Beer thread
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@MN5 said in Beer thread:
@nzzp said in Beer thread:
@MN5 said in Beer thread:
As the most experienced beer brewer I ( don’t actually ) know would you you recommend putting them in that little sack or not ?
Don't bother if they can drop out with a cold crash before you bottle/keg it. THe hops will drop out when it's cold, so don't worry too much
I have started using a floating dip tube with a hop screen, and it keep junk out of the beer and particularly the keg head post... really nice.
“Drop out” ? What do you mean?
Can you tell I’m really new to all this and the lingo that accompanies it ?
Aha, sorry, was travelling yesterday so quick answers only.
When you add hops (I'm referring here to hop pellets, which are all we really get regularly in NZ), they contain hop matter. The hops themselves are super bitter, which you'll know if you ever taste one (and you should, but probably only once).
What you want from the hops is the flavouring/armoa, particularly from the oils, and what you don't want is the hop matter. So when I say 'drop out' I refer to the hop matter.
If you dry hop heavily (and modern IPA/HAzy can have amounts of hops that classic beers never contemplated), you can get hop matter in suspension. This shows up in the beer as 'hop burn' - a real bitterness or burn in the back of your throat. You know if it you have it. That drops out if you gelatine fine, or leave it to drop out naturally, particularly in cold beers.
So, when you use a hop sock, it lets you take a lot of the hop matter out. The risk is usually seen as the hops not being completely exposed to the wort, and the possibility of the effectiveness of your dry hops dropping off. Thta depends on the sock size and amount of hops. Personally, I haven't bothered; I just chuck the hops in, and then cold crash and let it drop out naturally (or encouraged with gelatine fining). When it's all dropped out, you can serve - either from the fermenter if it can handle pressure (Fermzilla in my case) with a floating dip tube, or run it to bottles or kegs. If you move it, avoid oxygen at all costs; it oxidises the hop flavour/aroma really quickly.
Hope that answered your question, feel free to ask more.
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@MN5 said in Beer thread:
You and @RoninWC truly are the gurus and I bow to your knowledge ( either that or you’re great at googling and making things up )
honeslty, the more you know, the more you realise you don't know. I've been fiddling around with brewing for about 13 years now, so you pick a lot of informaiton up.
My mate is a real guru though, a much better brewer and follows modern brewing techniques. It's ridiculous - he got me into trying 24 hour dry hops and they came up really well ... a real change from 3-6 days.
It's a great hobby. Just do it, enjoy it and keep iterating. The best advice is to focus on repeatability - then you can iterate to better beer. If every brew has different faults, you'll struggle.
Also, we live in a golden age of brewing hardware. When I started you couldn't buy off the shelf brewing products easily - if you didn't know someone, trying to start all grain was a nightmare, and you largely had to make the gear you wanted to use.
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@MN5 and @nzzp
Dry hopping is such a cool part of home brewing, other than the selection and use of your yeast, hops provide most of the flavour in your beer.There is an old adage in brewing, "the brewer makes wort, the yeast makes beer".
And to add to that, the hops make a lot of the flavour.@MN5 the cold crash is done at the end of fermentation and it allows for all the non-beer matter such as yeast and other particles/matter called "trub" as well as hop matter. Generally a cold crash is done at around 1-5°C for a minimum of 2 days to allow for all the particulate to fall to the bottom of the fermenter.
At home, I use my kegerator and take the kegs out and put the FermZilla in that as it just fits. I'm not sure what you and your brewing partner use?
And to add a bit more information about dry hopping, I will often use a method called Double Dry Hopping (DDH - now you know what that means when you see it on the craft beer cans). So like @nzzp I just drop the hops in without a bag when dry hopping but, I only use that for the 2nd or late dry hop additions.
I always use a bag for the first dry hop addition when I do a DDH.
To explain, the first dry hop addition is usually made either at the start of fermentation just before pitching the yeast or at "high krausen" when fermentation is said to be at it's most active. This can result in biotransformation where certain yeasts have the ability to transform certain hop compounds to create even juicer flavours.
For the first dry hop addition, you usually want to remove this once the peak of fermentation is over and you don't want to end up with the hop burn the @nzzp mentioned before. And a general rule is that you also do not want your hops in with your wort for any more than 5-7 days as your beer will start picking up "green and grassy" flavours.
For this I use a bag and fish it out of the fermenter with well sanatised stainless steel tongs.
