12x12 Woodstock Inn Variety Pack

Beers included: Pig's Ear Brown Ale, Lost River, Peachy Wheat Ale and 4000 Footer IPA

Purchase date: 6 September 2025

Purchase price: $16.99

Brewers choice is always fun.

Initial Impressions

Woodstock Inn is the first one of my former accounts to be reviewed in this series. When I worked for Muntons, Woodstock Inn was a steady, if not particularly huge customer. They'd buy a pallet of torrefied wheat per month, and specialty malts including 40L Crystal and Chocolate Malt a little less frequently.

I was excited to find this sampler when I was up in New Hampshire for Jamboree. Having the flagship Pig's Ear Brown Ale included also gave me a great commercial beer for my side-by-side with my Long Leash Brown Ale 

12x12 Tuckerman Pale Ale

Beers included: Tuckerman Pale Ale

Purchase date: 6 September 2025

Purchase price: $16.99

Initial Impressions

When I resolved to start this 12x12 series, and earlier deemed the 12-pack the workhorse of the beer fridge, I wasn't sure if I specified 12-pack cans or not. Even if I had, I still would write the post. Either way I am glad that Tuckerman Pale Ale is the first 12-pack of bottles to be featured. 

Tasting Notes: North Shore Brewers 2025 Q2 Kellerbier

As much as I prefer the written word, the digital world is moving more toward video all the time. Over the years I have very lightly dabbled in video production. I have no patience for video editing. With that in mind, I went on Facebook Live on Big Brew Day thinking that might be an easier pivot to video when I brewed this batch. 

The tl;dw about the brew is I designed a Helles-recipe that borrowed slightly from my cream ale recipe, the beer got two weeks in primary fermentation before being racked to a keg for keg-conditioning and lagering. 

I was happy to pick up a fresh crowler of Notch Zwickel directly from the brewery for my side-by-side. 

Brew Years Resolutions for 2020

Another year and another decade in the books! All-in 2019 was a very solid brew year for me. The only hiccup was the beer I brought to Ales over ALS and having to dump eight one-gallon batches.

One of my big resolutions last year was to post more content. I did update this space more. I played around with posting video on YouTube until I realized I don't have the patience for video editing. I also consciously updated my Facebook page regularly. Even it it was something as simple as a link to an article or a photo. My engagement on Facebook has been strong and I've picked up a few new fans.

Dry(ish) January was mostly a success. I made it all the way to January 28th! On that day I was hanging out with the Buck family at Maine Malt House in Mapleton, Maine. There was a bar at the malt house and I may have gone overboard with sampling. From there I was snowed in and was lucky to find a hotel in Presque Isle.

I could do Dry(ish) January again, but I do think I have generally reduced the amount I drink. If my liquid calorie intake becomes an issue there is always Sober October or something else similar.

I never did retake the BJCP exam again in 2019. I didn't have time to study in advance of Homebew Con. After Homebrew Con I didn't see any other exams scheduled in the area. I'm fairly ambivalent about moving up in rank at this point.

My resolutions for 2019 were fairly modest and mostly successful. I brewed the beer I wanted to drink. As it turned out that meant I didn't brew a single IPA in 2019.  I have put some thought into what I want to accomplish in 2020, but not a great deal.

• Enter more competitions: I have always been in and out in terms of entering competitions. At some times I am all about it, and then I can go months at a time without entering any. After entering two BJCP competitions last year I want to get back into it and see what we can learn. 
• Enter Masters Championship of Amateur Brewing (MCAB) qualifying events: The MCAB is a competition only open to first place winners at select qualifying events. If I am going to enter more competitions I may as well throw my hat in the ring here.  
• Go all out for NHC: In 2019 I entered four beers into the National Homebrew Competition. The imperial stout I brewed with Sven advanced to the final round. A batch of Pa's Lager scored well and made it to mini-best of show in the first round which means it almost advanced. For 2020 I will apply for the maximum of five entries into the competition. The plan is to brew beers that I feel have the best chance of advancing and potentially medalling.
• Win a medal at Jamboree: This one is more about club honor. Mike Shea from the North Shore Brewers cleaned up last year, but as a club we can do better.
• Brew with my house yeast: One of the things I think that is missing from craft beer is the loss of house character. Breweries could make different brews and different styles, but they had a house character. As a drinker you could tell that the different beers a brewery made were made by that brewery. One way brewers did that was using a house yeast strain. Every beer I have brewed with my "House Irish Ale Blend" has been outstanding. I want to use that yeast in more brews and learn how it ticks. From there maybe my beers will have that house character. 
• Make more strong ales: This fall I was lucky enough to go to the Festival of Wood and Barrel Aged Beer (FOBAB) in Chicago. That rekindled my love of high gravity beers. I brew more of them in 2020 and cellar the bottles in my basement.
• Work to finish my home brewery: My basement brew area is overdue for tidying up. I need to clear out the clutter and improve organization down there. I spend most of my brew days looking for random items. The big thing I need is a sink. Cleaning with just a hose isn't ideal. Even more inconvenient is not having any place to easily dump waste water. I have watched YouTube videos that make installing a sink easy enough, but it's probably better for everyone if I just hire a plumber. 

That list is a lot longer than I thought it would be!

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Just when you think you have it all figured out....

I was feeling pretty good. On the heels of my imperial stout advancing to the final round of the National Homebrew Competition, I won a medal at the New England Regional Homebrew competition with my Olde North Shore Ale and an Honorable Mention for Fredward Wit. 

