Great Times with Great Family and Friends

This past weekend was my bachelor party weekend, which brought several of my close friends and family into town for some celebrating. :-)  It was great to see them all in one place for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it marked the first time I had seen a few of them in a few years.  Additionally, it was really fun to see my buddies from all the different phases of my life – my family, Theresa’s family, childhood friends, college friends, and friends from around where I live now – in one place, having fun together.  It really reminded me of how blessed I am to have so many loving people in my life! :-)

After everyone rolled into town on Friday, we got together for a couple drinks then went to a great Phillies game.  The Phils lost, but it was still a very well played game.  Afterwards, we went back to the hotel room where a bunch of my friends were staying, put on our drinkin’ boots, and did some damage on the alcohol supply of a well-stocked room of beer and liquor.  It was really great to just hang out and catch up with my friends and family who made it down for the weekend!

Some homebrews and a taste of the homeland (a.k.a. Labatt Blue Light and Saranac)

After shaking off the dust from the night before, the original plan for Saturday was to head out in Philly for the day and hit up a couple brewery tours and some great brew pubs throughout the city.  Hurricane Irene had other plans.  Because of the threatening hurricane, we ended up just hitting Iron Hill for lunch and the out-of-town guys ended up leaving a day early.  It was a bummer to have the weekend get cut short a little, but it was still awesome to be able to see so many important people in my life and at least spend a day with them!  Thanks to everyone who was able to make it down for an awesome weekend!

The rest of the weekend was pretty much dominated by Hurricane Irene.  As expected, we did lose power around 10pm Saturday night until early afternoon on Sunday.   However, other than that, we made out pretty well – no major damage or flooding to our apartment or cars.  Overall, it ended up not being as bad as I was expecting. 

Now it’s time to settle in for a pretty relaxing Labor Day weekend.  Most of my weekend will consist of hanging out with Theresa, brewing a beer (an adaptation of Charlie Papazian’s recipe Cherries in the Snow), bottling a small batch of mead, making another small batch of mead, and playing some Mass Effect 2.  Should make for a pretty solid low-key weekend. 

Hopefully be posting again soon with some brew day notes and tasting notes on the two pale ales and the stout that I brewed recently.  Until then, stay classy.

Song of the Day: “Layla” by Eric Clapton

Beer of the Day: Southern Tier’s Pumking  

Low on Beer! Only one solution.

That’s right ladies and gents, time to brew up some beer.  I actually do have a couple cases worth of big beers in storage currently, but I really do not have much in the way of session beers.  I pretty much have a drawer full of homebrews in the fridge (a mix of session beers – mostly hefeweizens – and stronger beers), and that’s about it.  Solution?  Five gallons of oatmeal stout and two half-batches of single-hop pale ales. 

The first half of the solution was brewed about two weeks ago.  Fork ‘N Knife Stout is my first attempt at a very sessionable oatmeal stout.  I had written the partial mash recipe for this a few months ago and finally got around to brewing it.  This was also the first beer to break in my mash tun and wort chiller.  The mash tun worked great without a single leak!  It worked a lot better for controlling the mash temperature than steeping on the stove top or by putting the pot in the oven to maintain temperature.  Mash and sparge done, time to boil.  The boil went as smooth as any other brew I’ve done – only had three additions: 1oz of Centennial at 60 minutes, 1oz of Glacier at 30 minutes, and some Irish Moss at 15 minutes.  Boil done, time to chill.  As expected, the chiller did its thing and got the temperature down in the 80s in no time.  I ended up doing an ice bath for the rest of the temperature drop because the tap water was struggling to get under 80.  I was eventually able to chill it down the rest of the way and pitch the yeast. 

The mash tun as it was draining the wort into the brew kettle, leaving the spent grains behind.

