Hop Farming in SW Ohio?

Cool Kickstarter for the SW Ohio brewing community. Osborn Brewing is a homebrew supply store in Monroe. Brent Osborn is teaming up with a local farmer to produce locally grown hops. They are hoping to have funding in place now and have hops available as soon as 2014.

Lots of great folks involved in this project. Really cool options at the upper end of the donation scale, such as working with Jeff Fortney (who brewed for local breweries Rivertown and the now-defunct Wooden Shoe), Jeffrey McElfresh of the newly opened Yellow Springs Brewery, or Gordon Strong, who holds just about every award possible for homebrew judging and literally wrote the style guidelines.

BrewTensils Brewing 101

Live in the Miami Valley and want to know how to brew or improve your brewing chops? Check out the brewing school at BrewTensils. There are four sessions, with the first one next week. From their website:

Introduction to Brewing

Brewing 101 – January 12th – 7pm to 9pm

Just the basics, this class covers what each piece of equipment in your brew kit is used for, as well as walking you through your first batch of beer.

Pre-req: A desire to brew great beer starting with your first batch!

Cost: Free!

In depth look at Ingredients

Brewing 102 – January 19th – 7pm to 9pm

Ever wonder what alpha acids are? Lovibond rating have you confused? Want to know the difference between 2-row and 6-row? This class is designed to demystify the ingredients used in the brewing process. With better understand of the ingredients used, it is a small step to take your beers to the next level.

Pre-req: It is usually a good idea to have your first batch under your belt before this class.

Cost: $5 paid at the start of the class.

How to Keg

Brewing 110 – January 26th – 7pm to 9pm

This class covers the trials and tribulations of setting up your own kegerator at home. You will also learn now to keg your own beer and how to maintain your whole system. This class is useful for anyone who wants to setup a kegerator at home, brewer or not.

Pre-req: The desire to have beer on tap at home.

Cost: $5 paid at the start of the class.

Introduction to All Grain Brewing

Brewing 201 – February 2nd – 7pm to 9pm

All grain brewing seems like a crazy amount of work and calculations. We help you realize that it’s a pretty simple and straight forward process to get into. This class walks you through the terms used in all grain brewing, as well as the equipment, and finally the process.

Pre-req: It is usually a great idea to have a few extract batches under your belt before you attempt all grain brewing.

Cost: $5 paid at the start of the class.

Good Beer Writer, Lousy Self-Promoter

I've been really busy writing lots of good beer-related stuff, but I've missed posting a few of my Dayton City Paper articles. A shame, since one of them was the cover article a few weeks back--probably the article I'm the most pleased with to date. Time to rectify that. Here are three articles that you may have missed:

Craft Brew Around Town
original publication date: April 12, 2011
A guide to some of the best places in Dayton (and surrounding 'burbs) to pair craft beer with sports, music, food, and cinema.



Do-It-Yourself Craft Beer
original publication date: April 26, 2011
An intro to homebrewing for the non-brewer, with an overview of the basics. Don't miss the DCP Summer Wheat Ale recipe, a straightforward ale that's as easy to drink as it is to make.


Buckeye Vodka
original publication date: May 10, 2011
Buckeye Vodka brings microdistilling to the Miami Valley, with their high end artisanal vodka with a mid-range price point. It's become my house vodka.

Prepping for brew day

Stopped by BrewTensils this morning to prep for my DCP homebrew feature and to pick up ingredients for tomorrow's brew session. Good talk with Darren Link, BrewTensil's manager, about the community aspect of brewing, and with Mike Schwartz, Belmont/BrewTensils owner about upcoming events. Also met several all-grain brewers at the Belmont brewout. Good group.

Trying a few new things tomorrow. Going for an all-grain RyePA. We'll see how gummy malted rye really is. I picked up some rice hulls--hopefully that will help. This will only be my second IPA, despite over a decade of brewing (the first was a Victory HopDevil clone and my first partial grain).

At Jim Witmer's advice, I also picked up 5.2 mash stabilizer--buffering salts so that I don't have to muck with pH levels. Heard that I'll see better efficiency rates. That's great, but I'm happy just to not have to worry about the pH level.

Finally, trying dry yeast for the first time since my first brew. Built up a starter using Goya Malta - the hop and malt based soda. We'll see how it goes. More notes tomorrow.

Brewing: Son of Lights Out Stout

When I brewed my first batch of homebrew nearly a decade ago, I invited a bunch of friends over and started the batch on our electric stove. We were midway through the event, with a house full of folks, when the kettle boiled over and shorted out the stove, kicking the breaker and darkening the entire apartment. We got the lights back on, but the burner never really worked correctly again. That first brew, an Irish Stout served on St. Paddy's Day, was forever known as Lights Out Stout.

