FOOLCiRCLE

So I got the score sheets from Split Rock back yesterday. You should already know how I faired, now you can read a sampling of what some others thought.

• ’05 MacRae – 18/23/21 -  “This beer should be entered as a Smoke Beer (22B).” – “Smokey phenols should come from traditional Scottish yeast not from peat-smoked malt.” – “Malt dominates, is overdone to the point of a bacon flavor.”
• Gnarleywine – 27/29 – “A hop character in the aroma would really add to this beer.” – “A good effort, but malt is one-dimensional, caramel.”
• Hazelnut Brown – 32/34/34 – Third Place Specialty Ale – “Overall a good beer, aromas & flavor were pronounced, nutty with malty sweetness.” – “Quite good and really interesting!” – “Overall I feel it is a good beer, maybe decrease nut flavor a little.”
• American Brown Ale – 25/27/28/25 – Second Place American Ale – “Good overall, body too light.” – “This was a good brown ale, add more body and it will improve.” – “Pleasant.” – “Not bad, just needs a little tweaking.”

OK, that was their reviews of my beers, now here’s my reviews of their reviews (got it?). Anyway, I mostly agree with the MacRae reviews, the beer is too peat-smoky, but that’s only because I’m an idiot! No, just kidding. Actually I think I have tried to enter this beer as a smoked beer and they said it’s not smoky enough and as a wee heavy (the base style) and they said it is too smoky, it’s a bastard. Also, I mostly agree with the Gnarleywine reviews. It’s a good American style Barleywine, but it is a little one-dimensional and could use a hop punch in the end, but I still think it is sticky delicious. Again, I mostly agree with the Hazelnut reviews (do you sense a pattern here?). I think it is good, sweet, and nutty, and yes maybe too nutty. I will make this one again but with less hazelnut extract, it was definitely a favorite with the ladies!

BUT, this is where I’ll have to disagree with the reviews of the ABA, even though it placed second (with the scores that I got and receiving a second, the other beers must have sucked). First I have to state that there were three apprentices and one certified judge. An apprentice has not taken (or at least not passed) the BJCP exam, cool no problem everyone has to start somewhere, but who the hell thought it was a good idea to put three apprentices with one other certified judge? These sheets were pretty wacked, it’s almost as if all four talked about the beer first then wrote down what they remembered the certified judge saying. Seriously, one score sheet had only 14 words on it, 14!? I’ve written more than 14 words during the bottle inspection before a beer was even opened. Seriously, this is all he wrote, “Nice roasted aroma, chocolaty. Good color & head. Good finish. Good body, mild carbonation. Pleasant.” I mean jeez if you take out the word ‘good’ he only said 11 words, and if you take out all the synonyms for ‘good’ your only left with 9. Here is this judges very descriptive review of my beer that I paid five dollars for with all the words that mean ‘good’ taken away, “roasted aroma, chocolaty, color & head, finish, body, mild carbonation”. Besides the first three words it sounds like those are categories to review not the review itself. Disgusted. Regarless, the results are in.

Yesterday I took a vacation day off from work and stayed home and brewed a Belgian-style Dubbel.

It was one of “those” kind of brew days, in a good way! As the picture shows above, it was a very relaxed, non-eventful, beautiful weather brew day. For the day before Thanksgiving being about 65F and sunny was a nice treat. I had no worries about getting other tasks done during this brew day and just sat back with a book and enjoyed. The day itself went really well too, less than five and a half hours of work from prep to janitorial, and had physically active yeast within four hours. So, though this isn’t an exciting entry, it is still a happy entry. Enjoy!

So I was thinking the other day, I wonder how many batches of beer I have brewed and when will I brew my 100th batch so I can do something big and special?

 

Well, it looks like I have brewed 101 batches of beer with brewing my 100th batch in October of 2007. Very unceremoniously, oh well. But the cool thing is I wanted to do something bigger than normal and something a little special. Well, for me an Imperial Stout falls right into that category, definitely bigger than normal and special in the sense of it’s not a beer you typically get to make (my third attempt, but really my first true Imperial Stout if you feel me).

