American Craft Beer Week
American Craft Beer Week was started in 2006 as a week of support and to promote knowledge of craft beer and craft breweries throughout the country. Being held at the beginning of the summer, ACBW kick starts the wonderfully busy summer of beer events. In 2012, ACBW begins May 14th and runs through May 20th.
What is Craft Beer Week? Well, it’s whatever you decide to make out of it. American Craft Beer week (#ACBW) is a time to celebrate the craft brewers and breweries throughout our country. From the smallest nano-breweries to the pioneers of craft brewing to the home brewers, each individual that creates and enjoys these unique beverages supports the movement of craft brewing that has allowed this amazingly diverse (and delicious) brewing culture to take hold in America. To me, ACBW is a time to try a new brew, check out some of the numerous educational or social events and pay tribute to all those who dedicate their time to providing us with amazing beer.
Hops Update – 5/6/2012
With the semester coming to an end I haven’t had a whole lot of time to post updates of the hops. Things have changed dramatically in the past few weeks with good growth seen on every plant. I found a T8 light ballast at a yard sale last week and have added that to my patio garden to supplement my lack of light. My patio is east facing and gets good light from about 6 to 10 and then my plants are in shadows. I need to switch up the bulbs in the ballast since I have no idea what the Kelvin rating is and I want it near 6500K for the grow portion. From what I’ve seen 2700K seems the most popular for home lighting and I’m assuming that is what I have. That spectrum of light is good for flowering so I’ll switch back to that when the time comes.
Hops
The hops are coming along well, all over 6 inches and a few over a foot tall now. That Nugget you see above decided to shoot up all of a sudden and surpassed everything else. For weeks it sat as a little nub just barely poking out of the soil and I thought it was dead. Two weeks ago I did a REALLY good watering and it shot up and shows no signs of stopping.
Lesson 1 – Water
I had my first death a couple days ago and I believe my problem was improper watering. The soil I have most of these girls in is not a well draining soil and thus the water doesn’t absorb and get to the roots efficiently. I put a gallon of water on one plant and 10 min later dug 1/2 inch in it was completely dry. What I’ve found I need to do is conduct a thorough watering, giving the plants half the water and let it absorb, then come back about 45 min later or so and soak again. A lot of places recommend watering only when really needed and then realllly watering to ensure all parts of the root system are hit. Since I’ve started watering more effectively the plants seem to be really responding. The newer plants (Chinook and Willamette) with the sand added into the soil are doing tremendously better because the improved drainage allows the water to seep through better and provide a good oxygenated environment for them.
Hydroponics
The experiment with hydroponics has been a bit trying. The pepper I posted a few weeks ago has lost most of it’s leaves and I believe that was due to nutrient burn. When I purchased the nutrients I used the recommended strength on the back not realizing that was the strength for soil plants which was roughly 3.5 times the amount recommended for hydro. Woops!
After talking to the guy at my local hydro-store I decided to switch from organic nutrients to chemical (CNS-17 Grow) and I now have a half strength solution to help this little guy recover from the torture I put it through. I’m not particularly attached to him, especially as ugly as he is, but I don’t want to put a hop plant in there until I feel comfortable I can keep it alive.
Hops Update- 4/22/2012
Alright, so I added a couple extra hops varieties to the collection (as if I didn't already have too much going on out on the porch). I now have Willamette and Chinook. The Chinook rhizome I received from Bald Brewer in Longmont was huge with massive nodes ready and begging for earth. I cut that one into two and planted it in a new mixture of soil.
Soil
My original mixture was 2 parts organic miracle grow to one part cow manure compost. I had some left over and mixed it 2-1 with sand to increase the drainage. I'm note sure if it was the rhizomes or the soil or both but the Chinook took off and has surpassed the Nugget which was planted weeks before.
Sun
I think a lack of sun is starting to take it's toll on my little girls they popped out quick and rose to about 3 inches and have failed to grow much more. I may be looking into buying a fluorescent system with bulbs in the 6500k spectrum for optimum growth.
