On the photography avenue, I have taken to using that flaming ball of gas we orbit as my primary source of light. To address the problem of fill light, I picked up a pair of Lastolite TriGrip Reflectors. Since bigger is always better I ended up with the large version. Four-foot tall reflectors are not easily handled without an assistant. Looks like I will need to find an assistant.

Usually, I would never dream of writing the above without the inclusion of some photographs. It just so happens my 5D is right next to me with plenty of photographs I would actually love to share. The problem? My Core2Duo 24″ iMac was kindly equipped with one of Apple’s subpar LCD panels. Leave anything still for even a single minute and its outline, and sometimes even text, would burn into the screen. I could understand if this happened after a period of hours. I cannot understand how it happens in less than five minutes. Anyway, my netbook lacks the power to handle my RAW files so until Apple is kind enough to give me back my iMac I have no real way to get those photos up. Sad times for all.

Still on the photography note, I am considering getting rid of my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM lens. Having gone through a good deal of my photos taken with that lens it seems I tend to use it at both 28mm and 50mm quite a lot. I have faster primes at each of those focal lengths. Just from actually using the lens I also know that I often find myself wishing I had just a hair more reach than its 70mm telephoto end gives me. Generally, that means I am either walking closer to my subject or swapping on the gigantic Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens. Right now, I have two thoughts on how I’ll approach this problem. Thought one involves the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens. Thought two involves the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM lens.

Enough photography talk for now. School is driving me mad. Once upon a time, I was awesome at math and science. If only the same held true today. Might my epic failure on my last physics exam be somewhat related to my not having had to use this half of my brain much at all in the last decade? Possibly. Am I okay with that? No, I am not. Next week I take my finals. Next week I do or die in both calculus two, and physics.

There is a natural light at the end of the tunnel next week. A few short hours after I finish my physics final, I will be flying to Boston for about a week. Sometimes the best way to deal with a stressful semester is to fly at least a thousand miles away from it. It helps when there are old friends to see all over the place, and new ones to meet in the same places. I am looking forward to the break because when it is done I have a brutal summer semester to tackle. Calculus three, and physics two. Oh. Joy.

What else? Oh, right. Beer. My keezer had a very large temperature gradient from the bottom of the keezer to the top of the keezer. This, it seems, was largely responsible for some of my more annoying carbonation problems. A fix was obviously needed and a quick trip to the garage provided me with an idea. A few minutes and a few pieces of bent metal later my temperature sensor had migrated its way off the floor. The temperature gradient still exists but now at least my beer lines stay cold enough to maintain an appropriate level of carbonation between the keg and my glass. I still need to go refill my CO2 tank.

Anyway, I’ve kegged another beer and now have it force carbonating as well. My “Adventure Ale” will not have a beer line connected to it until it has sat under CO2 pressure (10psi @ 35°F) for at least three weeks. We will see if I end up with better carbonation results than I did with the German Kölsch. One thing I intend to do before too long is build a small plenum inside the keezer to keep the cold air moving inside, instead of all just settling down on the floor. There is a fairly significant, at least if you’re CO2 dissolved into an aqueous solution, temperature gradient from the floor (35°F) of the keezer to the shanks for my faucets (39°F). Right now, my best guess is that the temperature gradient is responsible for loss of carbonation between the keg and my glass.

German Kölsch

The beer was already very clear, but in an effort to minimize any sorts of sediment I’m going to be using secondary regardless of whirfloc use (or non-use). To my surprise, the time it spent in fermentation calmed the incredible level of hop flavor down a good deal. It still certainly has a hop bite, but that bite is replaced with an interesting malt character on the aftertaste. I don’t know what to think about that, but I imagine with proper carbonation this will end up with a unique mouthfeel. I can definitely live with that.

Gravity and temperature

I took a drive down to DeFalco’s, and again spent more than I planned. Two one-gallon glass carboys, with stoppers and airlocks, came home with me. I also picked up a stopper to use when I finally start bottling from the keg. Whoever helped me at DeFalco’s took off grabbing ingredients when I said I wanted to brew an IPA. I failed to get an ingredient list, and I certainly did not get what is in any of their recipe kits online, so beyond knowing I used 1.5 ounces of Columbus hops, an ounce of Centennial hops, and an ounce of Cascade hops – I really couldn’t tell you what I did.