So I guess I’m going to break these down into some stupid stats and see how things look:

• Total number of different beverages made:  114
• Total number of beers brewed: 101
• Total number of different styles: 41 (I think 😉 )
• Year with the most number of beers brewed: 2001 & 2007 – 16 beers each
• Year with the least number of beers brewed: 1999 – 2 beers
• Beer repeated the most number of times: MacRae Scottish Ale
• My 5 favorite beers, in no particular order, and subject to change: MacRae Scottish Ale, Hogshead Porter, E.C.P.A., Pliny the Elder Clone, ABA Grand Experiment
• My 5 least favorite beers, in no particular order, and subject to change: Banana Spice Ale, Chocolate Covered Cherries Porter, Organic Barley Brew, All Malt Ale, Old Macungie Bear Swamp
• My 5 beers I may consider revisiting and trying again, in no particular order, and subject to change: Opaque Espresso Stout, Chamomile Brown Ale, New Year’s Eve Bourbon Stout, Moore’s Light, Union
• Most award winning beers: E.C.P.A. II and the original Red Card Ale both have received 5+ awards.

Honestly, I would love some feedback, especially from you fools who have been drinking my beer for the past 100+ batches (thanks you idiots)! What were some of your favorites, least favorites, what would you like me to try again, what haven’t I done that you’d be interested in seeing me do? I’m interested in your comments. Thanks to all who have enjoyed the ride with me.

Today was the Split Rock Homebrew Competition at Split Rock Resort in Lake Harmony, PA (Poconos) at the 16th Annual Great Brews of America Classic Beer Festival.

I had entered four beers earlier this week in this competition.  It was a little spurt of the moment timing and coming right off the heels of HOPS BOPS, but I decided to enter anyway. I entered the 2005 MacRae in the 9E-Scotch Ale category, the ABA Grand Experiment in the 10C-American Brown Ale category, the Gnarleywine in the 19C-American Barleywine category, and the Hazelnut Brown in the 23A-Specialty Beer category. I was just clicking-around and decided to see if the results were posted yet assuming they were not, and guess what? They were. Looks like I faired pretty well with the ABA placing 2nd at the American Ales table and the Hazelnut Brown placing 3rd at the Specialty/Spice table. You can see all the results here. I am pleased with these results. Not that I thought the two beers that didn’t place were not good, I just felt that the two beers that did place were the stronger of the four. I’ll post more after I receive the score sheets.

On a late piece of information I was told that the HOPS BOPS competition was last Saturday (11.10.07), so I sent out a couple quick e-mails and made some stuff happen.

So basically I e-mailed the people in charge to see if (1) they needed any more judges for the competition and (2) to see if I could still register my beers for the competition though the deadline to register had already passed. I was lucky and they said they could use both judges and I could register, plus I was allowed to hand-deliver my beers to the competition the day of the competition to avoid shipping charges.

I entered three beers in this competition, the 2005 MacRae Strong Scotch Ale in the 9E-Scotch Ale category, the ABA Grand Experiment in the 10C-American Brown Ale category, and the PABA in the 20A-Fruit Beer category as an American Brown Ale with peaches added. I was trying to wait until I got my sheets back before I posted this, but I still have not received them yet and they were supposed to e-mail them to us, weak! Anyway, the MacRae placed third in it’s group lumped in with British, Scottish, and Irish beers with only 7 entries. Actually there were only 94 entries overall. They really didn’t do a good job promoting this competition if you ask me.

Since I just got my sheets back (about seven hours after I posted this) I’ll post some of the results here:

• ’05 MacRae – 30/28/32 – “Complex aroma. Clear, pretty.” – “Smokey caramel with a slightly buttery note.” – “Nice rich malt with some supporting hop bitterness (maybe a touch high for style) and lots of smoke.”
• ABA – 28/31/31/31 – “Excellent drinking beer that would fit better as a Southern English Brown or even a Brown Porter.” – “Balance tends toward hop bitterness but finishes on soft sweet caramel notes.” – “Tasty, but could use a bit more bitterness, I really enjoyed the nutty/chocolate flavors.” – “Well balanced hops and malt.”
• Peach ABA – 29/24 – “Complex, peachy, chocolaty. Wonderful!”- “Nice peach aroma with underlying chocolate from brown ale.”

(I believe this beer (the PABA) was ‘digged’ hard because it was a ‘gusher’. I have a theory on why the PABA has become a gusher of a beer: I feel as if I should have moved the beer to a tertiary fermenter to let the peaches completely fall clear since I peached the ABA during secondary thus voiding the potential for the effects of the secondary fermenter, and because the beer had not fallen mostly clear a significant amount of sediment was carried over to the bottles, thus giving increased nucleation sights for the carbonation to escape suspension in the beer, leading to a gusher. I feel as if this beer did not have off flavors, was not infected, and was thoroughly tested by drinking 18 of them in one night, thank you Erik & Robert.)

