Investment?

So I am trying to decide if it is an investment or just another waste of money in this flight of fancy.

I picked up a Brewtec Micro Brew kit. I am sure there was a plan when I went out. I had vague ideas that I needed a crown capper as I have been collecting empties for bottling 'Joan Jettison'. I also thought that maybe I needed something to transfer the fermented JJ beer into before bottling so I could avoid the gunk at the bottom that insists on coming out of of the tap. Somehow this logic turned into a whole new beer kit...

It also means I have a 'Premium Draft' kit to turn into something drinkable...

Catrina Neue Costs

To satisfy my slightly OCD tendency's I have been recording all the money I am spending on my home brewing enterprise.

Here is a breakdown for the "Catrina Neue 1.0" brew I did:

*The amortised cost will decrease the more brews I make (you can see the number of brews in brackets)

The time is a bit of an estimate as I didn't record it accurately while brewing or making the labels. I will try to remember for future brews.

At the time if writing the per litre price sits at $15.93 (your view might be different as the above spreadsheet is dynamic) . Considering I want to say I paid $16.50 per litre (but I can't exactly remember) at the Garage Project cellar door for La Calavera Catrina in a rigger (the beer Catrina Neue is based on) when you include labour, trying to replicate it at home is not exactly cost effective.

Especially if it turns out to be undrinkable...

A beer only it's mother would love?

So I know I was supposed to wait - hell it has been less than a week since I bottled it - but when I was labelling my 'Catrina Neue' (the Garage Project knock off) some of the bottles that had been conditioning in a warmer location were rock hard and I started to get nervous about the two 330ml glass bottles and the potential for catastrophic failure of the containment grid...

So I put them in the fridge...

Opened one...

And it is drinkable...

Good carbonation (which is a worry after a week, what the hell is going to happen over time). Very clear. Very Red. Way too sweet. I mean way way way too sweet. It is actually a bit like a shandy (if shandy's had a chilli bite to them - which incidentally is the only thing I did get right). Too much watermelon syrup. Too much rose syrup. Too many carbonation drops. There are just so many things wrong with it - but of course I love it. And it is a v1.0 (actually it probably should be a v0.1)

Lucky I just picked up some Garage Project Venusian Pale Ale to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Lets hope it improves with age. All babies are ugly little bastards at birth.

Patience is a virtue?

Oh man, nobody warned me that waiting to sample would be so hard!

Every day I am squeezing the plastic bottles of 'Caterina Neue 1.0' trying to judge how much carbonation they have. They are getting harder so something is happening inside the bottles. It has only been 5 days since bottling, and already I am itching to throw one of the small glass bottles into the fridge to crack into. I know I have to wait, but it is killing me!

In other news I dropped my temperature sensor into the water surrounding the fermenter when changing ice packs. Considering it is just a raw circuit board and while in the water it decided to connect to the wifi to transmit a temperature I was thinking I might have stuffed it - however it has sat for a few hours drying out and after reconnecting the battery it seems to be working OK. I might need to come up with a better attachment method that the bungy cord.

I also took a sample of the 'Joan Jettison' stout. SG is down to 1020 (from 1074) making it currently about 7%, but even with all that residual sugar it still tastes rather bitter (living up to the Jettison part of the name?) It is also pretty chunky (I guess with the cherry puree and the tap at the bottom of the bucket I am picking up trub). I am thinking that I will leave it on the yeast cake for a few more weeks to hopefully clean up the flavour and try again. If it is still nasty then I might have a go at racking to a secondary fermentor and adding some more cherry.

All this waiting...

Beer Names and Labels

Generic brown bottles don’t really appeal. Brown plastic bottles appeal even less. You don’t see commercial beers without a label, so why should home brew be any different?

