BrewLOG expansion

Let's all raise a glass in welcome to new contributing author Jesse. Unlike yours truly, Jesse is experienced at lager brewing and kegging. I hear his first post will be tracking a typical lager brew run on his system. Cheers!

A hit from the biggest kid on the block

The blog got a hit from A-B. They were looking for the conversion from barrels to hectoliters. Let's hope they know which barrels they're using! (An A-B rep told the History Channel they use 31 gallon barrels - see the update in the cask esoterica entry). As I said in the Miller Time entry, wouldn't you think the biggest brewery in the world would have a better source of this info than an amateur brewer's blog?

It's Miller Time!

The blog is moving up in the world. I got a hit on the nomograph entry from someone whose IP address maps to Miller Brewing Company. They even downloaded my Excel spreadsheet designed to calculate salt additions for proper mash chemistry. Now, wouldn't you think Miller would have better sources for this stuff than an amateur brewer and his homegrown Excel engine?

Fixed links and IE problems

The Beer Advocate and Grape and Granary links were kludged. This problem has now been fixed. Also Internet Explor(d)er was having trouble with hypens for some unaccountable reason. This has now also been-fixed.

Giving new meaning to "entire butt" porter

I Hit this page on a random blog jump. I'm all for brewing with your kids, but I think this is taking the concept a little to literally...

Cask sizes and volumetric esoterica

In the British lexicon, casks are distinguished by size, as either fractions or multiples of a barrel (bbl). I find the names of the various cask sizes are amusing:

Pin - 4.5 UK gallons (1/8 bbl)
Firkin – 9 UK gallons (1/4 bbl)
Kilderkin – 18 UK gallons (1/2 bbl)
Half-hogshead – 27 UK gallons (3/4 bbl)
Barrel – 36 UK gallons
Hogshead – 54 UK gallons (3/2 bbl)
Puncheon – 72 UK gallons (2 bbls)

Coincidentally, most homebrewers end up producing batches of pin (4.5 gallon) or firkin (9 gallon) size. One of these days it would be fun to brew on a system cranking out hogsheads (54 gallons - 1.5 barrels) of beer!

This whole discussion brings to light the rather convoluted relationships of barrels to gallons on the two sides of the Atlantic. It seems that 1 US barrel of beer is 31 gallons, while the UK barrel is 36 gallons. However, the conversion from barrel to gallon is further complicated by the fact that a UK gallon is 1.2 US gallons. In order to compare the two barrels properly, it is therefore necessary to convert them both to liters. A US barrel is 1.17 hectoliters (Hl), or 117 liters. A UK barrel on the other hand calculates out to 1.63 Hl. To further confuse matters, the definition of a US barrel as given above ONLY applies for beer! A US oil barrel is 42 gallons (approximately 35 UK gallons), while a US barrel of any liquid except beer and ale is 31.5 US gallons (119 L). This is also referred to as half a hogshead, however a British half-hogshead would more rightly be converted as 32.4 US gallons (27 UK gallons). In addition, a US dry barrel is 105 dry quarts (115.6 L). Go figure.

Small commercial microbreweries generally use a setup of at least 10 bbl. Assuming those are US barrels, that's enough for 3000 12 oz bottles of beer! I still haven’t been able to ascertain for certainty, however, whether brewery output is measured in US or UK barrels, or both depending on the source, so a 10 bbl UK brewery could crank out as much as 4000 12 oz bottles. At this point, you may be asking “who cares?” You would be right. Who cares? I’m going to have a beer.

UPDATE: A-B apparently measures their barrels by the US standard, as they claim one barrel is 31 gallons (they crank out 16 million barrels a year - that's half a billion gallons!) Thanks to "Modern Marvels: Brewing" for the interview with one of A-B's reps. One other nugget from the A-B section of the show - they claim to actually use natural carbonation! I'm not sure how this works - do they filter, pasteurize, and package all under pressure? Seems like it would be easier just to force carbonate.

To keg or not to keg, that is the question

Whether tis nobler in the mouth to gather one’s beer in a container of outrageous size, or to take small containers against a sea of ale, and by separating preserve them?
OK, enough Hamlet… I could go on and on. This is the crux of one issue confronting the homebrewer, however. How to store that precious liquid? The short answer is "it depends"; the two common forms of libation protection have different and specific uses. Let us take a brief look at each one in turn:

The keg:

Traditionally, the keg was a large wooden drum, assembled at the brewery, winery, or distillery by skilled craftsman (coopers). Kegs now generally refer to stainless steel drums, and wooden drums for the storage of beer and wine are called casks. Commercial beer kegs are actually half-kegs (15.5 US gallons - also known as a 1/2 barrel), while homebrew kegs are generally converted 5 gallon soda syrup containers referred to as cornelius kegs (Are you confused yet?).

