SR4: Dialing it in (hopefully)

The new batch is started and hopefully it will be a lot like the old batch.

SR3, my unnamed original IPA, turned out really well. But there were a few things that I wanted to tweak: the hop flavor, the aroma and color. It was nearly there, but just not quite.

That said, I took SR3 to my first DC Homebrewers meeting last week and it went over well. I've been interested in joining the group for a while, but because I decided to start homebrewing as soon as the baby came along, I haven't had any extra time for it. It worked out, though, because I was able to bring my own recipe to the first meeting and compare it to what the other homebrewers produced. It stood up.

There were a variety of styles at the meeting, from double IPAs, to kolsch beers, to ESBs and Scottish ales (really, not a stinker in the bunch), but I was surprised to find that I was the only person to bring an IPA, easily the most popular style in the craft beer community. I was also surprised to run into Mike Roy, the brewer from Franklin's, and Tammy Tuck, a beer writer for the City Paper, both of whom were at my house for a beer tasting three days earlier. Small world.

If all goes well, SR4 will be a little better than its predecessor. Admittedly, I could've decided SR3 was good enough -- it does have a real nice hop flavor, a good aroma, the proper amount of bitterness and the alcohol content I was going for -- but I picked up some advice on Beer School: in order to make a beer right, you have to make it over and over again.

What a lot of homebrewers do is make a beer, decide it's good or bad and then move on to something else. On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with that. It is all for fun, after all. On the other hand, if you want to create a special beer, or at least get a beer just right, you have to work at it. And that means tinkering with the recipe over the course of a few batches. I think I might have this IPA dialed in with this batch, but I won't know for sure for another six weeks.

So for this recipe, I added another ounce of Simcoe hops at the end of the boil, used a crystal malt with a lighter toast and dumped in another two ounces of whole Cascade hops for dry hopping. I'll also leave the whole hops in for the full two week fermentation, rather than pull them out after a week. I thought dry hopping with an ounce of whole hops was a lot last time, but it was a damn hop salad in that bucket tonight. This should be one hop stinky beer.

You know, that's not a bad name.

SR3: I'm going to need more hops

SR3 is done. On the one hand, it's good, very drinkable. On the other hand, it's not where I want it to be.

First and foremost, it's not hoppy enough, especially on the nose, but also in terms of the flavor. The big hop aroma I got when I transferred the beer from the fermentor to the carboy after a week of dry hopping is gone, or at least greatly diminished. So for SR4, I'll be dry hopping with at least twice as many whole hops (two ounces) for twice as long (two weeks).

I was conservative with this batch because a) it was my own recipe and I didn't know what I was doing, and 2) I wanted to make sure I could drink the beer. Part of that meant I didn't want to keep the whole hops in the beer for longer than a week and risk having them rot, screwing up the beer. As it turns out, the hops were fine when I sparged the beer and could have gone another week or more.

I also think I'll add more flavor/aroma hops. I split up my simcoe hops to help with the bitterness. The bitterness seems about right, but I want more hop flavor and aroma. I need to step up the simcoe next time and I may add another hop varietal to further punch up the flavor.

As you can see, I hit the color I was going after (SR3 in the Big Boss pint, SR2 in the Dogfish Head pint). I liked the darker color of SR2 (a slight variation of Charlie Papazian's Palilalia IPA recipe) so I used amber malt and toasted crystal malt for SR3, too. I may eventually change this, but until I have the flavor dialed in I'll keep the malt as is. The flavor is good and I got the alcohol percentage I wanted (6.7% A.B.V.), so changing it is a matter of aesthetics.

So for a first batch of original homebrew, I would give myself a C+. It's a good beer, a drinkable beer, but there is still much work to be done.

HOP UPDATE!! HOP UPDATE!!

