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If you want it done right, you have to brew it yourself!
Strange Brew Review
The Newsletter of the Green Bay Rackers - - September 1998Club Business Meeting
Several homebrews were brought in by Jeff Rogers and Matt Arnold, as well as a club brewed ale and some commercial beers brought in by Jay. A proposed change to the handling of club business was not discussed and will be brought up at a later meeting by Mike & John Blohm. The discussion of the meeting centered on various aspects of brewing, with an expressed interest by the newer members on having an all-grain brewing demonstration. Time constraints make this difficult for doing on our typical club brewing night, but could be a good idea for doing on a Saturday as a a public demnostration - maybe at Life Tools with some advertising done ahead of time to attract attention.
Just a note: I will not be attending the October meeting due to yet another conflict with my work schedule. Articles for the last newsletter of 1998 will be due November 1st!
Software Review - ProMash
by Matt ArnoldSo when I saw a message on the Internet newsgroup rec.crafts.brewing which said the author of a new brewing program was looking for beta-testers (people to test the software before its release), I jumped at the chance. The author is Jeffrey Donovan, the product is ProMash.
ProMash allows you to create, save, edit, and print both recipes and brewing sessions. Every part of this program is customizable. You can edit the AHA guidelines (when they finally recognize Sticke Altbier as a subcategory), grain lists, hop list, etc. You can choose any of the popular hop IBU formulae, and there are even three different formulae to determine the final beer color! If you don't like that way ProMash has something set up, chances are you can change it.
The recipe designer allows you to create extract, partial mash, or all-grain brews. You can choose any of the latest AHA style categories. ProMash comes with a wide variety of grains, extracts, hops, and yeasts already included. If it doesn't have it, you can add it! The brewing session takes the information from your recipe and can keep track of the beer from the beginning of the mash through consumption. Bith the recipes and brewing sessions have plenty of room for additional notes.
There are also ten stand-alone calculators: unit conversion, hop time (hop degradation given a certain amount of time and storage conditions), hop IBUs, water profiler, water needed (to end up with the right amount of wort in the primary), strike temperature, mash designer, CO2, hydrometer adjustment, and alcohol percentage. All of them are easily accessible from ProMash's well-designed main screen.
While flexibility and options are ProMash's greatest strengths, they are also its greatest weakness. New brewers (or new computer users) might be a little overwhelmed by all of the options at first. The nice thing is that you don't have to use all of the features to use ProMash. Once you've toyed with it for a little bit, you'll get the hang of it.
Overall, I'm very impressed with ProMash. It does everything that anyone would want brewing software to do (and then some). Best of all, it's reasonably priced at $24.95. The author is very responsive to user's input. Many of my suggestions made it into the final product. It would definietly be worth your time to point your favorite web browser to http://www.promash.com and download the demo version. The demo gives you access to all of ProMash's features, but you are limited to saving three recipes.
Pros: "Swiss Army Knife" of brewing software; it does it all, very configurable, well thought-out and designed.
Cons: Can be a little compex for new users.
Overall: ***** (five out of five stars)
Requirements: Windows 95/98 or Windows NT, approximately seven megabytes of hard drive space plus extra space for recipes (~30Keach) and brewing sessions (~50K each).
In case anyone might misunderstand, I have no financial interest in ProMash or the Sausalito Brewing Company. I did, however, receive a free copy of the software for being a beta tester. If you have any questions about ProMash, go to their website, or send me email at revmra@iname.com.
Editors Note: Matt Arnold is a beer geek extraordinaire, and was a computer geek before it was fashionable to be a computer geek. In addition to being a rapidly advancing and highly skilled brewer, Matt is the webmaster for our homepage and does one heck of a fine job at that. Matt is a hop-head and thrives on altbier, although he never met a beer style he didn't like! His latest effort, a barley wine, is currently awaiting testing and review by this author.
