Brew Day: Galloupe St Gold

There really is something to be said for any brewer or beer drinker to have a house beer. A house beer being a beer that is kept in the house at all times. It's the beer you go to if you want to relax on a Tuesday night after work. For a craft beer drinker that can mean keeping a six or twelve-pack of a house beer in the fridge; for a homebrewer it's a beer brewed with some regularity and kept in stock.

In the past I tweaked and tweaked my milk stout recipe to perfect it. After continually tweaking, before finally dumbing it back down to a degree I am happy with the recipe. I haven't brewed a milk stout since Curly's Pumpkin Milk Stout. Partly that is due to my hiatus from brewing, but mostly milk stout isn't something I want to drink all of the time.

When we moved to our new home, and I built my keener, Jennie suggested brewing an easy-drinking beer to have as a house beer. Jennie came up with the name Galloupe Ave Gold. When we brewed together more, Jennie was always coming up with names for beer. The easy thing would have been to brew a British Golden Ale, but that is a style I brew every summer for the summer. I decided to look farther afield from the name of the beer for inspiration.

The first beer that came to mind for inspiration was New Glarus Spotted Cow. The Beer Judge Certification Program lists Spotted Cow as a commercial example for a Cream Ale, however the brewery bristles at that designation and calls their beer a "Wisconsin Farmhouse Ale". The grist in Spotted Cow is Wisconsin-malted barley, flaked corm as corn is widely grown in Wisconsin, and flaked barley. Several years ago we brewed Northern Brewers Speckled Heifer kit, a beer that as the name indicates is inspired by Spotted Cow. New Glarus holds their recipes close to the vest, but the ingredients in the kit gave me an idea of where to start.

Working for Muntons, and being well-stocked with Muntons' products, my house beer has to use Muntons malt. I took the domestic malts in the Northern Brewer recipe and substituted in Muntons malts. I'm using Muntons Propino Pale Malt as the base, Muntons Caramalt in lieu of Carapils, Muntons Brewing Wheat in exchange for flaked barley, only keeping the flaked maize. This grist looks an awful lot like an English Pale Ale. The color was a touch light for the style so I added a very small amount of Muntons Roasted Barley for color adjustment.

If I really wanted to be married to the style I would probably use Fuggle or Kent Golding hops. Having plenty of American hops in my inventory, and wanting my beer to have a bit of an American hop flavor, I used Columbus for bittering and Cascade for flavor. Both hop additions were small enough that our house beer should still be approachable.

Final volume was short. The heat wrap around the carboy
helped the beer ferment at ale temperatures in my cold basement.

My brew day went fairly well until it was time to add the beer to my fermenter. I was well short of five gallons. I'm still not dialed-in brewing outside with a propane burner. Instead of topping off with water, I just went with what I had. The beer did finish a couple points higher than estimated which isn't the worst thing in the world. On packaging day there was enough beer to fill a three gallon keg and a half gallon growler.

This is the first iteration of the beer. I am not married to the recipe and will tweak it until I feel I've nailed it. I could try using traditional English hops. I could use a darker crystal malt if the malt flavor is too generic. I think some amber malt could add a nice biscuit flavor.

What Jennie wants and I am trying to achieve with this beer is drinkability and approachability. I will know I have perfected this beer if it is a beer that both craft and non-craft drinkers enjoy.

As for the name, our house is on Galloupe Avenue, but when the city replaced the street signs the new signs initially said "Galloupe St". There was also some confusion with the direction of the street. I'm glad I snapped a photo so this multi-faceted fail can live on.

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Brew Day: Entry of Convenience (Baltic Porter)

Welp, I guess the last couple months got away from me. Lately that is my stock answer for when I don't get around to doing things. "Sorry I didn't do XXXX until now, the day/week/month just got away from me."

The malt business has been keeping me busy. I was lucky enough to attend Brew Your Own Magazine's Bootcamp in San Diego with Muntons. In between talking to brewers, I was able to mingle with brewing luminaries. I sat in on a session with Mitch Steele and learn about Advanced Hopping Techniques, and Advanced Homebrew Techniques from Gordon Strong. I have already started to apply those lessons.

Additionally I have visited in no particular order Northern Maine, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Maryland, Pittsburgh, and Ontario. The good news is unlike my last lengthy gap in posting on the blog I have been brewing.

After entering a lot of competitions last year and picking up my first medals, I haven't been active in entering competitions this year. Really I have been focusing on just brewing beers Jennie and Ilike to drink and enjoying drinking them on tap. It is crazy how much more homebrew we have been drinking since we have the keezer. As far as competitions go, the National Homebrew Competition is a different story.

This year I will be making my triumphant return to HomebrewCon. Instead of going as an attendee, I will be there as a vendor representing Muntons. Everyone at HomebrewCon is given a badge. The AHA also gives out ribbons to stick to your badge. Last time I received a ribbon for judging the final round at NHC. If memory recalls, vendors, presenters, and NHC finalists also got ribbons. I want to have as many pieces of flare as possible! I know I will get vendor and NHC judge ribbons; the one I want the most is NHC finalist!

