Investment?

So I am trying to decide if it is an investment or just another waste of money in this flight of fancy.

I picked up a Brewtec Micro Brew kit. I am sure there was a plan when I went out. I had vague ideas that I needed a crown capper as I have been collecting empties for bottling 'Joan Jettison'. I also thought that maybe I needed something to transfer the fermented JJ beer into before bottling so I could avoid the gunk at the bottom that insists on coming out of of the tap. Somehow this logic turned into a whole new beer kit...

It also means I have a 'Premium Draft' kit to turn into something drinkable...

Catrina Neue Costs

To satisfy my slightly OCD tendency's I have been recording all the money I am spending on my home brewing enterprise.

Here is a breakdown for the "Catrina Neue 1.0" brew I did:

*The amortised cost will decrease the more brews I make (you can see the number of brews in brackets)

The time is a bit of an estimate as I didn't record it accurately while brewing or making the labels. I will try to remember for future brews.

At the time if writing the per litre price sits at $15.93 (your view might be different as the above spreadsheet is dynamic) . Considering I want to say I paid $16.50 per litre (but I can't exactly remember) at the Garage Project cellar door for La Calavera Catrina in a rigger (the beer Catrina Neue is based on) when you include labour, trying to replicate it at home is not exactly cost effective.

Especially if it turns out to be undrinkable...

A beer only it's mother would love?

So I know I was supposed to wait - hell it has been less than a week since I bottled it - but when I was labelling my 'Catrina Neue' (the Garage Project knock off) some of the bottles that had been conditioning in a warmer location were rock hard and I started to get nervous about the two 330ml glass bottles and the potential for catastrophic failure of the containment grid...

So I put them in the fridge...

Opened one...

And it is drinkable...

Good carbonation (which is a worry after a week, what the hell is going to happen over time). Very clear. Very Red. Way too sweet. I mean way way way too sweet. It is actually a bit like a shandy (if shandy's had a chilli bite to them - which incidentally is the only thing I did get right). Too much watermelon syrup. Too much rose syrup. Too many carbonation drops. There are just so many things wrong with it - but of course I love it. And it is a v1.0 (actually it probably should be a v0.1)

Lucky I just picked up some Garage Project Venusian Pale Ale to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Lets hope it improves with age. All babies are ugly little bastards at birth.

Patience is a virtue?

Oh man, nobody warned me that waiting to sample would be so hard!

Every day I am squeezing the plastic bottles of 'Caterina Neue 1.0' trying to judge how much carbonation they have. They are getting harder so something is happening inside the bottles. It has only been 5 days since bottling, and already I am itching to throw one of the small glass bottles into the fridge to crack into. I know I have to wait, but it is killing me!

In other news I dropped my temperature sensor into the water surrounding the fermenter when changing ice packs. Considering it is just a raw circuit board and while in the water it decided to connect to the wifi to transmit a temperature I was thinking I might have stuffed it - however it has sat for a few hours drying out and after reconnecting the battery it seems to be working OK. I might need to come up with a better attachment method that the bungy cord.

I also took a sample of the 'Joan Jettison' stout. SG is down to 1020 (from 1074) making it currently about 7%, but even with all that residual sugar it still tastes rather bitter (living up to the Jettison part of the name?) It is also pretty chunky (I guess with the cherry puree and the tap at the bottom of the bucket I am picking up trub). I am thinking that I will leave it on the yeast cake for a few more weeks to hopefully clean up the flavour and try again. If it is still nasty then I might have a go at racking to a secondary fermentor and adding some more cherry.

All this waiting...

Beer Names and Labels

Generic brown bottles don’t really appeal. Brown plastic bottles appeal even less. You don’t see commercial beers without a label, so why should home brew be any different?

When you carefully hand make a beer, what could be a better tribute than to couple it with a hand made label. But not just any label. In the case of my clone of Garage Project La Calevera Cateria (which has a stunning label design from Autumn McGrail) I decided to stick with the La Calevara Catrina theme and do a handmade linocut version of a detail from PaleHorse’s Caterina. Caterina Neue 1.0 (though I guess it should have maybe been Caterina Nuevo 1.0)

This was printed on my little bottle jack press on what I think is 128gsm Glossy stock (we had it sitting round at work unlabeled, hence not much good for doing customer samples on) using some old offset PMS430C ink (another TradeMe purchase) and then when dry will be sellotaped on to the bottles.

