HOMEBREW Digest #892 Mon 01 June 1992

Digest #891 Digest #893


	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator


Contents:
  pilgrimage to mecca (Davis McPherson)
  Re: Calories in homebrew (Daniel Roman)
  Hops in SN Pale Ale (Keith Winter)
  Re: yeast questions (korz)
  simple yeast-starter recipe, cherry mead (Chuck Coronella)
  Re: Bending Tubing (Larry Barello)
  nastyeast (DAMON_NOEL/HP0800_01)
  Wyeast 3056 (Dennis J. Templeton)
  Brewpub Crawl, San Francisco Bay Area (James Margeson)
  Beer Head (fjdobner)
  G.W. Kent ("Spencer W. Thomas")
  hops, water (Donald P Perley)
  Re: Re: State with most micros/brewpubs per capita (martin wilde)

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---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 29 May 92 10:31:58 EDT From: davism at hns.com (Davis McPherson) Subject: pilgrimage to mecca Greetings fellow brewers, i will be travelling to Seattle in early june for a week of RnR and hanging out in beer joints. if some you northwest USA type of guys could email your favorite joints (bars or micro-brewies) i will raise my glass and toast you all while i'm there. thanx in advance davis Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 9:44:18 EDT From: tix!roman at uunet.UU.NET (Daniel Roman) Subject: Re: Calories in homebrew I had just recently finally gotten around to trying to decipher the post about determining calories in homebrew which was presented a few digests ago. It seems much to complicated and in some areas does not make any sense to me. If I was given a true/false test in chemistry and the question was "Is this the formula for determining calories in homebrew" I would have guessed false. Anyway, that formula really is no good to me since there is too much work involved to come up with a number just out of curiosity. Anyone have a formula which approximates the number of calores just based on the OG and FG. I envision something along the lines: calories per oz = X * (OG - FG) + Y * FG where X is the calories per specific gravity unit and Y is the calories contributed by residuals per specific gravity unit. The program I use to record my recipes calculates the % alc. (by weight or volume obviously) from the OG and FG figures already. I would just need an approximation for the value of Y and a number for the value of X (number of calories per oz. based on the % alc. as determined from the SG scale). It should be easy to come up with approximations shouldn't it? After all, if it's off by as much as 10% that's no big deal (to me at least). - -- ______________________________________________________________________ Dan Roman | /// Internet: roman_d at timeplex.com Timeplex Inc. | \\\/// GEnie: D.ROMAN1 Woodcliff Lake, NJ | \XX/ Only AMIGA! Homebrew is better brew. ====================================================================== Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 9:06:51 PDT From: winter at cirrus.com (Keith Winter) Subject: Hops in SN Pale Ale Steven Boege asks: > Greetings, > Would someone please tell me which hop varieties are used in Sierra > Nevada India Pale Ale and in Dinkel Acker Dark. > Thanks, > Steven J. Boege According to the information I got when I toured the brewery, SN Pale Ale uses two forms of Cascade Hops. The boil uses an experimental, high-alpha Cascade and regular Cascade Hops are used for aroma. A note about the post boil hopping: they use whole leaf hops as a filter stage in addition to flavor. They load a large fitting, that sits in the pipe between the boiling vessel and the heat-exchanger cooling apparatus, with the hops and force pump the wort through it. I guess this works because SN Pale Ale sure had a strong hop aroma. The thing looks something like this (please excuse the ASCII graphics): ------- / \ ------------------/ \--------------- from boiler ----> wort flow HOPS -----> To heat-exchanger ------------------\ /--------------- \ / ------- Keith Winter (winter at cirrus.com) Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 11:19 CDT From: korz at iepubj.att.com Subject: Re: yeast questions Al Taylor asks about yeast: > 1) Is there a significantly better dry finishing (high or low > attenuating, I can never remember the nomenclature) ale yeast > than Chico Ale (Wyeast 1056). I have heard good things about it. I've found that Wyeast Irish Ale (#1084) is one of their most attenative, but it does take a while to finish (i.e. the last few points take a few weeks). Attenuation is a measure of how much of the sugars a particular yeast will eat. Highly attenuative yeasts will eat even very big sugar molecules, whereas less attenuative yeast will will eat only the simplest sugars (like glucose and maltose). There is a two or three page sheet that you should be able to get from your supplier -- heck, it's no secret, maybe if I remember to bring it in, I'll post it. > 3) (This one is unrelated to my own yeast concerns) If the yeast > used for trappist ale is a mixture of several species and/or > strains, how would one go about making a trappist from pure > culture? Stated differently, what sort of pitching ratios of > the different strains should be used. Trappist Ales are generally made with single-strain cultures. It's Lambics that are made from a variety of strains of yeast as well as bacteria. Generally speaking, most pseudo-Lambic homebrewers use only the three primary organisms, Saccharomyces Cerevisiae (I use Wyeast #1056), Brettanomyces Lambicus and Pediococcus Cerevisiae. If you want to be even more close to the "real thing," then you can buy some Brettanomyces Bruxellenis (sp?), but it will cost you a good $50 or so. The other two can be purchased from G.W.Kent through your retailer. You may be speaking about the fact that Orval bottles with 5 strains. This is true, but they ferment with only one. I cultured the dregs of several Orval bottles and got starters that tasted very different from each other. I chose the one that tasted most like Orval and brewed a batch with that. Al. Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 11:49 MTS From: Chuck Coronella <CORONELLRJDS at CHE.UTAH.EDU> Subject: simple yeast-starter recipe, cherry mead Greetings Two quick question for the readership: 1) Can someone post a _simple_ recipe for a yeast starter? I know that I can just use a liter or so of wort, but what if I don't want to brew an entire batch? I know the ingredients; it's the quantities about which I'm concerned. How much extract (prefer volume), how much hops, for, say a quart of water? Can corn sugar (dextrose) be used? (It's easy to measure small quantites, compared to malt extract, which is gooey, and is generally a mess.) I've tried bottling wort, but nasties always manage to get in the bottle, and in a few months I've got a glass grenade on my hands. 2) As a result of the unusually warm spring we've had here in Utah, the cherries are almost ripe already. I'm looking forward to making my third annual cherry beer, and have no shortage of ideas for that one, let me tell you. But, I brewed my first mead this past December, and was thinking that a cherry mead might be nice. Suggestions? Thanks to everyone for all the great info that comes out in the HBD, and especially thanks to Rob for maintaining the digest. I'd like to mention that I'm grateful that this digest is still being distributed by email, since I have no access to all these r.c.b.-type forums (fora?). Cheers, Chuck Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 10:27:15 PDT From: polstra!larryba at uunet.UU.NET (Larry Barello) Subject: Re: Bending Tubing One thing I didn't see mentioned about bending copper tubing is that you can't just bend any old piece of tubing. You need to get tubing that is sold for bending. Then you can use a tree limb, you hands or a tubing bender to make your racking tube. Another nifty little gadget you can make with 6" of surplus tubing: Drill several 1/16" holes around the tubing about one inch from one end. Stick that end into the outlet of your chiller/racking hose. WHen racking the holes will suck in air and aerate your wort. No need to shake the carboy after using one of these gizmos. - Larry Barello Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 11:56:40 -0600 From: DAMON_NOEL/HP0800_01%mailhub.cs.itc.hp.com at cs.itc.hp.com Subject: nastyeast Thanks for all the feedback on copper coils and yeast care. The answer to the problem I posted a couple issues back is now clear. The batch brewed in the new mash tun with copper coil finally went into the static phase at an FG of 1.006, down from OG of 1.054. VERY strong phenol smell/taste. It seems a fair conclusion that my free liquid yeast culture was contaminated since standard sanitation procedures were followed. 5 gal>>>drain. I think the lesson learned is to plate out any yeast of possibly suspect origin. I am reasonably sure that wild yeast strains somehow entered the original culture. In the plating process do wild yeasts look significantly different from the good guys? I'm sure that bacterial infections would show up but how about the odd yeasts? Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 15:04:31 -0400 From: djt2 at po.CWRU.Edu (Dennis J. Templeton) Subject: Wyeast 3056 In a previous article, wtschant at magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (William R Tschantz)wrote: >A quik question about Bavarian Wheat yeast from Wyeast. I know that it is made >of 50 % S. cervisiae and 50 % S. Delbrucki. My question is when I make a >starter culture of this will the S. Delbrucki also grow in regular DME starter >or do I have to have some wheat malt included in the starter for the Wheat >yeast to grow? > >Thanks for the Help, Bill Here is a quick and a long answer from my experience of several months 1) it will grow fine on pure malt extract 2) despite being "50%" of each strain, I was not convinced that my original pack of 3056 was a 50:50 mix of anything. I took the original package (that was 2 weeks past the date on the cover, always refrigerated) and opened it sterily and streaked it for single colonies on a malt-agar plate. I got numerous single-colonies, and I expected to be able to tell the two species apart by their appearance on the plate, at least after several days, since someone here had advised me so. However, nearly all of the colonies looked the same, large, wrinkled (after a week) and very pale brown. With some scrutiny I picked out a few that were smaller, and when re-streaked onto fresh plates this phenotype was retained. So I got 2 colony types; large and wrinkled, and tiny. I then grew up a dozen colonies in 200 ml cultures of wort (unhopped, sterile) and fermented them out. Upon tasting, all 9 of the large colonies seemed identical, estery, slightly sweet, with the characteristic Weissbier cloveyness. The three "tiny" colonies were distinctly different, very dry product with little ester taste. I conclude that