So today mike and I entered a local homebrew contest in ridgeway. Being my first competition I didn’t really know what to expect but had a sneaking suspicion as to how it would go down.
My first inclination that the competition would be sub par was the fact that the beers were not categorized into styles but rather ale and lager…. and all ales and lagers would be judged together.
I entered a porter, a hoppy pale ale, and an imperial hoppy amber/red ale (Glamber). While I like all three beers a lot I realized going in, that the judges may not have a real experienced palate and that the very broad/vague beer setup would leave my fairly “to style beers” subject to scrutiny.
After tasting various wines and beers throughout the afternoon mike and I ventured over to the home brew/ wine area as you could taste some of the left over offerings. I sampled a Dutch lager and mike tried some orange cream-cicle ale. The Dutch lager was clean and refreshing with maybe a little green apple(acetyladehyde?) going on and the orange cream-cicle beer was kinda like a fruity cream ale? Both beers not bad at all, but I felt mike and I’s beer would reign supreme. While tasting the homebrew and wine we realized the award ceremony was starting so mike and I rushed to the stage.
After announcing the various wine style winners, she moved on to the beer category. She quickly announced “first place punkin beer, second place coconut vanilla java porter,and third place”… was some type of fruity wheat beer or something (I blacked out after the first two announcements). Oddly enough I did notice all the winners were the same names as the year prior, so I pondered how subjective the judging was. I’m not saying the “punkin” beer or coconut vanilla java hazelnut chocolate mocha porter thing wasn’t better than my regular robust porter or hoppy ales, I just think the contest setup led the more average to style beers at risk.
An obvious disappointment followed the announcements but luckily I know how good mikes beers are and the fact that none of his beers placed either led me to believe the judges were idiots. Mikes hiphop ipa scored a 43 out of 50 points at the Sam Adams long shot contest and made the best of show round(that’s really good). I also predicted that beer would win and it did not…..I smell shennanigans.
My one last rant is about the fact that there were no score sheets. The only reason to enter a contest is for feedback from a range of palates. What the general public or tasting panel like/dislike about a beer/wine is very precious to the brewer/vintner that created that particular beverage.
In closing this rant I would like to acknowledge that the people that put together this local beer and wine festival did a great job. The commercial beer examples were quite nice and showcased numerous styles (except bud straw-berita). It was also cool talking to some of the wine people, as I never realized how grape variety can play into the complexity of a wine. Maybe wine people aren’t all bad/lazy/dumb? (Sarcasm laugh)
All in all it was a fantastic day of good people, good beer/wine, and crappy pa weather. I will definitely go to the festival again and possibly enter a beer or two depending on how many “creative” beers I have on hand.
HBC Jolly Funkin Dream
So my buddy mike has pushing me to do a sour/funky beer for a while and I really wanna thank him for pushing me. Without his persistent nagging, I probably would have never dedicated a fermenter to Brett and bugs.
So I took a basic pale ale type base beer and fermented it with the dream weaver yeast i grew up out of the bottle. The base beer fermented out from 1.044 to 1.009, it tastes kinda ordinary, and isn’t as spicy and phenolic as what the commercial beer is so I figured this would be a great beer to fruit/funk. I’ve had various jolly pumpkin dregs that I’ve grown up and I have been waiting for a beer/vessel to inoculate them with.
I decided to get a little shy of 6lbs peaches, and 36oz of raspberries at the grocerie store today. While this probably is a little light for a traditional fruit beer I wanted to give my jolly pumpkin dregs something to chew on since my FG was pretty low.
As shown above I first had the task of de-seeding about 20 peaches which was tougher than I thought. I added those to a small 2 gallon pot. I then added the raspberries on top. I began mashing the fruit together to get it into a purée type state. I then slowly heated that mixture on the stove too till I reached 180F. I shut off the flame and let sit for 15 minutes to pasteurize.
I then cooled that mixture in an ice bath to 80F and added it to a sanitized fermenter. I racked my beer onto the fruit and then added my decanted jolly pumpkin dregs. I got my fermenter rather full so I added a blowoff setup and look forward to what the funky Dexter, Michigan microbes will do.
