Hump's Brewing

I’ve written in several recent articles about how the hop shortage is limiting my ability to brew big, crazy, west-coast-style hop-bombs. Today was step one in my plan to horde hops, in preparation for brewing Hump’s Brain Bludgeoner. I was happy to see Doug’s store doing well and busy and still with a fridge full of hops today. I placed the one ounce of Tettnanger I needed for my dunkelweizen on the counter and also a two-ounce pack of Glacier hop plugs. I asked Doug if he minded me buying extra hops as long as I was still getting no more than three ounces. He had no problem at all and keyed me in to some good news: there are some hop varieties that he can continue to get. They aren’t the popular varieties, though. Cascade, for instance, due to its popularity, is in very short supply; but Glacier, a slightly more obscure variety, is one of the hops that he can still get from his suppliers. So he didn’t mind selling me extra. He also told me of its virtues and how everyone he knows that has tried his Glacier Pale Ale really loves it. That only strengthened my desire to use it in an upcoming double IPA.

The double IPA I’ve crafted will require six ounces of high-alpha hops for five gallons of beer. Not too long ago, I thought that was an outrageous amount of hops. I even wrote about that being excessive when I talked about the amount of hops used to brew Sam Adams Hallertauer Imperial Pilsner. Using standard methods for calculating IBUs, my beer will weigh in at about 130 IBU. This is of course on paper only. In reality, the chemistry of IBUs put a physical limit of around 100 – maybe a little more (the Sam Adams beer is 110 IBU – measured, not calculated). That sounds like a lot, but I’ve read recipes for double IPAs that call for far more. The “award-winning” recipe in Jamil Zainasheff’s and John Palmer’s latest book (Brewing Classic Styles) is based on a clone of Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and calls for a whole pound of high-alpha hops!! Using standard methods to calculate IBUs, that would be 284 IBUs – outrageous! The actual beer is closer to between 90 and 100 IBUs.
Next in the brewing line up, after Hump’s Dunkles Hefeweissbier, will be Hump’s Black Kriek: a Robust Porter with a large addition of sour cherries. And after that, I should have enough hops accumulated to cook up the Brain Bludgeoner.

Speaking of hops and the hop shortage, our near-and-dear Terrapin Beer Company finally has a brewery of its own. Until recently, their beer was contract brewed in Maryland and then shipped to Georgia. Now it will be made in Georgia. Their beers are generally quite good – good enough for me to forgive them for picking Athens as their brewery location (after all, I’m a Yellowjacket, and Athens is the home of the Bulldogs). They have taken the opposite tact as most brewers: they are making a ridiculous, over-the-top hop-bomb in the face of the hop scarcity. They have even named this new brew Hop Shortage. It will be a one-time release, part of a new series of unique, single-batch brews – made possible by the fact that they now have their own brewery. You can read more about it here.

In other news, I will be bottling my Fiftieth Brew tonight. It has aged in the keg over a month now, and is quite good. Flavors of chocolate, dark toast, and citrus hops are strong, and it finishes dry with a strong bitterness from both citrusy and piney hops and from alcohol. But I have to move it into bottles to make room for the Reeb.

Speaking of which, I tasted the Reeb this afternoon, while drawing a sample to read its finishing gravity. It tastes pretty good. The dry-hops didn’t make quite as big of a punch as in the Fiftieth Brew, but it does have a decent hop presence in the nose and front of the palate. It has a solid, fruity bitterness in the finish, and a nice light, dry, bready maltiness in between. It will taste great once it has some more bubbles in it…

It looks like I could potentially be sued if I tried to actually sell my latest homebrew. In the movie Kalifornia, “Reeb” is what Early Grace (played by Brad Pitt) called beer. He said “they” (he and his friends, presumably) called it that so that authority figured wouldn’t be the wiser. Reeb, cleverly enough (or perhaps completely not clever) is beer spelled backwards.