For a beer that was three months old to medal at the largest competition in New England is pretty good.

Those were the only two competitions I had entered all year. Advancing at NHC was always a goal, but entering NERHBC was a bit of a lark. The two beers I entered were brewed for an event in July, not a competition in October. This year at Jamboree, Mike Shea from our club cleaned up with five medals. Ray Pickup, who is planning to open Rockport Brewing, was also at jamboree encouraging everyone else in the club to enter more beers next year.

A friend of mine who is a professional brewer also entered the competition at jamboree. I may be way off here, but I had the sense he was on pins and needles hoping his beer would win. It is also possible I was projecting what my feelings own would have been if I had entries. Deep down in places I don't talk about at parties, I am hyper-competitive. More accurately I hate losing. It rook me years to learn how to deal with failure. It probably took me longer than most well-adjusted adults.

Anyway, being around competitive people including another industry professional motivated me to enter the largest homebrew competition in New England. After entering two big competitions and winning two medals I was starting to feel pretty good about myself.

The next competition was Ales over ALS. While not a BJCP competition, I do want to win Ales over ALS after a couple near-misses. I brewed a wet hop IPA with my homegrown Chinook. It was a way to bring a one-of-a-kind beer to the event, and have a story for attendees at the event who aren't brewers or craft beer nerds.

The first time I tapped the keg was at the event. I got lemon and a some astringency in the finish. With over a pound of wet hops in a five gallon batch I expected some citrus and even some chlorophenols from all of that hop material in the kettle.

The attendees liked it enough, but two of the judges absolutely destroyed it. Both complained of acetaldehyde. The most common flavor descriptors for acetaldehyde are green apple like what is found in low levels in Budweiser and Bud Light,. The other common descriptors are raw pumpkin or pumpkin guts.

I was incredulous. Firstly, I didn't think the beer was problematic. If it was, I should have known better and caught it myself. Secondly my ego was bruised to have my beer torn to shreds by people I know and generally respect.  By the time I received my scoresheets I had already started breaking down. I went so far as to reconnect the keg and taste the beer again. I concluded that the judges probably were right. That meant I had been pouring problematic beer for four hours. Great.

All that was left was to figure out what went wrong. Acetaldehyde can be caused by fermentation problems. The original yeast I pitched never quite took off and I had to pitch dry yeast. Maybe the sluggish fermentation caused the acetaldehyde normally produced during fermentation not to be processed by the yeast. Acedaldehyde can also be caused by bacteria. The oxidation of acedaldehyde can also create acetic acid. That would explain the lemon that I was getting.

A couple weeks after brewing the wet hop beer, I brewed eight one-gallon batches for a Muntons sales meeting. I brewed the beers to showcase our malts as well as some of our competitors malts in a finished beer. I fermented in eight brand new one-gallon growlers. Each beer was over-pitched with half a sachet of dry yeast. Fermentation in all eight vessels was vigorous enough that it should have cleaned up any chemical byproducts during fermentation.  ALL EIGHT of those batches were acetaldehyde-bombs. Not only did I waste two days brewing and one day bottling those batches, I now have to fill that time at our meeting where we would have been tasting those beers.

If that wasn't enough, Jennie found a pellicle growing on a brown ale that was my most-recent batch.  A different beer, in a different vesel, with a different infection made it crystal clear I had a sanitation problem. I have been using an acid-based sanitizer Star San for years. Either something changed in the water supply in terms of alkalinity or mineral contact that is affecting the effectiveness of the Star San, or my Star San is just old.

After dumping 13 gallons of beer, I took every piece of equipment that touched beer recently, hoses, siphons, carboys, growlers, and sanitized it all the old-fashioned way: with bleach! Excuse me while I cry into a commercial beer.

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Making the leap to kegs

Investing in kegs is a leap most semi-serious homebrewers make. It is easier to clean and sanitize one keg than up to 50 bottles. If you use the CO2 tank to carbonate your beer it is ready to drink much sooner than when the beer is bottle conditioned. The American Homebrewers Association (AHA) has a great introduction to kegging article on their website.


Kegging was something I figured I would start doing at some point, but had put on the back burner. After trial and error, I became quite adept at bottling efficiently. As long as I brewed regularly and didn't let my beer sit in the fermenter for too long, I always had new beer in the pipeline making the quicker carbonation less of an issue.

There are certain styles like IPA that are best served as fresh as possible. Those styles will taste better out of a force carbonated keg because the beer doesn't need 2-3 weeks to carbonate like a bottle-conditioned beer. A properly purged keg will also expose the beer to less oxygen than a bottle. A capped bottle is not a 100% airtight seal and will slowly let air in over time. 

Bottling is not without its advantages. Some of the more obvious advantages are it can be easier to bring bottles to parties and give as gifts. Some styles like imperial stouts and barleywine will change over time as they oxidize. For me, those big beers are reserved for special occasions. A keg of barleywine can tie up a draft line for a long time if beer is only pulled from it every once in awhile.

A couple years ago I purchased four three-gallon kegs with the intention of regularly kegging my beer. Before we moved to our house, our apartment was cluttered with carboys, bukets, and brewing gear. Jennie really had the patience of a saint to put up with it. However the idea of having a kegerator in the corner of our kitchen or living room was a bridge too far. With no way to chill and serve kegged beer at home, I only used the kegs for events like Jamboree and Ales over ALS. 

Buying our home I was just as excited about being able to have kegged beer at home and I was having a yard and being able to brew full batches outside. Over the years I looked for bargains and slowly amassed everything I need to chill and serve kegged beer. All I need to do is build my kegerator!

