Brew Day - Angel's Wing's (Helles Bock)

I'm a loner Dottie... a rebel

As an only child who is a bit of an introvert, I tend to pursue most of my hobbies and interests alone. Being an independent learner means that most of what I have learned about brewing when it comes to my own beer and to my work in the industry was the result of self-study. I passed my first BJCP Exam after a month of cramming. For my role with Muntons, I passed the Institute of Brewing and Distilling's Malting Certificate Exam the same way. 

Homebrewing evolved from something Jennie and I did together to a solitary activity. Once in awhile there will be something Jennie wants to brew and she will want to brew it with me, but that is more the exception than the rule. I haven't brewed with my cousin Andy since he and his wife Juli had their second child. Since then they moved out of state. 

This batch was the first one in awhile I brewed with someone else. I first met Nate at a beer tasting; Nate was friends with Kert, who is the buyer at my local bottle shop. When Nate started working at my local homebrew shop he actually recognized me with my mask on. Eventually he pinged me on social media wanting to brew. 

Nate suggested brewing a lager of some sort. I suggested a Helles Bock as it's one of the few styles I've never brewed. It is also a style I have had very few examples of. The recipe in Brewing Classic Styles was simple enough: a blend of Pilsner and Munich Malt, a 60 minute hop addition, and lager yeast.

I almost always keep Muntons Pilsner Malt in my brewery, and I started keeping Muntons Munich Malt after having to make too many changes to recipes that called for stewed malts like Vienna, Munich, or Melanoidin-type darker Munich malts.

Perfect crush after first pass thru the mill.

I told Nate to pick out the hops and yeast while I had the malt taken care of. When the Alpha Acid percentage on the Magnum hops Nate picked out were a little high at 14.7%, I made a last minute change to the recipe by adding 0.75 ounces at 60 minutes and the remaining 0.25 at 15 minutes.

Nate really likes Imperial Yeast and chose their Harvest strain. A fine choice for a malty style like a Helles Bock, it's attenuation is moderate in the 70-74% range. To make sure the beer didn't finish too heavy, I lowered the mash temperature from the recipe in the book. 

Nate and I mashing in
.

Beautiful wort, looks like apple juice.

Although not as big as Field of Immortals, we were shooting for this beer to be over 7%. I replicated my process from the Field of Immortals brew day fairly closely. Again the mash efficiency was high, and the starting gravity of the finished batch was high. So high in fact it falls out of the parameters of the style. Once I entered our hop additions into BeerSmith, our calculated hop bitterness was also high.

How I am going to do every batch.

Nate and I ended up with almost exactly 5.25 gallons going into the fermenter, which should lead to five gallons of finished beer. It might make sense to dilute the residual sugar, alcohol, and hop bitterness with one gallon of water. That would make the beer more to style and would give us more beer. From now on I am going to assume higher yields in all of my batches and plan accordingly. 

Pitching yeast in well-aerated wort.

It was fun to brew with another person and share knowledge. I'm sure we will collaborate again. Hopefully next time with Kert. 

Wort getting down to lager temps.

Recipe: Angels Wings
Brewer: Jason 
Asst Brewer: Nate 
Style: Helles Bock
TYPE: All Grain
Taste: (0.0) 

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 7.49 gal
Post Boil Volume: 5.99 gal
Batch Size (fermenter): 5.25 gal   
Bottling Volume: 5.00 gal
Estimated OG: 1.067 SG
Estimated Color: 7.1 SRM
Estimated IBU: 41.7 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 76.7 %
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt              Name                                             Type          #          %/IBU         Volume        
8.86 gal         Yellow Full (Under 6 SRM)                        Water         1          -             -             
2.37 g           Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash)                  Water Agent   2          -             -             
1.58 g           Calcium Chloride (Mash)                          Water Agent   3          -             -             
0.79 g           Epsom Salt (MgSO4) (Mash)                        Water Agent   4          -             -             
0.50 tsp         Lactic Acid (Mash)                               Water Agent   5          -             -             
9 lbs            Pilsner Malt (Muntons) (1.9 SRM)                 Grain         6          65.5 %        0.70 gal      
4 lbs 12.0 oz    Munich Malt (Muntons) (8.1 SRM)                  Grain         7          34.5 %        0.37 gal      
0.50 tsp         Lactic Acid (Sparge)                             Water Agent   8          -             -             
0.75 oz          Magnum [14.70 %] - Boil 60.0 min                 Hop           9          35.8 IBUs     -             
0.25 oz          Magnum [14.70 %] - Boil 15.0 min                 Hop           10         5.9 IBUs      -             
0.00 tsp         Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 mins)                      Fining        11         -             -             
1.0 pkg          Harvest (Imperial Yeast #L17)                    Yeast         12         -             -             


Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Medium Body, No Mash Out
Total Grain Weight: 13 lbs 12.0 oz
----------------------------
Name              Description                             Step Temperat Step Time     
Mash In           Add 17.99 qt of water at 163.9 F        150.0 F       60 min        

Sparge: Fly sparge with 4.74 gal water at 168.0 F
Notes:
------
Original recipe needed 12 oz Acidulated Malt. Used Lactic Acid in Mash and Sparge instead. AA% on Magnum was high, so used 0.75 at 60 and 0.25 at 15 instead of 1.0 at 60 min.

