As many homebrewers know, making a great batch of beer requires a lot of effort.  It took me awhile to understand the importance of looking past the actual brewing day.    Focusing on a solid fermentation will be the difference between a good homebrew and a beer, which you will be truly satisfied with.  A wise friend once told me “There is no such thing as a bad beer.  Some are more desirable than others.” Keeping that in mind making a yeast starter along with proper aeration, quickly cooling your wort, etc. you will hopefully be able to achieve these results. 

 When brewing Ales with an Original Gravity of 1.40 or higher, the fermentation process begins 48-72 hours prior to your brewing day.  Session beers or maybe some German wheat beers will not require a yeast starter due to their low gravities. A yeast starter is a small batch of wort that is cooled down and added to your yeast.  This will give them the energy they need to wake up and begin multiplying, while not expending all the strength they have.  The gravity of your starter should be somewhere between 1.025 and 1.040.  Anywhere in that range should work just fine.  We are essentially making a tiny batch of beer that will result in a large number of healthy cells.  There is a difference between giving your wort the number of viable cells it requires and OVERPITCHING. Pitching rates are strain and style specific, but if you overpitch an IPA you will immediately know.  Been there, done that.

           

What will I need to make a starter

•      Stir Plate
•      1 2L Erlenmeyer Flask
•      Yeast Nutrient
•       Dry Malt Extract
•       Whisk
•        Aluminum Foil
•       Small pot to boil starter
•        1 Stir Bar
•        Funnel
•     Thermometer

What should the volume of my starter be?  (Step 1)

It can range anywhere from 1 Liter to 2.5 Liters and greater for high gravity brewing.  To determine the volume of your starter use the mrmalty.com App.  Enter the anticipated OG of your wort, volume of your batch (5.25 Gallons for this batch to yield 5), and the viability of your yeast.  One of the reasons I prefer Wyeast smack packs because the pack actual gives you a production date rather than a use by date.  To calculate viability simply enter the date into the pitching calculator.  Using a month old Wyeast pack will result in 75% viability.  In other words, you know what type of performance to expect. 

  

How much Malt Extract should I use in the boil? (Step 2)

Any free online brewing program should be able to tell you this.  Ill use a current recipe for a Belgian Pale that I am working on for an example:

Anticipated OG:1.054 using yeast with 95% Viability.  1 Liter starter is required with stir plate.  To achieve a starter gravity of 1.036: 1 Liter of Water, 3.5 Ounces of DME, and ¼ of yeast nutrient.  194 Billion Yeast Cells needed.

Procedure

• Pour water into small pot.  Add DME and yeast nutrient.  Bring to a boil and boil for 15 minutes. 
•  After 15 minutes, turn off burner.  Place pot in sink and make ice bath to cool wort to 70° F
•  Sanitize stir bar, 2 L Flask, Funnel, Yeast Pack, Aluminum foil.  Using a sanitized funnel add starter into empty flask with stir bar.  Aerate. Then add yeast.  Sanitize aluminum foil and place over the top of flask.  Poke holes in aluminum foil to give yeast proper oxygen needed to multiply.  Oxygen is critical to yeast growth.
• Place on stir plate with stir bar in the center of the flask for 48-72 hours. 

5   The starter should begin to bubble fairly quick.  If it bubbles too much.  You may have added too much extract, leading to a quick primary.  If the starter appears to be darker or bubbling more than usual. Nothing to stress about.  Use a blowoff tube in a pitcher of Star San.  After you have cooled you wort and properly aerated it, use a funnel to add it to the wort.  Within about 12-24 hours, a krausen should form.  Lag time has been eliminated and your fermenter should look something like this:

I hoped this might have helped to answer some questions.  Happy Fermentations!

White House Releases Honey Ale & Honey Porter Recipe

White House Releases Honey Ale & 

Honey Porter Recipe

                                                                                               

After weeks of refusing requests by brewers nationwide, the White House released its recipes for their Honey Ale and Honey Porter.  A petition was created and signed by over 12,000 Homebrewers and Craft Beer enthusiasts nationwide through the We The People.  While not the first president to advocate interest in homebrewing or distillation, Obama is the first to brew in the White House.  Even paying for the equipment and batches out of his own pocket. 