When you carefully hand make a beer, what could be a better tribute than to couple it with a hand made label. But not just any label. In the case of my clone of Garage Project La Calevera Cateria (which has a stunning label design from Autumn McGrail) I decided to stick with the La Calevara Catrina theme and do a handmade linocut version of a detail from PaleHorse’s Caterina. Caterina Neue 1.0 (though I guess it should have maybe been Caterina Nuevo 1.0)

This was printed on my little bottle jack press on what I think is 128gsm Glossy stock (we had it sitting round at work unlabeled, hence not much good for doing customer samples on) using some old offset PMS430C ink (another TradeMe purchase) and then when dry will be sellotaped on to the bottles.

As the beer is still warm conditioning I am not sure how this combination of stock, ink and adhesive will hold up when refrigerated so it might end up being something different for the chocolate cherry stout (which I have decided to call “Joan Jettison” - an oblique reference to Garage Project’s Cherry Bomb and the fact that I might want to throw it away after trying it)

Chocolate Cherry Stout

I loved KJD Cherry Porter when I first tried it a couple of years ago. Being a seasonal beer you don’t see it all the time, but when I spotted it at the supermarket over Xmas I bought 8 bottles. Boy was I disappointed when I got home and had a bottle. The only way I could describe it was it tasted like it had been brewed on a budget. Not enough cherry, not enough chocolate, not enough sweetness, not enough flavor. It was OK, but nothing like how I remember it.

I also loved Garage Project Cherry Bomb when I had it at Soba Matariki beer festival a few years ago, but despite me mentioning it every time I visit Garage Project, it has never made it from the pilot plant to the full scale plant, so it is never available.

Being one batch of beer into home brewing, full of piss and vinegar I figured that I could do better that KJD and GP. The starting point was a can of Blackrock Miners Stout. Rather than using sugar like the recipe on the can says I changed to a can of dark malt extract - then I went crazy and added two cans of cherries in syrup (whizzed in a sanatised blender) and 250g of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup. Just for giggles I also chucked in 500gm of brown sugar and made the total volume up to 20L. The wort tasted pretty good - bitter and sweet and chocolatey (in fact maybe a little too chocolatey!)

I learned from my mistake last time and had frozen an icecream container of water which I added to the wort to get the temperature down to 18deg before pitching rehydrated S-04 yeast (it was rehydrated in water, but I realised I should have used wort)

Despite the fact that the guy at the home brew shop said I wouldn't need a blow off tube I fitted one anyway (he was right) before putting the fermenter in a plastic crate and attaching a temperature sensor. The plastic crate was to allow me to add some cold water to keep the temperature down (S-04’s ideal temperature is 15-20deg). Turns out that I did need to wrap the fermenter in teatowels and wet with fridge temperature water (plus added a couple of slicker pads) when it got over 20deg. Looking at the log of the temperature rising now, looks like I will have to do that again just to keep it down.

I am not sure why I am not getting much krazen in my fermentation barrel - it makes me worry, despite the fact that the last batch did exactly the same and it fermented OK. I will check the SG in a couple of days and see what's happening. I can always pitch some more yeast if it needs it.

I have not yet decided if I am going to transfer to a secondary and add more cherry’s. I am concerned that moving the beer from the yeast cake, then adding more simple sugars will mean when bottling the yeast might not have enough muster to carbonate the beer. Maybe I need to transfer some of the yeast cake to the secondary too (the primary goal for secondary is to add more cherry flavor not for clearing the beer)

We shall see...

Temperature Control

Now this is the reason that I resisted home brewing for so long. I had a feeling that like many other hobbies that I have started, it would consume my life for a short length of time and I would end up going a little crazy on gadgets. Case in point:

My first home brew sat at about 22deg as that was the ambient air temperature - I only guessed at this because this was what showed on the stick on thermometer on the side of the fermenter. All my homebrewing buddies said that this was too warm and I should find somewhere cooler in the house. I did some checking and while I found somewhere that was about 20deg it was probably still a little on the warm side.