To maximize my odds of having a beer advance beyond the preliminary round I applied for the maximum of six entries. The plan was to brew and re-brew my beers that had performed the best in competition. In the end I was only awarded four entries.

Pa's Lager, my only first place winner is an automatic, and I rebrewed a three gallon batch. I was very happy with my first batch of Galloupe St Gold. Even though I did not entered it into competition, I am confident it can do well with a couple of tweaks. After taking a pull of Thomas Brady's Ale I bottled it up and made that my third entry. I wasn't sure what my fourth entry would be.

Eamon, my old boss at Modern Homebrew Emporium had applied for entry into NHC the past two years and not received any entries. I offered to brew a collaboration beer with my fourth entry and our marriage of convenience was formed.

Eamon's suggestion was to brew his outstanding Baltic Porter. Baltic Porter being a high gravity and high alcohol style, I wanted to brew it as soon as possible to give the beer as much time to condition as possible. I took Eamon's malt profile and approximated it as best as I could with the malts I had in my inventory.

Just like Gordon Strong suggested, I didn't mash my colored malts.
Instead I added them at the end of the mash.

In his talk at the BYO Bootcamp, Gordon Strong was a big proponent of not mashing roasted malts. Adding roasted malts at the end of the mash and before sparging will provide color and flavor just like steeping specialty malt during an extract batch will. Most extract brewers steep specialty malt for 30 minutes. That is basically how long a mashout and/or sparge will last. The benefit is that this method extracts less harshness from darker malts.

A gas stove makes yeast starters so much easier!

Baltic Porter is a cold-fermented style. Lager yeasts are commonly used, but a relatively clean ale yeast can work if fermented cool enough. I made a 2000 ml starter of Darkness from Imperial Yeast. Like Guinness Blonde American Lager I would ferment the beer at a cooler temperature to produce a clean beer.

The beer isn't quite at pitching temp, but my
controller is set for 64F. This setup worked great!

To control my fermentation temperature I fermented the beer in my cold basement. My basement sits in the low to mid 50s during the winter and has allowed me to brew lots of great lagers. To get into the temperature range of my yeast, I plugged in a heat wrap to a temperature controller. I purchased a thermowell stopper. The thermowell is a metal tube closed on one end. By putting the probe from my conroller into the thermowell, I can measure the temperature inside the carboy.

I fermented the beer at 65F, before ramping it up to 70F for a diacetyl rest, and then unplugged the heat and let the beer cool to basement temperature.

I bottle conditioned two gallons to make sure I had enough bottles for NHC as well as any other competitions I may want to enter the beer in. The remaining three gallons I racked into a keg for keg conditioning.

The samples I pulled were so smooth and full-bodied. The flavor reminded me of a Fudgesicle. I think the overall balance is there. The judges may think the beer is light for the style. We shall see!

See full recipe here

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Brew Year's Resolutions for 2023

What should my resolutions be for this year? I have no idea what I am doing with my life. Fuck do I know?

My mental issues aren't this bad.

That is only a slight exaggeration. It's been three years since I made Brew Year's Resolutions. Before starting this post, I skimmed through my previous years resolutions. My batting average on these resolutions is about what I expect the 2023 Red Sox to be. I still haven't studied for, or taken the BJCP Exam since 2019. My basement brewery still doesn't have a sink and is as disorganized as I usually am. I also still have not perfected Galloupe Gold as our house beer. Why do I do these again?

Brew Years Resolutions for 2019

Welp, 2019 is upon us! The one Brew Year's Resolution I failed miserably with from 2018 was to write more. Writing was so much easier when I was in a cubicle and needed something to occupy myself with between phone calls. Working from home it is easier to just watch TV than to write. When I travel it's easier to listen to podcasts, or wade into the cesspool that social media can be.

Before thinking about what I want to do for 2019, let's take a look at the rest of my 2018 resolutions:

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Hands on training for our new Midwest rep Sven! He is based in Lombard and will be spending a lot of time visiting breweries in the Chicago area. . . . #BrewDay #ImperialStout #MarisOtter #MarisOtterPale #PlanetPale #RoastedBarley #MunichMalt #WheatMalt #ChocolateMalt #BlackMalt #CrystalMalt #EmployeeTraining #employeeorientation #MadeWithMuntons

A post shared by Muntons North America (@muntons_north_america) on Nov 13, 2018 at 1:48pm PST

I resolved to brew more big beers and sour beers. In 2018 I brewed one, an imperial stout. At Muntons we hired a new sales rep based outside of Chicago named Sven. Sven had previously worked as a beer buyer and bartender, but had never brewed before. When Sven came to Boston to train with me, the first thing we did was brew a batch. Initially Sven wanted to brew a Tripel, but I wanted to brew something that used more of our products than just Pilsner Malt and sugar. I took one of Gordon Strong's recipes from his book Modern Homebrew Recipes, and tweaked it to utilize ten different Muntons malts.

I had a fresh sack of Muntons Maris Otter Pale Malt. The first thing I did with Sven was to show him how to properly open the grain sack by cutting and pulling the threads that stitch the bag together, and had him do it. Then we chewed on each different malt before throwing them into the hopper. We milled our grist so Sven could see what milled grain should look like with the inside of the grain crushed, and the husk intact.

