Adam Jackson

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This beer was brewed last month and received 10 days of dry hopping followed by an extensive 3 day cold crashing at 38 degrees. I kegged this and allowed to carbonate slowly (no keg agitation / shaking) over the course of 4 days at 20PSI. The smell is better than the taste but overall, this beer came out very nice!

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I finally got around to tapping my stout again. The beer brewed in late November, kegged late December with an infusion of bourbon soaked oak and vanilla beans for 2 weeks and then I realized it was entirely too oaky so I decided to just let it sit for a while. 

It’s tasting really fantastic. The sweetness is more pronounced and the oak is fading which is a very good thing. While it’s not yet perfect, the photos do show a beer that at least looks appealing. I’m very happy with how this has come out but am putting the keg back in the cellar to sit a little bit longer. 

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I repeatedly tell friends that I’m a shitty brewer, an amateur brewer and someone who’s just starting out. Simply because my hoppy beer is hoppy and drinkable with minimal hops floating around in the keg, doesn’t mean I should go and open my own brewery. To the sort of people who read this blog, that’s obvious. A lot of idiots brew beer but only a small percentage should actually brew professionally.

I get by.

My equipment is usually clean enough, I am not too picky with how clean my equipment is and I don’t label things well enough to split up the wild yeast equipment with non-wild. I haven’t had any infections until just recently but that was probably my fault. Okay, it was definitely my fault. What happens when you ferment a saison in a carboy that previously held a sour beer that was not cleaned properly? The answer is pretty simple.

I generally ignore the instructions that say I should add fruit to the secondary fermenter…nah, I put everything in right before pitching the yeast, blueberries and all. I ferment too low or too high, I don’t filter the beers when siphoning to the kegs and I clean my draft lines every 6 months.

I’m a terrible home brewer.

But, when someone comes over and likes whatever hoppy beer I threw together that should have been 8% but is now hovering at 11% (or 5%) depending on how efficient I was on brew day, they utter the words that I should start a brewery. How wrong they are.

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Yesterday, I took all of my kegs out of the kegerator which takes a lot of work and I hate my kegerator setup. It’s a very tight fit in there and I got out the Blichman Beer Gun and prepared to pressure fill a few 1 Litre swing tops to send some beer to friends who have been asking for it. I repeatedly tell people on Untappd my beer isn’t worth the cost of shipping but they insist and the guy who gave me the Maple Sap I promised a few litres of as well so anyway, typical day of 1 hour of prep where I sanitized the bottles and chilled them, hooked up all of the hoses, cleaned a work space off in the cramped kitchen and prepared to fill some swing-tops.

Foam, foam foam.

Usually, the blichmann does a great job but it turns out all of the kegs were over carbonated at around 12 PSI. I forgot to turn down the regulator once the beers were all carbed up and now I was pouring foam out of the beer gun despite a 2PSI pressure on the tank and a 10 foot long 5/16″ tube. The result, by the time I filled 1 growler of my insanely expensive and time costly Imperial Stout, I had wasted close to a gallon filling 1 litre of beer. and it was flat. I drain poured the growler this morning upon realizing that.

Overall, I went through a gallon out of each of my kegs trying to fill 1 litre each to send to people..all of it was flat and the process of getting the kegs back in the kegerator and hooked up took another 30 minutes.

I spent a lot of time yesterday for nothing and I’m pretty pissed off about it.

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This is how it goes though. After only brewing beer for 11 months, I’m still very new at this. I’ve had good luck with hoppy beers, and okay luck with wild ales. My 3rd stout tastes pretty damn good but it was a $50 grain bill, + $20 in vanilla beans + $30 in bourbon and it has had to sit for 4 months so the oakiness from those spirals subsided so overall, it’s drinkable but nothing fantastic. The $80 in Blueberries I added to this saison was a waste because now I have this tannic shitty mud water because I suck at filtering out yeast cake when kegging.

Overall, I think it’s a good idea to remain well-aware that I’m a shitty beer brewer and keep pushing myself to do better which means spending more time and money on the practices of beer brewing and less time on trading, rating and attending events. I’ll still do that stuff but I really want to become a great brewer. I want to be REALLY good and make exceptional drinkable beers that I choose over commercial beers and I’m not going to do that with fancy bourbon, vanilla beans and blueberries. The only way I’m gonna do that is to go back to basics and brew a simple porter, a simple stout, a very basic saison and then increase the skills from there. A saison without fruit is boring but a saison with fruit that was brewed haphazardly with $80 in blueberries is even worse because I wasted time and money on a beer that’s not even drinkable.

I’m writing this not for the reader but for myself so hopefully I can look back in a year and feel proud that I wrote this and said out loud that I need to seriously work on my skills and remain humble that I’m a shitty brewer and need to make improvements or else I’m going to keep wasting time and money brewing shitty beers that just get bored out into the back yard. I’m tired of doing that. and I’m going to aim to do better.

More reading, more time on sanitization and more time spent designing the beers I plan on brewing and not just brewing because it’s Saturday and I have nothing else to do.

I appreciate everyone who has read this blog and enjoyed my successes and my failures as a brewer but I think we all know I need more work so I’m promising myself that I’m going to do better and be better and strive to be great.

Thanks for reading.

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I now have seven corny kegs which is fantastic for some beers that I want to get out of carboys and carbonated to make things easier to tap. By Sunday, all of them will be full of fermented beer!

(sorry for the absolutely terrible iPhone photos)

As a follow up to my post a few hours ago, I decided with the help of Alan (a reader of this blog) to go ahead and keg both saisons. The sour saison at 1.028 gravity is only going to get more sour and the blueberry at 1.001 isn’t going to do much more so if I want more sweetness, I could add some DME up to 1.010 or just add some blueberry extract to sweeten things up but I’m going to do neither and just keg it. I also did a test today of the 3% Maple Sap beer that will receive some Apple-Flavored Extract in the keg. It took 7 days to completely ferment down to expected FG so I’m cold crashing that as well and will keg all of these on Sunday.