I ended up sticking the carboy right next to the AC unit to make sure it stayed down in the right temperature range.  That really was my biggest obstacle in this brew – the temperature.  In all my infinite wisdom, I decided it would be a good idea to brew on one of the hottest days of the year.  Smart move, John.  There were a few issues with this.  Since I had my supplies shipped to me, the yeast was actually feeling pretty warm from the few days it spent on a delivery truck, despite the fact that I had them add a couple ice packs in with the yeast.  Definitely should have done a starter on this one, but oh well.  After about a day lag, the fermentation kicked in pretty good and had a pretty healthy fermentation.  Another issue with the heat was chilling the wort down.  It’s a lot harder to get the wort down to temperature when the kitchen feels about 100F (it actually probably was up around there – definitely in the 90s I’m guessing).  Heating up a kettle a few times for mash water and sparge water, and doing an hour long boil of three gallons of wort, heats up a kitchen pretty quick.  I had initially intended on doing the pales ales the next day but decided against it since the temperature in the apartment was still recovering from the mass amount of heat I generated the day before. 

I just put this stout into bottles (one Party Pig, and the rest in bottles) this past Sunday.  It did taste pretty delicious from the sample that I took from fermenter.  It definitely had a punch of coffee flavor from the roasted grains but not excessive amounts.  I’m excited to see how it tastes once it is carbonated, but so far, so good.  One regret with this one.  I had originally intended on adding in a couple ounces of cocoa nibs into the Party Pig to impart some chocolate flavor into half the batch.  However, on bottling day, I realized that I forgot to add in the cocoa nibs (or even get them out of storage for that matter) about two seconds after I closed up the Party Pig and activated the pressure pouch.  Wah wah.  Oh well, no big deal. 

A sample of the oatmeal stout before it was bottled.

Where was I to be found this past Saturday?  In my kitchen all day doing my first all-grain batch.  Started off with ten pounds of American 2-row and a half pound of Crystal 60L in the mash tun at about 152F.  After the mash and sparge, I ended up with about six gallons of pale ale wort.  I split this into two three-gallon boils (I ended up draining the mash tun into my bottling bucket to collect the six gallons I needed and then put three gallons into the brew kettle, boiled, chilled, put that batch into the fermenter, then drained the other three gallons into the brew kettle for the second boil since I only have one large brew kettle).  For the first boil I added three additions of Calypso hops (.25oz at 60 minutes, .25oz at 15 minutes, and .5oz at 2 minutes), and for the second boil I added three additions of Sonnet hops (1oz at 60 minutes, .5oz at 15 minutes, and .5oz at 2 minutes).  I am planning on dry hopping each of these with an ounce of each of the respective hops.  I probably won’t bother putting these two through a secondary fermentation since I am looking to get some more beer sooner, rather than later.  Also, the main purpose of these two ales is to showcase the two hops so that I get a better idea of how I want to use these hops in future beers.  I am not too worried if these ales aren’t perfectly clear – John needs to stock his shelves with beer, so he’s not patient enough for a secondary on these two.  :-)  These will probably be bottled in about a week and a half. 

If all goes well over the next few weeks, I should have about three cases of beer and a Party Pig (about the equivalent of a case) ready to drink.  I see some delicious stouts, a couple interesting pale ales, and perhaps a few black and tans in my future.  :-) 

That’s all for now folks, stay frosty.

Song of the Day: “Stand Tall” by the Dirty Heads

Beer of the Day: Iron Hill Media’s Yin Yang

New Maynard!

Big congratulations to my brother Keith and his wife Sueann on the newest addition to their family, Megan Elizabeth!  She was born last night and both Sueann and the baby are healthy!  I'll be cracking open a couple beers tonight to celebrate the newest Maynard! :-)

Song of the Day: "Over the Hills and Far Away" by Led Zeppelin
Beer of the Day: Iron Hill Media's Yin Yang

An Update on Things Non-Beery

The last few weeks have been pretty busy.  Here’s a few of the highlights (excluding brewing activities – another post to follow soon on these).

