Fall Means Cider and Perry!

It's Fall and that means fruit trees are loaded with apples and pears waiting to be picked. Some will be eaten, but the lucky few will be turned into delicious cider! When I say cider, I mean hard cider. I don't understand why we call juice cider sometimes, but as we do, and as this is a brewing blog, I wanted to be clear. I am lucky enough to have a wife with family in Northeast Georgia that let me come by and pick all the apples and pears I want. So, this year instead of making baby food, I decided to try my hand at some ciders - fermented apple juice and perrys - fermented pear juice.

To start off with, I decided to do some small batch experimentation with different yeasts and sugar additions. As some of you know, my brother and I have made several batches of Apfelwein using store bought apple juice, corn sugar and Montrachet wine yeast. While Apfelwein is good and champagne like, I would like to make something closer to a traditional English cider that is a session drink. To test the effects of yeast, I decided to try three different dry yeast, Montrachet, Champagne and Nottingham Ale. To test the effects of sugars, I used separately honey, dehydrated malt extract, white cane sugar and dark muscavado sugar. All of the sugars are almost 100% fermentable by yeast and the additions were used to boost the apple juice from a specific gravity of around 1.040 to 1.055. I'm not sure how these will vary or turn out, but samples of the ciders taken tonight were still sour as the Malolactic Acid hasn't been converted yet. The smell is delicious and varying between the different batches. The most striking difference is the color ranging from vivid yellow to deep amber.

As it turns out, making juice from apples and pears is very difficult and labor intensive without a cider press. However, with determination, persistence, the help of my wonderful wife and not to mention the heroic job of the good old Cuisinart food processor, I have managed to juice 1.5 gallons of apple juice and over 6 gallons of pear juice. The juice of both tasted great and was surprisingly rich and deep in color compared to store bought. I still have over half of the pears I collected and if I'm feeling ambitious over the next week, maybe I'll manage to juice them too.

If anyone knows of a cider grinder/press I could use, please let me know as there is literally tons of fruit going to waste and rotting on the ground.

-Josh

Bavarian Hefeweizen is Bottled!

Tuesday night, Jesse, Ryan and I bottled the Hefe and everything went smooth as silk. Bottling is so much easier and more enjoyable with extra hands. Having three people made the process faster. Jesse's new house has a dishwasher with a sanitise cycle and we used it to give the bottles a final rinse. We of course still used sanitizer, but thought the extra precaution couldn't hurt.

We decided to use Wheat Dehydrated Malt Extract (DME) as priming sugar. Priming sugar is added at the time of bottling in order to carbonate and "bottle condition" the beer. There is enough residual yeast in the beer at the time of bottling that this sugar addition reactivates them. The yeast consume the sugar and their waste products are alcohol and CO2. The CO2 provides the carbonation for the bottled beer.

Our Final Gravity reading was 1.010 before adding the priming sugar and that is only 1 point off of the expected reading of 1.009. So, we must have done something right with this beer. As mentioned in a previous post, we did not take an initial gravity reading, so the exact ABV is unknown. Based on the recipe and our final gravity reading, we are estimating 5.4%. A sample was tasted and while still young, it seems like it's going to be a decent wheat beer. Our efforts resulted in 98 12oz bottles capped and ready for labels.

As a side experiment, we decided that the left over yeast looked too good to throw away, so we used some of it in a cider experiment. 1 gallon of Mott's apple juice, half a bear of honey and a generous does of left over Hefeweizen yeast and trub were the ingredients. We combined in a 1 gallon glass carboy, shook to mix and aerate and capped it with a bung and airlock. Less than 8 hours later it was in active fermentation with the airlock bubbling away about once a second. Should be interesting!

-Josh

Hefeweizen Label

I had a little time over lunch at work today to draft a label for our latest brew. I can't decide which inversion of the background colors to go with. I like the center portion of Version 1, but like the outer portions of Version 2. It's still a work in progress, but I'd like to hear your thoughts. I've set up a poll on the bottom right of the page.

Version 1
Version 2

Also, I see there are some followers now, but no one has posted a comment. The first person who posts a comment gets a six pack of the Hefe!

-Josh

Home Grown Hops!