A modified fridge or chest freezer would be ideal. Trade Me (NZ’s eBay) did show some affordable second hand fridges, but we really don’t have that much spare space, plus we do have two fridges already. The second fridge (ours, rather than the landlords) is fairly empty (it was what I used for crash cooling my first beer) so that has the potential for being turned into a fermenter.

Because I know that I do tend to go hard out with new hobbies I thought I would resist making modifications to a perfectly good fridge until I was 100% sure that this hobby is not just temporary, so I needed something in the meantime - so I spent a bunch of money and built an internet connected logging thermometer using an Electric Imp based on the TempBug Indestructible.

My reason for going with this (and ordering a couple of extra parts kits) was that it could evolve in the future to be able to actually turn on and off a fridge (for cooling) and a heat pad (for warming)

What I ended up doing was putting my fermenter into a larger plastic box and filling about 5cm from the bottom with water and adding ice packs to keep the temperature under 20deg. Seems to be working pretty well. I can see the temperature being logged every 5min and see when I need to change the ice packs - I tend to change twice a day, before going to work and before going to bed. Keeps it between 18 and 20deg - hopefully ideal for my stout.

Bottling Day!

Excitement, it’s bottling day for the first brew. It has been a bit over two weeks (which is what all the forums say, not what the can says), the Final Gravity has been stable for a couple of days and the fermentation bucket has been in the fridge for three days crash cooling.

Bottling is actually not much fun - it basically consists of a lot of cleaning. I am using new PET bottles for my first brew, so they should be pretty clean, however they do need sanatising with StarSan before I prime them and fill with beer. It is the sanatising process that is not a huge amount of fun, especially with 30 bottles.

Another suck thing about bottling is how slippery the wet bottles are with the StarSan - they slip out of your hand quite easily when you are not paying enough attention when filling. Did I say how little I enjoyed cleaning the bottles - try adding to this having to wash beer from the dropped bottle off the kitchen floor!

Eventually I did finish bottling my “Caterina Neue 1.0” (my Garage Project knockoff), it was finished with 20ml of Monin Watermelon Syrup (from Moore Wilson) and 10ml of Lebanon Gardens Rose Syrup (Mediterranean Food Warehouse) along with 2 carbonation drops. I realised at the end of bottling that I was meant to only use a single carbonation drop due to the sugar in the syrup, so potentially the bottle will be sweet and over carbonated (or they might turn into bottle bombs - especially the two glass swing top bottles with the dregs from the bottom of the fermenter). I have no problem with a sweet beer, however exploding beer sounds like more clean up... I will have to keep an eye on them over the next few weeks.

Ended up with 30 x 750ml bottles and 2 x 375ml bottles. Not too bad (assuming it is drinkable)

First Brew

While the kit sat under the Xmas tree I spent hours and hours pouring over webpages and forum posts about everything that can go wrong with your first beer (in fact when I was in the home brew shop the guy behind the counter said that I would probably screw up the first brew). I was determined that I would not make that mistake. Of course by then I had decided that my beer was not going to be a Munich Lager, so that raised the stakes in the screw up factor.

So Sanitisation is the number one problem. This was (hopefully) eliminated by another visit to the home brew shop to get a bottle of StarSan no-rinse sanatiser. I figured that if I cleaned all the kit equipment with the provided cleaners, then cleaned again with the StarSan I would mitigate against the potential for the beer to get an infection.

In addition to the StarSan I picked up a garden spray bottle, a roll of Chux style cloths and an box of rubber gloves from Mitre10. The idea was that the spray bottle could be used to spray StarSan into the tap after taking samples for hydrometer readings, the cloth for cleaning and the gloves to protect my delicate hands.

