Brewer’s Cache

Milwaukee, home to Miller Brewing and a number of quality craft breweries, is a great destination for a brewing vacation. The city, if you have never visited, is has a history that is expressed in all of its architecture. You’ll see the old and the new side by side, beautiful churches, stately hotels and manors, attractive stone work, inspiring high rises, but enough greenery to make this city feel small and comfortable. With a university downtown, the city is very pedestrian friendly and has a nightlife that is hard to beat.

An abbreviated list of breweries in the city include: Miller Brewing, Lakefront Brewery, Water Street Brewery, Stonefly Brewing Company.

Water Street brewery produces beer that is sold throughout the city. I had the chance to try their Water Street Weiss, Water Street Pale, and Maibock; all great beers that I would recommend. Water street offers tours of their small-scale brewery during Monday through Friday. Though I missed the opportunity to take the tour, I understand the brewmaster personally gives the tour and takes you through the whole process, all up close and personal.

A patron of the historic Astor bar and Grill highly recommended the Lakefront brewery tasting tour. The tour offers tasting sessions that include bottomless samples from their entire offering and end with an optional fish fry.

Miller brewing also gives a tour, a tour tailored for the beer drinker, not the homebrewer. The tour focuses on the bottling, packaging, and shipping stages of production. A brewhouse tour is available but seems to have been added as an afterthought–it only lasts about 10 minutes including the time to walk up the 56 steps to their mash and lauter tuns. Miller only educates their brewhouse tour guides with the most cursory information about their brewing process. They didn’t know which hop varieties were used, the mash temperature, or even how many pounds of grain are used to fill the mash tun. All they knew for sure was the Miller yeast is top secret and is used in the brewing of all Miller beers. The guide didn’t have a clue what specific gravity was but that didn’t stop him from using the term incorrectly throughout his presentation. For a homebrewer, there are more interesting ways to spend two hours.

If you visit the city, be sure to stop by Louise’s after dark for a bite to eat. Their Stromboli, accompanied by a tall glass of Water Street Weiss, was just fantastic. I had to actually put down my fork and just appreciate a dish that just hit the spot so well.

During my weekend visit, there was so much going on in the city, that I was never in want. Every Thursday night from June through September, there is live jazz music in Cathedral Park. I managed to also catch an air show at Veteran’s Park on the shore of Lake Michigan; it was amazing to hear the roar and rumble of jets flying overhead throughout the city. To top off the weekend, the city held its annual German fest. What a visit!

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This beer was produced during a period in which I was experimenting with lower mash temperatures to produce dryer beers. This beer has an intensely dark brown color with a modest chocolate-tinged head. This beer provides a nice complex flavor that starts with plum that resides to leave a subtle, lingering chocolate finish. There is no apparent hop aroma; plum notes can be detected in the nose. This beer is bittered to balance and has no discernable harshness.

Target Gravity: 1.054
IBU: 32.4
BU/GU: 0.6

Grain Bill

8.0639 lbs American Pale Malt
2.298 lbs Brown Malt
0.5 lbs Chocolate Malt
0.5 lbs Special B

Hops

2 oz Perle Leaf Hops ( 7.5 % ) @ 60 minutes

Yeast

US-50 SafAle

Schedule

Mash this beer at 151 for 90 minutes. Boil for 90 minutes. Ferment at optimal yeast temperature, approx 68F.

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Maintaining a constant temperature during the mash is very important to ensure the proper balance and yield of the beer. For new brewers or the average homebrewer that mashes without the assistance of a mash temperature control system, this can sometimes be a headache. The following ‘tricks’ might help you manage:

1.    Preheat the mash tun. This will reduce temperature loss by the mash tun vessel .

2.    Fill the mashtun with the appropriate amount of strike water before adding any of the grain. This will afford you the opportunity to double check the strike water temperature before having to deal with the grains. I generally overheat my strike water by a few degrees to account for temperature loss incurred while measuring out the water. If the temperature loss is less than expected, I just wait a few minutes until the water in the mash tun has dropped to the appropriate level.

3.    Keep the mash tun off of cold tile floors. This is one that I overlooked for nearly a dozen all-grain batches. During the winter months, tile floors act as a significant heat sink. By simply setting the mash tun on your countertop, you might be able to save yourself a degree or two of temperature loss.

4.    Drape some old blankets or some kitchen drying towels over the mash tun to add a little extra insulation. Most insulated coolers are engineered to keep things cold, not warm. Insulation is typically quite lacking in the lids of most igloo coolers.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Progress continues on the site.  The Brewer’s Cache Community Forum is now available.  Please sign up.  For now, forum registration will be kept independent of registration to the main site. http://www.brewerscache.com/forum

Popularity: 39% [?]

