New Beginnings: Bitter Barley Blog

Hello! I have some exciting news to share regarding a big transition from this old brewbunny blog to our new blog, Bitter Barley.

I’ve been brewing on my own for about six years now. Last year my life was changed when I met a fellow homebrewer who would turn out to become much more than that. In addition to being a partner in life, he is also a partner in brewing.

As a result, I am transitioning from this solo blog to our new joint blog: Bitter Barley. This new blog will follow the same narrative style as brewbunny, but will detail our collaborative brewing enterprises. If you currently follow brewbunny, please subscribe to the new Bitter Barley blog so that you can remain updated on our brewing progress! The brewbunny blog will remain active for reference of old recipes and blog posts, but I will not be adding any new posts here.

Happy brewing! Brew Bunny signing off =)

Baker’s Bitter ESB – brewed 4/13

Hi! About a week ago, I made one of my very favorite styles of beer: a solid ESB. I had been craving a good ESB, and was kicking myself for not having any ESB homebrew in the house. On a side note – if you’re into sessions and bitters and you’re in the SF Bay Area, I sure hope you’ve been to Magnolia. If you haven’t, go there! Like tomorrow!

Anyways, back to the homebrew. I made up a new recipe for this batch. I wanted to make something that was very toasty and malt-centric, while still being fairly dry and slightly bitter. I was going for a balanced session – hope I puled it off! As always, you can find the recipe under Baker’s Bitter ESB on my Recipes page.

No super notable or crazy things to discuss with the brewing of this beer. I made a 2 quart starter of Safale S-04 to make sure that I would get a nice dry session-y beer (I was aiming for a FG of close to 1.012). I mashed at 155 for one hour. Pre-boil gravity was 1.042. Post-boil gravity was 1.066 (too high!). I added one full gallon (yikes, that’s a lot!) of water to the cooled wort, which brought my gravity to 1.056 (right on the nose for the style).

Fermentation took off beautifull – nice and slow at exactly 68 degrees, with about two to three inches of steady krausen… until… the heatwave struck! I woke up three days into fermentation and the internal temperature of the carboy was at 78! Disaster!! Esters, acetaldehyde, damaged beer! I soaked a t-shirt in water, put it on the carboy, and put the whole thing outside in the breeze. Within twenty minutes, the temperature was down to 64. I moved the carboy to the coolest spot in my apartment, and there it sits still. I’m planning to leave the beer on the yeast in primary for an extra two weeks to see if it can clean up any off flavors that may have developed. Talk about beer first-aid emergency!

Two days ago (4/20) gravity was 1.012! Nice. The beer tasted toasty and dry. Perfect! I didn’t detect off flavors, but those can definitely magnify in bottle if they are even slightly present now. I’m going to leave, it just to be safe. Can’t wait until it’s carbonated =)

Now here’s a fun side-project that I had never done before this beer. I took some of the spent grain after mashing and baked ESB bread, hence the name of this beer, Baker’s Bitter ESB! Even though I used white flour for the majority of the bread, the spent grain made it taste almost like wheat. Delicious! I followed this recipe to a T, and had no problems creating three delicious loaves of fresh spent grain bread. Yum! I just wish my ESB was done so that I had something to wash it down with =)

Close But No Cigar Cucumber Saison Wrap-up: We Won!!

Hello! I apologize for the extended hiatus. Things have been a bit crazy, but don’t worry – the brewing has not stopped! First, though, I want to tell you about my VERY FIRST HOMEBREWING RIBBON EVER! Yep, it’s true! My New Years resolution this year was to win a homebrewing competition. Dave C. and I entered our cucumber saison (Close But No Cigar, inspired by Cigar City’s cucumber saison). I know, it’s not completely my ribbon, but I’m still going to count it as a resolution fulfilled! Of the 26 entries for BJCP Category 21 (Spice/Herb/Vegetable Beer) at the World Cup of Beer (held at Linden Street Brewery in Oakland, CA), we took first place! Unfortunately, even though this competition was an MCAB qualifying event (i.e., first place in any category gets a chance to compete in the MCAB), Category 21 is excluded from advancing to this competition due to the already massive volume of entries from more common categories. Oh well – I’m still stoked on my ribbon!!!