My hop rhizomes finally sprouted! I was almost certain that I'd either killed them or planted them upside down. I didn't (well, I might have planted them upside down, but nature finds a way) and they're looking good. All five hops broke ground and should be big enough to grab the guide rope in a few weeks. I don't know how much yield I'll get this year, but I'll be happy with whatever I can harvest and wet hop this fall.

SR3: Dry hopping rocks!

My daughter slept though the night for the first time last night. Unfortunately, the night ended at 5:30 this morning.

So I was up bright and early to start bottling SR3. As I mentioned before, this is the first batch I dry hopped. It was completely worth the trouble. Even with the coffee pot going, my kitchen was enveloped in hop aroma. And if the aroma is any indication of the quality of this batch, I'm on to something.

For a raw beer, the flavor was pretty good, too. The ounce of Warrior hops and half ounce of Simcoe seems to have added enough bitterness to balance out the 10 pounds of malt. Beer in this state always tastes flat and weird, but this is the first batch I've sampled and kind of liked. I wouldn't order this in a bar, but it wasn't terrible by any means. That also means I didn't infect the beer when I transferred it from the fermentor to the carboy. As long as my bottles were sterile, I should be good.

Speaking of the malt, it occurred to me this morning that I might not have an IPA at all. Rather, I think I made a hoppy ale. You can see in the photos, the beer came out a nice dark orange, but it did so with an amber malt base that included toasted crystal malt. Technically, an IPA should include pale malt. I may be splitting hairs here, but that's what I do.

I also got the A.B.V. I was shooting for. According to my favorite new iPhone app, BrewMath, my projected alcohol content is 6.7 percent (F.G.: 1.020). I tell ya, that's the best $3 I've spent in a long time. I hate doing math, especially when I don't completely trust the outcome. And as influential and successful a brewer as Charlie Papazian is, his A.B.V. equation never seemed to work out quite right, even to the guy at the homebrew supply store. Well, it doesn't matter now, I have technology on my side. So screw you math, I didn't need you in college and I don't need you now!

As I did with my last batch, I'm giving SR3 four weeks to ferment in the bottle. Regardless of how it tastes, dry hopping will be a regular feature of my brewing process.

I was planning on giving a status update on my hops by now. Unfortunately, they haven't surfaced yet. Folks on the Homebrewing Facebook page say that it's not unusual for rhizomes to take a few weeks to come up. I hope that's the case, otherwise it'll confirm my suspicion that I planted all five rhizomes upside down.

SR3: It's gonna be a bigger beer

SR3 is in the fermentor. There are a lot of firsts with this batch: first time I'm using live yeast (California Ale Yeast, which are good for hoppy beers), first time I did multi-stage hopping, first time I'm dry hopping, first time I'm clarifying, and the first time I'm using my own recipe.

I don't know how it's going to turn out, but I know that it will have a higher alcohol content.

As I've gone on before about Charlie Papazian's apparent penchant for lower alcohol beers (which have tasted quite good, I should add), one of the things I wanted to try was pushing the gravity of my own batch higher. Oh, it's higher.

The original gravity for Papazian's Palilalia IPA (SR2: Cabin Fever IPA) was 1.032. The O.G. for my IPA was 1.070. To put it simply, that is a huge difference.

I used the framework of Palilalia IPA for SR3, which is to say I followed the same boil time as Papazian's recipe, and added the same amount of gypsum and toasted crystal malt to the wort. Otherwise, I ventured out on my own, using an additional two pounds of dried malt extract and a few more ounces of hops I hope will play well together.

For bittering, I picked up an ounce of Warrior, a particularly bitter hop. Given the additional malt, I figured I would need to bump up the bitter to balance out the flavors. I also picked up a couple ounces of Simcoe hops, half an ounce of which were used for bittering. The rest went in at the end of the boil for flavor and aroma.

Because I couldn't just leave things at that, I added an ounce of whole Cascade hops to the fermentor. They'll dry hop in there for a week before I transfer the beer from the bucket fermentor to the carboy. The transfer should also clarify the beer a bit, which will be nice for the aesthetics.

