beer fountain

Ever since my first days as a homebrewer, I’ve been dreaming of trying my hand at a barley wine. Described by some as “the drink of the gods,” and capable of being aged for years, barley wine stands in the minds of many as a test of a brewer’s mettle. And with an original gravity of as much as 1.120 (or even more!), it’s about as big as beer gets.

Of course, to make a beer that big you need to start with a lot of ingredients. Malt is often doubled, and hops are too. And, in order for the yeast to have a chance to get through all that sugar before succumbing to the stupor-inducing alcohol, I’ve heard it’s best to pitch at least a pint of healthy yeast slurry in a five gallon batch.



Lucky for me, I have a yeast connection. A few months ago I had the good fortune of meeting the Brewmaster of my local brewery, Aloha Beer Company, and when I mentioned my dreams of making a barley wine, he offered to give me as much yeast as I could carry. I ended up walking out of there with two quarts—definitely more than I needed, but that’s the size of the container I’d brought, and he filled it almost to the brim.

It was lively yeast too, coming straight from a twenty barrel vat, raring to get back to work. In the few minutes I stood there chatting with the Brewmaster, the yeast swelled to fill the container. A few minutes more and the sides of my plastic container had begun to bend outward from the pressure.

I hurried to my car, put the yeast on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and turned the AC up full blast. For the whole ride home I was on edge, wincing at every bump in the road, afraid the yeast would go off like a bomb.

In the end I made it home in time, and got the yeast in the fridge without incident. Little did I know, “incident” was just taking a rain check.



Next day’s brew went fine. I started with ten pounds of Maris Otter grain in the mash, boiled the wort for an hour, adding four ounces of hops during that time. And then I took the kettle off the burner, mixed in four pounds of pale malt extract and three pounds of honey, and brought it back to a boil for thirty more minutes. I wound up with about four and a half gallons with an original gravity of 1.095—not as high as I wanted, but still within style guidelines.

Once the wort had cooled, I pitched the yeast. I wasn’t crazy enough to add all of it, so I split the difference and only threw in half. If a pint was good, I reasoned, then a quart would be twice as good.

And here’s where things went wrong. In all of my research about barley wines, I’d somehow failed to take in the importance of a blowoff tube. I figured a six and a half gallon carboy and an airlock would be good enough. Turns out it wasn’t. Not even close.

About two hours after pitching the yeast, my girlfriend and I heard a percussive sound, sort of a mix between a pop and a thud. “What was that?” she asked. I was afraid I knew.

I ran to the door to the basement, where I’d put the beer. It sounded like it was raining in there. I pulled the latches back quickly, and threw the door open.

The top of the airlock had blown off, and my carboy had turned into a beer fountain. A mighty stream of liquid shot straight up, to splatter against the ceiling, and then rain down on everything else.



I was able to jerry-rig a blow-off tube pretty quickly—amazing how fast you can make something when you’re supplied with the proper motivation—and I ended up saving about three and a half gallons of the beer. While it’s true I ended up losing almost a quarter of the batch, and several hours time spent cleaning up the mess, I gained something from the experience, too: a name for my barley wine, Kīlauea.

Brewing with Sage

Sage is a classic herb--just ask Simon and Garfunkel. I've got a bush growing in my vegetable garden, and I recently decided to try to use it in a homebrew.

Typically, sage is used in savory dishes, especially poultry dishes of chicken or turkey. Its flavor is unique, sort of peppery and bitter, but hard to define in more specific terms. It's also used for medicinal purposes, and has been recommended for treating just about any ailment you can come up with. And, perhaps most famously, sage is burned for spiritual reasons--it's smoke is considered a cleansing agent in rituals carried out by hippies and certain Native American tribes.



I decided to try to use sage in a Pale Ale. I thought its peppery bitterness might blend well with the hop-oriented nature of the Pale Ale style. Sage is an herb that combines in wonderful ways with other spices, such as thyme, and it's also sometimes used to accent acidic/sour fruit flavors, such as fruit-based vinegars. With that in mind, I figured I'd pair the sage with Centennial hops, a hop known for its citrus-like aromas and bittering qualities.