It was with that brewing misadventure in mind that we set out on a more recent journey. I've turned a lot of folks onto the joys of homebrewing, most notably my brother and my cousin. Both brew exclusively using extract, and when I mentioned that I had done some all-grain brewing, they were interested in a demo. For the non-beer-geeks (although I can't imagine any have gotten this far into this blog), the difference between extract and all-grain brewing is like making orange juice from concentrate vs. fresh squeezed. All-grain isn't all that much more complicated, but it is a serious time commitment, which is why I don't do it all that often.

This batch (recipe below) went off a lot better than its name sake, at least in the original brewing. The process took forever because my lauter tun runs slowly, but after 8 hours and more than a few high-test samples along the way, we pitched the yeast slurry.

That's when the problems started.

See, the more yeast you use, the better your beer is likely to turn out. In addition to fermenting the beer, yeast overwhelms the bad stuff that can grow in beer, making it less likely to spoil. The more yeast, the better. So, I had been creating a yeast starter, slowly growing up the number of yeast cells for almost a week, and rather than a small vial of yeast to start with, I had more than 1/2 of a gallon.

But, I forgot about one thing. Volume control.

The fermentation vessel I used holds nearly 7 gallons. The beer filled about 6. The yeast filled another 1/2 gallon. Usually, there's enough head space in the carboy that the yeast, which gives off a thick, sludgy head called krautsen, has enough room to expand. So, imagine my surprise when I opened my closet door and the krautsen had shot its way through the airlock and all over the closet floor. And imagine my frustration when I realized that the previous owners of the house had drilled a hole to pass the cable through the floor, meaning that in addition to everything that had covered the closet floor, there was another mess waiting for me in the basement.

A bucket of oxyclean, a few disapproving stares from my wife, and a new overflow airlock installed and all was back to normal. The beer has been fermenting for about a week and will go into the keg next weekend, with enough time to be ready for this year's St. Paddy's Day celebration. Hopefully this batch will be worth the trouble, but don't look for Grandson of Lights Out Stout any time soon.

Son of Lights Out Stout (All-Grain)
8.59 lbs 2 row pale malt
1 lb flaked barley
1 lb roasted barley
2 oz Perle hops (6.5% AA) at 60 min
1 oz Perle hops (6.5% AA) at 60 min
White Labs WLP004 Irish Ale Yeast

Mash for 90 min at 153
90 min boil

Technorati Tags: beer, craft beer, brewing, homebrew

Brewing: Belgian Dubbel

Trying my hand at my second Belgian style. I've brewed several Belgian Wits, which my wife tends to like a lot, but haven't explored beyond that style, until now. My brother had given me a gift cert for Homebrew.com a while back, so I redeemed it for their Belgian Dubbel extract kit. I haven't brewed from a kit in a really long time, and couldn't resist tinkering with the recipe somewhat. However, I restrained myself to just adding a bit more DME. Here's the recipe

Year of the Belgians: Dubbel

.25 lbs.	Belgian Special B
.25 lbs.	Weyermann Carapils®/Carafoam®
6.75 lbs.	Dry Extra Light Extract
.5 lbs.	Candi Sugar Clear
.25 lbs.	Candi Sugar Dark
1.5 oz.	East Kent Goldings (Whole, 4 %AA) boiled 47 min.
1 oz.	Hallertau (Whole, 3 %AA) boiled 12 min.
1 oz.	Styrian Goldings (Whole, 2 %AA) boiled 2 min.
1 ea.	Whirlfloc Tablets (Irish moss)
Yeast :	White Labs WLP570 Belgian Golden Ale

Originally, I had planned to harvest yeast from a bottle of Duvel I received for Christmas, staying up late one night last week to do so. However, after about 48 hours, it was clear the harvesting wasn't going to happen--with no activity in the Erlenmeyer flask. So, I trucked it to my homebrew store, bought a vial of White Labs WLP570, and created a small starter about 24 hours before I brewed. Not enough to get a huge influx of more yeast cells, but enough to wake them up and give them a head start.

Brewing went well, helped along by Nathan and Jonathan. It was bitterly cold, and we brewed in my garage. The propane burner produced enough heat to make it bearable, but the hose partially froze when we tried to use the wort chiller, and once we turned off the propane, our toes started to suffer from the cold. The only real glitch was that the stupid cork was evidently just a shade too small for the opening, and so now I have a cork floating in the carboy with the beer and had to steal another cork from another carboy I had sitting around. Hopefully it won't affect the beer and I can figure a way to get it out of the carboy, since that bottle is one of my favorites.

Glad I kick-started the yeast. Four hours later, I had about 3-4 inches of foam, and by this morning, the yeast had clearly peaked. Ferm temp will be a bit of a challenge. Usually, in the winter, I have a struggle to keep beers warm enough, but with this super active yeast, I have already had the opposite problem, having to bring the temp down about 5 degrees.

Am on the fence about bottling or kegging this beer, but figure I have a couple of weeks to decide. It will sit in the carboy, in the closet, for at least 2 weeks, before I have a chance to move it to secondary.

Technorati Tags:Belgian dubbel, Year of the Belgians, beer, craft beer, brewing, homebrew