Coffee And Chocolate Flavors In Your Beer

The home brew club I'm a part of met last night. There were a lot of good beers there but one stood out to me over the others. It was a coffee chocolate stout that really showcased the coffee and chocolate. It was rich and espresso like and not something you would want a lot of but it definitely stood out to me because I've never been able to get that kind of flavor into my beers.

I have always read that moderation is the key to adding spices and other extras to your beer. Apparently my fellow home brewers weren't reading the same books and articles. To get the coffee flavor they brewed a pot of coffee with 4x the amount of coffee  for an average pot and added that to the boil. They did the same thing for the Dutch baking chocolate powder they used for the chocolate taste.

I don't have any personal experience with this method of adding flavor to my beer but I will experiment with it and post the results here. If you've had experience with this method please leave a comment.

Reusing Bottles (Removing Bottle Labels)

I've been kegging now for about a year and since I'm lazy I find it to be a far preferable choice to bottling my home brew. There are reasons to bottle however such as competition entries and sharing your brew somewhere besides where your keg-o-rator is located. Since I started out by bottling I have a bunch laying around but they're all 22 oz bomber bottles. These are too big to send in for competitions and when you give them out to friends you don't always get them back. Since I am lazy I prefer to bottle as much of my beer as I can in the bombers because it takes less time but I do bottle a portion into standard 12 oz long necks for sharing.

Rather than hitting the local home brew shop for new bottles I, and I'm sure many others, like to buy beer and as a side effect get the bottles for a nickel each. Just make sure your not buying twist off top bottles and you can pretty much use any brand. When you do this make sure to rinse the bottles well after finishing them off so they can be easily reused. 

In order to reuse a bottle you need to clean, sanitize and probably remove labels from the bottles. This task varies in difficulty depending on the brand of beer you bought. The easiest way to clean and remove labels is to use an oxygen based cleanser such as Five Star Chemicals PBW or even Oxyclean. Just fill up a large container with water and cleaner and let the bottles soak for an hour and if you bought the right brand of beer the labels will "sluff" right off. If you didn't buy the right brand be prepared to first scrape the label then scrub the glue off, it sucks so you may just want to consider buying a different brand of beer for bottle reuse.

Sanitizing is simple as well. Fill another container with a mixture of water and a no-rinse sanitizer like Five Star Chemicals Star San. If you're using Star San just let the bottles soak for at least a minute then place them upside down on a bottling tree or Fast-Rack stack-able bottling rack.

This is a pretty simple process that probably didn't warrant it's own blog post but the tip of soaking in an oxygen based cleaner alone may be useful to someone, somewhere at some point in time. I'm going to leave a tiny list of easy to remove and difficult to remove bottle labels. If you know of anymore, through your own experience, for either category, please leave it in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Easy Label Removal Brands

Magic Hat

Left Hand

Difficult Label Removal Brands

Southern Tier

Village of Avoca, N.Y. Brewer's Water Analysis

Because the village I live in does not provide a complet water report I sent a sample of my tap water to Ward Laboratories in Nebraska because that is what Denny Con and others like themadfermentist and John Palmer recommended. For $27.25 in February of 2015 I received a very nice brewer's water analysis by email 2 days after they received the sample. I'm posting the result here in the event it may be useful to any other  brewer's in Avoca. I highly doubt that since I would probably already know them in this tiny little village but it doesn't hurt me to post it.

pH	7.7
Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est, ppm	502
Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm	0.84
Cations / Anions, me/L	8.2/8.7
	ppm
Sodium, Na	48
Potassium, K	2
Calcium, Ca	88
Magnesium, Mg	20
Total Hardness, CaCO3	303
Nitrate, NO3-N	0.4(SAFE)
Sulfate, SO4-S	16
Chloride, Cl 91	91
Carbonate, CO3 < 1.0	< 1.0
Bicarbonate, HCO3 306	306
Total Alkalinity, CaCO3 252	252
Total Phosphorus, P 0.82	82
Total Iron, Fe < 0.01	<0.01
< - Not Detected / Below Detection Limit

Brewing Formulas

I've been collecting useful brewing formulas for awhile now. I update my brew log with them every time I come across something I think I'll need. I tried to identify where I got the information but only found about half. Here is the raw list that I'll try to keep updated when I update my brew log. I hope someone else finds this useful.