I cut five large sprigs of sage from my plant, rinsed them in fresh water, and then chopped them thoroughly. Five sprigs turned into a bout three large handfuls when chopped. I added half of the sage right and one ounce of Centennial right at the start of the boil, hoping to utilize its bittering qualities. I added the other half of the sage at flame off, to see if it would contribute to the beers aroma. I also made sure that all of that chopped and boiled sage made it into to the fermenter with the yeast. I've read that certain chemical components of sage are most effectively extracted by alcohol (also apparently true of cannabis, though I can't say I've got any first-hand knowledge of that), so putting the sage in with the alcohol-producing yeast was a way of trying to utilize that concept.



The beer is in bottles now, and won't be ready to drink for another few weeks. After making the beer I realized there's an entry for sage in the book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, by Stephen Harrod Buhner. Buhner says that "sage ale was one of the primary ales brewed throughout the Middles Ages." He also describes some of its medicinal uses--everything from healing infection to inhibiting Alzheimer's disease--and he mentions that sage is known to make beer "especially inebriating." I'll let you know if I find that to be true.

HOPS Big Brew Day

On Saturday, May 4th, the Homebrewers On Pacific Shores brew club (HOPS) organized a Big Brew Day event. Homebrew in Paradise provided free extract-recipe ingredients for either a Belgian Blonde or a Dark English Mild. I went down there with my girlfriend and our friend Matt, and we brewed up a batch of the Dark English Mild. Homebrew in Paradise is also providing kegs to hold the beer, and the plan is to get everybody together on Father's Day (June 16th) to sample the brews.

It was fun to meet a few of the other Oahu-based homebrewers, and to see the gear and techniques they use for their brewing. There was also plenty of homebrew to sample--I tried four different brews in the first hour, and had to put the brakes on after that. A lot of the other brewers seemed to forge ahead without fear, and I was impressed by their ability to keep their brews going while drinking double-fisted. I was also impressed with the HOPS linchpin--I think her name was Cindy, but my memory of the event is somewhat impaired so I might have her name wrong--in her valiant efforts to maintain a sense of meeting order in the face of all the imbibing and brewing and other distractions. There was a rep there from Sam Adams (I think they flew him in from the West Coast) who didn't fare as well.

I'll be sure to post an update on the Father's Day tasting.

Brewing with Lilikoi

Lilikoi is a variety of passion fruit commonly grown in Hawaii. I've read that it takes its name from Lilikoi Valley in Maui, where it was originally planted. While the more common passion fruit varieties on the mainland look purple and wrinkly on the outside when ripe, Lilikoi turns yellow and doesn't wrinkle (before ripening, lilikoi fruit is green). Its fruit is perfectly round and ranges in size from squash ball to baseball dimensions. The plant itself is an aggressive vine that will totally take over if you don't keep it under firm control; you've got to cut it back harshly every few months--sort of like blackberry in Northern California, though lilikoi has no thorns.



The rind of the lilikoi is inedible, a stiff and durable material that resembles packing foam. You eat the fruit by cutting it in half with a knife and scraping out the inner pulp with a spoon. The pulp is very tart and extremely potent--about the equivalent of lemon juice in its potency, or maybe even beyond that. The seeds can be eaten along with the pulp, but because of how potent the taste of the fruit is, it's rarely eaten in its unadulterated form. Usually lilikoi is used for its juice, which is blended with other juices (a popular drink in Hawaii is POG, made from passion fruit, orange, and guava juice) or used to make jelly.



I wanted to use lilikoi in a beer, and decided to try it in an Amber. I'm hoping that the malty, sweet orientation of the Amber style will balance well with the tartness of the fruit, and I'm hoping that the color shade of the beer will be enhanced by the vivid orange of lilikoi juice. I brewed my last batch of beer, mentioned in my post about brewing in a bag, with lilikoi in mind. I pitched it with a British ale yeast, and let it ferment at 72 degrees Fahrenheit, to encourage the development of fruity esters. And the mash temperature was higher, which will likely result in more body and less fermentable sugars, which fit with an English ale.



