This is a great article on how to clean off your yeast to reuse in your next batch of homebrew.

This is one of several ways to drop your costs for making your delicious homebrew.

We recently brewed a maibock using Rogue’s Pacman yeast as distributed by wYeast that we picked up from the nice folks at Homebrewer’s Outpost.

Today when we checked our gravity after about 5 days of fermenting we were a bit below our goal of 1.016, coming in at about 1.023. Knowing that PacMan yeast is supposed to attenuate quite well I was curious as to what caused the yeasts to be so bashful at the dinner table. Our temperature was decent at about 68*, I made a good sized starter, so what was the problem?

I checked out the wiki at homebrewtalk.com and read over their page on attenuation. Using a formula I got from that page

Attenuation = 100 % * (starting gravity – current gravity) / (starting gravity – 1)

I realized that our attenuation was about 62% as opposed to the 74% we were shooting for. Further down the page I came across the following:

water to grist ratio: the enzymatic activity of the amylases is affected by the thickness of the mash. Thinner mashes enhance the maltose production and therefore increase the fermentability. See The Theory of Mashing.

We had indeed gone short on this. When we did our first few brews we followed Papazian’s recommendation of 1qt/lb of grain. After a few brews we started noticing that 1.5qt/lb was actually giving us a better brew. But, as is sometimes the case, we flaked on our math and wound up reverting to the 1qt/lb. We noticed this and took note, but had little idea how this would effect our beer. Now it’s clear that a higher water to grain ratio is preferred in order to increase the fermentability of your beer.

Duly noted.

So we bottled what may be our best (3rd) batch of an IPA yesterday. The whole process went incredibly smooth from sparge to bottling. We were so happy with ourselves that we felt a celebratory beer was in order. We put the beer in the back of Matt’s car and headed over to the Small Bar.

They had some great pulls yesterday: Surly Furious, Bockor Cuvee Sour Ale, Victory Prima Pils, Half Acre’s Baume, Tyranena’s Dirty Ol’ Man. It was a fine, fine celebration indeed, well armed and strategically executed. We even tried some of Rogue’s Whiskey, which, like Stranahan’s Flying Dog, they make from left over mash from their Dead Guy Ale. Rogue’s Whiskey was remarkably smooth with a touch of sweetness and a salty back end that is probably from them aging it in oak barrels by the Ocean. Though they only age the stuff for a week, so it’s also possible that salty flavor is from their talented marketing department as well.

But I digress. It was a monumental celebration. And goddamn, the Victory Pils and Dirty Ol’ Man were fantastic. Of course, all the beers were great, especially the sour from Bockor, a pitch-perfect modestly bodied sour that makes instantly weak any devotee of the flemish sours. But I hadn’t had the Victory Prima Pils until yesterday, so it really stood out for me.

Victory refers to it’s Prima Pils as a German Pilsner and though it may come off sounding initially a bit derisive, I would call Victory’s Prima Pils an American Pilsner, or maybe a New American Pilsner as I feel this is the first beer that actually deserves it’s name. It’s hop heaviness serves as a refreshing compliment to the crispness of the beer, the stuff practically snaps off and crunches in your mouth. There is some discussion amongst the beer geeks as to whether Victory is stretching the truth claiming they only use German malts in the Prima Pils. Some brewers are convinced the slight sour apple taste – the often undesirable acetyldehyde – on the front end is derived from wheat. There’s also some discussion as to whether this is an all Saaz brew or if there is some Northern Brewer at the bittering point. Wherever the flavors are coming from they are well proportioned. This beer is crisp, bright and hoppy enough to keep my filthy fingers digging back in for more. And I will.

This may be one of only, oh, three or four times I will say this in my life, but… that Dirty Ol’ Man, he was very good to me last night. Strong chocolate notes in a creamy body with just enough roasted character and hopiness to keep the stout from going past it’s surprisingly sessionable self.

And, as always, the food at the Small Bar was great, too. The pork nachos are incredible, the poutine is fucking trascendental, but yesterday we started with their Buffalo Chicken Spring Rolls:

chopped chicken sautéed in our house buffalo
sauce then wrapped with crumbled blue cheese
and fried in a traditional spring roll. served
with carrots, celery, green onion and blue
cheese for dippin

They’ve somehow managed to achieve the impossible and improve upon buffalo wings, making them easier to eat, and crunchier with a deep fried shell to safely transfer them from plate to face.