Second problem was the yeast that is supplied with the kit - the prevailing wisdom is to buy a new one. You get 5g of yeast with the kit, but when you buy yeast it come in 11.5g packets (I am using dry yeast here - not ready for liquid yeast, making starters etc) so that is at least double the amount of yeast! Another trip to the home brew shop and I had a packet of Safale US-05 yeast (and a hop sock, more on that later)

I didn't go with the advice of not using the beer enhancer (a mix of malt, hops and dextrose) and using another can of liquid malt extract-I was going to be making a lager, which is also against the recommendations of making a darker beer to hide any off flavors but I had other plans to hide the off flavors…

So brew day rolls around (after a particularly boozy Xmas day, it was not until the day after boxing day that I got around to brewing) and I opened the box and started going through all the equipment and fitting it together. The only trouble I encountered was that the sediment reducer what was supposed to fit into the back of the tap after it had been fitted into the keg didn’t. Will have to check at the Brew House as it looks like I would have to cut some of the plastic keg to have it fit - so I just left that part out.

Spent a long time carefully washing the keg and all the bits that would come in contact with the wort - first with the Copper Tun detergent, then with the Copper Tun no-rinse sanitiser and finally with the StarSan. I do wonder if that might have been overkill…

My cunning plan was to try and turn my Munich Lager into a facsimile of Garage Projects awesome La Calavera Catrina - a beer brewed with chilli, watermelon and rosewater. A beer so good that soon after trying it I went up the road (Garage Project brewery is only about a block from my house) and purchased a case of 750ml bottles for cellaring and have been buying in rigers from the cellar door ever since - I figured that eventually they would run out or take it off tap (a fear realised when I went to get some for New Years) so I better have a backup plan more than just the 12 bottles (actually 7 by now).

I figured I could add chilli to the wort, then rosewater and watermelon at bottling stage. The chilli would come from the 500gm bag of hot chilli flakes in my cupboard and the rose and watermelon flavor from syrups (which I hoped would also help with the secondary carbonation)

From totally arbitrary numbers I put 23g of chilli flakes into a hop sock and boiled for 10min in 1 litre of water. My thought were that I usually add about half a teaspoon of chilli when I am cooking, which must be about a gram, so 23g would be a gram a litre. Oh boy was I wrong.

I was smart enough to test it before I used it though - I extracted 1ml and mixed with 23ml water. I would have hated to have tried the undiluted chilli extract, it was much hotter than I had expected. In the end I only used 500mls of the chilli extract (making it about 1:46 dilution).

Basically the beer was made to the recipe on the can, with the addition of 500ml of the chilli extract. Only problem was that with the extra hot water, and the temperature of the water coming out of the tap (filtered by a carbon water jug) I couldn’t get the temperature of the wort down to 20deg. I had also rehydrated my yeast in water so that was busy bubbling away waiting to be pitched. I knew I was supposed to pitch after 15min of rehydration, but I also knew my wort was too hot. Panic.

I used some ice (which should have been boiled filtered water but wasn’t) and some cold water from the fridge (which was filtered) and got the wort to 26deg before pitching the yeast. It was still a bit hot, so I hope I didn’t do too much damage.
 

Screwed on the lid, inserted the hydrometer and put into the cupboard in the kitchen.

In all the excitement I forgot to take an initial hydrometer reading, so I won’t be able to calculate the alcohol percentage.

I guess I was expecting more. Yeast did eventually grow to form a bubbling cover over the brown liquid, but no huge krazen like I had been expecting.

After a few days I did remember about the specific gravity measurement and have taken a couple since then and it is dropping so something is happening.

It has been almost a week since the brew was put down and the tan coloured cap has gone off the beer. I have since hurt my shoulder in a squash accident so I can’t be tempted to do any bottling (which is a good thing because the recommendation is to leave for at least two weeks, then cool to fridge temperature for a couple of days before bottling)

I am already thinking about getting another full kit (as there is a cheap one with a crown capper, which I was going to get anyway) which would allow for a couple of brews on the go at once. I have also been looking on Trademe for a used fridge to turn into a temperature controlled fermentation container. Not to mention getting some electronics ordered so I can see the fermentation temperature via the internet.

I knew this brewing lark was going to be a bad idea…