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Ales Over ALS 2017

In sixth grade I put off and I put off starting my project for the school science fair. Finally, a couple days before the fair I slapped together the easiest experiment I could think of. I tested static electricity by rubbing my feet on a carpet and touching a door knob. As a visual aide I drew pictures of myself rubbing my feet on the carpet, and the spark produced. As I presented my experiment to my class and how I had tested my hypothesis about static electricity, one intrepid classmate asked "Did this take you five minutes?"

Somehow I received a B minus for my "work". I was never the most devoted student, but I remember feeling embarrassed seeing everyone else's displays that they had put weeks of work into, then seeing my sad project. I was reminded of that feeling at this year's Ales Over ALS.

Last year's event was an emotional experience. I had planned to brew Larrupin Lou's for months, and Pugnacious Pete's for weeks leading up to the event. This year I had planned to brew a witbier, then I let life get in the way. In addition to my new job with Muntons and all the traveling that has entailed, we finally bought a home! As exciting and at times unnerving the past couple months have been, I was never able to brew the witbier. 

Plan B was to bring Wet Hop Head. I figured telling people at the event that the beer was made with freshly harvested hops from Essex County would make them excited to try the beer. The week before the event I attempted to keg the beer and I realized I had lost my keg post socket. That meant I couldn't remove the dip tubes for cleaning or check the O-rings.

Plan C became to figure out what beer I had in bottles that I could bring and not run out of. The one beer I had more than a case of was Hazy Brown. That beer scored a 37 in a BJCP competition, and I was thrilled with how it came out. Additionally I found a case of an old cider while moving that I also brought to serve at the event. The cider was my take on Woodchuck Belgian White.

The day of the event I iced the bottles down in my cooler. After parking my car I tasted the Hazy Brown. Bottled in April it had held up nicely, but it was slightly oxidized to me. For the competition I decided to enter my Witcidre into the competition.

People seemed to like the cider. I think more people liked the Hazy Brown and it may have done better in the People's Choice voting. Three of the four judges gave the cider very favorable scores and writeups. One judge was decidedly harsh. To be fair, I agreed more with him.

This was a cider I made in early 2013. At that time I had been brewing for only a few months. I was still working at Target; After Christmas I stocked up on Archer Farms (Target Brand) Cider that had gone on clearance. I found the idea for a Belgian cider on a HomebrewTalk forum. When it was young, the cider was very dry and tart. I probably used the wrong type or orange peel or just used too much of it. In time that faded, but so too had the spice and any yeast character.

Instead of coming up with a plan and following that plan to brew something cool and interesting, I dug through my cellar and just brought whatever I could find. Both beverages I brought were enjoyable enough, but neither were the best representation of what I am capable of as a brewer. 

This is six weeks after I couldn't manage to bring anything to Jamboree. Instead I got Muntons to sponsor the event and set up a table to exhibit. At least I exhibited until it rained. Currently I have Thomas Brady Ale, Sour Chris, Simple Cider, Pastinator, Jack D'Or Clone, Wet Hop Head and Chali-4 still in carboys. I need to get these beers in kegs and bottles, and then get brewing again.

I have a house with space to brew outside, a basement to store grain in bulk, and space for a kegerator. Next weekend it is time to fire up that kettle and get back on track. As for Ales over ALS 2018, I decided on my way home from Ales over ALS 2017 what I want to bring. I am going to brew it sooner rather than later, because this brew will need a bit of time!

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Brew Day: Wet Hop Head Pale Ale (American Pale Ale)

It was only a couple short months ago that I was marveling that after three years I was still producing content on a regular basis. Between a new job, and hopefully a new house I haven't brewed a batch at home in over two months. Also, when I worked at Modern Homebrew Emporium being around ingredients and brewers once a week inspired me to brew more. Maybe not being in that environment lessened my enthusiasm.

The Chinook had a pungent, spicy aroma

I did have several beers I wanted to brew over the summer. Beers that I had bought ingredients for and to date haven't brewed. The state of affairs is so sorry I am going to Jamboree empty-handed. I should be there representing Muntons. If you are going to Jambo look for my booth and be sure to say hi.

What I needed was some inspiration and some motivation. That came when I was presented with a chance to brew with wet hops. Fitzgerald Farm in Haverhill posted to the North Shore Brewer's Facebook page that they had limited quantities of wet hops to sell. Not being able to grow my own hops this year, I jumped at the chance.

Whereas almost all beers are made with hops that have been dried, wet hops are hops that have been picked fresh off the bine. If hops aren't dried shortly after being harvested they will spoil within a couple of days. When a commercial brewer releases a wet hop beer they go to great lengths to have the hops sent to the brewery and used as soon as possible.

The Centennial looks like it was harvested at juust the right time

I arranged to meet the Fitzgeralds to pick up a pound of Chinook and Centennial. This is only the second year they have grown hops on the farm and the first year they had enough of a yield to sell to brewers. They hope to have more rhizomes to split off and have an even larger yield and incrementally grow. I am actually going to be one of, if not the first brewer to make a beer with hops from their farm.

Picked and brewed on the same day!

With two pounds to work with I decided to brew a batch with only the wet hops. On his blog, Brad Smith suggested using at least six to eight times the weight of wet hops as you would with dry hops to compensate for the higher moisture levels in wet hops.

