Just when you think you know a thing or two...

I'm beginning to get pretty comfortable in my ability to brew beer, at least in basic form. I'm only a handful of batches in, but in between each one I seek, find, read, and absorb more information about zymurgy (zymurgy = the branch of chemistry that deals with fermentation, as in brewing). I feel like I'm getting a reasonable working knowledge of the basics of brewing. Pardon the absence for three weeks, but my computer was on the fritz two weeks ago (and I didn't have much to write about), and I was sick the week after that (and therefore didn't have much to write about, or the motivation to write). But I'm back in full force!

My single-hop Amarillo Amber IPA is bottle-conditioned to the point that it is ready to be consumed, and is a success both in terms of being a good beer, and in terms of brewing a beer that I set out to create, from recipe to execution to final product. When I put the recipe together, I wanted it to have a mild but pleasant malt flavor with a touch of sweetness. I wanted to have a medium-low alcohol content (5.5ish percent abv), but not have a thin body. I like a beer with a little mouthfeel to it. Most importantly, I wanted a strong combination of hop flavor and hop aroma, but without much of the hop bitterness that is usually such a common feature of the IPA style.

I chose to use all late-addition hops, without any bittering additions. This would theoretically keep the majority of the hop oils intact in the beer. Hops have a combination of essential oils which give them their characteristic fragrance and flavor. These oils are very volatile, and boil off very rapidly when used in beer. As hops are boiled in wort, the oils are extracted and immediately contribute to the beer's aroma. As some of the oils boil off, their effect on aroma becomes less and less, but they still contribute to the beer's flavor. Again, as the oils boil off, their effect on the flavor becomes gradually less, up to the point that there are basically no essential oils left from the hops.

The component of hops which is responsible for the bitter flavor they contribute to beer is primarily the varieties of alpha acids which are present in the lupulin glands of the hop leaves. Alpha acids are extremely important to the formulation of a good beer, since their bitterness is used to balance out the sweetness of the sugars extracted from the grains used in the beer. However, their utilization is almost exactly the opposite of hop essential oils; the longer you boil hops in wort, the more alpha acids they impart. This is due to the fact that alpha acids undergo a process called "isomerization," which causes the alpha acids to break down slightly and become more soluble in water. The heat of the boil and the presence of the sugars extracted from the grains all have an affect on this process.

Pardon the layman's chemistry lesson, I get started talking about beer and sometimes I just can't stop. :) It's actually rather fun sometimes, like this past weekend when Cedric came down to help me brew a batch of beer, and I explained, at length, as much as I knew about what was going on at each step of the brew. Before I go on that tangent, I'll return to the original subject: my Amarillo Amber IPA.

Anyway, I used all late additions of hops so that the amount of alpha acids contributed by each addition was minimal, but they all added up to enough to balance the sweetness of the beer without leaving a lingering bitterness. That, and I wanted to get as much yummy hop flavor and hop aroma as I could from each addition. To take this up a notch, I dry-hopped the beer after it had mostly completed fermentation. Fortunately for the length of this post, I already explained dry-hopping two posts ago.

Here's the end result of all this beer brewing geek-speak:

Proudly presenting my Amarillo Amber Single-Hop IPA (now with cutting board backdrop!)

The beer is great. It has a very pronounced aroma, teeming with herbal and floral notes, with sweet citrus (almost like oranges) mixed in. The flavor is just as potent, but finishes very clean, without any lingering bitterness. Robin (my beautiful, wonderful, supportive girlfriend who I'm fairly sure doesn't ever read my posts) can't stand IPAs for the very reason that they're bitter, but is quite fond of this beer. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to run out quickly... Hmm... Better start brewing another one...