For now, cooling down these beers to legging / yeast cake temp requires fully emptying out my kegerator. I think this summer I will get a keezer to make things much easier so I can have beers on tap and another fridge for storage / fermentation. Will make things easier. Also, on days I pickup a lot of growlers, Elizabeth will be happy if those growlers are stored anywhere but our main fridge which is almost always full of food .

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Tomorrow is Lawson’s 5th anniversary with a few events planned

• Tonight: Prohibiton Pig has Double Sunshine on Cask and Lawson’s amazing “Toast” black IPA….one of the best black IPAs I’ve ever had. Also, HFS Double Citra / Friendship & Reunion on tap. You should get there! They’re giving out a Lawson’s “beer lover’s ball” ticket at 10PM
• Tomorrow:
  • AM: Worthy Burger Double Sunshine Breakfast
  • Noon: Lawson’s Farmers Market with special vendors and special bottles for sale
  • Evening: Ticketed event, beer lover’s ball with Mad Taco serving up awesome burritos, live music and special beer pours. I’m looking forward mostly to Farmhouse Rye 2009…great beer that I wish I had bought more of over the summer when it was on sale.

Everyone have a great weekend and thanks for reading.

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Truthfully, I need a pro to sample these for me.

The one on the left is the result of completely overshooting my grain bill and, when I took the original gravity reading on brew-day in January, BeerSmith told me I’d probably end up with a 13% Saison (Wyeast French Saison + Brettanomyces Lambicus). It’s been 3 months since brew day, the beer is very sour, hints of peach, clove and lemon zest and the gravity is currently 1.028 @ 60F and it’s still bubbling once every 60 seconds.

On the right is another saison that received some Hill Farmstead Arthur Dregs as well as Brettanoymces C..I think I don’t have my laptop with me so I can’t check BeerSmith to see exactly what’s in there. The Estimated ABV should be around 7% and the current gravity reading is 1.001 @ 60F. It received 8 pounds of blueberries on the same day I pitched the yeast and the blueberry earthiness dominates. There’s very little sweet or sour and quite a bit of horse blanket funk.

So, I’m at the point where the one on the left tastes perfect to me, no astringency, no vinegar and enough sweetness to be a nice beer as things warm up. The blueberry beer is too earthy almost like wood when you drink it. Do I just keg these now or wait longer? I don’t want to make the mistake of the Berliner Weisse and let it get too sour.

Thoughts?

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Monday, I bought a wort chiller. The simple copper tubing that is placed into a brew kettle, using water from the tap, you cool wort down from boiling temperature to a temp suitable for yeast pitching much faster than alternative methods. Last summer, when I started brewing, I did the ice-bath method but I also had a very large deep sink back then and an insane ice maker so it would cool the wort below 100 F in about 25 minutes. When winter hit, I started cooling wort outside by putting the kettle on top of snow banks and it would melt through them and this worked very well but cooling took about an hour.

One thing that kept me from making the purchase was not having the right connections. My cabin and the new house don’t have outdoor water hose hookups…yes, it’s insane. Inside, the kitchen was a retractable nozzle without the garden hose hookup required for the wort chiller. After a trip to home depot, I found that my bathroom sink has a piece that can be removed and, with an adapter, I can now hookup the wort chiller (garden hose) to the sink. Thank goodness.

On Monday night, I brewed a Kern River Double Citra clone with the addition of some tangerine juice / zest and, following flameout, hooked up the wort chiller. It took only 10 minutes for the wort to drop to 100 and an additional 5 minutes to get to 80F.

WOW

I’m really happy with how fast things chilled and it simplified the brew day quite a bit. I think overall, things are pretty setup now at home where I can brew almost anything I want and get it boiled, fermenting and into the keg quite easily. There are a few purchases that I’d like to make in 2013.

• Three-Tier System so I can have sparge water heated and utilize a pump for sparging. It’ll make things easier and I can use gas instead of propane so heating things up will be much easier.
• Larger brew-kettle…my current 7 gallon kettle is tight when I’m doing full boil brews. I have to kill the propane to my kettle with every single hop addition which takes time and a bit more stress
• A keezer w/ temperature controller. I’d like a place to do lagering as well as overall control over fermentation temps. This can also be used to keep carbonated kegs at serving temperature. Summer time means more parties at my place and, when a keg kicks, I have nothing to replace it with since all kegs in the cellar are around 60F which means at least 24 hours before I can serve them. Keezer can also be used to cold crash beers before kegging.
• Additional CO2 regulator to carbonate kegs in the keezer.
• Possibly an additional kegerator. I have 4 beers on tap now….but I almost always need more taps. The GF likes to have Root Beer or Cream Soda on tap as well as a Saison or Hefeweizen so that’s 2-3 taps right there. Then I have 2 IPAs and then something bigger like a stout or barley wine for myself so now we’re at 6 taps. I have 4 beers on tap now with 3 in kegs and 4 fermenting and I get bugged daily by Elizabeth to make more root beer which I currently don’t have any room for so it’s certainly something that would be nice (an additional 4 beers on tap) but another fridge, hoses, shanks, faucets, CO2 tank, regulator, it’s a lot of work so probably won’t happen this year.

It would be really nice to get a couple of 10 gallon conical fermenters but I think that’s an entirely other level of brewing where that would require I do some electric temp controls, better brew kettles w/ temp gauges as well as a commercial sink for cleaning things. So overall, stainless fancy stuff is probably going to wait a while or at least until i’m a homeowner.