Awesome mash, sparge and boil. Crush was perfect first time through mill. System is dialed in and will adjust profile accordingly. 

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Tasting Notes: Endicott Red (International Amber Lager)

I brewed Endicott Red for two purposes: I wanted to brew an Irish Red for St. Patrick's Day while feeling nostalgic about drinking mass-marketed lager at a chain restaurant. Drinking the beer as it conditioned in the bottle was in interesting demonstration as to the effects of carbonation on a beer.

The beer was designed to be light to medium-light in body. To work around my yeast's modest attenuation I added extra priming sugar so the higher carbonation would give the beer the body I was looking for.

The beer I made was okay. It was clean and fairly easy to drink. I entered the beer at the National Homebrew Competition where it scored a respectable 32. That feels about right to me. At nationals to cope with the volume of entries, judges use a modified scoresheet that doesn't provide as much feedback as one would normally expect.

The beer has a nice grainy malt aroma. I made Jennie taste the beer with me and she got a hint of citrus. The beer pours dark copper with a moderate foamy white head that persists decently enough. Medium bodied with medium-high carbonation, the beer has a nice clean finish.

The flavor is mostly grainy and doughy base malt, with a touch of raisin. There is a slight acidity which I attribute the citrus aroma Jennie was getting to. I may have added a little too much lactic acid to my mash, or it could just be the carbonation.

To me the beer doesn't know what it wants to be. When it was young and the carbonation was only at a medium level, the beer did drink like an Irish Red. As the beer aged and carbed up to a medium high level, it did lighten the body as I had hoped. It also dried out the beer a little more than I would have liked.

I want to brew this beer again next year, but with an ale yeast as a true Irish red. I may even reduce the color and/or amount of caramel malt. The next time I brew an amber lager I will certainly use a lighter base malt to lighten the malt flavor.

The beer is perfectly enjoyable. My best friend who isn't a craft beer drinker absolutely loved the beer. He dislikes hop bitterness and hop flavor, and this had little to none of both. When he stopped by to visit, I sent him home with a six pack. That's enough for me to call this batch a success.

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Brew Day - Pasteinator (Dopplebock)

The first ever batch where I employed a partial mash, a process that involves obtaining a percentage of your batch's fermentable sugars from mashing grains, and then topping that off with malt extract, was a beer called Bases Loaded Bock.

At that time I was still very green as a brewer. Looking back I formulated my recipes with the same skill level as a monkey on a typewriter. Somehow with this batch the monkey managed to bang out the Great American Novel. Well, that might be a bit of an overstatement, but compared to most of my early batches this beer was outstanding. 

After hoarding the beer over the years, I brought 12 bottles to Jamboree. On Friday night before the main festival, there was an Oktoberfest celebration where attendees were encouraged to bring German-styles beers. Revisiting the beer and sharing it with other brewers reaffirmed that the beer was good in its own right and not merely in comparison to my earlier batches. 

My original plan was to re-brew Bases Loaded Bock the same day as my Pulpwood Stacker Dark Lager and ferment both in Andy's shed using a heat wrap for my fermenters. To make a double brew day easier, I reformulated the recipe as an extract batch while staying as faithful to the original as possible. When I couldn't find the Vienna Malt extract my revised recipe called for I bought Vienna Malt and changed my recipe back to a partial mash. While the first batch straddled the line between a regular bock and a dopplebock, I also increased the original gravity to push it over the line. 

My planned double brew day never materialized when I didn't give myself enough time to make two large yeast starters. My ingredients for the new bock sat for around a month. Finally I decided to just use harvested yeast from Endicott Red and get it over with. After winning a medal in a lager category, and tasting other lagers brewed with WLP810 San Francisco Lager yeast, I think it should work just fine. My friend and occasional co-worker at Modern Homebrew Emporium Nate brewed a schwarzbier with this yeast and it tasted like a lager to me.

