2021 Q1 SheppyBrew Stats

Q1 of 2021 is already over, which means its time to report our brewing stats for the year so far.

Continuing on the trend from last year, I brewed a ridiculous amount of beer over the first 3 months of the year.

The first quarter of 2020, I brewed 7 whole batches with 35 gallons. In 2021, I brewed even more in Q1 ... 

I brewed 8 batches and 42 gallons of beer.

Arctic Vortex Winter Saison

Quarter Life Crisis (Batch 281)

Recently, I turned 40 years of age. Recent is a  relative term.

Even more recently, I turned 50. Time flies when you are having fun.

To be honest, I'm now significantly over 50. I think with all the biking I've been doing over the past few years, I might be in better shape than I was at 40.

At least I'm in better cycling shape.

Anyway, when I turned 40, I thought it might be a good idea to have a quarter life crisis, since I was obviously too young to have a mid-life crisis. 

I never did get around to having that quarter life crisis, but I did brew

Quarter Life Crisis Hoppy Red Ale

Everybody gets a certificate

If you follow this blog at all, or SheppyBrew's Facebook Page, or my twitter feed, or are just someone I have talked to in the past couple of weeks, you know that SheppyBrew's  Sasquatch Hunter German Altbier is now an award winning beer.

I won't go into the details on the 1st place winning beer here. If you want, you can read my posts "Kind of a Big Deal" and "Brewing for the Nationals". Feel free to shower me with praise and congratulations in any or all of the comment sections.

Lots of you know that I have been brewing since 2009 when my sister got me a Mr. Beer kit as a Christmas gift. Until this year, I've never entered a home-brew competition. I've been told that I should, and I always agree. Not that I necessarily expected that I would win anything. I mostly thought I should enter competitions to get objective feedback.

Birthday Edition: Brewing QLC

Yesterday was my birthday. I don't feel a day over 43. Not bad.

This year, I decided to take PTO and brew on my birthday. I got this idea when Scott at SNB Brewing mentioned that he has did the same thing this year. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

And what better to brew on my birthday than my world-famous Quarter Life Crisis? Obviously, my life is over a quarter over now. It is closer to being 27%, but I am ok with that.

Brew day began at 5AM. I overheated the strike water a bit and had to add cold water to bring it down to the desired temperature. I went too low, so I added more hot water. Eventually, I got the mash more-or-less where I wanted it. This yo-yo style of getting to the right temperature probably is not the best practice for precision brewing, but I find it always works out fine.

San Diego Super Yeast

Soon, I am brewing SheppyBrew's world-famous Quarter Life Crisis Hoppy Red Ale. My birthday is coming up, and my life will be almost 27% over. Obviously, this is a great time for a Quarter Life Crisis. I can't, after-all do a mid-life crisis yet.

If you've been following this blog long enough (or just followed the link above), you may remember that this beer came about after I received  Jamil Zainasheff's and John Palmer's book Brewing Classic Styles as a gift on my 40th birthday. It is a hoppy "West Coast" Red ... or at least that is what I call the style. Basically, it is hopped like an IPA, but is darker in color and more complex in the malt bill.

Helpful #HomeBrew Thieves

My wife's family visited this past weekend.

They came in last Thursday night and then we spent the weekend (Friday thru Monday) up in Breckenridge.

I wanted them to help me reduce my SheppyBrew inventory, and they did. Boy did they help.

I started them off with some Summer Lovin' American Wheat in hopes that they would help me kill that keg so that I could have an empty one (see below for why it was important to have an empty keg). After awhile Thursday night, though, they wanted to try some other beers, and of course I let them.

Tracy's dad seemed to really enjoy both the Gringo Cerveza Cream Ale and the Gringo Cerveza Jalapeño Cream Ale. He is certainly not a craft-beer drinker, and I was not surprised at all that the Cream Ale would be his favorite. I am a bit surprised that he like the Jalapeño beer, though.

The newest brother-in-law tried a bunch of different kinds. The one he seemed to like the most was 15 Year Anniversary Amber Ale. He told me that ambers are his favorite. I suppose he probably would have been a fan of Phat & Tyred Amber Ale, but I didn't have any to offer him.

