August 1999

[Greenblood]

Minutes of the July Meeting

Due to technical difficulties (i.e. I never received the notes from the last meeting, and they seem to have disappeared), we cannot report the Minutes of the July meeting. Alas, that month is doomed to be forever forgotten.

Ellen Jensen
Secretary

Library Book Suggestions
Rob suggested these two new books for the guild library. I think we should vote on them at the next meeting.

New Brewing Lager Beer by Noonan Brewers Publications; ISBN: 0937381462

Jeff also suggests:

Brewing Lager Beer : The Most Coprehensive Book for Home - And Microbrewers by Gregory J. Noonan ASIN: 0937381012
The second one is officially out of print. The AHA might still sell copies.

Kegging Kaveats
Part 2: Coming to Terms with What "Easy" Means

Right after cost, keg users proclaim that "kegging is easier." This is a misleading over-simplification. Simply racking beer into a large keg is easier than racking beer into smaller bottles, but that's not all there is to using beer kegs. Most people don't take into account keg training, acquisition, maintenance, inspection, cleaning and storage when making a statement about the ease of kegging. It's also important to define what "easy" really means. Easy is different for every person, which is probably why some people keg and others bottle their beer. For purposes here, we'll limit easy to mean "less time and physical exertion."

If you are going to start kegging, you need to get a keg. Of course, beer kegs aren't sold at grocery stores or hardware stores. In Lawrence, this requires a trip out of town or mail order. Bottling requires a trip to the liquor store, the trash or the recycling center (WalMart will let you dig through their bins for free, and people dropping off their recycling will be happy to "reuse" bottles).

After acquisition and after each use, both kegs and bottles must be cleaned, even if they are new. Cleaning the inside of a keg is truly a unique experience. You need an arm one inch in diameter with four elbows and a flashlight and mirror on your finger. E.T. would have been a good keg cleaner.

New bottles that have never been labeled are incredibly easy to keep clean. This is a procedure that can be done in the kitchen sink as the bottles are emptied. I personally find old grungy kegs much harder to clean than bottles with a good bottle washer. No one ever had to complain about "the odor that wouldn't come out of a bottle." If you really have a glass bottle that's retaining an odor, it's time to get a new bottle. With kegs, I've had to use solvents, sandpaper and a high-pressure sprayer to get soda label residue off, and the whole keg has to be cleaned at once. Woe is the first-time keg user who doesn't take Metallurgy 101 to find out what things ruin stainless steel. The rubber boots and handles on some kegs can't be cleaned at all. They can leave a goopy black residue on everything they touch and add floor cleanup to the cleaning time of kegs.

Kegs can often become finicky to work on, especially inexpensive or used ones. Nothing is more frustrating than spending time cleaning and sanitizing a keg, only to find one of the connectors won't seal or screw on just right. This is one of the often-overlooked "black holes" of kegging. The other black hole is training others to use kegs. Few people consider the time they've had to spend diagnosing and fixing a leaky keg, hand-scrubbing small corrosion spots inside the keg itself or tutoring a friend in keg operation.

The supporting equipment for kegs is another matter altogether. Kegs can't be used without the hoses, taps, wrenches, seals, o-rings, valves, regulators, bottles and gases that go with them. Any of these parts that come in contact with beer need to be cleaned and cleaned well. Some of these items, such as beer faucets and quick-connects, need to be disassembled completely and cleaned on a regular basis.

Kegs require extra parts on hand to deal with routine wear and unforeseen equipment failures. This translates into extra space and money. For all intents and purposes, to keep one keg in use, you need the equivalent of a second keg just for parts! This arises from the fact that a keg won't function at all if even one of its parts is missing or bad (including the tap and C02 equipment). The keg will either leak, or you won't be able to get the beer out of it.