Beer Quote:
from A Beer Drinker's Companion, Ayers Rock Press 1986
Styles & Evaluation: THE BJCP EXAM
by Mike Conard, BJCPDuring the written exam, the examinees are interrupted three times and are served a beer that they are to evaluate using the approved BJCP form. They are told what style the beer is so as to have a basis upon which to judge it. These beers have been pre-judged by the BJCP judges who are proctoring the exam. The examinee's scores are compared to the proctor's scores and are figured into the examinee's final test score.
The written exam is then sent to BJCP for scoring. Based upon the final score, he or she will then be given a ranking of Apprentice, Recognized, Certfied, or Master Judge. A minimum score in necessary to make any certain level, and then one must achieve experience points to get the higher rankings. If one has a high enough score on the written to make MASTER, he cannot be ranked as such until he has judged enough contests to obtain the needed experience points. If a judge has enough points but did not have a high enough score on the written test, he can re-take the exam to try and get a higher score.
Next issue: The BJCP Ranking System
Problem Solving
"A comment on the HSA article in the July newsletter. (See, I read these things we get in the mail, even if not always right away!)
A wort chiller is indeed a useful thing for homebrewing, but it's not essential. I don't own one, not because of the cost (you said homebrewers are a frugal lot), but because the nature of my home brewery (a kitchen in a small apartment) doesn't permit it. I wouldn't want to to have to remove my faucet water filter every brew session to be able to connect the wort chiller fittings on the kitchen sink. Others may simply prefer simplicity. A wort chiller does require some maintenance to keep it sanitary.
So what does this low-tech homebrewer do to bring my wort down to aerating and pitching temperature quickly? Remember my small scale kitchen situation. I'm one of those dreaded "extract brewers." (Everyone gasp in horror together.) Sure, I use a lot of "specialty" grains in my brews to add character to the beer that wouldn't be there with extract alone, but the bulk of the malt is extract. Experience, creativity in recipe design, good procedures, lots of healthy yeast, etc. go along way toward making (everyone gasp again) "extract brews" as good as the almighty "all-grain" brew.
With my kitchen stove as a heating source for my 5 gallon stainless steel brewkettle, I don't boil the full volume. Again, perhaps not ideal, but a full vigorous boil with three gallons is better than than a wimpy boil of six gallons. And with that procedure comes the wort chilling solution.
All the homebrew books tell you to add the water to the fermentor after transferring the wort. I don't know why my technique hasn't made it into the books, but after putting my brewkettle into a sink of cold water for some initial cooling, I add a portion of my chilled filtered water into the brew kettle to finish the cooling. Voila! No HSA. THEN I transfer the wort into the fermentor and top off with the proper amount of water to reach the desired orginal gravity based upon my calculation for the recipe.
This procedure gets the wort down to 20-25C in about 20 minutes (YMMV) and ready for aeration and pitching. Obviously, this doesn't work for anyone boiling full volume, but if you have the time, space, and equipment for an all-grain homebrewery, then you can go buy or make a wort chiller.
Bob Paolino
Editors Note: Doc can be reached at mconard@itol.com
Recipes & Techniques: Altbier
6.6 lbs of canned light malt extract
3/4 lb Crystal malt
1 lb Wheat malt
1/2 lb dark Munich malt
2 oz. Chocolate malt
1/4 cup roast barley
4 oz. malto-dextrin
1 tps Irish Moss
2 oz Perle hop pellets
1 oz Hallertau hop pellets
1 oz Tettnanger hop pellets
salts to approximate Alt water
Wyeast Alt/German Ale liquid yeast
Directions:
Step mash crushed grains & sparge. Add extract & dextrin to kettle and bring to boil. Add 1 oz Perle hops and 1 oz Hallertau hops at start of boil. After 30 minutes, add 1 oz Perle hops. At 65 minutes into boil, add Irish moss. Add 1 oz of Tettnanger hops at end of boil for finish. Chill, sparge to fermenter, aerate, and pitch.
Boiling time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
OG: 1.052, FG: 1.018
Ferment: 3 days at 63 degrees F in plastic, 4 weeks at 40 degrees F in glass.
Priming: 3/4 cup corn sugar
This recipe comes via email from Mike Woodard of Bar Harbor, ME