The older brother-in-law (older than the newer b-i-l ... not older than I am) also tried a bunch. He was a real big fan of the Fox Sox Knox Rye Pale Ale and the TommyHawk APA. He especially enjoyed the dry-hopped version of the TommyHawk, which was my favorite of the evening. I thought both those beers were tasting particularly delicious that night as well.

Tracy's youngest sister is pregnant, so didn't have much. She did have a few sips here and there and made some very complimentary comments.

The middle sister isn't much of a beer fan but did seem to like Summer Lovin' American Wheat and Buckwheat's Belgium Pale Ale.

I brought the rest of the keg up to Breckenridge. It emptied early Friday afternoon. This makes me very happy.

I let youngest sister take some beer home to one of my virtual beer friends. Hopefully next time I see her, she will be able to obtain some of his for me to try.

The SheppyBrew inventory is much lower than it was before the in-laws came to visit. In fact, it is lower than it has been in a long time. This is good in that I now can brew again. Sadly, we wiped out 15 Year Anniversary Amber Ale and Fox Sox Knox Rye Pale Ale. I'll certainly have to brew those again.

Can't wait to work on my pipeline again.

So, why did I want to have an empty keg? The last beer I made and kegged was Quarter Life Crisis Hoppy Red Ale. I dry hop this beer, and this time I decided to try dry hopping without using any kind of hop sack. Then, I didn't cold-crash and probably was not as careful as I should be to leave behind the bottom hop matter when I transferred from the carboy into the corny. Anyway, I ended up with enough hop matter in the keg that my poppet valve on the beer-out side was clogged up and the keg did not dispense beer.

The only thing I could think of to rectify the situation was to move the QLC into another keg, but at the time, my only other keg was full of Summer Lovin' Wheat. I would have bought another keg, but at the moment, used corny kegs are pretty expensive, plus I knew that the Beer Model's family was coming and that they have been known to consume a fair amount of beer when with me.

Tonight, I sanitized the empty keg and siphoned beer from the full keg to the empty one. I left a couple of liters of the QLC behind just to try to keep as much of the hop matter out of the new keg. I didn't waste it, though, I transferred some of that into a pint glass and the rest into a growler. I drank the pint glass and the growler is still in my fridge.

The new keg of QLC has been pressurized and is in the keggerator. I just poured myself about 10oz, and it does flow. It also tastes very good.

I guess the SheppyBrew Brew Master will consider this a learning experience. I'll be using hop sacks for dry-hopping and/or making sure I cold crash and/or be careful transferring dry-hopped beers into kegs. All's well that ends well, but I don't want to make this same mistake again.

Next brew day for SheppyBrew:  Phat & Tyred Amber Ale.

Fermentation Video

My Quarter Life Crisis Hoppy Red Ale is fermenting away. Those yeasties are getting a heck of a workout. I am not sure what kind of quality the uploaded video will be. Hopefully you can see the activity.

I hope the krausen does not get too much bigger. Perhaps I'll need a blow-off tube.

In case you want to read more about the brew day see "Brew day: Quarter Life Crisis".


----

Ok ... I've decided to add this video to youtube as well. I'm seeing which video seems better, the one from youtube (below) or the one uploaded straight to blogger (above)

Brew day: Quarter Life Crisis

Connor has been bugging me for quite awhile to make cookies with him. Saturday, while I was giving blood, he finally gave up on me and convinced his mother to make cookies with him. The picture to the left is what I came home to, a little baker with oven mitts and an apron on. He is a pretty cute chef. Just for the record, I was planning on making cookies with him this weekend. We just have not had time the other times he has asked.

But, that is not what this blog post is about. Today, we are talking about Sunday's brew day. On Sunday, I brewed up my Quarter Life Crisis Hoppy Red Ale.

It is really hard to declare any home-brew a favorite over another. As I've heard quite a few brewers say when asked to name their favorite beer, "my favorite beer is the one in my hand". But, if you made me tell you my favorite beer, usually my answer will be Quarter Life Crisis. It is big and hoppy with a malt complexity that IPAs just don't have. I love the Imperial (or West-Coast) Red style, and I think my Quarter Life Crisis is as good as any commercial example of the style. I like it very much.


