Sanitizer and Brewery Cleaner Quick Reference Chart

I frequently find the need for a small batch of sanitizer or cleaner and every time I need one I have to calculate out the batch size. Here is a handy chart I created for a quick reference

Water	Water	Water	Starsan	Starsan	Alkaline Clnr	Alkaline Clnr Kettles	PBW	PBW for Kettles
Gallons	Liters	Qaurts	ml	oz	oz	oz	oz	oz
10.0	37.9	40.0	60.0	2.0	2.0	4.0	1.5	3.0
9.5	36.0	38.0	57.0	1.9	1.9	3.8	0.8	1.5
9.0	34.1	36.0	54.0	1.8	1.8	3.6	1.4	2.7
8.5	32.2	34.0	51.0	1.7	1.7	3.4	1.8	3.5
8.0	30.3	32.0	48.0	1.6	1.6	3.2	1.2	2.4
7.5	28.4	30.0	45.0	1.5	1.5	3.0	2.8	5.5
7.0	26.5	28.0	42.0	1.4	1.4	2.8	1.1	2.1
6.5	24.6	26.0	39.0	1.3	1.3	2.6	3.8	7.5
6.0	22.7	24.0	36.0	1.2	1.2	2.4	0.9	1.8
5.5	20.8	22.0	33.0	1.1	1.1	2.2	4.8	9.5
5.0	18.9	20.0	30.0	1.0	1.0	2.0	0.8	1.5
4.5	17.0	18.0	27.0	0.9	0.9	1.8	0.7	1.4
4.0	15.1	16.0	24.0	0.8	0.8	1.6	0.6	1.2
3.5	13.3	14.0	21.0	0.7	0.7	1.4	0.5	1.1
3.0	11.4	12.0	18.0	0.6	0.6	1.2	0.5	0.9
2.5	9.5	10.0	15.0	0.5	0.5	1.0	0.4	0.8
2.0	7.6	8.0	12.0	0.4	0.4	0.8	0.3	0.6
1.5	5.7	6.0	9.0	0.3	0.3	0.6	0.2	0.5
1.0	3.8	4.0	6.0	0.2	0.2	0.4	0.2	0.3
0.5	1.9	2.0	3.0	0.1	0.1	0.2	0.1	0.2

HBW 2: 20151215 nternational Brew Day and Paul Wicksteed Supercharger Dr...

HBW 1: 20151208 Paul Wicksteed Supercharger

Rogue Chocolate Stout Clone

For our January meeting our brew club has decided to brew stouts for comparison and feedback from the club. I decided to brew a Rogue Chocolate Stout Clone with my own brewers signature in the mix.

This article from homebrewers association is what prompted my decision to brew the clone. http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/homebrew-recipe/rogue-chocolate-stout-clone/

This was a pretty typical brew day and I follow the instructions in the link above except for a few aspects.

First I input the recipe in beersmith and used my equipment profile which adjusted the OG, ABV, efficiency etc... So I used beersmith to recalculate these values based on my equipment in order for  the base recipe to end up as intended.

The second thing I did is mash at 160 degrees instead of 152. The Rogue stout finishes at 1.017 and it's a good stout but I like my stouts to have significant mouth feel especially one with chocolate in the name. The recipe includes oats which will help in with mouth feel but I wanted more. The increased mash temp allowed my beer to finish at 1.020 which is closer to what I wanted. I usually shoot for a 1.025-1.028 F.G. in my stouts.

The third and final adjustment I was forced to make because I used a natural chocolate flavoring instead of an extract. I wasn't sure what the difference would be but the recipe called for 1.5oz of extract. The bottle of flavoring I purchased called for 4oz / 5 gallons so I used the entire bottle.

Lastly I used a lower attenuating yeast WLP013 London Ale yeast. I chose this yeast because it will still ferment very clean like a CHICO yeast but should have left the beer with some more body.

while the beer was fermenting the entire first floor of my home smelled of cascade hops. I've never used American style hops in my stouts before and this was a pleasant byproduct of the Rogue recipe. I didn't taste the hops in the beer when I sampled while moving to the secondary.

This beer is currently sitting in the secondary on the chocolate flavoring and will be kegged and conditioned this weekend. I'll follow up with the results.

Craft Brewery Graveyard

So after so many breweries either being bought outright or selling off percentages of their company to big beer, I'm gong to start keeping a list of breweries whose beers I won't be buying anymore.

This is just my ideology about craft beer. So many of these breweries have preached doing it for the love of making beer and the comradery you get in craft beer that you can't get in any other business.

They preach about just loving what they're doing. Then they sell out to big beer. Well say goodbye to my money. I'm a homebrewer, I'll brew my own.

