Beer Diary...

My interview with the local Santa Cruz paper the Sentinel was just published today and includes a short video of me explaining the minimum equipment required to brew a batch of beer. Check it out. The Article Leave a comment about the beer school interview. Do you teach brewing?

Santa Cruz homebrew club 'Zymurgeeks' are interviewed for the local PBS radio station at an event that I wrote about here earlier in this blog. The interview took place at the Capitola Book Cafe. Go here to listen.

The Zymurgeeks homebrew club met up with the Fungus Federation http://www.fungusfed.org/ for a memorial day of food and homebrew. We supplied six corny kegs of beer and they provided all of the food for a warm and relaxing day in Scotts Valley, which is in the hills just e ast of Santa Cruz. From the fungus website: "The Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz (FFSC) is an informal affiliation of friendly, fun-loving, sometimes frenzied fungophiles dedicated to the knowledge, pursuit and appreciation of wild mushrooms. We organize many activities during the mushroom season from September through May." It was interesting to see how the brewers formed a seperate group, congregating around a picnic table, discussing their passion for beer. I don't know. I wish I could write that this was an exciting event but the truth is, not a lot was going on. We ate, drank, conversed and played horse shoes and before you could say "magic mushroom", the day ended and I made the trek ba...

Sometimes, even the simplest of ideas tickle the hell out of me and here is just one cast that keeps on giving in the tickle department. If you end up buying a chest freezer with the thought of turning it into a kegerator , like I did, you will need to purchase a temperature controller from your homebrew store. I got mine from http://www.breworganic.com/ . This device overrides the manufacturers built in thermostat and allows you to keep the temperature above the freezing range. I generally keep mine set at 42f.-45f. which accommodates my normal range of beer styles that are on tap. Now, the problem I have is two fold. First, I tend to screw around a lot with the kegerator . I'm either switching out kegs, pulling out a gas line to force carbonate a keg, grabbing bags of hops that I store in there, etc. This leads to the second problem which is that I am a cheap bastard when it comes to homebrewing , and opening the kegerator causes the condenser to kick on to replace the cold ...

I tapped the keg of Coopers Pale Ale today and wanted to share the results with those of you that are anxiously perched at the edge of your bar stool waiting to hear how it turned out. For those of you that don't follow this blog and are not necessarily perched, I brewed a five gallon batch of Coopers Pale Ale about three weeks ago(4/26/09)to find out if was any good. Here are the stats: Original Gravity in 5.25 gals. 1.045 Final Gravity 1.006 Alcohol by Volume 5.3% SRM 8 Attenuation 86% I'm not the type of person to negatively judge a homebrew related product. Partly because I don't like to be negative but also because there are real people out there that are trying to make a living or grow a business related to home brewing and genuinely believe in what they're doing and I want to be careful that I don't cause harm. At the same time, I like to be honest and upfront with my opinion out of respect to myself and the needs of my readership to get value from this blog....

Homebrewing friend and fellow Zymurgeek member Mark C. is participating with me in an experiment to put to rest, once and for all, the idea that adding excessive amounts of sugar to a recipe will impart a distinctive 'cider' flavor to the beer. We will both be brewing an identical recipe for a 5 gallon batch of pale ale, employing sugar as 50% of the adjunct. The recipe is as follows: 5.25 lbs. 2-row pale ale @1.037 assuming 80% efficiency = 155 .5 lbs. crystal #60 @1.034 assuming 80% efficiency = 13 total =168 3.75 lbs. cane sugar @1.045 assuming 100% =168 Total gravity = 336 divided by 6 gallons. = 1.056 We will be mashing at 158f. to hopefully leave some unfermentable sugars for body in the finished beer. We will boil for 60 minutes with the following schedule of hops: 1 oz. Amarillo (8 aa ) for 60 min =29 ibu's .5oz Cascade (7 aa ) for 15 min. = 6 ibu's 1 oz. Cascade (7 aa ) for 1 min. = 0 ibu's -------------------------------------- total IBU's 35 Ferme...

Considering that I occasionally run a couple of ads on this blog that feature Coopers products I decided that it was in my and my readerships best interest to brew up one of their kits to experience the process and sample the finished product. The style I chose was their 'International Series' pale ale. I opted for the pale ale because it's a favorite beer of mine that I drink regularly and am familiar with many commercial brands, so it's a good style for the sake of comparison. I also want to take a moment here to warn you that the following may be overly detailed (read boring) in order to be thorough in the process of examining my Coopers experience. The kit included 1.7kg (3.75 lbs.) of hopped, liquid malt extract and 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) of a mixture of dextrose, dry malt extract and malto dextrin, and also a 7gram pkg of dry ale yeast. It also included enough "carbonation drops" for bottling but I would be kegging this batch so I set those aside. The included...

We braved the weather for Big Brew, hauling our brewing equipment down to the parking lot of the Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing http://www.santacruzmountainbrewing.com/ parking lot for the group brewing session. Six of us had our kettles of various sizes boiling away by the time we lifted our glasses for the 10am. toast. We started to draw a crowd, including students from nearby UCSC as the day progressed. Although the sky threatened to rain, it never got worse than a light mist. "It's not rocket science, unless you want it to be." The gravity of my Saison came in where I wanted it, but the chilling process was a disaster, as I plugged up my plate chiller with coriander and grains of paradise. We had several kegs of beer on hand for sampling and to keep us revived as we brewed.