Here we are in April which means I won't be getting as many question as I did for last month's St. Patrick's Day about the  "widget" in Guinness.  This is my first opportunity to answer so let me now take a few paragraphs to explain.  Guinness famously developed and popularized the process of infusing beer with nitrogen gas — a marriage that subtly alters a beer’s aroma and flavor while lending it a silky, creamy mouthfeel. How does nitrogen do this?

It’s all about the bubbles.

Most traditional beers are carbonated, a process that can occur naturally during fermentation. As yeast converts sugar to alcohol, it also produces carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide — if the brewer chooses to trap it — infuses a beer with tiny gas bubbles that give it a lively, prickly texture akin to soda or seltzer water. Brewers can also add carbonation during the bottling or packaging process.

Most nitro beers are mildly carbonated. But the addition of nitrogen — an insoluble gas that forms smaller, more profuse bubbles than carbon dioxide — gives beer a smoother texture. For a long time, craft brewers tended to eschew nitrogen infusion. Part of that was the challenge of incorporating the gas into their brews — either in the can, or in barroom taps. Many also felt nitro-infused beers — especially floral, citrusy, hoppy brews like pale ales — lost a lot more than they gained. Not long ago, the only nitro beers you could find — on tap, or in cans — were Guinness and Left Hand Milk Stout.  All that’s started to change. Even Budweiser is catching on. While some hardcore craft fans still consider nitro-infusion anathema, others have come around to the idea that texture — along with aroma and taste — plays a big role in a drinker’s enjoyment.

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In my many years of brewing and talking to beer drinkers I've found that barleywine is also easily the most misunderstood major style of beer, exceeded only by Steinbiers and Kvieks and Grisettes and oddities like those, of largely foreign origins.

Here are a few of the explanations I’ve heard, first-hand of what “barleywine” means:
“It’s beer that fermented with wine yeast.” “It’s beer that’s partially blended with wine.” “It’s a beer but not a beer because the alcohol level makes it a liquor.”   It’s another term for a weaker brandy.” “It’s a form of barrel-aged Stout, mixed with grain alcohol.” “It’s a beer made from a base of alcohol, instead of water.” “It’s made from grapes and then distilled, like Grappa, and then is aged with barley and hops.”  STOP!

In fact, the explanation is a lot more simple: Barleywine is called that because it’s one of the upper alcohol ranges of Strong Ales and frequently sports an ABV more commonly found in a wine. Its full spectrum is really from 8-9% to well over 13%. (about the average for most normal red and white wines) 

The general style has been around since ancient Greece. But, it was probably a brewer who saw his big, malty, overdriven ale wind up around 14% ABV who named it.  It was first used on a bottle by Bass & Company Brewers in 1903 

Barleywine beer is a strong ale that leans heavily on malt characteristics for flavor.  As barleywine beers advance in age, they develop oxidative characteristics, including honey and toffee flavors as well as aromas, darker colors, lessened bitterness and more. They are among the most age-worthy beers and I’ve tasted some that were brewed in the late 60s and early 70s which were as vibrant as if they were made last month.

BUT – and this is HUGE – today, in the age of the universal mania for IPA and hoppy beers in general, many, maybe most, American Barleywines are made with an assertive or even aggressive hops profile, a distinct break from its British origins. One English brewer who messaged me a few years back, said that, if you make Barleywine correctly, it will be, “Like a boozy Scotch ale on steroids” and that’s a handy nutshell.

Homebrewers thinking of making a barleywine should first, think about whether you’d like to create an American or English barleywine recipe. Traditional English barleywines tend to be a little more malt forward than the American versions. English barleywines will still have a significant amount of bittering hops and will focus on English varieties (like Kent Goldings and Fuggles), while American barleywines tend to use American hop varieties (like Cascade) and will probably have more significant late boil hop additions. 

Barleywine ale requires a significant amount of fermentable ingredients to achieve the higher levels of alcohol. Many all-grain brewers will supplement a normal volume of grain with additional malt extract and/or sugar in their barleywine recipes. This allows them to perform a mash that fits in their all-grain system and still collect a decent volume of wort of the appropriate gravity. Aim for an OG of at least 1.090.

All-grain brewers: Using a pale ale malt as a base, add up to 10-15% specialty malts for color and flavor complexity. A Munton’s mild ale malt would be a good choice of base malt for a traditional barley wine. To create a more fermentable wort, mash the grains at the low end of the range, at about 150°F.

Extract brewers: will need three cans of liquid malt extract to achieve the gravity needed for this brew. Try a combination of light, Munich, and amber LME and steep some crystal malt to get the malt complexity that’s characteristic of barleywines. 

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

Jack

Before I get to my main topic, Sours, let to answer a question several readers have written me about.  Boiling wort is considered a crucial step in the brewing process, as it serves multiple purposes including eliminating beer spoilage microbes, halting the enzymatic conversion of starch to fermentable sugar, driving off the DMS precursor, and promoting the Maillard reaction.  It’s also during the boil that alpha acids from hops isomerize into iso-alpha acids, which contribute bitterness while reducing proteins that lead to increased body and haze.

Despite the general benefits of boiling, there are those who view the process as having downsides as well, particularly those interested in Hazy IPA. Hops contain a number of aromatic terpenes that react differently to certain temperatures, and many of the most desirable fruity ones are known to volatilize at boiling temperature. For this reason, some brewers of Hazy IPA opt for a “raw” brewing approach where the boil step is eliminated altogether, which ostensibly leads to increased fruity hop character as well as fuller body and improved haze stability.

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What defines sourness is as much a science as it is subjective taste.  Acidity is usually considered a flavor fault in modern beers. When speaking of beer, the word ‘sour’ is usually pejorative.” Yet when beers are intentionally soured, as in Old-World styles or the New-World replications of those styles, they can be among the most complex and refreshing of beers.  Generally speaking, sour beer is defined as that which is high in acidity derived from lactic-acid producing bacteria. Technically speaking, it is beer that has been subjected to bacterial infection. In other words, context is key. 

Sour beer styles span centuries of Western brewing traditions, In the last decade, Belgian- and German-inspired sour ales have split into endless refractions, bringing on such unexpected trends as fruited sours mimicking smoothies and decadent desserts; and hazy, hoppy sour IPAs.  Add in the overlapping “wild beer” category, which favors Brettanomyces yeast strains but is not “sour beer” unless acidified, and it’s no wonder retailers and consumers are often left in the dark about what exactly a sour beer will taste like. Where each wild and sour beer style lies on this microorganism-speckled spectrum depends on a variety of brewer decisions and environmental factors.

Kettle Souring

Quick souring, also known as kettle souring, encompasses a vast array of tart, low-alcohol American sour beers. With this method, beer is soured directly in the brew kettle, or stainless steel tank, by adding a lactic-acid producing bacteria to the wort pre-boil. This lactic acid starter gives the bacteria a head start on turning sugar into lactic acid before the brewer pitches yeast. It can also be pitched post-boil for added acidity.

The two main acidifying bacteria used to sour beer are Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. In the case of a kettle sour, Lactobacillus is more favorable, contributing what is considered a “clean” acidity. Pediococcus can offer a more complex acidity over time, but comes with more risk of off-flavors.

Souring With Spontaneous Fermentation

A growing number of U.S. craft brewers and blenders are incorporating spontaneous fermentation methods into their sour beer production. To achieve the complexity of a traditional Belgian lambic like Brasserie Cantillon, the single remaining traditional lambic brewery in Brussels proper, the most devoted have even added coolships to their properties. ,

Opting for open fermentation, or letting wort cool in a coolship, welcomes the spontaneous inoculation of wild yeast and bacteria in the air. This includes all sorts of microbes that you wouldn’t normally want in a sour beer.  Bacteria strains such as Acetobacter, Enterobacter, and Pediococcus will show up and make what would otherwise be considered some really gnarly off flavors.  That’s where Brettanomyces comes in. Given enough time, the Brettanomyces is going to clean up those off-flavors and turn them]into some really nice-tasting compounds,

Brettanomyces strains work very slowly. That’s one of the reasons that lambic and gueuze take such an extended maturation time to get a product that tastes palatable and tastes delicious.

Mixed-Culture Fermentation

Sister to spontaneous fermentation is mixed-culture fermentation. “I feel like there was a time in the craft beer scene here in the U.S. where folks were making really aggressively sour beer primarily through mixed-culture fermentation, pitching Lactobacillus, pitching Pediococcus, either post-primary fermentation and into barrel aging, or perhaps just into barrel aging.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

Jack

From the start, modern malt liquor was an industrial product aimed at the mass market. While the phrase “malt liquor” was occasionally used in previous centuries to describe beer, it didn’t appear as we know it today—strong, and laden with body-lightening adjuncts—until after Prohibition in the United States. A few Midwestern breweries, including Grand Valley in Michigan, Gluek in Minnesota, and Goetz in Missouri, were among the first to develop and market these strong beers.

A 1948 U.S. patent granted to Alvin Gluek describes his goal: “a very thin malt liquor of relatively high alcoholic content, brewed and fermented wholly from cereal products and having a very pleasing, dry distinctive taste not akin to beer, ale, malt, porter, stout, or other fermented beverages commonly brewed from cereal products.” The patent goes on to lay out what is basically a recipe for a 7 percent ABV beer, including 2,600 pounds (1,180 kg) of corn grits and/or rice to only 1,200 pounds (544 kg) of malt.

The idea was to use various tricks to increase attenuation for a beer with less malt, lighter body, and more of an alcoholic kick—light, dry, and sparkling, with a Champagne-like familiarity. One of the early brands was Country Club, originally brewed by Goetz in St. Joseph, Missouri. Pabst owns the brand now, but you can still find Country Club on the back shelves of coolers in cheap liquor marts around the country.

Given the rising interest in American adjunct lagers, it only makes sense that malt liquor should get a fresh look from small-scale brewers.

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Phenols represent a broad class of compounds that may be very welcome or completely undesirable in beer, depending on the brewer’s intention and the target style. Chemically speaking, a phenolic compound contains hydroxyl (OH) and a ring of hydrogen and carbon molecules (an aromatic hydrocarbon ring). Such compounds are prolific in nature and are responsible for many well-known flavors and aromas:

• Capsaicin gives chiles their fiery bite.

• Carvacrol is responsible for oregano’s pungency.

• Eugenol is found in cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and vanilla.

• Guaiacol is the smoky essence in whiskey and roasted coffee.

• Methyl salicylate smells and tastes just like wintergreen.

• Raspberry ketone smells like raspberries.

• Thymol is what gives thyme its distinctive aroma.

Phenolic compounds are also produced synthetically for industrial and pharmaceutical applications. But when it comes to beer, you may or may not want phenolic character. As usual, it really depends on what you’re after:

• Bavarian Weißbier, or Hefeweizen derives its signature clove character from 4-vinyl guaiacol.

• Saison often contains a mix of clove and pepper-like phenols.

• Brettanomyces-driven styles are often described as horsey or barnyard-like thanks to 4-ethyl phenol.

While cloves, pepper, and even sweaty horse blankets may be desirable in certain brews, other phenolic flavors are rarely welcome guests. If your beer tastes of plastic, smoke, Chloraseptic, or Band-Aids, then look to these potential sources.

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When is too much, too many, or not enough? When it comes to hops, the number of varieties and quantity, this question absolutely applies. For several years many, if not most homebrew recipes have called for an amazing variety of hops, with many IPA recipes calling for four, five or even six different hops. How can you achieve balance and structure—both are stern words if you enter your beer in contests—without added expense, the loss of precious wort to absorption, and still create the beer you want? 

In the actual brew, once you start introducing loads of separate hops over the course of the boil, you're going to lose a lot of those individual characteristics because first, you're introducing a very small amount, and over the course of that 60-minute boil you're not going to have enough differentiation to make as much of a difference as one might think. So, using a little more distinctive hop to try to give your final wort a little more distinction is probably a better bet. The result will be a cleaner flavor than what you would experience if you added several small additions.. I suggest deciding on the flavor and aroma characteristics you desire and use three, probably two hop varieties that best deliver what you want. So, remember, I think that usually you can get what you want out of two or three hops instead of a bunch of small additions of six or seven. 

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

Jack

The most convenient way to get your hands on fresh hops is to grow them in your own backyard: It’s easier than you think (or so I am told. I hold an enviable record when it comes to successfully destroying otherwise healthy-looking plants, hops included).

If gardening isn’t your thing or isn’t an option, some homebrew stores now organize pre-orders and will overnight fresh hops directly to your door. But you have to be ready to use them when they arrive. Those who live near hops farms may be able to negotiate a few pounds of freshies in exchange for a day of volunteer labor (harvesting hops is hard work!).

However you acquire them, fresh cones are almost always used late in the boil to add aroma, or even after fermentation to infuse the beer with incredible fresh hops aroma. This, of course, requires a bit of timing so that the hops can go straight into the beer after harvest.

Sometimes called whole cone or leaf hops, dried cones are fresh cones that have been dried so that they can be stored for year-round use. Properly stored, dried hops can last for several years with only minimal degradation. Some breweries pride themselves on brewing only with whole-cone hops and deploy legions of marketing professionals to make sure that consumers know it.

As a homebrewer, you’ll have no trouble finding high-quality dried hops cones. Given their bulk, whole cones do present some storage challenges, though, which is why homebrewers and professionals alike overwhelmingly choose hops pellets.

Pellets

Hops pellets may not be as romantic or as nice to look at as whole cones (they resemble a peculiar cross between rabbit food and, let’s say, Soylent Green?), but what they lack in aesthetic appeal, they more than make up for in convenience. Pellets are just dried cones that have been compressed and extruded through a die to create little pellets. The sticky resins within the hops are sufficient to hold the pellets together, so binding agents are neither necessary nor added.

Pellets offer several advantages over whole cones:

• Because they are compressed, pellets take up much less space than whole hops cones.

• Pellets have a lower ratio of surface area to volume than cones, which makes them less vulnerable to oxidation.

• Pellets tend to have more uniform performance characteristics than cones because the production process averages out variations in the crop.

In the end, choosing pellets or whole cones is less important than ensuring that the hops you purchase are properly stored, which means reducing exposure to oxygen and light as much as possible. Your homebrew retailer should only sell hops that are stored in the dark and that are either vacuum sealed or packaged in an inert gas such as nitrogen. Do not be afraid to ask your homebrew retailer about their hops-storage methods!

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I know that many of my readers are experienced all grain home brewers but I'd like to say a few words about extract brewers since I'm guessing many folks will try this great hobby for the first time as we enter 2024.  I feel strongly about the benefits of progressing through the brewing craft in a methodical fashion and I am grateful for all the lessons I learned from those early extract days. Some unfortunately may feel this process is like cheating in a sense. Someone has already taken the base grains, carefully extracted the sugars and flavors from those grains and condensed it into either a liquid in the form of Liquid Malt Extract (LME) or a powder in the form of Dry Malt Extract (DME). From the outside it appears an extract brew day is simply adding water and voila. However, there is a lot more to it and a lot to be learned from this path. It provides an onramp with guardrails to greatly improve the chances for a successful completion.  The more success for more the person will continue learning and brewing

For many others (and me when I first started so long ago), success along the extract path kept us encouraged to keep progressing and dig deeper into the craft. Just like my training wheels as a kid inspired me to explore cycling without them and eventually to build a ramp to jump my sister (she survived). However, more importantly I learned to comfortably navigate into and through the finishing side of the brewing process. The side that is probably most susceptible to infections and dumping liquid down the drain. The side of the process that determines if that Pilsner somehow becomes a sour, but not in a good way. The extract brewing process introduces us to the importance of controls, procedures, timing, and process on a scale that is not too overwhelming, expensive, or time consuming. It is the right proving ground on whether reality aligns with the fantasy of brewing. It introduces us to the anxiety of transferring liquid to various destinations within the process. It is the perfect way to test if you have the patience and work ethic required to become an all-grain brewer.

The most common criticism I've heard about extract brewing is that  the boil kettle is just like a crock pot, that you simply throw in the ingredients and come back later to a finished product. Not so. There is definitely a science to timing the additions, timing the boil, and controlling the ferocity of the boil itself. These are some of our earliest introductions to the intricacies of the process and the stress of hitting targets. We seek a well-balanced methodical process that produces predictable results that is dependent upon the brewer. Much like a perfectly seasoned and prepared steak at your favorite steak joint, we want the correct temperature with just the right additions at just the right time. Otherwise, we risk an inferior end product, dangerous boil overs, and even a ruined batch.  

If you know an extract home brewer give them encouragement and help if needed.  Regardless of the method used we are all united in the quest for making the best beer possible!

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

Jack

There is more to Czech lager than throwing in some Saaz and pitching a yeast strain labeled as “Bohemian.” And, after further study, if Czech lager begins to look like an annoyingly intricate puzzle—or a house of cards where all the pieces need to fit together just so—there’s a reason why: That’s how it evolved, as brewers there continue striving to outdo each other in making the kinds of beers that the locals want to drink in serious quantity.  

It’s naïve to think that Czech brewers adhere to decoction like religion because they’re just stuck in their ways. Many also experiment from time to time with infusion mashing—but they stick with decoction for what it adds to the beer. You can make great lager with an infusion mash—that should be obvious by now—but decoction is a critical piece of what makes Czech lager what it is. To get an idea of how a typical Czech lager decoction might go, here’s a simplified version of the program at Budvar: Mash in low, at 100°F (38°C), then raise it to 122°F (50°C). Separate about a third of the mash and take it through 20-minute rests at 149°F (65°C) and 167°F (75°C) before bringing it to boil for 20 minutes. Then reunite the decoction with the rest of the mash, mix thoroughly—and do it all over again. Brož says the whole mash process at Budvar takes about four hours. 

Many brewers have a simple view of decoction mashing—either it makes no difference, it’s unnecessary, or maybe it only adds some malty flavors. However, when Czech and German brewers talk about decoction, they talk about more than a richer malt flavor—they also talk about better foam stability, higher mash efficiency, more body, and higher attenuation. Those last two may seem counterintuitive—higher attenuation, yet more body?—but for the Czechs, that’s an important combination. The beer should be satisfying yet digestible—when your mug is empty, it’s a moment of great sadness and longing.

Home brewers should realize that decoction mashing is actually fairly simple. All it involves is pulling off a portion of the mash and boiling it for some time before adding it back in. The qualifiers—single, double, triple—refer to how many times the process is repeated within the context of step mashing. A full step mash schedule may include an acid rest at 95─113°F (35─45°C), a protein rest at 131─138°F (55─58°C), saccharification at 142─160°F (61─71°C), and mash out at 168─170°F (75─77°C). Decoctions can be used to heat the mash from one rest to another. Typically a single decoction is used to move from saccharification to mash out, but the extra rounds can be used with additional rests in the schedule.

So why bother? The biggest justification is somewhat outdated. Most malts today are highly modified, but that wasn’t always the case. The full step mash evolved to deal with under-modified malts, and boiling a portion of the grain prepares those malts to be more effectively mashed. Another part of the appeal is that it’s a traditional touchstone that connects modern brewers with their European forebears, and many would claim you can’t make a real German lager without a decoction mash.

Aside from the historical weight, though, there are some practical reasons to try it: decoction mashing adds melanoidins and complex malty character while creating the conditions for a clearer beer. But if you’re not convinced enough to tackle a decoction mash on your next batch, there are some simpler ways you can try to reap some of the benefits.

Here are some simplified alternative methods for decoction.

There are a few ways to capture decoction magic by integrating boiled grain into your mash. Some might argue that you might as well just do a decoction, but these approaches can streamline the process.

The first option is known as the Schmitz Process, and it’s sort of an inverse decoction mash. Bring the mash up to temperature for starch conversion, say 150°F (66°C), then let the malt settle before you collect as much liquid from the top as possible. Set the liquid aside, holding it at temperature, while bringing the grain to a boil for 15─30 minutes (be sure to stir constantly and keep an eye on your water levels so you don’t accidentally scorch your grains!). Then, cool the grist back down to 150°F (66°C) and stir the liquid back in to continue the mash. The idea is that boiling the grain will break it down and yield malt complexity, and it’s assumed that the liquid contains enough enzymes to convert all the starch.

To me, this seems like extra work, especially the step of cooling the boiled mash, so it’s not much of an alternative. If you try this, aim for a thinner mash to ensure that you’re pulling off enough liquid and enzymes.

Another choice boils decoction down to its simplest elements. Start your mash normally, holding your targeted starch conversion temperature. After about 25 minutes, pull out about 20 percent of the mash and heat it to boiling (again, watching your water levels, and stirring constantly!). This grain will be added after mash out, just before the sparge. The main savings relative to a real decoction is that with this method, you’re not depending on the boiled grist to heat the grain to mash out.