And as always the staff at Small Bar are some of my favorite people in the world, they always take good care of us.

But, OH SHIT! I forgot! The whole reason we came into the Small Bar to celebrate in the first was because of our beer. That we left in the car. In 20* weather. For now almost 24 hours.

Shit.

I woke up this morning, and while sharing a lovely breakfast with my equally lovely wife she off-handedly reminded me of my orphaned babies in the truck. This is, perhaps, as good as any argument for why I shouldn’t father children as well. It would be a shame to go out and properly celebrate my kid’s learning to ride a bike, or learning to read, or using the toilet only to come to the stark realization the next day that I would up leaving him in the car for 24 hours while I proudly drank in his honor.

But, in my defense, children and yeast are pretty resilient. After moping for a few minutes I hit the Beer Advocate forum and queried the geeks. And in under ten minutes I had 2 responses that put my mind at ease. Essentially, all I needed to do was give the beers a god swirl or two, put them back in the crate and expect full carbonation as if nothing had happened. My fear was, leaving the beer at around 35* for about 10 hours (20 hours in the car in 15-25* weather) that the yeast had gone dormant and wouldn’t get back up anytime soon to eat. But apparently, I have more than one thing in common with yeast, not the least of which is the will to perservere through a decent night’s rest with more than a little bit of snacking.

So, our team of crackhead brewers here at OA have found a new and interesting way to try and ruin our beer. Fortunately, this attempt was a bit easier to recover from than some mistakes of the past have been. I now wait patiently for the next manner in which we can subjugate ourselves on the road to delicious and plentiful beers.

I’m just learning this brewing process and it’s about one of the most enjoyable problem solving exercises I’ve tackled in my life and I’ve tried a few.

This morning on the bus I was trying to walk my amateur self through the process of how I would modulate my beer’s alcohol level either higher or lower. My mind slowly, and stickily dragged it’s wheels back to information on Enzymes and how they effect the starches in the beer. I then remembered that, of course, more sugars in your wort equals more alcohol in your beer and vice versa. I then wanted to remember how specifically I could create more or less sugars in my wort.

When I got to work I googled this quandry and came across the on-line version of John Palmer’s “How To Brew”. It was exactly what I needed. From what I can tell just about every question a budding brewer might have is answered clearly, specifically and thoroughly.

The short answer to my question of how to control the sugar content in my homebrew was found on page 5 of Chapter 14:

A lower mash temperature, less than or equal to 150°F, yields a thinner bodied, drier beer. A higher mash temperature, greater than or equal to 156°F, yields a less fermentable, sweeter beer. This is where a brewer can really fine tune a wort to best produce a particular style of beer.

I’ve been going out to Salt Lake City pretty consistently for the past 5 years, at least once a season, to indulge in what could arguably be the best snow in the world. Over that time I’ve learned a couple things that are worth sharing.

1. It’s cheap to fly there.  Real cheap.  Typically it’s about $200 round trip from Chicago to SLC depending on who you fly with.  Add in taxes and the cost of shipping your board both ways and it will realistically cost you around $250.  Compare that to $450 to Reno or $600 to Aspen or Vail and there’s just no question.  Check expedia.com and try not to travel on heavy days like Fridays and Mondays and you should find some great deals.
2. They have the largest variety of resorts within less than 1 hour of the airport.  Sure Reno has Mt. Rose and Aspen has the Highlands, Snowmass and Buttermilk, but SLC has an incredible variety of resorts like The Canyons, Park City, Brighton, Solitude, Alta, Snowbird and more all within 30-45 minutes of the airport.
3. Buy discount tickets.  Utah Ski & Golf has a great selection of discounted tickets for sale right downtown SLC.  You can ride most resorts all day, any day for just over $50.  In some cases that can save you up to $40 in a single day.
4. The Park City area is nice because it has plenty of infrastructure to house and distract you while not on the mountain, but Park City gets the least amount of snow of all the resorts.  Check SkiUtah.com for an honest daily listing of snow reports.  Just this past Sunday the Canyons got 1″ of new snow, whileThe Wasatch Mountains get crazy dumped on consistently that last week of March every year.  Last year I was out there for 7 days and they got at least 1 foot of snow 5 of those 7 days and that storm kept up the week after I left.  Now, granted, this is an el nino year and snow has been pretty scarce everywhere, but if I were a gambling man I would still put all in that the last week of March is the perfect time to hit your favorite resort or two in the Wasatch Mountains.
5. For the past few years the Canyons has been running a great deal during that last week of March and first week of April.  $200 gets you lodging, 2 lift tickets and 2 breakfasts every day.  So far I have not seen them advertising this deal for this year though, the closest being the Ski Free & Breakfast, but you only get that deal if you rent one of their suites that start at $350.  Not as good of a deal.  I’m going to keep my eyes open and I’ll shout if I see that deal come up.  It’s kind of a bummer because then you’re stuck riding the Canyons the whole time you are there, but the price and convenience is just real hard to beat.  Plus, if you’re staying at the base of the mountain, no storm, even the one as epic as last season’s that shut down 80 up to Kimball Junction, can keep you off the mountain.

