Los Angeles Brewers

It have been a while since we posted.  Apologies…

We brewed up a simple blond ale with 2-row and Mosaic hops.  We added Brewers Clarex to our White Labs 001 to reduce gluten and get us a crispy clear finish.

1.049 starting gravity. 

Been a long time since we last posted.  Sorry about that.  We have been brewing beer and we will try to update some stuff, but today’s entry is about our Christmas Berliner Weisse.

We were in San Diego and stopped by the Homebrew Mart for ingredients.  In a rush, we misread the recipe and bought enough grain for a 20 gallon batch.  We decided to brew the whole thing and used a combo of Philly Sour and Sourviese. 

The purpose of the brew (as if we needed one) was to participate in the Maltose Falcons’ beer Advent calendar. 

We blended the two different beers (produced by each of the yeasts ) and bottled.  A friend drew us a label and we bottled the blend into bombers. We added small vials of Waldmeister and Raspberry syrups to each bottle. 

This one was fun and an interesting take on a Christmas beer.

On September 27th, we brewed an amber ale featuring fresh, whole hops on the Maltose Falcons 40 gallon brewery.

After some grain mill problems, we were underway.

The star of the show:

The hops were brought by a hop farmer friend of the club’s president.

The grain bill is above. The other hops employed are below.  We did not find the second bag of golden promise, so we substituted with 14lbs Maris Otter.

Cascade was used as a mash hop.  

Mash-in at 152° 75 lbs into 80 quarts.  1.060 OG was the goal. Nailed it.

We added the big sack of fresh hops as a late addition.

The process was fun and the equipment was excellent.  The HERMS setup was very cool and automatic temperature control made things very easy.

Took home two carboys of ~4 gallons each.

One was WLP 090 San Diego Super and the other WLP 013 London Ale.  The 090 was much better.  Hops on display.

Today’s brew was a Scottish 70 shilling, built on Jamil’s Brewing Classic Styles recipe.

All numbers were hit except mash temp, which was undershot by a few degrees.

Further improvements were made to the brewery, including new hoses, three new 3 piece valves and all new quick disconnects.  The stainless was all Blichmann

The brew day went pretty smoothly.  The fresh hop red ale was kegged, with some overflow onto the garage floor.  4 gallons into a3 gallon keg will do that…

Had an odd assortment of beers while brewing…

Filled the fermenters, cleaned up and were done in 6.5 hours.

Well. I know. It’s been quite a while since we brewed. I’m sorry. We had more than enough beer to keep us going deep into the summer. And we have not run dry yet.

But all slow times must come to an end, so we decided on a whim to fire up the brew rig and get brewing again. After many fine beers at the LA Beer Week Kick-Off party, we decided on a session beer with Moteka hops. We went on a hop buying binge earlier in the spring and had 4 oz of this and a few other hops in the freezer. On the shelf was 20 plus pounds of 2-row, some odd grains and some wheat. We sat down with our favorite software, BeerSmith, and wrote up a simple recipe with what we had on hand. It turned out to be 17 lbs of Western Malting 2-row and 1 lb of wheat. Simple. A nice starting  point for what we believe will be an evolving recipe. We added the single hop, but with a twist. We had a bunch of hop extract left over from the Blind Pig Clone in June. That became the bittering 60 minute hop. In the Blind Pig Clone, the flavor was perfect. time to try it in a much lighter and lower IBU beer. We plugged in all of the hops and this is what we got… 13 IBU’s from the extract,  and a few more from a super late charge at 10 min, 1 min and whirlpool. When we went to the shop to get a few more hops for the dry hop, the instinct was to go with 2 oz for the whole dry hop. The aroma is so good on this hops and the alcohol is so low, we decided to double that and go short on the contact time. We shall see how this works.

The brew day went super smooth. No issues at all and we ended up with 11.5 gallons at the end in which we used the new White Labs Clarity Ferm in the fermenter. This is the second time that we have used this product and we were super impressed with the last attempt. We only used it in one fermenter on our normal 10 gallon batch and there was almost no difference between the two as far as taste went. I can’t wait to use this a bit more and see if some of our gluten free friends like the beer.

We will probably keg the beer very soon and from the samples so far, it seems to be on the right track. We might add to the super simple grain bill, but only one grain at a time.  Fermentation was quick and the beer now sits at 1.005 SG from a start of 1.042. Yeast was the hard working US-05 and the Dry 97.

We are brewing a Helles.  We will ferment half on Munich Helles yeast and half on Mexican lager yeast. 

We softened our water by cutting it in half with distilled.

Pretty straightforward brew day except we missed our pre-boil gravity by a few points. All fixed by a 90 minute boil.

Recipe variation from a pure Helles (other than the 5 gallons on Mexi yeast) includes Hallertau Mittelfrueh (straight-up Hallertau was unavailable) and a pound of Cara-Pils to add body/head retention.

We brewed a double IPA with $85 worth of hops. 

Centennial, Columbus and Simcoe to the tune of 28 ounces and 215 IBU.  Two row, a tiny amount of dextrine and Crystal 40 make up the grain bill.

We added 2 pounds of candi sugar to bring it up to 1.069 OG. 
We will pitch WLP001 and WLP090 in the two fermenters.  We also added Fermencap and Clarityferm as well. 

We hit all our numbers and, with a 90 minute mash and a 90 minute boil, it was a very mellow brew day. Only one problem, when carrying one of the fermenters it slipped out of the carrying handle and crashed onto the floor. Fortunately, it was a plastic “Better Bottle” and we righted it with a loss of only a quart of wort.

Two doses of dry hopping lay ahead. Then glorious hop heaven!