Zoom Black Session IPA

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Happy Lunar New Year, we are back. It was a busy end of the year for us, got married, drank and ate through New Zealand and Australia. When we arrived home we discovered our bar was running a bit dry. With the exit of our first houseguest and the soon arrival of 4 others I needed to get a new keg on tap fast. 

Over our long absence from updating the blog, I have been reading Yeast by Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff. It's a little heavy on the bio/technical side of yeast but has ton of great and useful information. My bottom line take-away from it was that the best thing a homebrewer can do to improve their beer quality is temperature control, the second best thing is a correct size of pitched healthy yeast, and the third is dissolved O2 levels before fermentation. 

I had 6 days to make a beer and I wanted to finally make an actual sessionable beer. I was aiming for 3.5-4% ABV for a 5 gallon batch, interesting grain backbone, and a ton of hops. For yeast I went with the WLP 090 super san diego for a more clean IPA profile. I haven't used this yeast since I first started brewing and it also come highly recommended for doing speedy brews like this.

For the black I used half a pound of Carafa III special dehusked. I think steeping it for the full 90 min mash may have been a bit much, I probably could have pulled the same color without the grain bitterness for adding it in the last 30 minutes of the mash. 

Zoom Black Session IPA

Ingredients:

3.22lbs 2 row

.5 carafa 3

2.18 Munich

1.1 pils

 

.5 Apollo @60 18.3aa

1 Denali @15, 15.4aa

2 Hbc438 1@5 16.6aa

1 motueka @15, 6.3aa

1 rakau @5, 10aa

WLP090 Super San Diego

Mash 90min at 156

90 min boil

Fermented 5 days at 64 deg. F

Measured 8.9 brix or 1.0355 for 6 gallons

Straight off the bat- Don't use half an ounce of apollo for 60, use a lot less or none. I think If I was to do this beer again (and I very well might) I'd use .2 at the most of apollo for bittering. Or else I'd cut it out and move the denali to 30 min and leave the rest, while adjusting the mash to add the carafa later. 

I brewed on a Sunday with the intent to keg friday for company. Wednesday I reached terminal gravity (after pitching at about midnight sunday) but the beer definitely tasted a bit green and needed a little more time to mature. I took it out of its fermentation control and let it warm up to room temp around 72 until friday. 

I wasn't paying very close attention to volumes and ended up at the end of boil with 6 gallons and fermented 6 gallons. With more proper mash and sparge volumes I think this would end up closer to 1.04 at 5 gallons. Final gravity was 1.008. Friday for kegging I pulled a gallon to drink flat while kegging the other 5. It was a different beer from Wednesday, good coffee and chocolate notes, bitter hops with a few fruity notes. 

It was better after fully carbonating Saturday though I feel the bittering hops overpowered everything else in the batch. 

My new years resolution this year is to brew more session beers and I think this was a good start. I was more impressed I had a very drinkable beer after 6 days. I am calling this a success even though there is a lot of room for improvement. 

Experiment Ale #438

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Avery's Twenty Two was definitely my favorite beer of 2015. I thought I'd never see it again, but slowly, seemingly randomly, they appeared in the DC metro area. I think I have picked up 6 bottles so far and might pick up more if I run into them again. 

Taking a step back, I think between talking to Mike Tonsmeire about dry hopping at last year's DC beer week and dicussing IPAs at multiple breweries, I finally discovered the downfalls of my previous IPAs. 

First off I wasn't drying my IPAs out enough, their final gravities were just too high. Admittedly I think a few of my earlier IPAs were  "kitchen sink" beers and had all my left over malts with hops I wanted to play with. Between bad mashes, tons of crystal malts, and what ever adjuncts, the yeast just couldn't dry them out. Not all IPAs need to be bone dry but it really helps accentuate the dry hops. That brings me to my second point, I was not dry hopping with nearly enough hops. One ounce into 5 gallons didn't have a big enough impact nor enough staying power. 

This time around I was going to do things differently. 

Avery had already teased me enough with Brett Drie. Crooked Stave had incredible brett beers. I was going to do my own Brett IPA, with HBC-438. HBC-438 is a neo-mexicanus descendant hop also known as "Ron Mexico".  It was the first harvest of this hop and it was only available to homebrewers. 

I took this opportunity to try out the Yeast Bay's Beersel brett blend. Planned to use a high alpha acid hop to bitter then everything else would be HBC-438 and then further dry-hop it with more HBC-438. 