I think the best alternative is Kai Troester’s (@braukaiser) pseudo-decoction. He recommends a thick initial mash, combining half the grain bill with a third of the total mash water. Once this is mixed together, he brings it to a boil for 20─30 minutes (don’t forget to stir and watch those water levels!). Then he mashes in the remaining malt with the rest of the water, aiming for his target saccharification temperature. The second half of the malt bill provides plenty of enzymes to convert all the starches. You get the melanoidin malt character from boiling the grain, but it’s done in a way that doesn’t disrupt the mash with complex operations. The added time is relatively short, too

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

Jack

Oak has been used in brewing for many years, but recently it has seen a resurgence of interest due to its large flavor impact on both wine and beer. In the past, the oak flavors gained from storage in wood were considered to be a secondary benefit. Now, with the popularity of stainless steel fermenters and storage tanks, brewers and vintners alike are able to use these flavors as a creative addition to their products.

When used properly, oak can lend the most beautiful, full and rich properties of the wood and weave them delicately into the beer. When used improperly, oak can destroy the balance that you have worked so hard to achieve, and can taste like you are chewing on tree bark. A little knowledge on what oak is all about can be the difference between turning a good beer into an award-winner or lawn food. 

Oak is full of many flavorful and aromatic compounds and chemicals that, when added to beer, create another level of depth and complexity. Examples are furfural, which lends caramel sweetness, or eugenol, which is clove-like. Vanillin, the most recognizable flavor, tastes and smells like vanilla. Lipids, which constitute the oils, fats and waxes found in the wood, are responsible for oak lactones, which lend coconut and aromatic wood flavors. These are the basic flavors found in all types of oak, and the ones we as brewers are looking for. The important thing to think about when choosing oak for your beer is? How will these flavors interact with the flavors already present? Knowing which type of oak contributes which flavors is key in matching beer to wood. The three most common types of oak are American, French and Hungarian, each with its own balance of flavor and complexity. American oak has a great aromatic sweetness along with a nice vanilla component. It provides a sweet and full mouthfeel to beer, easily paired with most malt combinations. French oak also has an aromatic sweetness as well as providing a full mouthfeel, along with cinnamon and allspice characters. It is widely praised for its sweet spice and confectionary flavor compounds (custard, butterscotch, milk chocolate). Hungarian oaks are said to provide a high amount of vanillin properties, along with roasted coffee and bittersweet chocolate characters. The flavor profile of oak is enhanced during the toasting process. Which compounds come out in what ratios depends largely on the variety of oak and the level of toast it received, ranging from light and untoasted to dark and heavy. When the oak is toasted, the characteristics unique to that varietal are brought out and defined. 

For example, American oak at a light toast level will lend a fresh wood and coconut character to your beers, but as toast levels increase to medium/medium-plus levels, these flavors are decreased and more vanilla and caramel notes are brought forward. Medium-plus is typically the best of all worlds in dealing with toast levels, as it brings out the qualities you would normally find in a heavier toast, without diminishing the vanilla and other softer qualities found in a lighter toast. There are many different oak delivery methods, including aging your beer in a full-size barrel, and using sawdust or barrel replica kits. Oak chips and oak cubes are the simplest for homebrewers to use. A barrel is not feasible for many homebrewers, as they require a lot of hard work to keep them in good working order (clean, stored properly and bacteria-free). Sawdust can be hard to work with and will take some extra time to drop out in your beer, not to mention its lack of complex flavors. Staves and other barrel replica kits are geared more for use with large barrels that have lost much of their oak impact, and are often too large to be used easily in carboys. Chips and cubes, however, are very user friendly and do not need any sort of extra attention or care like their larger counterparts do. 

Chips are flat shreds of oak, usually about two inches long. Because there are only two sides to an oak chip, the wood reacts quickly to the heat during toasting andboth surfaces are toasted to an even level.  This gives the wood a rather one-dimensional flavor. Chips have a very short extraction time in beer, usually about a week or so, which make them ideal for use in the fermentation process. Yeast will actually metabolize certain oak compounds, like vanillin and furfural, and leave much of the spice and other characteristics behind. This creates a nice foundation to build off of with any later oak additions. Beers that do well with this method include English bitters and American pale ales-styles that generally don?t benefit from a longer aging time. Oak cubes have several layers of toast due to the thickness and shape of the cube. A toasted oak cube will have varying degrees of color along each side-these layers represent the level of heat penetration during the toasting process. Heat is what brings out all of the different and wonderful flavors of the wood, and different temperatures with different woods for different lengths of time develop different flavors. Oak cubes replicate the complex flavors of a barrel better than chips because the cubes are able to have multiple toast levels like a barrel would. Think of it as what you see is what you taste,where the different colors of the cubes provide more flavors than the single color of the chips. Cubes also have a much longer extraction time, from about two weeks up to a year depending on the size of the cube (the beer has a lot more wood to penetrate than with a chip) and the longer extraction time enables the beer to absorb the full character of the oak, and not just one or two facets of it. Cubes are ideal for beers that require a lengthy aging process such as imperial stouts and barleywines. 

Many homebrewers have not experimented with oak, mainly due to one fear-sanitizing! How should I sanitize this stuff? Do I soak them in sanitizing liquid, boil them in water? Sanitizers should not be used, as the sanitizer will be absorbed by the wood and carried over into your beer.

A simple way is to steam the wood, killing anything that may be living inside. One method is to put the wood in a Pyrex measuring cup with just enough water to cover the wood. Cover the top with a saucer and heat it in the microwave until the water starts to boil. Turn the microwave off and let the wood steam for two minutes. Repeat the process twice. This should kill anything that may be living in the wood. Add the oak and the water left behind to the keg, as the water will have a nice oak essence to it. If you plan on soaking your oak in alcohol, such as whiskey, this is all the sanitizing you will need as the high percentage of alcohol will kill anything that may be living in the wood. Kegs are the best container to store your beer while it is aging on oak. You can carbonate it at the same time, and it is much easier to pull samples than from a carboy.  Once the beer has been racked into the keg, it is time to add the cubes. Eventually the cubes will end up sinking to the bottom of the keg, and because this is also where the dip tube will be pulling your samples from, you will no doubt taste a very unbalanced beer. Every three weeks or so, rock the keg gently back and forth to ensure the portion of the beer that is in contact with the oak gets properly mixed with the beer toward the top of the keg.

If you are interested in trying your hand at a bourbon-aged oak flavor, try soaking your cubes for two weeks in a few ounces of bourbon or whiskey, and discard the whiskey before adding the oak to your beer (I find Wild Turkey blends well with darker beers). It is very easy to overdo the addition of bourbons or whiskeys, and less is definitely more which is why I prefer letting the cubes dose the beer over time. The oak should be up front, with the booze layered softly under the malt. If the flavor is not pronounced enough after two months of being on the oak, adding bourbon straight to the keg is acceptable, but be careful not to overuse it.  Tasting the beer over the next few months is a great way to see how the flavors and oak compounds blend and merge into your beer. After the first week on the oak, you will begin to taste hints of different flavors, but I find that they really start to meld after about four to six months. The longer you leave your beer in contact with the wood, the more of these great compounds will become infused with your beer. The cubes will continue to add flavor up to about a year. A great way to get that deep, complex oak characteristic is to use a one-two punch of chips in the fermenter and cubes in the keg. Adding oak chips to the fermenter will allow the beer to absorb some of those basic oak flavors we are looking for, and gives the cubes a nice foundation to build on when they are added to the beer after fermentation. Half an ounce of chips per 5 gallons of wort is a nice place to start. 

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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Jack

What is kellerbier? It is a version of German lager originating in Franconia, Bavaria and dates to the very beginnings of lagering in the latter half of the Middle Ages. It is unpasteurized and traditionally conditioned in an oak cask that was open to the environment through an unplugged bug hole. This allowed any CO2 from secondary fermentation to escape, and anything in the immediate environment in which, even in the relatively stable environment of a cave, no doubt created nuanced differences in the Kellerbier.

The bung hole was only sealed for shipping and the beer was served from the same cask it had matured in. So, the resulting pour would have been minimally, if at all carbonated, and quite cloudy with yeast and nutrients that neither settled out, nor been filtered out.

There are a couple even more obscure sub-styles of Kellerbier. Zwickelbier is basically a younger, weaker, less hop-forward, and usually darker version of the same “Keller” song. It isn’t allowed the same maturation time as Kellerbier.  

In fact, right before fermentation is complete the bung hole is sealed giving the beer decent carbonation and as soon as the yeast has finished its work, it is served. Its name is taken from the German name for a beer sampling device that is hung on the outside of fermentation takes, the Zwickel.

The other sub-style, Zoiglbier, is pretty hard to tell apart from Zwickelbier. Just like Zwickelbeir it is less hoppy, weaker, darker, more carbonated, and served younger. It may be slightly less carbonated, maybe a little darker in color, but it would be pretty hard to tell the two styles apart.

The pale-style Kellerbier, outlined below in “Characteristics,” is a modern adaption of the original darker Franconian style. It is more along the lines of a Helles than a Märzen, and is more popular, at least outside Franconia, than the traditional style.

Kellerbier in all its forms has survived in large part because of Franconian love. It still enjoys vast popularity in its place of origin, which, no doubt has saved it from total extinction. One of the trademarks of Kellerbier is conditioning in oak for several months. Some semblance of this conditioning can be had though, by using oak chips. You can either put them directly into your fermentor or make a tea that would then go into the fermentor (or do both).

Because of the tradition of serving Kellerbier from its conditioning cask it has very low carbonation. Think, English cask ale low. If you’re bottling, be stingy with your priming sugar. A volume of 1 to 1.8 is probably about right. The same goes for kegging. Only use enough pressure to serve the beer. Drink up! This beer isn’t meant to be saved once it’s ready to drink and will deteriorate quickly, so share it around and let all delight in your labors.

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What is needed/required from the lagering phase will very much be impacted by what occurred during the fermentation phase. A strong, healthy fermentation will take off some of the pressure during lagering to ‘heal wounds’ There are a number of fermentation byproducts which occur during primary fermentation which are best addressed during that phase but can be mitigated during lagering if need be.

The compound diacetyl, which can taste like butter, is produced during all fermentations but for a healthy fermentation it is cleaned up by the yeast during the end of fermentation. For lager beers some brewers conduct what is known as a diacetyl rest towards the end of fermentation to encourage the yeast to ‘clean up’ the diacetyl.  This is a step where the temperature of the beer is raised for a few days to help the yeast process this compound. 

f there is some perceptible diacetyl remaining in the beer at the completion of primary fermentation (e.g., beer has reached final gravity) it is possible for the yeast to further process this compound during lagering although the cold conditions are not as well suited for this biochemical process. It is truly best to ensure that no perceptible diacetyl is present before transferring the beer to the lagering vessel. 

The chemical compound acetaldehyde, which adds a taste described as green apple, is also produced during fermentation but towards the end of fermentation the yeast processes this compound into alcohol. Just like for diacetyl it is best to conduct a healthy fermentation such that the amount of acetaldehyde at the completion of fermentation is below the flavor threshold. Just like with diacetyl there is a possibility that the yeast during the lagering phase could reduce the acetaldehyde to below flavor threshold but the cold conditions do not favor this occurrence. 

A sulfur compound sometimes associated with lager beer is Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS) but the principal cause of this compound is from the chemical precursor S-methyl methionine (SMM) prevalent in Pilsner Malt which is converted to DMS during the boiling of wort. A strong, rolling boil followed by rapid cooling of the wort is typically sufficient to mitigate DMS in the resulting beer. When you homebrew a beer which features Pilsner Malt you should conduct a vigorous boil for 75 minutes. If you have ever tasted Rolling Rock beer you have tasted DMS which tastes like creamed corn to my palate. This flavor in Rolling Rock is an intended feature and not unpleasant for me but others will think differently here. 

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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Jack

Using Cryo Hops pellets instead of traditional T-90s offers the brewer higher oil concentrations in a smaller footprint, reducing shipping volumes and cooler storage. The benefit of less hop matter can translate to more finished beer—fewer pellets leave less trub soaking up wort in your kettle, whirlpool, or precious beer in your fermentors. This reduction in absorption allows breweries to produce more beer each year, or by producing the same amount in fewer batches. For every barrel of beer gained, the brewer uses water, malt, utilities, and labor more efficiently. Cryo Hops beers tend to showcase pronounced zest with reduced grassy and vegetative characteristics. 

Cryo pellets are made of concentrated lupulin from whole-leaf hops. Resins and aromatic oils are preserved using a proprietary and patented cryogenic separation process in a nitrogen-rich environment. The delicate lupulin is gently removed from the bract, or leaf matter, with a single screen passing through a mechanical sieve. The concentrated lupulin is then pressed through a liquid nitrogen–cooled pelleting die for a user-friendly pellet shape. They are immediately sealed into their oxygen-impermeable pouches, packaged, and shipped. 

Yakima Chief Hops launched Cryo Hops in 2017, it was considered the biggest discovery in advanced hop processing that the industry had seen in decades. Cryo Hops are not merely glorified T-45 pellets. Receiving a U.S. patent means that our process is a significant and measurable improvement from any other hop production process 

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A refractometer is a device that measures the index of infraction in a liquid sample. In the context of homebrewing, a refractometer is essential to taking a measurement that determines the starting Brix and or Specific Gravity of your beer.  Using a refractometer is simple and allows you to take a key measurement. One of the most important measurements you can start with is the starting gravity of your brew. The gravity refers to the amount of sugar present in the liquid you’re testing. This tells you what fraction of the brew will ultimately be converted to alcohol when undergoing fermentation.

To use your refractometer to take this measurement, take your pre-fermentation solution—also called the wort—and put several drops of it on the viewing glass of the refractometer. The light that passes through those drops will create a prism, and the prism will illuminate the looking glass’ chart indicating what the specific gravity of the solution is. It is important to frequently calibrate your refractometer. Be sure to use distilled water when calibrating your refractometer. To do this, place several drops on the looking glass and close the cap. You can then look inside the glass and adjust the calibration screw until you see a reading of 0 Brix scale and or 1.000 Specific Gravity Scale for the sample depending on your model.

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There are some people who say that I’m just an old brewer with a religious adherence to the style guidelines. Honestly, though, I have a pretty laissez-faire attitude when it comes to those guidelines. I see them as more of a canvas, a starting point rather than the rule of law that every brewer must follow or off with their heads. Of course, there is one exception to this attitude. And that exception is Kölsch.

I love Kölsh.  It is and will always be brewed only in Köln (Germany) and the surrounding areas. I sometimes hesitate even to call it a style; to do so ignores the significance of the city’s history and culture in its development. Kölsch as we know it today would simply be a German pale ale without Köln’s rich and diverse culture to back it up. Everything I love about the beer—the glassware, the surly köbes who serve it, the tallying of each stange on the coaster—are as important to Kölsch as the beer itself. You can’t separate it from its culture. However, this doesn’t mean that we as brewers and drinkers in North America and around the world can’t have some fun trying to re-create the best beverage in the world. Here are some tips for you brewers on making a great version -

1, Köln’s water is hard, contrary to popular belief. More importantly, it is high in temporary hardness. To get a similar profile at home or in your brewery, treat your water accordingly by adding some baking soda, since the bicarbonates in Köln are in the hundreds of ppm. 

2. Another key to a brewing a great Kölsch-style beer is high-quality German pilsner malt. Keep it simple. I’ve read anything from adding Vienna or Munich malt to adding a large portion of wheat—the latter being the most common misconception about Kölsch. While there are one or two brewers in Köln who use wheat malt in their Kölsch, it is not 20 percent of the grist. If you must use wheat, keep it to around 5 percent of the grist or lower. I use German pilsner malt and a touch of Carapils—that’s it—for a nice bready aroma with a touch of honey. 

3, The beauty of Kölsch—and the reason it is, in my opinion, the hardest beer to make—is its delicate balance. Because this style is highly attenuated, there must be a hint of sweetness to it. I personally do a three-step mash, but this is one area where a brewer can play around. Do whatever works for you. 

4. The key to Kölsch’s hop character is restraint. Use German Noble hops or similar, such as Perle. To keep it close to authentic, avoid newer varieties with a citrus or fruity character. These flavors overpower the delicate dance among the malt, hops, and yeast. However, don’t be afraid to add some later-addition hops to liven things up. 

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“Italian Grape Ale”. It’s a relatively new kind of high-fermentation craft beer made with grapes or grape must. This combination of beer and wine flavours, given the huge amount and variety of vines in Italy, creates infinite combinations of taste and aromas and opened the doors to a new and original way of distributing Italian specialities in the world.

IGA , the first beer with the addition of grapes, was produced in 2006. The success of the first product encouraged Barley, the first brewery to try this variant of craft beer, to launch several IGA beers on the market. After 2010 other breweries started to produce their own variants of Grape Ale, and now it is estimated that more than 150 different types of IGA beers are produced in Italy.

Italians aren’t the only ones making it. Delaware’s Dogfish Head was probably the first modern brewery to do so when Sam Calagione concocted Midas Touch in 1999 as part of his Ancient Ales series. That recipe—with muscat grapes, honey, and saffron—was based on residue found on drinking vessels inside King Midas’s tomb. 

In making an IGA the grapes are destemmed, crushed, then briefly cooked, a step that doesn’t change the flavor but reduces the amount of wild yeast on the skins. The cooked must is then combined with fermented blonde ale. A second fermentation occurs, triggered by the grape yeast, then everything rests, skins macerating in beer for two to three weeks. Afterward, the liquid is racked and put into French barrique for some aging. The unfiltered beer ferments a third time in bottle. It’s a long, laborious process as with any brewery making fruit ale.

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If you're a home brewing enthusiast you'll be happy to know that there are several awesome ways to turn a five gallon all-grain beer into a ten gallon batch of the good stuff. Here are two ways.

The first is a technique long since abandoned by those who originated it, called parti-gyle. In this method you are creating two beers. You will brew a strong beer (1.080 or greater gravity) while following a normal brew day (with a slight deviation at mash-out). After your strong beer is into fermentation, you will then mash in again with the same grain. You will then proceed again with a normal brew day. You can net about 40-50% of the original gravity of your first beer using this method, so long as you follow some specific mashing out steps. Add as much strike water as you can so you can avoid having to sparge. When your first mash is ready to lauter, you will drain the mash tun dry without adding any sparge water. If you find yourself coming up short in the kettle, you can add a gallon or two of water that is no hotter than 155 F, as any hotter and you can kill the enzymatic activity you’re going to need for batch two. Use as little sparge water as you can. The more you add for this first beer, the weaker beer number 2 is going to be. he second mash can be a little trickier if you forget some basic all grain principles. First off, your strike water temperature is going to need to be adjusted from what it was in mash number 1. Your mash should still be hot, so plan on adding cooler water than you did before to hit your desired mash temperature. Also, you are still going to need to stir the mash and have it form a filtering bed at lautering.

When forming a recipe, it is very important to keep the second beer in mind. Be sure not to overdo the crystal malts. Also, if making a dark beer, keep highly acidic malts like Black Patent to low levels. You are going to get more color and flavor from your specialty malts proportionate to fermentable sugar than you will from your first beer. In the recipes at the bottom of this blog post is a recipe for an American Strong Ale/Petite IPA that is darn tasty. Or at least, it can serve as inspiration for your own parti-gyle beer.

The other way to super-size your 5 gallon batch is to utilize malt extract, and then split the batch so you can get two distinct beers. Your brew day will be the exact same all the way up until knockout, or when you kill the flame on the kettle and would normally start chilling. Depending on what you’re making, you’ll add about 1.25 pounds of malt extract for every percent of alcohol you want. So if you’re making 5 gallons of a 6 percent beer, you would need about 7 pounds of malt extract. As for procedure, you’re basically doing a large “partial mash” beer. But since we’re making 10 gallons, all of our hop additions will need to be doubled. This is something commonly overlooked with this method.

 Remember to double all the hop additions! When you add the malt extract at knockout, you will then chill it down as usual. But you will need to add water to bring the volume up to 10 gallons and also bring the future beer to its proper strength. I like to do this step in the fermenter so I know I’m getting it right. I’ll have both fermenters side by side while I empty the kettle equally into both. I will then use gallons of spring water to top them both up to five gallons. Now comes my favorite part. I rarely make 10 gallons of the same beer. There are quite a few beers with similar recipes that only differ when it comes to the yeast, and even more that are just tasty with a non-traditional yeast choice. You can make your favorite IPA, but for 5 gallons of it pitch an Abbey or even Saison yeast. Take a porter recipe and use an American strain on one, and a super malty and fruity English strain on the other. 