For good measure I also threw in two expired packages of Wyeast 2308 Munich Lager. This was the yeast I originally intended to use. The Munich Lager has a higher attenuation than the San Francisco Lager, and I am hoping that it will help here. It is easy for a big, malty lager like this to finish heavy and sweet.

Brew day was fairly smooth. As I added the last bit of malt extract, I noticed that my wort looked to be a little light. I forgot to add the Carafa III malt. A dobblebock doesn't have to be brown, it can be lighter. This wasn't as disastrous as forgetting to add extract.

Since both the grist, starting gravity, and yeast were all different from the original, it only made sense to rename the beer. I probably won't lager it in the traditional sense by storing it at near-freezing temperatures, but I will let it condition for eight weeks in a secondary fermenter.

Come to think of it, it should be ready for my club's competition in May. 

See the full recipe here

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I actually won something

In my recent post Making hard cider at home, I admitted that the only medal I had ever won in a competition was for a cider. I was hoping to change that last year as I vowed to enter more competitions. I didn't brew quite as much in 2016 as I had in 2015. A lot of what I brewed last year was for events like Jamboree and Ales over ALS. Entering more of my beers into competitions was one of my Brew Year's Resolutions.

I had gotten great feedback on my latest batch Pa's Lager. Before that I entered Pa's Lager and Curly's Pumpkin Milk Stout into a competition in Portland, ME: the Groundhogs Day Homebrew Competition 2017 run by the Portland Mashing Maineiacs. Additionally I volunteered to judge in the competition. I'll take a built-in excuse to visit Portland. I made time to stop by Foundation and D.L. Geary's before heading home.

The competition wasn't huge with only around 100 entries. The categories were grouped into six different "tables" from which awards were given. I judged American Ales, American Porters, and American Stouts with a brewer and judge named Doug who is from nearby Swampscott, Mass. He was also a Certified BJCP judge and additionally he is a Certified Cicerone. Our scores tended to diverge a bit, but we were able to reach easy consensuses for the winners of both flights we judged.

Of the two beers I entered I probably had higher hopes for the Pumpkin Milk Stout. I was really happy with how that beer came out, and I thought it was a more forgiving beer and would better mask any flaws or off-flavors. After Doug and I finished our flights, I was milling around and saw the table where all of the judged beers were lined up. As I looked for my entries and any hopes I had of the Pumpkin Milk Stout placing were dashed. I found the bottle of Pumpkin Milk Stout with dried foam on the outside. If my beer gushed, there was no chance it would win anything.

The steward from that table told me the beer didn't gush when opened, but it did slowly foam after opening. I took a swig from the already judged bottle. It didn't taste offensive, but it clearly had fallen off from even a month earlier.

What I didn't find was Pa's Lager. The Best-in-Show judging was being conducted in a separate room that I could see into through a large window. I saw the bottles in contention for BOS on a table and I was pretty sure I saw a bottle with a yellow cap with the top filled in with black ink. Was that Pa's Lager? It certainly looked like it.

I made sure not to let myself get too excited, but as soon as I got home I kept refreshing the competition's website waiting for the winners to be announced. Finally, late on Monday night I saw this:

Pa's Lager finished in first place at it's table! After four years of brewing I finally have brewed a beer that medaled in a competition. I woke Jennie up to tell her and she was so happy and supportive. I shared the news with my family on social media. That a beer brewed in honor of Pa Chalifour won an award meant a lot to them also. 

For me as a brewer I was happy to receive the acknowledgement. In the past I have entered beer into competitions that I had high hopes for, but the entries maybe were not at the peak of freshness like the Pumpkin Milk Stout or I had entered "bad bottles" that were infected while the rest of the batch was fine. Some of the beers I have brewed that I thought were the best were made in too small of a quantity, or were consumed at an event like Jamboree, and couldn't be entered. This time everything came together. 

This past Saturday I received my scoresheets via email. Pa's Lager was judged by two professional brewers who gave it an score of 43.5. That is by far the best score I have ever received in a competition. Curly's Pumpkin Milk Stout received a 26. The beer did gush. The judges thought the beer was thin and too spicy. That is further evidence that the bottle was infected because having designed and tasted the beer myself, the beer was neither when it was young. 

Now, was this the biggest competition? In terms of number of entries it wasn't. I am entering three different beers in the Ocean State Homebrew Competition which should have five or six times the number of entries. I also applied for three entries into the National Homebrew Competition, the largest competition in the country. 

I have several projects I am working on at the moment. A couple of them are beer-related so check this space for details. The key is balancing work, brewing, and life in general. I need to keep my pipeline of fresh beer churning if I want to keep doing well in competitions. If I want to go to the next level, a closet full of medals will only help the cause and give me credibility.