Only about five parts (out of about 15 or 20 total) on a keg can be randomly discarded if they become problematic, but any single bottle that won't come clean or de-label has a marginal cost of nearly zero to replace. Because all cappable bottles are interchangeable, one never gets into the position of requiring a specific kind of bottle from a specific manufacturer. Compare this to a particular poppet, o-ring or valve on a keg. The first time you need a part for your keg and don't have it, you'll start stockpiling parts, which requires space, time and money to track. Replacement "parts" for bottles, on the other hand, are readily available for free even in the middle of the night in any city. If you're one o-ring short to get your keg working, you'll be cursing. If you're one bottle short, you'll be drinking another beer.

Any discussion of kegging and bottling inevitably raises the issue of counter-pressure bottle fillers. These devices are purported to let you bottle beer from a keg. The very existence of pressure fillers is testament to the fact that bottles are sometimes preferable to kegs. If storing, transporting and dispensing beer in kegs were always preferable to bottling beer, these devices would not exist.

Most of the counter-pressure fillers are quirky at best, unusable and destructive at worst. They foam if you don't use them just right; they waste precious beer, and they have to be completely disassembled for proper cleaning after each use. The documentation accompanying them is typical of most brew equipment: Bad. The art to using a filler can be learned over time by reviewing articles and messages on the Internet and combining that with experience, but it's not easy. In the end, bottling from kegs involves the time, expense, equipment and space of bottling, kegging, and pressure filling combined! This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, easier than bottling.

Next month: Little Things Add Up

Rob Dewhirst


Cooking With Beer
Chicken with Coffee Stout Glaze
This recipe came from the Kansas City Star. It is very tasty and fairly low in fat. Definitely get the soba noodles. They're fairly expensive, but worth it.

1 1/2 lbs. chicken thighs, skins removed and trimmed of all visible fat.
12 oz. coffee stout (We used Redhook; Pyramid also makes one)
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. white pepper
3 cloves minced garlic
1/3 cup orange juice concentrate
2 Tbs. dark corn syrup
Soba noodles
Toasted sesame seeds and minced green onions, for garnish

Rinse and pat dry the chicken pieces. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place chicken in a buttered 9 by 11 inch baking dish. Blend the remaining ingredients, except the garnish, and pour over the chicken.

Bake the chicken at 350 degrees, stirring and basting often for 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the size of the pieces. Turn several times, so that the glaze is evenly baked on the chicken.

Remove from oven and let cool for 10 to 15 minutes before garnishing.

Kendra thickened the remaining sauce with some corn starch before serving.
Serve over soba noodles.
Pair with an amber lager or kolsch.

Pete Clouston


Aiyiyi! - UDK Centerfold
The secret it out. Dwight homebrews. His basement is musty, and even he has screwed up a couple of batches! Here are some excerpts from an 11-year-old University Daily Kansan, the March 30, 1988, edition.

The sample of brew reached the red line on the tester. A message above the line said, "Bottle here." Dwight Burnham and his professor buddies siphoned the fermented barley and hops into empty glass ale bottles and left the bottles in the cellar for their final aging. A week later, the three returned to taste their creation. Burnham saw it first - a shard of brown glass stuck in the drywall above the spot where they had left the pale ale. The bottles had exploded under pressure and left a mishmash of glass and smelly, bubbly liquid.

Ten years after the pale ale disaster, Burnham was again in his cellar fermenting home recipes, this time making wine. He had made a grape mixture that was ready to be poured into the plastic fermenting tub. All he needed was one more ingredient: Sugar. He reached to the shelf and grabbed a 5-pound bag. In it went. Now, all he had to do was wait for grapes, yeast and sugar to transform into wine.

Days, then weeks went by with no sign of life in the tub. No bubbles, no froth, no heady aroma, no warmth created from the biochemical reaction.

Then, it hit him. That 5-pound bag of granulated white stuff wasn't sugar. He rummaged through a big bin in the corner and found the evidence: An empty bag with white letters that said, "canning salt."