Experiment Ale #438

1.68 White wheat

5.03 2 row Brewers malt

2.15 Pilsner

2.17 Vienna

 

2 campden tablets

1 tsp gypsum

 

Mashed in 3 gal to hit 130

2 gal 172 step mash up to 140

Drew 2ish gal thin mash to heat up to 152

 

.5oz Magnum 12.3 aa, first wort

1oz HBC-438 @15 (16.6aa)

2oz @5

Beersel Brettanomyces Blend 


3oz HBC-438 dry hop for 5 days while cold crashing

OG: 1.062

FG: 1.003

ABV: 7.7%

Brewed 11/11/15, Kegged 1/24/16

Notes: Tropical and phenomenal. Bright sunshine and tropical fruit with a slightly bitter edge.

Better representation of the color

This was exactly what I was hoping it would be. Tropical when cold and a little herbal bitterness as it warms, but the earthy brett really comes through in the finish. I think the Beersel blend from Yeast Bay worked really well for the HBC-438 myriad of flavors.

Annibeersary 3: Sir Etch-a-sketch

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Back in August we had the chance to go to Denver and visit The Source. In the River North district you can find Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project nestled inside The Source.  They make some wonderful funky and sour beers. In fact Chad Yakobson, the owner/brewer of Crooked Stave wrote his dissertation on Brettanomyces. The Brettanomyces project is probably more than most people need to read on Brett but a fantastic resource. The effort from that clearly shows in the beers from Crooked Stave. 

While we tried just about everything on tap and a few bottles, Surette really stood out and we brought a few bottles home with us. After reading over the Brettanomyces Project, and reviewing a few lectures Chad gave, we decided to try and spin up the dregs from Surette. Surette is fermented with a blend of BSI B. Drie, CMY001, Orval's B. Brux, and ECY B. custersianus then barrel aged. We didn't entirely know what to expect from this, but 2 bottles of dregs and 500ml of wort started fermenting pretty fast. We stepped this up over five days. 

Deciding what to make to celebrate another year together always  tends to be interesting. We were hoping to use some of our own hops, though they were a little burned out from summer. Luckily our friend Jeff gave us a sample of his homegrown cascade. 

Sir Etch-a-Sketch

9lb pils

3lb white wheat

½ lb aromatic

1lb acid malt

 

1oz warrior 60min

1oz cascade 20min (leaf)

.9oz centenial 5min (homegrown)

Surette Culture

Mash

20min acid rest at 120

60 min sacch at 153

mash out 164

OG: 1.070

FG: 1.003

ABV: 8.8%

Pitched starter 10/28/15

 

Test 11/15/15: measured 1.009 Slight acidity, fairly dry, smells very bretty, tastes balanced little bit of lemon but very reminiscent of avery twenty two before dry hopping.

 

12/20/15: FG: 1.003 abv 8.8 Full flavored, nice malt base but mainly lemony flavored. Not overly acidic but well balanced.


1/10/16: added 2oz cascade for dry hopping while cold crashing.

This beer was brewed at the end of October and left to mature (slightly forgotten about) until the beginning of January. It was never trying to be Surette, but it turned out great! It has a bright hop nose with a hint of acidity. It isn't super sour but has a little acidity to it, hops up front but has a refreshing lemon character a bit of a dry wheat finish. It gets a little more fruity as it warms up. I think the dry hopping really rounded out the aroma and paired well with the slight lemon tartness. This is easily the best beer I think we have ever made. I almost feel bad that we got snowed in with it and I might drink the entire keg by myself. 

 

The Evolution of a Female Homebrewer Pt. 1: From Kits to Recipes

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As a woman that brews, you get used to the looks of sheer shock when you share that information, even from men who brew themselves. I suppose we are a rare breed? But I have never been a fan of the shocked reactions or the implicit assumption that always followed the shock that I must only brew because a man introduced me to it. As one old coworker put it when he found out, "Did your boyfriend get you into that?"

But I started when I was single. And I started for the love of beer, and with the hope that I could craft my own versions of the beers I loved. 

My palate has grown over the years, but when I started brewing I was predominately interested in hoppy beers and Belgians. I was absolutely in love with Troeg's Nugget Nectar, Affligem Blond, and every beer made by La Chouffe. But I didn't know anything about anything, so I started with an amber ale kit.