Not only that, but I felt as though this competition was very disorganized. It was supposed to start at 9:30AM so I arrived early at 9AM so there would be time to register my beers, have some typically supplied breakfast and coffee, and get situated for the morning. I actually beat the organizers to there own competition and I live in a different state! Anyway, I was early to say the least, they didn’t supply breakfast, not even coffee (blasphemy!), and things didn’t get really rolling until almost 10:30. I had heard the day of the competition that they had less than 100 entries so I figured we were going to bust them all out in the morning and have an early day, but instead they tripled and quadrupeled some of the tables of judges together – ugh! It was like pulling teeth to get through the day in general.

I judged Specialty Beers in the morning and Strong Ales, Wood-Aged, and Smoked in the afternoon. Though the specialty beers can be quite a scary category (think everything that doesn’t fit into another category) it was actually better than the afternoon category. In the morning we had a black honey lager, two rye beers, an apple cobbler beer, an Altbier light, and one dubbed the Peanut Butter Bomb. The Peanut Butter Bomb was a stand-out for all the wrong reasons, quite a lovely gusher it was. In the afternoon we had a really terrific Old Ale that the other two judges weren’t feeling, four English Style Barleywines, a wood aged beer, and a smoked beer. The wood one was like sucking on oak chips and the smoked one tasted like a burn-out from a car, both pretty gross.

Overall it was a long, kind of boring, relatively expensive day. I left the house at about 8AM to leave for Philly and got home a little after 5PM, I really would have liked to have seen us bust out the whole session in just the morning but instead it was way drawn out, and between entry fees and parking it cost me $45 to volunteer my help for the day. Well, on a slightly more positive note, the food and beer at Nodding Head Brew Pub was good.

OK, tonight was a double-hesitation-WTF. I have hesitated for quite some time now on trying to re-bottle-condition the Saturday IPA. Well, tonight I tried.

Well, sort of. I had all practical intentions to try and re-bottle-condition roughly 40 bottles of the Saturday IPA, I mean come on seriously, WTF. What’s the worse that is going to happen? I ruin about two cases of beer that I wasn’t drinking anyway? I waist a bunch of my time and money (and Garrett’s too)? I create two cases of bottle-bombs and the shit hits the fan? I was tired of not drinking my delicious nectar. So I gathered my things from the basement to re-bottle about two cases of beer. I was going to sanitize everything, carefully pour the beer down the side of the bottling bucket, measure the beer, run the volume / temperature equation through pro-mash (which seems to be working), boil my priming sugar, add that to the beer, add a half pack of dry yeast, and re-bottle. It seemed simple, logical, and easy. Yes, I know I would heavily oxidize the beer, but I didn’t care. If it carbonated properly then I would probably drink it in two weeks or so, especially if I “had to”. Anyway, I had just opened the first bottle to dump in and pftssst! The sound of carbonation. It must be a flook, opened a second bottle and pftssst! WTF! OK, now I’m feeling a little crazy, what’s going on with this beer? I try both samples, neither are fully carbonated both had good mouth feel and are definitely carbonated. Now, I hesitate, WTF!? I decide to abort mission and call fair is fair. As of now the IPA is “somewhat carbonated”. Who knows what I’ll do, WTF . . .

Yesterday (10.20.07) I brewed a Belgian Tripel style beer. Also, while brewing, I bottled the Small Beer from the second runnings of the Imperial Stout.

Things with the Tripel went well as soon as I got my butt in gear. Per usual I have one time set in my head as the starting time and then one thing leads to another and before you know it I’m starting two to three hours later. I need to be more strict with my time guidelines, or just stopping caring about it so much. Anyway, I finally started around 11PM. To me a Tripel is a simple beer to brew, the trick lies with the yeast and letting them work their magic on the wort you created for them. The recipe I created used only Belgian Pilsner malt and clear sugar mashed at a quite low temperature to create a very fermentable environment for the yeast. I also only used European Noble Hops (Hallertauer and Saaz) and a pure Belgian yeast strain WLP550. The OG was 1.082, and everything felt like it went smoothly. I was finished and cleaned up by 5PM, a nice clean straight forward six hour day.