Keg Advantages:

• easier to fill than bottles

• great for dispensing a lot of beer quickly (parties)

• easier to clean

• allows for force (mechanical) carbonation

Keg Disadvantages:

• not very portable (heavy, requires a carbon dioxide tank and regulator)

• proper carbonation can be tricky to balance

• even trace contamination will ruin the whole batch

• to send beer to competitions, it must be bottled using a counterpressure filler

Bottles:

People have been brewing beer (or at least a fermented beverage derived from grains) for thousands of years. Since the advent of glassblowing, they’ve probably been filling bottles with it. The modern concept is pretty much the same as it has always been, with the exception of the cap. The cap is a piece of molded round metal with a plastic fitting that is crimped tightly onto the top of a full bottle of beer with a tool specifically designed for the task. Both caps and cappers are widely available, and any non-screwtop beer bottle can be recycled into the service of the homebrewer.

Bottle Advantages:

• portable

• cheap/disposable

• facilitate long term aging/storage of big beers

• yeast-driven carbonation and the resulting bottle sediment contribute (some would say are essential) to the flavor and stability of the beer. Only naturally carbonated ale is considered “Real Ale”.

Bottle Disadvantages:

• A pain to clean

• A pain to fill

Hopefully this list of pros and cons will help you decide which choice is right for you. If you host a lot of parties and your beer never seems to last very long, I would recommend kegs. If (like me) beer tends to persist longer in your fridge, you would like to store part of a batch for aging, and/or you enter a lot of competitions, bottles are probably the way to go. The annoyance of cleaning and filling bottles is offset for me by the sight of bottles from 20 different batches of homebrew sitting in my fridge at the same time!

Kegging Tips:

I don’t keg my beer, so I’ll have to refer you to outside sources on this one. Check the index of any of the many homebrew reference books available (Brew Ware, for example, has a whole chapter on kegging), or visit here, here, or here.

One note: ‘Corny’ kegs come in two types, ball lock and pin lock. The fittings from one do not work on the other, so when procuring keg equipment, make sure to adhere to a single standard!

Bottling Tips:

#1 – Use a bottle filler which the shutoff valve at the top, not the bottom. That way, the level of the beer when you stop filling is the level that you get when you pull the filler out (disregarding the space taken up by the filler tube itself, which isn’t much).

#2 – Put the bottling bucket up high (I set mine on the washing machine) and put the bottles on a stand about chair-height to fill them (I use a plastic roughneck tote – also useful as a tub to clean and store the bottles). This way, you can comfortably sit in a chair while filling. It beats the heck out of kneeling on the floor!

#3 – Use Iodophor, not boiling, to sanitize the caps. I know iodophor is mildly corrosive to metals, but I rinse the caps in hot water after a few minutes and they never seem to suffer any ill effects. Boiling, on the other hand, can damage the plastic seals, particularly the oxygen-absorbing ones.

#4 – Clean the bottles, especially “recycled” ones, very thoroughly. If the labels are still on, a soak in hot water will loosen them. Experience will teach you which breweries have labels that come off easily. After label removal or in between batches. my cleaning method is to rinse them well with a jetwasher, soak them in dilute bleach overnight and rinse them again. On bottling day I fill them with diluted Iodophor solution for a few minutes to sterilize them. Investing in a bottle tree is helpful here. It holds the bottles inverted so the residual iodophor drips out as they dry. Iodophor is "rinse free", so the bottles are ready to use as soon as they stop dripping.

#5 – Add the priming sugar to the bottling bucket first, then rack the beer onto it. I also use the cane end of the rack to (gently!) stir the green beer with the priming sugar. This ensures even and consistent priming.

#6 – Use bottles of varying sizes in each batch. Big bottles save time on bottling day and are great for parties, but sometimes 12 oz is all you want.

#7 – Store your beer in a cool, dark place. No matter how clean the fill is, heat and light are still the bane of beer. I carbonate my ales at 67°F for 2-4 weeks (big beers - over 1.070 OG - I let go longer), then store them in the fridge.

A final thought:

Some commercial microbreweries (and some homebrewers) are closing the circle and returning to beer packaged in wooden vessels - casks. Cask-conditioned ale is generally served at room temperature, with lower levels of carbonation. This is traditionally natural carbonation, with live yeast still in the cask. The beer is drawn off through a hand pump referred to as a beer engine (what a great term) and replaced by room air, not carbon dioxide. These differences, combined with the aging effects of the wood, lend cask-conditioned ale qualities that are often described as soft, smooth, mellow, or complex. To be fair, some less charitable descriptions (bland, watery, horsey, musty) might also apply, depending on what microbes sneak into the vessel along with the air and what draft style the drinker is used to. People seem to either love or hate cask-drawn beer. Casks are available online and at some homebrew stores for home use, however they are by no means cheap.

Essential books on Homebrewing

These are the books I find myself returning to again and again for information and techniques. They are listed roughly in order of complexity.

Homebrewing for Dummies (Marty Nachel) This book is more useful than it sounds. Written in the straightforward style which is a hallmark of the 'Dummies' series, it takes a nested approach to brewing; first it describes what absolutely needs to happen, then what should happen to make better beer, then the various advanced techniques and ingredients that might happen to make the best possible beer.

Homebrewing, Vol. 1 (Al Korzonas) focuses on extract brewing techniques but is useful to all levels of brewer. His writing is knowledgeable and thorough.

