Back on the 5th, I brewed two beers using some of my new equipment. Joining me was my boss, Eric, who is interested in getting started in homebrewing, and my father, Curt, who has helped out on at least a third of my batches.

Our first beer was an All-Grain Rye IPA, based on Denny Conn’s Rye IPA, which I brewed last year, with some changes to increase the hoppyness. Last year I dubbed this one Jack the RIPA, and I think it will keep that name. I quite liked it last time, and I plan to keep brewing this every 2nd or 3rd batch so that I have a good recipe to iterate on.

My basic recipie was as follows:

• 12lb US 2-Row
• 3lb Rye Malt
• 12oz Caramel 60L
• 8oz Carapils
• 8oz White Wheat
• 4oz Caramel 40L
• 1oz Newport (9.3AA) First Wort Hopped
• 1oz Columbus (14.5AA) 60 Min
• 1oz Mt Hood (5.2AA) 30 Min
• 3oz Amarillo in Hop Back
• 1oz Columbus Dry-Hopped
• 1oz Amarillo Dry-Hopped
• Mash at 153°F for 60 minutes
• Boil for 70 minutes
• Use a large starter of WLP051-California Ale V, and ferment cool, ~66°F.

This should result in a beer with an Original Gravity of 1.075 and Final Gravity of 1.020 with around 7.5% ABV, if we presume 70% efficiency, and around ~100-110 IBUs.

How did it go? Well, I had several major issues. First, I missed my mash in temperature by about 4°F too low, and had to greatly increase the amount of water in the mash. I think I need better compensate for my larger cooler, and winter temperatures of my ingredients. The pump was great for getting hot water safely to the Mash Lauter Tun and Hot Liquor Tank. Once I had 7 gallons collected, I added hops and started boiling. When I got near the end of the boil, I hooked the pump up in a loop and recirculated boiling wort through it to sanitize the pump. I filled by sanitized hopback with whole leaf hops, and hooked it up when the boil time was up. I used the hopback with an immersion chiller, so i recirculated the wort through the hopback and onto the cooling coils. It seemed to work great for the first 3-5 minutes, but then Curt noticed nothing was coming out of the pump.

We deduced something was wrong with the hopback. After tinkering with the flow and tubing, we disassembled the hopback. It appears that the hopback, which is supposed to work as a filter, worked too well, and had caught all 3oz of pellet hops inside the whole leaf hops, and jammed up. In the future, I will need to bag the pellet hops, or perhaps just run the pump more gently, to not compact the hops.

After the beer was cooled, and being moved to the fermenter (again using the pump, which made things much easier), we took a gravity reading. We got only 1.064 as the original gravity, or a whole 11 gravity points under the target, and giving a mash efficiency of only 63%. I think several things may have gone wrong here. My first, and greatest suspect, is my grind from my grain mill, as I discovered with the next batch that one of the rollers was gummed up. Also, missing my target mash temperature, although I got it corrected quickly, probably decreased the efficacy of the sparging. Also, I should have taken the gravity before the boil, as if I had known earlier, I could have boiled for longer to concentrate the wort, or added some malt extract or sugars.

Photo of my brew day setup. The orange cooler is the HLT, the white cooler is the MLT, the Brew Kettle is a 10 gallon Blichmann, and the march pump is connecting all of them. Here I am recirculating the mash to clarify the wort.

The second batch was an extract with grains recipe of Southern English Brown Ale, based on the recipe in Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. I did this recipe for two reasons: One, there are no good commercial examples in the US, so I needed to brew it to try it, and two, I had 5lb of Liquid Malt Extract lying around that I needed to use, and that is what the recipe used. Also, it would a quick counterpoint to Eric about the complexities of all grain brewing, and I could use dry yeast, to keep things cheap and simple.

The Southern English Brown Ale seemed to go off without a hitch, except for the aforementioned roller jamming up on the grain mill. But we got that fixed by scraping malt dust off the edge of the free roller (only one of the two is motor driven). We hit our gravity target by 1 point, and got it fermenting right away.

I used a March 809-HS that I got for Christmas (the new variant, as sold at MoreBeer) from my wife (isn’t it great having someone who supports (or some might say, enables) your hobbies!). This pump is food safe even at boiling temperatures, and with a magnetic impeller, so that the motor does not touch the beer.  I ran a short length of silicone tubing (safe to 500°F) out from the brew kettle to the pump, and attached a 1/2″ stainless ball valve on the outlet of the pump. From here, I had a clover sanitary fitting that I could attach to a hopback or directly to more tubing.