To be honest, the best bag I've used and was one of the best pieces of advise I received when starting out, was to go to Bunnings and buy an XL pain straining bag in a pack of 3 (https://www.bunnings.com.au/uni-pro-10-20l-paint-strainer-bags-3-pack_p1661270).
These bags are big enough to handle the large hop additions I use which can be up to 200g.
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@nzzp said in Beer thread:
@MN5 said in Beer thread:
You and @RoninWC truly are the gurus and I bow to your knowledge ( either that or you’re great at googling and making things up )
honeslty, the more you know, the more you realise you don't know. I've been fiddling around with brewing for about 13 years now, so you pick a lot of informaiton up.
My mate is a real guru though, a much better brewer and follows modern brewing techniques. It's ridiculous - he got me into trying 24 hour dry hops and they came up really well ... a real change from 3-6 days.
It's a great hobby. Just do it, enjoy it and keep iterating. The best advice is to focus on repeatability - then you can iterate to better beer. If every brew has different faults, you'll struggle.
Also, we live in a golden age of brewing hardware. When I started you couldn't buy off the shelf brewing products easily - if you didn't know someone, trying to start all grain was a nightmare, and you largely had to make the gear you wanted to use.
Oh absolutely, I know the old cliche of your uncles shitty old home brew that is barely drinkable is a thing of the past. The gear and products are just awesome these days.
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SF's Anchor Brewing Company, country's 1st craft brewery, shutting down after 127 years
"It was great that Fitz Maytag saved it back in 1966. I just wish somebody would save it now." This latest development comes one month after Anchor announced it was stopping national distribution and discontinuing its Christmas Ale, which it has produced since 1975.
Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
It was a successful and respected company when sold to Sopporo.
Craft breweries close all the time, especially in these days of flatlining segment growth and marketshare encroachment from spirits. But Anchor is not just any craft brewery. By most accounts, it’s America’s first craft brewery, credited with mainstreaming the entire concept of local, independent, artisanal beer production starting in 1965, when industrial scion Fritz Maytag saved the company from insolvency. Maytag transformed Anchor’s flagship steam beer from “sometimes drinkable” to “consistently delicious,” and played benevolent godfather to two generations of brewing virtuosos that would go on to become household names in the industry. Though Maytag sold the brewery in 2010 to the pair of Skyy Vodka vets who’d go on to sell it to the Japanese later that decade, and has since retired, present-day Anchor employees still fondly refer to him on a first-name basis in interviews.
Sapporo’s management of the storied Bay Area brewery betrays no such sentimentality. Via its United States’ subsidiary, Sapporo USA, the megabrewer made several baffling missteps at Anchor’s helm. When the brewery’s production workers unionized in 2019, the company’s execs spent weeks trying to bust the union and ultimately forced an election, casting themselves as cartoonish corporate villains to the pro-labor local customer base in San Francisco. They introduced a disastrous rebrand in 2021 that turned Anchor’s singular homespun look into a retina-searing amalgamation of much younger craft breweries’ worst aesthetic tendencies. They made costly investments in automated bottling and canning lines that might’ve made the plant more efficient if they were properly commissioned and staffed—but workers tell me they never were, meaning production actually decreased by as much as 60%. And when Sapporo USA acquired San Diego’s Stone Brewing Co. in June 2022, Anchor became second fiddle—the Japanese wanted to brew rice lager, and its smaller, older facility couldn’t easily be retrofitted to do so, while Stone’s could.
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@MN5 said in Beer thread:
@RoninWC said in Beer thread:
@MN5 here's what I would recommend, rather than just sticking with the kit and that's it, there are two ways to add extra ABV, one which will add no extra flavour or the other which will add flavour and body to the beer.
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Simply add Dextrose to your kit.
So heat up some of the water you are going to use in a pot on the stove and dissolve say 1 kg or more of Dextrose into the water, let cool and add to your fermenter.
Roughly, for 10l of beer, 250g will add .5% additional ABV. So 1kg will add roughly 2%.
There are calculators available online that can give more precise figures but I usually work with that. -
Add either Dry Malt Extract (DME) or Liquid Malt Extract (LME)
Similar to the above but don't add the DME to very hot water or it will go into clumps and may even caramelize (yes, I know this one from experience). So 1kg DME added to 1.5l of water will do the trick, just make sure you stir constantly until it all dissolves.
For LME, you heat up the can by placing it in water and just pour the liquid into your fermenter as you do the other Mangrove Jacks ingredients.
