First Attempt at Hop Water

Experimentation time! One of my taps on my keezer is reserved for carbonated water. It's really nice for cocktails or just when you want a refreshing fizzy drink without any calories. I think it was a little over a year ago that I discovered Lagunitas Hop Water which is essentially carbonated water with hops. I usually buy it by the case and I've turned a bunch of my friends onto it too. Like carbonated water, it's also great for cocktails (I recommend making Ranch Water with Desert Door Texas Sotol) or just when you want something hoppy but can't have or don't want a beer.

This is my first attempt at making hop water, so this recipe will likely change as a refine it. Anyway, here's attempt #1:

5 gallons Walmart brand Spring Water

Phosphoric acid to adjust water to 4.5pH

1t Nutritional Yeast

6g Waimea (whirlpool)

6g BRU-1 (whirlpool)

6g Rakua (whirlpool)

6g Waimea (added to keg)

6g BRU-1 (added to keg)

10g Motueka (added to keg)

Water was heated to 170F while whirlpooling to sanitize everything.

Add nutritional yeast and whirlpool hops.

Chill then transfer to keg with dry hops. In this case, I used a stainless mesh tube for dry hopping in the keg.

Force carb for a few days and (hopefully) enjoy.

Brewing Notes

You couldn't ask for an easier brew session. Your basically just heating the water then chilling it back down and transferring to keg. Stay tuned for tasting notes.

Update 8/2/2021

It's still not carb'd yet, but I pulled a sample today. Appearance-wise, it has a slight greenish tint similar to Lagunitas. Aroma is definitely more intense than Lagunitas. Flavor...well it's kind of like chewing on a hop pellet; I may have overdone it on the dry hops. I've seen other folks comment that the first few pints were too intense on hop character, including bitterness, and that it got better the further into the keg they went. So, I'm not giving up on this batch quite yet, but I definitely may need to dial things back a bit.

Update 8/3/2021

Ok, the flavor is much improved today. A lot of the raw pellet character is fading. I left my sample glass on my desk for about 45 minutes and noticed a bunch of hop debris had settled out, so I think that most of the harsh bitterness and tannic character is coming from hop debris in suspension. This seems to be consistent with the experiences reported by others (e.g. Brulosophy). Yesterday I was thinking this might be a dumper, but today I'm very optimistic. Carbonation is still a little low, but I filled this keg to the brim so I was expecting it might take a little longer to carb due to reduced headspace and the fact that it took a while to chill down to serving temp.

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Becoming a BJCP Judge

I took the BJCP Tasting Exam at the end of 2019, just a couple months before COVID shut down everything including homebrew competitions. I've been judging comps since 2013 and homebrewing since 2000 (or thereabouts...I always forget exactly when). My homebrew club is pretty competition-focused and within the club we have numerous BJCP judges. For anyone that sticks with the hobby there tends to be a natural progression towards becoming a certified judge. I kept planning on taking the exam but other things would always come up.  In the Fall of 2019, I finally decided I'd put it off long enough. I’m hoping this post might help motivate those that have been sitting on the fence about getting certified.

First off, if you're not familiar with the BJCP, it's the Beer Judge Certification Program. The purpose of the BJCP is:

Encourage knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the world's diverse beer, mead, and cider styles;

Promote, recognize, and advance beer, mead, and cider tasting, evaluation, and communication skills; and

Develop standardized tools, methods, and processes for the structured evaluation, ranking and feedback of beer, mead, and cider.

Style guidelines are one of the important contributions of the BJCP from a competition perspective because they serve to define characteristics for recognized beer styles. The BJCP also focuses on developing a common beer vocabulary which is important for being able to describe virtually everything about a particular beer, including its appearance, aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel. This is important because it doesn’t matter how great your palate is if you can’t describe what you’re tasting.

So, let’s say you’re to the point that you’re hooked on the hobby and you want to dive a little deeper and learn about the various beer styles around the world. Or let’s say you’re a seasoned homebrewer that’s stewarded or even judged in a competition and wants to dive deeper into the brewing hobby. If either of these statements describe you, then you’re probably a good candidate for taking the exam. 

Step 1 - Entrance Exam

The overall process for becoming a certified judge starts with the entrance exam which is a timed online exam. The BJCP’s site has plenty of details about the exam, so I won’t get too detailed here. The only thing I’ll say is it’s open book, but I wouldn’t recommend taking it without studying. It consists of 180 questions in 60 minutes. That’s 20 seconds per question. There are some questions that everyone gets, then other questions that are pulled from a pool of available questions. Long story short, you won’t get the same test as your buddy. Some people I know have passed without studying, but for the majority of us it would be a waste of money to take the exam without prepping. 

Numerous questions will focus on style comparisons and typically involve popular/common classic styles. One funny note, I had multiple questions re 19B California Common (Steam Beer) and 10A Weissbier, two styles I rarely drink because they just aren’t favorites of mine. I'd spent a lot of time studying American Pale Ale, Porters, and Stouts...but definitely not California Common or Weissbier. One nice thing, you immediately find out at the end of the hour whether you passed.

