Revenge of the Pumpkin Porter

Awhile back my aunt was browsing through a collection of books at a garage sale and stumbled across a homebrewers book in near mint condition.  She borrowed $1 from my brother, who didn't get the book because it was 50 cents and he didn't want to break a dollar, and bought it for me.  To this day my brother will argue that he bought me the book, but I'll always know what really went down.

That being said, it reminded me that I'm very grateful to have family that knows and supports my hobbies, and as the saying goes "I don't have a drinking problem, I have a brewing problem"... as weird as this sounds, I feel like they understand me in that sense.  I brew for the science and knowledge, not the alcohol (although the alcohol is a nice bonus).

Now, back to the book.  It's titled Extreme Brewing by Sam Calagione, the owner of the Dogfish Head brewery (fantastic beers), and let me tell you, this book does not false advertise.  It has some of the strangest beer recipes I've ever seen, some of which sound incredibly tasty (kiwi beer!).  When I first got the book back in June I was browsing through some of the recipes and stumbled across a Pumpkin Porter.  Most pumpkin beers I've tried have always been amber beers, and the question that sprung to mind was "why hasn't anyone thought of this before?"... well, commercial brews anyway.  I mean, the thought of having a pumpkin beer with hints of chocolate and toastiness, it would be like drinking a pumpkin pie with chocolate whip cream!  I decided right then and there that this needed to be brewed and ready to drink by the fall.

The recipes in the book are extract recipes so I had to do a little tweaking to covert it to an all-grain recipe.  So here's what I came up with:

Revenge of the Pumpkin Porter

Grains/Ingredients

11 lbs                     Rahr 2-row                                                         

1.0 lb                     Crystal 120L                                                        

0.5 lbs                   Black Patent Malt                                             

0.5 lbs                   Chocolate Malt                                                 

30 oz                      Pure Pumpkin (2 cans added to mash)

1 tsp                      Allspice (added 5 min left in boil)

1 tsp                      Cinnamon (added 5 min left in boil)

1 tsp                      Nutmeg (added 5 min left in boil)

Hops

1.0 oz. Hallertau (60min)                                                               3.8% AA

1.0 oz. Cascade (20min)                                                                 6.1% AA

0.5 oz. Hallertau (10min)                                                               3.8% AA

Yeast

Wyeast 1056 American Ale (Optimum Temp: 60-72F) 2nd generation – 1000mL yeast starter

BrewDay Stats                                  

Style: Porter

Brewed:  8/13/11

H2O/grain ratio:  1.15 qt/lb  (Added 1 tsp of gypsum)

Mash Temp (Time):  157.1-152.4F (60min)

Mash Out Temp:  160F

1^st Batch Volume:  ~2 gal

Grain Absorption (gal/lb):  0.??

2^nd Batch Sparge H2O Temp/Mash Temp:  ~180F/166F  (Added 0.5 tsp of gypsum)

2^nd Batch Volume:  4+ gal

Pre-boil Volume: 6.25 gal

Pre-boil SG:  1.0?? – calculated: 1.055

Boil Time:  60min

Post Volume Boil: 5.2 gal

Mash Efficiency:  ??%

Transferred to secondary:  Skipped

Bottled:  9/22/11

OG = 1.066

IBU = 26

BU:GU = 0.39

Fermentation Temp:  68F

FG = 1.013

Apparent Attenuation = 80%

ABW(%) =  5.5%

ABV(%) =  7.0%

The brewday went well with the exception of adding the pumpkin to the mash.  Pumpkins weren't in season when we brewed this beer back in August so we had Pure Pumpkin in a can as a substitute.  That was a HUGE hassle draining that mash tun with pumpkin clogging the drain every minute.  Everytime we got a nice steady flow the pumpkin would clog it within a couple of seconds.  Oh well, live and learn.  The guys at my homebrew club suggested to add rice hulls to the mash next time, so if anybody else sets out to brew this one, learn from my mistakes.

Also, I've been working on making labels for my beers since the Christmas holiday season is right around the corner.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Revenge of the Pumpkin Porter":

I'm trying to go for a constant theme between all my beers with having my main scientist stick figure (from my logo) in all the labels.  This image I took a screen shot from one of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes (I <3 the Simpsons!)