Here's a pic from this weekend of some hop cones on one of my two Nugget hop plants. Looks to be a good year for hops and I'm planning on using my harvested hops in a "wet hopped" harvest ale of some kind. Wet hopping refers to using the hops fresh as opposed to drying them first. My plan this year is to pick and immediately freeze until I've accumulated enough to use. The harvesting will start mid August and go until they are all ripe and picked, probably through September.

I have future plans to start a hop yard with several varieties, but that will have to wait on aquiring a suitable piece of land in North East, Georgia.

-Josh

Bavarian Hefeweizen Brew Night

Last Thursday night my brother and I did our first brew at his new house. Neither of us particularly like wheat beer, but we have friends and family that do, it seems to be a crowd pleaser and it's something we haven't done before, so we decided to give it a go.

Turned out to be the brew night from hell. We decided it would be a good idea to start the evening out by grilling brats which turned into a big production due to the lack of a charcoal grill. There was however a gas grill that didn't work anymore, so we just used charcoal in it. Getting the charcoal to light was a pain due to the lack of starter fluid or chimney starter, but with dilligence eventually we had a nice bed of coals.

Brewing started around 9:00 pm and we got off to a slow start as we had to locate, clean and rig a setup since it was our first brew since the move. To the left is a pic of our improvised brew setup. The orange cooler is a 10 gallon mashtun, on top of it is an aluminum turkey fryer pot, on top of that is a piece of oak we use as a mash paddle, kettle stirrer and it's also notched at 1 gallon incriments for the boil kettle. To the left is the propane burner and 15 gallon stainless boil kettle. Jesse is in the background playing with his new toy (iPhone).

9:00 pm is a late start for weeknight brewing as a typical all grain-batch takes 3 to 4 hours start to finish. Wheat beers are notorious for having stuck sparges. The wheat is very gummy and forms a doughy oatmeal type consistency during the mash and there is a tendency for this to completely plug the mashtun outlet. To prevent this we added more than a pound of rice hulls which add no flavor but just provide some media to encourage free drainage. It didn't work out so well, and while we never had a stuck sparge, it was sooooooo slow. A mash and sparge process that should have lasted around 2.5 hours ended up lasting around 4.

After finally collecting around 11.5 gallons of wort, which was over 1.5 gallons short, we started the boil. Interesting thing about this brew was that there was no tendancy to foam and I never saw what I would typically call Hot Break - when all the foam subsides and the top is clear wort. To make cleanup easier we used hop bags for the hop additions. The Hallertauer Hops smelled great! The pic to the left is of me, happy about the beginning of the sparge which was soon to slow to a trickle. Eventually we are going to add some equipment and build a tiered system that allows for gravity drainage and eliminates the need to pick things up during the process (10 gallons of scalding hot sugary wort is heavy and picking it up could prove dangerous). But until then using empty kegs as a mashtun stand, picking up, draining and pouring into the boil kettle will be the process.

Spectators are shown in the pic to the right (from left to right - Ryan, Jesse's roommate & future brewer - Jesse - Kristen, Jesse's better half) all drinking "The Champaign of Beers," one of the worst beers in the world. This pic was taken around 1:30 am and everyone was still going strong. This is about the time the boil started. The boil smelled really good once the hops were added and the wheat portion of the grain bill was definately prevalent.

At the end of the boil an immersion chiller is submerged to sanitize it. The immersion chiller, shown in the pic to the left is our homemade copper monstrocity. Cool tap water flows in through the garden hose and exits out the braided hose to the left in the pic. Jesse's new house has some water pressure issues that we're going to try to work out, but overall the chiller performed really well bringing the boiling wort down to around 70 degrees in about 15 minutes. It is crucial to chill the wort as quickly as possible in order to prevent DMS from building up. DMS will give the beer a "cooked corn" flavor profile and is not desirable in most ales, but is more acceptable in lagers, think Rolling Rock or Corona. I really want to be able to cool the wort faster, so I'm going to look into adding a pre-chiller to the setup that will chill the tap water to a lower temperature befor entering the immersion chiller.