Home Brewing Apps
Here is a list of some useful Android apps and PC programs dedicated to helping the home brewer. Apps range from simple calculators to recipe storage and inventory management.. I have sorted the apps by platform first and price second. I haven’t been able to try all of them so if you have some personal experiences with any of them or use one that is not on this list please let us know! Right now we only have PC and Android apps (since that is what I have) but I’ll look into the iPhone/iPad apps and update the post.
Desktop
Free
- QBrew - QBrew is an open-source recipe formulator along the lines of BeerSmith and Promash. It has less functionality but has most of what you would want and has the ability to export to BeerXML, PDF, .txt or .html.
- Brewer’s Friend – Alright, this isn’t an app to download but it is a great resource with a lot of calculators and ability to create recipes on this site.
- Brew Target – Another open-source program built for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Supports BeerXML.
Paid
- BeerSmith– This one is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. This is an all in one program that has anything you can possibly want from a home brewing program. There are calculators and recipe formulation. Also, you can keep your inventory with price and cost and create shopping lists within the program. It has an internal database of hops, grain and yeast with all of their stats (IBU, SRM, etc). You can download it for a free 21 day trial to see how you like it.
- Price – $27.95
- ProMash– Here is another program that is easy to use and has loads of functionality. It doesn’t look as “new age” as BeerSmith2 but it is still really nice. It is quick to put in recipes, but sometimes it is hard to navigate. You can download a trial version of this as well which is the full version but only allows you to save 3 recipes and 9 brew sessions.
- Price – $24.95
- BeerAlchemy – Available for Mac. Suggested by bifftradwell on reddit who noted it has “…a much better interface than BeerSmith, and instructions are better-formatted as well.” Available as a demo version for full unrestricted 30 day use.
- Price – $29.95
Android
Free
Note -There are a lot of calculator apps so I won’t list them all but I’ll try to list a few of the better rated ones.
- Brewzor Calc – Has a ton of different calculations. I’m not sure about the color estimate but it’s been noted that it’s nearly impossible to denote an SRM as an RGB.
- Brewzor Pro – This is the beta, so it might not be free forever. While it is pick it up in the Market and save all your recipes to your phone, generate a shopping list and keep notes all at your finger tips.
- HBC Homebrew Tools – Another recipe saving tool and has a built in hops timer.
- BrewR – Also saves recipes. A little lower tech than Brewzor and HBC but still does the job.
Paid
- Mr. Malty– I use Mr. Malty all the time but I’m not sure why anyone would buy an app for it when you can get the same service online for free. If you do though you’ll be getting a good service I’m sure.
- Price – $4.95
- Mash ~ For All-Grain Brewing- Strike calculator for all-grain brewing.
- Price- $0.99
- Brewdroid- Brew droid is a beer recipe formulation program and home brew support app.
- Price – $2.00
RE: Learn to Brew: Your First Home Brewery
For those of you who have read our Learn to Brew posts, you know that there are a lot of different ways to get started. Well, lucky for you I saw a great deal on a hombrewing kit from Midwest Supplies: Homebrewing and Winemaking.
How to: First Extract Brew
If you have been following with us from Your First Home Brewery, you now have everything you need to brew your first batch of extract beer. While it is true that you can’t get quite the range of recipes and fine touch with your brews using extract as apposed to all-grain, the quality of extract these days allows homebrewers to make some amazing beer with the time saving ease of malt extract.
Malt extract is the reduced and refined sugars extracted from barley grain and provided in either a dry (DME – Dry Malt Extract) or liquid (LME –Liquid Malt Extract) form. Many varieties exist ranging from light, amber or dark to Belgian and Bavarian styles. You may pay more for extract than equivalent grain but you save hours of preparing and processing the grains to get the sugars out.