Anyway, Happy Halloween everybody!

Holt Brew Logo

I've been slowly working on a logo these past couple weeks and I've finally settled on one.  Hope you all enjoy it as much as I do:

I had the idea floating around in my head for quite awhile but just recently made it a reality.  I was going for the basic bubbly look (because I'm artistically challenged), and I knew I wanted to add a bit of a "science" touch to it, hence the lab coat and Erlenmeyer flask.

Since the holiday season is just around the corner and I wanted to hand out some of my brews as presents, I'm hoping to start making some labels for the future winter beers with this as the small logo in the corner.

Kegerator Build

If the laws of nature allowed it, I would ideally like to have a river of beer flow through my yard, in which all I would do is grab a mug from the house and grab a nice refreshing beer whenever I want.  But I can't (yet anyways), BUT I can have the next best thing, a kegerator!  Every time we bottle beer it takes about an hour to sanitize 50+ bottles, and fill and cap them with beer (with 2 people).  I'm not going to lie, I made that sound a lot smoother than bottling day actually goes for us.  Usually we have a major disaster like the capper bending or the valve from the filler getting clogged with small hop particles, but what if this could all be avoided?  And it can, thanks to building my own kegerator.  I've seen kegerators on the market that sell for $500+ but that was a bit out of my price range, and the website that I gain a lot of valuable information from homebrewtalk.com has a Do-It-Yourself section, from which I got the idea.

So to start off, I did what any sane poor person would do and searched craigslist for a refrigerator.  Turned out to be a little more difficult than logging in and magically finding a cheap fridge, but after about a months worth of searching my dad said he found a $25 fridge near my house, in which he so kindly helped me pick it up with his truck... thanks dad!  This fridge was more disgusting than any Miller beer... seriously, look at the picture... I think that's rotten meat juice, which is exactly how it smelled.  Needless to say, I did some heavy duty cleaning.

Before :(

After :)

Not only did my dad help with picking it up, but also with the massive holes that needed to be drilled.  Apparently, it's pretty freakin' hard to drill a 1" hole in a fridge.

Next step, feed the shanks and faucets through the holes, run some lines to a keg, and viola! Kegerator!

I wish that really that fast, but in actuality I had to wait a week or two before my Thanks-A-Latte Coffee Stout was finished fermenting.  And now it's on tap!  My cousin also got me a sweet chalkboard tap handle for Christmas last year which I've put to good use, as you can see from the pictures.

Lastly, I needed to find a place that would fill my 5 lb CO2 tank, and luckily I found a place near my job that fills it for $8.  The guy was pretty nice and filled it up in less than 5 minutes.  I think one full tank will get me through 5-7 kegs worth of beer, but I guess I'll found out exact values later on down the road.

A tap is much more convenient for whenever I have guests over because now I can put those small beer tasting glasses to good use that my roommate and I have accumulated from all the beer festivals we've gone to.  Can't wait until I've got a second beer on tap!  My roommate and I have a crazy brew coming up, I wouldn't want to spoil anything in advance, but it is going to be the next on tap.  Do I see a possible tasting party in the near future?

Enjoy the pictures!  If you're wondering what the mason jars in the fridge are, they are yeast that I've saved from a previous batch of beer in which I can reuse in future batches.

Note to self:  Draw my future river of beer.

Thanks A Latte Coffee Stout

The name of this beer stems from an event that happened a few years ago.  After church on Sundays my family would always head over to the St. Louis Bread Company (aka Panara) for a nice breakfast and coffee.  Everytime I would just get a bagel and hot coffee, but my cousins and younger brothers started to try some of the many many possible ways to make coffee... well, not taste like coffee.  Fraps, lattes, capichinos, you name it, they went crazy for these quite delicious beverages.  Normally when ordering one the order would be placed and you went and stood off to the right and watched someone make your drink.  As you can imagine, my youngest brother Zach thought of a clever play on words for that sorry soul making the drinks.  At the time he probably thought it was the single most greatest line ever, and the stupid grin on his face showed it.

Drink maker: "Frozen latte!"
Zach: "Thanks A Latte"

And thus, the "Thanks A Latte Coffee Stout" has its name.