The possibilities are only as confining as your imagination. 

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Home brewers love to share their beer with friends and family.  Unfortunately some may not get the full enjoyment out of a beer that they could.  Here are a few tips any brewer should make to anyone (especially those new to craft)who is going to drink his beer.

DO take more than one sip when trying a new beer.

DO enjoy your beer at the correct temperature. That does not always mean as cold as possible. Remind them the sensation of coldness inhibits the tongue’s taste receptors, and so by over-chilling your beer, you are numbing your palate to any nuances of flavors. 

DO take your time when trying a new beer. Aromas can be tempting and deadly. Flavors can be complex and barring. Aftertastes can confuse and beguile. So, go slow; take your timebefore you decide if you really like (or dislike) a beer.  

DO employ the correct glassware. The tulip glass, the flute, and the imperial pint are all things of great beauty. Learn to enjoy your beer in the correct glassware, not only for the visual verification that it may imply, but also to maximize the flavor. 

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Now for a something every homebrewer should consider trying.  Here we go.......

Water, malt, hops, and yeast are, of course, beer’s four critical components, but thinking that’s all it takes to brew a fine beer would be overlooking the most ephemeral of its ingredients. The gas that’s dissolved in beer—the bubbles that it forms and that spring so readily from within—is an underappreciated piece of the whole picture.

It’s the force behind the fizz and the foam that’s intrinsic to beer, and it’s crucial to the whole sensory experience of enjoying a beer. While no skilled brewer would ignore carbonation levels, the typical procedure for ensuring the correct levels of carbonation in a brew is about force, not finesse.

There’s another way, rooted in tradition and exploiting the same biochemical reactions that create alcohol, and the brewers devoted to natural carbonation say that it results in a better drinking experience. All it takes is pressure and time.

Everybody can do it using the technique called “spunding,”  The approach is that instead of relying on an external source of carbon dioxide, some of the carbon dioxide produced by yeast during fermentation is retained within the beer. Developed hundreds of years ago by German brewers working under the constraints of the inflexible Reinheitsgebot laws, spunding is as simple as sealing a vessel toward the end of active fermentation.

Without a blowoff and with no place to go, the carbon dioxide is instead dissolved into the liquid. Brewers dedicated to this method use a simple valve to manage the pressure level in the tank and, thus, the amount of gas that ends up dissolved in the beer.

“It’s basically a pressure release valve,” or PRV, Carter says about the commercial spunding valves used at Bierstadt. Built by German brewing equipment manufacturer Barby Kühner, the spundapparat (literally: “bunging apparatus”) comprises an airlock-like valve, which can be adjusted to dial in the exact pressure that it will hold, and an integrated gauge that shows the tank’s pressure.

Similar devices are also manufactured by GW Kent, Ss Brewtech, and others, with various pressure ratings and fitting hardware from tri-clamp to ball lock.  The technique of spunding also naturally fits into the slower, colder, lager-brewing process. Without diving too deep into the physics of carbonation, I’ll just say that the amount of carbon dioxide that can dissolve into a beer is affected by two main variables: pressure (which the spunding valve handles) and temperature. The colder a liquid is, the more readily it absorbs carbon dioxide. A lager’s cold-conditioning phase is the perfect time to spund a tank and allow the yeast to slowly add carbonation to the beer. 

Fermenting under pressure is the process of fermenting beer inside a closed, pressurized vessel (such as a corny keg). Fermenting lager under pressure at higher-than-normal temperatures actually speeds up the fermentation. It also helps to suppress unwanted esters, sulfur, and flavor compounds such as buttery diacetyl. You can also make clean lagers in a fraction of the time—about 10 days versus the usual three- to four-week fermentations.

During a typical fermentation in a bucket or carboy, you’re letting CO2 escape the fermentor through an airlock or blow-off tube. In pressurized fermentation, the fermentor is sealed, and the CO2 produced by the fermentation is trapped inside.

Achieving this at home is easy. However, there are a couple things you’ll need:First, you’ll need a five-gallon (19-liter) corny keg with a rating of at least 60 PSI. (This is all of them, in theory, but you can check that the rating is clearly printed on the exterior keg wall.)

• Next, you’ll need a spunding valve—a device you should be able to find at your local homebrew-supply shop or online retailer. It usually costs about $30–$40.

The spunding valve simply attaches to the gas-in post on the corny keg. There is a pressure setting that you can dial in, so that any pressure that builds over the set value is released through the valve—this prevents over-pressurizing. A good starting point is 8 PSI. It’s possible to dial it up to 15, but that’s up to you. (My best results have been at 6 PSI.) Set your spunding valve as soon as you’ve pitched the yeast.

Here’s the bonus: While the beer is fermenting under pressure, the CO2 is being trapped in suspension, naturally carbonating your beer along the way.  Pressurized fermentation is a great tool for a variety of reasons. Brewers at any level of expertise can manage it. It can improve the fermentation turnaround time while also inhibiting off-flavors—no easy trick for those without temperature control. It also saves you the trouble of carbonating your beer after packaging—no need to add external CO2. Even experienced brewers who are used to temperature control and carbonating their beer might want to give this a try. 

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Italian Pilsner

Just when you had your German and Czech pilsners straight—not to mention figuring out where American pilsners fall on the spectrum—Italian pilsner entered the chat. The substyle was born, naturally, in Italy in 1996, when Agostino Arioli brewed Tipopils at his Como brewery, Birrificio Italiano. A fan of German pilsners like Jever, Arioli had been on a mission to brew his own take on the style. It wasn’t until a trip to England where he learned about hop plugs and dry-hopping real ale in casks, however, that the pieces fell into place. Upon opening Birrificio Italiano, he combined the dry-hopping he learned in England with his formula for German pils. The result was a “kind of pils,” or tipopils, in Italian.

Today, dry-hopping is the defining characteristic of Italian-style pilsners, which stand apart from the slightly sweet Czech pilsner and the drier, crisper, more bitter German pilsner by retaining the aromatics of the hops, which might otherwise be lost to the boil. Those aromas should come from traditional European hops, especially noble hops, with floral, citrusy, spicy and/or herbal notes. (If you see a pils dry-hopped with American or Southern Hemisphere hops, consider it an American pilsner.)

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Maturation

All beer needs a period of time during which rough edges can smooth, flavors can meld, and yeast cells can clean up after themselves. Maturation, is as critical a phase as fermentation itself, and it can be as bearable as a couple of days or as insufferable as a couple of years. 

Once the waiting period is over, it’s on to packaging, the final step in moving your homebrewed beer from grain to glass. The maturation period is also the time to introduce additions such as dry hops, fruit, chiles, or oak. The only way to know that your beer is ready for maturation is to measure the specific gravity, which is an indirect indicator of density, and thus, how much of the available sugar in the original wort has been consumed by the yeast. This number steadily drops during fermentation and eventually reaches a steady final gravity (FG). 

After three gravity readings on consecutive days yield the same specific gravity at or near the expected final gravity, your beer has passed out of fermentation and into maturation. The maturation phase is known by many names, including conditioning and secondary fermentation. I have no love for the term secondary fermentation because, usually, little to no fermentation occurs. I much prefer maturation or conditioning, which more precisely describes the purpose of this period.

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To Rack or Not to Rack

Some brewing guides insist that you should move fresh beer to a secondary container, such as a 5-gallon (19-liter) carboy soon after fermentation subsides to get the beer away from the large cake of yeast that flocculates to the bottom. Growing numbers of modern homebrewers, however, eschew the secondary fermentor altogether and feel that some further contact with the yeast promotes a smoother, less rough product in the end.

This is one of those things you’ll have to decide for yourself. I recommend trying both approaches and seeing which you prefer. My recommendation is not to rack anything that you intend to package within a month: These beers don’t need much aging and can go straight from the fermentor to bottles or kegs. You can safely leave beer on top of the yeast for at least a month without risking off-flavors, so long as storage conditions remain relatively cool.

Although I’ve found that most beer can remain in contact with the yeast cake for well beyond a month, I usually rack anything that needs to undergo extended aging. This is as much about freeing up space in my fermentors as it is about removing it from trub, to be honest. But it is true that yeast eventually dies, and when it does, it can self-consume, or autolyze. Autolysis can lend some unfavorable flavors to your homebrew, including a soy sauce–like umami character that can actually work in certain very dark styles. It is, in most cases, however, undesirable.

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American wheat beer is a brand new style, invented by specialty brewers in the United States only about 10 years ago. It may even stretch the definition of “style,” for nowhere is the creativity and diversity of America’s craft brewers better displayed than in the new wheat beers. Every brewer has closely held ideas about what constitutes a good wheat beer, and some are highly idiosyncratic; nevertheless, some common defining characteristics can be identified. In general, most American wheat beers are intended to be light summer thirst quenchers, yet they are imbued with the unique, refreshing flavor of wheat malt. They are something like German wheat beers, but without the spicy/phenolic character of the distinctive weizenbier/weissbier yeast culture.

Home brewers, especially on the West Coast, opt for fuller flavored, hoppier interpretations that are derived more from American pale or golden ales than from German Weizenbier. A case could be made for giving these “wheat ales” their own subcategory. Some of these are notably fine beers that have achieved good market acceptance. Dark and bock versions are not unknown, and one brewer (Rubicon Brewing Company, Sacramento, California) has produced an excellent “wheat wine” that must surely rank as one of the most unique beers in America.

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Most classic beer styles can be brewed using only the four traditional beer ingredients: water, malt, hops, and yeast. But stepping away from the Reinheitsgebot-approved components doesn’t always mean reaching for the closest fresh-baked confection to make a donut-laden pastry stout; nor does it require packing in pounds of fresh fruit purée for a thick, smoothie-esque mouthfeel. Sometimes, a subtle flavor enhancement is all a beer needs to bring a fresh perspective to homebrewing — and for a growing number of brewers, that can come in a variety of tea leaves.  Tea — green tea, black tea, or even Earl Grey — can bring a wide range of mild natural flavors to various beer styles. And with more commercial examples hitting store shelves in recent years, homebrewers can take inspiration from beers out on the market.

In order to showcase the most nuance of the tea flavor, a simple grain bill is required. Focus on keeping the malt flavors light, choosing a grist that will just add a touch of malt flavor from a small addition of Vienna or Munich malt as well as a little Carapils/Carafoam for body. The rest of the grain bill is pilsner or another light malt. kept it really simple in order to not mask the flavor of the tea,

Tea contains tannins — the same drying, harsh compounds contained in the husks of malt — so it is important to take care of the delicate leaves in order to avoid extracting too many tannins into the final beer. just need to be careful of getting the tea too hot and becoming astringent  The tea can be added on the hot side of brew day (during any step before the wort is chilled), or the cold side (typically after fermentation is complete). If a brewer decides to add tea ingredients on the hot side, the tea is added to the whirlpool. Some tropical teas that are lower in astringent compounds, such as hibiscus, are sometimes added to the boil to extract more of vivid magenta color, but this isn’t common.

It’s tempting to think tea would be added in the boil kettle with the hops, but for most tea varieties this exposure to hot wort would be too long. Especially for black teas, extended time at boiling temperature extracts astringent compounds that give beer a harsh mouthfeel. For any tea, lengthy boiling would blow off most of the complex aromatics. Instead, tea should only be added after the boil during the whirlpool. This ensures the tea won’t be in contact with wort for too long, and keeps tea leaves out of the fermenter as they will be left behind with trub in the whirlpool.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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In answer to several emails I've received let me remind everyone that porter and stout are fraternal twins. They both are brewed from the same recipe of a mix of brown and pale malt. By pulling off less wort the English were able to make a beer called Brown Stout. Pulling more wort off the next batch they made a beer called Porter. Both beers were dark ales, born of the same mother but different. Brown Stout had an alias, “Strong Porter”. Or to put it another way, if you put water in your whiskey is the drink no longer whiskey? 

I would take the position that the introduction of Patent Malt (Black Malt today) in 1817 was where the difference began. It was a cheaper way to make the same beer. By the late 1800s Roasted Barley came into the picture.  Wars, Taxes, and Prohibition left its mark on Stouts and Porters inevitably widening the difference. This time period saw the ABV reduction in Stouts and Porter each to different levels furthering the divide. 

By this time we get to the mid-1900s, after the repeal of prohibition. Big beer, was coming to the forefront, providing their brands in mass quantities to the masses. Stouts and Porters although not forgotten were hard to find. Now they of course are everywhere, many slightly different than the others.  Even the Beer Judge Certification lists over a dozen styles of porters and stouts.

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Through lots of trial and error, I’ve learned a few things about how to clone some of my favorite commercial craft beers. I hope by sharing these it will save you some time and effort as you try to clone some of your favorites. You should understand and accept upfront that in many cases you will not be able to strictly clone your favorite beer. This sobering revelation is due to several realities. First, your favorite beer is likely brewed using a “house” yeast, exclusive to that brewer. That yeast have been cultivated over time. 

Another sobering reality is that of the commercial brewhouse itself. Despite the homebrewing axion that states “homebrewing systems are just small commercial breweries”, in truth they are not. The size, scale and process emphasis of commercial breweries are very different from the typical homebrewer. These system differences lead to differences in the finished beer. 

The obvious place to start your cloning efforts is with widely available beer clone publications. The Homebrewers Association website also offers many commercial clone beer recipes for you to browse through. In addition, all of the online homebrewing supplier websites offer clone beer recipe ingredient kits for purchase and many of your favorite brewing books include clone recipes for some of the more famous craft beers. Finally the excellent BeerNexus' column "home brewing page" by professional brewer Arnie Lands has many too.

If you still can’t find a recipe for the beer you want to clone look at the breweries websites. You may be shocked to find that many brewers list their recipes right on their website! You might even contact the brewer directly. Many craft brewers have graciously offered guidance to homebrewers when respectfully contacted via email or even in person. 

You might consider designing your clone beer from scratch. It can be a daunting task, but it can also be very rewarding. To build a clone beer from scratch you’ll need to evaluate the beer using skills similar to a beer judge at a competition. Sit down with as fresh as possible bottle or can of the beer you want to clone and work back from there. Once you’ve brewed your new clone beer, it’s time to evaluate it. Put your inner-beer judging skills to work again to evaluate what you got right and wrong. Make the necessary recipe design and / or process adjustments and brew it again. Keep refining your recipe designs and processes until you get it right. 

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Over the past few years, Cold IPA has introduced many brewers and drinkers to the idea of a non-lager beer style fermented with lager yeast. However, this is a familiar move that brewers have been using ever since lager yeast strains and bottom-fermentation techniques first spread from Bavaria in the 19th century. Whether for reasons of practicality or flavor profile, many styles commonly brewed with ale yeast have also been brewed with lager yeast by breweries all over the world. 

As lager brewing became more popular, ale and porter brewers reacted to the new competition with beers such as cream ales—essentially, pale lagers made with ale yeast. That brings us to an example of where things got mixed up: Once this style became established with consumers, some brewers began making them by blending beers made with ale and lager yeast. Others who were used to brewing lagers also wanted in on this trendy style—so they simply brewed it with lager yeast. 

Even traditional farmhouse beers have fallen under the sway of lager yeast—namely, French bière de garde. Some of those brewers use lager yeast, some use ale yeast, and good luck finding out who uses which without asking them personally. 

Steam beer is a quirky example of pragmatic brewers using the yeast they had within the constraints of their environment to make beers the market demanded. For whatever reason, this unique name stuck with brewers in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid- to late 19th century, as they brewed with lager yeast at ambient temperatures in shallow, open-fermentation pans. The style nearly died out as refrigeration made colder fermentation possible, but the idea of steam beer lived on because of one Fritz Maytag, who bought the struggling Anchor Brewing in the late ’60s. Over the next few years, Maytag re-tooled the Steam recipe from a pale lager–like adjunct beer into something more closely resembling an English pale ale. The malt combo of two-row pale and crystal 40 would go on to set the baseline for American pale ales and IPAs well into the next century. Likewise, the selection of English Northern Brewer hops provided a bitterness that set Steam apart from the light lagers of the day, and that assertive profile would become the norm in the coming microbrewing movement. 

The basic approach of steam beer is essentially what’s driving the current cold IPA trend: Certain lager yeasts are perfectly happy getting up into the lower temperature range of ale fermentation—usually around 60–65°F (16–18°C)—and they still produce clean beers lacking the fruity esters apparent in most ale fermentations. They also still produce small amounts of sulfur dioxide, the antioxidant compound that gets some credit for the flavor stability of lagers. This all allows for crisp beers that have good shelf stability, can be produced within ale-like timeframes, and happen to be great for showcasing hop aromatics. 

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Homebrewers today have more yeast choices than ever before, and growth seems unlikely to slow down. As homebrewing’s popularity increases, new yeast manufacturers are popping up here and there, and established suppliers are upping their game, expanding their offerings, and delivering more strains than you’re likely to ever need. yeast is available to homebrewers in two forms: liquid and dry. Both are excellent, and both will make great beer if treated well and used properly. More strains are available in liquid form than in dry, but dry yeast has a longer shelf life and is easier to use for spur-of-the-moment brewing. Ultimately, the choice of one over the other depends upon your personal preferences. 

Liquid yeast products contain a liquid growth medium in which billions of yeast cells are suspended. These products are perishable and best used fresh, although making a starter (more on that soon) can boost the viability of old cultures. The two largest suppliers of liquid yeast products, White Labs and Wyeast Laboratories, collectively offer hundreds of strains of Saccharomyces (conventional brewer’s yeast), Brettanomyces (wild yeast), and bacterial cultures of Lactobacillus and Pediococcus bacteria for sour ales. 

Because liquid yeast products are perishable, they must be transported and stored under refrigeration and used as soon as possible. If you have fresh, well-treated liquid yeast, using it couldn’t be easier. You simply take it out of the refrigerator a few hours before you need it. When you’re ready to pitch the yeast, you open the yeast packet and pour the contents directly into fresh wort. 

Despite all of the wonderful and diverse liquid strains available, more often than not, I use dry yeast. There are certainly beer styles for which I prefer the liquid options that are available, but for the vast majority of English- and American-inspired ales, and even Continental lagers, dry-yeast products exist that are just as good as their liquid counterparts. Dry yeast stays viable for long periods of time, takes up very little room in the refrigerator, and can be used at the last minute.

I enjoy brewing lagers, and making a great lager means using several packets of liquid yeast or growing a large yeast population using a starter. And I do this several times a year, but it requires some planning to either buy fresh yeast or prepare a starter. However, one of the most widely used lager yeasts in the world, Weihenstephan W 34 / 70, is available as a dry product, which means I can keep a few packets in the fridge and choose to brew on a random Sunday afternoon with little to no planning. Two packets of W 34 / 70 added to 5 gallons (19 liters) of Pilsner wort are enough to get it up and running quickly and conveniently.

Pitching a large population of healthy yeast cells at the right temperature can make the difference between beer that is just okay and beer that is truly remarkable. Take the time to experiment with both liquid and dry yeast strains, and don’t be afraid to make substitutions if the exact strain you want is unavailable.

Homebrewing is about having fun, so choose the yeast-preparation method that is most fun for you.

American beer drinkers often treat foam as a flaw, not a feature, expecting mugs to brim with beer. Begone, bubbles! Big mistake. Foam is an indicator of a capably constructed beer, and a fluffy cap helps capture fast-vanishing volatile aromatics and protect beer from ruinous oxygen. Varying levels of foam can also impact a beer’s carbonation level, leaving it crisper or softer and better tailored to different food.

Typically, bars and taprooms install standard faucets that pour most beers fairly well. Pull the tap forward, beer flows out. But the open-close mechanism makes it tough to fine-tune foam. That’s why breweries are increasingly installing things like the Czech company Lukr’s side-pull faucets, which let bartenders control a beer’s flow and produce lustrous foam that serves as a lager’s final ingredient.

Czech beer culture champions several distinct pours including the smooth hladinka, in which three fingers of foam crown a beer, and the cutting na dvakrá (“crisp”). The all-foam mlíko is served alongside the šnyt, which features a bit more foam than beer and leaves head space in a mug.

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No-alcohol beer is often obtained by reverse osmosis.  The technique involves a membrane that separates alcohol and part of the water from a beer, but that does not remove larger molecules such as flavor compounds. The beer’s initial volume is commonly restored by simply adding fresh water to the liquid, however, some manufacturers distill the beer’s original water, then blend it back into the drink once the ethanol has boiled off.  Vacuum distillation and spinning cones are still the most popular means of manufacturing no- and low-alcohol beer and wine.

