Beer Blogger Brewoff - Brew Day

I have recently started using Twitter more often and shall we say more completely. I had registered a while back just to play around but never really used it on a day to day basis. I've only recently started doing this as well as adding a bunch of users to my "following" list. As a beer guy it's a great tool for staying connected with all the local beer happenings as well as the individuals involved. Some of the people that I follow are other beer bloggers from the twin cities area. It was in doing just this that I discovered a brew-off just in the nick of time. Fellow blogger Aaron from The Captain's Chair had retweeted a tweet from SimplyBeer in Jersey about a brew off. This tweet piqued my interest so I checked out the SimplyBeer website. Sure enough, there was a brew-off between bloggers where each of them would brew the same stout. The kicker is that each would be brewed with a minor change or one secret ingredient. When finished all of them would be shared with the rest of the brewers. I thought it was a great idea. There was a brewing, bottling and shipping schedule and it looked like I could meet all the dates. So, I sent an email to Peter over at SimplyBeer and asked if I could get in on the action. I was welcomed enthusiastically. The cap was set at nine brewers to try and keep the shipping costs from getting out of control.

The important dates for this brew-off are December 13th - brew day, January 10th - bottling, February 1st - shipping and finally February 12th - TASTING! Details of the day can be found here.

My brewday began somewhat surrealistically. I slept much more than usual on Friday night (I wasn't feeling so hot) so when I woke up at 5am on Sunday I just tossed and turned. I gave in at 5:45 and jumped out of bed. I was already heating my strike water by 6:10 without even a hint of fatigue. Here's where disaster strikes (pun most definitely intended). There are many websites out there with strike water calculators. These help you determine what temperature a given volume of water needs to be when mixed with grain at another tempurature. If done correctly you will hit your target mash temp. Well, the strike water temp seemed abnormally warm but my grain was left in the garage overnight so that temp (50 F) was lower than normal. There were a lot of other internal alarms going off at this time - enzyme denaturing, tannin extraction, etc. But I just dismissed those and decided to not argue with the computer. What happened is I completely overshot my target - 170 F!!! In my panic I added a lot of ice which dropped my mash to 135 F. More hot water followed by more ice and I finally gave up. My mash was too cold and too thin. Chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. I discovered later in the day that I had selected the pounds/quarts option when I was entering my water volume in gallons (I did the gallon to quart conversion in my head). Perhaps I was sleepwalking after all.

Now, I will be the first to recognize that we are spoiled here in the Cities because we have not one, not two, but three LHBS* in the metro area. For many other brewers out there this would have ended their day. The bad news for me is that on Sunday the earliest store opens at 11am. And all this happened before 8am! Fortunately I had two beers that needed to be racked into secondary. I also decided to make lemonade out of lemons and use the wort collected from the disaster brew. I collected all those yummy flavors and colors and added six pounds of wheat LME and pitched it on top of the Scotch Ale yeast cake I had just racked off of. I also used all six ounces of Glacier hops I had sitting around. Yikes, thats a lot of hops! It was nice to have all this random stuff at my disposal to try and salvage what I could. I came up with an OG of 1.078, higher than I expected. But how much of it is fermentable? We'll find out. To my surprise, I had vigorous fermentation after only three and a half hours! Keep your fingers crossed.

At 11:30 I finally made it to the LHBS, got my new grain and I was off. The rest of the day was pretty much uneventful. To my delight I mashed in at precisely 152 F. Vorlauf lasted about 20minutes and sparging around 45 minutes. The boil was more of the same, just following the recipe. I could only get leaf hops in the one ounce Willamette variety but used pellet hops for Tettnang. I wasn't sure if we were to use German or US Tettnang so I defaulted to the traditional German variety. With ten minutes left in the brew I added my secret ingredient... Irish Moss! Just kidding. I did a lot of thinking about what I would add. I wanted it to be very unique and I finally decided that since the tasting would be conducted around Valentines Day that I would add cinnamon red hots. I added 1/4 pound with ten minutes remaining in the boil. The wort was very sweet and roasty with just a little bit of cinnamon heat. I think it will be good.

I finally pitched my yeast at 6:20pm and my 12 hour brewday was complete. I am really excited about this project. It is great getting to know the guys and fun to experiment. I have to admit, I unintentionally deviated from the recipe because I did indeed add Irish moss. It was more out of habit than anything. One could argue that with an opaque stout like this it isn't even necessary and you'd be right. Hope I don't lose any points : )

Cheers!

DA

*Local Home Brew Store/Shop/Supply