One of the lilikoi characteristics I wanted to capture was its delicate aroma--a truly unique scent that's unlike anything else. Because of that, I added the lilikoi juice to secondary, when the yeast is less active and has already consumed most of the fermentable sugar in the wort--I didn't want my lilikoi aroma to be blown away by all the carbon dioxide produced with the yeast's initial feeding frenzy. Also, because of my desire to capture as much lilikoi aroma as possible, I treated the juice with only a very delicate pasteurizing process--raising it to 160 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of 20 minutes--before adding it to the carboy. I would have liked to pitch it in directly, with no pasteurizing at all, but Hawaii's warm, fertile environment is full of potential beer-contaminants, making off-flavors a much greater threat here than they were in my San Francisco-based brewing.



In the end I only added about four ounces of lilikoi to about a five gallon batch of beer, dropping it into the bottom of my secondary fermenter and then racking the beer on top. It may not seem like much, but lilikoi is (like I said before) a very potent, very distinct flavor, and I'd rather add too little than too much. My general approach to adjunct ingredients is to shoot for an effect that will be notable, but not overwhelming. I want the drinker to notice something unusual about the beer, but to have to concentrate in order to decipher what it is.

I'm planning on letting the beer sit in secondary for another two weeks, and then bottling. So it'll be about another month before I know whether four ounces was the right amount.

Brewing in a Bag

After reading about it in the January/February issue of Zymurgy, I've been wanting to try the whole brew in a bag process. It seems like a remarkably easy way to handle grain mashing, and the Zymurgy article claims it's as efficient as the more traditional mash-and-sparge approach. I wanted to try it with my last beer, a Poi Wheat ale, but I didn't have a grain bag, and I wasn't sure how much additional gravity would be added by the poi. In the end I used a modified approach in which I mashed the grains in six and a half gallons of water, instead of my usual one-or-two-quarts-per-pound mash with a two-quart-per-pound sparge, and then drained it into the kettle. Grain absorption meant I had to add more water, which I ran through the grains straight from the tap. I was satisfied with the original gravity I wound up with, but my questions about brewing in a bag weren't really answered.

Since then I've acquired a grain bag big enough for an all-grain brew, and yesterday I used it for the first time. What's more, since I brewed a recipe I've brewed before, I was able to compare the conversion achieved with the brew-in-the-bag method to the conversion I achieved previously, with a separate mash and sparge. (If you want the end result, you can skip to the bottom of this post--what follows is a bit of detail about the process I used.)

In order to compensate for grain absorption, this time I started with about eight gallons of water in the kettle. I brought it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, put my bag in the kettle, and dumped my grains straight into the bag. I mixed them around a bit, and then twisted the top of the bag in hopes of keeping the grains from sneaking over a dropped edge. And then I put the lid on the kettle and let it sit for an hour.



I should mention that I added 10.5 pounds of room-temperature grains to eight gallons of heated water, and the relatively small amount of grains meant that the mash temperature only dropped to about 160. I didn't add heat at any point in the 60 minute mash, and after an hour the temperature had dropped to 144. Those are sort of unusual mash temperatures, which probably affected the original gravity I ended up with. And it's likely that the high starting temperature resulted in a more dextrinous wort, with less fermentable sugars, which will result in a heavier-bodied beer. (I love heavy-bodied beers, but since I've moved to Hawaii I've been trying to lighten them up a bit, so my hot mash was probably a mistake.)

Anyway, after an hour I started the flame again, and immediately after that I lifted the grain bag out of the wort. I held the bag above the wort for a few minutes, wanting to let it drain more wort into the kettle. But before long I decided I'd just throw the grain bag into my old bucket fermenter, let the wort separate out there, and then open the tap to pour that wort into the kettle. (In the picture below you can see the shadow of the wort that's starting to gather at the bottom of the bucket.)



After that, it was brewing like normal.

The end result? My previous brew of the same recipe had an original gravity of 1.058. This brew, using the brew-in-the-bag approach, resulted in an original gravity of 1.055. So I lost .003 points, or around one-tenth of a percent of potential alcohol. But I also cut my total brewing time by nearly an hour and a half.

For me the time reduction and the greater simplicity make the brew-in-the-bag mash a winner. I'm planning on using the big grain bag for my next batch.