Support materials

Given that I had no idea what was in the specialty grain bag, I just took a SWAG and heated 2 gallons of water to 150°F and steeped for 25 minutes. I definitely got color from the specialty grains, a very dark amber. Anyway, from there I brought my volume up to 6 gallons and stirred in my unknown amount of liquid malt extract (I also don’t know which variety LME I used, I seem to recall seeing pilsner on the side of the barrel it came out of, but who knows). Once everything was dissolved, I kicked up the heat and brought things to a heavy boil.

Steeping Grains

After the foam dropped, in with an ounce and a half of Columbus hops. 40 minutes later, an ounce of Centennial went in, and at flame out an once of Cascade. Something, that’d be my tongue, tells me this was entirely too much alpha acid. Entirely. Too. Much. Makes for good pictures though.

Columbus Hops

All things considered, I will be very surprised if this beer ends up being drinkable at all. That said, it wasn’t a complete waste. Joseph got to experience a brewday and see how things generally go together and make beer. Carrie got to participate too, via Skype, by telling me just how much fun it was to watch “brown water boil.” I will leave the fermenter in the closet, and keep an eye on things, but I am not expecting to get a good beer out of this. Time will tell.

The build was actually quite simple, and can be done for far less than I spent on mine. Impatience won out, and I ended up converting a brand new chest freezer rather than scouring classifieds in search of one that wasn’t three tanks of gas away. In short, get a refrigeration device, some kegs, a temperature controller, faucets, a CO2 system, and plumbing for your fluids. Drill some holes for your faucets and hook up your plumbing. Serve beer.

Perlick 525SS faucets

You didn’t really think I was going to leave it at that, did you?

In the interest of not having to post every single image, I’ll do another slideshow, but first a brief rundown of how everything happened.

First, I bought a G.E. chest freezer from Home Depot, along with some sheet metal for my drip tray, black appliance paint, and some textured paint for the collar. I also bought wood to make the collar (a spacer to increase the vertical clearance inside the freezer – and keep me from having to drill through the side of the freezer). When I got that home, I took the lid off the freezer and sanded the whole freezer.

Building the collar was easy, as I already had the dimensions for the top of the freezer and had the 2′x4′ piece of plywood cut when I bought it. Butt joints won today, and were covered up with wood filler and sanded smooth. Just like it never happened. Since I was mounting the lid to the top of the collar, I decided to reinforce where the lid would attach by gluing and screwing another board in at the mounting point. Insulation was next, adhered by my friend Liquid nails. A few moments with a measuring tape and pencil and I had center marks for my faucet holes. Once all of that was finished, I hit the whole collar with sandpaper and washed it off to apply some cool looking textured paint.

While the collar was drying, I hit the freezer with a few coats of black appliance paint. Sadly I got rushed, a little high (from the fumes, people), and ended up with some drips here and there. Attempting to fix those later was an exercise in failure. Sanding a thick, hard, epoxy paint doesn’t work so well. If only I had a sandblaster. Anyway, it still looks pretty decent so I finished the build by drilling a hole for my temperature controller and leaving the probe in a bottle of water. It won’t get cold enough to freeze the bottle, so I didn’t bother with glycol or anything like that.

The only thing that is incomplete, as of this posting, is my drip tray. I bent, with a hammer, sheet metal in to a box and sealed the corners up. Right now, paint is drying. Tomorrow I plan to mount the drip tray to the keezer and post up a final photo. I do have my keg of German Kölsch on tap #1 at this very moment, and do believe it’s a perfect time to go pour myself a glass.

I took the kegs apart, cleaned everything, replaced the O-rings, and then treated both with some more of my 12.5ppm Iodophor solution. From there the process was a lot like bottling. My priming solution (1/3 cup corn sugar in a cup of water) was added to one of the cleaned and sanitized kegs, and I siphoned the beer from my fermenter to the keg. I did manage to make a pretty huge mess, but I’ll solve that problem with a longer section of tubing before I keg another beer. Now that one of the kegs has beer conditioning inside, I’ve got a week or two to actually finish my keezer build. Better get a move on it.

Kegs + Carrie

The Ingredients

• 5 pounds pale malt extract
• 2 pounds wheat malt extract
• .5 pound Carapils® malt
• 1 ounce Palisade hops (bittering)
• .5 ounce Hersbrucker hops (flavoring)
• .5 ounce Hersbrucker hops (finishing)
• 1 vial White Labs German Ale/Kölsch (WLP029) yeast
• 1 package BruVint (yeast food)
• .75 cup corn sugar (priming)

The Process

This time I did a few things different from my first 5 gallon brew, mostly because I needed to save as much time as possible. As always, clean and sanitize everything. Yes, everything. Just do it, stop arguing. It doesn’t take that much time, nor does it cost that much.