When our gravity was off by a few points after our mash and fly sparge, we weighed out and topped off our wort with Muntons Light Spraymalt (Dry Malt Extract) as a way to show Sven how most craft brewers use our extracts

Too many of the pros get this wrong 

The brew day was great. We had enough fermentable sugars in the mash to do a parti-gyle and make a small beer. I made a huge yeast starter for the Imperial Stout, which took off right away after being pitched. Within a week the beer was within a couple points of it's final gravity. That beer is in a secondary fermenter right now and I look forward to bottling it in a couple of months.

As great as that brew was, it was the only big beer or sour beer I brewed in 2018. Overall I have to say this resolution was a miss. As was my resolution to make other fermented beverages and food; that was a total miss.

The one resolution that was a success was my hop garden and making a beer with my home-grown hops. In the spring I planted five different hop rhizomes: Centennial, Cascade, Chinook, Northern Brewer, and Willamette. I suspect I planted the Centennial and Cascade a bit too deep. Eventually I replanted them and they did grow. The Centennial grew to a modest height, but I did clip the Cascade with my weed whacker....whoops!

I had heard that Chinook grows really well in this area. For a first year plant it did okay in my yard, but I do think it would do better in a spot that gets more sunlight. The Willamette looked promising early, but never really took off. I spoke with a representative from Four Star Farms at a trade show who told me that Fuggle-derivatives like Willamette don't always do well in Massachusetts. I'll give the Willamette plant another year and see what happens.

The plant that did the best by far was the Northern Brewer. I planted the rhizome in the middle of my yard, which in hindsight meant it got the most sunlight over the course of the day. I probably harvested about a pound of wet hops from the Northern Brewer plant. I dried them on a screen and used them as the flavor and aroma hops in a California Common. The beer was decent enough, but didn't have a ton of hop flavor. I probably harvested the cones too soon which would explain the lack of flavor and aroma. Next year I won't be so anxious.

In 2018 I wanted to perfect a house beer. I brewed three versions of Galloupe Street Gold to date. The first batch was good, but a little more hop forward than I was going for. I designed the second batch to be more of a traditional English Bitter. That batch was infected and I dumped it. My third batch that I brewed in the summer was pretty good. I used a single hop, Sterling, and just thought the beer was a little one-dimensional. Jennie will want me to brew this one again.

For 2019 I want to keep my resolutions and make them obtainable. I will carry over one resolution from last year, but with a twist:

• Generate more content next year. Instead of just resolving to write more blog posts, I just want to post more stuff. Whether that content is new blog posts, a quick post on my Facebook page, sharing posts from my archives, or new photos and videos., I want to post more. I could post about brew days, tasting notes, or maybe just cool places I visit on my travels. One or two posts per week should be easy.
  
• Retake the BJCP Exam and score an 80. I told myself I would never try to become a National judge. Now I have the requisite experience points and work in the industry, I feel compelled to push on. To move up in rank I need to score an 80 on the BJCP Exam, which for me means I need to take it again, and then pass the BJCP Written Exam. I retook the exam at HomebrewCon last year in Portland. I barley studied and took a punt that additional experience since I last took the exam would carry me through. I scored a 76, which tells me I am not far off. Rumor and innuendo is that the BJCP is loath to give out scores that are off by a point or two because that invites exam-takers to appeal their grade. If I continue to judge and put more effort into studying I am confident I can achieve this one.
  
• Dry(ish) January. Dry January is a recent phenomenon that encourages people not to drink in the month of January mainly for health reasons. I seldom drink to get drunk, but I am looking to get back into shape in the new year. In August 2015 I vowed to downsize my consumption and production of beer. For two years I did a fair job with it. There were times my diet and exercise was better than other times. A rotator cuff injury in 2016 didn't help matters. In 2018 the wheels fell off again. From mid-August to mid-September I was on the road almost every week. Eating out, eating at airports, eating at highway rest stops, my food choices steadily became worse. When traveling alone it became too easy to sample the local beer where I was staying. From my experience, a few weeks of abstaining from alcohol can do wonders in terms of lowering my alcohol tolerance, which will help me drink less in one sitting.
  
  Beyond the calories I will be saving, I think a bit of a break from beer will be good. So many beers I try now are indistinguishable from other beers I have tried. I am increasingly bored with New England IPA.  It has been too long since I have tasted a beer that really wowed me or made me want to try and brew a beer like it. My palette needs a break almost as much as my waist.
  
  I am calling it Dry(ish) January because my job does make it almost impossible to completely abstain from alcohol. If a brewer asks me to try his/her beer I'll limit myself to just a couple of sips or a four ounce taster at the most. Similarly if I need to taste my own beer, I'm not going to make a huge deal out of it. 

In terms of what I want to brew in 2019, I am going to keep things open ended. Luckily my brewing has been more consistent than my writing over the last six months. I have no overarching goals. I am having fun revisiting my older recipes, and there is at least one new recipe I have been working on that I can't wait to have a go brewing. In 2019 I'm just going to keep having fun with my brewing.

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