Brewblog and some other stuff

It's been nearly a month since this post, so it's that time again for some updates on the other stuff in my life. Mostly beer.

Brewblog, Entry One

In the month of April so far, we have had two brew days. Due to ugly weather and other commitments, we did not brew on the weekend of the 9th. We can afford to take some weekends off now, though, because we have developed a fairly sizable stockpile of beer in the first three months of this year.

On Friday, April 2nd, we brewed an Oud Bruin aka Flanders Brown ale. This beer will be aged in a glass carboy for one year with some crazy yeasts and bacteria, souring the beer and hopefully giving it complex flavour and aroma. Normally we like to start drinking our beers within a month and a bit of making them, so it'll be strange to let this batch do its thing for so long. Writing this blog entry right now reminds me that I need to rack this thing into that carboy and soon.

On Saturday, April 17th, we took a second crack at brewing an English Pale Ale aka Bitter. Our first Bitter was a drinkable, low alcohol, mostly unmemorable malty beer, so with this second batch, we upped the hop quantity and slightly adjusted the malt recipe. The end result will not be to style at all, with hop bitterness well above recommended, but this beer won't last until a competition anyway, so we might as well create beers that we will enjoy. I will have more to say on this topic of homebrew competitions in the next section.

The most interesting element of the last brew day was that we successfully implemented a major process improvement. While talking with Dave Rudge, guru of Half Pints Brewery in Winnipeg, this week (while drunk on his Pothole Porter at an ALES Club volunteer appreciation night), he suggested that with Regina water we should have no problems completing our mash starch conversion within 30 minutes.

When we started all-grain brewing, we began with a 60 minute mash. (I'm not going to bother explaining here what the mash is. You can Google it, if curious.) As time went on, we extended this to 75 minutes, and on rare occasions when recipes called for it, 90 minutes. The thought was that the longer we let the mash do its thing, the more sugars we'd get in our wort. It made rookie brewer sense.

On Saturday we tried the 30 minute mash that Dave Rudge recommended, and we didn't seem to lose any efficiency, where efficiency is the percent of available sugars extracted in the mash. Thanks to that 45 minutes of time savings, we completed the entire brew day easily in four hours, including a 90 minute boil. (90 minute boils are also a recent process change, although in this case we have lengthened our day by 30 minutes. In theory, the extra boiling time gives you better hop utilization and possibly wort caramelization.)

The longer mashes were rarely a waste of time, because we tried to take advantage of that 75 minutes of sitting around waiting to do miscellaneous important tasks like bottling previous batches. But I suspect that it will be a long time before we do another mash that is longer than 30 minutes.

We hit 84% efficiency on this last brew day, which is excellent and well above our average of 72%. With our first Bitter, we hit 79%, so we have had above average results in the past with smaller grain bills (ie. less grains in the mash). I'm not going to attribute the 5% better efficiency with this second batch to the shorter mash, as that is nonsense, but it is solid evidence that we didn't lose anything. There are likely more efficiency gains to be found in the running off and sparging processes, so we are always experimenting with those tasks as well.

We are brewing again on the coming Saturday. We have not picked a recipe yet, but Blonde Ale has been suggested.

Competition Results

We entered 11 beers and 1 mead in the ALES Homebrew Open 2010 competition. We were mostly seeking feedback and constructive criticism, if not a little validation. We believe we make good beers, but were any of them competition quality beers? The answer to that question was mostly "No," sadly.

Our average score was a solid if unspectacular 27.6 out of 50. That score sounds worse than it is (it's more C+ than D), because it is incredibly hard to score above 35. But at the same time, unless your beer is the worst thing a judge has ever tasted, you will rarely score below 20. So, yeah, we are halfway between really good and really terrible. We didn't win any medals, which you earn if a beer places in 1st to 3rd place in one of the 20ish categories.

Our Biere de Garde rebounded from its poor showing in Calgary in February, where the judges thought the beer may have been infected and slammed it with an average of 24.5, to be our top scoring beer here with a 38.7 average (impressive scores of 40, 40, and 36). I'm sure glad we gave the Biere de Garde another chance. It didn't win a medal, but I have it on good authority that it was very close. It was competing in its category against Saisons and other Belgian beers, so it was tough.

Scott's Stout 2, my favourite of our 2009 brews, scored a very respectable 37.5 (39 and 36) in Calgary. Unfortunately, with Biere de Garde doing so well at the ALES competition, the universe insisted on balancing that result out by turning Scott's Stout 2 into a bottle bomb that yielded our second lowest score ever with a 20.7. Because the bottle gushed for a couple of minutes into a pitcher, it was completely flat by the time the judges drank it. The judges were not fans and also detected off-flavours that had not previously been present. Shitty.

Here's a quick rundown of how the other ten entries performed: Winter Wheat 2 (32.7), Raspberry Mead 3 (31.5), Sour Cherry Ale (30.7), Vanilla Porter (29.0), Matrimonial Ale 2 (27.3), Scottish Ale (27.3), Pilsner (25.3), Paul's Tripel (25.3), Punk IPA (22.0), Anniversary Bitter (20.3).