We ran into some troubles because of a bone-headed screw up a few batches of beer ago and needed to find out if we had wrecked our beer with an inappropriate temperature too early in the process. If we had failed to exract fermentable sugars, or enough fermentable sugars we didn’t want to waste another 3+ hours monkeying with our brew. To find out whether we had screwed up our mash we performed an iodine test.

The procedure is simple. Get a small container and put a simple of your mash liquid in there (no grains!). Put a drop or two of Iodopher in there. If it turns black or blue you still have starches to convert. If there is no color reaction you’ve maximized the attenuation of your wort and you’re ready to sparge. It’s that easy and a best practice for good brewing.

Check out the homebrewing wiki’s page on the iodine test.

So we made our 3rd and what appears to be our most successful batch of our IPA on Monday evening. The entire process went incredibly smoothly, from mash to sparge to pitching and it seems the few variables we shifted were the right ones producing a yield we were hoping for.

Our 2nd batch of IPA was decent in flavor though the yield fell about 2.5 gallons short producing just around 3 gallons. We underestimated how much the industrial burners we use would boil down our wort and came up short. The malt character was very nice, but frankly it just wasn’t quite as hoppy as I felt it should be. So we adjusted two things to solve these issues.

First, we added more water to the mashing process to bring our yield up, as opposed to adding more water for the sparge. I got the idea off the AHA forum where someone was inspired by some papers they read on BrauKaiser.com that more water at mash will yield an extraction with a larger amount of fermentable sugars. So instead of a 1qt/lb mash we upped it to a 1.5qt/lb mash, and reduced our sparge water equally.

The first time I noticed a significant difference was in the boil over. Our wort went crazy with it’s frothy head that seemed to not want to relent no mater how much I stirred it down. This cappucino like head continued for probably 10 minutes where in the past the boil over threatens for little more than 3 or 4 minutes.

Our second indication that something was quite different – an insanely active initial fermentation – was probably a result of two variables: the higher extraction of fermentable sugars from the diastatic activity in the mash and the fact that we used a dry yeast instead of a liquid yeast.

I was forced to use a dry yeast when I rolled up to Brew & Grow and found they were out of their American Pale Ale slap packs. I initially thought I would make a yeast starter but after some research I found that not only is a starter unnecessary with dry yeast you don’t even need to rehydrate the dry yeast to make it active. In addition, dry yeasts contain over twice the amount of yeast cells that liquid yeast packs do making the party that much more active.

About 30 minutes into the brewing I pulled a couple cups of wort out and put them in an erlenmeyer flask, let that cool and pitched in the 11.5g pack of yeast. In about 20 minutes there was a frothy head and it was clear my yeast was hungry. After chilling the rest of the wort I pitched this tastyness in and let those bad yeasties rape and pillage the beer like they so want to do. After one day our beer was in a frenzy, with a several inch kreausen on there and CO2 spitting out every second.

I added a bit more hops on the bittering end this time around in hopes of balancing out some of the maltiness, but other than that I think we should be good to go. One thing I screwed up was forgetting to take the OG, which, especially in this case of a such a strong and different reaction, is pretty disappointing.

