One Fine Day at the Saint Arnold Brewery

So here's the quaint little blog about the four Wicked Hops and their wives enjoying a nice Saturday at the Saint Arnold Brewery...

Here, Christie anxiously awaits the freshly kegged goodness of Saint Arnold Brown Ale, her favorite.


Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be as they were all out of Brown Ale in the hospitality room. D'oh! Not to be deterred, we all had very nice pints of the rest of their available beers, including Elissa IPA, Lawnmower, Amber, and Summer Pils.


The wives were on-hand too (I guess that makes them the Wicked Ho(p)s?) Man I hope Sarah doesn't read this! :)


All in all in was a pretty kick arse time. We all went down into the war room to gaze and the giant kettles and fermenters that were furiously working hard to make more great SA biers.

Bye-Bye to Bad Beer

Alliterative titles aside.. I recently had to dump 24 x 660ml bottles of some ooold homebrews (#8 and #9, a terrible Irish Red and an even worse stout) out to make way to bottle some much better beer (remember the One Thumb Blackberry Wheat?).

Anyhoo - check out the action in the sink. Good riddance!


Upshot is that was a whopping 22 brews ago - thankfully things have gotten considerably more quaffable. :)

Prost,
Jeff

Sweet Sixteen - Continued

Sorry folks.. I'm posting a little out of order here. I'll follow up to what Moss said:

Saturday, March 27th was an absolutely beautiful and perfect day for brewing. I mean really, upper 60s/lower 70s in Houston with a nice breeze? Why wouldn't you be brewing? :)


If you remember what happened during our last triple brew, we decided to take it upon ourselves to not drink until the boil. Now we didn't say which boil, but the idea was no beers until boil...

Ok so we didn't last that long, we cracked open some cold Lagunitas IPA during mash and enjoyed the wonder day and brewing. :)

Here's a pic of Moss and checking temps in his mash and Fred surfing midget pr0n or something like that.


As Moss mentioned earlier he was making a German-style hefeweizen, while Fred was also making a hefeweizen and I was making a pale ale from a kit I bought from Austin Homebrew. Here's the recipe:

• 9# 2-Row
• 1# Medium Crystal (40L)
• 1 oz Sorachi Ace (14% AA) @ 60
• 0.5 Cluster (8% AA) @15
• 0.5 Sterling (8% AA) @ 15
• 0.5 Cluster (8% AA) @ 5
• 0.5 Sterling (8% AA) @ 5
• Target OG: 1.051
• Target FG: 1.012
• Est. ABV: 5.1%
  

Definitely been a while since I've done something even remotely hoppy, and I was curious to try out the Sorachi Ace hops (granted, they were pelletized). Have to admit, when I opened up that pouch and took a whiff, those hops weren't playing around! Here's a pic of the 3 kettles almost boiling in unison. Funny how 3 propane burners can warm up a garage :)


The mash was uneventful if not slow. Total mashout time including sparge was something ridiculous, like on the order of 1.5 hours. Boil was pretty straight-forward as the hop schedule was pretty standard. Finally at this point we cracked open a few ice-cold Pine Belt Pale Ales from Southern Star Brewing.


Racked the ale to the carboy, aerated (shook the shit out of it) and done. Might have been a hair under 5 gallons, but I hit my gravity at 1.052. I'm also digging the amber color, say thanks to the Crystal 40L and ask her how her momma durn!


Flocculation started pretty quickly, I happened to take a peek at her early Sunday afternoon where the pleasant smell of hops were being pushed out of the airlock. Looking forward to this one for sure.

Next up? Who knows... I still have beach bier (witbier) ingredients sitting here looking at me, and Moss and I are dying to crank out another 10 gallon. Stay tuned!

Prost,
Jeff

The Quad That Wasn't (And other assorted regrets of overindulgence)

Folks.. there comes a time when you keep telling yourselves that rules are made to be broken. Well, break rules we did.

March 6th was supposed to be the Quad Kettle event, but only turned out to be a Triple Kettle (thanks Bryce.. ASS). Not to be deterred, we plodded forward. T'was a late start due to some other events, but we got things going. Fred was doing a partial hefeweizen, Moss was doing an all-grain Irish Red, and I was making an all-grain blackberry wheat again.