As for a recipe to showcase these wet hops I had a perfect recipe ready to go. I had planned to brew Modern Homebrew Emporium's best-selling Hophead Pale Ale extract kit and had already bought the extract and specialty malts. I picked up the hops on a Monday night and needed to brew with the wet hops before the hops spoiled. A short and easy extract brew was perfect for a last-minute brew day on a Monday night.

I made sure that all of the hops were submerged. 

I used the same hop schedule as the recipe called for, but I did adjust the amounts and type of hops to use all of the wet hops. The volume of hop material to add to the kettle was substantial. I used one of the large grain bags I usually use for my BIAB batches. After the boil I used a strainer to let the bag drain just as I would let a grain bag drain.

With the huge volume of hop material I did have to top off with almost four gallons of water. I suspect any fermentable sugars lost to hop absorbtion will be balanced by lower hop utilization in the more concentrated wort. With no lab analysis of these hops I am really shooting from the hip in terms of IBUs.

The Fitzgeralds are anxious to hear how hops from their farm. I am almost as anxious to have a hoppy beer in the house again.

Click here for the recipe.
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Tasting Notes: Queue Juice (New England IPA)

I held off on a brew day post for this brew as I brewed it specifically for Homebrew Talk. It was a post specifically about New England IPA. I shared my insights, tips, and brewed a sample batch. The recipe was loosely based on my previous Haze for Daze.. As there are several commercial beers named Haze for Daze. I came up with a new name for this brew. Oh, and somehow I ended up adding 43% more hops.

When a beer is dry hopped for too long, or too much dry hops are added the beer can take on a grassy flavor. There is a line where too much is too much. This beer was right on the edge. It was on the edge of the cliff. It's tippy toes were just over the edge. It was looking down as tiny pebbles crumbled off the edge and fell into the abyss below.

The snow on the ground indicates it was bottled awhile ago. 

The beer poured a hazy deep gold color. There was a thick, frothy white head with excellent retention and left a beautiful lacing on the glass.

One thing I am comfortable saying is that this is my most aromatic IPA I have brewed to date. Lots of papaya, mango, and tropical fruits.

Carbonation was medium to medium-high. The carbonation does cut through the creaminess to an extent. It also amplifies the astringency that the hops leave in the finish.

When the beer was young the flavor was a wall of hops. After two weeks in the bottle I did get an unpleasant grassy flavor. A week later that grassy and vegetal taste lessened and the beer hit its peak. It was around this time I shared bottles with several friends and coworkers who all really seemed to enjoy it. Jennie even gave it 4.5 stars on Untappd.  

Eamon, my manager at Modern Homebrew Emporium examines my Queue Juice.

When I saw the Boston Worts added a special New England IPA category to their competition I decided to enter the beer. Their judging was on May 6, the same day as the judging for our competition. Queue Juice was bottled on March 12, seven weeks before judging. I threw a couple bottles in the back of the fridge and hoped for the best. Queue Juice recorded a respectable, if unspectacular 26. As of press time I still haven't received my score sheets.

On Sunday May 7 I opened one of the handful of bottles I had left. The hop aroma was nice but not nearly as intense as it was a few weeks earlier. The grassy flavor was gone and the hop flavor had similarly lessened. That slight astringency in the finish never went away. Without seeing the scoresheets, that score felt right to me as I drank Queue Juice on the couch. 

I can take several lessons from this brew:

• The flavor of NE IPAs fall off so quickly I will never make a batch larger than three gallons unless it is for an event like Ales over ALS or jamboree.
• There is a point of diminishing returns with dry hop additions. This beer had a really nice hop flavor and aroma, but if I dialed back and dialed in the amount of hops I add the beer would be smoother. In future batches I will work to find that sweet spot.
• If entering an IPA in a competition the beer has no chance if it is not at the peak of freshness. I planned out The Anti-Chris perfectly at it placed at the Worts' competition. I suspected freshness would be an issue for Queue Juice and entered the beer as a bit of a lark when I saw the special NE IPA category. 

I am overwhelmed with beer at the moment that is ready to be bottled and racked. Warm weather is also coming which makes fermenting American styles difficult for me. I probably won't brew another batch of Queue Juice until the fall. I do have some fun, experimental hops I look forward to trying in future batches!

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Brew Day: North Shore Brewer's Barrel Beer #4 (Wee Heavy)

Awhile back my homebrew club The North Shore Brewers acquired two used Utopias barrels from Samuel Adams. The first two barrel beers were two batches of a Kate the Great/Mott the Lessor clone. The club brought a keg to Jamboree last fall, and the beer was excellent. Club member Ryan Veno entered two of his bottles in the National Homebrew Competition. The beer finished first at its table and advanced to the Final Round of judging held at HomebrewCon.

The third batch was a SMaSH barleywine. I brewed a batch with my friend from the club Pat, but by the time it was done the barrel was full. We ended up raking our barleywine into 5 different one gallon growlers where we are aging the beer on different woods and different spirits.

After the barleywine the club had a vote on the club forum about what style of beer to brew next. I suggested either a Strong Scottish Ale (or Wee Heavy) or a clone of Westvleteren 12, one of the most sought-after beers in the world. I made sure to leave the forum open to other suggestions.

In the end the Wee Heavy won out in part because it is less expensive to brew. The Westvleteren 12 clone would have required relatively expensive dark Belgian candi sugar. Paul Gentile from Gentile Brewing helped us out with a grain buy. A grain buy is when a group of brewers get together to buy bulk grains directly from a wholesaler, or when a commercial brewer orders grain for homebrewers. We ordered our hops in bulk directly from a wholesaler, and I brewed a beer to propagate enough yeast for everyone. In all the cost of the batch was less than $30. For a high-gravity beer that uses as much malt as this beer, that's not bad at all.