There is now a commercial beer in China that has taken that name. I suppose I couldn’t be sued if the beer’s maker doesn’t have it trademarked here. I wonder if I should file for the trademark in case they haven’t already done so…

Anyhow, I racked my Reeb over a half-ounce of Amarillo hops last Friday morning. It tasted pretty decent, and Amarillo hops smell amazing, so I think it will turn out grand. I think I’ve finally perfected the label for this batch of brew, too:

This evening I’ve been preparing a brew plan to last me most of the year. It involves numerous low-hop brews (due to the recent hop shortage). I’m thinking of buying extra hops while getting ingredients for those recipes. Doug, the owner of the homebrew store, will sell no more than three ounces of hops for each batch, but I have a few recipes that only call for one ounce. If I tack on a couple of extra ounces, then after three months I’ll have enough hops to brew up a double IPA. My recipe, Brain Bludgeoner, calls for an ounce each of Warrior, Columbus, Simcoe, and Centennial (all high-alpha American hop varieties) and two ounces of Glacier.

I’m praying for Doug (and a bit for me, too) that his store manages to flourish despite the hop crisis. With luck, he’ll find a new supplier or his current supplier will manage to acquire more hops – though I’m sure prices will double (or more) if and when that happens… But I don’t mind – hops are typically the least-cost ingredient in a batch of beer at current prices ($2.50 per ounce – about double the cost of hops when I first started brewing). Even if they go up to four bucks per ounce, it would still only be $24 for all of the hops in my big ol’ double IPA. The malt extract for that same batch runs over $30, or a little over $20 for all grain. Since I do a mix (5 or so pounds of grain and then the rest extract), I’d be looking at right at $30 for the fermentables. Considering that the vast majority of flavor and character in that type of beer is from the hops, it doesn’t seem outrageous for that ingredient to cost so close to half of the bill…

My plan for this year has me “saving up” for hops every few months so that I can brew a Double IPA this year as well as both a classic English IPA and a nice American IPA. The American IPA is an adaptation/reformulation of my Hellishly Hopped Ale, which was a fantastic beer that found itself squarely between two styles: American Pale Ale and American IPA.

I tried to look online for hops and found a very similar situation. Even some of the really big online stores are all out of plugs and leaf hops and are limiting quantities of pellet hop purchases. And they are changing anywhere from three to eight dollars per ounce!

I’ve read a bit about hops recovering by 2010. I’m hoping it happens sooner than that, but it may not. It typically takes a couple of years for new land to yield good crops. So the upswing in production that began in 2007 as a reaction to the shortage won’t really be fruitful until the 2009 harvest. This year’s harvest is likely to be much better than last year’s, but harvest isn’t until fall. So 2008 hops won’t likely roll into homebrew shops until 2009. It relieves me somewhat to see that the Boston Beer Company (makers of Samuel Adams) seem to be counting on better fortunes next year. One of the three beers that won their recent Long Shot homebrew competition was a Double IPA (if you follow the link, select the year 2007). They postponed its appearance to 2009 due to the shortage. So the six-pack this year has only two brews: a Weizenbock (pretty good) and a Grape Pale Ale (notably less good). When they get to the Double IPA next year, it will reportedly be the largest single batch of Double IPA ever brewed. I don’t have a link to the source of that report, but I heard it when listening to the archives for The Jamil Show. They’ve had the Double IPA winner, Mike McDole, on their show a few times and talked about the competition and his recipe in several episodes. They also had the Weizenbock winner, Rodney Kibzey, on the show this past December.

Speaking of weizens, my next batch will be a Dunkles Hefeweissbier (Dunkelweizen for short). It will only need one ounce of hops. I’m basing the recipe loosely on the base beer for the Berry Weizen I made in 2007, except that I’m experimenting with some new grains: Dark Wheat Malt (which doesn’t actually impart a very dark color) and Chocolate Wheat Malt. I think the Chocolate Wheat Malt would be even more appropriate as part of the grist for a Weizenbock, but I plan on using a little in the Dunkelweizen I’ll be making.