Step 2 - Tasting Exam

After passing the entrance exam, the next step is to take the Tasting Exam. Although this may seem intimidating, it's really not too bad, especially if you’ve judged in a competition before. Personally, I was much more nervous about the Entrance Exam due to the time limitation than the Tasting Exam. Although the Tasting Exam also has a time component. The Tasting Exam is similar to judging a competition, so if you've done that before, you should be familiar with the process. A few tips:

• Make sure you’re familiar with the BJCP scoresheets.
• Practice judging at home with various styles and time yourself. You’re shooting for a 100% completed scoresheet in no more than 15 minutes. That seems like a lot of time but it goes by quick.
• If you can pair with an experienced judge for some practice sessions, do it. They’ll help you validate and describe what your tasting.
• Re the scoresheets, focus on completeness. Whitespace is bad. Use all available lines for each section.
• Get familiar with common terminology/vocabulary to describe malt, hops, and yeast-derived characters. For example, bready, floral, fruity, phenolic, estery, etc.
• Use quantifying descriptions with your malt, hop, and yeast descriptors. For example, low fruity hop aroma.
• If you get hung up on something, skip it and come back to it after a minute or two.
• Practice writing legibly. My penmanship used to be incredible. Years of working on computers and tablets have definitely had a negative impact. Write clearly so the exam graders can easily read your comments.

The Tasting Exam is not open book, in fact no phones or reference materials of any kind are allowed. It’s just you, your pencil, and the beers you’re judging. You’re not allowed to discuss the beers with anyone until after the exam concludes. For the Tasting Exam itself, you’ll be judging side by side with about a dozen other examinees. There will also be a couple proctor judges as well, but they won’t be seated with the examinees. You get 15 minutes per beer, 6 beers overall, so a total of 90 minutes. 15 minutes flies by, so make sure you’re timing yourself during your practice judging sessions. At the end of the exam after everyone’s scoresheets had been collected by the administrator, we talked about each beer with the proctors. This will give you an idea of how well you did by how close your scores and comments matched up with the proctors.

Post-exam

Ok, so now you’ve made it through the Entrance Exam and the Tasting Exam. Here’s the hardest part…waiting for your exam results. The tasting exams are individually graded by volunteers, experienced judges who are also graders that will evaluate your feedback compared to the proctor judges. Timelines vary a little, but I wouldn’t expect to get your results any sooner than 3 months from the exam date. That seems like a long time but try to remember it’s a volunteer organization and the graders are literally reading through all comments from all examinees. Mine ended up taking about five months if I remember correctly but that seems to be longer than most.

That’s about it. If you don’t score well the first time, try not to beat yourself up over it. I mean, it’s just beer after all. You can always retake the exam, plus you do earn points for judging which will help you advance if you struggled with the exam. Cheers and happy brewing and judging.

Resources - Below are some resources I found helpful in studying for both the Online Entrance Exam and the Tasting Exam:

• Barleypopmaker's free BJCP prep course videos. I found these videos very helpful. They give you a great overview of the process and help you focus on key points. Take notes, especially for things he tells you will be on the test. Edit: This website seems to no longer be available, but the videos are still on YouTube.
• Beer Style Compare-O-Matic from beersyndicate.com - I didn't see this one until after I'd already passed the Entrance Exam, but it would have been very helpful during the open book exam. This tool really makes it easy to compare styles on the fly. You will be comparing styles during the test...the only question is which styles will you be comparing? 
• BJCP.org - The BJCP has published numerous materials that will help you pass both the Entrance and Tasting exams.

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Fruit Beers - Minimizing Loss

Today's write-up today is about minimizing loss on heavily fruited beers.

Well done fruit beers are some of my favorites, especially when using a sour beer as the base beer. That said, they can be a complete pain to deal with. I like my fruit beers to be very fruit forward, modeling them after my favorite commercial sours from breweries such as Casey Brewing and Bruery Terreux. To do this, I often use two or more pounds of fruit per gallon of beer. These high fruiting rates can be a pain when it comes time to transfer for packaging. The problem is fruit begins to break down during the aging process; even if you start out with large chunks of fruit, you eventually get a mess of fruity sludge in your aging vessel. This usually isn't as big of a concern if you use pureed fruit, but I prefer the character derived from whole unpasteurized fruit, so that's what I usually use in my fruit beers.  

In my experience, even if you cold crash, the fruit rarely settles out completely or very compactly. When it comes time to transfer, all the little fruit bits can clog your racking cane causing you to lose siphon. If you pressure transfer, (my preferred method) there's a really good chance your keg posts will get clogged with fruit bits.  I recently ran into this issue with my Sour Dubbel on plums. I'd estimate I lost 1.5 to 2-ish gallons out of about 13 gallons because the fruit sludge kept clogging the pickup tube on my Kegmenter. 