Update: Bottled Beagle Mild on 2/28

Quick update on the Mild. We bottled this beer on Thursday night. It tasted very toasty and light – just what we were going for. We ended up having about 2.5 gallons of beer – I primed with a quarter cup of corn sugar. Should be ready to drink in a couple weeks!

FG was 1.008, ABV=3.5%

Update: Dry-Hopped IIPA on 2/28

Hello! Just a quick update about Billy’s Revenge IIPA. On Thursday (2/28), we racked the beer into secondary and dry hopped with 1 oz Columbus and 3 oz Falconer’s Flight. I’m going out of town for a week and a half pretty soon, so this will end up being dry hopped for about two weeks.

FG was 1.010, ABV=8.66%. =)

Waste not want not – Mild from Second Runnings 2/17/13

Hello =)

This post is sort of a continuation of the IIPA brew day. After we had collected 6.5 gallons from sparging the IIPA grains, the runnings coming off of the grain had a gravity of around 1.050. We decided to just run all of the liquid out of the mash tun to see what we could get out of it, and ended up with about 2.5 gallons of wort with a gravity of 1.040. Sooo… we made a little stovetop mild! No recipe for this one, just sort of winged it.

To darken and flavor this little mini-batch up a bit, we steeped 0.5 lb of special B and 0.5 lb of victory in the wort at about 140 degrees for about half an hour, and “sparged” this by pouring a couple cups of hot water over our little tea bags of grain.

We hopped with .75oz Fuggle (4.2%AA) at 60 and .25oz Fuggle at off. We added water to bring the beer down to a more appropriate OG for a mild, and hit 1.035.

Since this brew day also happened to be barleywine bottling day, we racked this wort right onto the small bit of yeast cake left in the barleywine’s secondary carboy, hoping this would be enough.

Well, after a couple of days of no action in the carboy, we decided to take some action ourselves. We moved a bit of the yeast cake from the actively fermenting IIPA into the mild. Over the next few days I observed some odd fermentation. First, there was some very gentle fermentation with about a half inch of krausen (assuming this was the US-05 from the barleywine). Soon after, there were odd large breaks in the krausen that I hadn’t seen before. The next day, we had vigorous fermentation rolling in the true form of WL001.

Hope this frankenstein beer turns out to be a tasty one!

IIPA Brew Day – 2/15/13

Hi! Second catch-up post of the night: IIPA! It’s been absolutely ages since I made a good ol’ California IIPA – you know the kind, hoppy and strong as hell with no apologies. You can find the recipe for this on my Recipes page, under Billy’s Revenge IIPA. Brew buddy for this was Dave C.

Altogether, we will use 13 ounces of hops in this 5 gallon batch of beer. Wow. That gives us a grand total of 143 IBUs! This is going to be one bitter beer.

We mashed on the low side at 149 for an hour. The goal is to have a crisp light-bodied beer with this one. Before mashing in, we added 3 teaspoons of gypsum to the mash water. This adjusted the water composition to approximately 300ppm of SO4, which should accentuate the hop flavor. This is my first time playing with SO4 concentration, so we’ll see how this goes.

Another first for me this batch was first wort hopping (FWH). By allowing wort to run out of the mash tun onto some hops, over the course of the sparge aromatic compounds that would normally volatilize during the boil have a chance to gently break down and incorporate into the wort, which allows these aromatics to remain in the beer more effectively. These volatile compounds usually may only remain in the beer if the hops are added for finishing, essentially at off. We decided to FWH and finish with the same hop (Amarillo) to try to capture the full aromatic profile of this hop.

Everything else went as per usual with this batch. OG was 1.074. I’m planning to rack to secondary and dry-hop after a couple of weeks of primary. Updates to come!