I scaled up the recipe for Pyrite Pistol, changed it to all-grain, and then made a
couple of tweaks.

The starting point for the recipe was Pyrite Pistol. When converting the batch from malt extract to all-grain there we decided to use Scottish Golden Promise base malt. One club member suggested using some Munich Malt to punch up the malt flavor so we added a pound to the grist. I replaced the lighter Caramalt from Pyrite Pistol with 150L CaraArmoa malt. The idea is to give the beer the color and flavor it needs without having to employ too long of a boil. A shorter boil will boil off less water, which requires running off less wort from the mash, and will leave more sugars behind to brew another beer with the second runnings.

After my experiment with The Anti-Chris, I felt confident in brewing a batch like this with my mash tun in my kitchen. I mashed in just like I would with any other all-grain batch. I ran off around four gallons of wort expecting to boil it down to 2.5 gallons. Before I brought that to a boil, I filled my mash tun with sparge water, stirred the mash, and sealed the mash tun. When my first boil was over, I cooled my wort, poured it into my fermenter, ran off another four gallons, and boiled the second half of the batch.

This worked fairly well as I ended up with just a shade under five gallons. After pitching my yeast starter I was probably right there. The only downside to this method is the time involved. It takes time to bring the wort to a boil, this batch used a 90 minute boil, then I had to cool it down. Conservatively this added an extra two hours to my brew day. That is without factoring in a second beer I made from the grains.

It is good to know that I can brew a big, all-grain beer in my kitchen. The brew day is just so flipping long I can't see myself doing it more than a few times a year.

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Beer Inspiration in our Backyard: Barrel House Z

Barrel House Z (BHZ) opened in 2016 in Weymouth, Mass., and is a brewery that specializes in barrel-aged beers. Last year as they opened, BHZ sponsored their Launch Pad homebrew competition. I entered a second iteration of my Camp Randall Red IPA. I bottled my beer too soon, and the resulting batch was yeasty and overcarbonated. The over-carbonation caused the beer to gush.

Wanting to foster relationships with local homebrew clubs, when BHZ put together their Lift Off Competition for 2017 they restricted entry to homebrew club members that live within 25 miles of their Weymouth brewery. As I lived more than 25 miles away I couldn't enter the competition this year, but I did volunteer to judge. The competition was organized by the MASH Holes who I had a great time hanging out with at Jamboree and Homebrew Con.

Judging was at South Shore Homebrew Emporium in Weymouth. After sleeping through my alarm I managed not to arrive too late. In the first round I judged Strong Dark Lagers, and then participated in the Best-of-Show judging. Six beers advanced to the Best-of-Show round. Our job was to only pick the top three to be brewed on BHZ's pilot system. From there, the beers will be served at the brewery and winner selected at a special event.

For any readers not from Massachusetts, I live in an area north of Boston called the North Shore. Weymouth is located south of Boston on the South Shore. Although not separated by many road miles, Boston and it's poorly-conceived road and rail links separate the North and South Shore like Hadrian's Wall.

With no traffic on a Saturday morning it took me an hour to get to Weymouth. On a weekday it would easily have taken me twice as long. While I was in the area the plan was to always go to Trillium's brewery in Canton after judging. When I saw that BHZ was less than ten minutes from the judging site it made perfect sense to stop by the taproom as well.

The space at BHZ was really nice, lots of exposed wood and metal, and plenty of room to sit and relax. The staff couldn't have been more friendly.

I started with a taster of a juniper pils, Sunny & 79º. The juniper flavor was more prominent than most gins I have tasted, but it worked well with the base beer. I also enjoyed two barrel-aged stouts Adeline and Quaker State. I gave Adeline a slight edge over the oatmeal stout, Quaker State as I felt it had a more robust roasted malt and hop flavor. 

The two beers that got my wheels spinning a bit as a brewer were Townie a 9% Irish Red Ale aged in rum barrels, and Red Rye Ale #23, a 10% red rye ale aged in Jamaican rum barrels. Technically speaking the base beers would be in the American or British Strong Ale category due to their high ABV. In a commercial as opposed to composition setting I don't worry nearly as much about style parameters. A commercial brewer deserves wide latitude in how they describe their beer to the public.

These two beers were a revelation because the vast majority of barrel-aged beers are imperial stouts. There are some barleywines and a few Belgian dark strong ales. The only beer available locally that experiments with different styles and wood is Innis & Gunn. These beers showed the kind of flavor a scaled up Irish Red or American Amber Ale brewed with rye can produce. In both cases the rum barrel was perfect for aging. 

As homebrewers we should experiment with aging different styles with wood or in barrels. An ESB, Brown Ale, or even an IPA scaled up and aged on or in wood would make an interesting beer to try. Next time I go big with one of my beers, I think I might try a bit of an unconventional style. 

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Kräusening, never again! At least probably never again

There are some practices employed by commercial brewers that aren't necessarily practical for homebrewers. There are also traditional methods that were employed for various reasons that no longer make sense with modern brewing methods and ingredients. Kräusening arguably fits both.

Kräusening is the process of adding actively fermenting wort, at high kräusen, to an already fermented beer. German brewers bound by the reinheitsgebot couldn't use priming sugar to package their beer would frequently use this method. In addition to helping carbonate packaged beer, the most obvious is you can top off a batch with the fermenting wort. My original impetus to try kräusening was when my Anti-Chris and Sour-Chris both finished under five gallons.