But, at the moment, I only have one Quarter Life Crisis in my inventory, and I've been telling myself for quite awhile that I need to do another batch. On Thursday, I finally stopped by the Brew Hut and purchased ingredients to brew another batch so that I could brew it Sunday.

And, that is just what I did.

This batch was my first all-grain version of QLC. It was also my first 5-gallon batch of the recipe. One of the reasons I switched to BIAB was because my 5 gallon mash tun would not be big enough to do full-sized all-grain batches for my higher alcohol beers. My 8-gallon brew pot is obviously bigger than my 5-gallon tun.


The brew day went pretty well. I hit all my gravity numbers at acceptable volumes, but I think ideally I would have an even bigger vessel for mashing the grains for this recipe.

My 8-gallon brew pot was great for mashing Gringo Cerveza Jalapeño Cream Ale (1.046OG, 4.69% ABV) and Summer Lovin' American Wheat (1.052 OG, 5.99% ABV), but QLC has an OG of 1.072, and you might be able to tell from the picture to the left, that much wet grain is pretty bulky. You probably can't tell from the picture, but might be able to imagine, that much wet grain is also very heavy. I was able to fit the grain plus about 6 gallons of water in the mash. That left almost 3 gallons of water for a sparge, which I did in my 5 gallon mash tun. The fat, heavy, wet bag of grain was difficult to get into the gott-cooler, and I spilled some of my precious sugar-filled wort moving the bag to the sparge vessel.


Like I mentioned above, I hit gravity numbers, so it did not cause any kind of real problem with the resulting wort. It was just more difficult than it seems it should have been.

The boil went well. Absolutely no issues over the 90 minute boil. One thing I did a little differently this time was I used another bag to hold the flavoring hops in the boil. The bag was smaller than the BIAB bag, but bigger than the hop sacks I've used sometimes in the past. The idea here was to easily filter the hop material (there are a lot more hops in this recipe than any of my other recipes), but still allow the hops to "swim free" for the most part, allowing decent hop utilization. The filtering part seems to have worked really well, and I think I got  more wort because of considerably less gunk on the bottom of the pot. Not sure how my utilization actually compared, but the wort sample did taste hoppy, so I guess it was decent.

It was a hot, sunny day in the upper 80's or maybe even in the 90s, and my chiller did not get the wort as cool as I would like. As I mentioned in Beer Model Brew Day, I might want to invest in a pre-chiller to help chill on these hot summer days. I would put my pre-chiller in an ice bath so that my chilling water would be much colder. I think that would help quite a bit, but I don't know how much colder I'd be able to chill with this pre-chill method.

This time, though, what I ended up doing was putting carboy into my chest freezer for about half an hour (might have been more). This got me from about 72 down to around 62, which is a perfect pitching temperature for an ale. Note, I do know that lots of brewers will say that 72 is a perfectly acceptable pitching temperature. I just have had better results when I pitch either right at or a little bit lower than fermentation temperature, and I've had much better results starting fermentation in the low 60's than I have had fermenting at or above 70. So, I guess until I make or find an inexpensive pre-chiller, I have an acceptable plan - B.

Now, back to brewing the bigger-gravity SheppyBrew all-grain recipes, I am back to thinking that I need a 10-gallon gott-cooler to use as a mash tun. But, I am sort of thinking it would be just fine to use my BIAB method inside the cooler so that I don't have to do any modification on the cooler. Not only would this mean less up-front work, but also, one of the things that appeal to BIAB for me is that there is no danger of a stuck-sparge. All-grain wheat and rye beers and beers to which I add flaked oats will not have that risk. I suppose I'm just a bit gun-shy after the last time I tried to brew Phat and Tyred Ale (see Worst brew day ever?).

While I was cleaning up from my brew day, the beer model and the brewing assistants planted perennials on Sunday. Unfortunately, very few of the perennials that we plant in the front ever come up perennially. I guess the beer model still thinks that perhaps this is the year that the plants will survive to come up in the future. I think she is planning on making watering the plants one of the jobs on the kids' checklists so that at least they should get enough water through the summer. I guess we'll see. If they don't survive, I guess there is always next year. She is a Cubs fan after-all.