I had an issue with the wort temperature again.

As with SR1, the wort was too hot. Even after adding three gallons of cold water, the temperature was hovering around 1oo degrees. Now that the weather is warmer, there was no way I was going to get the temperature to drop 30 degrees simply by setting it outside. Fortunately, my mother in law of all people had a great idea: setting the fermentor in the wash sink in my laundry room. I then filled the sink halfway with ice water. It took all night to bring the temperature down, but the fermentor was sealed, so the length of time didn't matter.

Now it's a waiting game. I plan to give the beer two weeks to ferment and four weeks to finish in the bottle. That works out to May 16 before it's ready to drink. Here's hoping the waiting will be worth it.

The rhizomes are in! The rhizomes are in!

My mother will fall out of her chair if she ever reads the following statement:

I was stoked to do some gardening the other day.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I owe my education and station in life to my absolute disdain for landscaping. Growing up, my folks got into the landscaping and irrigation business. That meant that for much of my teenage years I was on the working end of a shovel. I hated it. Absolutely hated it. There are few shittier jobs that weeding greenhouses, digging irrigation trenches and fitting PVC pipe in the Florida sun. In fact, the only job I can think that's worse is raising tilapia in makeshift backyard ponds. I did that, too. I hated that, too.

So the irony wasn't lost on me when I was picking up my hop rhizomes the other day from Maryland Homebrew and working out locations to plant them with the missus. Maybe if those damn plants of my youth were hops and the irrigation lines were full of beer I would've stayed in the business.

No, probably not.

Anyway, I bought five rhizomes: two Willamette, two Cascade and one Centennial. Since then, I've done a bit more research on growing hops -- including listening to an excellent Brewing Network show on the subject -- and realized I should've had at least two rhizomes of each hop in case one of the rhizomes doesn't take. Oh well, I'll keep my fingers crossed that I got a robust Centennial plant. Because hops are vines, I needed a place for them to climb. While I could have done something as simple as hang some twine from the roof, I decided to plant a post along my fence line and run some lines for the hops to climb.

All three varieties are primarily flavor and aroma hops. While I'm willing to grow my own hops, I didn't see the need to screw about with bittering hops, like Columbus, when hop pellets work just fine. With the three hop varieties I bought, I'm hoping to have enough cones this fall to wet hop a few batches of beer. We'll see.

I also picked up the ingredients for my next batch of homebrew. I've decided to do another IPA, but with an ABV in the 6 to 7 percent range. Rather than following Charlie Papazian's recipes, which seem to produce 3 to 4 percent beer, I'm going to use the recipe for his Palilalia IPA as a framework for my own IPA. Lucky for me, the folks at Maryland Homebrew are patient and knowledgeable people who looked over my recipe and stopped me from making an undrinkable toxic wash: apparently four ounces of Warrior hops is WAY too much for five gallons. We dialed it back to one ounce of Warrior and I'm going to use some of the Simcoe I picked up to help with the bittering and flavor. I was also buying too much amber and crystal malt.

So what did I learn: 1. You can't just double the amount of ingredients from one batch to another; 2. hops have different amounts of alpha acids, so they can't necessarily be treated the same; and 3. when in doubt, check with the guy at the homebrew store.

I'll provide more details when I get to brewing (hopefully this weekend). But I've had some success with my first two batches, so we'll see how I do once the training wheels are off.

SR2: Cabin Fever IPA

You know it's going to be a good day when your phone reminds you to drink beer.

I got just that reminder this afternoon. It's not that I need to be reminded; rather, it was my reminder that SR2 was ready for consumption. And let me tell you, SR2, a.k.a. Cabin Fever IPA, clearly the best thing to come out of D.C.'s super shitty winter storms.