You place the valve on the outlet of the pump to safely control the speed of the beer, without running the pump dry. The liquid is used as the bearing, if you will, in this design of pump, and you don’t want to run it dry, which you might if you were to restrict the inlet. By restricting the output, the magnetic impeller will just spin freely, with no danger of running the pump dry.

The pump made transferring hot water from the stove near the ground up to the mash tun 4 feet up, and to the hot liquor tank 7 feet up much safer, with no risky lifting of hot water. I was able to pump at least a gallon or two per minute up 7′ of gravity, and much faster at lower heights.

I attempted to use the pump to recirculate the runoff from the mash tun to clear it up, and it seemed to have no issue with the grain. However, it was hard to slow the pump down enough so that it did not kick up the grain bed. I think I need some sort of defuser to reduce the turbulence.

I wanted to use the pump to drain the brew kettle to the fermenter. To do this, it is considered safest to run the pump in a loop while the wort is boiling, to sanitize the pump and all of the tubing. I did this, and then took advantage of this recirculation to try out my Blichmann Hop Rocket hop back. I had some troubles there, which I will detail in a later post. I also used the recirculation to help chill the beer (per Zainasheff at Mr. Malty). I need to do some good A-B comparisons there. I think doing this reduces settling of cold break and hops, and could use some time to just sit after chilling.

Using the pump to transfer to from the kettle to the fermenter is so much easier. No more lifting the pot full of wort (60+ lbs) onto the table to slowly let gravity flow into the fermenter. But I needed to keep the rate under control to not suck up all the debris.

The major problem I had several times, was needing to purge the pump of air. If there was air in the tubing, the pump seemed to suck it right up. It required pulsing the pump on and off, and lifting the pump and twisting the tubing around to get the bubbles out. I plan to try and add a purge valve to the pump, but placing a T-fitting between the pump and ball valve, with another valve coming out the top, just to get rid of air.

Another issue, although more minor (Except when dealing with the hopback, see later posts), was switching what was connected to the pump, without leaking wort everywhere. I think I will just work over a bucket, when I need to.

In addition, I wish it were easier to turn the pump on and off in my setup. Although I intend to computer control it, I would like to get a foot switch override or some such, so that I can turn it off quickly when it runs dry. I had to flick the switch on the powerstrip, or more importantly, yell for one the folk who were giving me a great hand to shut it off. Adjusting the flow via the ball valve, and the on-off, all by myself, would have been challenging.

Well, that one topic ended up being longer than I expected. I guess I have plenty to talk about with homebrewing!

In addtion, this weekend will feature my first use of a pump (march pump), clover sanitary fittings, and hopback (blichman hop rocket) in brewing. I will post later feedback about these new tools, along with my attempts to build my own temperature controller from scratch.

After these two batches of beer, next up is a Bohemian Pilsner, also based on a Brewing Classic Styles recipe. This will be my first true lager, testing my temperature control abilities.

While I enjoy Double Bastard, I find that the balance is thrown off, as the ratio of Hop Bitterness (IBUs) to Alcohol breaks down, as there is a saturation limit of IBUs at around 100. Although Stone lists the IBUs as “classified” for all Bastards, I would guess that Arrogant Bastard is near the limit of 100 already. When you up the ABV from 7.2% to 11.2%, the sweetness and residual sugars increase, but the hops cannot increase enough to match, thereby throwing off the profile of Arrogant Bastard. I may write more about these ratios in the future.

As for the Lukcy Basatrd in question, I find it to bring all three of these beers together in a quite enjoyable way, that smoothes over their flaws. The oak becomes a light hint of complexity, like I might expect in a Firestone Walker beer brewing in their oak fermenter, or like an cask-aged British Strong Ale. The fruitier notes from the Double Bastard (most likely caused by the strain on the yeast at higher alcohol levels) bring more fermentation notes, while both versions of Arrogant Bastard ironically lower the alcohol to 8.5%, keeping the malt and hops in (extreme) balance. I find this to be a very enjoyable beer, but at over double the price for a 22oz compared to “normal” Arrogant Bastard, I might not pick up too many of them. However, do it soon, as they have only made one batch so far.

On a second tasting, when drinking about 8 oz, I found it to be more enjoyable, with better balance, and the hop character is really nice. So, share a bottle with friends, as I did for the 2nd one. But I think others have this category better sewn up, and I hope Sierra Nevada Brewing can iterate on this, and balance it a bit better next year, or just sell it in smaller bottles (like they do for Bigfoot Barleywine).