Oh yeah, we were visited by a MASSIVE flock of the famed Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill during this brew day! I think they liked the smell of the mashing grain almost as much as we did =)

FiftyFifty Totality Clone – Brewed 2/2/13

Hello! I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last post. We definitely have some things to catch up on…

First and foremost, on 2/2 I assisted brew buddy Dave C. with brewing a ten gallon batch of a clone of FiftyFifty Brewing’s Totality Imperial Stout, the base stout for their barrel aged Eclipse series. The plan is to age this stout in a 10 gallon small batch Hudson Rye whiskey barrel after it’s done fermenting.

Because this is a clone recipe that Dave received from the folks at FiftyFifty, I am not able to put the recipe on my blog for obvious reasons.

This is a pretty big stout. We mashed the 34.8 lbs (!!) of grain at 156 degrees for 90 minutes (shown on the left). We had to scale down our mash thickness to 1.25 qts of water per pound of grain to make sure everything would fit in Dave’s equipment alright! That’s a lot of grain!

In addition to all that grain, we added three different adjunct sugars to this beer: honey, DME, and gula jawa (i.e., palm sugar). These adjuncts were added at various times over the course of the boil. In total, there were four hop additions, at 90, 80, 75, and 60 minutes (so 100% bittering).

Original gravity clocked in at 1.104. Fermentation was temperature controlled at 68 degrees, up to 21 days.

Today (2/20) the gravity was 1.036. Plans to put this into the rye barrel are currently on hold as Dave tries to get the gravity down a bit more. Some beer first-aid attempted today: Dave added yeast energizer and aerated with pure O2 for a minute. I’ll keep you posted!

Goldenberg’s Barleywine

Hey everyone! Writing to update you on my first brew day of 2013.

Yesterday I brewed an American barleywine as both my first beer of the year AND my first beer in my new San Francisco apartment. I had help from my parents and brother for this batch, so I’m naming it after the family. Check out the recipes page for details!

My family members are, by and large, not beer people. Because of this I was incredibly excited when they volunteered to lend a hand with my first SF brew day! Here’s a picture of my dad and brother mashing in. It was pretty darn cold yesterday (especially compared to sunny San Diego), and I neglected to compensate for that while heating my water.

As a result, I ended up mashing in at 149 degrees (I had been aiming for 152). I didn’t bother trying to add hot water to raise the temperture since the mash tun was pretty much full to the brim at this point (turns out 20lbs of grain, with associated water, takes up a fair bit of space in a 10-gallon cooler).

At this point, my dad and brother left, and my mom replaced them. Here’s a picture of her sparging. Generally, everything mash- and sparge-related went as per usual.

I decided to start with 8 gallons of wort and boil that down to around 5.5 gallons over the course of two hours. The expected effect of this is subtle caramelization in the kettle during this wort concentration process.

This was a fun brew day, since brew buddies tagged in and out throughout the day. Right when my mom left, brew buddy Tony S. showed up to help with starting the boil. Once he left, brew buddy Katrina S. came by to help finish up the boil and cool the wort (here’s Katrina stirring in a hop addition). The wort cooled incredibly quickly due to the cold weather. This is probably my favorite aspect of brewing in San Francisco vs. San Diego (that and the water quality!).

This was my first attempt at making barleywine. As this beer was expected to be pretty big, I made a 2-quart yeast starter. Shown here is the starter before (left) and after (right) refrigeration. I poured off the majority of the liquid in the “after” picture before pitching what was left. OG was 1.098 (a bit lower than I was hoping for, but that’s alright).

Within about four hours of pitching, fermentation was observable. I can’t wait for this to be done – excited! Happy brewing =)

Bottling the Cucumber Saison

Hi! I feel a bit awkward writing this post, since I didn’t actually do the bottling here – Dave C. did! Here’s the information I got from him: Dave bottled the saison on January 5, using 158g of corn sugar (2 pints) to get 3 volumes of carbonation. After the fact, though, there was some concern about miscalculation in relation to what the volume of beer actually was. I’ll let you know if Dave ends up having some bottle bombs to clean up =/

A side note – apparently the cucumber flavor is super subtle right now, probably due to the fact that the cucumbers we used were not exactly ripe… again, I’ll keep you posted on this one during tasting notes.