BREW DAY: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper Edition)

July 10, 2011

This was an interesting brew day, but it was also a long one and this will be a long post.

The recipe didn't end up being as big a departure from the original as I had originally planned. This was largely because I couldn't find some of the ingredients I wanted - for the next batch I'll have to special order some things - although I was able to change the extract to light and I made some hopping adjustments. The real changes, though, were with my equipment and procedures (see the last Sarcastic Doorman brew day to compare), and not all of those were intentional. I decided to make it a twelve liter batch, so I can have a keg and a decent number of bottles, but there were consequences I didn't adequately consider beforehand.  More on that later.

First I handled the defining ingredient of this beer, the Westphalian pumpernickel. I used two 500 gram loaves from the German grocery (this will account for ~30% of my grain bill, the same as last time - I changed my mind about cutting it in half), crumbled by hand one thin slice at a time.

At Smashton & Parris, we use only the
very sexiest of breads.

Check the ingredients - it's halfway
to being beer already!

1 kilogram of pumpernickel

This took a while.

Crumbling by hand rather than trying to "mince" it like last time resulted in a much finer product:

Next it was time to measure out and crush the grains. This is where the changes start. First, I'm using more specialty grains (chocolate malt and extra-dark crystal malt), because we're now using light malt extract instead of dark, so all the colour and flavour is coming from my own ingredients. (Okay... I used a little dark extract as well because it was all I had left and I thought I was short of fermentables, but it was a small percentage of the total.) The new recipe calls for 250 grams of chocolate malt and 375 grams of extra-dark crystal. It doesn't sound like very much, but that's about two cups of chocolate malt, and three heaping cups of crystal.

Remember, the cup weighs 75 grams.

Crystal malt isn't as dense as the
chocolate malt.  Note the heaping.

Now, we aren't grinding our grains into slivers and powder in a food processor at Smashton & Parris anymore; we have a brand-new grain crusher!

It used to be a pasta rolling machine, but we made a few modifications of our own.

Mr. Smashton did the machining, knurling the rollers so they grab the grains, and I re-built the device. In the long run, we're going to make completely new rollers because our standards for stainlessness are evidently higher than the original manufacturers', but for now I was able to clean it up enough that it was fine for one batch of beer.

It does a good job.  Note the absence of the sort of fine dust created when I did this with the food processor:

The hulls are all broken, without
crushing the kernels.

For the chocolate malt I made the gap
between the rollers smaller, resulting
in a finer crush.

Now, recall earlier I said there were consequences from my decision to make a twelve liter batch - I'd worked out that would be a comfortable size based on my new cooler.  Those became apparent at this point, when I discovered I don't actually have a pot that will hold, let alone safely boil, twelve liters of water.  I figured I could boil eight liters in my largest pot, and a mere two liters in my second largest, so I decided to do (at least to begin with) a ten liter steep.

Which was fine, except of course - I can't boil that ten liters of wort once I'm done steeping, can I?  But we'll come back to this.

While the water was coming to a boil and then cooling to my steeping temperature, I prepared the steeping vessel.  This brings us to two new pieces of equipment.  First, I bought a new cooler, but second and more excitingly, we now have a grain bag!

The bag, in the cooler.  Credit goes to my mother for actually
making the thing - that mesh is not easy to sew at all.

Made from a very fine poly mesh (sheer curtain material), a grain bag works basically like a huge tea bag.  In this case, it was made in an inverted truncated pyramid shape, and is designed to line the cooler and drape over the sides.  This way, I can stir the grains in the bag after adding the water.  A draw string keeps it all tidy, and the lid fits on with the bag in place nice and tight.  This setup would work for mashing as well as steeping - I could actually go all-grain at this point for a slightly smaller batch.

I filled the lined cooler with pumpernickel, chocolate malt, and crystal malt, and added the water when it hit the appropriate temperature.

The space blanket further insulates the cooler so as to have
a more stable temperature.  This will be more important when
I start actually mashing grains rather than just steeping.

Now, I had about an hour to think.  How was I going to boil twelve or even ten liters of wort in a pot that barely accommodated eight liters?  I decided to do two consecutive boils of six liters each.  For the first boil, I would have to use the syphon to remove six of my ten liters of wort, and then add two liters of fresh hot water to the remaining four which would continue steeping until the pot was available again.  Alternately, I could have removed the grains at the end of the first hour, topped up with my two liters (cold or hot), and then done two boils, but I figured if I was going to have wort waiting to boil it might as well be extracting some more flavour and colour from my grains.

I just tugged one corner of the bag aside
to syphon out from under it, getting wort
without any grain particles.

I don't usually syphon anything hot,
but it was the easiest way to transfer
only part of the wort to the pot.

Since I was doing two boils, I had to divide all my hop additions in half as well.  In the first boil, I used:

• 8 grams of Amarillo hops (American, citrusy) boiled 60 minutes for bittering.

It's an ~14.2 gram spoon.

• 5 grams of Fuggles  hops (English, earthy) boiled 10 minutes for aroma.

• 5 grams of juniper berries (the main flavour in gin), ground in the food processor, boiled 10 minutes for aroma.

The dry malt extract went in with twenty minutes left on the boil, ten minutes before the Fuggles and juniper berries.  I added one kilogram of light extract and probably about 150 grams of dark.

For the second boil I duplicated all except the Fuggles, which I decided to cut back from ten grams to only five at the last second.  In hindsight I may have been being overly conservative when I did that, but I didn't want them to compete too much with the juniper berries, which I went pretty light on to begin with.





Once the first boil was completed and cooled (in a sink full of ice, like before), I poured it into the fermenter and noted that I'd boiled off approximately two liters in one hour (which would turn out to be the same for the second boil, so at least I'm consistent).  Unfortunately six liters is the most wort I can safely boil in that pot, so there was no way for me to compensate for this in advance - I just had to top up with four liters of plain water in the end.

But first I had a second boil to get through.  Transferring the wort to the pot was much easier this time, anyway - I just pulled the bag out of the cooler, let the excess water drain, and the poured everything into the pot to boil.  Definitely much easier than colanders and cheese cloth.

Neat and convenient!

Because I topped up with plain water, which doesn't always mix perfectly into the wort right away, I don't fully trust my original gravity reading:









That's at least 1.080, a good ten or fifteen points higher than expected, and while it could be I got a higher efficiency somewhere than I anticipated, my guess is that it's down to the sample having more concentrated wort.  This will all balance out in the end, and I anticipate another 5.9% ABV when all is said and done.

Finally, I added the yeast.  Once again I used Wyeast's Scottish Ale Yeast, from a smack-pack I activated the night before:

It's bulging because the yeast, "woken"
when the pack is smacked, are producing
CO2 in there.

It was a long brew day by my standards.  Including sanitation and the little bit of cleanup I didn't think I could put off until today, I'd say it was about ten hours start to finish.  Having to do two boils back to back contributed a lot to that.  Each boil is an hour, not including time to bring it to a boil, time to cool it, and transferring wort...  Call each one two hours, all-told, and you wouldn't be far off.  The larger quantity of grains to crush and hand-crumbling the bread also added time, although those could have been done the day before (and the new crusher still makes them pretty convenient).  If I'm going to keep doing batches this size, I'm going to have to solve some issues.

I confident the beer will be good, anyway, and in the end, that's what counts, right?