Although Bryce wasn't able to brew, he was able to join us in the festivities by bringing copious amounts of homebrew (his DFH90 clone was fantastic) as well as other high-gravity biers. So, the good part was we tried a lot of beers, with many of them being very good. The bad part was, we tried a lot of beers, with many of them being pretty bad!


Did I mention high-gravity? Yes I thought I did, and you can see the effects on me as my eyes are half open.. at 5pm. I won't go into too much of the effects of drinking too much during the brew session, but here are some highlights:

1. Moss forgot to add his aroma hops
2. Jeff was reading Celsius and not Fahrenheit during this mash (ok so this was BEFORE drinking.. )
3. Jeff had no idea how much volume he mashed out with
4. Jeff had no idea how much volume he ended up with
5. Jeff had no idea what his OG was

And to add to all that, I sliced off the top of my thumb while preparing dinner. Upshot is we now have a name for the beer: "One Thumb Blackberry Wheat"


But all is not a loss. Afterwards we all vowed that subsequent brews would follow (or at least try) a more strict enforcement of rules surrounding drinking while brewing. But if I were a betting man, I wouldn't count on that lasting too long. ;)

Prost,
Jeff

Sweet Sixteen Brew Session

Another beautiful Spring day resulted in another great brew session. Jeff and I met over at Fred's house to not only make some tasty beverages but to also sample some micro brews. I decided to brew a German style hefeweizen that will eventually include apricot extract at kegging. This was, of course, requested by the wife. Spring is upon us bringing warmer temperatures so who's complain. This beer, brewed with a German style yeast, has a med-high attenuation and should easily satisfy anyone's thirst. Take a look at the recipe:

German Pilsner Malt 5.25#
German Wheat Malt 4.25#
Carapils .50#

German Hallertau Hops (Alpha=3.8 @ 60 mins) 12.1 IBUs

Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan Weizen Yeast
Apricot Extract @ kegging (2 oz)

The wort hit my target gravity so things were looking good. Remember we brewed at Fred's place... well that following morning, me and the fam are getting ready for church. I go out to the truck to get the kids loaded and spot my primary in the front passenger seat. I open the door and get hit by fumes from a combination of hops, yeast, CO2 and whatever else is discharged. It was a very interesting trip into church to say the least. After church, I crack open the pantry to see if fermentation has started. I open the door to a shelf full of krausen spewed all over the place. The airlock blew off the primary! Wyeast is clearly more active in early stages than White Labs yeast. Here's a pic: I was able to capture some video footage of the airlock after putting it back on.



I have never seen a batch produce this much krausen. I decided to leave off the airlock and will worry about it after fermentation ceases.

BB Wheat - Kegged!

Just a quick note on the bb wheat - kegged this guy tonight after about 3 weeks in the secondary. That might have been a bit long but wort tasted great and FG was 1.010. Oddly enough it was 1.006 when I went to secondary, maybe my hydro is toast.


According to last records, OG was 1.053 so we're looking at about a 5.6% ABV wheat beer. That sounds about right.

This weekend the Four Horseman of the Hopocalypse will be getting together for the first-ever Wicked Hops Quad Kettle event. I'm pretty sure neither one of us knows what that means, but I'm also pretty sure its going to involve a lot of beer! I'll be sure to post pictures of the event, and let you guys know how the bb wheat turned out.

Prost!

-- Jeffro

The Dixie Cup!

No, I don't want you to pee in it.

But what I do want you to do is take a look here at one of the largest homebrew competitions in Houston, the aptly named Dixie Cup.

Methinks that the Wicked Hops cronies ought to enter!

Also, if you don't like shirts like this, then you obviously don't have a pulse!


Prost!

-- Jeffro

Here is a photo of the weizenbock after two weeks. She's still holding strong, bubbling every 15 seconds or so. Reviews posted online about this yeast indicate that fermentation may take 4+ weeks to complete.