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Let's end this month's column with a primer on malts.

Malt is to beer as grapes are to wine, as honey is to mead, and as apples are to cider. It supplies the sugars that yeast cells convert into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Without malt, beer as we know it would not be.

As complex as malt can be, knowing how to work with it as a homebrewer really means understanding just two things:

·   Malt is always made from a cereal grain (such as barley, wheat, rye, or oats) that has been modified to make its internal starches readily available for brewing. The degree to which a malt is modified from raw grain is called—wait for it—modification.

·   Malt is always kilned (heated) to some degree. The degree of kilning may be so light as to be virtually unnoticeable or so aggressive that the kernels turn completely black. But it’s always there. The degree to which malt is kilned is called kilning (maltsters are an imaginative lot).

That’s it. Modification and kilning are the two processes that transform raw cereal grains into malt.

Malt generally falls into two broad categories: base malt and everything else. That everything else, usually called specialty malt, is further categorized into caramel/crystal and roasted malts, so a good taxonomy for the types of malts you’re likely to encounter is as follows:

Base malts, which are modified and then very lightly kilned

Caramel and crystal malts, which are modified and then moderately kilned

Roasted malts, which are modified and then heavily kilned

very beer contains at least one kind of base malt. Base malt is so named because it forms the base upon which a recipe is built. Supplying the bulk of a beer’s fermentable sugars, this class of malts usually represent anywhere from 75 to 100 percent of the grain that goes into a recipe.

A base malt’s influence can range from style-defining to barely noticeable. Base malts come in all kinds of varieties, but the most important thing to know is that base malts contain enough enzymes to fully convert their own starches into sugars, and—in many cases—they have extra enzymes to convert starches in other grains as well.

It's important to note that some hops behave differently with different yeast strains.  A hugely oversimplified view is that an enzyme produced by the yeast meets a non-aromatic compound from the hops. The two interact, causing a change in the hop compound’s chemical structure, transforming it into a delicious flavour active compound that we can taste and smell. This happens in a multitude of different ways but that’s the general idea.

Changing a yeast makes a big difference in how a hop presents itself in a beer.  It's is a complex problem which, outside of the yeast strain chosen, is also heavily impacted by wort composition, beer style, brewhouse hardware, pitch rate, fermentation temperature, starting pH, dry hop timing and quantity among others. At a basic level, I find the yeast ester profile to be the main factor here, particularly in hazy styles, where hop flavor and ester fruitiness / sweetness are heavily interlinked in consumers’ perception of "hoppiness".

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Broadly, stouts are “roasty” beers. A close reading of the style guidelines might suggest that that’s the only real differentiation between stout and porter—and that’s tenuous and debatable because there are obviously very roasty porters, just as there are stouts that are not especially roast-forward. 

Things get more complicated once you start untangling the many stouts because having “roasty” in common isn’t much of a common bond in this set of beers. Stouts can be sorted within their category by several features, all of which have recipe and process implications. These features include:

Roast character: This is the most complicated one, and that’s unfortunate because “roast” is the only real toehold across all these styles, besides their dark color. The level and complexity of roast varies. You’ll need to choose the right chocolate malt for your roast flavor target, and you’ll need to choose other ingredients that won’t muddy up that flavor.

Sweetness: When a category includes beers with descriptors such as “bone dry” and a subcategory known as “sweet stout,” you know you’re in for a ride. Notably, “roasty” isn’t synonymous with “dry.”

Strength: Stouts have an incredibly wide range in ABV, from a dry Irish-style stout in the low-3s up to an imperial stout in the double digits. The overlapping styles stretch across the whole spectrum.

Hops: In aroma and flavor as well as bitterness, the hop presence in stouts will vary. Naturally, the American stout leads the charge here, but other styles call for hops, too, while in still others they’re absent or fleeting.

So, what I'm really saying here is this: As a brewer, you should begin by defining your stout and doing so in specific terms. Identify a style, and then make deliberate choices about where in that style you’d like to end up. Identify your target and aim for it through the dark, roasty fog.  Remember, there’s no one profile for a good stout—there are many..

Here is the one piece of advice I will confidently impart about adjuncts: Use only what you need. The four primary brewing ingredients are quite capable of adding a huge range of flavors to your beers, from toast and coffee to blackberry and banana to marshmallow and nuts and more. If you can get it from grain, yeast, hops, or water, try that first: It will nearly always be easier to control and yield a more integrated flavor. 

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Lastly, a quick word about barrel aging. An experiment in the mid-1990s redefined dark ales for the American audience, and it actually brought them a lot closer to original London porters. That was the famous 1994 beer event jointly hosted by Jim Beam and Goose Island, in which master distiller Booker Noe suggested aging beer in some of his cast-off bourbon barrels (by law, he could use them only once). Greg Hall decided to put a strong stout in them, and the rest is history. They are now kissed by whiskey rather than Brettanomyces, but they’re very strong, oak-aged, and among the most prized ales available. And—like those old London porters—they are now widely imitated across the globe.

The bourbon-stout phenomenon was a bit slow off the blocks, but all these years later, barrel rooms are the norm rather than exception. Bourbon’s sweetness and culinary elements naturally led to more experimentation. Stouts are commonly chocolaty, and that makes them perfect substrates for the pastry-stout movement that followed. This is essentially what London brewers discovered 140 years ago; while today’s dessert stouts are quite a bit different from the sweet stouts of the 1880s, it’s hard to miss the historical echo.

Please ask your friends to read my column.  You don't have to be a home brewer to enjoy it.  To put it another way, the more you know about beer the more you'll enjoy it.  Have a great new year!  2023 here we come!

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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Southern Hemisphere hops have changed the game, but one New Zealand hop in particular has brewers moving to planet Nectaron. Historically, hop growing regions were centered in Germany and the UK, before the pacific northwest became the dominant center of the hop world in the early 90’s. It wasn’t until the new millennia when varieties like Nelson Sauvin got brewers re-evaluating what that part of the world could offer up in hop innovation, and the results have changed the flavors of the modern American IPA. These days some of the most desirable hops in the world come out of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, where the only recently released Nectaron hops come from.

What makes New Zealand hops special is a chemical composition that yields an essential oil and alpha acid combination that is unique to that country’s southern hemisphere terroir. The Nectaron hop is the product of hybridizing the best elements of it’s sister variety Waimea and a daughter of the Pacific Jade hop that yield a proprietary triploid aroma type.

Known for the high levels of tropical fruit character, namely pineapple and passion fruit, as well as stone fruit (peach) and citrus (grapefruit), Nectaron is the hottest southern hemisphere hop on the market, but not the most common, as varieties like Motueka are a lot easier to obtain by small craft brewers. The relatively low acreage and yields that outstrip demand for NZ hops also probably has something to do with the hype among craft brewers. Nectaron’s renowned qualities had made it the #5 most desired hop variety according to a recent Brewers Association survey, astounding results for such a brand new variety. 

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Every winter, merrymakers around the world turn to mulled wine to mark the holiday season. There’s glühwein in Germany, glögg in Sweden and vin chaud in France, to name a few.  Here’s an easy way for you to make your own version of a mulled beer.  using an acidic, tart sour beer like a Berliner Weisse, or something that has a fruit base. Then, build up the base with puréed fruits and juices. Add in raisins, if you’d like, and the spices—cardamom, ginger, peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, dried orange peel, allspice—and let it simmer (never boil) on the stovetop. Simmering the beer releases the carbonation, so it won’t be fizzy. To spice it up further, add a shot of brandy or rum to the finished product.

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Let's end this month's column with a few words on the Bourbon revolution. When the revivalist Americans started making their porters and stouts 40-plus years ago, they were nothing like the old vat-aged London porters of the 18th century. They were weaker and made of entirely different grists, and brewers fermented them cleanly and quickly. Americans may think of those as “old school,” but they’re anything but. Except for the Saccharomyces yeast used for primary fermentation, literally nothing about American pub ales and London porters was the same. 

However, an experiment in the mid-1990s redefined dark ales for the American audience, and it actually brought them a lot closer to those original London porters. That was the famous 1994 beer event jointly hosted by Jim Beam and Goose Island, in which master distiller Booker Noe suggested aging beer in some of his cast-off bourbon barrels (by law, he could use them only once). Greg Hall decided to put a strong stout in them, and the rest is history. They are now kissed by whiskey rather than Brettanomyces, but they’re very strong, oak-aged, and among the most prized ales available. And—like those old London porters—they are now widely imitated across the globe. 

Bourbon’s sweetness and culinary elements naturally led to experimentation. Stouts are commonly chocolaty, and that makes them perfect substrates for the pastry-stout movement we see flourishing today. This is essentially what London brewers discovered 140 years ago; while today’s dessert stouts are quite a bit different from the sweet stouts of the 1880s, it’s hard to miss the historical echo.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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Let's start off by reviewing some very basic things about yeast. There are three major factors that will affect the health of your yeast and the quality of fermentation:

• Temperature control: Yeast are very sensitive to temperature changes. If there are fluctuations over 10 degrees, the yeast get stressed out and can produce undesirable flavors. Ale yeast ferment best in the 60 to 70° F range, and the cooler end of this range generally produces better flavors from the fermentation. My strategy to keep a constant temperature for my fermentation is to put the fermentation bucket in the coolest closet in the house, and just check up on it a couple times a day.

• Oxygen: Like most living organisms, yeast need oxygen to be healthy. Before you add the yeast to your unfermented beer (the wort), you have to increase the amount of oxygen in the liquid. This can be done by vigorously shaking or stirring the wort for a couple of minutes after it has been boiled and cooled. If you stir the wort with a spoon, be sure that the spoon has been thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. It's important to note that after fermentation has begun, shaking or stirring isn't beneficial, and can actually cause your beer to go stale quicker.

• Cell Count: If there are not enough yeast cells, they will spend more time and energy reproducing and not as much quality time fermenting the beer. Having a low cell count will cause off-flavors, increase the time of fermentation, and can even cause your fermentation to stall out prematurely. If you're going to make a stronger beer using liquid yeast, be sure to make a yeast starter. If your recipe calls for dry yeast, you don't really have to worry about cell counts.

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 Yeast nutrition is an essential factor in the overall health and success of fermentation. Monitoring yeast health and managing nutrient requirements not only allows for regular and complete fermentations but enhances sensory perception of a beer.

Nitrogen, the most important yeast nutrient, is a key factor that has a significant impact on fermentation. Similarly other nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, salts etc. are also critical for yeast cells to thrive and perform optimally. But what happens when these nutrients fall short? Or what if there are not enough nutrients in the wort? Well, there are many possibilities such as slow/stuck fermentation, yeast stress, off-flavor production and plenty more.

Majority of the yeast nutrition is derived from the brewing ingredients. In some cases where there’s a use of adjuncts in larger quantities, yeast nutrients tend to fall short. For scenarios like these, yeast nutrients are manually added in which help and promote the growth of yeast cells and increase free amino nitrogen which eventually improves fermentation and increases efficiency of the final product.

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Lastly let me answer several questions readers sent in asking about Belgium beer yeast.  Many Belgian beers are brewed with unique yeast strains. There are many different strains used, so it is impossible to generalize about them. You could make a Belgian style wit beer with a normal lager yeast if you like, it will just not have the nose and taste of a Belgian wit fermented with an authentic Belgian wit yeast strain. These strains usually produce a lot of phenol and clove flavors, as with wheat beer yeast. Many Belgian style yeast go beyond just phenol and clove and produce a lot of esters, fusel alcohols and earthy flavors. The balance of these compounds helps determine the flavor profile of these strains. These strains would be ones that are used to make Belgian style Trappist beers, for example. White Labs WLP500 (Trappist Ale) has a good balance between esters and phenolics, while WLP530 (Abbey Ale) ferments faster and produces fewer esters. Many Belgian strains, as with wheat beer strains, do not flocculate well. I recommend a higher pitching rate — between 10–15 million cells per milliliter — for most Belgian strains.

Creativity is key when trying to create Belgian style beers. In fact, creativity is the key to brewing beer. Mix in a little science, good cleaning, and you have the recipe for great beers.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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Many credit the character imparted by decoction mashing—a technique frequently used when brewing Czech and German Lagers—for making these beers so utterly quenching. At its core, decoction mashing consists of taking part of the mash (the grain and water mixture that becomes wort), boiling it separately, and then mixing it back into the main mash to raise its overall temperature. As it boils, the decocted mash develops Maillard-reaction flavors, which deepen the longer you boil it. A minute gives the finished beer an extra hint of grain character. Ten minutes will get you toasted bread crust, toffee, and caramel notes, similar to those that brewers seek from specialty malts.

Double decoction is just as it sounds: You do all this twice, as brewers at Budweiser Budvar have been doing for over a century (Josef Groll likely also did so to brew the world’s first Pale Lager, Pilsner Urquell). You can even do it three times. Triple decoction was so popular in Munich during the early 1800s that brewers called it “the Bavarian method,” while Anton Dreher, who developed Vienna Lager, also used it. 

Decoction mashing is still so integral to Czech beer that it is mandated for any breweries that want to use the České pivo Protected Geographical Indication. PGIs like this are legally enforceable seals of quality based upon how and where a product is made, as well as which ingredients are used.

To understand decoction, you need to have a handle on malt—and in particular a process called modification. Brewers need grain for its starch and protein. In their natural state these are locked away inside the grain, so the grain is malted first. Malting—germinating the grain before drying and kilning it—breaks down its cell structure to reveal the starch held within. It also breaks down the grain’s proteins, some of which become amino or fatty acids; these important yeast nutrients help fuel fermentation. Most importantly, malting produces enzymes that will later be essential for turning the starch into fermentable sugars (a process called conversion).

Maybe it’s no wonder that, apart from a coterie of traditionalists, brewers use decoction infrequently these days. A triple-decoction mash can take many hours to complete. It costs more to keep the brew kit running, and it requires more effort from the brewer. Meanwhile modern malts are well modified and give a very high extract (lots of sugar for turning into alcohol). And today’s maltsters can kiln malt without overheating or scorching it. This leaves it with more enzymes intact, which leads to better conversion in the mash.

Even barley itself has changed since decoction mashing first became popular. If you were to place a stem of barley from the 1820s next to a stem from the 2020s you would see some clear differences. The grain from the 1820s would be landrace barley—farmed and adapted over time to its surroundings, but not cultivated to develop particular characteristics. It would have a long stem topped with an ear of small grains, some of which would be dead (which would be of no use for brewing). The modern grain would have a shorter stem, fatter grains, and a higher proportion of viable grains.

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Just a reminder to new homebrewers, - the only time you want to let oxygen get into your beer is when you pitch the yeast. That is it. Any other time and you are asking for trouble. The biggest result of letting oxygen into your beer is an off flavor or bad tasting beer.

A couple of things you can do to reduce the chance of letting oxygen into your beer are:

=> Keep the lid on fermenter sealed.

=> If you are using an airlock make sure it stays filled with liquid (water and sanitizer).  I sometimes use vodka since it gives me a reason to have a sample or two just to make sure it's good.

=> When transferring your beer from fermenter to bottles or kegs make sure you are using a liquid line (hose) and that it is sitting on the bottom of the new container you are transferring to so that you do not get any splashing.

=> Don’t secondary. I never transfer my beer to a secondary fermenter. Most people who do this do so to help clear their beer. I find there is to great of a risk of getting oxygen into your beer during the transfer.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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A recently released report from researchers at the University of Oregon confirms what brewers have always known. Hops are impacted by terroir. For instance, Mosaic hops grown in Oregon’s Willamette Valley are not the same as Mosaic hops grown in Washington’s Yakima Valley. A particular variety of hop will exhibit different characteristics depending on exactly where it was grown and the conditions under which it was grown. 

The report helps explain why hop selection is such a big deal. Maybe you’re not yet familiar with the term hop selection. The term used in both its noun form and verb form. In short, hop selection is a part of the harvest season. It’s a time of year and it’s an activity. Brewers from across the country and around the world converge on hop-growing regions to carefully examine the year’s crop and select exactly which hops they’ll purchase for the upcoming year.

For the brewers, it’s not so simple as deciding which hop varieties they want to use. Rather, it’s about selecting exactly which Mosaic, Citra, Centennial, or Cascade hops they want to use. From which farm? From which lot? Early harvest? Late harvest? All of it may depend on that year’s growing season. Was it wet or dry? Hot or temperate? There are a lot of variables that impact the deepest essence of the hops.  Hops are not too different than wine grapes: terroir matters. Because of that you may start to notice more breweries discussing the origin of the hops in a particular beer. Instead of just mentioning Mosaic hops, you might see a label that says, “Brewed using Mosaic hops from Roy Farms in the Yakima Valley.” If you do, know that it’s real. There’s a reason they’re sharing that info.

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Bamberg, Gemany is still the epicenter of rauchbier (literally “smoked beer”), but the style is now having a modest revival in many parts of today's world. It is a larger, usually a marzen. Smoked malt is the key to smoked beer. Interestingly, all beer was once brewed with smoked malt. That’s because malted barley was exclusively kilned over wood-fired ovens, where the smoke passed through the malt. This imparted that unmistakable smoky taste in all brewer’s malt as it dried. Then, during the industrial revolution, through the 17th century, coal fired kilns began to replace most wood-fired ones. Smoke from the burning coal was diverted to chimneys, and the residual heat produced by the coal was what was used for drying the malt.

Because of this, smoked flavor was eliminated from nearly all malt. Brewers and consumers alike began enjoying the more neutral flavored malts. The shift allowed brewers to have more flexibility in highlighting hop and yeast expression.  Wood smoked malt was relegated to traditional breweries and specialty beers. Today, several maltsters make specialty smoked malt, and some breweries even produce their own. The largest smoked malt producing maltster is Weyermann, in Bamberg, Germany.

Generally, smoked beer should be balanced. If it’s very smoky, malt sweetness and balanced bitterness should complement those intense flavors. For lightly smoked beers, like smoked pilsner or helles, crisp malt backbone and herbal hoppiness is desirable. If you just want to see what all the fuss about, this rauchbier is the best place to start. Brewed for nearly two centuries, Aecht Schlenkerla’s Original Rauchbier gives you authenticity, smokiness, with a little maltiness to take the edge off.

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In answer to a couple of e-mails about creating a recipe let me remind everyone doing that brewing is more like baking and less like cooking. Simplicity can be the key to a fantastic beer. With all the vast ingredients to choose from, it is easy to become like a kid in a candy store; however, I suggest picking a couple of elements and letting them shine. 

Also, never forget that you, the brewer, makes the wort; the yeast makes the beer. That is why any fermentation flaws can be the first element that can make a bad beer. Pitch enough yeast and make sure you ferment at a consistent and correct temperature. And, always make sure the wort is aerated properly. And of course, make sure your fermentation is in an oxygen-free environment. Reduced oxygen environments can be challenging for new brewers, but ensuring that all vessels are purged with carbon dioxide between all transfers is critical. 

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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Malted barley is the backbone of beer as we know it. And why not? It’s delicious and versatile, and it has a satisfying sweet aspect. But it’s not the only grain in the brewery. Since its earliest days in the Neolithic Middle East, when cereal grains were still being domesticated, beers incorporated not only barley, but emmer and einkorn wheat and spelt as well.  In Northern Europe, wheat or “white” beers started spreading about the same time as hops, roughly a thousand years ago. Today we can still recognize similarities to these ancient white beers among many classic wheat styles: Berliner weisse, Belgian witbier, gose, Lichtenhainer, and even Scandinavian farmhouse brews. As a group, white ales are typically of everyday strength, employing normal or lactic fermentation. 

Why make beer from wheat instead of solely from barley malt? Historically, it may have been just a matter of availability or economics. But really, there are better reasons. Wheat brings a softer, less malty nose to beer compared to barley. This comes with more body and mouthfeel for an experience unlike any barley-malt beer. Grains such as oats, rye, and spelt can do the same, as can unmalted flaked barley. Some have subtle flavors as well. Wheat is fairly neutral, sometimes with a whiff of bread. Oats have a slight nuttiness, especially if they are lightly toasted before brewing. Rye confers a pleasant mix of woody spice and a hint of indefinable fruit, maybe somewhere between cranberry and plum.

Wheat generally has more protein—especially glucans—than barley, and that increases body (see table above for a comparison of various brewing grains). Much of the creaminess comes from certain gluey-textured carbohydrates: pentosans and beta-glucans. Like starch, these are polymers of sugars: pentose in the case of pentosans and glucose in the case of beta-glucans, linked with chemical bonds (or glycosidic bonds) that resist saccharification in the mash. Barley also has plenty of both of these weird carbs, but malting dramatically reduces their levels, since brewers demand it to help avoid slow runoffs and inefficient mashing.