I didn't necessarily rush out to brew this beer for the purpose of naming it that, I am quite the avid coffee drinker and had the strong urge to combine two of my favorite beverages in the world, beer and coffee.  During the winter months I love to grab a 6 pack of Coffee Stout from a local brewery here in St. Louis, Schlafly.  So I set out to try to devise a recipe of my own, which happens to be the very 1st Holtbrew recipe!  Here you go:

Thanks A Latte Coffee Stout (Holtbrew recipe)

Grains/Ingredients

8 lbs                       Rahr 2-row pale                                         

1.25 lb                   Roasted Barley                                             

0.75 lbs                 Crystal Malt 60L                                          

0.5 lbs                   Chocolate Malt                                              

0.25 lbs                 Oatmeal                                                            

4 oz. Lactose added at beginning of boil                                            

12 oz. Coffee Beans (Cafe Kaldi) – Steeped for 16 hours in 5 cups of boiled/cooled water and added during kegging

Hops

1 oz. East Kent Goldings (60min)                                                               4.5% AA

Yeast

Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale (Optimum Temp: 62-72F) – 1 quart yeast starter

BrewDay Stats                                  

Style: Sweet Stout

Brewed:  1/23/11

H2O/grain ratio:  1.15 qt/lb  (Added 1 tsp of gypsum)

Mash Temp (Time):  158-153.5F (60min)

Mash Out Temp:  158F

1^st Batch Volume/SG:  3.0 gal/ n/a

Grain Absorption (gal/lb):  0.13

2^nd Batch Sparge H2O Temp/Mash Temp:  190F/168F  (Added 0.5 tsp of gypsum)

2^nd Batch Volume/SG:  3.125 gal/ n/a

Pre-boil Volume: 6.13 gal

Pre-boil SG:  1.050

Boil Time:  60min

Post Volume Boil: 5.0 gal

Mash Efficiency:  83%

Transferred to secondary:  1/31/11

Kegged:  2/20/11

OG = 1.062

IBU = 15

BU:GU = 0.24

Fermentation Temp:  64F

FG = 1.022

Apparent Attenuation = 65%

ABW(%) =  4.1%

ABV(%) =  5.2%

I picked a "sweet stout" as the style because I wanted to have a medium to full-bodied beer, meaning I'd have to have a significant amount of sugar that could not be consumed by the yeast (unfermentable sugars).  There were two ways we went about doing this:
1) We held the mash (crushed grains + heated water) at a relatively hotter temperature (158F) than we normally do (154F).  There are 2 types of enzymes that break down starches into sugars, alpha amylase and beta amylase.  If you think of starches as just long chains of sugars, beta amylase nibbles the sugars off of the ends of the chains resulting in more fermentable sugars, and alpha amylase chops the chains in half resulting in less fermentable sugars (more unfermentable ones).  The reason why we normally hold the mash at around 154-155F is because that's the temperature range where both enzymes are active, if we go colder, alpha amylase becomes inactive, and if we go hotter beta amylase becomes inactive, which is what we chose to do to get more unfermentable sugars.
2) I used a lactose addition.  Lactose is milk sugar and it cannot be fermented by brewers yeast, but I also figured it should be a nice addition simply because "latte" is in the name.

As good as brewdays can go, I'd say this was probably one of our best ones.  The only problem we had was cooling the wort and it somehow worked to our advantage in some way.  We had just gotten over a couple snow storms in St. Louis and temperatures were not particularly what we'd call "warm".  I believe the brewday temperature was hovering in the mid 20F range, and that's not including the wind chill.  The problem was that the hose, which we use for running water through our wort chiller, was frozen rock solid, so we had to be a little creative (as you can see from this picture):




Just packing snow around it didn't help much when reducing the temperature, but when we stirred the wort with a sanitized wand it dropped rapidly.  Overall, it probably took us an hour to cool the wort from boiling to 80F, and that was with taking warm up breaks.  The reason I said this worked to our advantage was because while we were stirring we were oxygenating the wort really REALLY well, which is excellent for the yeast.  The more oxygen that is absorbed by the wort, the faster the yeast can use their reserved food and start munching on the sugars in the wort, resulting in faster fermentation.  Normally it takes between 6-12 hours for the airlock to show any kinds of bubbling activity, but this coffee stout was bubbling in less than 4 hours!