Poi Beer

Poi is one of the most sacred and important dishes in Hawaiian cuisine, and I've been dreaming of finding a way to work it into a homebrew ever since I moved to Honolulu. On Sunday I made my first attempt.

For those who don't know, Poi is a thick, paste-like substance made from the mashed up roots of taro plant. Although I've brewed with starchy root vegetables before--in my Fenton Smith's Sparring Spud Stout (which I consider one of my more successful recipes)--my approach to the use of poi was slightly different. With Fenton Smith's I used potato hoping that it would affect the body and strength of the beer. I wanted the poi to have an affect on both of those characteristics, too, but there's another quality to poi that I wanted to harness: it's lovely purple color. I wondered if there was a way to have that purple color come across in a beer.

I figured my best chance of capturing some degree of the color was to base my recipe on a beer-style known for it's light, nearly-white hue. At first I thought of a hefeweizen, but the truth is I'm not fond enough of that style to want to produce five gallons of it. I decided to start with a grain bill modeled on the Weissbier style, instead. Here are the grains I used:

4 lbs. white wheat malt
4 lbs. Pilsener malt
1 lbs. Munich malt

Another choice dictating my approach relates to the Brew in a Bag article I read in the last issue of Zymurgy, which claims that mashing in the total amount of water planned for the entire recipe results in conversion at least as effective, and sometimes more effective, than the more traditional dense-mash-and-then-sparge approach. So I filled my kettle with six and a half gallons of water, brought it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and threw in all of the grains and two pounds of poi. (You might be thinking that 165 degrees is pretty high for mashing temperatures, and you'd be right. I brought the water up to that heat because I figured the room-temperature grains and the refrigerated poi would drop it down to mashing range, which it did.)

(For those who were wondering, I got the poi at Fort Ruger Market.. I'd planned on buying a bag, but on the day I was there they only had poi in little containers, and I bought out almost all of their remaining stock, which cost me about eleven dollars.)

So, all the grains and all the poi are in the pot, mashing. First thing I noticed was how viscous poi is--even when dropped in hot water it holds together. I wanted to break it up, thinking that dispersing it more evenly with the grains would give it greater contact with the enzymes in those grains, allowing better conversion (does poi have converting enzymes of its own? I don't know). Although I've heard people caution against disturbing the mash, claiming that stirring will only add more chance for oxidation, I threw that caution to the wind and STIRRED the mofo pot.

When it was all mixed in, I let it sit for another twenty minutes. The temperature dropped a bit, so I turned the flame on low and stirred some more, until it rose back up to 155.

At the end of an hour I drained out the liquid. Absorption from the grains reduced my total volume to lower than what I wanted, so I ran about a gallon of straight-from-the-tap water through them, and put that in with the rest of the liquid in my boil kettle. I probably had around eight gallons to start with.

From there on it was a normal brew. I used cascade hops--an ounce for 60 minutes, a half ounce for 30 minutes, and another half ounce at five minutes to flame-off--because I like cascade and I thought the citrus characteristics would give the beer a more tropical feel.

My original gravity reading came out as 1.047. I don't know if that number indicates conversion of the starches in the poi, or not. I have seen a recipe that used a nearly identical grain bill (minus the poi) and claimed an OG of 1.049, but frankly I'm skeptical. I don't think I've ever gotten gravity that high from nine pounds of grain. Or maybe I'm just really ineffecient.

When the wort was cool enough, I threw it in a 6.5 gallon carboy and pitched the yeast. Twelve hours later it was bubbling heartily, but I noticed something I hadn't expected. Instead of the purple color I'd hoped for, the beer has taken on a slight-green hue. Maybe the grains resulted in a yellowish color, and that blended with the purple to produce green. I don't know. I guess green is sort of cool, but I'm a bit bummed I didn't get purple.

First taste of the first beer

After the fiasco-in-process of the second beer, I'm happy to post some more positive news: I've opened the first bottle of the first beer, and it taste's great! The pithy bitterness from the tangerine peel has disappeared (though, truth be told, so has any other trace of the tangerines), and the cloying sweetness is gone. What's left is a delightfully light, delicious, clear and crisp beer with a nice bite to it. I wouldn't think it qualifies as a pale ale anymore, but I'm not sure what other style it more closely resembles. In any case, I'm thinking it'll be a perfect beer for a hot winter's day in Hawaii. Cheers!