So, if you want the effects of these specialty grains, there’s a price to pay in the process. Most brewers use rice hulls to provide extra filtration, which definitely helps.

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Working With Grains

There are huge differences between malted and unmalted grains. Malting breaks down the walls of the starch granules, making them much more accessible to the mash liquor and its enzymes. Unmalted grains, traditionally preferred for styles such as witbier, require a gelatinization process to render their starch soluble in the mash. 

Smaller breweries generally use pre-gelatinized, unmalted cereals in the form of flakes, grits, or torrefied (i.e., puffed like popcorn) grains. Gelatinization is a non-reversible heating process. When grains reach a critical temperature, the granule walls burst and allow the starch to absorb water, changing its crystalline structure into an amorphous, glassy state. Rapid cooling and dehydration stabilize this, allowing flakes or other pre-gelatinized grains to be directly added to a conventional mash with no need for a special mash-cooking procedure. 

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Yeast and the Home Brewer

Two big rules of thumb for healthy yeast: Don’t let it sit in the fridge for months, and make sure you’re giving it the right nutrients and amount of oxygen to get the job done. When investing in tools and equipment, find fermenters that are easy to clean and inspect. Also, invest in oxygenation, whether in-line or a wand/stone. You will see a dramatic difference in fermentation performance with pure oxygen versus aerating by hand. When the yeast are happier, they'll reward you with better tasting beer. 

You should strongly consider making your own yeast starter. It’s the best way to ensure your fermentation cycle starts off right with an active fermentation, it lowers your chance for contamination, and unless you’re making a super low-gravity ale (basically, lower sugar-to-alcohol ratio), you’ll have to spend a lot of money on multiple premade packets of the stuff. Either way you choose, you’ll need to plan ahead—if you’re DIY-ing your yeast starter, you’ll want to give it 24 hours to keep reproducing after the initial half-hour fermentation. If you’re using the premade stuff, “wake those pitchable packs up and get them ready for your wort” a few hours before you need to add them 

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

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What Is Cold IPA?

To brew a crisper version of IPA, brewers created Cold IPA using pilsner malt and lager yeast. Sounds a bit like an India Pale Lager, right? Well, it’s not. To begin with, because it’s an IPA, its ABV is higher than an IPL, but there’s more.  Because it is an ale, it is fermented at a higher temperature. Lagers are brewed using lager yeast, which is most effective between 48 and 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Ales are fermented with ale yeast, which is most effective between 60 and 78 degrees Fahrenheit. This new style of IPA is often described as a hybrid style because it is brewed using lager yeast at ale temperatures. Well, warmer than normal lager temps anyway.

A lot of brewers use pilsner malt in their IPAs, so a brewer needs to do more than that to make a Cold IPA. Adjuncts (rice and/or corn, for example) might be used to lighten the body. Brewers need to find a way to create the desired ABV without creating more malt character, another thing that sets it apart from other types of IPA.

Since it’s an IPA, expect gobs of hop character. Do not expect to find old-world, noble hop varieties like you might find in a traditional pilsner (Saaz and Hallertau e.g.); rather, Cold IPA is more likely to feature new world hop varieties (Mosaic, Citra, Strata, Sabro, Azacca, and so on). Expect the kind of citrusy, tropical, resinous, pithy, fruity hop character you might find in the latest and greatest IPAs.

An IPL is essentially just a very hoppy lager. This is not a lager. Can you taste the difference between an IPL and a Cold IPA? Maybe, maybe not. Some folks can’t taste the difference between a Brown Ale and a Porter, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.

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Scotch Ales

Setting aside porters and stouts, 19th century Scottish brewers didn’t much use speciality malt. Apart from a couple of brief dalliances, they didn’t use brewing sugars either. So, the classic Scotch ale grain bill is surprisingly simple: 100 percent pale malt.

There’s a persistent myth that pale malt from this era wasn’t actually pale. However, the brewing and malting textbooks of the time outline the desired moisture contents and kilning temperatures clearly—and the malt was definitely pale by our contemporary standards.

The gravities of these 19th century Scotch ales are often a sight to behold. They frequently exceed 1.100 and can be found at 1.120 or even 1.130. The highest I’ve seen was Fowler’s Twelve Guinea Ale, clocked by beer historian Ron Pattinson at 1.159 in brewing records from the 1850s.

Now, you may be thinking, “If they’re using pale malt to hit numbers like these, they must be using very long boils.” Not so. In fact, Scottish brewers were going for shorter boils, and they developed modern sparging to allow for that. (Meanwhile, the parti-gyle system of other British brewers ordinarily required boils of two or three hours.) Scottish brewers sometimes boiled for less than an hour. The advantages included paler color, smoother (though not necessarily lower) hop bitterness, and better-preserved hop aroma. So, contrary to myth, Scottish beer in the 19th century was actually (and famously) pale—including those enormous Scotch ales.  Today, we tend to reach very high gravities by adding sugars or malt extract, or by employing very long boils. Old Scotch ale brewers were hitting these numbers with nothing but pale malt, a one-hour boil, and true brewing grit. 

Another hop-related myth to puncture is that British brewers used old or poor-quality hops. On the contrary, the hops used in pale ales and fancy styles such as Scotch ale were of the highest quality. They were kilned at lower temperatures than we use today, packed tight, kept cold, used fresh, and often treated with sulfur to prevent oxidation. The best brewers also got their pick of the best hops, ironing out inconsistencies. So, there’s nothing anachronistic about using the best hops you can get. 

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Since were talking a bit about brewing history you might be interested in knowing that in the final quarter of the 19th century, no one in brewing was doing more cutting-edge research than Carlsberg. In 1883, Emil Hansen isolated pure yeast strains there. In 1909, S.P.L. Sørensen developed the pH scale. Between those landmarks, in 1903, the researcher Niels Hjelte Claussen peered through his microscope and made his own discovery: a type of yeast cell distinct from the kind that made Carlsberg’s lagers and one responsible for the “peculiar and remarkably fine flavour” it made in the beer from which he cultured it.

That beer was an English stock ale, also known as old ale or barleywine. To honor the beer’s origin, he named his discovery the “British fungus”—Brettanomyces.

For hundreds of years, strong, vat-aged British beer had been the most prized in the world, traveling in the bellies of ships bound for Boston, the Baltics, Bombay—and points all over the world. Over those centuries, brewers knew vat aging was essential, but Claussen’s discovery helped explain how. In the technical paper announcing his discovery, he concludes, “it is evident that the secondary fermentation effected by Brettanomyces is indispensable for the production of the real type of English beers.” (He even italicized his conclusion for emphasis.)

Unfortunately, Claussen’s discovery arrived at a moment of seismic change, when technology, war, and the rising popularity of lagers would conspire to end the era of vat-aged, Brett-kissed stock ales. Despite the revival of wild ales—these days associated far more with Belgium—strong English ales of mixed fermentation now seem out of place, or out of time. Inspired by their historical fame, breweries occasionally create revivals, but these often seem strange and foreign to modern palates.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  

His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

"Trappist" Beers 

While “abbey” is generic, the monasteries own the Trappist designation and enforce its authenticity. Monasteries across Europe were brewing in the Middle Ages, but in the mid-1790s the French Revolutionary forces dissolved, sacked, or destroyed Belgium’s abbeys. Any remaining connections to ancient monastic brewing were cleanly severed. The exhaustive Belgian brewing treatise by Georges Lacambre (1851) describes dozens of local styles, but Trappist beers are not among them.

The reality is that these supposedly historic ales are actually 20th-century inventions, inspired by the beers from neighboring England, Scotland, and Germany that flooded the Belgian market in the early 1900s. Strip away the marketing, and you’ll see bocks, Scotch ales, pale ales, and even pilsners behind these quintessentially Belgian beers.

We’re talking about a range of pale to deep-brown top-fermented beers ranging from about 6 percent to more than 10 percent ABV. Over the years, writers have sorted those spectra into identifiable styles, yet abbey singel and Belgian blonde form one extended tribe; angelic tripel and devilish golden strong are like their twin big brothers. Abbey dubbel and strong dark ale form another continuum. 

These Belgian styles are a best case for the use of sugar. The term “candi sugar” is widely used, but I find it way too vague and prefer more specific terms: candi syrup, brown sugar, unrefined sugar, and others, which describe distinctly different products. The classic use of sugar is the iconic strong golden ale Duvel, which uses almost 20 percent dextrose (corn sugar),  Brewers of darker beers have the option of using colored sugars to add a layer of caramelized, fruity, or chocolaty flavors while still lightening the body. Belgian sugar beets are typically the source of these products, often employed in syrup form. 

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Hazy IPAs for Extract Brewers -

I've received quite a few questions on this from extract brewers so will answer them all here in a bit more details than I normally would.  For some great recipes check out Arny Lands column on this site.

Extract brewing has its limitations—namely, without mashing, you’re somewhat hamstrung in terms of additional ingredients you can use. Anything that requires mashing is a no-go for extract brewers. This is a problem in the world of hazy IPA brewing because a common ingredient in many of these beers is the wonderful oat. The problem is a lack of enzymes to convert the oaty starch into oaty sugar. So we’ve got to get you a way to convert oat starch into fermentable oat sugar and allow you to take advantage of the protein and body-building properties of Avena sativa.

The easiest, hackiest solution is to use oat milk, a dairy alternative made from soaked oats and enzymes. Remember, liquid starch is highly undesirable in a shelf-stable foodstuff. Manufacturers will soak oats with amylase to convert starch into sugar and then blend and strain the gruel into a milk-like product. Several breweries and homebrewers have added oat milk straight to the kettle post boil. The result is an outstanding murk with plenty of sugar for fermentation.

But I think the best way is using oat malt is that comes packed with enough enzymatic power to convert itself. In other words, if you’re steeping grains (and as much as I believe in the power of extract, you really should be steeping fresh-cracked grains), you can steep your cracked oat malt and get adequate conversion. Just watch your crush. Oat malt is remarkably skinny and can slip through a lot of mill gaps unharmed. For that reason, I like to mix in pale malt to aid in crushing and add some more heft to the steeping liquid. Just keep in mind that you want your gruel to land in the 150–165°F (66–74°C) range for 20 minutes.

When shopping for extract, choose the freshest palest liquid extract you can find. Look for extracts that call out a Pilsner character.

Choose a strong haze-helping yeast—Wyeast 1318 London Ale III is a solid go-to. Look also for Imperial A38 Juice and White Labs WLP066 London Fog, among others. Get a starter going to make some healthy sugar eaters.

On brew day, steep your grains and watch the odd swirling character of the oat malt come out. After you strain and rinse the grains and bring your grain tea to a boil, take your pot off the heat and stir in 1/4 to 1/3 of the extract. This small addition helps adjust the pH of the wort, which will make the hops chemistry work more efficiently. Once the wort is back to the boil, I like a small addition of bittering hops such as Warrior, but I’m a bitter West Coaster.Since we’re not extracting bitterness, a short boil suffices. I go for 20 minutes, remove the kettle from the heat, and add the rest of the extract. I bring it back to the boil for 10 minutes, then cool the wort to 170°F (77°C). Stir the kettle vigorously and add your hops for 20 minutes. Your hops steep, unleashing goodness.

Chill your wort down with dilution water (if doing a concentrated boil) or any process that works for you. Pitch your healthy yeast and wait three days. After three days, hit the fermentor with more hops and let the final bit of magic happen. Interactions between the yeast, the hops oils, and the proteins in the wort will cause a stable haze to form. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a beautiful golden orangey glow to look forward to.

After seven days on the hops (ten days total fermentation), you should be ready to bottle. Let’s stop and back up for a second—what changes if I’m brewing all-grain? Not much. I’m replacing the liquid malt extract with 12 lb (5.4 kg) of pale malt and mashing that at 152°F (67°C) for 60 minutes with my other grains and then sparging. All told I’m adding more time (while saving money on the grain), but all the boil, fermentation, and packaging steps? Exactly the same.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  

His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Steinbier

You might know that steinbier is an old lager style made using hot stones to boil the wort. It was made when breweries really did not have any kettles whatsoever, which is why they were using stones. It’s not that kettles didn’t exist at the time; it’s just that, historically, they were very expensive. So, imagine for a moment that you’re going to brew somehow, without using a kettle. What would be your first problem? That’s right: mashing. How would you do it?As we know from the traditions of raw-ale brewing, boiling isn’t necessary at all; historically, in fact, boiling was not even common practice. However, if you want to brew beer, you absolutely must heat the mash somehow. As you might expect, a steinbier brewery used hot stones to heat the mash.  When it was time to mash, they heated stones over a wood fire for about two and half hours in a structure called the grumatl. Then they removed the stones with steel tongs and placed them in wooden baskets, which were first soaked in water so they wouldn’t catch fire. 

In the mash tun, they placed juniper branches in the bottom as a filter—yet another similarity with farmhouse brewing. They added a little water, then threw in the stones. Then they would dump in “a small sack” of hops—this was deliberate, so that the hops would roast on the stones, filling the room with smoke. After one minute, they added more water and covered the mash tun for 10 minutes.

Finally, they would begin adding malt, starting with the oats. They stirred these in immediately, taking care not to upset the juniper branches on the bottom. They added some more hot and cold water at the same time, before adding barley malt.

They mashed the wheat malt separately in a small vessel, also using hot stones until it boiled. They left this until the next morning when they dumped everything into the main mash tun. Then they added about 20 kilos (44 pounds) of hot stones to heat the large tun, slowly bringing it to a boil. (Wouldn’t it be nice to know which mash temperatures they hit? Sorry, no luck there. They didn’t use thermometers at all. That's farmhouse brewing for you.)

After a few hours, they were ready to lauter from the mash tun through the juniper branches. They would pour the wort back until it ran clear—a homebrew-style vorlauf step—before running off, cooling, and pouring it into fermentors.  So, what did steinbier actually taste like? Unfortunately, nobody alive today can tell. The sources say it was lightly acidic and very smoky, which seems reasonable. It may have been phenolic, with some banana aroma from the yeast. It also must have been very light, but probably quite full-bodied since they used oat and wheat malt and never boiled the proteins out of the wort. There must have been some typical raw-ale flavor, too.

What’s certain is that it must have been very different from the many re-creations of “steinbier today. Here are the key takeaways: Steinbier was a raw ale, and the hot stones went into the mash, not the wort. If anything was boiled at all, it was the mash.

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Kveik

Kveik is really just another word for yeast. It’s not a style of beer, though we shouldn’t ignore the unique, Norwegian farmhouse ales that have kept it going. Instead, kveik has come to mean a whole family of genetically similar cultures from western Norway, handed down, continually selected for quality, and often shared among the farmhouse brewers there. Researchers have so far identified at least 24 different kveik cultures, among many other farmhouse yeast cultures. So far, each culture has been found to contain multiple yeast strains—sometimes as many as 10.

No other yeast ferments like a kveik culture.

Here are the main things to know:  1.They tolerate a wide range of temperatures, performing well from 70 to 100°F (21 to 38°C) or higher. 2.They ferment quickly, often within 48 hours at the higher temperatures.  3. Unlike some temperature-tolerant Belgian yeasts, for example, they do not produce spicy phenolics at those warmer temperatures. (In technical terms, they are phenolic off-flavor negative, or POF-.)  4. Also unlike some of those saison cultures, they are not diastatic—meaning they won’t keep on chomping dextrins until there’s nothing left, leading to possible over-attenuation.  5.They are, however, good attenuators, often up to 80 percent  6. They tolerate higher alcohols better than most yeasts, comfortable up to 12 percent ABV but apparently able to handle up to 15 or 16 percent alcohol.     7. They generally ferment cleanly, without obvious off-flavors, with their main flavor contribution being subtle fruity esters that can help accentuate fruit or hops.

In short, kveik is dynamic, versatile, and forgiving—potentially a dream for any brewer who is looking to experiment or isn’t necessarily married to using a particular yeast strain for a matching beer style  At the very least, kveik already has become a useful tool in the box of amateur and craft brewers around the world. Yeast labs have made various strains more widely available over the past few years. Now, I can’t help but think of us—hundreds of thousands of homebrewers and 8,000-plus commercial breweries in the United States alone—as an unprecedented sort of open, collaborative laboratory to really explore the potential of what these unique creatures can do. 

If you're going to try using Kveik here are two I recommend: Both yeasts should work well in the 70–100°F (21–38°C) range.  From Sigmund Gjernes in Voss. This is one of the most widely available kveik strains. It produces orange citrus–like esters. Commercial examples: East Coast ECY43 Nordic Farmhouse, Escarpment Voss Kveik, LalBrew Voss Kveik, Omega OYL-061 Voss, White Labs WLP520 Sigmund Kveik, and Yeast Bay WLP4045 Sigmund’s Voss Kveik.     No. 3 Stranda  From Stein Langlo in Stranda. Per Omega yeast, this kveik has an “astoundingly wide temperature range and little change in flavor across the range.” It produces mango-honey notes. Commercial examples: OYL-057 Hothead and White Labs WLP519 Stranda.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  

His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Does pitch rate matter? A pitch rate is simply the number of yeast cells added to start things going in the fermentation tank per volume of wort. Yeast can be added directly to the wort in dry form or via a wet slurry of propagated yeast. If you want to brew consistent beers, it’s critical to maintain a standard pitch rate each time you make the same beer. And as we know, yeast is temperamental. It needs just the right conditions to do its work.

If you under-pitch—meaning you don’t add enough yeast to the cooled wort waiting inside your fermentor—the individual yeast cells may struggle to do more work than they can handle. They can reproduce too many times in order to compensate, which increases the chances of off-flavors.  If you over-pitch, or dump in too much yeast, your squadron of cells might over-accomplish its mission, thereby fermenting too fast and stripping the beer of much of its desired character. If you’re aiming for esters and other complexities that arise during fermentation, you might not get them.  Pitch rate depends on original gravity, yeast strain, and fermentation temperature. The cooler the fermentation, the slower the yeast activity to start and the more you need to pitch to get the job done. Lagers fall into this category.

Because ales ferment warmer, they naturally ferment faster, meaning they don’t require as much yeast to jump start the process. However, higher concentrations of alcohol—in both ales and lagers—can create greater barriers for the yeast to overcome. Brewers can adjust for this by pitching at a higher rate.

Pitch rates are usually expressed as cells per milliliter (c/ml). A broad and widely known guideline for pitching yeast is 1 million c/ml per degree Plato (°P). However, like almost everything in brewing... it depends. There are several ways to get an accurate cell count of your pitch. Many yeast providers will include a guaranteed “live cell per milliliter” with any fresh liquid pitch, or dormant cell per gram for dry yeast. The key is less about focusing on exact counts of cells and more about being consistent with the overall pitch quantity each time you pitch.

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Hop creep is a common term that refers to the overattenuation of dry-hopped beer. One might otherwise describe it as a sneaky, unwanted secondary fermentation that can lower gravity, provoke a diacetyl spike, and create excess alcohol and CO2. 

The biggest factors that affect refermentation of dry-hopped beers are hop contact time and amount of active yeast, followed by temperature. A recent technical brief published by the Brewers Association concludes that warmer dry-hopping temperatures and longer exposure time increase the formation of fermentable sugars, and heat-treating hops before dry-hopping can deactivate their enzymatic activity.

So, while it’s not necessarily possible to prevent hop creep altogether, it is possible to monitor, reduce, and control it. Brewers can monitor for over-attenuation by measuring the alcohol and specific gravity. They can reduce its likelihood by writing recipes for a higher-fermentation wort or by factoring the effect of hop creep into the brewing process by intentionally under-attenuating their beer.

Moreover, researchers have found that shorter dry-hop times equate to more fruity aromatic characteristics, while longer dry-hop times are associated with polyphenolic herbal notes. I recommend considering contact time as a way to mitigate hop creep on beer with higher dry hop loads, it may be time to consider how long you are leaving your beer on hops.

It’s possible to play with temperature to either slow down hop creep or speed it up, and brewers generally prefer one method over the other. They can try to get it over with, so to speak, by forcing it to develop in the tank instead of surprising end-users drinking out of a keg, can, or bottle that has been warmed at some point post-production. Alternatively, they might choose to create cool conditions that minimize its formation. 