there were indeed two organisms, quite distinct, in my 3056, but at least by the time I got it opened one was vastly predominant to the other. What I've been doing for my weissbiers now is to make two starters, one with the "Large" (estery) colony and innoculate that upon cooling the wort. I then innoculate the fermenting wort with the "tiny" (dry, non estery) starter at day 3. I want to give the wort a few days to develop the clovy tang before hitting it with the other culture. Has anyone out there similar or different experience with 3056? Does anyone know if wyeast really tries to make it a 50:50 mix? thanks, dennis Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 11:14:56 PDT From: jamesm at chips.com (James Margeson) Subject: Brewpub Crawl, San Francisco Bay Area I thought this might be of interest to people who live in or near the San Francisco Bay Area: Brewpub Crawl Sunday, June 14 Breakfast buffet, 9 am, at Winchester Brewing Co., 820 S. Winchester Blvd., San Jose. The tour visits: 20 Tanks Marin Brewing Co. Bison Brewing Co. Pacific Coast Brewing Co. Buffalo Bill's Brewpub-on-the-Green and ends up back at Winchester for a dinner buffet. Winchester's Red and Porter will be served on the bus. Price is $50. Call Frank or Tam at (408) 243-7561 for a reservation. Deadline is May 31 and it may fill up quickly. Tell them I sent you, and ask them for a tour. Jim Margeson Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 15:23 CDT From: fjdobner at ihlpb.att.com Subject: Beer Head Would anyone happen to know if allowing beer to ferment with trub present cause a deleterious affect on beer head? I have serious staying power problem with beer head. It is not detergent, it is not grinding grain too fine, it has nothing to do with oils present (since I eliminated all of these). Has water quality anything to do with head? Frank Dobner Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 16:49:54 EDT From: "Spencer W. Thomas" <Spencer.W.Thomas at med.umich.edu> Subject: G.W. Kent korz at iepubj.att.com writes: > You can get two of the most dominant beasties from G.W.Kent in Ann > Arbor Michigan. You'll have to go through your retailer. My > retailer charged me $8 each for Brettanomyces Lambicus and > Pediococcus Cerevisiae. G.W. Kent has a small retail outlet at the warehouse in Ann Arbor. They just won't sell retail by mail. Prices are generally a little lower than the same product in a retail store, but higher than wholesale. (e.g., Coopers Light extract 1.7kg was about $9 at Kent, and $12 at a local HB store). It's open 9-6 M-F and 12-4 Sat. Take Morgan Rd. west from Platt just south of the landfill (about a mile south of I-94). They're located at the end of the road, right by US 23. One question, Al. How do you keep the Brettanomyces and Pediococcus from infecting your other brews? =Spencer W. Thomas HSITN, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 spencer.thomas at med.umich.edu 313-747-2778 Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 19:28:22 EDT From: perley at easygoer.crd.ge.com (Donald P Perley) Subject: hops, water > Re. a question on hops: The first year will not yield any hops to speak >of; it takes at least 2 years before you get any measurable harvest, and it >is also dependent on the type of hops. Cascade grows faster in general than My hops, of questionable descent, but somewhat Saazish were obtained from the farm of a family of Czech descent. They had been growing on their farm since prohibition :-). Anyway, it yielded 8 ounces the first year. That is, I planted the root in the fall, and harvested 8 ounces the next September. They claimed the fall is the best time to take root samples and plant them. I guess the commercial guys take them in the fall and sell them in the spring? I have never heard of commercial roots being available in the fall. -don perley Return to table of contents
Date: Fri, 29 May 92 19:32:04 GMT From: martin wilde <martin at daw_302.hf.intel.com> Subject: Re: Re: State with most micros/brewpubs per capita Not to be outdone: > As I understand, and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong :-), > Vermont has the largest number of micros/brewpubs per capita: > > Population: circa 550,000 > Micros/Brewpubs: > Catamount > Vermont Pub & Brewery > Mountain Brewers (Long trail ale) > Otter Creek > 2 others in brattleboro I believe, but only counting the 4 above, > we get about 1 micro/brewpub per 150,000 residents. > Rich Oregon --- Population: circa 3,250,000 Micros/Brewpubs: Widmer Brewing/BrewPub (2) - Portland FullSail Brewing/BrewPub (2) - Hood River, Portland Bridgeport Brewery/BrewPub - Portland Oregon Trail Brewery/BrewPub - Corvalis SteelHead Brewery/BrewPub - Eugene Deschutes Brewery/BrewPub - Bend Umpqua Brewery/BrewPub - Roseburg Rogue Brewery/BrewPub (2) - Ashland, Newport Portland Ale/BrewPub - Portland McMenamins - (10) - Hillsdale, Salem, Eugene, Roadhouse, Oak Hills, Edgefield, Lincoln City, Fulton, Highland, Murray Road. There maybe 2 others I believe, but only counting the 22 above, we get about 1 micro/brewpub per 147,000 residents... If you just look at Portland metro area alone: 15 Micros/BrewPubs/1.5 million people, you get 1 micro/brewpub per 100,000 residents. People have said there are more McMenamins Pubs/Brewpubs in the Portland area than McDonalds... (better food at least - A pint of ale beats a BigMac anyday!!!). Return to table of contents
End of HOMEBREW Digest #892, 06/01/92