The beer pours a malty dark amber with a thick head. It's nice and hoppy on the nose, and bitter and a little bitey in the mouth. The finish could be better. I find it does linger much, but I could also describe that as "clean." When I compare it to SR1, Honkey's Pale Ale (below on the right), it's clearly a darker, yeastier beer, thanks in no small part to the toasted malt and lack of filtration (why bother filtering when the yeast bring their own flavor to the party). And the extra hops in Cabin Fever have resolved the cereal flavor issue I had with Honkey's.

All in all, not bad for a low alcohol IPA.

As I mentioned in my last post, the A.B.V. is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 percent (which really is a surprise considering how well the malt level balances out the hops). I know I said I was going to make a bitter next, but I think I'm going to take a shot at another IPA. This time, I'll use Papazian's IPA recipe as a general template, but basically double the malt a double or triple the hops.

I don't know whether that will work -- or be drinkable -- but it should result in a beer closer to the traditional A.B.V. of IPAs. If 6 pounds of malt produces a 3 percent beer, 12 to 13 pounds of malt should produce at least a 6 percent beer, right? Besides, I've looked at other brewers recipes and all of them call for at least that much malt. Hell, for things like Scotch ales, some recipes call for 24 to 28 pounds of malt in a 5 gallon batch.

So I think it's time to take off the training wheels and give a go at my own recipe. At best, it'll be a full-powered IPA. At worst, it'll taste like the stuff I brewed at Shenandoah.

One more thing; I talked to the folks at Maryland Homebrew. My hop rhizomes should be in by the end of the month. With any luck, I'll have fresh hop buds by this fall.

SR2: Blizzard bottling

After a while, the novelty of being snowed in wears off. Well, it's worn off. Fortunately, I had beer to bottle.

I was planning on bottling this latest batch on Friday. That would have given it 13 days to ferment, and it's my day off. But seeing as Tuesday was the second of three (and counting) consecutive snow days, I decided the bottling could commence. Besides, there were no longer signs of fermentation in the carboy, so the beer with ready to go.

As was the case with the wort, things went very smoothly. I sanitized and dried the bottles well ahead of time, and when I was ready to do the bottling, I pulled out and sanitized only the equipment I needed. What took me several hours the first time, required only a couple hours this time.

Like the first batch, I didn't quite get two cases of beer. For this batch, I produced 46 and a half bottles. That half bottle though, is filled with the bucket dregs of leftover yeast, malt and hops. I'm curious to see how it tastes, but I'm not expecting much. I'd like to get a full 48 bottles, but I'm afraid of siphoning up any of the gunk and the bottom of the carboy, so I end up leaving about an inch of decent looking beer behind. The sacrifices we make.

The rest of the batch looks great. The Cabin Fever IPA, named for all the damn snow piled against my front door, turned out a beautiful, soft orange color (basically, it's Charlie Papazian's Palilalia IPA recipe with more malt and hops). The color will mellow some over the next four weeks during the bottle fermentation, but it should remain a nice looking beer.

Although I'm pleased with how this batch is turning out, there have been a couple issues. Once again, the alcohol percentage seems very low. And this time, I was able to get accurate original (1.032) and final (1.014) gravity readings. But if I'm following Charlie Papazian's equation correctly, the IPA is about 2.3% ABV. That's very low for this style of beer (which should be around 6% ABV), so I'm suspicious. That said, I was researching other styles, and recipes for Scottish ales and double IPAs call for twice as much malt, or more, than what I've been using. So maybe I'm just not using enough malt. I put the question out to a homebrewing group, and will continue to research this.

The other snafu I had was during bottling last night: I dumped a good few ounces of beer on the floor. The siphon isn't the easiest tool to use. It's necessary to get the beer flowing from the carboy to the bottling bucket, but it's tricky. As I was screwing around drawing beer out of the carboy, I didn't notice that the other end of the hose popped out of the bucket and was dangling over my foot. Well, I didn't notice until my foot started getting wet.

Other than that, everything seemed to go well. As with so many things, practice and repetition help tremendously. So now it's a matter of waiting another four weeks (March 10) to see if the beer is as smooth as the process.