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  

His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

It seems brewing myths come from literature (books, magazine, digital), forums, word of mouth and even from commercial brewers. Many times we read or hear something from one of these sources and it instantly becomes fact. We then tend to repeat that fact without understanding the underlying principles and caveats. Information from commercial brewers may not be a myth in their environment, but it can be to a homebrewer. let’s get started exploring some pervasive brewing myths.

Myth: “You Can’t Brew a Quality Beer with Malt Extract” 

Just because all grain brewing is more challenging and gives you more control, doesn’t mean it always produces a better beer. Some of the best homebrewers I know, still use extract to produce fine beers. This is because they have refined their brewing processes over time and understand how to brew at a high level. They continue to use extract because its easier to use and generally allows them to shorten their brew day.

Myth: “Dry Yeast is Inferior to Liquid Yeast”

Many home brewers include dry yeast in their brewing and use it confidence. In addition to cost, dry yeast offers important advantages over liquid yeast including a smaller storage footprint and longer shelf life. Personally, I recommend you give more consideration to choosing the correct yeast strain for fermenting the beer. If there is a liquid or a dry version available, I often suggest home brewers choose the dry one for the advantages referenced earlier. 

Myth: “Batch Sparging is Inferior to Fly Sparging”

This myth is probably true, in a perfect world. But most of us don’t live in a perfect world. For this myth to be true, you need a perfect fly-sparging system along with perfect sparging skills. Batch sparging removes variables like lauter tun design and sparge technique from the process.  In the real world, batch sparging efficiency can equal fly-sparging efficiency. Like some of the earlier myths, this one has more to do with the brewer’s skills in executing the method than just the method itself. I believe the decision to choose one method over the other should be based on preferences and equipment choices, not efficiency concerns.

Myth: Believing Ambient Temperature Control is “Good Enough”

Most recipe kits will tell you what temperature to ferment your wort at, but not how to reach and maintain that temperature. Investing in a fermentation refrigerator, temperature controller and a thermowell Will allow you to easily control the internal wort temperature at the manufacturer’s optimal yeast temperature. This investment will make the single biggest improvement in your home brew quality.

Myth: Using a Secondary Fermenter for Every Batch

For years many prominent homebrewing authors advocated using a secondary fermenter as an additional step after primary fermentation concluded. The benefits were to remove the beer from the trub as quickly as possible to prevent off flavors from the trub seeping into the beer. This step also allowed for beer to clear, without the trub concerns. Since that time, many of those same authors have evolved their view and now support my advocating against using a secondary for this purpose believing the risk for transfer oxidation and contamination are greater than from trub off flavors. Unless you plan to dry hop with hops, fruit or something else to impart its character or aroma into your beer, you don’t need to include a secondary fermenter in your normal brewing process. 

Myth: Believing Every Fermentation Requires At Least Two Weeks 

To me, a more thoughtful approach is to monitor fermentation to determine when a given yeast strain has completed it’s work. Every yeast strain has its own characteristics to consider. Also how that yeast strain performs when fermenting different beer styles can impact its fermentation time as well. My experience has been to monitor fermentation until the activity stops. At this point, I take hydrometer readings for a couple of days after to confirm fermentation has ended. Then I allow another 48 hours to allow the yeast to clean up after itself.  So, all of this might result in less than 2 weeks, 2 weeks or more than 2 weeks to complete fermentation.

Myth: Believing It’s Ok to Drink Your Beer as Soon as its Packaged

It’s important to understand that your beer is likely still “green” when its first packaged. Depending on the beer style, it requires a couple of weeks or more to reach it’s optimal taste and flavor character. Brewing experts loosely refer to this as conditioning. At least two weeks under carbonation will condition most beers. However many beers will benefit from additional time. consuming a beer as soon as it’s carbonated is consuming it when it’s good, but before its as good as it could be. In other words, this myth is actually true if you want to drink just “ok” tasting beer.

Myth: “Lagers are Difficult to Brew”

Lager beer styles themselves generally leave little to mask brewing mistakes or poor techniques. Unless we are talking about decoction mashes and the like, brewing lagers doesn’t have to be overly difficult.  For example, I’ve found 90 minute boils to be unnecessary. If you choose the right yeast, you can ferment a lager as quickly as most ales. Some of the most widely used commercial lager yeasts are extremely forgiving and can be fermented at ale temperatures with no ill effect to the beer.

Myth: Believing Lagers Require Months of Lagering to Taste Good”

It’s a fact that many of the largest commercial brewers in the world managed to brew their lagers in weeks, not months. In addition to technologies, they speed up the brewing process by choosing the right yeast. Extended lagering (or conditioning) is mostly unnecessary if the brewer chooses the right yeast.  by choosing a temperature tolerant lager yeast, brewing it at ale yeast temperatures and allowing for diacetyl rests, along with time for the yeast to clean up after itself will yield a great craft lager. Ideally, I allow an extra week or two of conditioning under carbonation to round out the flavors, much as it seems to do in lesser time for my ales.

Myth: “It’s Not Necessary to Thoroughly Clean Mash Tuns, Kettles and Their Valves Because Everything Gets Boiled Anyway”

This myth makes me cringe, and it should make you cringe too. We all know cleaning and sanitizing are critical for brewing quality beer. But many homebrewers rarely consider equipment areas like valves on your brew pots and mash tuns. Many homebrewers seem to allow hard water and beer stone to build up. It’s just as important to remove these as they can introduce unwanted odors and flavors into your beer. Even a little build up can change how your kettle conducts heat, affecting boil off rates and time.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  

His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Bitter is the signature English beer style—the culmination of centuries of brewing know-how in an evolving cultural and historical context. Multiple forces have honed it into a drink that represents the best of what classic beer ingredients can become, perfectly suited to the unique drinking culture that pervades the island nation.  It is  Built on the foundations of IPA and its forerunner, October beer, “bitter” is a term that seems to have arisen late in the 19th century, associated with a lighter, drier pale-ale style. Bitter and pale ale are somewhat interchangeable terms, although pale ales are typically associated with the stronger end of the range. The division of bitters into three distinct gravity/strength categories in North American competitions is simply a tool to split a (once) large category into manageable numbers for judging. Most brewers in England produce more than one strength, but they rarely offer three, and the terminology—ordinary, best/special, ESB—is anything but consistent.   It does have a relatively low ABV but that makes it more attractive.  I’ve always said that bitter should be judged by how good the third pint tastes., and a good bitter passes that test.

The proper temperature is that of a cool cellar, in the mid 50s°F (11–14°C) rather than the 38°F (3°C) typical for lagers. Cellar temperatures allow the aromas to blossom generously.

Bitter’s gentle carbonation is a holdover from the earlier use of wooden kegs, which can’t handle as much pressure as modern stainless steel. Rather than flat, it’s carbonated at about 1 to 1.5 volumes of CO2, as opposed to perhaps 1.5 to 2.5 volumes for other ales and lagers or the 3 to 4 typical of weissbier and Belgian ales. This lower carbonation reduces the masking effect of the gas, further enhancing flavor and making the beer easier to consume heartily. What drives these characteristics is the cask ale tradition. This is beer carbonated in the vessel from which it will be served, without the use of added CO2. Bottle-conditioning is acceptable, but draft is the heart of the style. Cloudiness is generally viewed as a sign of poor cellarmanship.  Indeed, one of the reasons for cask ale’s decades-long decline may be inconsistent quality at the point of service. 

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I've received a few emails about brewers asking if they should keg or bottle.  I’ve been kegging most of my homebrew for about six years now. But deep down, I’m still kind of partial to bottle-conditioned beer. It’s often said that carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide, whether created by yeast in a bottle or delivered from a tank of high-pressure gas. But I still insist on bottle conditioning certain beers, such as barleywines, that I want to age, as well as a handful of styles that I think really do benefit from being in the bottle (if for no other reason than personal preference), such as Weißbier.

And yet, most of what I brew ends up in a keg. In choosing one vessel over another, I consider a variety of factors. Here is my completely subjective list of considerations in the great kegs versus bottles showdown. 1. Clarity - It’s rare that you move a keg once it’s in the fridge, so there’s little opportunity to disturb the yeast sediment after it has settled. Keg is the choice here.  2. Competitions - If you want to enter a homebrew competition, you’re going to have to submit bottles. Now, it’s entirely possible to bottle from a keg using a counter-pressure bottle filler, but it’s an extra level of complexity that bottlers don’t have to deal with. Bottle is the winner here.  3.  Complexity - Kegging simply requires a lot more equipment than bottling. To keep a keg system going, you’re going to have to deal with gas cylinders, tubing, faucets, clamps, O-rings, wrenches, lubricants, and all manner of other gadgets .  Point for bottling. 4. Convenience - won’t lie. I often put off bottling because I know I’ll need to set aside a couple of hours to complete the project. So on my laziness I'm giving the nod to kegging.  5. Carbonation - Kegging lets you precisely adjust carbonation to a level that’s just not possible with bottles. From high-gravity imperial stouts to sour ales, setting a regulator is much more reliable than futzing about with priming sugar and yeast. This one goes to kegging.                6. Portability - taking it along to a party, the beach, or wherever is needless to say easier with bottles.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  

His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Bière de garde

The revival of French artisanal brewing restarted in the 1970s; it was orbited around an unusual range of beers—typically strong, smooth, and malty—known collectively as bières de garde. While the name may be familiar, the beers are among the most misunderstood. Routinely described as “farmhouse ales” and lumped together with Belgian saison, they can surprise drinkers with some decidedly un-Belgian flavors. In both characteristics and process, modern bière de garde often has more in common with German bock than with anything Belgian. Yet the association isn’t entirely wrong—it’s just outdated. 

By the end of World War II, 90 percent of the French brewing industry was gone. In a familiar story, lagers replaced local ales in post-war France, while the number of local breweries dwindled to a couple dozen.  It seems then that France would be an odd country for a local ale revival. Yet that’s exactly what happened when Brasserie Duyck suddenly found favor with college students.  A traditional ale brewery, Duyck, in the 1950s, started making a strong specialty beer (Jenlain) packaged in a wine bottle with a caged cork. That beer became the prototype for a reborn bière de garde—and served as an inspiration for other breweries in the region. 

The original Jenlain was an amber, or ambrée, like the older beers. It was strong, at 7.5 percent ABV. Most importantly it was “kept,” or aged—to which the idiomatic phrase de garde refers. In other ways, it was quite different. Few brewers boil their wort for half a day anymore—they darken it with specialty malts. In Jenlain’s case, the grist looked something like a bock grist, with a base of pilsner malt and Munich for color. In terms of taste, the biggest change was yeast. Modern bières de garde typically use neutral ale or lager yeasts. Unlike with modern saison, the fermentation characteristics tend to play more subtle roles. Brewers don’t age the beer to let the wild microbes produce a harmonious vinous flavor, but rather to develop lager-like smoothness. 

For a world magnetized by hops and intensity, bière de garde is out of step with the times. The style accentuates malt, not hops or yeast, and subtlety rather than drama. 

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Old Ales

Old ales have a flavor profile that many younger drinkers, currently rapt with barrel-aged stouts, might love, thanks to complexity, acidity, and gentle sweetness that make them very contemporary.  After reading this I hope you might give them a try.  You won't be disappointed.

In a world where innovation and youthfulness dominate the beer industry, could anyone have invented a worse name for a style of beer than  Old Ale? Check your local beer aisle for old ales, and you can confirm that indeed, they’re not big sellers. The lineage of old ales dates back 400 years to just after the adoption of hops in England.  With the hops to retard the worst ravages of this aging, brewers discovered they could make stronger beers that could ripen in casks for months without turning into vinegar. 

The lineage of old ales is highlighted by Burton ales, which emerged in the 1740s. Brewed to gravities higher than 1.100, they were very thick and heavy and very bitter and were often made palatable only by ripening in oak. From this practice of vat aging emerged a type of beer known variously as “stock,” “stale,” or “old” ale. These names tell us a lot. As the beer sat in barrels, it went stale—that is, flat. This was in contrast to regular “mild” or fresh beer, which was served, as it is today, lively and effervescent from the natural carbonation the beer produced. Because the beer was both intensely flavored and still, it was regularly “stocked” at the pub to blend with fresh ale.  Of course, those wild microorganisms resident in vats of old ale continued to change the beer, turning it more acidic and vinous as it aged—and were thus the source of that sherry-like palate. 

In terms of volume, old ales were never a dominant style, but they had a remarkable run. As other styles came and went, old ales continued to plug along through to the twentieth century. As a reaction to the austerity of WW II, old ales enjoyed a resurgence in the 1950s. The number that continued to be vat-aged dwindled, but a few survived the century. Now the tradition of English old ales lives, as much as anywhere, in the barrels and foeders of American craft breweries inspired by this old tradition. The historic old ales picked up their Brett naturally, in the staves of the oak in which they were aged. American craft breweries don’t leave matters to chance, adding the wild yeast after primary fermentation of a strong ale. Most Americans adhere to tradition in the grist, with a base of English pale and crystal malts and a dash of dark for color. They may hop stiffly or gently to preference with English varieties and add a classic yeast strain to develop esters. 

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I've received a few questions about making a "fast brew", that is having your beer ready to drink in a week or two. Here a few quick tips to help those willing to give it a try:  1.  Stick with ales (but you already knew that). 2. Keep the original gravity low. 3. Utilize bold flavors; 4. Pitch lots of the ideal yeast. 5. Carbonate in kegs.  If you need more details just send me a note here at the Nexus.  

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Yeasts / Stouts / Shipping / Boil Times

There’s a trending not-so-new category of super-yeasts in town and if you haven’t tasted or brewed with them yet, you likely will soon. Called kveik (kuh-vike) yeasts, they hail from Norway, and their fans say that almost anything your yeast can do, kveik yeast can probably do better.  For the brewer it’s awesome because it ferments fast and hot yet so clean you can make most ordinary beer styles with it. The beer doesn’t need to mature very long, either, so you can go from pitch to selling in a week .

In total, around 100 single-strain and mixed kveik yeast cultures are sold commercially around the world. These literal farmhouse yeasts, which tend to give off fruity flavors and lend themselves nicely to a vast array of styles but particularly NEIPAs, have remarkably been documented fermenting at temperatures as high as 107℉ without any unwanted off-flavors from fermenting too hot, Because they can ferment so hot, they can also ferment fast. Really fast.  Why kveik fermentations occur very fast at higher temperature ranges is a similar notion as why lager fermentations occur slowly at lower temperature ranges. In general, enzymatic reactions will be faster at high and slower at low temperatures. Unfortunately, a speedy fermentation also brings along the risk that things can go south more quickly than you may be used to. Plus, you’ll have to remain very vigilant if you want to collect data to set benchmarks for future kveik beer recipes.  So while you might check your fermentation once or twice a day when brewing with a standard yeast, you’ll likely find you need to pull your kveik samples much more often. 

Since we're talking about yeast here are two big rules of thumb for healthy yeast: Don’t let it sit in the fridge for months, and make sure you’re giving it the right nutrients and amount of oxygen to get the job done. When investing in tools and equipment, find fermenters that are easy to clean and inspect. Also, invest in oxygenation, whether in-line or a wand/stone. You will see a dramatic difference in fermentation performance with pure oxygen versus aerating by hand. When the yeast are happier, they'll reward you with better tasting beer. 

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It’s a sign of the times that big, rich imperial stout probably will be easier to find than a good brown ale or any Irish stout not named Guinness. Even when they’re not barrel-aged or flavored with dessert-like adjuncts, imperial stouts cover a surprisingly broad flavor spectrum; levels of sweetness and roast-bitterness vary widely but are ideally in balance with each other, leading to drinkability that is dangerous at this strength (often 9 to 13 percent ABV).

Contemporary examples are getting increasingly thick and viscous in body, with an almost syrupy impression that associates easily with their deep chocolate flavors—these are some of the world’s most indulgent and flavorful drinks. Additional layers may come from ingredients such as cacao nibs, vanilla, cinnamon, or the warm embrace of a bourbon barrel. It’s not unusual to taste one and think, “I should pour this over ice cream”—and maybe you should. Or include it in the ice cream at the outset, allowing the cream, vanilla, and sweetness to fully absorb these plainly compatible flavors.

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Answers To Readers Questions

I've received several emails from homebrewers who want to know how to ship their beer as gifts to friends and relatives.  Here's what I usually do - Use a sturdy double-walled box, or put one box inside another. Use plenty of filler material. Packing peanuts and bubble wrap work best. Make sure no glass is touching. Make sure nothing moves when you shake the box. Use styrofoam wine shippers or similar for the easiest way to pack and ship. Tape, tape, tape! Write fragile on the box (though I’m not convinced this makes any difference whatsoever) Write “liquid yeast samples” on the box (sort of true).

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I've also received a few emails about mash and boiling times. If you’ve read any brewing book, then you’ve probably seen that just about every recipe out there has an arbitrary number of 60 minutes for mash and 60 minutes for boil, not 45, not 90 but 60.  For the mash time, I believe the assumption is the longer you steep the grains, the more sugars you’ll extract. However, thanks to improved modifications of the brewing malts we use today, most of the starch to sugar conversion happens in the first 15 minutes or so. That means you really don’t need to go longer than 15 minutes to get solid wort out of your mash.  I usually go for 30 to 45 minutes to save time and I add a little more grains to make up the difference. These days I rarely go longer than a 30 minute boil and just add a little more hops to get the right IBU range. On the larger brewery scale, adding more greens and hops can add a lot of costs. So I get why longer mash and boil times make sense for them. But on homebrewing scale, it costs us cents to add a little more of these ingredients. So save yourself some time and consider reducing your mash and boiling for shorter brew days.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Hop Terpenes

Over the next decade, some breweries will shift to using 100 percent liquid hops. Made from terpenes—highly aromatic compounds that enjoy especially high concentrations in hops as well as cannabis—they can add incredibly potent aromas and flavors to beer. As a bonus, they also offer benefits to brewing efficiency.

Hop terpenes can keep for several years, and they take up less than 10 percent of the space needed for a comparable amount of pellet hops. A company with the right equipment can take any overstock—or hops that are just past their best days, or even freshly harvested ones—and extract terpenes for future use.

For brewers, there is no sludgy biomass to soak up wort or complicate runoff, and they report 10 to 15 percent higher yields. The extraction relies on a supercritical CO2 process rather than solvents, so its proponents pitch it as environmentally friendly. And considering the flavor and aroma benefits, a future where some breweries go with 100 percent liquid hops doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

Because the terpenes add a powerful hop flavor to finished beer, Capps suggests using a sweeter base beer with a bigger malt cushion to try them out—think double IPA. On the hot side, he says he’s had a lot of success using terpenes in the whirlpool. On the cold side, he says that adding them in the brite tank has worked well for him.

Notably, one problem complicating the use of these terpene extracts is that they’re hydrophobic—they don’t mix well with water. Capps says they should be mixed first with a spirit of at least 190 proof, such as Everclear, before adding to the beer. For a six-gallon batch, he recommends adding just 1 ml of terpene extract mixed with 5 ml of alcohol.

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Tips on Making a Lager

There's no secret about what made lager different: You ferment it colder. With the benefits of hindsight and experience, we know it isn’t quite that simple—but as many distinguished brewers will tell you, it doesn’t have to be all that complicated, either. Cold fermentation is good fermentation when it comes to lager yeast (at least initially). Here’s a simple fermentation plan for lager yeast: Pitch at 50°F [10°C] and after three days, raise the fermentation temperature a couple of degrees per day. After a while just let it free rise to promote full attenuation, but that cool start is the key.

Besides temperature, we have the amount of yeast you’re using: You want to pitch enough cells to reduce yeast stress. A cooler fermentation is a slower fermentation, and sluggish yeast can throw off more compounds than they can sufficiently “clean up” without enough cells and a vigorous fermentation.

High cell count and viability when pitching [are] critical. I recommend half-again as much yeast as you’d use for an ale fermentation of similar gravity. It’s okay to slightly  “overpitch” since as a brewing “error” that’s basically in the same lane as saying you “work too hard” when a job interviewer asks about your biggest weakness.

Don’t just pitch a lot of yeast, but also make sure it’s healthy yeast. You can’t expect good fermentation without healthy yeast, in the right quantities, with proper nutrition—just like you can’t expect kids to grow healthy and strong without proper nutrition.  Brewing up a good starter and giving your yeast sufficient oxygen and nutrients are great ways to get your fermentation off the ground and into orbit.

