This one doesn’t get a name. Kinda/sorta/more-or-less like last year. I could name it, but it would be a dumb name. Instead, it’s just the 2019 Seattle Cider — 100% Jonagold juice fermented with Danstar Nottingham. See?
After posting Puzzling Out Brew House Efficiency, I shared the link with the local homebrew club, just to see what others might have to say on the subject. (Always tap into the collective wisdom, right?) One member shared a link that helped me think about “where to from here” with this on-going experiment. This post is a think-out-in-the-open style follow up to my previous post, in light of reading this research series posted on BrauKaiser.com.
Continue reading →Generally speaking, Brew House Efficiency (BHE) is number, expressed as a percentage, that calculates how efficient your wort production is — i.e., how much of the potential fermentables actually make it out of the grain and into your fermentor. The calculation is comprehensive, and accounts for (among other factors) how much of the grain’s starches were actually converted to sugars, and how much of the produced volume was lost to losses like absorption and transfer losses. 1
When I was new to all-grain brewing, BHE was not a number that I kept track of. It wasn’t that I didn’t know about it — it was that with everything else to learn, I just wanted to see if I could pull it off at all and then maybe I could start to quantify and use those numbers for process improvement. That said, I probably started to care about BHE numbers after about a year of partial mash brewing 2 and then another year (coincidentally, when I moved from partial mash to all-grain BIAB) before I started tracking it consistently. 3
And that being said, it took me another two years to finally get around to actually looking at all the compiled BHE data. (Guess I just needed enough of it?) The main question I found myself asking: Why is it that my BHE numbers are usually lower (and further off) for my higher gravity beers?
Continue reading →I already mentioned some Vermont homesickness. Well… it’s not going to be cured by just a single batch. It’s going to take multiples. It seemed fair to clone the mead first because the mead scene here is… not Vermont’s. That said, I’ve been able to get some decent beers. Even some decent rye IPAs. But Light in the Window will forever 1 be my go-to. And since BBCO stopped production and we moved 3,000 miles away… there was only one solution to this. Re-group on Clone in the Window:
Since moving to Seattle, one of the (many) Vermont things that I miss is constant access to the craft meads of Groennfell and Havoc. And while there will always be the specialest of special places in my heart for Valkyrie’s, when we really break it down, Root of All Evil has always been our go-to. Which is probably why I made my own clone twist on it four times. 1 2 3 4 It’s also why it’s (one of) the first meads I made since moving out here.
After a four-and-a-half month 1 (forced) hiatus, I got myself brewing again. 2 I needed to get at least one brew day in before I went back to work, after all.
New state? New space? New water? New homebrew supply store? Throw caution to the wind. Set your sights on an Imperial Stout and see what happens. Go big or go home, right? And this gives us Primogeniture:
While I’m still settling into my new Seattle home, I’ve tried to keep my brewing chops sharp through… let’s call it academic research. In other words, even though I’m dying to get my first Seattle brew under my belt, I haven’t figured out all of the ins-and-outs to getting there so I have settle for reading articles and watching HomebrewCon videos. Anyway — more to the point of the title here: one of the things I realized along the way is that Hazy (“New England”) style IPAs seem to be a perfect storm for diacetyl.
[Epistemic status: most statements backed up with citations, but some claims are speculative.]
Continue reading →Wherein I write about this beer belatedly, and with some distance. But with some distance (both temporal and geographic), it seems like I’d better write about this one for the sake of completeness, lest my trans-continental move-related homebrewing hiatus cause everyone to think I’ve disappeared. In any event, here’s a little story about the Mashers Scotch Ale that I pretty much just fermented a few gallons of.
Seventeen years in Vermont. My tasting notes don’t go back far enough to give me a beer for every year. But between my memories and the notes that I do have, there’s enough to work with to give it a 10 list.
Our original plan was never to stay. We came for Amy’s graduate school, with every expectation that we would be gone in four or five years so she could chase a post-doc and then a tenure-track role after that.
But that’s not how things shook out, and all the subsequent decisions — large and small — accreted into a 17 year stint that looked like it might keep us here for good.
But that’s not how things shook out either.