Update on the second brew

On January 2nd, the first day I figured Homebrew in Paradise would be open, I stopped in and got another carboy and airlock. As soon as I had them, I went back home to transfer the Southern Breakfast Stout. During transfer I took another gravity reading, and tasted the beer to assess for contamination. The original gravity of the beer was 1.040, and the hydrometer showed a gravity of 1.023 at transfer to secondary. Not much of a drop, so I'm taking that as a sign that something did indeed go wrong during my fumbled cleaning on New Year's Eve. I couldn't detect any significant off-flavors when I tasted the beer, but maybe it's too soon to tell about that. I do know that the beer didn't start bubbling with any renewed vigor after the transfer.

My plan at this point is to wait a few more days and then test the gravity and flavor again. If the flavor isn't horrible, but the gravity still hasn't dropped, I might try pitching more yeast. If the flavor is really messed up, maybe dumping it will be the best option. I'll have to wait and see.

Problems with the second brew

Homebrew in Paradise, the only homebrew shop I know of on Oahu, has very limited hours. They're not open on Sundays, they're not open on Mondays, and they're only open from noon to 5 pm on Tuesday through Friday. On Saturday they open up a bit earlier, but they still close by 5 pm.

I wanted to brew a beer on Sunday, December 29th, and my plan was to drop by on Saturday to pick up the ingredients. Saturday morning I went for a hike, Saturday afternoon I was at the beach. I remembered that the homebrew shop had longer hours on Saturdays, but I thought that meant they stayed open later. When I finally realized that they close at five on Saturdays too, it was twenty past four.

I jumped on my moped and raced over there. I got there at ten minutes to closing, so I started grabbing everything as quickly as I could. In the end, I forgot one crucial item: an air lock. The kit I bought from them a few weeks back only came with one airlock, and it was still in use on the surprisingly high gravity beer I brewed three weeks ago. That beer is still bubbling, so I don't want to bottle it yet. And that means the airlock is occupied.

So, on Sunday, after brewing a new recipe I'm developing called Southern Breakfast Stout (which is an Oatmeal Stout spiced with molasses), I had no airlock for the fermenter. I decided to jerry-rig an airlock, which you see in the above picture.

The airlock worked well enough for the first 24 hours, and it might have kept on working too, but my uptight nature wouldn't let me leave it be. See, the fermentation kicked off strong, and twelve hours into fermentation the cup in my pseudo airlock was overflowing with foam. Hawaii is cockroach country, and when I spied a cockroach coming round to sip the spilled suds, I got paranoid. I worried that if I left a puddle of sugary wort on the floor, that one lush of a cockroach would soon have a whole party going. So I decided to clean it up.

I mopped the floor, wiped down the fermenter, and changed the cup. But, in the process of all that, the tube coming out of the fermenter came loose. And when I got it back in place, it wouldn't bubble anymore.

That was New Year's Eve. My girlfriend was hollering for me to hurry up--we were on our way out--so I left it as it was. I had hopes that the pressure in the fermenter would return to bubbling levels if given time.

The next morning, it still wasn't bubbling. I disassembled and reassembled the makeshift airlock, and still no bubbles. I'm not sure if the seal on the fermenter wasn't good, and was letting air out somewhere else and thereby not running it through the bubble cup. I don't think that was the case though, because it didn't smell like beer near the fermenter.

Another thought is that somehow, during my hurried fumbling with the airlock, I contaminated the beer, and the contamination knocked the yeast out of its cycle. Or a final idea is that the yeast finished with all the sugars really quick, before I got a good seal set up again, and is now lying dormant. Or maybe CO2 built up in the fermenter during the time without a good-working airlock, and poisoned the yeast with its own waste product.