Weizenbock Lager

Okay, it has been two weeks since I actually brewed this beer but thought it was worth adding to the blog. My lagering fridge had been empty for several weeks and I really wanted to get a beer in there. I get to the brew shop and start to gather ingredients when I realize that this beer is an ale...not a lager! How did this happen might you ask? Well, technically bocks are brewed as lagers but this is a strong, dark wheat beer which are classified as ales! I then ask myself, why can't I lager a Weizenbock??? After browsing through the different White Lab lager yeasts available I conclude that the Oktoberfest matched the profile of the beer pretty well. The yeast produces a very malty, bock style beer. Works for me! Fermentation temps range from 52-58 deg which is perfect for my lagering fridge. Here's a look at the recipe:

7.5# Wheat Malt
2# Munich Malt (dark)
2# Vienna Malt
1# Melanoidin Malt
4oz. Chocolate Wheat
2oz. Chocolate Malt
1oz. Tradition Hops (alpha=5.8) @ 60 minutes
White Labs (WLP820) Oktoberfest lager yeast






Also brewing on this beautiful day was Fred (aka...new kid on the block) making a Belgian Witbier.

Racking the Black(berry wheat)

Thought I'd share with you guys how the racking went. If you are scoring at home, you'll remember that this guy made mad krausen during fermentation. The last beer that did this to me was the Beach Bier (more on that later), and it was one of the best beers I ever made.

Apologies ahead of time for the shite quality of images here, my Blackberry (ha no pun intended) phone's camera leaves a lot to be desired.

First thing to notice below the the eponymous krausen crust at the top of the carboy. Pretty benign actually, if not just gross. :)


Racked as usual to the 5-gallon glass carboy, and took a gravity reading. 1.006!!! As it stands this guy has a potential ABV of 6.16%, which is relatively high for a wheat beer (I think). Here's a picture of the sample:



Nice and cloudy, as it should be. Took a swig and DAMN it was good! Bready with a lot of body, not a lot of hop bite (no surprise given the recipe), with a very clean finish. Put it this way: I let Master Chief (wife) try it and she was impressed. I think I'm going to shed a tear!

Because of the extended time in the primary (close to 13 days) I'll probably let this sit about 2 weeks in the secondary before kegging.

Oh, and as for the Beach Bier (its a witbier), that was the beer of request for this year's Crawfish Boil ("Ball") down in the cul-de-sac. Keep your eyes peeled for that brew session, it's a great recipe and will be sure to share it with you all.

Le Pumpkin et Le Blackberry Wheat

Hail peasants!

Today I want to go over a couple of things, namely the tapping of the Keith's Pumpkin Ale as well as a quick ditty of brewing the Blackberry Wheat.

The KPA was a partial extract recipe from deFalco's, they call it the Great Pumkin [sic] Ale. I tried this recipe as an all-grain last time and added WAAAAAY too much pumpkin. To call it chewy and mealy would be a compliment. This time however I scaled back on the pumpkin quite a bit, and poured the first pint below.


I'm pretty pleased with the results. The base beer is an amber that finishes with pumpkin pie spice. I'd like to have tasted more body in the beer, but will give this guy a little bit more time to settle and condition. Ok, on to the Blackberry Wheat!

This is a recipe that I've kind of modded along the way. Technically its an American-style hefeweizen (at least with the grain bill), but I like to use the Wyeast 1056 American Ale yeast. Here's the recipe:

• 6# 2-Row Pale Malt


• 3# Domestic White Wheat


• 8oz Cara-Vienne Malt


• 4oz Rice Hulls


• 1.0oz Czech Saaz 3.1AA @ 60m


• 0.5oz Czech Saaz 3.1AA @ 5m


• 2oz blackberry extract @ keg


• Wyeast 1056 American Ale

Mash in with 1.5L of water per pound of grain (about 3.5g) at 152*F. Hold for an hour, mash out slowly (I did a 40min slow draw). Sparge with 4.5g of water at 170*F.


It was a cold mother that day (well, at least for Houston) so we brewed in the garage. You can see the dead soldiers starting to pile up on the table. Somewhere there's a Wicked Hops Rule of Thumb that says not to drink until the boil, but we typically ignore the hell out of that. As Captain Barbosa likes to say, "They're more like guidelines than actual rules." :)

Here we are racking to carboy. Aerated (violently shook) the carboy before adding the Wyeast, and was good to go. Hydrometer reading came in at 1.053. I's pleased with that.

Against, temps in Houston were to be relatively low this week, so I wrapped the guy in a towel and set in the garage. Good thing I did because...


LOOK AT THIS! This is about 24 hours after racking and I've got krausen coming out of my ears! To be fair my carboy is a 6-gallon model and not a 6.5-gallon like Brandon has. Mayhaps I need to invest in one.


All for now, will update you guys when I get em!

