Normally it gets to be late January before I realize that I am rapidly running out of lagering season, and I end up in a rush to get them finished before the weather warms up. Lager yeasts need low temperatures and a couple of months of time to do their work, so absent a specialized freezer, it has to be Adeodatus’ crawlspace in January, February, and early March. This year I’m ahead of the game: he may be storing my carboys before the New Year.

This year’s light lager is very similar to the recipe I’ve used in the past, except this year I used White Labs Copenhagen Lager Yeast (at Adeodatus’ suggestion) and clover honey instead of wildflower (because they were out of wildflower):

I elected to do the amber lager again this year, not being overwhelmed with affection for the dunkel I did last winter. This too is derivative of previous works, but with the same yeast change and a touch more Saaz hops than in the past. I’m thinking of dry-hopping it, too, but that is yet to come:

UPDATE (12/28/06): After two full days of inactivity, I bought an extra couple of vials of White Labs German Lager yeast, since the store was out of Copenhagen. It’s been way too long for me to wait any longer. Beer at Home treated me better than right, charging me for only one of the replacements. Way to go, guys!

Last Saturday morning I brewed beer and baked an apple pie. Inexplicably, I didn’t take pictures of the pie.

The recipe is Beer At Home’s IPA kit. It should ferment down to about 1.010 in another week. As long as there are no delays in bottling, it will be marginally ready to drink in time for New Year’s.

If you were concerned, the pie really turned out alright, even being gluten-free as it was. Presentation left something to be desired—I really need to work on the crust, gluten or no—but it has gone over well.

UPDATE (12/19/06): I bottled it this evening. It’s good an hoppy, so if it doesn’t mellow during conditioning, it will be a winner.

Herewith my first IPA:

It’s about 1.039, which is a light initial gravity. Adjusting for temperature might push it a hair over 1.04, but if it doesn’t ferment out close to 1.000, it will be a light one regardless. Adeodatus just brewed this recipe (which is courtesy of Matt Causey at Beer At Home), and speaks favorably of it. I’ll let you know how it bottles.

And speaking of Zymurgy–which we have not in some time–I made a valiant effort in the late spring to brew a recipe Mrs. Berglund would enjoy, even though she does not historically have a taste for beer. I made it as light as I could with available ingredients, added no adjuncts and virtually no hops, and bottled it with a full ten ounces of strawberry-kiwi extract. If ever there was a girl beer, this was it.

Well, not long after I racked it, Kari was diagnosed as being gluten intolerant. This is actually a pretty big deal and a long story in itself, but for our purposes tonight, suffice it to say that the gluten-bearing barley in the Strawberry Kiwi Light Ale kind of killed the deal. I bottled it, let it carbonate, and finally tried one. It was disgusting. Seriously, it’s undrinkable.

The upshot is my sister likes it, so at least it won’t go to waste. I have higher hopes for this IPA.

Brewing has been suffering along with blogging under the onslaught of SpotComponents and my massive three-hour load in school. Yet I have eked out a bit of it, and it has owned me. This latest product is hoppy.

The initial gravity reading, all foamy and everything:

The final gravity reading. You know you want some:

I took the initial gravity as 1.045, and the final as 1.007. That tells me 4% alcohol by volume, which I trust, as Douglas Adams said, about as far as I can comfortably spit out a rat. Will I never get good gravity data? Perhaps not. But I will get good beer.

Next up is lagers. Adeodatus ordered the goods for 30 gallons of lager between the two of us, so expect to hear about that soon.

Some zymurgystic banalities for you during this Election Week! I’m certainly not thinking about beer right now, being too busy hitting refresh on RCP about every ten minutes, but at least they both have “American” in their name.

Beer At Home’s October special is, appropriately, a stout. They call it “American Stout,” which in this case seems to mean “Porter.” The picture doesn’t capture it well, but this is pretty light stuff as far as stouts go.

American Stout prior to pitching.

And now, a Tim Berglund exclusive: a ho-hum wheat in late October! Only your colonialistic, totalizing metanarrative would tell me I can’t. Plus it was supposed to be a Blackberry Wheat (my fruit beers having enjoyed some success recently), but I forgot to put the blackberry extract in while I was bottling. I brewed the stout at pretty much the same time I was bottling this, so I was plenty busy.

American Wheat prior to bottling.

Monday night was way to hectic to indulge the tradition of the Hydrometer Photo, but I did get the ESB into bottles. Final gravity was about 1.010, and it is a beautiful amber brown, and it has a very hoppy finish. All is well.

