, realizes that the Surgeon General's decree that cigarettes can't be marketed as healthy is actually an advertising boon. You have several companies with essentially identical products, so you can say anything you want to sell your product. Hence, the creation myth for Lucky Strike's "It's toasted!" slogan. The fact that ALL cigarette tobacco is toasted is meaningless.

And now, almost a decade into the 21st century, we are seeing a similar phenomenon with Beer.

Miller Lite has abandoned "Tastes Great/Less Filling" catfights and celeb-soaked "Man-Law" roundtables for a more craft-oriented advertising approach: telling you to drink their beer because it is "triple-hops" brewed.

The fact is that all beer everywhere, from my 2.5 gallon homebrew batches, to dozen-year-old barleywines made by monks, to the huge behemoths of Miller and A-B, are all triple-hops brewed.

Un-hopped beer would be cloyingy sweet and not pleasant to drink. Much of the sweetness is taken out at the "bittering" stage, where hops are added at the beginning of an hour-long boil. "Flavor" and "Aroma" hops are added at times closer to the end of the boil, depending on the style.

Bottom line, don't mistake process for craft.

Beer update

A list of what's going on, beer-wise:

My Spiced Wheat Beer will be ready to drink this weekend. Cloves, coriander, orange zest and Liberty Hop pellets went into the boil, and tastes out of the fermentor have been very promising. Anticipating something similar to a Leinie's Sunset Wheat or maybe a Hoegaarden.

Also this weekend, my Weizenbock (Dark Wheat) should be ready to bottle. This will be my hoppiest beer to date, as the extract I used was pre-hopped and I added the balance of my Liberty Hops as well.

The Sweet Chile O' Mine (green chili ale) will need another week in the main fermentor. Our airlock hasn't been bubbling like I expected, but I held up a flashlight to the outside of the fermentor and there is definitely a decent kreusen on top, so we shall see.