Honestly, for me I would go down the Dextrose or DME route which I've done for beers that don't for whatever reason meet their expected Starting Gravity (amount of sugar in water) before fermentation starts.
Another thing, since you are getting into this, invest in a Hydrometer. All local home brew shops (LHBS) will have a hydrometer. Measure the liquid from the fermenter before you pitch the yeast and then measure again once fermentation is complete (Final Gravity) and then using one of the online calculators, you will have your ABV. And they really are simple to use.
To add, Dextrose, DME and LME will also be found at your LHBS.
Yeah the kit I’ve got comes with a hydrometer. No dramas there.
Excellent post, some great food for thought.
I remember close to 20 years ago when Monteiths Winter first came out and we all went, “whoa, a 6% beer, steady on”. Now that’s pretty much the norm ( or maybe late 5% or so ) as drinkers we’re so conditioned to the stronger beers now and it can be dangerous trying something new when you have to drive and realising it’s 8% or so !
My brewing partner and I popped into the shop on Friday avo and the guy was a great source of info ( much like yourself ). He suggested warming up the pouches in hot water to make them pour easier. Genius. So much easier today.
We were going to pick the Sabro single hop IPA but instead went for this…….
Pink Grapefruit IPA with Dry Hops
Inspired by Brew Dog's Elvis Juice Citrus IPA, this contains great citrus hop notes combined with grapefruit aroma to give an abundance of fruit on the nose. Sharp and tangy, the grapefruit complements and enhances the citrus character of the hops, making it refreshing, clean and crisp on the...
Really excited to see how it turns out, a bit of Vitamin C for winter perhaps.
You can’t fault the price, this, Malt extract, 12 more glass bottles, extra sanitiser and a little pouch for the hops for $56 each split down the middle. SOOOOOO good !
Can confirm we sanitised the shit out of everything too.
Happy to report this turned out fucken outstanding. Seriously good, my brewing partner, two different mates and the old man all confirmed it was excellent and a massive step up from the first rather boring generic brew.
The issue we have now is whether we go for another one and run the risk that it won’t be as good or if we go for the same one but add a few brew enhancers to it. I’d still like it around 6.5% if at all possible.
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Seriously think about a 'house beer' that you like to drink. Then repeat the brew on that - it is the way to refine your system, make sure you have repeatability and incrementally improve. If your process isn't repeatable, you will brew the same recipe twice and get two outcomes - and hten you don't know what to do to improve.
Obvoiusly doesn't have to be every beer you brew, but if you want to get better, you have to have a process that you understand
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@MN5 said in Beer thread:
@nzzp said in Beer thread:
Sad. sad news
Jeepers……really sad.
That Hop Zombie was an amazing drop.
I think Armageddon was their best beer. Just superb.
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@Bovidae Coping with getting 'big' is one of the biggest challenges for a craft business of any type though.
Personally while I can see the attraction I think craft breweries should avoid the supermarket trade. Screws their margins and cash flow completely.
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@Tim dont think that is restricted to craft beers, it is across the range of products they sell, which is largely down to 2 main suppliers in NZ, whereas at least alcohol there are other retailers as well, but people will go where it is cheaper, which is invariably the supermarket (although this post skirting close to stuff in the political now)
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Very sad news, one of the OGs.
I was first introduced to Epic in a visit in the late 2000's and what an eye opener that was.
Coming from Aus where the beer scene was all Tooheys New, VB and other absolute dross. The only decent beers at this time were Coopers & Little Creatures with a odd local find.
Epic haven't always been easy to find here in Aus but sometimes in good/specialty bottle shops. When you did it was to be savored even though they were often months old.
A very sad moment in craft beer. On of the few times I would hope that a big brewer comes in a purchases them. What are the thoughts on this happening over in NZ?
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Ironically the last week or so I have been drinking their Jump Joose at my local.
Last night I said I would have it while I still could. Then it ran out halfway through the pour, which meant a freebie.
Be interesting to read the liquidators report and see if it can be salvaged, but at this early stage I'd say it's unlikely Lion or DB pick it up
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In happier beer related news I can report we’ve put this down as the latest brew…
We’re brewing 20 as opposed to 23 litres to take the ABV to 6.5%…….opened the lid to chuck the dry hops in and it sounded like a kettle boiling ! Loads of action in there.
Bottling tonight, drinking some of the previous beers then watching the Rugby after.
Brewing is AWESOME !!!!!!!