While the mash was mashing I got things prepped to bottle the Small Beer. I was lucky and Karen was home to give me a hand which usually makes bottling feel smoother. The bottling seemed to go off without consequence. I tasted the beer of course (see picture above) and it was OK. I really don’t know what to expect from this beer so it is hard to be disappointed or really excited at this point. It tastes light in flavor and body, the nose is weak and the appearance is dull as of now. I know, I make it sound very appealing don’t I. So I’m hoping with some carbonation and temperature adjustments it’ll be a nice easy drinking, smooth, session beer (maybe close to a Mild, maybe).

Between brewing and bottling I also did a couple other “beer chores” and cleaned three carboys that were sitting with cleaning solution in them, rearranged some beers in the cellar (which desperately needs some attention), and tried the Amarillo Amber for the first time full on. The carboys were no big deal, just one of those things that need to be done. The attention given to the cellar was actually in preparation to see how many empty 12oz. bottles I would have available after bottling the Small Beer, like less than half a case. I also pulled out a bunch of painted 22oz. bottles I had (think Rogue) and threw them out deciding it wasn’t worth the effort to try and remove the paint to use the bottles, plus I’m not too big on bottling in 22oz. bottles. But in doing so I came up with about a case worth of Belgian-style 750ml. bottles that I put aside to give to Garrett. He likes to bottle-condition some of his Belgian beers in these type of bottles, so they’re all his. And the Amarillo Amber seemed like it’s going to be an easy drinker. The Amarillo hops seemed to have already mellowed some and are leaning toward the orangey-citrus side versus the cat piss type of aroma they can develop sometimes.

By the way, looks like I’m going to need some help drinking some beer soon. I have about two cases of American Brown Ale, two cases of Peached American Brown Ale, four cases of IPA (only very lightly carbonated, but tasty), two cases of Amarillo Amber, and two cases of the Small Beer. On top of that there is the Vader Imperial Stout ready in December, the Linvilla Hard Cider ready in November, and now the Tripel probably ready in December. When are you available?

So tonight I accomplished four beer related activities, three of which were homebrew related. I drank the growler of Rhode Island Blueberry Ale from Coastal Extreme Brewing, I made a started with WLP550 to brew a Tripel this weekend, I de-labeled and sanitized two cases of bottles to bottle the small beer from the Imperial Stout this weekend, and I transfered the Linvilla Hard Cider and Vader Imperial Stout to secondaries.

 

I’ve been dying to crack into one of the growlers from RI sometime this week. Always a concern with growlers is ‘how fresh will it be for how long?’ Fortunately I have had good luck with storing growlers. I always arrive with clean and sanitized growlers, I try to use the plastic lids which I feel you can get a better seal on, and I try to use electric tape to seal the outside of the growler if I know it is going to be more than 24 hours before I drink it. I split the growler of the RI Blueberry Ale with Karen tonight and it was pretty good. Her remark was it tasted like a blueberry breakfast bar – sweet, blueberry, and grainy – I couldn’t agree more. After about the first pint the beer really began to grow on my, kind of like the blueberry version of #9 from Magic Hat.

Originally I was hoping to brew the long anticipated second beer with Dave, an Oatmeal Honey Stout – Zog’s Grog Uncle Tupelo Honey Stout. But with the way the world works it was still not meant to be, yet. I think the original beer with Dave we made was like in 2004, geez how the time flies. Come on, Dave, we should at least make this annual  ;-). So instead after I realized that wasn’t going to happen, I made a started of WLP550 – White Labs Belgian Ale – to brew a Tripel this weekend. I don’t think I’ve messed around with Belgian-style beers since the old Double Dubbel trip and haven’t messed with a Tripel in particularly since 2002.

I also realized it has been about three weeks since I brewed the Small Beer and the Imperial Stout and I knew I just had to bottle the small beer. With a beer that small/young/fragile I really probably should have bottled it last week, oh well. At least now the bottles are clean and sanitized and ready to go. Hopefully Saturday morning the deed will get done, but we’ll see.

Also I transfered the Imperial Stout and the Hard Cider to secondaries. The Imperial Stout dropped just a smidgen to 1.035, still a little high, but it actually tasted pretty good. I’ll probably leave this beer alone to age to at least the beginning of December in preparation to bottle and serve between Christmas and New Years (estimate, fingers crossed). The Cider should be finished fermenting, it’s SG was at 0.0996, quite low honestly. Last time my Cider finished higher than that (0.0998) and was bone dry and quite un-apple-licious. This time I tasted the sample and it was kinda-appley and sorta-sweetish. So who knows, the numbers don’t always tell the truth. I’ll let this one sit in secondary until at least November in anticipation of bottling and serving for Thanksgiving. We’ll have to see how that goes. I still have a trick up my sleeve to help this bad boy clear if it decides to be difficult.

