Service Station

The Hops are here!

2011-09-12T20:40:00.002-04:00

Well it's been a long time since the plants began to climb and I did a poor job of documenting the first year growth but the results are starting to come in and I have to say I'm pleased with the way these things have gone in year one. Big picture, Cascade has grown the best. one plant died, the other two have swarmed over the front porch to an almost alarming degree, but they haven't produced very many cones. The Nugget has grown a lot less aggressively but has produced the best cones, some of them are really beautiful. The Willamette hates Charleston and the last I heard the three plants (all of them lived, grudgingly) were pooling their money to get a Southwest ticket back to the Pacific northwest. OK, enough copy, here's the payoff:

Not too bad!

Homebrewing: Priming & Bottling

2011-04-11T10:22:00.006-04:00

OK! priming and bottling. This one is light on concepts and heavy on photos. Since we bottle all of our beers (as opposed to kegging them), we need to "prime" the beer before we cap it into a bottle by adding a little bit of sugar (corn sugar, cane sugar, dry malt extract) to the bucket. This little dose of sugar reactivates some of the yeast, which then goes back into fermentation mode and produces a tiny bit more alcohol and some carbon dioxide. By the time the yeast has started to do this we have capped it into a bottle, so no gas can escape. Some carbon dioxide sits in the head space (air at the top of a bottle between the liquid and the bottlecap) the rest of it remains dissolved in the beer, carbonating it.

The most time consuming part of this stage is prepping the equipment. Recycled beer bottles are scrubbed and rinsed then sanitized, the bottle caps, scrubbed, rinsed, sanitized. The bottling bucket, the racking cane, the bottling wand. Scrubbed, rinsed, sanitized. Anything that will come into contact with the beer or something that holds or touches the beer has to be scrubbed, rinsed, sanitized.

These bottles should be nicely carbonated in about 10 days and ready to sample a week after that. We like to keep IPAs and Pale Ales in the bottles for at least a month (if we can wait that long) to let the yeast settle out and allow time for bottle conditioning. The longer they sit in the bottles the better they taste.

Cheers in 28 days!

the brews: IPA (left) Pale Ale (right)

scrubbed and rinsed

sanitized

ready for action

racking the IPA again (to remove more sediment)

bottling the Pale Ale into bombers

what's happening down in the bottle

sampling the Pale Ale, it's already tasty!

bottling the IPA

everyone's helping out

capping the bottles

the wreckage

(67) 12oz bottles + (22) 22oz bombers = about 10 gallons of beer

The Charleston Hops Project (update)

2011-03-29T20:52:00.004-04:00

so far we're looking at 90% success for the rhizomes. 2 Cascade, 3 Willamette, 4 Nugget. It appears that one cascade doesn't want to take part in the experiment. The fastest starter is a Cascade and the second fastest is a Willamette. I think the weather these last few days has them thinking that they're back home in the Willamette Valley (which looks like zone 8a on the usda map, but OSU says is zone 5). I hope they get their climbing shoes on before the zone 8b weather shows up.

(Willamette)

(Cascade)

(Cascade)

More to come!

www.byersdesign.com

Homebrewing (Racking & dry hopping)

2011-03-24T16:59:00.005-04:00

Here's how you make beer:

Boil a mixture of sugar (extracted from malted barley) and hops
Cool it down and add yeast
Let it ferment in an sealed environment
Put it into bottles or a keg

The current batch of beer is in stage three, fermentation. This phase is interesting because of the yeast. The yeast used in brewing has four stages in its life cycle. To oversimplify, the life cycles are defined by the levels of usable sugar and oxygen in the closed system. When you put in your yeast and seal the container (pitching the yeast) you create a little world of sugar and oxygen that us gradually used up. When these items have been consumed the fermentation phase is over.