Here is the Quarter Life Crisis carboy fermenting away:

QLC All Grain Brew

New Direct TV Dish

This past weekend, I brewed an all-grain version of my Quarter Life Crisis Hoppy Red Ale. It is sort of difficult to name a favorite beer. I "love" all of my beers. But at least right now, this is my favorite. Its a deep-red colored beer with lots of nice caramel malts, but it is very hoppy as well. It is hard to find commercial beers in this "West Coast American Red" style of beer (at least here in Colorado). Luckily, I know how to brew my own.

Draining the Wort

 
I did the mash while the Direct TV technician installed our Dish and ran cabel to our TVs. I started the boil as he was cleaning up. My pre-boil gravity was right on. Today was windy, and a couple times my flame blew out, so I had to babysit the boil more more than usual. I kept the flame a bit higher, which resulted in a more vigorous boil than usual. After I set a couple of our patio chairs on their sides as wind breaks, the flame never went out. I might have to start doing my winter brews in the garage to get out of the wind. 

Start of Boil

I had to make some recipe adjustments "on the fly" today, because when I finalized my recipe, I thought I had more columbus hops than I actually had.  Somehow, I also overstated my AA on the cascade hops.  Luckily, I realized all this pretty early in the process, so I could make my changes to the recipe in plenty of time to make the recipe adjustments. 

Wind Screen

I used hop sacks in the boil this time. Somehow even so, there was hop gunk in the pot.  Not a big deal, but I'm not sure how my hops got free.

Hydrating the Yeast

My pitch was right at 62, which is exactly where I want it.  My OG was a little high.  I think I probably put more of the wort in than I should have, but I don't really care if my OG is a bit high.  The fermentation has been pretty active so far, although I have maintained a pretty low temperature (62).  I will not be surprised if I get an overflow.  In about a week, I'll add in my "dry hop" addition of cascade and centennial.

I am looking forward to trying this in about 4 to 6 weeks.  I'm hoping I can save a few of the batch I have in the fridge right now to compare the partial-mash to the all-grain.  Who knows if I will actually be able to do so.

The direct TV installation went well.  It is nice to have a DVR again to pause and fast-forward through commercials.  Now, I can watch my NHL games as well.  Of course, so far the Hawks have not won a game, but I'm sure that will change tonight.

Best Beers in America II

So, just a couple days ago, I posted that The AHA recently posted their 2010 Zymurgy Best Beers In America Poll, and that I had not had very many of them.

Since then, I stopped at the liquor store.  I wanted to buy Russian River Pliny the Elder (#1 on the list), but I could not find it.  Disappointing.  Instead, I picked up  Arrogant Bastard and Dogfish Head's 90 minute IPA.  So, now I've tried 3 of the top 5.  I've had 4 of the top 10, and 10 on the list.  I'll feel pretty good about myself if I can taste 5 or 10 more on the list.

Both  Arrogant Bastard and Dogfish Head's 90 minute IPA are fine beers.  Of course, neither of these are locally brewed, so they are pretty expensive.  I do not know for sure, but I assume if I were in a more local liquor store to either of these, they would be fresher than the beer I got.

Personally, for the cost, I would just as soon drink a local Imperial IPA as I would the 90 minute.  I do not think it is any better than the New Belgium Ranger IPA, for example.  It very well could change my opinion if I were to get one fresh out of the brewery, but Delaware is a long way from Colorado, so my Colorado beers are going to be fresher than anything I'll drink from Dogfish Head.  IPA is not really my preferred style of beer anyway.  Because of that, I do not really have one of my beers to compare to the 90 minute IPA.

Arrogant Bastard is a very interesting beer.  To me, it tastes like a more bitter, less hoppy version of the SheppyBrew Quarter Life Crisis, which is a beer style that I really do like.  And yes, as arrogant as it might sound, I like my beer better than I like Arrogant Bastard.  Again, freshness might be a factor in the "sample" I got.  Plus, I think it is somewhat human nature to prefer something that I, a home-brewer, created over another beer.  That being said, if you were to offer me an Arrogant Bastard, I would not hesitate to accept.  The beer is deep red in color, and aggressively bitter throughout the drink.  It has a nice malty / caramelly background with a healthy dose of American citrusy and piney hops and maybe just a touch of roasted malts.  It is really what I would call the perfect combination of flavors ... except mine just blends them better (IMAO).

Anyway... there you go.  I am on my way to trying more of the best beers in America.