The biggest disappointments for me, other than Scott's Stout 2, were: the Sour Cherry Ale, which tastes like delicious cherry pie, but unfortunately doesn't really fit the BJCP guidelines for a Fruit Beer; Raspberry Mead 3, which is very raspberry-y, but is apparently not meady enough; and the Vanilla Porter, which wasn't quite ready for this competition, but might be my new favourite of our beers. Winter Wheat 2 did better than expected, validating me at least amongst our little group, as I was the only one that thought it was good. We didn't expect much from the Pilsner nor Paul's Tripel nor the Scottish Ale, entering them just to get feedback. Punk IPA is great, but not an IPA. Matrimonial Ale 2 was entered as an American Pale Ale, despite its 9% abv, just to fuck around. Anniversary Bitter, our lowest scoring beer, had a skunky bottle apparently; I have a hard time believing that it deserved the 18 that it received.

It's a little depressing to see all those mid-20s scores. I have been extremely happy with the beers we have been making lately, so much so that I have only purchased one six-pack of beer in the last few months. But we still clearly have a long way to go before we are making excellent beers. We are all driven to improve our process, improve our recipes, and improve our scores for next year's competition.

Novice Beer Judge Extraordinaire

I skipped the March meeting of ALES Club due to sickness, so I missed out on the volunteer sign-up sheet for stewarding (ie. serving beer to the judges) at the 2010 ALES Homebrew Open competition. At the April meeting, I asked the competition coordinator if there was anywhere he could fit me in, and he suggested that Monday night could probably use me.

So I showed up at Bushwakker on last Monday evening at 6:45 to steward for the first night of the competition. As I arrived downstairs, the competition coordinator informed me that I was judging this night instead of stewarding. I thought he was joking and laughed it off. I'm not a beer judge; I've never judged beer. It took a good minute of him trying to reassure me that it would be okay for me to agree. I even emphatically said no at one point, but he didn't let it go. When he led me to my table, where I was to be judging with him and the manager of Bushwakker, I saw that he had printed labels with my name on them already.

We were judging category 19, Strong Ales. Strong Ales includes three subcategories: 19A, Old Ale; 19B, English Barleywine; and 19C, American Barleywine. There were 11 entries, 3 Old Ales, 5 English Barleywines, and 3 American Barleywines.

I can only recall drinking one Barleywine previous to this night. I'm not sure what the brand or source was, but I think it fit into the English Barleywine category. I note this to establish the fact that I was not familiar with the style at all going into judging.

On the table in front of each judge was the 2008 BJCP Style Guide and a stack of score sheets. To prepare for judging, I quickly read through category 19. I am pretty familiar with some of the other categories, having had to read them to ensure I was submitting our beers into the correct categories for competitions, but 19 was new. We have never made a Strong Ale.

I don't want to bore you with too many details. But here's a quick summary of the process. One by one the beers are brought out in three sample glasses. Each judge individually and silently assesses the beer in the five areas on the score sheet [aroma (12 points), appearance (3 points), flavour (20 points), mouthfeel (5 points), overall impression (10 points)], writing comments as they go, and then adds up their score. The scores are compared and the difference between the highest and lowest judge must be 7 or less to reach a consensus. The outliers will then discuss their reasoning and adjust their scores if necessary.

Even knowing very little about the category, and accepting that my sense of smell is not really up to snuff, I followed the BJCP Guide carefully and was able to score nine of the eleven beers entirely in line with the other two judges (ie. within 7 points). On one beer, I penalized it heavier than the other two judges and ended up relenting and raising my score. On another beer, I was too high, and I adjusted down a few points while another judge adjusted up. The rather brilliant English Barleywine that won the category got a 41 from me and one other judge, and a 40 from the third, which was amazingly consistent.

If scoring the beers was all you had to do, I would have had a great night. I repeatedly proved that I had a good feel for what a beer should get as a score. Unfortunately, you can't just award a score; you have to provide comments and notes to support your score. And this was the part of this evening that I disliked. My comments were so inane and dumb and unhelpful that I felt embarrassed to hand the score sheets in to the head judge. Ultimately, I have a hard time recognizing and describing the complexities of beer. (This extends to basically everything I eat or drink. I know what I like, and I know generally why, but my senses of taste and smell struggle to detect subtleties.)

The entries were quite solid throughout the night, very few scoring below the upper 20s. There was only one sample glass that I did not finish, because I found the beer to be borderline awful. One clear indication of my lack of judging experience was the fact that my judging partners did not finish any of their sample glasses. That was amazing to me, because I felt like I needed every millilitre of liquid in those cups to make my assessments.

At the end of the evening, I was quite drunk. Eleven samples of 10% beers will do that to me. And after judging, we were permitted to sample the victors of the evening's other categories. I found a couple Bitters that I really liked, but was ultimately not in the mood to do much extra drinking.

I was asked a couple times that evening (and many times later in the week) if I enjoyed judging and if I would do it again. I always answered yes to both questions.

Shaping Up?

I took Daisy for a walk yesterday. Does that count?

33...

...is how old I will be on Friday. Fuck me.

I'm taking Friday off to sit outside, drink, and read my book. If the weather does not cooperate, I will still partake in the drinking part of that plan.