It has been awhile since I talked about my goals to get back into shape.  To be honest, I fell off that wagon pretty good for a couple months.  While I was still eating decently and maintaining about the same weight, I found that I really wasn’t running or going for hard hikes very often, and as a result, was not really getting in any better shape.  A couple weeks ago I decided to give myself the proverbial kick in the ass and start exercising on a more regular basis.  I still am not in quite as consistent of a routine that I would like, but I have been getting a few runs each of the last couple weeks.  With the summer heat in full swing, I have been trying to get my ass out of bed by 5am at least a few times each week (not fun!) and go for a run.  When I do manage to do this, it has worked out great – I get my exercise done for the day, Abby gets her exercise in before it gets too hot (that little bulldog is not a fan of the heat), and it clears my head and gets me ready for the day.  It really is an invigorating time of day.  There are almost no cars outside, the birds are chirping, and I can often still see the moon out in the sky.  It is a very serene way to start out your day.  Once I smooth out a consistent routine, I will be back in the saddle and on my way to getting back in shape.

I was able to take a couple days off this past weekend to enjoy some time with Theresa and just relax.  This was the first time I have had a chance to take some days completely off from work since January (long overdue).  Theresa and I made our way to Citizens Bank Park to see the Phils play the Giants on Thursday.  The Phillies lost and we got rained on a little bit but we had a lot of fun and had some good seats!



Fun seats in center field!



One of the perks of traveling as much as I was in my old consulting job is that I accumulated a lot of Marriot Reward Points.  These come in handy for last minute plans to go on trips.  The rest of this past weekend turned into one of those situations.  Theresa and I ended up getting a hotel just outside of Atlantic City so that we could go to the Shore to relax, enjoy the beach, and hang out with Theresa’s sister (whose birthday was on Friday – happy birthday Gail!) and some of her other family.  It turned out to be a beautiful weekend and just the relaxation that I needed.  We ended up spending most of our time in a combination of Sea Isle, Avalon, and Ocean City and had a really good weekend! :-)

The last few weeks I have also made an effort to spend a little more time playing video games to catch up on a couple games that I have been meaning to play.  I was finally able to finish off Mass Effect a week and a half or so ago and was very impressed with the game overall.  I loved the RPG balance in the game and loved the story.  Hooked into the story and wanting to play further into the story, I borrowed Mass Effect 2 from my buddy Jim and starting playing it a couple days later.  The second installment is a blast to play but does have some notable differences.  The RPG elements are much lighter in this one (a little too light in my opinion) and the combat seems much faster and forces you to play a bit more aggressively.  I am not far into the game yet so I can’t make a complete judgment on the game but it seems like BioWare has made some noticeable improvements to the series in this installment, as well as some detractions (in my opinion), but overall the game play is very fun and very solid.  The storyline is very well written and addicting so far.  Overall, although I would have liked to see them keep the RPG mechanics closer to the first installment, I am very impressed with this game.  I am trying to get through this one (or at least most of it) prior to October.  Since the end of September will see the release of Gears of War 3 and November will see the release of Halo CE: Anniversary Edition and Modern Warfare 3, the time that I will have for video games this fall, will most likely be spent with these three sequels to three of my favorite game series to date.  More to come on Mass Effect 2 as I get further into the game.

Song of the Day: “Lullaby” by Jack Johnson ft. Matt Costa

Beer of the Day: Yards Brawler

Update: Mash Tun Done

I pulled apart the valve assembly on my mash and switched out a couple seals and put it all back together on Tuesday.  After doing a half-hour leak test, it looks like it is holding a much better seal and I am good to go.  As promised, here are a couple pictures of the finished product.  If all go as planned this weekend, I should be breaking this baby in on Saturday and/or Sunday!

The plastic spigot that was originally on this cooler was replaced with a 3/8" ball valve.

An inside view: I built a little screen filter out of the stainless steel mesh from a washer connector hose.  This should keep the grains out of boil kettle.