I wrote about shortages and rising prices of hops and malts a few months ago. Well, the hard times have finally hit me – yes, me, the lowly home brewer. I went to go pick up ingredients for my next batch (a rye pale ale that I call Reeb) yesterday, and I was planning on picking up ingredients for two batches. I have a recipe for a Double IPA that uses the same yeast as the Reeb (Wyeast 1272). So my plan was to cook up the small beer first, and then cook up the big beer in a couple of weeks and rack the big beer right onto the yeast cake of the small one. That will not only save money on yeast, but it will also insure there is a big, healthy pitch of yeast to ferment the big beer.

My small beer requires 2.5 ounces of hops, 0.5 ounce of which I already have in my fridge – left-over Chinook. The Double IPA calls for six ounces of hops – all high-alpha hops, too. When I took eight ounces of hops up to the counter, Doug politely informed me that there is a three ounce per recipe limit. I was hoping this was a financial thing – perhaps his costs went up, and he felt he would alienate his customers by raising his prices to cover his costs, so he was simply limiting the amount of low-or-negative margin goods he was selling. So I offered to pay more for the hops than he was asking. He said he still couldn’t do it, and then he told me why. His primary supplier has completely cut him off; they have no hops available to sell to him. Another supplier of his said they only have another nine weeks of supply for him. That means in nine weeks, he will have no supply of hops for his customers. He had calculated that, at the rate he usually sells hops, that he would completely run out by May. Upon hearing that distressing news, I changed my brewing plans. I figure I’ll just make the big beer another day (maybe I can find an online supplier that is willing to sell large quantities of hops – although it is completely possible that the online shops are encountering similar situations). And, instead of buying the two ounces of hops I needed for Reeb, I figured I’d just use more of the other left-over hops in my fridge and so only bought one.

What a bummer!!!

So it looks like I’ll have to stick with brewing low-hop recipes for the foreseeable future. That is certainly depressing because I was really wanting to cook up an IPA or two. The fact that I can’t make the Double IPA anytime soon is certainly a let-down.

This evening, I racked the Vanilla Stout to a secondary fermenter and added two vanilla beans. They were bought from the grocery store (McCormick brand), and the label doesn’t say the source of the beans. After I readied them for beer (cut in half, lengthwise, and then sterilize by adding to 1/2 cup boiling water), they smelled like a mix between vanilla and tobacco.

The beer itself tasted good – like it would make a pleasant recipient of the vanilla. It was roasty with a slight level of residual sweetness and no hop flavor. It didn’t attenuate as well as I’d hoped, so I really won’t need to add much lactose when it’s done (likely only four ounces).

Earlier this week I kegged my Fiftieth Brew (so named because it is my 50^th original recipe). Prior to dry-hopping, it had lots of chocolate flavors with some subtle hop flavor and bitterness. It also had a note of ethanol: not hot or solventy, but a not-so-subtle flavor of alcohol nonetheless. The ethanol flavor has slowly gotten less overt, but it it still there. The dry-hopping did wonders for the flavor: loads of beautiful citrus from the Centennial hops. This new nuance to the flavor helps distract the taste buds from the ethanol. And, now that it is kegged, the carbonation further reduces the alcohol flavors. But, alas, they are still present. They may remain forever, or perhaps will simply require six months (or more) of aging before going away. Luckily, as it is now, it is still pretty decent. The alcohol lends a dryness to the finish, and is much more subtle than it was a few weeks ago…

This Saturday I’ll be cooking up beer again. I haven’t decided yet what to make. I’m currently leaning towards something small – like an English bitter or an American Pale Ale. I have until Thursday to decide since that is the day I’ll be going to the homebrew store (that is the day I work from home and pick Will up from school, and his school is less than two miles from the homebrew shop).

This past Friday I missed the latest Session. This month’s topic was Barleywine. Unfortunately, I don’t feel inspired to write about this topic, so I won’t be trying to make a late entry today. Instead I’ll just refer you to the roundup.

To make this post slightly more substantive, I’ll also mention that I have had several Barleywines in the past couple of months: Three Floyds Behemoth, Bell’s Third Coast Ale, and Clipper City Below Decks. Generally, I greatly prefer American Barleywines over English ones. English ones can be so rich in caramel that they become cloyingly sweet. American examples are more likely to be cranked up on hops and thus, at least to my palate, much more balanced. My favorite two examples have been Stone Old Guardian and Avery Hog Heaven. Another nice, local example of American Barleywine that I’ve found quite enjoyable is Sweetwater Donkey Punch.