Faced with at time crunch, I did not do a full boil this time. 2.5 gallons of drinking water was heated to 155°F in my main brew kettle. In went the half-pound of Carapils® malt to steep for half an hour. The instructions this time around said to cut the heat, but when I did that the cold air outside managed to cool the pot down below 150°F very quickly. Right then, low heat it is.

Steeping Carapils® malt

When my steep time elapsed, I used let the grains drain and added my liquid malt extract. Boil time! A 110,000 BTU jet burner will bring 2.5 gallons of wort to a massive boil very quickly. When I say a massive boil, I mean one so large you end up facing a boilover from 2.5 gallons in a 10.5 gallon pot. Yeah, full power was a bad idea. Good thing I move quickly, and managed to cut heat and get the foaming under control before I had a large problem.

A few short minutes after I cut the heat on, there was a very pronounced hot break. Cue the addition of an ounce of palisade hops for bittering, and the start of my timer. 40 minutes later, I would add half an ounce of hersbrucker hops for flavor. The final 5 minutes of my hour-long boil would see another half ounce of hersbrucker hops for aroma.

Full Boil

Once I had the pot off the burner and in the house, I put my sanitized wort chiller in the pot and stirred with one hand and poured in another 2.5 gallons of water with the other. Temperature dropped quickly. The 8″ strainer I picked up for a few bucks did a great job of keeping the sludge at the bottom of the pot from making its way into my fermentation bucket. With everything properly cooled, and in the bucket, I brought my volume up to the full 5 gallons and gave everything a healthy shake to make sure I had plenty of oxygen in my wort. A gravity reading was also taken, and temperature corrected to 1.049 (a point shy of my target of 1.050). In went the yeast, on went the lid, and in went the airlock.

Right now, the fermentation bucket is under the stairs sitting at a fairly stable (though still too warm) temperature. The job is now in the hands of some White Labs yeast. As Tom Petty once said “the waiting is the hardest part.” Good thing the American Amber Ale is just about ready to chill and drink!

Final gravity was 1.007, down from an original gravity of 1.055. My American Amber Ale will pack a little more punch than is typical of the style, at 6.3% ABV. That, my friends, is not a complaint.

The clarity is pretty excellent, thanks to extra time in secondary (and an auto-siphon rather than tipping it out a spigot). My favorite part is the taste. Unlike my West Coast Pale Ale experiment from Mr. Beer, this beer actually has a nice balance between hop and malt character.

To say I plan on waiting a few weeks to try this with carbonation would be to tell a most uncool lie. I have one bottle that filled enough to get decent carbonation, but not the full monty. In a week or so, it will be popped open and enjoyed. Good chance I take some video of the first pour, like I did last time, as well.

American Amber Ale, with great clarity.

The Ingredients

DeFalco’s happens to have a recipe for that very thing, so here’s the ingredients list for my second homebrew:

• 6 pounds light malt extract
• 1.5 pounds pale malt
• 1 pound medium crystal malt
• 1 ounce Mt. Hood hops (bittering)
• .5 ounce Cascades hops (flavoring)
• .5 ounce Cascades hops (finishing)
• 1 package Burton water salts
• 1 vial White Labs California yeast
• 1 package Bru-Vigor (yeast food)
• .75 cup corn sugar (priming)

The Process

The first step to any successful endeavor is planning. For brewing, make sure you have all the equipment you will need. If you are using gas, as I am, make sure you have full tanks of propane ready to go. Few things would be less awesome than running out of gas before you hit your boil, or during the boil. Do you have your thermometer(s), hydrometer, a large stirring spoon, an appropriate brew kettle/stock pot, enough water you can actually use? What about a wort chiller (or some means of cooling 5gal of wort from boiling to yeast-pitching temperature as rapidly as possible)? Do you have the lid or stopper for your primary fermentation vessel? What about an airlock? Do you have a fluid you can put in your airlock that will reduce the risk of infection? Are all of your ingredients accounted for? A checklist is useful, and Brewer’s Friend happens to have several of them already made up (wish I’d known that before I made my own)! Anyway, if you answered yes to everything you’re ready to start brewing.

Brewing supplies

To start, clean and sanitize everything. Yes, everything. Sure, much of what you will be using are going to contact boiling water sooner than later but you won’t hurt anything by sanitizing it first. I use a light, fragrance-free, detergent and a 3M sponge/scrubbie to physically clean everything to a smooth and grit-free surface. Rinse, dry, and coat in a mist of 12.5ppm Iodophor solution. It stays like that until use.