Song of the Day: "Good People" by Jack Johnson
Beer of the Day:  Sam Adams Summer Ale

DIY Homebrew Gear Update

Homemade wort chiller and mash tun.  Done and done.  Sort of. 

I spent a decent chunk of my free time this weekend building a couple new additions to my homebrew kit, as I discussed in my last post.  With a shopping list of parts and hardware in hand, I set off to Home Depot to get all the materials I needed.  A couple hours later (it took me forever to find all the stuff I needed and some of the staff their seemed like they were covering areas they don’t normally cover, making it take way longer to find what I needed), I was back in my apartment ready to go. 

The wort (unfermented beer) chiller went pretty smooth.  I ended up getting a 20ft. coil of 3/8” copper to mold into my chiller.  Since the copper came in a nice coil, a lot of the work was done – I only needed to shape it into the size chiller that would fit in my brew kettle.  My 8 qt. stock pot worked like a charm as a nice mold.  After that, all I had to do was bend up the intake and the outtake (so they will be sticking out of the kettle to be able to hook hoses to) to the top of the chiller.  This was where I had to be a little delicate to not kink the piping (which would disrupt water flow through the piping and make the chiller much less efficient) while bending the two ends up.  Since Home Depot did not have the proper size bending tool for me to use (which allow you to bend pipes without kinking), I had to do this by hand.  No worries though, I was able to bend it up fine without kinking the pipe.  After clamping on the hoses and the sink fitting, I was all set to give it a test run.  After a quick leak test and tightening the clamps a bit, I was ready to give it test to see how fast this puppy would cool down a kettle. 

Ready to chill :-)

Fast forward to Sunday.  For the chilling test, I put about three gallons (my normal boil volume) of water into my brew kettle, brought it up to a full boil, then took it off the burner, hooked up the chiller, and started the timer.  This chiller took the boiling water down under 100F in about 10 minutes, which I was very happy about (this will carve a whole lot of time off the ice bath method).  The one tough part was that it only got it down to the mid 70s after 20 or so minutes.  However, after a little investigating, I realized my tap water would only go down to around 74 or 75 this time of the year.  A little problematic if I want to pitch my yeast in the 60s.  Looks like I may have to use an ice bath at the end of the chilling to get it down the last 10 or so degrees.  The other option would be to build a pre-chiller (basically a smaller version of the chiller that you can put in an ice bath that would be upstream from the wort chiller to chill the water further before going into the chiller).  Either way though, this chiller will definitely help me out a lot and cut down the time of my brew day.  The only part I don’t like much is the sink fitting that I used to hook the intake hose up to the sink.  It’s clamped straight to the tubing which makes hooking it up to the sink kind of a pain.  I may end up looking into getting a couple extra pieces that would make this easier but for now I just went with a little bit of a cheaper method.  No biggie though – I can definitely make do with it as is.  Here is the link to the site that I used as my rough design.

One piece of equipment done.  Now, on to the mash tun.  For those unaware, a mash tun is basically a heated or insulated container that you “mash” your malted grains with hot water to extract the fermentable sugars from the grains.  The solution that a lot of homebrewers employ is to convert a water cooler into a mash tun since it is very well insulated.  The basic idea is to swap out the plastic spigot for a ball valve, put a mesh screen or false bottom on the inside opening to keep the grains out of the runnings, and you’re good to go.  Add grain and hot water, let it rest, rinse the grains with more hot water, and you have wort. 

Get home from Home Depot on Saturday.  Take off plastic spigot.  Done.  Start assembling ball valve.  Correctly sized hardware?  No?  Bunk.  Pause until Sunday. 