The yeast goes through four stages in its life cycle. In the first stage the yeast cells wake up from dormancy and begin to build food reserves using the sugars in the beer and burning up some of the oxygen in the closed system. After they have bulked up they begin to reproduce. Here comes the second phase. The yeast begins to grow and reproduce, filling the beer with active yeast cells who are all growing and reproducing in a mad frenzy. This phase uses up the rest of the oxygen (and builds up a thick, sticky foam on top of the liquid). When the oxygen is gone the yeast cells make the huge shift from aerobic (using air) to anaerobic (without air). They stop multiplying and move into phase three, fermentation 9at this time the thick foam from phase two, called krausen, falls back into the beer). This is where the yeast cells do what they do best: Eat sugar and crap out alcohol (and carbon dioxide). This is the best phase. Phase four starts when the yeast realizes the party is over (the food is gone). The cells begin to build strong walls and prepare for dormancy. They all begin to settle down to the bottom of the container and go to sleep.

Racking in when you move the beer from a sealed container (primary fermenter) with airspace (6.5 gallon container with about 5 gallons of liquid) to a smaller one (secondary fermenter) that doesn't have airspace (5 gallon container, 5 gallons of liquid). If you were able to hang in there with me in the last paragraph you can probably figure out at which point the brewer decides to rack the beer (for the TL;DRs: you rack the beer after phase two)

That's what we did last weekend. If you're going for a brew with that strong hop aroma you can add extra hops to the beer at this time. If you read the article about hops you know that adding hops now will contribute the beta acids (resiny, cirtusy, piney goodness) without adding the alphas (bitterness). This is called dry-hopping. Since we were brewing a Pale Ale and an IPA we dry-hop.

So now our batches of beer are fermenting away happily in their anaerobic worlds, becoming delicious.

If you look closely at the pictures you'll notice that the IPA developed another krausen after it was moved to the secondary fermenter. This probably indicates a combination of two factors. One, the beer was probably racked to the secondary fermenter a little bit too soon, Two, during the transfer between the fermenters the liquid picked up a some new oxygen. The combination kicked some of the yeast back in to phase two. Not ideal but in no way a terminal problem. I'll just let it sit a little longer in the secondary fermenter. The beauty of beer is that if you give it a little bit of time it will usually sort itself out. It will be interesting to see if the final product will be affected. It may even make it better.

Cheers!

Empty primary fermenter - notice the krausen residue around the top. The sludge at the bottom is the dormant yeast. This is called the yeast cake.

Here is the Pale Ale in its secondary fermenter. You can see the some of the the un-dissolved hops floating on the top. The greenish hue in th beer comes from the hops that did dissolve (we used pellet hops, they look like hamster food).

Here is the IPA. You can see the re-formed krausen in action.

KRAUSEN! After a few hours it fell back in to the beer. This made me happy.

Cheers!

Service Station

The Hops are here!

Homebrewing: Priming & Bottling

The Charleston Hops Project (update)

Homebrewing (Racking & dry hopping)

The Charleston Hops Project

The Class of 2011 (garden)

Labyrinths In Healthcare Symposium

Homebrewing (1 of ?)

This is not an Abstract Painting.

Christopher Murphy Art Opening at BDG Studios

Sally Bennett Art Opneing at the BDG Studio

Sustainable Site: Harvesting and Milling Lumber

Cheese.

A City Garden

I love working in Cannonborough

Limestone Jesus is Coming Soon

The Payoff

Getting’ Fresh at the 2009 Mt. Pleasant Farmers Market Opening

BDG Rooftop Garden

Peas and Beans

There's a Killer in the Garden

A Salvaged Brick Walkway

More from the yarden

Yarden Update

Purple Tomatoes

Hand Pollinating an Espalier Pear and the Remarkable Avocado Flower

Front Yarden, Part 3: most of this thing is in the ground

The 5 Best Brick Walls in Charleston: #5

The 5 Best Brick Walls in Charleston: #4

The 5 Best Brick Walls in Charleston: #3

The 5 Best Brick Walls in Charleston: #2

The 5 Best Brick Walls in Charleston: #1

Starting Seeds

Front Yarden, Part 2: the first plants go in

Front Yarden, Part 1:

On-Site Power Generation: Smart and Green