Southern Star Brewing Contest

For those of you in the Houston and surrounding areas, Southern Star Brewing is arguably one of the hottest craft breweries to have sprung up in the last few years. They're celebrating their 2 year anniversary this year, and in addition they're going to have their Pro-Am Homebrew Contest again (similar to how St. Arnold's does their Divine contest). Here's a link to their newsletter.

Of interest is also how they are celebrating National Homebrew Day on May 8th May 1st. Allow me to quote:

Dave invites all home-brewers to come join him in brewing a special batch on the big system. After we are finished, we will split the wort up into home brewer's individual carboys to take home and tweak/ferment as they see fit. NO yeast will be provided at the brewery, so get with your local home brew supply shop and order some yeast. We want everyone to keep records of what they did, and then join us on a Sunday in mid to late August (date to be determined later) to share the fruits of our labor. To guarantee wort for yourself at this event, signup is encouraged (brewery@southernstarbrewing.com). 16 Barrels makes about 100 5-gallon batches. The wort made will be Brown, 1.060 and 30 IBU’s with a fairly neutral hop (probably Saphir or Goldings). Bring your pre-sanitized carboys.

That's pretty freaking sweet!

I'll be brewing a blackberry wheat birthday bier this weekend for yours truly, will be sure to post some pictures.

-- J

Day 9: Oops, not as punctual as Brandon. My 5 gallons of "I'm not a" Brown Ale has a gravity of 1.006 (ABV: 6.9%), which is awfully low compared to Brandon's (1.011). To be fair I don't have much faith in my hydrometer, and for the sake of beer science what I should have done was rack and measure at Brandon's house. Oh well, next time for sure. Like Brandon I also sampled the wort; definitely had hints of biscuit...

Day 7: Racked beer over to secondary. The Cracker-Brown American Ale has a gravity of 1.011 (ABV: 6.34%) and didn't taste too bad. Maybe this will be a good beer after all.

This photo was taken 4 days into fermentation. They're both blowing and going...and producing a funky smell in my pantry!

This picture was taken 12 hours after yeast was pitched. I was completely shocked to see the difference between the two yeasts. The front fermenter used Wyeast American Ale and the back fermenter has White Labs California Ale. I guess the Wyeast Smack Pack really works!

No comment needed...

The Inaugural Wicked Hops Brew Session

The inaugural Wicked Hops brew session was a success. We all had a great time and many different beers were sampled. Both Jeff and Brandon combined their efforts to brew a 10 gallon batch for the first time and Fred knocked out his first batch of beer!


For the inaugural 10 gallon, Brandon and Jeff attempted a clone of St. Arnold's Brown Ale that would be split into two 5-gallon primaries with different yeasts. Here's the original recipe.. more on that in a bit:

• 18# Domestic 2-Row
• 3# Munich
• 3# Belgian Cara-Munich
• 0.5# Belgian Special B
• 0.125# (2 oz) Chocolate
• 2 oz Perle @ 60m
• 2 oz Cascade @ 15m
• 1 oz Liberty @ 0m
• Wyeast 1056 / White Labs WLP001
• 1.060 OG / 1.016 FG for est. ABV of ~5.8%
  

We used approxmately 7.5 gallons of strike water to mash in a 156*F for one hour. Everything was going well until mashout. Take a look:


I don't know about you - but that's about the most non-brown brown ale I've seen! Something was amiss. Both ProMash and BeerCalculator pegged a decent SRM value.. we definitely should have been darker. Our suspicions were that perhaps BOTH the chocolate and special B were missing, but what to do? Our primary concern wasn't that this wasn't a perfect 10 gallon brew, but that we might make the PERFECT beer and not know what the hell was actually in it!

Alas - we plodded forward. Our target sparge volume was in the neighborhood of 5 gallons at 170*F, and we had to fly-sparge (as best we could) given the volume of saturated grains in the mash tun (approx 7#). We had about 13 gallons of wort collected before boil, and Brandon played bad cop and was serious one (ok the least drunk one) while the rest of us watched him work. :) Good thing though, since we hit target gravity (actual OG of 1.059).

Gracías, Señor Brewmaster:


Racked the wort into two primaries, almost done:


All in all, everyone had a great time. This will be the first of what will be many more 10 gallon brews!

PEACE OUT!

