Any Home-brewers?

[Forever Spinning Vinyl]

(01-24-2021, 03:08 PM)MileHighGrowler Wrote: Using a little irish moss and doing a cold crash before kegging I've never had an issue with clarity on the beers that need it (Vienna lager, for example).  But the wheat beers and hazy IPAs are wonderful to not even have to give it a thought.  

Funny you mention gravity checks.  I like to check mine when I brew a new beer, to see how the recipe might need some tweaking or to check efficiency with a process mod.  But if I brew it twice and the OG comes out the same, I rarely check it again if I keep brewing it.  When I was doing extract it was outrageously consistent from one batch to the next no matter what.  When I switched to all grain it's a little more fickle, because the moisture content in the grain can vary, the age can make a difference, etc.  And when I moved to 6,000 feet elevation after living at sea level, that made a big change to my processes as well, because the boil point is lower, so it changed the hop utilization and boil-off levels.  I've been in Colorado for 5 years now, though, so I've gotten consistency back and all of my old recipes updated. 

I've gone back and forth over the years with big beers and small beers.  When I started, I know it was the "cool" thing for a while to see how big you could brew beers.  I wanted to buck that and make session beers with the same level of flavor.  So I was doing stouts, IPAs, etc and keeping all of them between 4.5 - 5.5%.  People could come to the house, sample everything I had on tap and still drive home after.  Then I spent some time learning higher gravity beers.  I don't brew them super often, but I've a russian imperial stout I brew which clocks in at 12.8% that I do different things with (I've done maple coffee and coconut bourbon - the maple is VERY much on point to Bell's Canadian Breakfast Stout), and I've done triple IPAs and some Belgians that over 13%.  

I've cut back considerably on my alcohol consumption lately so I'm not brewing every few weeks like I was.  Maybe a few times a year now.  But I love brewing with the seasons, or for events.  I just like having total control over what I'm drinking.

I have some Irish Moss concentrated into powder and some actual Irish Moss that you need to "activate" before tossing into your brew, but, since most of my brews are Hefeweizens, I rarely need it. We're close to the ocean so elevation has never been needed to factor into my brewing. Interesting problem to adjust to. I'll mention it to my mentors the next time I talk to them.

I've never liked the stronger flavored beers. Outside of a couple of local IPAs that don't try to show off how much they can over hop their beers, I don't touch them. Almost all of the West Coast breweries over hop all of their beers. I never noticed it until I came back from 20 days in Germany and ordered up a local Pilsner that I had loved for years. Took one drink "Yech! Is this a specialty brew?" Later, when I got back into brewing, I cut every recipe's hop suggestions in half and have really enjoyed the results. When I make a batch ordered up by friends, I explain everything to them followed by "Do you want what the recipe asks for or do you want what I brew?"

If you are ever in Anchorage, King Street Brewing Company is the best brewery at staying close to the original recipes. The rest are too extreme for my tastes. One of the KSBC owners commented "Let's have a contest and someone can squeeze out every last drop of hops into a glass, serve it up, declare 'I win' . . . and then can we get back to normalcy?" The other owner worked as an assistant brewer at a brewery in the Czech Republic for 2 and a half years. One of the few breweries with a Pilsner as a regular beer . . . Needless to say, they've received a lot of my money over the years.

The only reason I brewed up a Brown Ale yesterday was because I bought a kit from somebody and he had a pre-hopped Brown Ale in a 3.75 lb can so I added a small container of Pale malt(about 2.5 lb) and no hops to balance it out (far left in the pic). It's the darkest beer that I've ever brewed and it will probably stay that way. Not a fan of Porters or Stouts but do make the occasional Dunkelweizen mostly out of boredom and when I've already re-used a Bavarian yeast cake several times. 



BTW . . . never throw away yeast when you are done. It is OUTSTANDING plant food. Pour it into a container, fill it up with water, stir it up well and pour it into house plants in the Winter, garden in the Summer. A friend asks me to bring some over every Spring and he strings out his badminton court in his back yard. We pour it along the string, remove the string and for the rest of our short summers, the grass along the line is greener than the rest of his yard and it ends arguments with his kids on "In or Out". I found out the greener grass trick completely by accident. I had heard that some home brewers used it as plant food, poured out some in my yard and had an erratic spiral pattern in my yard that was darker for the rest of the Summer.