And as an aside, I would like to make it clear that this sort of thing only happens to home distillers, not home brewers. The headline is misleading; it should say “moonshine,” which is slightly colloquial but far more accurate. And far more dangerous to boot.

My Zymurgy Blogging has been lax. Two weeks ago we had a very enjoyable dinner out with our most excellent neighbors, after which we retired to Berglund Manor to brew beer. We made a raspberry honey wheat, which is due to be bottled on Monday. (Technically, it’s just honey wheat at this point, since the raspberry extract is added just prior to bottling, but the goal is well enough in sight.)

I’ve taken a fair amount of slack for brewing such a girly beer, so I decided my next one had better be a bit more manful. Well, there’s now a company picnic scheduled for July 3, which should be just enough time for this glorious ESB (Extra Special Bitter) to finish out and find its way into bottles, thus vindicating my manhood:

The hydrometer shows 1.042. Compensated for temperature (it was 75°F), this is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.046.

And hey, if the fruit beer is a bit too…fruity, I’ve got a couple of customers lined up who insist they won’t complain.

NOTE TO ATF: When I say “customers,” I mean “wives of friends who will take homemade beer from me for free.”

Why so much brewing? Well, good question. First of all, it’s a bit of a pain to brew in the heat of the summer. Even with air conditioning, the temperature is still usually a bit too warm in the house to make it convenient, so I’d like to get the summer’s needs met before it gets too warm. Second, with the recent addition of the dedicated beer fridge (thank you, Jim), I’d like to accumulate a good variety in storage, so guests will always have their options open. A burst of brewing activity is required to prime the pump, as it were.

I documented the original gravity reading of this beer here.

I read about 1.009 on the scale. Again, without any temperature compensation, that gives me an alcohol content of 2.4% by volume, which just doesn’t make sense. Oh well. If I had to pick tasty beer or precisely measured beer, I’d take the arrangement I currently have.

Back at the beginning of February I blogged the brewing of a light lager and an amber lager. After seven weeks in the relative temperature stability of my sister’s crawlspace (usually at a comfortable 45°F, which is just perfect for lagering), I’ve finally got it bottled.

I read about 1.003 on the scale. Without compensating for the slightly different temperatures at the time of the two readings, that gives me about 3.1% alcohol by volume–perfect for this kind of brew. And check that color: I did say light lager, did I not?

See, this is why I don’t trust my initial gravity readings:

This had a roughly equivalent amount of extract as the light lager, to which it added a pound and a half of adjuncts. You’d think the gravity would make it up there, but we only see about 1.032. Something seems fishy here.

Not that I mind, really. I give away around 40% of what I brew, and 90% of what remains I drink with dinner. Low alcohol content in a dinner beverage is a good thing; I’d just like to have control over the measurements.

In any event, two batches down, and only bedtime in front of me. Enjoy the pictures, and my apologies in advance if load times are slow tomorrow. We are self-hosting here at TimBerglund.com, which means bandwidth is miserly.

The second beer of the evening will be an amber lager. Darker and maltier than its light cousin, it is suitable for all-weather drinking, but will defer to lighter brews on the hottest of summer days.

The recipe:

• 6 lbs. amber malt extract (plastic tub on right). This is a pre-processed sugar mixture extracted from malted barley
• 3/4 oz. Saaz aroma hops (bag, right front)
• 1 oz. German Hallertau M.F. bittering hops (static-safe bag, left front; it is little known by homebrewers that hops are static sensitive)
• 3/4 lb. Crystal 40 malted barley (glass bowl, rear left)
• 3/8 lb. German Light Crystal malted barley (glass bowl, rear left)
• 3/8 lb. Honey malted barley (glass bowl, rear left)
• White Labs German lager yeast (not shown)

Note that this batch has whole malted barley in it (the contents of the glass bowl). These grains are called the adjuncts. Adjuncts add more sugars (hence higher alcohol content) and not surpisingly, a heavier, maltier body. Adjuncts are added to the water before the heat is applied and allowed to steep as the wort reaches a boil. Just before it starts to boil, the wort is taken off the heat and the adjuncts are strained out and thrown away.

Hops have a wonderfully strong smell, but for overall odorific goodness, adjuncts may be the winner across the entire enterprise of homebrewing. The best way I can describe the feeling I get from smelling fresh adjuncts is happy to be alive.