In any case, I'm kicking myself for not getting an airlock when I picked up ingredients, and for not being more careful when I tried to fix the foam-over. The best next-steps I could come up with at this point were: pick up a proper airlock and another carboy as soon as possible, transferring the beer to a secondary fermenter and sealing it up again, and testing the gravity and the taste at that time, to assess whether fermentation really did finish, and/or whether the beer has been spoiled. I did all of the above, and tomorrow I'll post about my findings.

First beer goes into secondary

So I transferred the beer to secondary, and took another hydrometer reading. The gravity dropped from 1.100 to 1.010! I don't know if I've ever had such an efficient fermentation. And once I put the airlock on the secondary, it bubbled for another 24 hours. I'm guessing it'll be over 12% ABV when it's finished.

I also tasted the beer, and got another surprise. Despite such a dramatic change in gravity, I didn't note any harsh ethyl flavor. The sweetness is still there, though it's mellowed considerably. It's still a bit pithy for my taste, but that's mellowed some too. In any case, it doesn't taste like any barleywine I've ever had. (Doesn't look like one either. It's got a delicate honey color, cloudy but light.)

I double checked my hydrometer in plain water, just to make sure it wasn't messed up, and it reads right. I'm still bewildered as to why the fermentation was so efficient, and why there isn't more of an ethyl harshness with such a drastic gravity change. Is there something in the honey, or tangerines, that goosed the yeast to greater heights? Or was it the yeast itself--a dried British strain I've never used before?

In any case, I'm planning on measuring the gravity again in two weeks, and then--assuming the fermentation has finished--priming and bottling. I'll definitely be putting a lot of the bottles aside for aging. I'm excited to see what time does to it!

My first Oahu-brewed beer

When I left the Parkside in San Francisco, about five months ago, I gave my brewing gear to the other founding-brewer of Parkside Brewing, my friend Scott. Now that I'm settled again, in Honolulu, I wanted to pick up new gear and get back to brewing. As far as I know, the only place to buy beer gear in Oahu is Homebrew in Paradise. I stopped in just a few days after arriving in Oahu, and picked up their kit, which included the ingredients and recipe for their "Paradise Pale Ale." On Monday, December 10, I found the time to brew it, and eight days later I moved it to secondary.

But of course I couldn't leave well enough alone with their recipe, which had a grain bill consisting of 6 pounds of extract and 1 pound of 40L crystal. I haven't done an extract beer since my third or fourth batch, and a single pound of crystal didn't seem nearly fancy enough to dress it up. My beer-snob instincts kicked in. I decided to try to dress it up on my own.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to buy more grains while I was at the shop, and I didn't want to drive back to the shop just for supplementary ingredients, so I started thinking of other stuff to throw in the brew pot, hoping to add complexity without grains. I'm very interested in the idea of using locally-produced ingredients in my beers, in hopes of adding some island flavor.

One thing I've got plenty of access to right now is tangerines. My girlfriend and I are staying with her grandma in Palolo valley, and her grandma has a tangerine tree in the backyard that's covered with fruit--I've been eating two or three every day since arriving. The picture above gives an idea of how many tangerines I'm harvesting each week. (It shows a bunch of lilikoi too, which are the round green things in the picture. I'm planning on using them in a beer soon, and will write more about them then.) With all the tangerines I've got access to, it seemed logical to try to use them in the beer.

The idea I had was that the tangerines could be used to complement the citrus-like aspects of the cascade hops in the "Paradise Pale Ale" recipe. I've heard of orange peel used in certain beers--mainly Belgian Wits--and I wanted to give it a try in my pale ale. Also, after reading the Hana Hou article, in which two of the three interviewed brewers claim honey as their favorite local ingredient, I figured I'd throw some honey in too.

Problem is, I think I went too far with both. Honey was on sale at the local Foodlands grocery store, so long as you bought two pounds. So I bought two pounds and threw it all in after flameout. And five minutes before that I threw in the peels from four tangerines.

The result, which I tasted right before putting it in the fermenter, was a cloyingly sweet liquid that also managed to be exceptionally bitter, in a citrus-pith sort of way. Plus, it clocked in at an OG of 1.100, which is way way way higher than I'd been planning on. Thinking back on it now, I'm guessing I should have just zested the tangerines, and taken it easy with the honey.

Tomorrow I'll post about what I noticed when I transferred it to secondary.