Brewing up a kolsch

End of hiatus?

One of the things my fiancee and I want to do for our wedding next fall is have some homebrewed beer for the reception and possibly a tasting session of our favorite craft beers and homebrews. I like the idea because it'll give us something different to do during the reception AND I get to brew up a ton of beer. Double win. 

So the next task is to think of some beer styles I can brew up that will be fun to make and drink and the first thing I thought of was Kolsch ale. It's light, clear and fairly crisp, so non-craft beer drinkers won't get weirded out and if done right can pack a lot of flavor and feel into something that looks like a macro brew. Thumbing through How To Brew and The Complete Joy of Homebrewing gave me an idea of where I should start and thumbing through homebrew forums yielded a ton of  recipes. From those I cobbled together an all-grain recipe that looks something like:

Malt:

11 lbs German pilsner

1 lb Vienna

1 lb Cara Pils

Hops

1 oz US hallertau 4.6 % AA (60 min)

1 oz Tettnang 4.8% AA (60 min)

White Labs WLP029 German Ale/Kolsch Yeast

I'd cut out 2 lbs of the pils malt next time, my original gravity was 1.064, which is high for the style.

This brew also featured my sweet new equipment:

Best use of a turkey fryer that doesn't involve hot oil.

So that went swimmingly, the yeast started doing its thing and the bubbles from the airlock burbled me to sleep. And then the weather decided to turn balmy and beautiful here in MI.

One of the reasons the Kolsch style is clean-tasting is because it's fermented at lower temperatures than most other ales and I was concerned that the fermentation would start producing off flavors. I turned to Science for my salvation:

Swamp cooler to the rescue! The primary is sitting in a tub of water, covered in a towel that is wicking up the water. The fan evaporates the water on the towel, cooling the fermenter and keeping the yeastie beasties under control and well-behaved. 

Hopefully we'll get our brew on some more this weekend for some Marzen fun...

A geas completed.

Tonight I shall tell you about a quest. A quest I undertook and completed. A Beerquest. (Regular blogging will commence when I stop freaking out about school, finding a job and life in general).


I can't really get behind people obsessing over acquiring "rare" or highly rated beers. Rarity and quality are not equivalent and most of the reviews I read on Beer Advocate have been mathematically proven to be suspect. But around last January I'd been hearing good things about Oskar Blues' Old Chub from multiple trusted sources and wanted to try some. So I looked for it at my favorite local beer dispensaries. No dice. I couldn't find it at Plum Market or Whole Foods in A2 either. Fine. Oskar Blues doesn't distribute to MI. Nor does it distribute to Ohio. So my search at Jungle Jim's and the drive-thru beer store turned up empty. (Though I did get some nice beers at both of those venues, including the Lake Erie Monster.) Despair.

Cut to last August, when I realized I would be traveling to theAmerican craft beer motherland for the Fall ACS meeting. In the words of my 7th grade science teacher, "Boo-yah!" My first evening in the state I walked from my seedy motel to an adorable cafe, had myself some Fat Tire and shrimp tacos then walked across the street to the liquor store and loaded up on some Colorado brews that are unobtainable in the fair state of Michigan.

Oh yes. I did get me some'o that.

And some Modus Hoperandi

Oh yes, cans. Beautiful cans of Old Chub, Modus Hoperandi and Silverback Pale Ale (and a bomber of Yeti Belgian Imperial Stout). All of these beautiful beers survived the trip back to the Wolverine State in my checked luggage. I shall blog about them soon.
+500 XP.

Review! Great Lakes Lake Erie Monster IIPA

August 4th is International India Pale Ale Day. I would celebrate it with some tastings down at my favorite local pub but I will be canoeing in the wilds of Canada, where the beverage of choice is high-proof vodka. I am reviewing Great Lakes Brewing Co's Lake Erie Monster instead. I picked up this beer at a drive-thru beer store and it made my day.

I'm still working on the photography.

The head on this beer is beautiful: it pours thick and creamy and persists to the bottom of the glass. It  a golden amber color with a reddish tint - much like bow rosin. Lots of haze in this unfiltered monster. 

 

The smell that comes off has some fruityness and pine.  I can only describe it like a grapefruit, pomegranate and fig had a three-way and their spawn moved in with a pine tree. The beer volcanoes in heaven smell just like this.