A light-colored, light-medium bodied ale with nice, noticeable citrusy notes that is reminiscent of Boulevard Wheat Beer. This is my all-grain version of the Kansas City Wheat beer.

Expected Original Gravity: 1.047 – 1.051
Expected Final Gravity: 1.010 – 1.014
IBUs: 22-26
Alchohol by Volume: 4.5-5.0%
Boil duration: 60 mintues

Grain Bill

10 lbs Wheat Malt
0.5 lbs Caravienne

Mash Schedule
Protein rest ~ 20 minutes
Sacrification rest @ 153 ~ 60 minutes

Hop Schedule
1 oz * Cluster Hops ( bittering ) @ 60 min
1 oz Willamette Hops ( finishing ) @ 5 min

Notes

* I am going to substitute the Cluster hops with Amarillo–it is the variety that I have on hand.

You will need to adjust the quantity of bittering hops depending on the alpha acid content of your variety; shoot for 23 IBUs.

Ferment this beer around 65F to reduce the fruity esters. In the past, I followed the 1-2-3 rule, but this time, I think that I am going to ferment in glass and primary this beer for 3 weeks and then rack to a keg for secondary fermentation until its time to tap the keg.

Popularity: 43% [?]

The brewerscache.com website is coming along.  Having not created a webpage in quite some time, it has required quite a learning curve to get up to date on many of the new webpage technologies.  I am still getting all of the database functionality up and running and then will certainly have a couple of weeks of polishing before I can slap the “beta” label on it.

Initially, the website feature set is going to focus on brewing recipes, searching for,  sharing,  and rating recipes submitted by the community.  The recipe builder options will perform many of the common brewing calculations (IBU, OG, etc) for you as you go.

In the long run, I hope to add quite a number of recipe analysis operations that will let you compare your recipe to a style, other recipes, etc.  For the recognition of the ambitious homebrewer, I will also be adding fun “achievements,” honors that will be awarded members who accomplish certain feats,  like brewing x number of gallons in a year, or brewing x different styles, or having x number of top rates recipes, etc).

Of course, if you have been looking for a particular brewing tool or  have some suggestions, please let me know while things are in their early state.

Happy Homebrewing!

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Blonde ale is what most Amererican’s think of when they think of beer.   This is a light, easy drinking beer that is well balanced, lightly hopped, clean, and crisp. The grain bill is very simple–blonde ales can be brewed using only a single grain, the base malt. 

Grain Bill

12 lbs    2-row
0.5 lbs    Crystal  20L
The Mash

Single Infusion Mash  @ 151F

Hop Schedule
90 minute boil
1 oz Willamette @ 60 minutes.
Yeast
White Labs California Ale Yeast
 Notes:
Create a yeast start at least a day ahead of time or pitch two vials of yeast. Fement this beer at 67F; mine took about nine days to complete.  For such a simple grain bill, the fermentation temperature must be well controlled. Off flavors will not be hidden!

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This is the new home to the “Brewer’s log” found on http://brewbaron.wordpress.com.

I will leave the old wordpress blog up for the time being, but all new content will be posted here.

Also, with luck, I will have http://www.brewerscache.com up and running with some new features. You should expect to someday find some interesting recipe and style analysis tools, resource locators, forum, etc. The development of the website, like brewing, is a hobby and will take some time to perfect and populate. I will be rolling out the new features as soon as they are developed.

Thanks,

Brewbaron of Brewerscache.com

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Tomorrow is a big day for brewbaron.wordpress.com.  It is the day that, if things go as planned, I will break 10,000 hits.  Thanks for tuning in to the blog; the positive daily traffic is what keeps this interesting.  I always love to hear from you; keep the comments and questions coming.

At this point in my brewing hobby, I have brewed 60 gallons of beer, a meager number compared to some in the same time frame, and have attempted a dozen or so styles.  Before I started homebrewing, I really only took the time to enjoy a small subset of the many, many varieties of beer.  Now, I always have two examples of good beer on tap!

If you are just starting out, stick with it, try new things, and RDWHAHB.

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My batch of Company Cream ale is aging nicely and is becoming more drinkable.  The almost-overpowering ester profile has faded considerably and the corn-like flavor (style characteristic) is starting to come through.  Also, the beer has marginally cleared; it is still hazy but not embarrassingly hazy.  The hop bitterness is spot-on; I wouldn’t change a thing.

If you attempt this one, be sure to keg it and forget about it; come back to it in six months and I bet that you will be pleased.

Popularity: 42% [?]