After going back to Home Depot on Sunday to get the right size washers and o-rings, I was able to finish up the build on the mash tun and do a couple tests.  First test was without the screen on the inside with room temperature water.  Not even a hint of a leak.  Next, I put on the mesh screen I put together from the stainless mesh off of a washing machine connector hose.  Time for a hot water test with the final assembly.  After adding in a couple gallons of hot water into the tun, I noticed a little leaking around the outside of the washer and o-ring on the outside.  Nothing big though – should be easily remedied by either tightening the assembly a bit better (I didn’t have the right size wrench for the ball valve so it is only hand-tightened) or by playing with the o-rings and washers a little bit to get a combo that seals up a little tighter.  Either way, I should be able to fix this up and get a pretty sturdy mash tun for use in all-grain and partial mash batches.  Here is the link to the design that I roughly based my mash tun off of.  They also have a design over there for converting a rectangular cooler into a mash tun.  I'll post a picture of my finished mash tun soon.

I ended up going with a 5 gallon water cooler (which is actually only big enough for enough grain to produce a beer around 6% ABV if you’re doing an all-grain 5 gallon batch of homebrew) for my mash tun due to space, price, and use issues.  No big deal though – since I am still restricted to brewing in my apartment’s kitchen, I will mostly be doing partial mashes and all-grain half batches in this mash tun, giving me plenty of space in this tun.  Occassionally, I will do a full-sized all-grain brew, but this will be pretty rare since I would have to split the wort into two boils since I am brewing on my stove.  In light of this, I am fine with the restrictions of a 5 gallon mash tun for now.  I’ll probably upgrade to a bigger size when I have more space to have a proper all-grain set up.

Song of the Day: “Lay Me Down” by The Dirty Heads (ft. Rome from Sublime with Rome)

Beer of the Day: Sam Adams’ Blackened Hops (Sam Adams Longshot Homebrew Contest Winner) 

Brewing To-Do List

I’m taking a slight break from brewing to regroup, get organized, and plan out some new stuff.  Here’s a peak at what I’ll be working on for the next couple weeks on the brewing front:

New Hops: Sonnet and Calypso

In a stroke of inspiration from Stone Brewery’s blog, I decided to order some new hop varieties a week or so ago to try them out.  Sonnet hops are very new, and don’t even have an official pedigree yet over at Hops Direct.  It sounds like they are similar to a UK Golding and weigh in at around 4% Alpha.  Calypso’s aren’t quite as new but are a new-ish dual-purpose (bittering and aroma) variety of hops that weigh in around 12% Alpha.  Since I ordered from Hops Direct, I had to order in one-pound quantities so I decided to get a pound of each.  I’m pretty excited to try these two varieties out and see what I can do with them.  To start, I am going to do two small batches of standard pale ale with each hop for all additions (i.e. a pale ale with all Calypso and a pale ale with all Sonnet) to get an idea of the flavor and aroma that each impart.  From there, I should be able to tell what styles of beer I want to use the hops in. 

New residents in my freezer: a pound each of Calypso and Sonnet Hops

DIY Homebrew Equipment: Wort Chiller

One of the pieces of equipment that has been towards the top of my wish list for quite some time now is a wort chiller.  A wort chiller will help cool my wort much more efficiently than the ice bath method I have been using and will help clear up my beer also.  From what I hear, once I have a wort chiller, I should be able to substantially reduce the amount of time it takes to reduce the temperature from boiling to around the mid-60s (depending on the yeast strain) in order to pitch the yeast at the most optimum temperature.  Instead of shelling out the money to buy a pre-made chiller, I am looking into embracing the DIY nature of homebrewing and making my own chiller out of copper tubing.  This may be a project for this coming weekend. :-)

DIY Homebrew Equipment: 5 Gallon Cooler Mash Tun

Since I have been doing primarily extract batches (due to space constraints) until now, I have never really had a need for a separate mash tun.  However, I am seriously considering getting one because I have been doing more partial-mash batches (which still uses malt extract but does a mash on up to 5lb. of grain in the boil kettle) and I would like to start doing all-grain half-batches (or even full batches split into two boils).  The way I figure it, since I can pretty comfortably do a 3-gallon boil in my kettle, there is nothing to stop me from doing an all-grain batch that will yield 2.5 gallons or so (about a case of beer) of finished beer.  This will allow me to practice full mashing techniques and allow me to have more control over my beer.  However, in order for me to do this, I will need a mash tun that is better insulated and has a larger capacity than my kettle.  This will allow me to do all-grain half batches, as well as, more accurate mashes when doing partial-mash batches.  Once again embracing the homebrewing DIY spirit, I am looking into building my own mash tun, using a 5 gallon water cooler and some hardware to assemble a screen filter and valve. 