How to Brew (John Palmer) is free online or can be purchased in hard copy. This book is comprehensive and very well written. Palmer does a good job of explaining the intellectual and scientific framework behind brewing. Includes cool nomographs for mash pH and water chemistry, original gravity, and hop bitterness calculations.

Brewmaster’s Bible (Stephen Snyder) I return to this book often for its handy tables and detailed descriptions of styles and ingredients,

Designing Great Beers (Ray Daniels) This book was a great leap forward for my recipe creation process. Daniels takes a style-by-style look at the parameters and ingredients of commercial and award-winning homebrewed beers, and blends this analysis with erudite descriptions of each beer style, Anyone who likes to make their own recipes from scratch should own this book.

The Classic Beer Style Series (Brewers Publications), takes Daniels' concept a step further, and has a separate book for each style of beer, including a detailed analysis of the style history and commercial examples. Each short book has a different author; an expert in that particular style. For example, Pierre Rajotte's "Belgian Ale" (#6 in the series), is a nice quick look at the history of Belgian beers, for those of you who are so inclined.

Homebrew Water Chemistry and the Nomograph

Update: For those of you looking for brewing water profiles, download the water salt calculator Excel table. Not only does this have a list of famous water profiles, but it will semi-automatically calculate water salt additions to create these profiles. Also, this calculator has been updated so the profiles page comes up first, not the calculation engine.

Every now and then something comes along that really blows the top of your head right off. For me, one of those things is the nomograph. In an age where there is an online calculator for every conceivable thing (including, I'm sure, conception), it is satisfying to find that pen and paper can still produce a more efficient and elegant method of deriving data. A nomograph is a set of calibrated rulers. By plotting values on several of these rulers and linking the points with straight lines, the commensurate values of the remaining rulers are derived. I came across this while researching the chemistry of mash water to fine-tune my homebrewing process.

To use the homebrewer’s nomograph, magnesium and calcium ion concentration are plotted to derive effective hardness, and this value is combined with alkalinity to determine mash pH. John Palmer, author of a very useful homebrewer's manual and the creator of this nomograph, has thoughtfully included a color-coded scale above the pH ruler to emphasize the proper mash pH for the various hues of beer. This is not only very cool but very useful to the grain-based homebrewer, as it allows an easy assessment of the effects of water chemistry on mash pH, and therefore, on the suitability of a particular water for brewing different types of beer. I have taken this tool and overlaid on it the calculations for the worlds major brewing waters. (Follow this link for a powerpoint version of these graphs) It is fascinating that the beers these cities are famous for generally follow the trend indicated by the mash pH resulting from the water. For example, Pilsn and Burton-on-Trent have turned out the worlds best pale lagers and ales, while Dublin is famous for its coal-black stout. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It's also interesting that there is more than one way to get to the optimal pH for a light-colored beer. The water in Plzen (Pilsn) has little ionic content, and is thus ideal for the delicate Pilsner style (the true pilsner, not the cheap imitation that American macrobrews turn out). On the other end of the scale, Burton-on-Trent's massive calcium load aims it squarely toward the low pH as well. (Burton's concomitantly high sulfate load also plays an important role in the hoppy character of the region's classic pale ale - it both accentuates and improves the bitterness of the hop.) To illustrate how this is used in homebrewing, I have plotted my standard water profiles for light, medium, and dark-colored beers.

To determine how to adjust our well water to generate these three profiles, I created an Excel-based water salts calculator. This calculator is set up to be useful to any homebrewer - once you have entered your base water profile (this should be available from your water supplier, or from a water analysis of well water) and have tuned the conversion table to generate the appropriate profiles from this base water, simply entering the volume of water that you need will provide you with the amounts of gpysum, epsom salts, chalk, and/or salt needed to achieve each standard profile (For those who want to go "under the hood", the engine that drives the ppm/tsp conversion is in the second tab of the Excel file). Though I do not use them, I have also included conversion calculators for utilizing baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and calcium chloride, as a service to those homebrewers who do. Yes, I know that ProMash, BeerTools, and other brewing software have calculators that can do these things as well, but I prefer to get in and mess around with the calculations directly. This spreadsheet allows you to easily do that.

For those of you who are using tap or well water that is naturally high in the important brewing ions, you can still approximate at least the correct mash pH, by using the nomograph to adjust the important parameters. Of course the ions listed in the calculator, along with the various counter-ions, have additional important roles in hop utilization and flavor perception and history has shown that deviating from these profiles can cause suboptimal results. For the best possible beer, I would suggest using distilled or spring water for at least some of your brewing liquor, to lower the base ion content (Alternatively, find a friend or relative with a favorable water profile and fill a couple of 5-gallon jugs there for your brew day needs!).

I originally set out to create a calculator that would do the first part for you - calculating the desired tuning conversion table automatically, but that turns out to be very, very complicated, as there are multiple ways to achieve each water profile. Though not quick, providing both the base profile and the conversion table allows for the most flexibility and usefulness in the calculator. Once it is set up, brew day adjustments are a breeze, and I firmly believe that proper mash chemistry is one of the factors that has allowed us to consistently produce award-winning homebrew.