Tasting starts off with the piney, works its way to some carbon dioxide spicyness with some sweet malt undertones and finishes with the alcohol heat and some more pronounced sugars. As it warms the aroma and taste take on a more orangey character, tasting sweeter relative to the bitterness of the hops. Which is saying a lot because this is one hoppy, bitter beer. It takes a bit of thinking and swishing to reveal this  because the bitterness is fairly balanced against the malt profile, letting the hop flavor and aroma profile shine. The alcohol is only noticeable at the end of the taste, which is pretty astonishing for a beer that's 9.1% abv. By taste I would have pegged it at around 7-8% but there is so much hops and malt that you don't notice it until you go to pour yourself another.

I've been savoring this beer for the past 30 minutes and it still has a beautiful layer of foam on top with enough carbonation to keep the beer popping in the mouth. Overall this is a solid IIPA, very hop-forward but not too bitter with a very American flavor profile. My only regret is that it's available May-July and I only picked up one four-pack.

Review! Two Brothers' Domaine du Page

Tonight I'm sampling Domaine du Page from Two Brothers Brewing Co. I've been looking forward to this beer because I have heard good things about Two Brothers from Groucho and Chud of the Beer Report and I can't find them in Michigan. So this comes from my stash o'beerz from Jungle Jim's in Cincinnati.

The beer poured well, and is a dark amber color. There's not a whole lot of smell coming off the head save for some dark fruity notes, like sniffing a date. Or something. I don't know what a "country ale" is and I'm too lazy to Google it but if it's like a farmhouse ale, then it's supposed to be drinkable and a little funky. The first sip speaks to both of these facts. This is a malt-centric beer, with sweetness giving the backbone of the flavor throughout the profile. I also get a bit of winey notes, which is probably what is bringing the funk of the beer. There is just the beginnings of a sour note which is not unpleasant. The beer is 5.9% ABV so while it doesn't knock you out it's not something you'd drink a lot of after a day as obnoxiously hot and muggy as what we've been experiencing here in the midwest/east the past week. Nothing new is really brought to the beer as it warms, which is all right, it's packing a solid taste, but I kind of expected some more flavors and tastes to come out with temperature.

Overall, this is a good beer: I'm not sure it's a fair representation of the farmhouse style but it does call itself a country ale. But it proves that just because a beer is French-styled doesn't mean it's going to surrender to your mouth.

Review! Smuttynose IPA

Decided to restart bloginating. Tonight I'm going to try reviewing a beer my wonderful fiancee picked out for me, Smuttynose's "Finestkind" IPA.

Apologies for my poor photography skills, the only digital camera I have right now is the webcam on my MacBook and it's hard to angle shots well.

The beer pours perfectly, I got a good half inch of head off that stuck around a bit. It's a reddish amber color, hazy with a little bit of sediment. I got a faint whiff of citrus from the pour. Grapefruit aroma is definitely present when you sniff the beer, this is an Amurrican IPA. This is good because the beers I've been drinking lately have been a little lacking in the hop character and I could use some bitter in my life. The first sip is a piney, grapefruit ambrosial experience that mellows into the malty backwater flavors of the beer, along with a not unpleasant alcohol burn. It's hard to forget this is a 6.9% ABV (alcohol by volume) but this doesn't detract from the hop-forwardness, just livens up the tongue for the next sip. As the beer warms the malt flavor starts to drown out the alcohol, which is nice. This is a little less balanced between hops and malt than I'm accustomed to, but the hops are balanced within themselves so the bitter is not overpowering and there's a full spectrum of hop flavors.

Overall, Finestkind is  a quality American IPA, no surprises, no flaws and a good way to spend an evening

First Impressions

Probably the first thing people notice about a beer they have just poured is the color. The darkness of a beer is measured by the Standard Reference Method (SRM for short). This is basically a measure of how much light goes through the beer. (For more information, Wikipedia is a good start.) The higher the SRM, the darker the beer.

I've found myself making (and drinking) darker beers these past couple months. There's something about that touch of sweetness and coffee flavor that warms you up in the cold seasons. Last night I was brewing a weizenbock, last month a roasty toasty mild ale and the month before that an Oktober-style ale. Before this I've been pretty enamored with paler styles, trying to achieve complexity without color, but these experiments in darker malts have been paying dividends.

First Post- An introduction

Hello Interwebs! I'm a Ph D student in chemistry who enjoys brewing beer. I hope this is a chronicle of my exploits and creations in crafting boozahol, with occasional rambling thoughts on what goes through my mind and explanations on brewing from a chemist's perspective.