Anyway, as I previously mentioned, Cedric came down before noon on this past Saturday to help me brew a batch of beer. I followed, with some personal twists, a community-crafted clone recipe of Bert Grant's Perfect Porter. Bert Grant was the head brewer of Yakima Brewing Co in Yakima, Washington. His original brewery has closed since he passed, but there is another brewery of the same name carrying on the tradition of craft beer in Yakima. "The Beer Hunter," Michael Jackson (not the singer), wrote an article in August of 2001 titled "How Bert Grant Saved the World." This article is a lively read, and I encourage you to read it in your spare time. It will paint a very vibrant picture of a man who was insanely passionate about craft beer, and certainly can still serve as an inspiration to anyone who likes, I mean really likes, beer. There are mentions of several of his beers in that article, and one of them is his Perfect Porter. An assuredly humble name, the article quips.

This porter uses an abundance of chocolate malt, with almost as much caramel malt. There is a touch of smoked malt, too. The original recipe used peated malt, this we know for sure. Me being me, I just can't seem to be content to brew someone else's beer recipe, and I must inflict my own changes (for better or for worse) on them. While I was at the brewing supply store picking up the ingredients, I decided to test the flavors of the grains I was buying. My main interest was in the smoked malt. Peat smoked malt has a very distinctive flavor, and if you've ever had one of the smokier varieties of single-malt scotch, you're certainly familiar with this flavor.

The store currently has three varieties of smoked malt; peat-smoked malt, alderwood smoked malt, and cherrywood smoked malt. The peat-smoked malt certainly tastes like it sounds. Peat smoke has its place, and is a fairly strong flavor. In my opinion, it's not the smoothest of the smoke flavor. The alderwood smoked malt had a flavor that was instantly reminiscent of Rachbier from Germany. It's a very distinctive smoke flavor, and I can't quite think of how to describe it other than the characteristic smoke flavor of the famed smoked lagers of Germany. The cherrywood smoked malt, however, had an almost succulent and beckoning smoke flavor. It was the only grain of the three which got a "yum!" from me, although I do like all three. It was a much softer, smoother, and warmer smoke flavor overall. So, I decided to use that one in my version of Perfect Porter.

How will it turn out? Well, there total amount of smoked malt in the recipe is just over 1% of the total grains, so either way it will be a subtle flavor. I'm very excited to see what comes of it, and how it interacts with the chocolate and caramel flavors of this recipe.

Oh... there was one other thing that got changed. It was changed out of reaction and necessity. The recipe called for Edinburgh Scottish Ale Yeast. This yeast strain comes in a vial, and is stored wet, meaning it is not dehydrated, and is in liquid form. This was my first experience with wet yeast. It did not occur to me that, having been put in a vial, in solution with liquid, there might be a little bit of resultant pressure in said vial from the naturally occuring processes of yeast (mainly, turning sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide). Vials of yeast probably hold about 2-3 ounces of liquid, so there isn't much space in there. Any residual sugar that gets processed will drastically increase the pressure inside the vial. Being that the yeast is stored cold and reheated to room temperature just before the yeast is needed, then shaken back into solution in the liquid in the vial rather than being a sludge on the bottom of the vial, any pressure that is created while it's cold is surely amplified.

So, when the time came to pitch the yeast, Cedric wanted to open the yeast and pour it in himself. He started slowly opening the vial of Edinburgh, and it let out a little "hiss." I didn't think or expect it to be pressurized, so I told him to just open it. About 3/4 of the yeast sprayed and spilled out of the vial, to the shock and dismay of both of us (and his shoes). We dumped what was left, but that was without a doubt not enough yeast to do a responsible or effective job of fermenting the beer. As a stroke of extreme fortune, I had a packet of dry English ale yeast in the refrigerator, which I promptly opened and poured into the beer. So the recipe was accidentally altered to use a different yeast. I guess we'll see how that works out, but for now, the beer is happily fermenting away!

Like I said, I'm getting a comfortable level of knowledge about brewing. But just when I think I might know a thing or two, along comes something out of left field to remind me that you never stop learning, and you have to be ready to be humbled and take it with good humor and faith that the journey will still take you exactly where you should go.

Until next time, beer on and beer often! Cheers!