I don’t know if I’ll use dry yeast again, but my interest is definitely piqued. It couldn’t have been easier and it’s been a ton of fun to watch the beer really lose it’s mind a bit. I feel like we’ve finally found out how to tickle the demons inside that brew and get them to bloom more of the secrets they’ve got inside them. I shouldn’t speak too soon or claim success too early, but it certainly is enjoyable to see some new and strong reactions in the lab.

Waxing your snowboard is a pretty enjoyable and brainless way to help stoke your excitement for your next trip.

Here’s what you need:

A Work Space
This gets a bit messy with shreds of wax turning your floor into a curling rink so make sure you’ve got a garage or basement or some place that can take some mess and clean up easy. I use my garage along with 2 saw horses. There’s a radio out there, plenty of light, all the tools I need and it sweeps out into the alley quick and easy.

An Iron
Pick one up used at a thrift store for a buck or two or buy one at Target for $15. Don’t waste your money on anything fancy (like this overpriced idiocy)
and don’t expect to use this to press your church clothes when you’re through.

Goo-Gone
You know the stuff, you can get it at just about any grocery store or pharmacy.

Wax
We used Cera Nova CH Wax 60g by Swix, it’s the medium grade or mid-temperature grade as we couldn’t get a good answer on what the temperature refers to, the ambient air temperature or the temperature of the snow. If somebody knows and could give a decent reason as to why the ambient air temperature would actually effect how your snowboard glides I’d love to hear it.

Paste
We used Dakine Snowboard Paste.

Scraper
I’ve used a CD case in the past and a ruler, any kind of hard straight edge that’s not terribly sharp should be fine.

Steel Wool
The cheaper the better.

Beer
I like a nice cold sessionable beer, most recently that’s been Half Acre’s Daisy Cutter.

Here’s what you do:

In good light, put your board on a long workbench or a couple saw horses. I find the saw horses work well as the bindings, nose and tail drop below your work level and don’t interfere. Scrub off any old wax with your Goo-Gone, just wet a rag with it and scrub.

Once your board is nice a clean take a chunk of your wax and rub it on the hot part of the iron until it starts to drip, then move your wax and iron across your board so you can get full coverage. An alternative way to do this is to cover your board with the wax like it’s a big crayon. This can help get you a more even coverage at the outset and may save you some time later.

Once you’ve got a decent coverage of wax go ahead and use the iron to spread it evenly all over the bottom of your board. Make sure every inch of your board that will be in the snow is covered evenly.

Take your scraper and, at about a 60* angle to your board start scraping off the wax in long strokes. Move from the front of your board to the back. Continue this until nothing but the bottommost layer of wax remains and all inconsistancies are smoothed out. You should be able to run your hand over your board and have it feel smooth.

Take your steel wool and buff it out good.

Finally, rub on your paste in circular movements. Wipe down real good with a soft towel.

There you go, just like that and you’re ready to enjoy a gorgeous mountain!

Bacon, bacon, bacon, blah, blah, blah. Blirrr, blam, blatz. Farb, harr, flim, flim, flim. Bacon, bacon… Oh, what’s this? Bourbon? Cookies?

The New York Times of all places has a recipe for a bacon infused Old Fashion.

Here’s a few other ideas on how to use that delicious porky effluvia.

Yeah! What that subject line said!

A to-be-published meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition supports my view that animal fat is nowhere as bad as we’ve been told a thousand times. It says:

During 5–23 y of follow-up of 347,747 subjects, . . . intake of [more] saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease], stroke, or CVD [cardiovascular disease]. The pooled relative risk estimates that compared extreme quantiles of saturated fat intake were 1.07 (95% CI: 0.96, 1.19; P = 0.22) for CHD, 0.81 (95% CI: 0.62, 1.05; P = 0.11) for stroke, and 1.00 (95% CI: 0.89, 1.11; P = 0.95) for CVD.

Emphasis added. One aspect of the results suggested that studies that found an positive association (more fat, more disease) were more likely to be published than those that didn’t find an association or found a negative association. Which means these numbers may underestimate the good effects.

I scrubbed this from this dude Seth’s Blog.

I kinda want to celebrate by eating my neighbors dog!