Don’t be afraid of relatively higher temperatures toward the end of a lager fermentation. Let the temperature rise gradually up to about 60°F (16°C) and the fermentation get as active as it can then. Anything that wasn’t crisp and clean already will have a much greater chance of being scrubbed or blown out if you allow the temperature to free rise. Lager yeast like it cold—but all yeast like it warm toward the end of the fermentation cycle.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

India Pale Lagers / Lagers Today

One of my favorite styles is IPL - India Pale Lager.  Before you dismiss it let me explain.  First: In no way, shape, or form is the style we call “India pale lager” (IPL) the first or only type of hop-forward lager. The great granddaddy of pale lagers—Pilsner Urquell—was known for being hoppy for its time, and it’s far from the only classic example. In fact, Czech- and German-style pilsners ought to have evident bitterness and hop character.

Here is where IPLs and other modern-day hoppy lagers depart from their ancestors: Hop expression is the sine qua non of their existence. If you aren’t pushing for full force of the cone, you’re making something else. The first IPLs, about a decade ago, were brewed precisely how you’d think, given the name. Breweries made a beefed-up pale lager base and then liberally hopped it with Noble and Noble-adjacent varieties to achieve high bitterness. That was a problem because irresponsible levels of plant matter from low-alpha hops led to a sort of “hop burn”—not unlike some hazy IPAs today, when too much of the voluminous dry-hoppage remains in the finished product. Alternatively, some brewers in those days would simply switch yeast and lager their chewy, high-IBU, caramel-and-C-hops IPAs—and that didn’t quite work either, lacking litheness and finesse.

We’re better at this now. Innovations in how we use hops have improved the whole realm of hoppy lagers. It doesn’t hurt that the influence of elegant, hop-infused “Italian-style” pilsners have helped nudge things in a more drinkable direction—but that’s far from the only recent development.

One name that has caused a stir in brewing circles lately is “cold IPA,” coined by Kevin Davey at Wayfinder Beer in Portland, Oregon. Wayfinder Relapse gets lager yeast but ferments at relatively warm temperatures; there is rice in the grist to lighten the body, and it’s hopped like a West Coast IPA.  Whatever you want to call it, brewers agree that hopped-up lager needs to combine the better parts of its split personality. You want that dry, crisp body and repressed yeast character of the lager with the effusive hops of an IPA.

As I see it, a good IPL is something you can repeatedly drink without question, with the hops providing that mouthwatering trigger of fruity oils and floral resins. The beer to always dry and bubbly, and the lingering impact of hop resins very apparent.

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In the early days of American microbrewing and homebrewing, when our modern beer culture was a shiny new thing, experts often divided the world into lagers on one side and ales on the other. But in terms of chemical reality, the difference is that lager’s cooler fermentations produce fewer chemical by-products. These can be smallish molecules called esters; heavier, even oily alcohols called fusels; and others.

I like to think of yeast cells as leaky bags of goo. Inside, multiple chemical processes are occurring—absorbed sugar is being snipped apart, and carbon energy units are popping off to fuel cellular activity. Excess energy is stored as fat. Waste is sequestered or expelled. Amino acids assemble into proteins. Sometimes, the cell is making baby yeast. Each process is a sequence of molecular transformations with multiple chemical actors. Some have potent aromas, and those can leak out into the beer.  All of these reactions speed up as temperature rises. For any given yeast strain, the warmer the fermentation, the more rapid the reactions. Accelerated chemical activity means more of these intermediates adding their flavors to the beer. At the low temperatures of lager, there is less activity, and the yeast is able to keep the chemistry cleaned up as it goes. 

Whatever the yeast strain—whether called an “ale” or “lager” type—the actual fermentation takes less than a week. Following that, there is a post-fermentation period called conditioning or maturation, where the “green” beer rests and clarifies, while still-active yeast removes many of these unwanted chemicals—especially the apple/grassy/raw-pumpkin smelling acetaldehyde and the hyper-buttery diacetyl. But there are limits to the maturation process, and not all of these flavor chemicals are removed. Esters and phenols generally remain in the beer. 

For most, the global lager standard is mass-produced adjunct beers, fermented at warmer temperatures and aged for shorter periods than traditional versions. This means they retain a wisp of ale character: In Coors, for example, there’s a little banana candy; Budweiser has a bright apple note. There are also lagered ales (obergärige lagerbier) in the form of Kölsch and Düsseldorfer altbier, which use unique yeast and combine an ale fermentation with cold conditioning—another kind of hybrid. Steam beer further muddies the waters. 

Today the question is how far can you push the boundaries of lager styles and not puncture the illusion of lager-hood? Lager gravity and alcohol are pretty flexible, up to a point. While the classicists at the Weihenstephan brewing school near Munich decree 11.8°P (OG 1.048, resulting in about 5 percent ABV) as the optimum gravity for pils, shooting for 9.5–10°P (1.038–1.040) will get you an all-day drinker in the 4-point-something ABV range. Or you can even jump to 14.5–15.5°P (1.059–1.063) and still not blow your cover. Go much higher, and you may land in maibock or even imperial pils territory.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Saison / Boc k/ Fruit Bee r/ Pre-Prohibition Lager / Faux Barrel Aging 

Saison is most commonly a pale and highly attenuated ale, finishing dry with a light to medium-light body. It should be refreshing.  A typical all-grain grist might consist of 100 percent pilsner malt, or it may include portions of wheat, spelt, or other grains. The hops can be traditional Saazer or other Noble hops, or you can add your own spin with New World varieties. Citra or Mosaic can work well with the yeast-driven zest, while New Zealand–grown Southern Cross, Moutere, or Nelson Sauvin can play wonderfully with the spice character. 

While the hops and grain provide character, the yeast tends to be the real star of the show. Its flavor and aroma are at least partly yeast-driven, often with phenolic spice notes—but the beer itself is not often spiced. Some examples can be quite hop-forward, while relatively darker versions may offer more malt character.

The strength can vary widely, too. Historically, it was probably often quite light, akin to table beer, perhaps 2 to 3 percent ABV. More modern examples tend to be more mainstream, from 5 to 6.5 percent, while the range of special-occasion “super” saisons may go as high as 10 percent, akin to rustic tripels.

My favorite examples are Saison Dupont—arguably the archetype—at 6.5 percent ABV and the spelt-based Blaugies Saison d’Epeautre at 6 percent. Both exemplify the style in their pale golden color and enticing aromas—pleasant fruit notes (orange, lemon); peppery, yeast-driven spice; and fragrant Noble hops.

Belgian-brewed saison has a dense, long-lasting, rocky-white or ivory head that gradually collapses as it is drunk. When beer enthusiasts or judges speak of characteristic Belgian lacing, they are referring to the pattern of foam that sticks to the sides of the glass as you drink the beer to the bottom. The foam and lace are signs of careful brewing and ample carbonation (and a beer-clean glass.)

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As a style, American bock is different from German bock. It’s lower in alcohol and comes from a time when American public taste was transitioning from Munich-style brown beer to paler pilsner. The best-known holdout of this once very popular style is Shiner Bock, which today is 4.4 percent ABV and has 13 IBUs. Its lineage is a product originally made for the brewer’s home market in Texas.

Sometimes darker and often hoppier than Shiner, American bock was born well before the invention of the IBU scale. Shiner Bock holds true to the strength, if not the pre-war color or hop character. While it does contain roasted barley, the Weger Brothers Bock of 1909 used porter malt—a dark malt that could vary greatly from maltster to maltster. Porter malt even varied within a single batch, with some grains closer to the color of corn and others closer to charcoal.

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Fruits, spices, herbs, and other ingredients are so very much fun to play around with in a homebrew. Anything from fresh strawberries and basil to vanilla beans and cardamom can really complement the other malty, hoppy flavors in a beer. Be cautious when you first start experimenting — a little goes a long way. You can always add more if the flavor isn’t quite strong enough, but you can never take it away once it’s there.

You can add these ingredients in two places during the brewing process: in the last five minutes of the hop boil, or to the secondary when you transfer the beer. Adding them at the end of the hop boil tends to give you a softer, more mellow flavor (and the boiling wort sanitizes the ingredients so there’s no worry of infection). Adding ingredients to the secondary gives a brighter, fresher, more vibrant flavor, but there is some risk of picking up an infection.

There is generally enough alcohol in the beer by the time it’s in the secondary that you don’t need to worry too much about adding ingredients, but even so, use your best judgement. Wash any fresh fruits or vegetables before chopping them and adding them. You can soak chopped fruit, whole spices, vanilla beans, and other ingredients in a little vodka or other alcohol before adding them. 

Answering The Mail

Several home brewers have written in with a question about Pre-Prohibition lagers.  To quickly answer their inquiry note that in 1920, the national average was 11.2 oz (318 g) of hops per barrel of beer. Averaging that out to five gallons today, it’s about 1.8 oz per five-gallon batch. Whether you’re using American, Czech, English, or German hops, my preference for these lagers is firm bitterness and fair amount of hop aroma. Consider the classic hopping schedule of additions at 90, 60, and 30 minutes. Also consider first-wort hopping and using your “best hops” at the end of your boil.

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In answer to more than a few questions  about an "easy way" to make a "barrel aged" beer here it is-  An simple way to replicate aging a beer in a liquor infused barrel at home is by soaking oak cubes in the liquor of your choice, then adding both the soaked chips and the liquor to the beer in the secondary.  You don’t need much of this to give your beer a nice oaky, boozy flavor. Use 1/2 ounce of oak cubes for a 1-gallon batch of beer (and 2 1/2 ounces for a 5-gallon batch). Pick the liquor you’d like to use, and soak the cubes in just enough to cover for a few days. Add them to your beer and let everything mingle for at least a week or up to two months – taste your beer as you go and rack the beer off the cubes when it tastes good to you.

Bigger, high-alcohol beers, like imperial stouts and barleywines, tend to be best for this kind of barrel aging, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. If you have a brilliant idea for infusing your pale ale with tequila, go for it.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

        ------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Normally, fresh hop beer is produced with hops that are still fresh off the bine. Whether you draw that line at 24 or 36 hours, fresh hop beer involves the use of hops that have been picked but not processed. Not dried. Not pelletized. Still wet. Fresh. The introduction of a new fresh frozen product/program does not change that. Fresh still means fresh.

Since the vast majority of the USA’s hop crop comes from the Yakima Valley, brewers in the Pacific Northwest enjoy an advantage when it comes to this kind of beer. For breweries in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho driving to the hop fields to load a van or box truck with freshly picked hops is something of a ritual. Frozen Fresh Hops will give more craft breweries the opportunity to brew fresh hop beers.

With the growing popularity of fresh hop ales, the need to create a more flexible and sustainable product has increased dramatically,  Frozen Fresh Hops are the answer.  It's raw, un-kilned, flash-frozen whole cone hops produced in a state-of-the-art food processing facility. Unlike traditional freezing, flash freezing retains the delicate nuances of un-kilned hops by protecting lupulin gland integrity, preserving fresh hops from both a physical and aromatic perspective. The result is a product that delivers the magic of fresh hop season with better storability and logistical flexibility,  As you can see, I'm a fan. Try them the next time you brew.

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Let's end this month's column with a few words about nitrogenated beer “Nitro” was developed in 1959 as a

way to replicate the creaminess of cask-conditioned ale, which has lower carbonation than most beers.

Nitro beer is dispensed utilizing a draught system, whereas cask ale is pulled out with a beer engine. One benefit of nitro beer is that kegs are easier to ship and serve than casks.

 A nitrogenated beer has much lower volumes of carbon dioxide (1.1-1.7 v/v) dissolved in it than a typical beer as well as a small amount of nitrogen. Because the amount of nitrogen dissolved in the beer is so small, it isn’t usually quantified.

Nitrogen (N₂) bubbles are smaller than carbon dioxide (CO₂) bubbles. This creates a “creamy” or “smooth” mouthfeel. The small bubble size also contributes to a more stable and longer-lasting head. This is due to the relatively low gradient between the concentration of nitrogen in the beer compared to the high concentration of nitrogen in the air. The inverse is true in regard to CO₂, which is why the head on a non-nitro beer is quicker to dissipate. The lower carbonation of nitrogenated beer combined with the different foam qualities of the head will likely subdue a beer’s aroma as well as soften the perception of bitterness in beer.

To meet the high applied pressure requirements, a specially designed nitro faucet should be used to provide additional resistance to the system. A restriction plate in the faucet’s spout forces the beer through tiny holes in the plate. On the other side of the plate, the flow straightener ensures an even, consistent flow from the faucet.

• This restrictor plate also helps break the nitrogen out of the beer through turbulence, which contributes to

the cascading effect in the glass, as well as the creamy mouthfeel and the stable head. To maintain the correct balance of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in a nitrogenated beer, a gas blend must be used to dispense these beers. A typical gas blend for nitro dispense is 25% CO₂/75% N₂ (30/70 may also be used).

• Using a blend with a higher amount of CO₂ (including using 100% CO₂) cannot be used to dispense nitro beer as the beer will become over carbonated.

• This blend can be obtained by using an on-site blender or by sourcing a mixed gas bottle, often called G-Mix, Beer Mix, Beer Gas, or Guinness Gas.

• Non-nitro beers should not be poured using this specialized gas blend. Beers with higher volumes of CO₂

that are poured with this blend (even at higher applied pressure) will lose carbonation and become flat over time.

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Hope you found this month's column of interesting, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago  His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

There’s a saying among brewers, usually used as a cautionary tale: “Everything likes beer as much as we do.” It’s a reminder that it isn’t just your good old brewing yeast that wants to get in there and ferment; it’s everything. Ordinarily we’re invested in keeping anything except our yeast out, but when it comes to sours we actually want other things in—not everything, but a few select dinner guests that will give us some of the flavors we want (and on occasion, even an “open door” policy is desirable!). But first let’s talk about the “big three” in sour beer fermentation: Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus.

Brettanomyces

Brettanomyces (Brett) is a wild yeast that is probably the most commonly used agent in sour beers. One reason for its ubiquity is its versatility: depending on the strain, acidity, and alcohol levels and presence of other microbiota, you can bring out a massive array of flavors that range from apple and pineapple to deeper pit fruits such as plum to earthy notes of horse blanket and hay and (in extreme cases) more-intense funky flavors (one was described by a senior beer judge as “cherries rolled in cigar ash, but in a good way”). When Brett is used as the only fermenting agent, the flavors tend to be surprisingly restrained even when using a more-aggressive strain: fruit leads the way when young, and only after extended conditioning in the package do the more barnyard-y flavors emerge. In a mixed fermentation, though, strain will matter a great deal more. Brett claussenii tends to produce a less-funky fruitiness, whereas Bruxellensis and Lambicus strains tend toward the funkier flavors. Select your strain carefully and choose a fermentation process consistent with your desired flavor profile!

Lactobacillus and Pediococcus

Moving on from yeast, we turn to bacteria, specifically Lactobacillus (Lacto) and Pediococcus (Pedio). Both produce significant amounts of lactic acid (a nice, clean, sharp acidity), with Pedio taking substantially longer to do so than Lacto. The advantage of Pedio lies in its tolerance for a wider range of environments: Lacto sours quickly and well, but it is not a survivor. It requires an environment in which almost no isomerized alpha acid is present (anything more than 10 IBUs is greatly limiting) but can be used successfully in beers such as Berliner weisse, where hops are used minimally, or in sour mash/kettle souring applications (see below).

If Lacto isn’t an option, though, Pedio can produce the same kind of acidity—but it needs help cleaning up after itself. Never pitch Pedio alone. It should be used as part of a double-act with Brett to ensure that precursors and off-flavors are dealt with; my most-common tasting note when Pedio is present (absent Brett) is a combination of buttery diacetyl and grape juice. Pedio can also lead to a period of “sickness” in your beer, in which the beer becomes ropey and thick, but this should clear over time and is not a reason to dump the beer!

Open Fermentation

Then there’s the “open fermentation” option. There are any number of wild strains of yeast and bacteria just floating in the air that might make for incredible beer: one reason for the success of the lambic breweries of Belgium was the presence of desirable wild seasonal yeast strains floating through the air in the Senne River valley. It may well be that your brewery, yard, or garage has a number of good strains available to you! You can simply let your local microbiota have a crack at fermentation and see what you get.

Be warned, though: this is also a good way to get a disgusting beer. In addition to Brett, Lacto, and Pedio, you may well be exposing your beer to mutated wild yeasts—Acetobacter (adding vinegar flavors from acetic acid) and other foreign bugs—that could produce something rank instead of something beautiful.

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Quick ways to make sour ales - 

Brewers who want a faster result have at least two process-based solutions available: sour mashing and kettle souring (also known as sour worting). There’s also straight-up cheating: just add your acids directly. The advantage of these methods is obvious: they’re fast. The disadvantage is that they’re really only good for producing a relatively clean Lacto character; if you want the more-complex funk of something such as Brett, I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait. It should also be noted that sour mashing in particular can go badly wrong: Acetobacter and/or Clostridium can grow in a sour mash, producing flavors akin to vinegar and…well, vomit. The risk of those can be limited, however, and quick (or cheat!) souring methods give you another way to add sourness to your beers, all without the months of barrel watching that traditional methods often require.

. Sour mashing is done in a variety of ways, but the simplest is to mash as usual, first, then allow the mash to cool to between 110–120°F (43–49°C). At that point, you can add either a pure culture of Lacto or simply add a pitch of unmashed base grain (which is lousy with Lactobacillus) and hold at temperature for 2 to 4 days. While doing so, you should do everything you can to reduce the amount of oxygen in the mash: flush with carbon dioxide or nitrogen and press plastic wrap over the grain bed.

You can hold the temperature by using an electric blanket, adding small doses of boiled water, or through the use of a hot water bath (if using a kettle). Once you reach your desired level of acidity, just sparge as usual and boil away!

Kettle Souring

Kettle souring is the same basic process, just in your kettle instead of in your mash vessel. Mash, lauter, and sparge as you ordinarily would. Allow the wort to cool to the same temperatures (110–120°F/43–49°C) you would in a sour mash (again, these are Lacto-friendly temperatures!) and pitch your Lacto culture. You should likewise ensure that you protect your wort: keep the kettle covered and flush with carbon dioxide or nitrogen to guard against unwanted intruders. Once you reach your desired sourness, you can simply proceed to the boil as usual! You can also kettle sour post-boil, but if you do so, be sure to minimize your IBUs (less than 10) so that you aren’t creating a Lacto-inhibiting environment.

=====================

Hope you found this month's column of interest, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

My mailbag had several questions about original gravity from both homebrewers and people who just wondered about it after see that notation on many a can.  Hope this helps.

During the brew day, one of the most important things to write down and one of the very last things to write down is Original Gravity. Original Gravity dictates whether the desired ABV will be achieved in a brew. It dictates whether the hop additions will provide the desired balance. It determines whether or not the brew day went as planned. Ultimately, it's a measure of how well the brewer knows their brewery.

Gravity is a key measure in physics and petroleum as well as brewing and winemaking. In physics gravity is the force bringing objects together. In the contexts of petroleum and fermentation, gravity is the measure of a liquid's density relative to water at a specified temperature. Within brewing and winemaking, the difference in density is a result of dissolved, fermentable sugars. Each increment (1/1000th) on the specific gravity scale represents a .1 percent increase in density - a 1.100 specific reading indicates a wort that is 10 percent denser than water. Most 5 percent ABV beers have an original gravity around 1.050. Bigger beers like American Barleywines and Imperial Stouts can surpass 1.100 with smaller beers like an American Light Lager or Berliner Weisse rarely exceed 1.030.  

Gravity measurements, or 'specific gravity readings' are made at key points throughout the wort-making and fermentation process; prior to boiling the wort ("pre-boil gravity"), immediately prior to pitching the yeast ("original gravity"), and post-fermentation ("final gravity"). These readings are usually taken with a floating hydrometer or refractometer. A hydrometer is a tall, thermometer-like glass instrument placed within the sample of the liquid to be measured. A refractometer is a monocular-like instrument with a glass prism where a drop of the sample liquid is placed. Hydrometers and refractometers expect the wort to be at a calibrated temperature – usually 65˚F. Calculations exist to adjust the readings taken at higher temperatures – though this is less of a concern with the refractometer because the sample size, a drop from a pipette, cools much faster than the 130 milliliters of sample required by the hydrometer. 

These dissolved, fermentable sugars were extracted from the beer recipe's grist – the barley, malt extract, adjuncts, or sugars – as part of the brewing process. The amount of sugars within a fermentable ingredient is measured in Points Per Pound Per Gallon (PPG), or the specific gravity reading from extracting 100 percent of the sugars of one pound of the fermentable within one gallon of water. Each ingredient has a different amount of available sugars; Liquid malt extract has 36 PPG, American 2-row barley has 28, wheat has 38. No all-grain brewhouse can extract all 100 percent of the fermentable sugars. Commercial breweries aim to extract 80 to 90 percent of the sugars where as many homebrew-scale recipe writers assume the homebrewer's system can achieve only 70 percent. A number of factors impact brewhouse efficiency and therefore impact the original gravity reading these include; the amount of sugars in the fermentables (total PPG), volume of each fermentable, the temperature rests of the mash schedule, mash pH, and total boil time. 