I did not drink a Barleywine this past Friday, so I have no recent experience to recite. But I did try Clipper City Winter Storm this weekend. The label describes it as an Imperial ESB, but it could also pass as an American Barleywine – albeit a small one (7.3% abv).

What would a post be without mention of homebrew? I’ve recently reformulated the recipes I have sitting around so they involve a mini-mash with 5 to 5.5 pounds of grain (some of the recipes I have are old, before I was doing mini-mashes). One of them was a recipe for an American Barleywine: Hump’s Old Humperdink Barley Wine. Once brewed, this beast should weigh in around 9.9% abv and 95 IBUs (calculated). I’m not sure when I will get a chance to actually cook this one up though. I’m leaning towards smaller beers for my near future batches. When I do make a stronger beer, I’m currently leaning towards other recipes in my repertoire – like a Strong Scotch Ale or an Imperial IPA…

This past Sunday, the sun shone down on my back deck like few other winter days. Will and I brewed up Hump’s Vanilla Stout to the tune of the Star Wars original soundtrack (an anthology of four CDs that includes all of the music from the original trilogy). Will has gotten hooked to playing Lego Star Wars on our X-Box, and he now asks to hear the “Lego Man Music.” He actually hasn’t played it much lately because he is only allowed to play as a reward for keeping his underwear clean and dry – a task with which he still finds difficulty. He likes to help me brew. We go outside on the deck, bring out a bowl full of salted cashews, pour some juice for him (a homebrew for me), and then cook up some beer. This weekend was the perfect time to brew because the weather was so great.

I have to go back to the homebrew store tomorrow to pick up some lactose and then to the grocery store to pick up a vanilla bean or two. I’ll add the vanilla to the secondary and then add the lactose just prior to kegging. Adding the lactose at the very end allows me to only add as much as it needs based on how it tastes at that time – just enough to augment the vanilla and give it some residual sweetness and more body. I’m not trying to make a Mackeson clone, so I doubt I’ll need to add much (1/2 pound at most).

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New Year’s Eve was tame this year. I had a 750ml bottle of Lindeman’s Pêche Lambic, instead of Champagne or Asti, but didn’t get a chance to toast at midnight. My wife and I had a fantastic dinner of braised beef short ribs served with a delicious dish of pasta: fresh egg noodles with a variety of mushrooms and a duck demi-glace. Instead of beer with that meal, we shared a bottle of French red wine (a 2003 Grand Cru from Bordeaux). After dinner, we watched a movie with the intention of cracking open the lambic and pouring it into champagne flutes at the stroke of twelve. But, instead, we missed the big moment (the movie was not finished until quarter past midnight) and then decided to go to bed.

The next day I was planning to brew my fiftieth original recipe. Instead, I hung out around the house in a bathrobe all day. I finally got dressed and ready for the day – around 5pm. At that point it was too late to brew, so instead Malin and I opened our bottle of lambic…

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Yesterday was the 11^th Beer Blogging Session. This month it is hosted by Brewvana, and the topic is Doppelbock, the Illuminator.

I’m hoping they’ll still include my post in the round-up despite the fact that I’m a day late. I meant to write this last night, but my wife and I had company over, and they didn’t leave until close to midnight. After that, I was too tired to post and instead went straight to bed.

Like my post for last month’s session, I’ll be talking about more than one beer.

Doppelbock Deathmatch

A little over a year ago I tried a horizontal tasting of German doppelbocks. In the line-up that night were Paulaner Salvator, Spaten Optimator, and Ayinger Celebrator. I enjoyed this style and these three beers so much that I sought other traditional doppelbocks over the next few weeks and found Weihenstephaner Korbinian and Tucher Bajuvator.

In the original tasting – which happened to include the three most famous examples of the style – I discovered a delightful breadth to the style. All three of these beers are very different from one another. Their similarities – governed by the style – were a darkish brown color (though Celebrator was distinctly darker than the other two), strength (though Celebrator is notably lower in alcohol than the other two), and a chewy, malt-oriented flavor.

