Batch 54 and Beyond

Under gray skies and light rain in the back yard yesterday, I squeezed in my first brew of 2010. On a purely trivial note, this is the 54th all-grain batch of my brewing life. Somewhat less trivial (at least to me) it was really now or never if I want to make a run at besting last year's personal best of 16 batches, considering the relentless train of winter storms now aimed at Southern California along with an increasingly busy work and family schedule. Moreover, having carboys and/or kegs sitting empty in the brew corner of our garage just never feels right.

The pressure to brew also stems from recently having to call a corny of my Helles on Wheels up to the front a few weeks early, to duty on the ole kegerator's Sunset Wheat tap. With the rest of my year-end series of German lagers sleeping in their kegs, I decided to start another series of English ales. I so enjoyed my first attempt last fall at a dark mild, as well as the subsequent English IPA, that I just couldn't wait to repeat the series. Plus this present batch of Brooks Leather Saddle Mild should just about be ready to go when the current keg on tap blows. Here is yesterday's recipe, only slightly modified from the first batch:

OG: 1038 (9.5°P)
84% Pale Maris Otter malt
8% Medium Crystal (60L)
5% Chocolate malt (450L)
3% Wheat malt
single-infusion mash at 155°F

approx. 20 BUs (calculated using Tinseth)
boil 75 minutes
Northern Brewer hops, 60 min.
American Goldings hops, 5 min.

White Labs English Ale yeast (WLP002)

Despite the light rain, my brew day went pretty smoothly. My brewhouse efficiency was a little higher than expected, but this was largely offset by less kettle evaporation on the wet day, so my starting gravity still came in on style. I use a rather primitive, but cheap and effective, water-bath system for managing fermentation temperatures. The temperature of one of the two carboys was spot-on this morning, at 67°F, and it was already showing some activity through the airlock. The other carboy, however, was sitting in the low 60s, so I quickly brought up the temperature several degrees with a boiling-water addition to the water bath. I've used this technique before to good effect, and I expect both carboys will be going strong by the end of the day.

Rather than repeat my fall series of English ales exactly, I'm going to experiment a bit in the weeks ahead. First, I'm going to add a couple ounces of cocoa nibs to one of the two carboys of the current mild as primary ferment dies down. I'm hoping that a week or so of "dry nibbing" will yield a nice chocolate aroma, but this is my first time using nibs, I don't really know what to expect. My second change from the fall series will be swapping out the ESB that I brewed last time for a completely revised version of my Roubaix Red, an American Amber ale. ESB is one of my favorite styles, but I wasn't thrilled with my own Penny Farthing ESB in the fall, and I've got a good supply of American hops I want to play with instead. Plus, I recently was inspired by a clone recipe of Stone's Levitation ale, and I'd like to try something comparable myself.

After these two session-strength beers in January, I plan to stretch the capacity of my mash tun in February, first with an encore batch of Century IPA-UK, then with a pair of half-batches of Barista Porter and an experimental oak-aged Man With the Hammer strong ale, the latter based on a clone recipe for my favorite beer of the 2009 winter holiday season: Lagunitas Brown Shugga'.

Then, in March, before the weather turns too warm, I plan to brew another series of lagers before moving on as summer approaches to a long-overdue series of something Belgian. As always, though, these plans are subject to change. Such are the joys of freedom that homebrewing allows. Cheers!

Brew Year Halftime Update

It's about halftime in the cool-temperature brewing season, as well as the end of another calendar year. I've managed to complete two full cycles of three beers each since the beginning of September, bringing my total for 2009 to 16 batches. That's still a few batches shy of our household's legally allowed maximum (200 gallons, if anyone is keeping track), but is nonetheless a new personal best.