What followed was a mixed bag of trial and error. Some brews were raging successes in all ways, but there were also exploding bottles from too much bottling sugar and batches with off flavors because I had no control of the temperature in my apartment. It was also weird brewing in my apartment at times. There were three of us living in a two bedroom, with the dining room walled off with plywood to make a third bedroom. One of my roommates didn't like beer, didn't understand the appeal of making your own beer, and resented the afternoons I took control of the kitchen to brew. Sure, I made a huge mess at times, but I always cleaned it up and I liked the way our entire apartment smelled like warm grain when I was through. But there remained a strange tension around it. Once I caught her spraying my fermenting bucket in the communal closet with perfume, even though it had an airlock and didn't smell. After that, I fermented in my bedroom to keep meddling paws away from my beer and dreamed of a time when I'd have my own place where I could brew as much as I pleased. I definitely wasn't going to branch out from extract batches in that situation.

By the time I met Evan, I felt boxed in by kits. I had just moved into my own place, so I finally had the opportunity to branch out. I wanted more control over the beers I made, but I had never made my own recipe. I didn't have the equipment needed to go all grain. And I didn't have any friends who brewed and could give me advice. I began considering braving homebrew events, even though I was nervous about sticking out like a sore thumb as one of the few women in the room. But luckily fate intervened and I met Evan. 

When I first met Evan, I asked a million questions about his brewing process. He was brewing far more interesting beers than me: a peanut butter stout and jelly ale meant to be mixed together like a black and tan and an IPA with an insane amount of hops. When I asked why he put so many hops in the beer, he replied "Why not?" It was such a refreshing attitude about beer. So creative! He was already designing his own recipes and brewing outside of the box in the way I aspired to. 

The first beer I designed was a Nugget IPA. It was an extract brew with Maris Otter, 2 Row, 1 oz Warrior hops and 3 oz of Nugget hops. It turned out well, so I decided to branch out further. My next beer was a not-so-pale IPA with aromatic grains made entirely with Nelson Sauvin hops. Half of the batch was fermented normally, while the other half was fermented in secondary with a hefty amount of pineapple. Evan's creativity in brewing had rubbed off on me. I consider it one of the first major milestones in my evolution as a brewer.

 

Agent Nelson IPA

Extract recipe for 5 gallons

6.6 lbs Golden Light LME

3.3 lbs Golden Light DME

2 lbs Aromatic Grain

1 oz Nelson at 60

1 oz Nelson at 30

1 oz Nelson at 5

1 oz Nelson at 2

First a bit of history.

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I started brewing in 2008 after a friend introduced me to the concept and showed me the kegs of homebrew he and his roommates had. Honestly, I don't remember much of what I tried at his apartment, but the seed was planted. When a technical writing class assignment required me to create a brochure on a process, I chose brewing. Down the rabbit hole I went. It seemed easy enough, and if my friend could do it, why couldn't I? I found some old, unused brewing equipment in my parents' basement, ordered the missing parts and a stout kit, and began. My first brew was a half decent oatmeal stout, although I learned the hard way that plastic miller lite bottles do not make for a great way to age beer. 

Fast forward a few years later: I bring a couple of my homebrews to a housewarming party. My friends hosting the party introduce me to a girl who also brews and who brought a few of her homebrews to the party. I have her try my 50 shades of Greyskull IPA, continuously hopped with a pound of Sorachi Ace in a 5 gallon batch. (See recipe below. She hasn't let me live it down yet). She has me try an amber ale that was made with the wrong yeast. (She wasn't very happy with it.) We hit it off that night, and 3 years later we are still brewing together. During the past three years, our brewing process and beer knowledge has evolved. We've gone from extract batches to all grain, as well as coast to coast and abroad to learn more about beer. I feel we have come leaps and bounds from when we first started brewing together, and even farther from where I started alone. 

That brings us to today: the first of February. We live together now and recently built out our keezer to run 3 taps. The beer garden in our dining room is now open. This month I've decided to challenge myself to only drink alcohol we have made. This shouldn't be a particularly difficult challenge, as we have five kegs partially full of beer and the other half of the keezer filled with various bottles and cans. 

 

 

The larger challenge is preparing for the DC Homebrewers Cherry Blossom competition. I am currently fermenting a small batch of a cherry blossom lager, brewed last weekend. Stay tuned: more on the lager and brewing to come soon.

-Evan 

50 Shades of Greyskull IPA (2012)

For using up a remaining pound of hops as well as meeting new people

5 Gallon Batch

13 oz sorachi ace hops leaf, 1 oz every 6 min, 3 oz dry hop

10 lbs 2-row or other base malt (extract: 6 lbs light dry extract)

1 lb cara munich

1 lb carapils

San Diego Super Yeast WLP090 

OG: 1.065

ABV: 6.7 - 7%