Behold The Kegerator

Hey folks - thought I would create a post here about my kegerator and the steps and materials used to build it. Here's a look at the almost finished product:


Making your own kegerator is fun, and believe it or not, relatively inexpensive. For those of you (including yours truly) that tire of the incessant cleaning and scrubbing of bottling, kegging your own homebrew is an absolute Godsend.

Before I begin, the first thing I bought was a basic keg kit from KegConnection.com. Here is a short and non-comprehensive list of items that I got from their 2 Keg Basic Keg Kit:

• Two (2) Cornelius kegs (soda kegs)
• Two-port manifold with check valves
• 5/16" ID hose for gas line
• 1/4" ID hose for beer lines
• 5# CO2 tank
  
• regulator

And in addition I purchased their most excellent 3-faucet drip tray.

Next came the fridge. I really lucked out when a neighbor of mine had a buddy who looking to get rid of his old top-down. Here's a picture of the victim:


Next, I purchased a litany of items from Austin Homebrew Supply:

• 1 x MFL Bulkhead (4")
• 2 x Stainless Steel Shank (4 1/8") with 1/4" Fitting Kit
• 1 x Stainless Steel Nipple (1/2" NPT to 3/8" Barbed)
• 2 x Chrome Faucet with Low Profile Faucet Handle
• 2 x FFL Fitting (5/16")
• 1 x FFL Fitting (1/4")
• 1 x Air Line Hose 5/16" - Length: 2'
• 2 x Beer Line Hose 3/16"- Length: 3'
• 2 x MFL Liquid Disconnect (Ball Lock Keg)
• 8 x Stainless Steel Hose Clamp
  

The idea here is that I wanted to store the CO2 tank outside of the fridge (hence the MFL bulkhead), leaving more space for the kegs inside the fridge. Regular-sized bar taps are fun, but the low-pro faucet handles were needed so that I could open the freezer up without hitting the taps and spilling my oh-so-precious beer. And yes, that is a hand-drawn plan of how it all was put together. I'll try and recreate it for you guys.

Here's the tools I used:

• 1" hole saw (I think $11 at Lowes) for faucet shanks
• 3/8" bit for MFL bulkhead (crap maybe it was bigger?)
• safety googles
  
• teflon tape
  
• drill
• wrenches :)
• cold beer

Last but not least, and certainly the most important part of this whole project plan: The Foreman (aka My Lovely Assistant aka My Wife). Hey, she's an engineer from Texas A&M University, and who am I to question that kind of authority?


Let's begin with the MFL bulkhead. I wanted this in the bottom-right corner of the fridge door, on the hinge side (duh). KEEP IN MIND that all drills were done on the DOOR of the fridge and ONLY THE DOOR. The cooling lines run through the sides of the fridge, and if you get stupid and drill blindly through them, well... kiss your fridge bye bye.

Also - do me a favor - unplug your fridge. Better safe than sorry!


I want to say that I used a 3/16" bit for a pilot hole and then moved up to a larger 3/8" bit for the final drill, but I can't remember. :(


And here's the finished product.


Next came the cutting out the holes for the faucet shanks. Because there was a rib down the middle of the interior door, the faucets had to be offset slightly to the right. This actually worked out ok because that meant there was less need for really long beer lines when the door opened, since the faucets were now on the hinge side.

Here's The Foreman checking my measurements:


1" hole saw about to get busy:


Jeffro making the cuts:


Assistant Foreman (aka My Daughter) checking on progress:


Voila - shanks inserted, drip tray mounted. The shanks are tightened by the nuts on the inside of the door. Remember not to tighten too much or else you'll warp the inside plastic.




Next, onto taping - we're almost done! Standard teflon tape used here to ensure water-tight seal with the 1/4" fittings.


Here's an interior shot of the final product (at the time):


Ready to drink! Let's pour!


LOL - don't forget to adjust your pressures! Should have bled a bit more pressure out of the keg and lowered the output psi of the CO2 to the neighborhood of 7-8 pounds.


So that's pretty much it! Really wasn't TOO hard, and I am one dumb animal when it comes to mechanical doings. If I can do it, trust me you can too!

Since then I've finally gotten around to adding the third tap, but can't use it until I get a three-valve manifold. :( Maybe for my birthday, are you reading this, Lovely Assistant????

All for now - please feel free to e-mail me at jeff@wickedhops.com for any questions!

Prost,
Jeffro