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Brew Day: Endicott Red (International Amber Lager)

After another successful batch of Pa's Lager, I started to brainstorm about what other styles I could brew with San Francisco Lager WLP810 yeast. This is a yeast that can product lagers while fermenting at ale temperatures as high as 65F. In the throws of winter, now is the time to take advantage of cool temperatures in our apartment.

As I thought about lager styles I could brew, I also started to think that St. Patrick's Day is only a couple of months away. I started to think of taking another crack at brewing an Irish Red.

Back when I was fresh out of college most of my friends and I still didn't have our own place. If we wanted to have some beers and watch a game we had to go to a bar. We spent a lot of time at bars. In particular, the since closed Uno's on Endicott St. in Danvers, Mass. The draught special at that Uno's for what must have been two years, was a tall Killian's Irish Red for $2. We drank a lot of tall Killian's Irish Reds. While not a clone of Killian's, I do want to make a beer inspired by it.

The Killian's Irish Red name was actually acquired by Coors in the 1980s, and the beer brewed as a lager. Per the 2008 Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) Guidelines and Irish Red can be brewed as an ale or a lager. The newer 2015 BJCP Guidelines specify "Finally, there are some commercial examples that sound Irish but are essentially International Amber Lagers, with sweetish palates and little bitterness".

In a technical sense this beer falls into the International Amber Lager category, which is a bit of a catch-all category like the International Dark Lager category. Other than the yeast, this is an Irish Red recipe by any standard. It would actually be interesting to split this recipe, brewing half as a lager and fermenting the other half with a British or Irish ale yeast.




An Irish Red is a simple, easy-drinking pint.When designing the recipe I really tried to dumb it down: Irish Pale Ale base malt, a small amount of caramel malt for the characteristic red color, and an even smaller amount of roasted barley to help dry out the finish. I brewed this as a 3-gallon BIAB batch.

San Francisco Lager's Achilles heel is it's low attenuation. To compensate for the yeast's shortcomings with its attenuation I used some flaked maize and corn sugar in the recipe to help lighten the body. I also mashed it longer and at a lower temperature.

As soon as I find time to bottle my latest batch of Pugnacious Pete's, I'll rack Endicott Red into a 3 gallon keg for secondary conditioning. I want to see how much that helps the beer clear.

Click here for the recipe.
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Tasting Notes - Pa's Lager (International Pale Lager)

My cousin and occasional brew collaborator Andy has actually been brewing for much longer than I have. He used to share a two-family home with his sister Jill and brother-in-law Greg; Andy and Greg were brewing together well before I got into the hobby. When I started brewing there were several batches I brewed with Andy and Greg. Now that Greg and Jill have three boys all under the age of six, Greg isn't able to make it to every brew day anymore.

The first brew day that Greg missed was the first batch of Pa's Lager. After he tasted the beer Greg lamented, "The best beer to come out of (our homebrewery), I had nothing to do with!"

I received a similar response from my boss who has tried several of my beers. He said Pa's Lager was probably the best one of my brews that he has tasted. After I gave him a couple of bottles of my latest batch he said it was a tossup between Pa's Lager and Summer Somewhere (2015). I'm not sure what it says that he enjoyed the most two of the simplest recipes I have brewed to date.

The beer pours a very nice straw color. There is a foamy white head with fair retention.

Adding back that small dry hop addition really made a difference. It gives the beer a noticeable low to medium-low hop aroma. The overall flavor is evenly balanced between malt and hop flavor. The finish is dry without being harsh or puckering. It cleanses the palate nicely before the drinker goes for the next sip.

I shared some with Paul Gentile from Gentile Brewing. He enjoyed it for what it was. Pa's Lager will never be a beer that blows the drinker away with flavor.



I also shared some with my colleagues at Modern Homebrew Emporium. They all gave the beer ratings of 4 on Untappd.



Unfortunately I had to work at the shop and miss my family's holiday gathering. I had Jennie bring a 12-pack and the reviews there were positive.

After messing around with the recipe I think I basically have it locked in. If I can't get my hands on any more free Liberty hops, I may go back to using Perle for bittering. That I don't think would have much of an impact on the flavor.

One adjustment I may make to my process when I brew the beer again would be to rack the beer to a secondary vessel and use a fining agent to reduce some of the haze. The last batch I brewed with Andy had almost brilliant clarity. I'm not sure if that is due to less trub making it into the fermenter, or that the batch was kegged.

Part of me would love to brew this again before next Christmas. At the same time I have so many other brews I want to get to. We'll play it by ear.

In the meantime I did enter the beer into a competiton. I'm very interested to see how it does. The lager categories tend to not be as competitive in terms of the number of entries. 

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