If you have been contemplating getting into homebrewing, now is a great time to give it a try.  Cost and difficulty have been taken out of the equation have dramatically decreased, while quality of equipment and ingredients have improved.  The White House chefs are using equipment available through websites such as Northernbrewer.com or MidwestSupplies.com, which will run you about $100.  These recipes were created in collaboration with local DC brew masters using malt extract, specialty grains/adjuncts, hops, and rehydrated dry yeast (I prefer liquid, but that’s a story or another day).  Malt extract is a “Commercially prepared syrupy mixture of sugars and proteins that along with added yeast will produce alcohol and give a lot of taste to the finished beer.”  -Via Ray Daniels, Brew Chem 101.  I did some basic calculations for the recipe and came up with a few results (may not be 100% accurate) and drew some basic conclusions from there.

WHITE HOUSE HONEY ALE

SRM: 6-11                                          OG: 1.063

                               

WHITE HOUSE HONEY PORTER

SRM: 27                                             OG: 1.070

                                               

Positives of Processes/Recipes:

•           Steeping Grains at 155°F should yield a thicker wort, forming long chain proteins essential in a traditional porter recipe.  Rinsing grains with 165°F water will insure leftover fermentable sugars are rinsed from the specialty grains and not left behind.
•            In the Honey Ale recipe the honey is added during the last 5 minutes to dry out the beer.  Easy drinking and great for summer.
•         Based on the video, the White House has something that few Homebrewers have in the Chicagoland area, a temperature controlled room for fermentation.  (Unless you have a temperature controlled/ converted chest freezer)  Most batches will yield optimum results if you can ferment at a constant temperature.  For most ale yeast strains, 60°F-72°F should be optimum. 
•           Cooling such a small volume of wort can be done in relatively quickly.  Thus, reducing any Dimethyl Sulfide, an off flavor that will affect your beer. 

Negatives of Processes/ Recipes

• Topping off Fermenter With Water When Transferring to Secondary.  Water can contain microbes that might infect your wort. (Acidity from dropping pH levels and the amount of alcohol present at this point would likely keep your wort safe.) Keeping in mind that water has a Specific Gravity of 1.00 and the gravity of your wort is probably around 1.024 it will slightly dilute the finished product. When brewing a 5-gallon batch you should lose about a ¼ gallon to trub/hop loss.  Account for that when pitching your yeast, collect 5.25 gallons of wort. 
•  If you have the capacity boiling the entire wort will give you a better-finished beer.  Although adding water to extract beers can be beneficial because of the amount of oxygen present that yeast rely on to metabolize and ferment.  This will not be an option if you transition to all grain brewing.
• Always aerate you wort.  If you’ve noticed your fermentation is slow to reach the growth phase, aerate vigorously.  
• Ensuring a viable yeast cell count by making a proper yeast starter. Volume of starters needed for these beers with a Stir Plate (Assuming 89% Viability):

Honey Ale: 1.14 Liters or 2.8 Wyeast Smack Packs
Honey Porter: 1.43 Liters or 2.6 Wyeast Smack Packs

• With the Specific Gravity of the boil being as high as 1.102 for the Porter and 1.162 for the Honey Ale, because of the amount of liquid being boiled, hop utilization is dramatically decreased.  The first hop edition for the Honey Ale occurs @ 45, hop utilization drops from 19% to 7.7%!

After watching the YouTube video, you notice several things about the chefs that make the brew.  One chef refers to “letting the beer distill”.  While the other, transfers the wort to the secondary “Fermentator”.  The recipes are sure to confuse any new brewer.  Traditional hop additions occur at 60, 45, 30, 15, or 0 (aroma). 60 minutes indicating the beginning of the boil. However, the porter recipe lists the addition aroma hops at 60 minutes (flameout).  They also misspelled a few ingredients, etc.

The purpose of this isn’t to bash these White House Chefs.  The more awareness that is spread for Homebrewers and Craft Breweries across the country the better.  I praise the President for bringing this in for this generation and the hopefully many more.  This recipe and the video should encourage people everywhere to buy a brewing and recipe kit and brew a tasty, fermented beverage at home. Brewing on a small scale can be very easy and can be done on a small budget.  Do your homework and have fun with it.  Brewing is meant to be enjoyable. Cheers!