Sunday I ran out to Linvilla Orchards to scoop up some fresh apple cider to make a second attempt at making a hard cider.

Last time I made hard cider was October of 2005. I followed some simple “rules” I found online and kind of went from there. This time I am essentially using the same “rules” + “experience”= to make a “new” hard cider. I still like the idea that hard cider should essentially be just real apple cider and yeast, that’s it. The only other thing I added was a yeast nutrient to help with fermentation. No additional sugar or spices or other bizarreness.

I bought the cider Sunday and let it sit out at room temperature all night to come up to ambient temperature. When I got to it after work it was 70 degrees, perfect. I dumped the five gallons of cider into a sanitized five gallon carboy, took a gravity reading (1.052), hit it with about 60 seconds of O2, dropped in an opened Servomyces capsule (yeast nutrient), and pitched my yeast. That was about it. Maybe 30 minutes worth of work, 60 minutes if I include the time it took to sanitize the O2 aeration stone and moving slowly. Hard cider, at least like this, is just about as easy as it gets.

Last time I used an Champagne yeast which made the cider very dry, beyond crisp. The original cider was decent for a first try, extremely crisp, tart, English cider like according to some people. But, it wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted something with more flavor. One option would be to try and make a sweet cider like commercial American ciders, but without the capacity to force-carbonate the cider this would be dangerous. The reason it would be dangerous is the fact that the extra or additional sugar plus the yeast necessary for bottle-conditioning would lead to the possibility of exploding bottles from over carbonation, or as us homebrewers call them “bottle bombs”. So this time I figured I’d get a little crazy and use a pseudo-Belgian-style yeast with the cider, Safale-33. It could be great, it could be awful, I guess we’ll all find out together.

I’m also going to try and not age it as long as last time. Last time I bulk aged the hard cider for like nine months then bottle conditioned it for like three before serving based off of the online “rules” from before. This time, I’d love to have it on the table by Thanksgiving. Really I suppose I should be aiming for an earlier “brew” date for the cider so it could be around for Halloween and Thanksgiving time, but oh well. The biggest issue will be if the cider will clear by then or if I’ll be willing to bottle and serve it still “cloudy”. If it ferments and clears by the first week of November we’ll be looking good. Until then…

So I bottled the Amarillo Amber today, everything went as expected, so that is good. This beer was actually in its third carboy trying to clear, this was the beer that wouldn’t clear.

So I cleaned the bottles for this beer last Thursday and I finally got around to bottling it on Sunday. This beer was brewed almost a month ago, transfered and dry-hopped to secondary after about 10 days, and then transfered again to tetrary after about another 10 days in hopes that it would eventually clear. It has appeared to finally clear with a FG at 1.012. I used the Pro-Mash program again to see if that helps with carbonation. I bottled 4.5 gallons with 4.20 oz of corn sugar, more than I expected, but hopefully no carbonation issues.

I also checked the SG for the Imperial Stout and the “small beer”. The Imperial Stout clocked in at 1.036 right now and the small beer at 1.009. I’m hoping the IS comes down at least 0.006 more points and I’m happy with the “small beer”. Of course I tasted both; the IS was sweet yet it was also cut by the alcohol (like 8.5% already), it was thick yet not too thick and cloying, as of now it has potential, and the “small beer” was surprising in that there were notes of wood, and smoke, and leather, non of which were in the recipe, interesting.

I also sampled one of the IPA’s that were brewed with the dry yeast today to check on carbonation and I was pleasantly surprised to see it has reached the level of “creamy”. There is definitive carbonation, just not up to the level I was hoping for. Hopefully though this is a sign that it will continue to climb to the desired level.

I also drank the growler of ABA that was bottled in the growler instead of regular 12oz bottles. My main concern was carbonation, but it seemed to have carbonated just fine, maybe just a smidge less then the bottles. But there was a small problem. When bottled I assume some residual beer was left in between the threads, so when I uncapped the growler where the threads had been screwed to the bottle there was some mold. It appears as if no beer actually touched the mold, so I removed the cap, wiped down the neck of the bottle, and enjoyed the growler. No off taste or aroma as I could pick up. If I am dead tomorrow you know why, just kidding.