Next Full Batch: Fork ‘N Knife Oatmeal Stout

I’m also pretty excited for my next 5-gallon batch that I will probably be doing in the next couple months.  Looking back through my brew log, I realized the other day that I had not brewed a stout yet.  I was taken aback by this quite a bit since this is one of my favorite styles of beer.  Taking on the challenge to add an oatmeal stout into my annual rotation, I wrote up a partial-mash recipe to have a delicious, low-alcohol stout to enjoy on its own, or in black and tans.  Can’t wait to try this one out!

Online Recipes

As some of you may or may not have noticed, there’s a couple new tabs at the top of this page which I have added some homebrewing info to.  To start, I have added a tab for my own homebrewery (Black Walnut) and the collaboration homebrewery (Two Guys and a Barrel) that I do with my buddy Keith.  The main purpose of these tabs is to act as a mechanism for me to post my homebrew recipes online so that you fine people can use them to your hearts’ content.  The idea will be to post some notes about what worked well for each recipe, as well as what didn’t, so that others can benefit from my experiences.  I’m not exactly what you would call an expert brewer (in fact, I’m still a bit of a newbie), but I am hoping that my experiences will benefit other like-minded brewers.  As you can tell by looking at these pages, they’re a bit sparse at this point but I will be posting recipes up there very shortly.  These pages are static but I will be updating them periodically with new recipes, notes, tips, tricks, and other goodies, so check back once in awhile.  There will probably be a few more tabs to come also. 

Label Art

Like most other homebrewers, I don’t add colorful, ornate labels to my bottles that get tossed into my fridge at home; a simple numbered sticker slapped on the cap does the trick just fine for my purposes.  The reason for this is simple – I’m the one who has to de-label the empties prior to sanitizing and filling the bottles for the next batch of beer.  This is typically more hassle than it’s worth for beer that I drink at home.  However, I would like to start developing label designs for some of my beers that will be seeing their way into my regular rotation, as well as special beers that I give away as gifts around the holidays, etc.  I also think it would be fun to get some solid logos for my beers to add some depth to the story and meaning of these beers to me.  I have already been working with Theresa’s brother Harry to design a brewery logo (which is already looking pretty sweet after only a couple passes) and will be looking to do label designs for specific beers in the next few months.  Let’s be honest, I’m not exactly the best graphic designer.  In light of this, I will be looking to work with other, more artistic folks on these label designs.  More to come on this, but if you are fairly artistic and are interested in collaborating on labels for my beers, let me know (primarily looking for those of you interested in accepting homebrew as currency :-P)!

Homebrewery Organization

Each time I add a new piece of kit to my homebrewery, images of hoarders with stuff piled floor to ceiling flash through my head.  Ok, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the back corner of my second bedroom where I stash all of my gear, fermenters, and bottles is starting to get a bit cramped.  As a homebrewer living in an apartment, my biggest constraint to space.  This break from brewing will give me an opportunity to re-organize my gear a bit and figure out some ways to store everything a little more efficiently.  It will also give me a chance to do some other odds and ends while I have everything out, such as de-label some empties so that they are ready the next time I bottle.  This is by no means a fun task, but it is a necessary evil for any homebrewer that bottles using empties that once contained commercial brews.  All this organizing should make the next few brews go a bit smoother. 

Alright, less typing, more doing.  Until next time, cheers!

Song of the Day: “Rascal King” by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Beer of the Day: Stone Brewery’s Imperial Russian Stout