Kräusening when the beer is conditioning in a secondary fermenter had and is said to have other benefits: the active yeast can help ensure a full attenuation and/or jumpstart a stuck fermentation, the active yeast can clean up off-flavors (which is why Budweiser is kräusened), and it can help reduce oxidation.

In a pale, dry, high gravity beer like Anti-Chris, all of these benefits are appealing. Last summer, the only beer out of the four I brewed for my US of IPA project that I racked to a secondary was Broken Fist. At Jamboree Dave from SoMe Brewing sampled Broken Fist off a keg and noticed it was oxidized. The portion of the batch that I bottled were even worse over time. The beer took on an ashy hue, while the hop flavor was flat and generally unpleasant. A big, boozy beer like Anti-Chris will need to condition in a secondary fermenter.

For a commercial brewer that brews the same beer often, kräusening can be fairly easy. It is as simple as rigging up a hose from a batch that is actively fermenting and topping off a batch in another tank. For a homebrewer it is not that simple.

The easiest way, and only way I could see myself ever kräusening again, is to boil a small amount of dry malt extract, pitching some yeast, and add to your carboy after a day or two. Another option that seems workable is to set aside a portion of wort and yeast from brew day, seal them, and then pitched the saved yeast into the same wort after you rack the main batch to a secondary, and then blend back in.

I didn't have the foresight to do the latter. Even if I did, I would be scared of contamination. Not wanting to alter my original recipe, I didn't want to go with the DME route. What I ended up doing was brewing a mini-batch of Anti-Chris, pitching yeast, and then using it to top off the other batches.

I shot for a two gallon mini-batch. Both beers I was kräusening already had ample hop bitterness. I thought it would be fairly easy to do a small BIAB mash, boil my wort for 15 minutes just to ensure it was sterile, and pitch my yeast. 

Unfortunately Anti-Chris employed a 90 minute mash, plus a 15 minute mashout. In addition to those steps, the time it took to heat my strike water, and time to cool the wort, the mini-batch took almost as long as a regular batch. While I was mashing i racked Anti-Chris to a carboy. 

I pitched my yeast and after 12 hours there were signs of active fermentation. At around 24 hours I poured the fermenting wort into the carboy of Anti-Chris to top it off. In hindsight I really should have gently racked the beer with a siphon. Pouring the beer as I did only introduced more oxygen. Hopefully the active yeast gobbles it all up. 

My initial batch was really close to 5 gallons.

After pouring there was a thick krausen at the
top of the fermenter. It quickly subsided.

After 18 hours a new layer of krausen emerged.
Hopefully it takes care of the oxygen I needlessly
introduced.

Adding the wort to a carboy allowed me to monitor what was going on inside the vessel. My mini batch ended up at only 1.5 gallons. I probably blended in at most 0.25 gallons into Anti-Chris. The rest went into Sour Chris. As Sour Chris is still in a plastic bucket, I couldn't see exactly what was going on, but there was plenty of airlock activity. The mini-batch should boost the overall ABV of Sour-Chris.

We'll see in another six weeks when Anti-Chris is ready to drink if this was worth the effort. We will also see if I unnecessarily infected, oxidized, or otherwise altered the flavor of the beer. I did have a small sample before racking. It was dry, bitter, and some of the hop flavor was present. with some time to let the hop bitterness mellow it seemed like it was on its way before I dumped this extra fermenting wort in there.

While working on this, I did settled on the blend of dry hops I plan to add.  I am going to bottle the Anti-Chris and Pasteinator the weekend of April 15-16. That will give both beers three weeks to condition in the bottle before our club's competition.


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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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Tasting Notes – Catching up on past beers Part II

This is a belated Part II where I post some thoughts and reflections on beers I brewed in 2016. Click here for Part 1.

Salted Caramel Brown Ale – The other batch we brewed for Jamboree. Adding the actual salted caramel was an afterthought, which given the name of the beer was something of a problem. In a pinch I added Hershey’s caramel syrup and sea salt to taste when I kegged the beer. The beer didn’t have enough time to naturally carbonate in time for jambo. In the end the beer was a decent enough brown ale, with a slight hint of salt and caramel. I promised Jennie I would go back to the drawing board before brewing another salted caramel beer. I still have most of the keg in the basement. I think I will break it out for the North Shore Brewers holiday party in January. Rating 3 out of 5.

NSB SMaSH Base Malt – I jotted down some quick thoughts on the other SMaSH beers brewed by other club members. All of the beers were fairly boring, because the beer was designed to be boring. The point of the exercise was to taste the flavor contributions of various base malts.

The ingredient variable aside, having brewed basically the same recipe as several other brewers, my batch more than held its own. After my Galaxy IPA from the club’s single hop project finished overly dry last year, having this year’s club project beer be as solid as it was validates my brewing process as much as anything. I packaged the beer in four half-gallon flip-top growlers. I opened one at the club picnic. I brought two to jamboree to be served along with the club’s other SMaSH beers. I ended up dumping most of those when I needed to fill the growlers with leftover Broken Fist. Alas, I still have one growler left. Rating 3.75 out of 5.