So I say it's about the money for these companies, which is pretty damn good considering the cheapest craft beer in Western NY is about $10 a six pack, even from our local breweries like Ithaca brewing. Most of the time I'm paying $11-13 a 6 pack which is definitely an increase over just a couple of years ago. They claim they need to charge these prices because they use more expensive ingredients and they use more of these ingredients but me thinks its about the money and I'm done paying for it.

You also have the Brewers Association changing its definition of what a craft brewer is. In 2010 they changed the maximum barrel allotment from 2M to 6M to accommodate Samuel Adams and in 2014 they started allowing  those who use rice and corn in their beers to be called a craft brewery. WTF? Why not just let anybody in? Its about money and I'm guessing it always has been.

I know its a little naive to think everyone who starts up a small brewery is doing it because they love beer, they love brewing and they love the community, but I wish it wasn't. And I wish they would stop selling out to big beer. If you want out of the business hand it down to your kid or allow your head brewer to buy it on a lease to own deal or to another private brewery owner looking to expand like what happened with Logsdon Organic Farmhouse Ales and Uptown Market, my guess is that you can afford it.

I recently went on vacation to Vermont and toured many of the states 40+ microbreweries. It was a fantastic and quaint visit full of some of the best beers I've ever had. I would desperately like to have that experience over and over again in the future. This doesn't seem possible when breweries keep selling out.

Please support your local breweries who are making great beer but let me know if they sell out to big beer or to private equity groups so I can add them to this list. I don't want to accidentally support them. This county was built on small business, some companies get to big for their britches and greed has them wrapping their tentacles around our beloved microbreweries.

2016

• Devils Backbone - ABinBev

2015 

• Elysian Brewing - ABinBev
• Oskar Blues - Not to big beer but looking kinda shady as they won't release details
• Full Sail Brewing - Oregon Craft Brewers Co Investment Group
• Lagunitas - Heineken
• Firestone Walker - Duvel
• Ballast Point - Constellation Brands (Corona, Pacifico and Modelo)
• Saint Archer - MillerCoors
• Golden Road - ABinBev 
• Four Peaks - ABinBev
• Founders - Mahou San Miguel 30%
• Breckenridge Brewery - ABinBev

2014

• 10 Barrel Brewing - ABinBev
• Southern Tier - NY Investment Firm
• Blue Point - ABinBev
• Widmer Brothers - ABinBev 33%

2011

• Goose Island - ABinBev

Brew Day Checklist

I was listening to a recent episode of The Session on the brewing network about Faster Brewing techniques. The guest was Chris Graham from Morebeer and he had some great suggestions for speeding up a brew day. Some I already implement like batch sparging but there where others that caught my attention and I wanted to share one here.

The idea that most intrigued me was the idea of a brew day checklist. This is something I haven't used before but I immediately thought it would be useful. I mean who hasn't had that Oh Shit moment while brewing because you forgot to do something? Usually for me this moment is realizing I forgot to add metabisulfite to the water to get rid of Chlorine and Chloramines before mashing or I forgot my salt additions during the mash.

So I decided to create my own checklist and this is what I came up with. Maybe it will be useful to someone else.

Brew Day Checklist

• Heat Mash Water and add Campden Tablet, Acidify If necessary

• Weigh and Crush Grains

• Add Salts to mash water and dough in

• Heat Sparge Water

• Wash Lauter Tun

• Vorlauf and Batch Sparge

• Start Boil

• Prep Hop Additions

• Clean Mash Tun and Lauter Tun

• Sanitize Fermentor, Airlocks, Aeration Stone or Wine Degasser and Hose

• Add Immersion Chiller or hook up pump and Plate Chiller and Circulate to Sanitize

• Add Whirlfloc

• Whirlpool if necessary

• Chill

• Aerate

• Add Yeast

• Clean Boil Kettle

Busy Beer Weekend

So it was a pretty great weekend ranging from sour beer wort to a homebrew club meeting.

On Saturday I brewed 10 gallons of a Golden sour wort with the plan to move an existing sour beer off the cake and into a long term aging vessel. To my surprise the beer was already as sour as I would want it with a F.G. of 1.010 which is a bit high after only 2 months. So my plans were changed for me. I kegged 4 gallons of the amber sour and placed the remaining gallon into a 1 gallon glass jug for further aging to see how it will turn out.

I also dry hopped a Chinook, Cascade, Centennial, Amarillo IPA I brewed last week. 0.75 oz of each hop went into the dry hop.

On Sunday I brewed a  Weissbier after having a couple commercial examples last week I couldn't help myself.  I added 1.8 oz of fresh Clementine Orange Peel and 0.4oz of coriander seeds ground at the end of the boil. I used a Fermentis WB-06 yeast and it was happily bubbling away this morning.

Here's a shot of the color. It's going to be a pretty beer.