Alkalinity = (Calcium / 3.5) + (Magnesium / 7)	Bru'n Water Water Knowledge Sheet
RA = Total Alkalinity - ((Calcium / 3.5) + (Magnesium / 7)	Bru'n Water Water Knowledge Sheet
Gravity Units = (O.G. -1)*1000*Volume	Designing Great Beers, Ray Daniels
(EstSG) GU After Boil = Preboil GU * Preboil Volume / Ending Boil Volume	Designing Great Beers, Ray Daniels
GU Adj w/Extrct = Target GU - Preboil GU / Extrct GU per LB per Gal (Light DME=44)	Designing Great Beers, Ray Daniels
Predicted Final Gravity = ((O.G. - 1)*(1-Attenuation%)) + 1	Designing Great Beers, Ray Daniels
ABV = O.G. – F.G / 7.5 (OG and FG in GUs)
ABV = (og – fg) * 131.25	Brewer's Friend Website
ABV =(76.08 * (og-fg) / (1.775-og)) * (fg / 0.794)	Brewer's Friend Website
ABW = ABV * 7.5
F.G. = 1 - Attenuation as Decimal * GU
Evaporation % =100 - (postboil vol x 100 -;- preboil vol)	BYO Magazine May 2000 Issue, Mr. Wizard
Strike tmp = .2 / ration * msh tmp – gr tmp + msh tmp
Ex Strke tmp = (.2 / 1.25)(152 – 70) + 152 = 165.12 F
AAU = Hop Weight * A.A. %
Scaling Hops = AAU / AA
Scaling Ex. Recipe Calls ½ oz 8.1% you have 5.4%.
.5 * 8.1 = 4.05 AAU
y * 5.4 = 4.05 | y = 4.05 / 5.4 | y=.75 oz of 5.4
Bitterness Ratio = IBUs / O.G.
Degress Plato = S.G. / 4
Recipe Total Gravity = GU * Batch Volume (5.5Gal)
Efficiency = O.G. GU / Recipe Potential GU

Water Adjustment: What and Where

Before I start about water I want to say that I use the Bru'n Water spreadsheet and the Brewer's Friend mash and water calculator for all my water adjustments. This gives me some piece of mind that I'm not blindly following one suggestion without considering other options. It's also rather pointless to treat your water with salts without knowing what you're starting with so look up your cities water report or send a sample in to have tested independently.

Overview:

Water is usually the last aspect of brewing tackled by most home brewers and that is the case for me as well. I'm going to start this blog by talking about water because it's the most recent aspect I've learned and therefore the freshest in my mind.It's also the first ingredient you deal with when making beer and the ingredient that makes up the majority of your beer. I won't go over everything in this post because there is just to much and frankly I don't know everything. I'll start with an applied overview that is a very important base to understanding the rest of water treatments. This will also allow someone to think about how to treat the water for themselves rather than just mimicking what someone else has done or says needs to be done.

All Water Pre-Treatment:

The first step in treating your brewing water, whether you're going to utilize salts to mimic a historic region's brewing water, is to rid your water of Chlorine and Chloramine. You can get rid of chlorine by boiling your water or letting it sit overnight but this will not get rid of Chloramine. The easiest way to eliminate both from your water  is to drop one Campden tablet in per 20 gallons of water.

If you are brewing a pale beer you may also want to consider treating all your water to remove carbonate/bicarbonate to hit your target pH and residual alkalinity or RA. You can use lactic acid, hydrochloric acid and phosphoric acid. Any of these will be a good choice but Hydrochloric acid may be hard to find and lactic acid can change the flavor of your beer if using more than a few mLs / gal. I use phosphoric acid because it's easy to find and doesn't affect the flavor or your beer. For more information on this see Gordon Strong's Brewing Better Beer. I like to adjust all my brewing water down to a pH of 5.5 when brewing a pale ale and below a pH of 6 for all beers so I'm not extracting tannins from the grain during sparge. My water is high in Alkalinity so I treat it with 120 mLs of a 10% solution of phosphoric acid per 9 gallons of water. This eliminates the carbonates in my waer and brings the pH into range. You would't want to do this step for all your water if you're brewing a dark beer because dark grains assist in lowering mash pH.

The Mash:

You should treat the mash for the amount of water going into the mash and take into account any acidulated malts the will affect the pH and RA of your mash. Using Calcium Sulfate (Gypsum) and Calcium Chloride will drive the pH down while Calcium Carbonate will drive the pH up and add to hardness. A little off topic for this post but your goal when adding salts, besides adjusting the RA and pH should also be to have a specific Sulfate to Chloride ratio because this is more important to the resulting taste of the beer than nailing the 800ppm Sulfate of historic Burton on Trent water.

The Kettle:

You should subtract the amount of treated mash water from your total pre-boil volume and calculate kettle additions based on the difference. The reason for this is because you've already treated the 3-4 gallons of the mash water now you only have to worry about the additional 3-4 gallons matching the water profile for the type of beer you want to brew. This will give you a matching water profile to the region you're trying to mimic.