A simple American Pale Ale recipe may include 9 pounds of 2-Row and .25 pounds of Crystal 40L. The 2-Row has a 37 PPG and the Crystal has a 34 PPG. On my homebrew system, I usually brew six gallon batches and average 70% efficiency.  By multiplying each grain's PPG by the number of pounds used divided by the batch size in gallons (37*9/6=55.5 for the 2-Row and 34*.25/6=1.4 for the Crystal) the maximum gravity I could reach would be 55.5+1.4 = 56.9. Rounded and converted to a specific gravity reading gives us 1.057 Original Gravity.  That's if 100 percent of the sugars were extracted. Multiplying the 57 by my 70 percent brewhouse efficiency gives us 39.9, or and expected original gravity of 1.040. 

The amount of sugars extracted stays constant (through PPG & efficiency), it's the volume of liquid changing the gravity. Which means, if I took a gravity reading at the end of the brew day and discovered I extracted more than 70 percent of the sugars. I could dilute the batch with more water bringing down the OG. If I extracted less than 70 percent, I could boil longer or add an easily dissolvable fermentable like honey (36 PPG) or corn sugar (46 PPG) at the end of a boil to achieve the target Original Gravity. 

A brewer with the same recipe and an 85 percent efficiency could achieve the same 1.040 target OG with just 7.4# of 2-Row and 3.3oz of Crystal. Conversely, if they brewed with my 9 pounds and 4 ounces their 85 percent efficiency would result in a 1.048 OG. This substantial difference is why professional brewers talk in percentages - rather than pounds or kilograms - when describing a recipe, e.g. "97.3% American 2-Row, 2.7% American Crystal 40L, to 1.040 OG." This concisely describes the ratio of ingredients and target gravity, while leaving out the brewhouse-specific efficiency.

The bottom line is - hydrometer is your friend.

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Brewing With Honey (and I don't mean your significant other)

While it may conjure up saccharine associations, honey can bring much more than sweetness to the table when used in brewing beer. It’s one of the earliest ingredients ever used to make fermented beverages, and it continues to be a go-to for modern brewers.

Honey is often used during fermentation to accentuate texture and color, or added after the boil for enhanced aromatics. It only sweetens beer when added after brewing. But it’s tricky to work with. 

Honey can be damaged by the heat of the brewing process, and the viscosity makes it a mess to use, Too much or the wrong hops can overwhelm honey’s inherent nuances. But the results are worth the effort.

(Look for more about this topic in future columns.

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Hope you found this month's column of interest, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com)

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

 Brewers, both home and professional continue to innovate and show the creative abilities that make craft beer. beer what it is.  Currently I see four trends that demonstrate this.

Cryo Hops

Brewers are always looking for ways to get more flavor and brew more efficiently, and the recent advent of cryo hops accomplishes both. Lupulin – the substance that’s really the flavorful essence of the hop – is extracted at extremely low temperatures. This leaves just the good stuff brewers want while eliminating waste and increasing yields. “You’re basically getting twice the flavor and aromatic impact out of the same weight of [hop] pellets,

Norwegian Kveik Yeast

This hearty family of yeast strains has been a brewing staple in Norway for generations, but only recently has it taken hold in the rest of the beer-drinking world. Its resilience in high temperatures is amazing.  Kveik can ferment at temperatures upward of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (typical ale strains ferment around the 70-degree mark) without producing any off flavors and completes fermentation faster, allowing brewers to get their wares to thirsty fans quicker.

Smaller Formats

Perhaps because of the communal nature of the homebrew and microbrewery worlds, at the dawning of the craft brewing scene most beers were available in hefty 750-milliliter or 22-ounce “bomber” bottles meant to be shared. These days, smaller formats have taken hold so that individuals can sip solo without wasting beer or feeling like they have to overindulge.

Aged Hops

With all the work that goes into processing and packaging hops to keep them as fresh as possible, the idea of aged hops seems counterintuitive. But this technique has a very specific application, and it’s getting noticed with the increasing interest in esoteric brews like sour beers and farmhouse ales. “It’s not something that works well in, say, an IPA,” Wymore said. “But it works in many traditional Belgian-style beers, like lambic and guze.

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Here are some strategic thoughts about home brewing your best of any beer.  The question is should your brewing be directed toward  accepted guidelines of recognized styles or not.  Brewing to style does have benefits.  

Try to recognize that style guidelines (and style nomenclature, appellations, identifiers, and more) are just that: guidelines. They exist to help you as a brewer know what they (and you) as beer drinkers will be expecting when you say, “this is an Oatmeal Stout".

That expectation-setting function is valuable because it primes us to be able to appreciate and recognize what we’re drinking. Without that priming, not only can it be hard to identify and classify what you’re drinking, it can be a challenge to pick out flavors you’d otherwise notice immediately.  However, they’re still just guidelines. Brew to the limits of them, and even beyond them. Use them as a reference point rather than a hard boundary.

Take your recipe design seriously, and for good reason—it’s the one part of your brewing you control absolutely. Don’t start overcomplicating the recipe. Embellishments and accents that don’t get you closer to your target taste/style will only confuse things.  Start simple, and then add in the flourishes once you determine they’re necessary to create the most focused recipes you can.  That’s exactly what I do when creating recipes for my column.  You can’t go wrong following them.

Brew a bunch of batches when you’re new to brewing (or in a rebuilt process/using new equipment), and dial in your process using one standard recipe. Once that part is nailed down, change up your recipes to get closer to that target you’ve selected. It takes a little more effort, but if you want real control then a stable process is a laudable goal.

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Hope you found this month's column of interest, If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit an idea for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me (webmaster@beernexus.com

.                                                                        Thanks and Cheers!

------------------------

Jack O'Reilly attended the famous Siebel Institute/World Brewing Academy in Chicago His column will discuss techniques and insights for the serious craft beer fan and home brewer. 

Basics of Fermentation / Barrel Aging Homebrew

Alcoholic fermentation, also referred to as ethanol fermentation, is a biological process by which sugar is converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Yeasts are responsible for this process, and oxygen is not necessary, which means that alcoholic fermentation is an anaerobic process. Byproducts of the fermentation process include heat, carbon dioxide, water and alcohol.  In this case, we're focusing on the latter. 

Humans have been using the process of ethanol fermentation for millennia. The ancient Greeks were known for their mead production, which was produced by fermenting honey and water. In the meantime, though, honey has taken a back seat to other foodstuffs, most commonly grains (for beer and spirits) and grapes (for wine). Additional base products include other fruits, such as berries, apples and so on, rice (for sake) and beyond. Native yeasts (also known as wild yeasts or ambient yeasts) are naturally present on fruit skins and in cellars. When a booze producer chooses to let their juice ferment with native yeasts, this means that they're simply relying on the naturally occurring yeasts found on the raw materials and in the cellar where the fermentation is taking place. 

When fermentation is done naturally, it tends to take much longer, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. When a producer chooses to use cultivated yeasts, this means that a specific strain of yeast is sought out, purchased and added to the raw materials to kick-start fermentation. Yeasts come in all different flavors and makeups. Purists will argue that using cultivated yeasts takes away from the authenticity of a raw material, though the fermentation process will generally take much less time and the result is often more predictable and consistent. 

Alcoholic fermentation is the process of using yeasts to convert sugars into alcohol. Distillation is a process used to higher-ABV beverages from already-fermented base products. (For example, the distillation of beer wort creates whiskey, while the distillation of wine produces brandy.) All alcoholic beverages undergo fermentation, thought not all fermented beverages are distilled.

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Wood aging is all about surface-to-volume ratio. The smaller the barrel volume, the larger the surface area, and the faster it ages. So start with a small barrel and work your way up.  I had a 12-gallon oak barrel that I aged about 20 beers in before I ever got my hands on a [53-gallon] bourbon barrel. Don't expect to age it as long as your local brewery would, either. 

Taste regularly and decide for yourself when it's ready, but it could be on the order of just a couple weeks. Please remember that Beers that contain a minimum of 8-9% ABV or higher are better suited for barrel aging than their lower ABV counterparts. There are a number of reasons for this. First, higher ABV beers can withstand the harsh environment of a barrel. These beers are generally aged in barrels for approximately 6-9 months, or even longer. The higher alcohol content acts as a barrier for microbes that would normally turn beer bad. Second, beer styles that have higher ABV are styles that can incorporate oxidized flavors into the beer. While keeping oxidation at bay is the norm for most beer, it's an accepted part of the beer style for higher ABV beers like Barleywines, Imperial Stouts, and Belgian Quads.

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Hope you found this month's column of interest.  If you have any questions about beer or brewing or just want to submit a word for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me. Thanks and Cheers!

When it comes to European-style pilsners, most beer lovers know about Czech-style and German-style. Recently,

a few breweries around the Northwest have introduced the word Italian to the pilsner dialog. So, what is so Italian

about Italian pilsner?  Many people credit one brewery in Italy for introducing the earliest version of this style.

Birrifico Italiano’s Tipopils is brewed in a small Italian town southwest of Lake Como. Birrifico Italiano began brewing

the beer over 25 years ago.  Tipopils was the inspiration behind Firestone Walker’s Pivo Pils.

So what is it? The shortest answer, Italian pilsners are super-hopped versions of German pilsners. Brewers

accomplish this extra-hoppy character by dry-hopping the beer with noble hops (traditional European hop

varieties). There really isn’t anything that makes it Italian.  But that  is not the whole story, just most of it.

Some brewers ferment Italian pilsner at a higher temperature. Not insanely high, but higher than other styles of

pilsner. Without diving too deep into the biochemistry of brewing, the intention is to get more flavor out of the

grains and the yeast, though the technique does present some challenges.

Some brewers also adjust the water chemistry when creating Itailan pilsner, The adjustment typically involves the

pH level of both the mash and the sparge liquor. . Most craft brewers would not put "Italian Pilsner"  on the label

unless it deserved to be there, but no laws exist to prevent using the word Italian just because it’s trendy.  I want to

reiterate that the extra-hoppy character is the primary attribute differentiating Italian pilsner from other pilsners.

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Buckwheat is something of an unexpected guest at the party. It’s not something most brewers carrying around in

their hazy toolbox, but maybe it should be.Buckwheat in beer is not revolutionary or unheard of, but its use is not

common. That is unless you’re talking about gluten-free beer. Gluten-free brewers,often use buckwheat in place of

gluten-rich grains like barley and wheat. Interestingly, buckwheat is not a grain, though it is often called a pseudo-

cereal or an ancient grain. Whereas grains like barley, wheat, and rye are members of the grass family, buckwheat

is akin to an herb and is related to sorrel, knotweed, and rhubarb.

The buckwheat plant produces small, triangular, edible kernels that are high in complex carbohydrates and can be

malted like grain. From these malted buckwheat kernels, brewers can extract the proteins, starches, and enzymes

needed for the brewing process, just as they would from malted grains. o lend hazy IPAs their cloudy character

brewers typically rely on protein-rich grains like wheat, flaked oats, and spelt, as well as yeast strains with low

flocculation tendencies (strains of yeast that like to stay in suspension instead of settling out of the beer). Grainy

protein, yeast, and hop particulate matter all contribute to the hazy appearance, the flavors, and the pillowy

mouthfeel that makes so many beer lovers swoon:

The fact that buckwheat can contribute to haze without adding more gluten to the beer is incidental, really. From

what I’ve heard, brewers are using it along with other haze-creating, gluten-packed grains. It is part of a hazy

recipe, but not the star of the show. It’s garnered interest not only because it helps with the haze, but also because

of the other attributes it brings to the beer. Buckwheat can add some desirable character to hazy beers,  It has a

higher gelatinization point compared to barley, which allows it to create a stable haze, increase head retention,

provide fluffier mouthfeel, and add residual sugars into beers. All things that are highly desired in hazy IPAs.

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Hope you found this month's column of interest.  If you have any questions about beer or brewing

or just want to submit a word for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me. 

So what the heck does Cryo-hop mean? Essentially, these are hops that have been put through a cryogenic

process, meaning the components lupulin (the essential component that provides much of the flavor and aroma of

the hop) and bract were separated from the whole hop cone using an extremely low-temperature processing

method. The process results in a powder of lupulin that, is sen as being more powerful in flavor and aroma than if

the hop underwent a more traditional processing method.

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In answer to several e-mails from readers let me say a few words about CBD and beer.  CBD is acannabidiol, one

of the active ingredients in cannabis and has proliferated across North America in the past couple of years. Its

advertised benefits include relaxation without marijuana’s THC high, plus a litany of reputed health benefits that

are generally either unproven or unprovable. Still, considering its growing popularity, it may seem surprising that

we haven’t seen more brewers put the stuff into beer. On a commercial level, there’s a good reason why not: It’s

not technically legal—yet. The issue lies between the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) and the

Food and Drug Administration (FDA). .TTB won’t grant any approval until the FDA finally makes a statement

that CBD is safe for consumption,so, even though CBD is legal, and the FDA isn’t telling people they can’t

make it, the FDA also hasn’t technically said it is safe.

While commercial brewers wait for red tape to be snipped, let us state the obvious: Homebrewers don’t need TTB

approval. We also share this disclaimer: Certain CBD and hemp-based products may contain small amounts of

THC; the legality of brewing with that at home is unclear, and it may depend on your state. Got it? (Now, please

sign this release form before proceeding.)  Please note that the CBD products that don’t contain any THC—such

as CBD tinctures or isolates—are not water soluble. That presents a puzzle for someone brewing a product that is

typically 95 percent water.  For home brewers who want to try it the easiest way is to just  make an infusion of

organic CBD hemp tea, and add it to the secondary.

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Many homebrewers form very strong opinions regarding the secondary fermentor. Some claim that the secondary

is almost always necessary, while others brag about how many months their 1.112 (specific gravity) barleywine has

been sitting on the yeast. First of all, even though we all say it, secondary fermentation isn’t really the right term.

Little to no fermentation actually takes place in secondary, which is why I often go out of my way to refer to this

phase as conditioning, maturation, or lagering (in the case of the eponymous cold-fermented styles). Whatever

you call it, secondary is simply the vessel to which beer is racked away from the yeast and trub that remain after

primary fermentation is complete.

Those homebrewers who favor secondary fermentation generally offer two excellent reasons for racking to a

carboy for bulk conditioning -.1 Moving homebrew off the yeast reduces opportunities for yeasty off-flavors such

as those associated with autolysis. 2. Aging in a secondary results in clearer (brighter) beer.  Glass carboys are

not oxygen permeable, making them the preferred vessels for long-term aging without oxidation.

Many homebrewers however prefer not to bother with a secondary vessel.  Here are three points in their favor-

1. Racking is just another opportunity to introduce oxygen. Foregoing the transfer to secondary can delay the

onset of stale flavors. 2.Leaving homebrew on the yeast for an extended period of time gives yeast an opportunity

to clean up after itself, re-absorbing unwanted compounds such as diacetyl. 3. Bright homebrew can be achieved

without transferring by simply giving yeast the time to drop out of suspension.

As with so many aspects of homebrewing, the decision to secondary or not is mainly one of personal preference.

In my case, it often comes down to time constraints and the style of beer I’m working with. I never rack German

Weißbier to a secondary carboy because the style is meant to be cloudy and yeasty, and Hefeweizen should be

consumed early: no time to condition! But I almost always transfer high-gravity ales and lagers to conditioning

vessels because these usually need to mature for several weeks or months, and I’d rather not risk the possibility

of off-flavors. I think the secondary debate isn’t really a debate at all. Leaving your homebrew in primary has a

place and a time, as does transferring to a carboy for aging. If you’ve never tried a secondary phase, give it a go.

If you’ve always secondaried, try bottling or kegging straight from primary. See what you think and let your

observations take you the rest of the way.

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Hope you found this month's column of interest.  If you have any questions about beer or brewing

or just want to submit a word for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me  - webmaster@beernexus.com

Thanks and Cheers!

When you look at the history and evolution of a style, it is typical to follow the beer. The story of pale ale usually

leads back to Burton upon Trent in the English Midlands.. But American Pale Ale has it's own story that starts in

1956 in Corvallis, Oregon, where a plant researcher working for the USDA had planted 7,000 seedlings of new

hop crosses, hoping to find a variety resistant to downy mildew. Developing new varieties of hops is a slow

business. Eventually, over the next 12 years, one of those little seedlings—No. 56013—worked its way through

successive rounds of eliminations and field trials. Finally in 1968, the first commercial  Cascade is out.

it was the first American hop with measurable farnesene—an aromatic compound found in classic Nobles such as

Saaz and Tettnanger. The aroma of Cascade is delicate, slightly spicy.... Aroma notes associated with Cluster,

Brewers Gold, Bullion, and Talisman and described as ‘American aroma’ are absent or very subdued in Cascade.”

The first beer to tap into the power of Cascade was a celebratory beer brewed in advance of the American

bicentennial in 1975. The Anchor Brewery made a robust ale of 5.9 percent ABV hopped exclusively with

Cascade—47 IBUs worth. It was not a big seller, and its full, fruity profile wasn’t quite where beers would eventually

go. Nevertheless, it must have turned heads in the same year that Miller was launching the first national light beer.

The more important beer arrived five years later, in a green bottle. Sierra Nevada was among that first cohort of

founding breweries, and its first beer was Pale Ale.  Founder Ken Grossman.said he chose the Cascade hop for

his new pale ale because it was about the only signature American aroma hop at the time.

The original formulation of that beer contained three elements that would become a blueprint for American brewing

over the next 30 years. He used a neutral yeast, a decent dollop of crystal malt for a sweet, caramel note, and

those unique local hops. The process didn’t call for dry hopping (though Sierra used that technique in

Celebration) but instead for large infusions of late-boil Cascades. The rich note of caramel sweetness was a

perfect counterpoint to (what was then considered) an intense bitterness, but it also drew out the sweeter, fruity

quality of American hops. It was such a winning combination of flavors that almost every brewery in America

imitated it. Pale ales based on this template would remain the most popular style in the craft segment until 2011.

That year marked an important transition point in the popularity of pale ales and in the way Americans made

hoppy beers.

Unlike other herbs, hops act as an antimicrobial agent, so brewers boiled them in wort so the beer would keep

longer. Whether a beer was strongly or weakly hopped, brewers put most or all of the hops in at the start of boil.

Americans eventually turned that conventional practice on its head. Americans hops had been bred for maximum

bittering potential and, for a time, IPAs were extremely bitter—a consequence of using high-alpha hops in quantity

throughout the process. Yet by the mid-2000s, brewers were increasingly going after the intense tropical-fruit

flavors that American hops could provide, rather than their bitterness. To extract those flavors, they used more

and more hops, but later and later in the process. The emergence of juicy American-style IPAs has been one of

the watershed developments in brewing; the flavors and aromas were unprecedented, and brewers were using

hops in ways that would have been inconceivable even a decade earlier. Fortunately, not long after that

conversation, pale ale 2.0 emerged—beers that strike a balance between the drinkability of the first era and

the hoppy saturation of the second.

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The etymology of the term “dry-hopping” may be lost to history. Some theorize that at one time, hops came into

the brewery fresh, and were used fresh on brew day. Then, when hops from that same batch were added seven or

more days later, the hops had dried.Others say the term developed because the brewer is adding them at a time

when you’re no longer touching liquor (brewer’s term for water) or wort, the process requiring only tossing dry

hops into a fermenter. Though it doesn’t necessarily make sense, just know any hop added after the wort has

been chilled on brew day is considered a “dry hop” no matter what form the hop comes in. As such, any hop

addition to wort or beer after it has been chilled to fermentation temperatures is considered dry-hopping. At these

lower temperatures, different aspects of the hops are utilized.

Alpha acids are the compound in hops that make beer bitter. However, they only produce bitterness after they

have been isomerized into iso-alpha acids via a chemical process that occurs at temperatures over 175 degrees

Fahrenheit. (This usually takes place during the brewing process in the boil at 212 degrees F.) Since the additions

take place at cool temperatures, beer does not become more bitter from hops added during dry-hopping because

alpha acids are never converted.

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Hope you found this month's column of interest.  If you have any questions about beer or brewing

or just want to submit a word for me to discuss here just e-mail it to me at webmaster@beernexus.com

Thanks and Cheers!