Beer and Brewing Journal

Last night I finished my last Jolly Pumkin. I originally purchased three different 750's and a single mentioned here.

Here's a quick review of their Oro de Calabaza:

color: straw to yellow with big, puffy, billowy head like duvel.

aroma: belgian characteristic, candy sugar, tart, fruit, wood? or was I expecting that...

taste: carbonation, tart/sour belgian goldon strong, pineapple and subtle wood

after: wood (subtle), dry
overall: I like my goldon strongs straight up and drinkable: prankster, duvel, and damnation.

While this is a very well made beer, all of the Jolly Pumpkin beers are well made beers, I don't like the play between wood and the golden strong style. I like the golden strong style straight up, smooth, and drinkable. There is a reason that it is known as a great "hair of the dog" beer. A little tart is interesting but also takes a little away from what I like from the style. I have to say my favorite Jolly so far has been the Noel beer. They avoided the typical holiday jacked up spice route and went with subtle cherries and wood with nice malt (as I recall). I just remember enjoying the hell out of that beer. La Roja is very nice as well. Of the three Jollies i've had, here is my personal ranking:

Decided that I need to start using my stash of magnum and cascade so I took JZ’s recipe, changed out the hops (calculated ~35 IBUs) and then converted to mini-mash. I figured the mini-mash would only add another half-hour to my day since the little amount of water will come to temp quickly and I batch sparged. I used light DME to make up the difference in gravity (….4.25 pounds worth).
I didn’t hit my projected OG of 1.052 and ended up with 1.056 instead. No biggy, but the seemingly wanton nature of my refractometer readings is bothering me. Supposedly the thing has auto temp control….and I cool the wort on top of it. Not sure why my readings seem to be all over the place. In the end, I know my kettle pretty well and with the immersion chiller in the pot, I need to have the water level at about 6.5 gallons. So I got close to the OG I needed...by eyeballing it.
Due to water restrictions I am now cutting over to ice water recirculation at 120 degrees (instead of 90 degrees) when chilling the wort. This saved many gallons of water and didn’t really call for too much more ice.
Since we are having warmer weather in Berkeley, I worried about whether I would need to cool the ferment or not. The basement ranges between 66-75 degrees now, so I cooled the wort to 65 degrees, got it in the carboy and let it settle. Since the carboy is sitting on concrete and I put a wet t-shirt around it, it held at 66 degrees for pitching.
Come morning the t-shirt was still moist and the yeast had started up to the tune of about a ¼ inch of kreusen. Temp was still 66 degrees. Figure I’ll check tonight when the yeast is producing the most energy. If I am still 66 degrees, I’ll move to a heat wrap and do a warm temp control when necessary, to get it to, and keep at 67 degrees. If it has moved in temp up to 68 or higher, I’ll leave it on cool temp control, which will trigger a fan that is positioned to blow on the carboy. I can also add a pump to pump water over the carboy if necessary.

UPDATE: temp was holding at 66 with an air temp of 76.....so I put on the heat temp control with a dry shirt around it. Now happily fermenting at 67 degrees.

I have the highest respect for Dan Gordon. His mission in life is to bring the beers of Germany to the U.S. by brewing them here and serving them fresh. All done in accordance to Reinheitsgebot. 100% the way they are brewed in Germany. This includes a decoction mash for most beers that causes the brew day to be 10 hours. Dan backs up his strict guidelines with the highest level of brew education achievable in the world. His post-graduate work was at Weinstephan in Munich.....a demanding four year course where, " a passing grade is equivalent to A level work at UC Berkeley".
If you want to hear more about Dan, I highly recommend listening to any of the three times he visited the Sunday Session on The Brewing Network.

Dan's west coast man in charge of brew operations, including SF, the Northwest, and Hawaii is John Tucci. No slouch himself as he fleshed out his brewing education at Paulaner in Munich. He’s a perfect fit at GB. And thanks to a co-worker that grew up with John, we had the chance to take a private tour of GB-SF brew operations yesterday.
We started off with a couple of pints to warm us up….I had never tried the GB scharwzbier, so I did. Nice, mellow and obviously to style. I love Köstritzer and I would say the GB Schwarz is a hair mellower than that one. We were readied up to go tour the brewery and we were instructed by John to bring an empty glass with us for a tasting…most of us had one.