As the beer is still warm conditioning I am not sure how this combination of stock, ink and adhesive will hold up when refrigerated so it might end up being something different for the chocolate cherry stout (which I have decided to call “Joan Jettison” - an oblique reference to Garage Project’s Cherry Bomb and the fact that I might want to throw it away after trying it)

Chocolate Cherry Stout

I loved KJD Cherry Porter when I first tried it a couple of years ago. Being a seasonal beer you don’t see it all the time, but when I spotted it at the supermarket over Xmas I bought 8 bottles. Boy was I disappointed when I got home and had a bottle. The only way I could describe it was it tasted like it had been brewed on a budget. Not enough cherry, not enough chocolate, not enough sweetness, not enough flavor. It was OK, but nothing like how I remember it.

I also loved Garage Project Cherry Bomb when I had it at Soba Matariki beer festival a few years ago, but despite me mentioning it every time I visit Garage Project, it has never made it from the pilot plant to the full scale plant, so it is never available.

Being one batch of beer into home brewing, full of piss and vinegar I figured that I could do better that KJD and GP. The starting point was a can of Blackrock Miners Stout. Rather than using sugar like the recipe on the can says I changed to a can of dark malt extract - then I went crazy and added two cans of cherries in syrup (whizzed in a sanatised blender) and 250g of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup. Just for giggles I also chucked in 500gm of brown sugar and made the total volume up to 20L. The wort tasted pretty good - bitter and sweet and chocolatey (in fact maybe a little too chocolatey!)

I learned from my mistake last time and had frozen an icecream container of water which I added to the wort to get the temperature down to 18deg before pitching rehydrated S-04 yeast (it was rehydrated in water, but I realised I should have used wort)

Despite the fact that the guy at the home brew shop said I wouldn't need a blow off tube I fitted one anyway (he was right) before putting the fermenter in a plastic crate and attaching a temperature sensor. The plastic crate was to allow me to add some cold water to keep the temperature down (S-04’s ideal temperature is 15-20deg). Turns out that I did need to wrap the fermenter in teatowels and wet with fridge temperature water (plus added a couple of slicker pads) when it got over 20deg. Looking at the log of the temperature rising now, looks like I will have to do that again just to keep it down.

I am not sure why I am not getting much krazen in my fermentation barrel - it makes me worry, despite the fact that the last batch did exactly the same and it fermented OK. I will check the SG in a couple of days and see what's happening. I can always pitch some more yeast if it needs it.

I have not yet decided if I am going to transfer to a secondary and add more cherry’s. I am concerned that moving the beer from the yeast cake, then adding more simple sugars will mean when bottling the yeast might not have enough muster to carbonate the beer. Maybe I need to transfer some of the yeast cake to the secondary too (the primary goal for secondary is to add more cherry flavor not for clearing the beer)

We shall see...

Temperature Control

Now this is the reason that I resisted home brewing for so long. I had a feeling that like many other hobbies that I have started, it would consume my life for a short length of time and I would end up going a little crazy on gadgets. Case in point:

My first home brew sat at about 22deg as that was the ambient air temperature - I only guessed at this because this was what showed on the stick on thermometer on the side of the fermenter. All my homebrewing buddies said that this was too warm and I should find somewhere cooler in the house. I did some checking and while I found somewhere that was about 20deg it was probably still a little on the warm side.

A modified fridge or chest freezer would be ideal. Trade Me (NZ’s eBay) did show some affordable second hand fridges, but we really don’t have that much spare space, plus we do have two fridges already. The second fridge (ours, rather than the landlords) is fairly empty (it was what I used for crash cooling my first beer) so that has the potential for being turned into a fermenter.

Because I know that I do tend to go hard out with new hobbies I thought I would resist making modifications to a perfectly good fridge until I was 100% sure that this hobby is not just temporary, so I needed something in the meantime - so I spent a bunch of money and built an internet connected logging thermometer using an Electric Imp based on the TempBug Indestructible.

My reason for going with this (and ordering a couple of extra parts kits) was that it could evolve in the future to be able to actually turn on and off a fridge (for cooling) and a heat pad (for warming)

What I ended up doing was putting my fermenter into a larger plastic box and filling about 5cm from the bottom with water and adding ice packs to keep the temperature under 20deg. Seems to be working pretty well. I can see the temperature being logged every 5min and see when I need to change the ice packs - I tend to change twice a day, before going to work and before going to bed. Keeps it between 18 and 20deg - hopefully ideal for my stout.