They nevertheless taste like Grape Nuts.

Taking the initial gravity marks the end of the process. The wort has been mixed, the yeast has been pitched, and we’ve poured off half a cup to measure the specific gravity. This batch reads at about 1.033 without temperature compensation. I never really compensate for temperature (you can get a dramatic demonstration of how the density of a liquid changes with temperature just using hot and cold tap water), and I’m never that confident that I get a sufficiently homogeneous mixture at this point, but this reading looks pretty good.

Percentage alcohol by volume is a function of initial and final specific gravity, so this is a good metric to have.

Here I (guy in the striped shirt on the left–have we not been over this?) am pouring about a gallon and a half of recently boiling wort into the carboy. It has about two gallons of cold tap water in it, and I’ll top it off with cold water when I’m done.

After it’s topped off, I’ll cap it and shake it vigorously for a few minutes. This helps oxygenate the wort (helpful since primary fementation is aerobic in nature), and helps mix us the hotter, sugar-laden part of the mixure with the cooler tap water. Interestingly, the hot, sugary wort is still denser than the cold water. Regardless of this everything will work out fine after the yeast is pitched, but I prefer a good, homogeneous mixture before that, so I can get a good hydrometer reading.

Whole hops accumulate some sugars during boil, and we covet sugar. We have to strain the hops out of the wort before transferring it to the carboy, so we first pour boiling water over the hops petals to “sparge” the sugars back into the wort. Then the tasty hops go into the trash.

Note that I did add the second ounce of Saaz about two minutes before I took the pot off the heat. Ahhhh, the smell…

Here my nine-year-old is using my innovating technique of filling the carboy (the five-gallon glass jug at bottom) with water without the need for a sterilized jug. The carboy and the funnel have both recently had a bleach bath. The boy will get one tomorrow (well, without the bleach).

The carboy needs some water in it before we add the hot wort; otherwise the glass will crack.

It was hard to get a good picture of the boiling “wort,” but this was as close as I could come:

By the way, we achieved boil at approximately 7:00pm. We should be sparging the hops in a half an hour.

Officer, it’s not what you think. Normally I use pelletized hops, but Adeodatus’ recipe calls for whole hops. Hops are actually the pedals of the flower of the hops vine. These are Saaz hops, and if I could blog the smell, believe me, I would.

To the right is Irish Moss, typically an additive only to lagers (not ales). According to legend, it helps proteins congeal more efficiently, leading to a clearer finished product. Ever since glassware replaced stoneware and pewter here at the Berglund household, we take pride in trying to get a certain clarity out of our lagers.

No shot of me adding these to the pot; not even brewing can withstand such tedium.

I don’t normally brew with dry malt extract, but without resorting to the more complex whole grain process, this is what you have to do to get a really light beer. Mind you, it’s not going to be Bud Light–just crisp, refreshing, and slightly hoppy. Add three pounds of this stuff to the three pounds of wildflower honey, and you’ve got enough fermentable sugar for the naturally occuring alcohol conversion nanobots to eat and be filled.

Here we have me (stiped shirt) pouring the amazingly delicious wildflower honey (light brown gooey stuff I’m pouring) into the stock pot (stainless steel stock pot). The pot contains warm water, but the heat is not on yet. After I add both containers of honey, I’ll stir the pot thoroughly to keep undissolved honey from carmelizing.

All recipies tonight are courtesy of Adeodatus, who was going to be here brewing tonight too, but was detained by the exigences of bad weather two days ago (see his blog).

Here we have the ingredients for the first batch: two cases of a crisp, light lager, suitable for summertime quaffing.

The recipe calls for:

• 3 lbs of dry extra light malt extract (bag in center)
• 3 lbs. delicious prairie wildflower honey (plastic containers on either side)
• Two ounces whole Saaz hops, one ounce bittering and one ounce aroma (bag at left)
• White Labs German lager yeast (16-oz. bottle at right with plastic wrap around top)
• Zero overripe bananas. (Those will become banana bread tomorrow, I’m told)

I overcompressed that JPEG, didn’t I? And I didn’t keep a copy of the original. Better luck next time.

It is my pleasure to announce a first in the history of TimBerglund.com: I will be live blogging the brewing of two 5-gallon batches of lager tonight. You’ll be getting real-time progress updates on both batches, including pictures. More or less, anyway; Mrs. Berglund is going to be out of the house tonight, and it’s bath night. I’ll do the best I can. Keep hitting refresh…