On Sunday night our brew club met at our new location. It turned out to be a great venue and even though I dropped an entire growler full of sour beer it was an amazing night. The original club founder ran home and grabbed his shampooer and saved us from being booted out of a great place to meet. Other than losing a nice Hill Farmstead growler and 64oz of sour beer the night was a great success. All the members brought some truly great beers like pumpkin ales, sour dunkel (?!) hefe with chamomile, cream ales, helles', maple porters and on and on.

We also made some great forward steps with the group. We starting paying dues so we can get a BJCP tasting kit and everyone can get certified. We're registering with the AHA so more people can find us and we've organized the regularity and brewing schedule of the meetings all of which should help us grow.

Extras:

While my Golden was boiling on Saturday I put together a couple more pieces of the brew room, here are some photos.

The keggerator finally got a drip tray!

A $24 inset drip tray and two $1.50 brackets modified with some tin snips did the trick!!

Removed the small dry erase board and chalk board painted the freezer.

Chalk board in action.

American Beer (Distribution/Inflation/Supply and Demand) Rant

I was in Rochester, NY for work yesterday so I stopped at Beers of the World. They have the best selection of beers from (as the name implies) all over the world. 

I was looking for Kloster Andechs Dopplebock Dunkel so I would have one to compare my clone recipe along side. Unfortunately they don't seem to stock it any longer. This is a shame because it's such a great beer.

So naturally I started browsing the entire store. Several west coast breweries caught my eye and a couple east coast. The 750ml bottles were quite expensive, anywhere from $15-$25 depending on the brewery and the style. I was specifically looking for sour beers and these were $19-XX. 

I can't justify paying that much money for such a small amount of beer (or wine or mead) that I'll have gone in an hour. I wouldn't sit at the bar and pay $15 for two pints of beer and I won't buy it off the shelf that way either. In fact if I'm at a brewery and the pints cost more than $5 each, I'm finding another brewery. I will make small exceptions for sour beers because I realize the extra time and effort and space are worth something but with kettle sours my resolve holds. Maybe part of my attitude comes from being a homebrewer and knowing I can come close to reproducing the beers I want. Maybe I'm just being frugal.

What's really burning my ass here is that I found a fantastic beer that came all the way from Belgium and only cost me $11 for a 750ml and it's a sour! A Flander's Red from Petrus called OUD BRUIN to be precise. This beer was subtly sour, a little sweet and a great beer. 

So lets see. Belgian breweries can produce a truly amazing aged sour beer, ship it across the ocean, pay import taxes and still have it be more cost effective than our home craft breweries, really?!  Does anyone else have an issue with this? 

We are constantly paying a premium for American craft beer because it's become so popular that the breweries are either in a endless state of expansion (which we're paying for in every pint) or so small they are paying a premium for ingredients etc... When does this level off and become more realistic. At some point the market will become flooded and a microbreweries will begin to fail. The remaining breweries will start fighting for market share with prices rather than styles produced because the market will be over saturated and we will finally benefit. 

End of Rant.

Cider 2.0 - My assumptions were wrong

So I have to take back at least part of my assumption that this cider wasn't going to clear. It did settle out quite a bit from what it was and even though I forgot to add the pectic enzyme before fermentation it's pretty damn clear from where it was. The last cider aged for two months, this one aged for 1 and it may have continued to clear out if I let it go another month.

I've given my back sweetening regimen in a couple other posts but I'll reiterate here. 2.5tsp potassium sorbate,1 500ml bottle of wine conditioner and 1 gallon cider frozen and the concentrate dripped out. 

Here are some pictures of the sophisticated concentrate extract process.

This is how the cider looked after fermentation but before the pectic enzyme and a month of clarifying.

Here are a couple of photos after the clarification aging.

m

So after assuming this cider wouldn't turn out because it didn't clear immediately and because the initial taste test after fermentation was lacking, I have to admit that with back sweetening it's just as good as my last cider. I used the same recipe and it tastes pretty much the same. It's a little darker in color and nowhere near as transparent but those are visual competition issues not worth evaluating for a house cider. The "dryness" still isn't as clean as I expected but after sweetening its no longer distracting.

All in all I'm pretty happy with this cider. Now that I've made a cider from commercial concentrate and a fresh local cider mill I don't see what all the hype is about over fresh cider. I actually like the results better from the commercial cider for both dry and back-sweetened versions. The commercial version was also $1 cheaper per gallon than the local fresh cider. While I 'm willing to pay the extra to support a local business I won't do it if the results are sub-par as they were in this case. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't be a cider snob just because you've read some posts about how superior fresh milled cider is, my experience hasn't proven that to be true

Enjoy some more photos from the process.

Here are the individual parts.

Clarity Pics

The sediment