The hands-down winner was Ayinger Celebrator. It remains one of my all-time favorite beers. Paulaner’s Salvator is also a decidedly delicious product, and took home silver that evening. Optimator is a very tasty brew, but it simply couldn’t muscle its way into the company of the other two, taking a distant third place.

The follow-up tastings of Tucher’s and Weihenstephaner’s doppelbocks resulted in a new third and fourth place (respectively), with Spaten’s Optimator still rounding out the set in last place. The Tucher Bajuvator was very characteristic of the style and was very close to a tie with Salvator. Weihenstephaner Korbinian was a very interesting brew with some flavors that are familiar from other Doppelbocks. But, at the same time, it had the greatest variance in flavors – almost cloyingly sweet aroma, but a more bitter finish. A good beer, but no match for Celebrator.

To remind myself of some of the brews, I bought a bottle of Optimator and a bottle of Bajuvator last night. But the company we had over last night were more interested in my homebrew, so we drank that instead of doppelbock. I did get a chance to have the Optimator before everyone arrived. Admittedly, it was better than I remembered. In fact, I updated my rating on RateBeer.com with my latest impression of the beer. It is now tied for fourth place with Weihenstephaner Korbinian.

Perhaps I’ll get around to trying the Bajuvator this afternoon/evening…

Hump’s Emancipator Doppelbock

What would a post be without mention of homebrew?

I have made one doppelbock during my years of home brewing. I formulated the recipe pretty early on – and prior to reading Ray Daniels’ Designing Great Beers and, admittedly, prior to actually trying any authentic doppelbocks (at the time, Georgia law prohibited the sale of beers stronger than 6.5%, so these brews were unavailable here). Further major impediments included the fact that I was still doing a partial boil (cook 2 gallons of super-strong beer and then dilute with 3 gallons of cold water to make a 5 gallon batch). I was also getting 100% of the fermentables from extract – specialty grains were steeped, no mash was ever performed. Finally, I had no temperature-controlled environment in which to lager the beer. What I did have was an uninsulated storage room that – because I brewed in winter – got very cold and maintained temperatures that were cool enough for lager brewing (although with a temperature swing of about 10 degrees between day and night).

Despite these major obstacles, the beer I designed and made was actually an awesome brew and a good example of the style. Because I was doing a partial boil, I had to use 8 ounces of hops! That would usually make a beer quite hoppy, but partial-boil brewing is very inefficient when it comes to extracting bitterness and flavor from hops.

I was sad to see this batch go. I had saved a pop-top 1-liter bottle of the brew for a special occasion. I opened it on the following New Year’s Eve and was quite disappointed to see that the gasket of the pop-top had not sealed properly: the last bottle of precious Emancipator was flat…

Oh, well. I still have very fond memories of it. I should probably design a new recipe – that includes a full-volume boil and mashing of grains – to see if I can make an even better one.

The last week of 2007 saw a few interesting and tasty brews. Decadence, however, is admittedly overstating things.

The Saturday before Christmas, I kegged Hump’s Humble Monk Ale. On Sunday, Malin and I went to dinner with several friends of ours. My brother, Jake, also came along. Our destination was the Brick Store Pub in downtown Decatur. Among the brews we tried was a delectable Belgian seasonal: De Ranke Père Noël. It was a lovely, deep gold. Its flavor was balanced, slightly fruity, and crisp. The Brick Store had it on tap, and our group helped put it away (the keg ran dry before we left).

On Christmas day we ate potato croquettes, roast duck, and bacon-wrapped asparagus. This was paired with an inexpensive red wine. Alas, I had suitable brews to accompany this menu, but none that would be chosen over wine by my wife or my mother-in-law. Particularly good could have been the Belgian Pale Ale I just made – which had just reached a suitable level of carbonation on this day: the Humble Monk Ale.