Besides the quantity of beer brewed this year, I've been generally pleased with the quality. The first four beers I brewed in 2009 all won ribbons at various competitions, and a couple of my more recent brews (I think) would be worthy contenders, too, if I were to bottle and enter them as well. So far, my personal favorite is the Brooks Leather Saddle Mild I brewed back in September. It's a near-perfect clone of Moorhouse's Black Cat dark mild, and if judging in a competition, I'd give it an "excellent" BJCP score of around 40 out of 50. I used the same yeast in subsequent batches of Penny Farthing ESB and an English-style version of my Century IPA. The former was just OK--very clean and drinkable but rather lifeless--while the latter was probably my best IPA brewed to date. We've nearly finished off one of the two kegs of IPA, which proved extremely drinkable despite being full of interesting stone- and tropical-fruit flavors derived, presumably, from a combination of the malts, hops, and yeast-derived esters. A second keg of the same beer remains untapped as my first-ever experiment in wood aging. It spent a month on a small handful of Hungarian oak cubes, along with a pitch of Brett C. wild yeast and a couple of weeks dry-hopping. While not really historically accurate, it's nonetheless an experiment inspired by the IPA style's history as a colonial-era ale made for long ocean passages between Britain and British India. If nothing else, I'm anxious to see in 2010 what sort of complex (and hopefully still drinkable) ale is the result.

With summer temperatures now a relatively distant memory, I'm finishing up my last brewing cycle of 2009 with three lagers: a Munich Helles, a Bohemian Pilsener, and a Maibock. Primary fermentation is now finishing up with the last of these, while the first two are lagering. Because I had such success earlier in the fall with my English ales, I'm going to repeat a similar cycle early in the new year: another mild, another English IPA, and then one half-batch (5 gallons) each of my robust porter and a new idea for an oak-aged strong ale based on a clone recipe of Lagunitas's phenomenal Brown Shugga. I'll likely follow these ales with yet another round of lagers, and then as the weather gets warmer later in the spring, an overdue series of Belgian-style ales.

That's what's brewin' around here. May everyone have a Beery Christmas and Hoppy New Year!

Brewing Season has Arrived

Since the middle sixteenth century, the official Bavarian brewing season has begun on St. Michael's Day (September 29), which is effectively Germanic Catholicism's celebration of the autumnal equinox. With the emergence of Munich's Oktoberfest celebrations three centuries later, and the Great American Beer Festival three decades ago, the arrival of Fall has taken on even greater significance in brewing traditions world-wide. 'Tis the season for beer!

Like modern brewers of today, even those in Bavaria, I have no problem brewing during the summer, even if it requires a little more effort to manage my fermentation temperatures. Nonetheless, every year around this time I find an extra dose of energy around my brewhouse. And it arrived not a moment too soon. We emptied two kegs yesterday, which I was able to replace with two full ones waiting on deck in my lagering freezer. But that leaves just a single full keg in reserve, and four empties sitting around ready to be filled.

The good news is that those kegs won't be empty long. Fermentation is nearing completion on two carboys of a not-quite-mild Brooks Leather Saddle ale. This was supposed to be my maiden English Dark Mild, but a surprisingly high mash efficiency (due to the new grain mill at the homebrew shop?) led to a somewhat stronger ale that will end up being more of a Northern English Brown (OG=1045, expected ABV=4%). Over the next month, I plan to complete my series of English ales with an ESB and an IPA. All of these English ales will be welcome additions to the Bike Brew kegerator, which has been decidedly Germanic and Belgian for much of the year. Here, for example, is the current line-up:

• Beach Cruiser Blonde (a Bavarian-American hybrid ale perfect for our warm SoCal Indian summers)
• Dunkelrad (a traditional Bavarian dunkelweizen)
• Gran Bel Giro Maibock (the first keg we enjoyed in May; the second keg is serving as our Oktoberfest beer)
• Black Lion (a non-traditional ale of Flemish inspiration: a black witbier? a Belgian schwarzbier?)

Finally, the annual autumn energy surge at the Bicycle Brewery got an extra boost from the recent Pacific Brewers Cup. After getting off to an inauspicious beginning--I lost two intended entries in a glass-shardy mess on the floor of the homebrew shop--the PBC ended fantastically for me. The two entries that I did successfully deliver to the competition both took first place (!) in their respective categories; blue ribbons for my CrossXtoberfest Vienna lager and my robust Barista Porter. Alas, the remaining few bottles of each are set aside for the upcoming California State Homebrew Competition, so I'll just have to brew them again in the months ahead.