Every master has one or two humbling stories to tell. These were Burnhams. Even so, the salt wine wasn't a total flop. Instead of throwing it away, he added some sugar and fermented it. It made a great meat marinade and good Christmas gifts. (Yeah, that's right, Dwight. Give away the bad stuff!)

Burnham tried his first batch of homebrew 50 years ago when he was a freshman at Rhode Island School of Design. It was awful stuff, he recalls. He and his roommates made it in an old lard tub in the closet of their cold-water flat. They didn't have a recipe, just improvisation and hand-me-down instructions from upperclassmen. They strung up a light bulb and let it hang right in the beer to keep the brew warm enough for the yeast to work its magic. When the bubbles stopped, they bottled the brew.

Today, Burnham uses state-of-the-art homebrewing equipment and scientific methods to make an average of 200 gallons of beer each year. He also makes 100 gallons of wine.

Last year one of his beers placed third in a national competition in Kansas City. The beer, "Roastaroma Deadline Delight," got its name from the Celestial Seasonings tea he used to flavor it. Burnham has won at least 10 other awards, both national and regional, since he began entering contests in 1981. When someone recently asked to see his awards, Burnham fumbled through stacks of crumpled papers in his musty basement and produced a few wrinkled satin ribbons. His wife, Lillian, says that the ribbons are only a quarter of the awards he has won. But Burnham doesn't care about the awards. He makes beer and wine for himself and his family, not to impress judges.

Burnham does his brewing in the basement of his Lawrence home. Plastic barrels and big glass jugs, some with cloudy brown liquid inside, stand on shelves around the room. In one corner, empty wine and beer bottles are heaped three feet high. On the wall near his workbench, like a child's growth chart, numbers and letters are scribbled to keep track of batches of beer. Between the empty bottles and his workbench, in the crawl space underneath the house, rests his treasure - more than 1,000 bottles of wine and beer. One dates back to 1972 - his oldest remaining bottle of wine, he thinks. A Rose Peach. He's not sure because he never kept an inventory. He just makes the stuff and stashes it.

The winemaking process seems simple when compared to the process of brewing. "Wine is a natural occurrence," Burnham says. "You just leave some fruit around, and it makes itself. Beer is another story. It's so complicated, I wonder how they ever invented it. Everything has to be just right."

Burnham brews twice a month. He brews 12 gallons of staple beer, the same pale ale recipe he has used for years, and five gallons of specialty beer. His specialty beers are recipes that simulate famous European beers, such as Irish stout, English bitter and Belgian Chimay beer, which ages for two years. Or, they are flavored beers, such as his cherry, raspberry and ginger beers. Some of his beers have odd names, such as "Mozart's Minuet Lager" and "Smokey the Beer," so named because the grain is smoked. In all, he has tried nearly 100 varieties.

Why does a man spend hours upon hours making beer and wine in a musty cellar when he could, in 15 minutes and for not much more money, go to the store and buy the same thing? It's because Burnham gets satisfaction from doing it himself. He also sought that satisfaction by designing and building his house and art studio. A few years later, he added a greenhouse to grow his own herbs and vegetables. Then, he designed and built a gazebo with a wet bar, lights and a ceiling fan for entertaining in his back yard. He built his own television. He even bakes his own bread, not from flour, but from whole wheat kernals that he grinds himself.

He enjoys the creative process. And although homebrewing and winemaking have become nearly a science in recent years, they remain an art for Burnham. He is always experimenting and varying his tried-and-true formulas to come up with something even greater.

Here, here!


Gyle, Not Guile
Unfermented wort. The term is usually used in conjunction with the kraeusening process. Before adding yeast and fermenting the wort, a small amount of wort is reserved as a priming agent. This reserved wort, or gyle, is carefully stored in a sanitized container and usually refrigerated to prevent it from being spoiled by wild yeasts or bacteria. Once the fermentation is complete, the gyle is added back into the beer, and it is bottled. It is used at the rate of about 1 quart per 5 gallons of beer. To reduce risk of contamination during storage, it is a good idea to can the wort.

From The Encyclopedia of Beer