Commonwealth v Chalifour – This was a tripel recipe I developed, that Andy and his brother AJ brewed. After rushing to have it ready for AJ’s 30th birthday party, we weren’t able to bottle the beer in time. Andy and I each kept four bottles, and gave the rest to AJ. I thought it was pretty good, if perhaps a little light for the style. Jennie said she got some sourness in the flavor. I didn’t really get it. I shared a bottle with the manager at the Modern Homebrew Emporium as part of my “liquid resume”. Plenty of esters from the Belgian yeast. Rating 3.5 out of 5.

Summer Somewhere 2016 – I had originally planned to bring this beer to Beans N Brews in June. However I let the beer sit in the secondary for too long before packaging, and it was not ready for the event. I ended up bringing bottles of Fort Dummer instead.  I ended up bringing a keg of Summer Somewhere to AJ’s birthday party in lieu of the not-quite-ready Commonwealth v Chalifour.

The London Ale 1318 yeast definitely threw more fruit flavor into the beer than the Irish Ale 1084 I used in the 2015 version. The Styrian Bobek hops gave the beer more of a pilsner-type flavor. The beer tasted far more European than the citrus bomb that the 2015 version hopped with Galaxy was.

I brought a one gallon polypin to a North Shore Brewers meeting. The beer had fallen off considerably by then, but was still drinkable.

At AJ’s party there was a half-barrel keg of Samuel Adams Summer Ale and a quarter-barrel keg of Harpoon IPA. That my 3 gallon keg kicked that night is a point of pride. This is a beer I will brew every year. I might play around with different ingredients, but the bones of the recipe will never change. Rating 4.25 out of 5.

Fort Dummer – It’s never good when you find two ounces of hops in the freezer and realize they were supposed to go into the beer you just bottled. The batch was still pretty good. The folks at Beans N Brews enjoyed it even though they were expecting an English summer ale. When I drank it I kept thinking about the missing hops and in my mind the beer should have been better. When brewing four IPAs at once for my United States of IPA project, I made sure to pre-measure and label every dry hop addition to avoid making the same mistake again. Rating 3.5 out of 5.

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Brew Day: Utopias Barrel SMaSH Barleywine

Shortly before I rejoined the North Shore Brewers, the club obtained two used Samuel Adams Utopias barrels. Utopias is one of the rarest and most sought-after beers in the world. I was lucky enough to have a very small sample at the brewery. I made sure to savor every mini-sip. It is a big deal for the club to have gotten its hands on the barrels.

Around the time I joined, the club filled both barrels with an imperial stout; a clone of Portsmouth Brewery’s Kate the Great. Several members of the club brewed the beer, let it ferment out, filled the barrels, then after the beer had aged for several months got the same volume of the now blended beer back. On top of that the club got five gallons to pour at Jamboree. The keg at Jamboree kicked fairly quickly once word spread the club had a Kate clone. I made sure to try some early on, and it was outstanding.

After emptying both barrels the club decided to fill one of the barrels with an English Barleywine. Like the SMaSH Base Malt beers we brewed earlier this year, the SMaSH Barleywine used a single malt, Maris Otter, and single hop East Kent Goldings. A big beer like this uses a lot of grain, 20 pounds to be exact. There was no way I would be able to brew that at home. The brew day would also be very long. I wouldn’t want to impose a long brew day like that on Andy. As it is we will do well to squeeze in one last brew day before winter.  In my mind I was going to sit this one out and maybe brew something when it is time to fill the second barrel the second time.

At the last meeting I was encouraged to brew a batch of the barleywine because there was room in the barrel for another three batches before it would be full. I texted my friend Pat who is also in the club and we arranged a brew day at his house.

 

My 10 gallon igloo cooler mash tun was plenty large to accommodate all of the grain and mash water. Pat asked about maybe brewing a 10 gallon batch, but we would not have been able to do it with the equipment we have. Our target mash temperature was right on the money at the end of the mash rest.

  

The recipe called for boiling down one gallon of the first runninigs, that is the first liquid to run out of the mash tun after the mash and is the highest in sugars, all the way to one quart. The idea is the concentrated first runnings would add some additional malt complexity to a single-malt beer. The boil was 90 minutes. The longer boil enabled us to collect more fermentable sugars before boiling it down to our five gallon batch.

 

We started around 10:00 a.m. and finished around 4:00 p.m. While long the brew day was fairly smooth. In about three weeks we will drop off the beer to be racked into the Utopias barrell. From there it will probably be at least six to nine months before we can collect our share. The plan at that point is to add some fresh yeast before bottle conditioning and splitting the bottles.

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Brew Day: Larrupin Lou’s XXX Ale (American Pale Ale)

In 2015 I was sort of a last minute fill-in at the Ales for ALS Homebrew Competition in Essex. Jennie and I each hastily put together recipes for Fort Dummer and Shareholder’s Saison, to bring along with some bottles of Curly’s Milk Stout which was the beer I entered into the competition.

I was quite happy with both beers we brewed for the competition. I have already re-brewed a batch of Fort Dummer. That batch was okay, but after packaging I found two packages of hops that were supposed to go in as the second dry hop. We have been cellaring several bottles of Shareholder’s Saison. We opened a bomber at Jamboree and found that while still subtle, the brettanomyces flavor is a bit more pronounced while the hop character has faded.

As pleased as I was with both of those beers, shortly after the event last year I started thinking about what I would want to brew for the 2016 event. While looking for some beer inspiration, I found the experimental HBC – 438 hop online. New, experimental hop varieties are given numbers instead of names until they are ready to be sold on a commercial scale. There are two features about HBC – 438 is that make it perfect to bring to an event like this. Firstly the hop is currently only available to homebrewers. Nobody attending the event in Essex would have likely ever tasted a beer with this hop. More pertinently, all of the proceeds from this hop go to ALS research. It is too perfect not to use.