Tasting notes to follow in a few months….or year(s).
Nevermind the cheesy wedding photos in the background…. Although she’s pretty cool letting me have numerous fermenters hang out in our living room.
Addendum- I way overfilled my carboy with fruit/beer and once the yeast started chewing on the newly introduced sugar, I realized how big of a mistake I made. Mrs. Snydez suddenly isn’t as cool with a living room full of fermenters.
Then 24 hours into re fermentation and after numerous fruit blowoff’s I woke up this morning to this.
Mighty mash temps
Mash temperature is something that plays a significant role in how a final beer turns out. Generally high mash temps (155-160f) makes alpha-amylase a happy enzyme leading to a fuller bodied beer and higher FG. While low mash temps makes beta amylase happy (140-149f) which can lead to a more fermentable beer leading to a dry thinner body. Most brewers shoot for a middle road single infusion mash temp of 150-154f to get both enzymes working in tandem.
I was listening to the the CYBI lagunitas IPA episode last night and the head brewer specified that they do a single infusion 160f mash. OG of the beer is 1.060 with an expected FG in the 1.016-1.018 region. The clone beer finished a tad high at 1.020 FG and Jamil said he would do a 158f infusion mash if he were to do it over. While tasting the beers side by side no one thought either tasted sweet or under attenuated but rather nice and balanced. While the beer obviously didn’t finish “dry” it really interests me that a super high mash temp doesn’t leave a beer sweet and syrupy as I always thought it may.
While reading a byo article today I noticed they touch on your water to grist ratio and how a low one will tend to be more fermentable. Mike recently told me that DFH uses 1.1 qt/lb on 90 minute which is quite low in my eyes. Utilizing a low water to grist ratio is probably something to think about when mashing a beer as high as 158-160f and may be what caused jamils to finish slightly higher.
When I brewed Glamber a couple weeks ago a faulty old dial thermometer and some human error caused me to mash in around 160f on accident. The beer started at 1.073 and last I checked was at 1.019 10 days in. Mike and I tasted that hydrometer sample and there was no sweetness to be detected which baffled me and led me into this ongoing mash temp research raid.
I look forward to tinkering with mash temp more and hopefully do some small batch comparisons as to what high and low temps do beyond the numbers. Even though I’m uneasy about my Glambers FG number I look forward to tasting notes compared to my previous “normal temp” amber ales.
Dry hoppin
A couple days ago I dry hopped the Barleywine mike and I brewed on May 4th with an oz of centennial and an oz of Amarillo. OG was 1.100 FG 1.022.
10%abv
Mission Statement.
I’ve enjoyed drinking beer for a number of years now, but I chose to imbibe for different reasons than I do now. Like most teenagers I started drinking right around the time I started to drive. My friends and I were mesmerized by the mind altering buzz this libation provided us with. Flavor was not what drove our enjoyment but rather the the lowered inhibitions and laughs that ensued. We would drink whatever lite American adjunct lager we could convince someone to buy us.
Fast forward some years and in 2011 I started noticing different beers on the shelf that seemed foreign to me. Dogfish Head, Leinenkugals, Shock Top, Magic Hat to name a few. While not all true micro craft breweries their different flavor profiles really got me questioning what beer really was.
I really started to enjoy drinking DFH 60 minute as regularly as I could afford it and soon there after started enjoying some offerings from Troegs. I then decided that drinking good beer was not all that I was wanting to find…
In late 2011 I asked my now wife to buy me a homebrewing kit for Christmas online (buckets/carboy/supplies except for my kettle). I then started reading John Palmers online book and knew that beer brewing is something I wanted to pursue.
March 2012 I ordered my 7.5 gallon economy kettle and my very first extract beer kit (a pale ale kit). I brewed the beer, scoffed at sanitation and in 5 weeks I had a brown beer that gushed out of the bottle and tasted like a bandaid wrapped clove. Let sit for another few weeks to see if it would improve, a bottle exploded and I decided to take that batch to the dump.
Now this really is where I decided to go all in and stop being a half ass jerk.
Hormtown Brewing CO. 