After a long night of brewing I think we were successful with this batch. Only time will tell, and I'll update in a couple weeks to let you know how fermentation went. We missed our targets a little both in mash temperature and in final volume, but oh well, it will still be beer. I didn't even bother to take an initial gravity reading because after cleanup it was 3:30 am, but my assumption is that it was a little on the high side. It will be a long time before we attempt another hefeweizen, but when we do it will not be on a week night. After a 2 hour nap, Friday proved to be a painful 11 hour work day filled with meetings.

I have provided the basic recipe below. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Cheers! - Josh

Recipe (thanks to EdWort, http://www.homebrewtalk.com/)
Mash 90 minutes at 153 degrees
14 lbs. German Wheat Malt
8 lbs. German Pilsener Malt

1 lb. Rice Hulls

1 tbs. Fivestar 5.2 mash pH stabilizer

7.1 gallons strike water at 163 degrees (based on grain temp of 87 degrees)

9.2 gallons of sparge water at 185 degrees

Vorlauf & sparge to collect 13 gallons of runnings in boil kettle

Begin boil. Time = 60 minutes at hot break

1.5 oz. Hallertauer hop pellets (3.0% AA) at 45 minutes

0.5 oz. Hallertauer hop pellets (3.0% AA) at 15 minutes

Cool to 70 degrees, transfer to fermenter(s) and aerate

Pitch 2L of yeast starter (made with wheat DME & Wyeast 3068)

Ferment 10-14 days at 68-70 degrees

Expected OG: 1.052

Expected FG: 1.009

Expected ABV: 5.9%

Tonight I'm making my yeast starter for our brew day tomorrow. Yeast starters are a necessary method for producing great beer in certain situations. A small amount of Wyeast 3068 (Weihenstephan) will become over 2 liters of viable yeast cells ready to perform their magic, turning sugar into alchohol, carbonation and flavor.

Photo is of my homemade stir plate and 2 - 1 liter flasks of starter. Since it's a wheat beer we're brewing tomorrow, I decided to use wheat malt extract for the starter. Also in the pic is a bottle of Brooklyn Brewery's East India Pale Ale...Yum.
-Josh

First Blog

This is my first blog post ever! I (Josh) have decided to start a blog because I get so many inquiries about what I'm brewing, how the process works, is it legal, etc. My hope is that my brother (Jesse) will also post here and that this will become a blog for Myers Brothers Brewing. To be honest, I haven't even talked to him about it, but oh well...

I have plans to document with photographs our brewing process and evolution of the brewery. We are brewing tomorrow night, so be on the lookout for a post of that brew session.

Background Information
Home brewing is a growing hobby in the United States and worldwide. In the U.S. it is legal in almost every state. There are specific limits that vary from state to state. However, in general the rules are that you cannot sell homebrew and you are limited to a certain volume of brewing on an annual basis. For more information on your state's regulations, visit http://www.beertown.org/homebrewing/legal.html.

We have been fooling around with brewing for the past several years on an individual basis. Jesse was the first as he and his fraternity house dove in and gave it a go. For Christmas that year, I believe it was 2006 or 2007, Jesse got me a homebrew equipment kit. I brewed a few extract batches with it that were okay at best. Then things got busy with work, school, pregnancy, kids, etc and I took about a 1 year break from brewing. In the Fall of 2008, we decided to combine our equipment at Jesse's apartment since it was so close to my work. We started with a few mini-mash kits we ordered online and they again were mediocre.

At this point I had joined a homebrew forum, http://www.homebrewtalk.com/, and our little hobby turned into a full fledged obsession. Over the past winter, we have purchased and fabricated some additional equipment to allow us to brew all-grain instead of extract and brew larger batches. We jumped from a 3 gallon brew kettle to a 15 gallon one. We figured out ways to brew at my brothers apartment, but it wasn't convinient and space was limited. Turns out aparments frown upon people using large propane burners to boil 15 gallons of scalding hot wort on their patios. Luckily we didn't get caught until recently, and then we just moved the propane tanks inside until brew night.

This past month my brother moved out of his apartment and into a house with a full basement and garage. I can't tell you how excited we are to not be brewing in an apartment anymore. The brewery setup is still in progress, but we have big plans and the only things limiting us are time and money.

Good things to Come!

Cheers - Josh