The coffee addition was interesting.  I did some research on a great homebrewing website (HBT) on how other people have added coffee to their brews.  I finally settled on what is called "cold brewing" coffee, which is essentially brewing your coffee without hot water.  The process can probably be explained better elsewhere but I'll give you a brief summary of what I did.  I boiled and cooled about 5 cups of water in a pitcher and ground up the 12oz of coffee with a sanitized grinder set on med course.  Then I threw the grounds into a sanitized muslin bag to be steeped in the 5 cups of water for 16 hours.  During kegging I removed the muslin bag and poured the super concentrated coffee in with the transferred beer.  Note: I probably ended up with 2-3 cups of the final cold brewed coffee, the ground beans soak up A LOT of liquid.

As a side note and not really related to the beer in anyway, but this was my first beer that I was going to keg.  That's right, all those hours spent transferring the beer into 50+ sanitized bottles are now reduced to one single transfer of 5 gallons... I've never been happier.  Plus, I've now got this sweet refrigerator in my basement that was converted to a kegerator.  Thanks to my dad for helping me pick up and haul the fridge there and also with the drilling.  I'll try and write a post about building that soon.

After pulling the tap handle about a week into carbonating at 8 psi, the beer was relatively flat with some carbonation.  I decided to let it sit for another week or so, in which it became much more carbonated than before, but I'm considering letting it carbonate for another couple days.  From the time of tasting after 2 weeks there's a couple things I noticed.  This has an intense coffee aroma... like, ridiculously noticeable.  If I were to do this coffee stout again I'd consider stepping down to 8oz of coffee instead of 12oz.  I have read on forums about coffee flavor and aroma in beer and people have reported that if given enough time, the coffee effects will be reduced, I guess I'll have to wait and see with mine.  I like the taste, it's such a full-bodied beer, which is what I was going for, and one pint of this would probably equate to an entire meal for some people.  I'm not sure if it's the roasted barley or the coffee addition, but you can definitely taste a strong roasted flavor in the beer, which I find enjoyable.  Overall, I'm pleased with the outcome, and I'm even more excited to see how this beer ages over time.  Perhaps I will consider making a coffee stout ice cream float?... ... make that a definite yes.

Sugar Extraction and Predicting OG

When you make beer, there's two main ways that you can go about doing it, one method is making it from extract and the other is via the all grain (AG) method.  When you first start brewing it's typical to go out and buy extract, it really speeds up the brewday.  When I talk about extract I refer to the sugars that go into our beer compressed into either a powder or syrup:

You can buy these by the pound from your Local Homebrew Shop or online.  It is a little more pricey but you're paying for a shorter brewday because you can just start the brewday by boiling the water.  On the other side we have the all grain method.  The AG method involves an extra step called the "mash", which can take more than an hour to complete in most cases.  It is basically steeping the crushed grains in hot water for an hour in order to extract the sugars from them.  And remember from the Determining Percent Alcohol post, the more sugars we can get from the grains, the higher the Original Gravity will be.  But I'm going to tell you a little secret *drum roll*... I've already predicted how much sugar will be extracted before I even steep the grains.  I mean, what kind of scientist would I be if I couldn't predict the future with math?... not a very good one.

The mash, as I said before, is steeping the crushed grains for an hour in hot water.  How hot?  About 150-158 degrees F.  Why?  That's the temperature range the enzymes in the grains are active.  These enzymes breakdown the starches from the grains into simple sugars that we can ferment into alcohol, so in summary, these enzymes are pretty freakin' important if you want to make beer.  It goes something like this:

The way we predict how much sugar will end up in the wort is through a term I like to keep track of called Mash Efficiency.  Mash Efficiency is recorded as the percentage of sugar extracted from the grain.  Each type of grain has it's own Grain Potential (reported as 1.0xx), which is what you would read on the hydrometer if you were to mash 1 lb of that certain grain and drain out 1 gallon of water with 100% extraction of the sugars.  This number may look very similar and in fact the xx actually are what we call "points", or another term, Gravity Units (GUs) from the BU/GU ratio post.  We refer to these as points sometimes because a term commonly used by brewers is ppg, or points per pound per gallon, which is what I described earlier about the 1 pound and 1 gallon extraction.  The terms are interchangeable, I could say "2-row has a Grain Potential of 1.036" or "2-row provides 36ppg", they mean the same thing.  For calculations we'll use the ppg value (or GUs, if you're more comfortable with that terminology).