Down the stairs we went to the basement where all the fermentation and lagering takes place. BTW, GB-SF has a 25 barrel brew system….kind of unusual in that they have two kettles that do some back and forth. The mashtun also serves as the boil kettle. They mash, pump 80% of it to the lauter tun, then deconcoct the remaining 20% in the mash tun. When this is done, they bring the remaining, deconcocted mash over to the lauter and sparge. Then, the runnings get pumped back to the mash tun where they boil and hop. Back and forth. In the basement, we went through a VERY short door that led us to the bottom of the fermentation tanks (60 barrel tanks, they brew twice to fill it and have 10 barrels of headroom….and no kreusen blowing all over the place). I have to say, this is probably the most cramped setup I have seen. They fit this system in the spaces the best they could but there is a lot of bending down during the processes of brewing beer here. A tall guys nightmare.

From here, we went into the lagering space, in the basement right under the bar/eating area of the restaurant. Tanks were horizontal and tucked neatly into a space very short on headroom. Here is where the treat of the evening started.

Ingredients don't get much simpler than this: Wheat dry malt extract and Cascade hops.

Last Sunday I brewed a batch of American Wheat ala JZ’s recipe. In this, Jamil mentions a couple points that I stuck with:

• Resist the temptation to add specialty grains…go with just base barley and wheat.


• Use a Kölsch yeast strain for a crisper, more stand out beer.
  

It was a pretty standard brew day. I propagated up a 1 liter starter of the Kölsch yeast the night before and boiled up the ingredients the next day. I pretty much hit my numbers all the way through….I was targeting a post-boil gravity of 1.052 and according to my refractometer I was spot on. When I took the final hydrometer reading later in the day, it was showing 1.058. I swear the wort was cool enough when I did the refracto reading but I guess this is something I need to note and adjust for in future brews.

The boil (above) and the almost extinct Cascade hops (below), the bigger dose for bittering at the beginning of the boil and the smaller dose for aroma at end of boil. I calculated the bittering units to about 22 IBU for this batch.

As originally reported by Jay in the Brookston Beer Bulletin, GB Dunkelweizen has now hit store shelves. I picked up a six pack on sale at Safeway for 6.99 (all GB is on sale here again for this price). It’s pretty exciting that GB has decided to do seasonal beers as now we can experience a wider range of German styles brewed fresh here on the west coast. I also appreciate the fact that they are mass producing another unfiltered beer.

Saw this bottle on the way to and from work. Didn’t know the brand so that’s what caught my eye. I’m sure it isn’t a sought after craft brew but I researched nonetheless: Looks like Regia is from El Salvador and gets so so rankings on the beer review sites. I guess in the end I could have just come up with that since you don’t often see bottles of Unibroue or Ommegang sitting around empty on sidewalks.....

I have to give props to Ledgers. They are simply the best store in the area for beer. Below I mentioned being lucky to find the Anderson Valley 20th Anniversary beer at a Bevmos. Just as soon as I posted that, I realized that I didn’t check out Ledgers. Of course it turns out Ledgers has a good half dozen cases of the beer.
Storeowner, Ed, is a great guy. I have had a couple of different conversations with him at the store. He is friendly and will listen to requests. A few months back, he started getting most styles from Lost Abbey. I know I asked for it! Ledgers is also the only place I have seen Ommegang’s Ommegeddeon.

It has a “bottleshop” feel to it since everything is individually priced. Ledgers is located at the corner of Acton and University in Berkeley.

This takes the use of a Safeway card to get the special price but I am still using the phone number from my wife’s old apartment….I am not sure how long the specials run but both Andronicos and Safeway last at least a week if not more. BTW, Andronico’s, as pricey as they are, had a long running special on all Lagunitas beer for $6.99 a six pack, so I never take this store out of the running.

The main point here is don't stick to your favorite six pack of beer and that's it. Be open to what is on sale and keep an eye on 12 pack and case prices. You can keep the cost of beer down this way.

Steeping grains - about 2 lbs. total. I always try to make these bags no more than half full for better utilization:

I pitched at about 6pm. This is the krausen about 12 hours later at 6am:

Notice the basement temperature on the left and the temp controller on the right sitting nicely at 68 degrees. The basement gets as cold as 50 degrees but I have no trouble holding 68.