Multiple Beers, One Mash: Parti-gyle Brewing
I've been wanting find as many ways of reusing my spent grain as possible and have been making cookies, bread and even dog treats but I still wanted to get more out my grain. One thing I noticed with the grain is that even after a good sparging there was still some remaining good sugars in mash so I did some research and found parti-gyle brewing. Parti-gyle brewing is the process by which multiple beers are created from one base amount of grains. Often people will make a barleywine then a brown or something similar, going high to average gravity. I decided to give it a try but without following any sort of real formula, just trying to see what kind of beer I could get from a second running. This technique promised a new way to reuse grains and even get more beer out of it! Here's what I did and how it went:
Playing with yeast – Amber ale (extract)
Over the weekend I took part in my friend James’ extract amber ale brew. This was a pretty standard extract brew with a few exceptions: brewing a larger than normal batch (about 7 gallons when it’s all said and done) and splitting it into two different carboys for fermentation. The fun part comes during the yeast pitching and fermentation. James decided use two identical (maybe not truly identical, but for our purposes close enough) batches and ferment them with separate yeasts. The batches are currently bubbling away at a steady 68º and should be ready to bottle shortly!
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas! We here at brew-colorado.com would like to wish you and your's a very merry Christmas! For this special day we are giving you a special beer, Santa Claus beer! With a target ABV of 14%, this is a strong beer perfect for the holiday season. A note to all, this particular brew takes a LONG time to come to fruition (it will be ready next year at Christmas time) so make sure to prepare before preparing your sanitizer! This is an extract brew, so it's do-able for the new home brewers to the advanced! We hope you have a great time this holiday season, and please drink responsibly!
Style Information
Grains & Extracts
| Name | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| German dark crystal | 1 lb | |
| Belgian Cara Munich | 6 oz | |
| German Cara Vienne | 4 oc | |
| Extra light dry malt extract | 13.33 lb | |
| Cane sugar | 2 lb | |
Hops
| Name | Amount | Alpha Acid % | AAU | Time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northern Brewer (pellets, bittering) | 1.00 | 10.4% | 10.4 | 0 min | |
| Tettnager (pellets, flavor) | 1/2 oz | 0% | 0 | 45 min | |
| Hallertauer Mittelfruh (pellets, aroma) | 1/2 oz | 0% | 0 | 58 min | |
| 0% | 0 | ||||
| 0% | 0 | ||||
| 0% | 0 | ||||
| 0% | 0 | ||||
| 0% | 0 | ||||
| 0% | 0 | ||||
| 0% | 0 |
Adjuncts
| Name | Type | Use | Amount | Time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Irish moss | Other | Boil | 1 tsp | 45 min | |
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil | ||||
| Fining | Boil |
Yeasts
| Name | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| White Lab: Super High Gravity Ale (WPL099) | Ferments at 65 - 69 | |
| Champagne | Ferments at 65 | |
| Danstar Windsor Ale | ||
Mash Steps
| Name | Step Type | Step Time | Temperature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion | |||
| Infusion |
Fermentation
| Step Time | Temperature | Container |
Additions
|
Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 days | 65 - 69 |
|
|||
| 8 weeks | 65 - 69 |
|
|||
| Fermentation Completes | 65 |
|
Add Champagne yeast | ||
| Three days before bottling | 65 |
|
Add Danstar Windsor yeast (or additional WPL099) for bottling |
Beer Recipes Plugin by Brad Ledbetter
First BJCP Inspired Tasting
Today we attempted to do a BJCP inspired tasting to begin to experience what it would be like to judge beer, or at least look at it more objectively. Being new to this, and not thinking, I made some delicious pizza earlier in the day. The issue with this is that the garlic that I used not only ruined my taste buds, but happened to be an over powering smell that sticks around for a few hours and makes it very difficult to detect any sort of aromas. I had never done any serious tasting so I was not paying attention to the little details of the tasting environment.
Once we aired the house out (which was not a pleasant experience given the snow and freezing temperatures) we were ready to officially begin our first tasting. We were not attempting to become immediate judges, we were just trying to get a bearing and start working towards a goal of becoming proficient enough to improve our home brew. The structure was a blind test followed by a review of class requirements and then other (much more experienced) judges opinions.