Let's work through a real life example.  For the next brew that we have coming up, it's a relatively simple pale ale, containing only 2 types of grains. Here's the grain bill:

7.5 lbs 2-row (Grain Potential = 1.036)
0.5 lbs 60L Crystal Malt  (Grain Potential = 1.034)

Total = 8.0 lbs

The plan is to mash this 8 lbs of crushed grain with about 155F water for one hour.  How much water?  Up to you, it sometimes depends on the style of beer, but for the most part I've seen people use from 1.00qt/lb to 1.75qt/lb.  We usually go with 1.15 quarts of water per pound of grain, which works out to be 9.2 quarts or 2.3 gallons in this case.

Moving on... how much sugar will we get from this?  Well, I'm glad you asked.  Since we plan to make 5 gallons from this recipe, we'll probably need 6 gallons of wort generated from the mash, this will be called our pre-boil volume (it is typical for 1 gallon to be boiled off over the course of 60 min).  The pre-boil volume is whatever volume we get from the mash, so that will be our "per gallon" value in ppg, in this case 6 gallons.  Next we need to calculate how much sugar can be extracted if we extract 100% of the sugars from the grain.  Since the 2 grains we're using have different Grain Potentials we can calculate them separately, then sum them in the end:

2-row:                 7.5 lbs x 36 = 270 GUs
Crystal Malt:       0.5 lbs x 34 = 17 GUs

270 + 17 = 287 total GUs

So we can get a total of 287 GUs from all 8 lbs of grain.  Now we divide by the pre-boil volume:

287 GUs ÷ 6.0 = 48 GUs

What this tells us is that after the mash is over, and we're left with 6 gallons of wort, if we extracted 100% of the sugars our hydrometer should read 1.048.  But as I said earlier, that's not very likely to extract all 100%, so now we can multiply it by the Mash Efficiency.  In our setup, the mash efficiency is close to 80%, meaning we extract 80% of the sugars from the grains everytime we mash:

48 GUs x 0.80 = 38 GUs

Or in a real situation we would actually expect the hydrometer to read 1.038 because we would have extracted 80% of those sugars.  Doing one last basic step, we'll use the equation for dilution to find our final concentration of our wort after our boil from 6 gallons to 5 gallons (where Mx is concentration and Vx is volume):

M1V1 = M2V2
M2 = M1V1 ÷ V2
M2 = (38 GUs)(6gal) ÷ (5gal) = 46 GUs

So our final concentration of our wort (or the Original Gravity) is predicted to be 1.046.  How about that?  And we haven't even brewed yet!  A lot of times you'll here experienced brewers say "Oh, I was only 2 points off from my Target OG".  This OG calculation that I've just gone through is what they're referring to as the Target OG.

Mash Efficiency can vary from brewer to brewer and no one can tell you your mash efficiency for you.  You just have to brew and find out.  The only numbers you need to measure on brewday are the hydrometer reading just before you boil the wort and the exact pre-boil volume.  Along with the grain potentials that are available online, you can calculate your own mash efficiency for the next time you brew.  For our example, let's say that we mashed the grains mentioned above and got 6 gallons drained out and our pre-boil hydrometer reading was 1.036:

(Our hydrometer reading in GUs) ÷ (hydrometer reading for 100% of sugars extracted in GUs) = 36 ÷ 48 = 0.75 = 75%

If that was our hydrometer reading then we would have a mash efficiency of 75%.  If you're just starting to do all-grain brewing they say assume 75% mash efficiency when brewing for the first time, then you can calculate your actual mash efficiency from that.

Lots of factors affect the mash efficiency, such as crushing the grain (too fine or not crushed enough), water temperature, dead space where water gets trapped in your mash tun, etc.  So you really just have to experiment and find a balance that works for you.