Knowing I would need to heat water for steeping my specialty grains and water with which to rinse said grains, I split my water between two kettles. I would steep and sparge in my main brew kettle, a 42 quart stock pot, and use another pot to heat my sparge water. My brew kettle was filled with 3.5 gallons of spring water, to which a packet of Burton water salts was added, and brought up to ~165°F. At the same time, my sparge water was warmed to ~150°F to rinse the grains after 30 minutes of steeping.

Steeping was pretty easy, and rewarding. The clear water turned a deep amber very quickly, and released a great malty aroma. To make sure all of the grain was exposed to the hot water, I continuously bobbed the grain bag in the brew kettle. As soon as the bag hit the water, I started the stopwatch on my iPhone – at least my iPhone does something correctly. When 30 minutes elapsed, I pulled the grain bag from the water and rinsed it with the sparge water I had heating in the house.

Steeping speciality grains

At this point, my brew kettle now had 6 gallons of wort from the specialty grains ready to bring to a boil and have 6 pounds of light malt extract stirred in. The jet burner made quick work of bringing the 6 gallons from ~160°F to a rolling boil. It also dropped the pressure in my propane tank so fast the outside of the tank frosted over. That was pretty cool, literally. When the boil hit I cut back the heat, to avoid scorching, and stirred in the light malt extract.

With the wort as full of sugars and proteins as it was going to get, I went back to full heat on the burner until the hot break. A foam formed over the surface of the wort, and then sunk back in. You could see the hot break particles moving about as solids in the wort. This was my cue to add 1 ounce of Mt. Hood bittering hops, and hit the lap button on the stopwatch. 30 minutes later, I added .5 ounce of Cascade hops for flavor, and 15 minutes after that I added the remaining .5 ounce of Cascade hops to finish for the final 15 minutes of the boil.

Final hop addition

At the end of the 1 hour of boiling past my first hop addition, I cut the flame and immediately moved the brew kettle to my wort chiller to start cooling. Stirring the wort while the chiller was running made the temperature drop much faster than just letting the cooler run on its own. It only took about 15 minutes to drop the wort from more than 210°F to ~80°F. This could be done even faster if I also had a pre-chiller to drop the water flowing through the immersion chiller down closer to freezing.

Cooling the wort

With the wort cooled sufficiently, I took sample and found its gravity using my hydrometer. I also took the temperature so I could correct the hydrometer reading. My target original gravity was 1.050, per the recipe, and my actual original gravity (temperature corrected) is 1.055. Final gravity should be 1.012 when all is said and done. The California yeast is a high attenuation yeast, so it should be able to bring the gravity from 1.055 down to 1.012 without trouble.

The cooled wort was poured into my 6.5 gallon primary fermentation bucket. I splashed it around as much as possible for aeration, but took care to minimize the disturbance of the sediments that fell out of solution during the cooling phase. Another temperature reading verified that my wort was well within the pitching range for the White Labs California yeast, so the vial was shaken and poured into the wort along with the packet of yeast nutrient. I snapped the lid down securely, agitated some more, and put in my airlock.

Everything I’ve read places fermentation temperature control up near the top of the list of things one must have for consistently good beers. My first brew likely suffered some due to 10°F temperature swings in my closet from the heat of the day to the cold of night. Fortunately our house has a very central closet that maintains a very stable temperature day and night. My fermenter, wrapped in towels and topped with a thermometer, found its way to this closet. Some 20 hours later the airlock was bubbling like crazy. A good sign for sure.

In the fermenter

In a few days, when the bubbles slow in my airlock, I will take a sample of my beer and make another gravity reading. Should this reading be 30% lower than my original gravity, I will prepare to rack into my 5 gallon glass carboy for secondary fermentation to clear the beer more before bottling. When the time comes, I will clean and sanitize my bottling bucket and rack from my secondary fermenter onto a priming solution (.75 cups dextrose in 2 cups of water, boiled and cooled) in the sanitized bottling bucket. Unlike my transfer to my primary fermenter, I will seek to minimize any splashing as much as possible to avoid oxidation problems in my beer later down the line. The majority of this beer will go into standard 12 fluid ounce glass bottles, though I intend to bottle some of the brew into larger containers I can bring with me to share with friends.

Update:

In just four short days this beer fermented down all the way to a temperature-corrected 1.009, so I went ahead and racked to secondary. The beer will sit there for a few weeks, and hopefully get super clear for me when I bottle. At any rate, I am looking forward to drinking this one. The sample I took my gravity reading from tasted great.