Northern Brewer sells a Luckiest Man Pale Ale kit featuring HBC – 438 where a portion of the proceeds benefit Ales for ALS, but I felt like I had to develop my own recipe. I thought about Lou Gehrig and the Yankees. Then I remembered the connection the Yankees had with the old Ballantine Brewery from when I brewed a one gallon Ballantine IPA clone.

The other recipe I found at that time was for a pale ale, Ballantine XXX Ale. My idea was to brew a version of the old XXX Ale, but with HBC – 438. It would be too perfect. There is a connection with Lou Gehrig. The hop in the beer directly benefits the same charity as the event itself. I bought the hops months in advance just to make sure I would have them for when it was time to brew.

 

I kept the grist exactly the same as the clone recipe that I found. I made sure to use all American malts as that felt like what Ballantine would have used. I did find East Coast Yeast’s Old Newark Ale strain in stock. This is almost certainly the old Ballantine strain, and the description on the website says it is NOT the Chico (Sierra Nevada) strain as is widely rumored. However, I couldn’t bring myself to spend $15 to ship an $8 vial of yeast. A fellow club member in the North Shore brewers has a culture of the strain, but I didn’t have time to build up his culture to make sure I had enough cells. I compromised and used one of my favorite strains, Wyeast 1272. The profile seems similar enough to Old Newark Ale.

 

This was my first brew day at Andy’s in quite awhile. We are going to try to get one last brew day in before winter. I enjoy brewing outside on a nice day so much more than making a mess inside my kitchen. I think it would be fun and interesting to brew with different people and see their process first-hand.

See the full recipe here.

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Tasting Notes: The United States of IPA

I am terrible when it comes to posting tasting notes for my beers. I’m lucky if I get around to writing up my impressions on half of my batches. In the future I think I’ll do some catch-up pieces where I write some quick impressions of several beers.

The US of IPA is the perfect time for me to test out this concept. I brought the beers to Jamboree, and with all that goes on at Jambo I didn’t exactly have time to hold each beer up to the light to note the appearance, and then swirl the beer around to rouse the head and make a detailed description of the aroma.

Broken First IPA (West Coast IPA): I think I nailed the recipe. The extra Citra that I didn’t have for batch one gave the beer a much more prominent hop flavor. I ran into a coworker who was attending Jambo for the first time. He tasted all four of the beers and enjoyed this one the best.

Dave Rowland from SoMe Brewing said he got a very low level of oxidation from it. Oxidation may be an off-flavor he is more sensitive to than others, especially as a commercial brewer. Broken Fist was the only beer of the group that I racked to a secondary fermenter which could explain the oxidation Since the beer was double dry-hopped, I didn’t want the beer sitting on the first dry hop for too long. Broken Fist was also the first of the four that I brewed making it the least fresh.

To improve the beer going forward is more about improving my process than the recipe. Dave said when I think I purged my keg with CO2 enough, to go ahead and purge some more. If I rack to a secondary fermenter, that should be purged also. Next time I would need to brew more wort to account for the huge amount of hop absorption.

Ideally I would cold crash the beer and use a fining agent like gelatin to help with clarity.

Age of Sail IPA (East Coast IPA): This beer proves that an IPA can showcase a rich and complex malt profile. I learned at Jamboree that Stone Path Malt while based in New England that the malt is actually malted in Germany at a family-owned malthouse in Bavaria. Even if the malt doesn’t have a New England terrior, the traditionally produced malts were perfect for this traditional IPA. Michael Scroth, co-founder of Stone Path really enjoyed the beer.  I look forward to using their products more in the future. The Ringwood Ale yeast with its medium attenuation accentuated the malt flavor perfectly.

Hop bitterness was sufficient, while the hop flavor was perhaps a touch low. If I brewed this again I would probably substitute the Mt. Hood hops for Crystal or Cascade, increase the hops late in the boil and dry hops slightly. For a first brew I was quite happy with it. The 3 gallon keg kicked at Jamboree. It is comforting to know I am not the only person who still appreciates a more traditional, balanced IPA.

Flyover IPA (Midwest IPA): Not only was this the last recipe I finished putting together, it was the last name I came up with. I wish I did a little more research on the name as there are several commercial beers with the same or similar names.

The beer itself is rock solid and felt like a quality representation of Midwest IPAs. It was hoppier than Age of Sail, and maltier than Broken Fist. The underlying malt flavor was clean and slightly sweet. It was also not too sweet that the mash clashed with the citrusy hop flavor. I think the hop profile was perfect for this beer. Flyover was the only keg not to kick at Jambo. I look forward to revisiting it again and seeing if I enjoy it as much as I did at Jamboree.

 

Haze for Daze IPA (New England IPA): I couldn’t have been happier with this brew. It had the characteristic “juicy” hop flavor and soft mouthfeel. I think increasing my flaked adjuncts really enhanced the latter.

I got similar fruit esters from the Giga Yeast Vermont Ale yeast as I’ve gotten from Heady Topper and beers I’ve made with The Yeast Bay’s Vermont Ale. That really complimented the fruity hops used in the beer. The Pearl malt gave the beer a light sweetness which added further complexity.

This beer is another keeper. I would love to brew exactly the same recipe, but with three different hops varieties.

In all I would say the project was a success. I was able to brew with a wide variety of different ingredients, combine different flavors, and make four unique beers that all fall within the same style.

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