The day after Christmas was a feast in Greenville, South Carolina – where I grew up and where my parents still live. We had a tasty feast that afternoon, and that evening my wife and I went out with some friends of ours that were in the vicinity. Part of that evening’s festivities included sampling some of the brews I recently acquired:

• Left Hand Oak-Aged Imperial Stout, 2004: Delicious. A fantastically smooth, roasty, strong, sweet stout. The wood added a delightful note of vanilla that was divine.
• Three Floyd’s Fantabulous Resplendence – X: A very nice barley wine. Like other great American barley wines, it was well hopped – almost too much at first. But as the palate acclimated itself to this big brews, all the flavors melded fantabulously.
• Courage Russian Imperial Stout, 1993: This is the last year that this beer was brewed. It was an interesting and memorable beer – but part of that memory are the off flavors of a beer that is a little past its prime. Particularly, there were sour flavors that were intriguing, but didn’t really seem like they belonged. Also, the sight of chunks of dead yeast, stained black from 15 years spent swimming in black beer, was less than stellar.

The next night, I hung out with my friend Jason and sampled some other tasty brews: Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, Bell’s Third Coast Old Ale, Stone India Pale Ale, and Stone Double Bastard Ale.

We then exchanged some beers. In exchange for a case of home brew, I received several treats from Bell’s Brewery: Two Hearted Ale, Porter, and Kalamazoo Stout.

In addition to the above brews, I also got to taste New Glarus Dancing Man Wheat and Bell’s Batch 8000 Ale (both courtesy of CaptainCougar). And I’m still looking forward to the rest of the great stuff in my cellar: Three Floyd’s Behemoth, Three Floyd’s Dreadnaught, Dogfish Head Golden Shower (all three also from CaptainCougar), Lagunitas Kill Ugly Radio, Mikeller Black Hole, and Left Hand Twin Sisters Double IPA.

Stay tuned. Later this week (Friday) is another Session, and this month the topic is Doppelbock.

This week I met one of the Top 50 Raters at RateBeer.com: CaptainCougar. It turns out he is local, so we met at a local package store to trade beers. His selection of beers was much more impressive than mine, so I had to materially supplement the brews I took with cold, hard cash…

I got some really good stuff out of the deal though. I’ll post more about them later – but particularly noteworthy are a 1993 bottle of Courage Russian Imperial Stout and a bomber of Three Floyds Behemoth.

Among the beers I took him were some home brew. I tossed in the cinnamon brew as a freebie, but I’ll ask him what he thought of the Farmhouse Ale and the Praying Monk Ale. (I don’t need to ask about the cinnamon brew – I know that it is too spicy…)

Tonight I racked the Humble Monk Ale (a Belgian Pale Ale) to the secondary fermentor. It has attenuated well , and tastes pretty good, but it is a bit light in both esters and hops departments. Only time will tell just how the final product tastes. I’m expecting to take some of it with me to Greenville next week. I’ll be sharing many of my home brews with a friend of mine, that one included. I’ll likely take some of my recent acquisitions, too (more thanks going to CaptainCougar).

I’ve been trying to read up on Mint Stout recipes but I can’t seem to find anything specific regarding how much mint to use. I’m also having trouble finding any recipes at all that use mint extract over fresh mint leaves. I have some extract that I was thinking about using (1 ounce that is 90% alcohol, 5% peppermint oil, and 5% spearmint oil).

I am thinking quite strongly about making a micro-batch of homebrew using the coffee maker method (mash small amount of grains in the coffee pot, then sparge by putting the grains in the filter basket and circulating the wort through it several times by simply turning the coffee maker on). The only trouble with this approach would be yeast, seeing as I don’t have any slurries of brewer’s yeast I can use. I may buy a few packets of dry yeast next time I’m at the store, just to have some for these sorts of experiments… With the coffee maker method, I’d probably try adding ¹/₂ oz. of mint extract to the finished 60 ounces of brew. If that works then it would translate to about 5 oz. of extract for a full-size batch. If it didn’t work then I’d brew another micro-batch and try a different amount of mint extract. In addition to yeast, I’ll probably need to pick up an extra pound or two of base malt (most likely Maris Otter) if I’m really going to pursue the “coffee maker experiments”.