After that frustrating experience, I remembered reading about Scott Jannish's method for dry hopping loose in a keg and thought it might work well for fruit beers.

I tried this method out recently with the first 10-ish gallon pull (it was probably closer to 12 gallons) off a sour solera that went on 21 pounds of raspberries and it worked amazingly well. I used it in my 15 gallon Kegmenter, but as long as you have enough volume for the fruit, it should work for any size keg. My setup consist of:

• Kegmentermenter fitted with a straight 22" pickup tube
• Auto-siphon filter from Utah Biodiesel
• #6 drilled stopper

I set it up the same as Scott Jannish describes in his write-up here; stopper goes in the top of the filter then the diptube is inserted into the drilled stopper. This is really easy on a Kegmenter since the gas and liquid posts are installed in the removable tri-clamp lid. 

When it's time to transfer off the fruit, I pressure transfer to a serving keg and the filter keeps the fruit pulp from clogging the pickup tube. It's important not to rush things so as to give the beer time to drain out of the fruit mass; I only used about 5 PSI to transfer. 

As the Kegmenter empties, you'll get to a point where you'll start pushing CO2 through the line. When/if this happens, stop the transfer and let the Kegmenter sit for a while so that more of the beer can drain out of the fruit. Repeat this a few times and you'll find you'll have minimal losses. In my case, I stopped twice after pushing CO2, and let it sit for 30 minutes each time. The first time, I probably pulled out about 20 oz. The second time, it was probably closer to 12oz. After dumping the fruit, I'd be surprised if there was more than 8oz of "beer" left trapped in the fruit, so this process was much more efficient compared to the several gallons I lost with the plums.

Bonus content: Another thing that I used for the first time is a spunding valve to help regulate the pressure in the keg as the mixed cultures were working their way through the fruit sugars. The Sour Dubbel on Plums had so much fruit and a very active secondary, so much so that bits of fruit were clogging the PRV when trying to vent pressure. The spunding valve works much better than the built-in PRV because it's able to bleed off excess pressure in a very controlled and constant manner. In the case of the raspberries, I didn't have any fruit push up into the spunding valve due to sudden venting. One thing to keep in mind, the spunding valve's PRV is not a super precise piece of equipment, I mean it's less than $15. You can expect to see occasional fluctuations of a couple PSI, so nothing too extreme. That said, it's still a good idea to check the pressure daily to make sure there aren't any pressure spikes.

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American Lager 2021

Today I'm brewing 10 gallons of my easy drinking American Lager base. Just a couple minor tweaks this go around; single infusion mash, 2-row instead of 6-row, and no late hop addition. No late hop addition because some buddies and I are going to do some experiments with hop extracts in this batch. Also, I'm splitting the batch and fermenting with two different lager yeasts.

10 gallon recipe

15.12# Root Shoot Pilsner
0.5# Briess Crystal 10L
1.0# Rice Syrup Solids (5 min)
1.0# Corn Sugar (5 min)
2.0g BrewTan B (dissolved in warm water, mash)
3.0ml Hopshot (60 min)

Wyeast Nutrient
9.32g BCAA (Dissolved in warm water, 5 min)
1 Whirlfloc
Saflager 34/70
Imperial L09 Que Bueno

Single infusion mash at 151F. 90 minute boil.

Fermentation:

• 34/70 half - Start at 52F, ramp up to 54F over 2 days.
• L09 half - Start at 46F, ramp up to 50F over 4 days.

Water Profile to RO or Distilled Water add:
0.38g/gal Gypsum
0.32g/gal Epsom Salts

0.49g/gal Calcium Chloride

Brewing Notes

No issues during this session. OG came out to 1.054, so a little higher than I was shooting for. I had a little higher boil-off rate than normal so this is likely the reason for the higher gravity. 

Update 6/16/2021

I started cold crashing tonight.

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Weldwerks Achromatic Stout

Friday evening brew session! Today I'm brewing an Imperial Stout based on Weldwerks' Achromatic recipe. I was planning on brewing this beer back on Big Brew Day, but we ended up working on finishing up some yard projects...but I digress.

A few buddies and I recently traveled to Colorado to drop off entries for the AHA's National Homebrew Competition. Long story short, I talked them into a 500+ mile road trip to hand deliver competition entries, after which we'd visit a few tasting rooms; it really didn't take a lot of convincing. I was a little worried because we were set to arrive in Louisville, CO on the last day for drop-offs; if we ran into unexpected traffic, got a flat tire, whatever, we risked missing the 4:30pm deadline. 

We ended up leaving my house a little before 6AM, made incredible time, and arrived at the drop-off location at 1pm. Turns out that a car full of dudes needs fewer bathroom stops compared to family road trips. 

I'd also arranged to pick up a sack of Root Shoot Pilsner Malt, but that wasn't supposed to happen until closer to 4pm, so we had no other choice than to grab a bite to eat while visiting some tap rooms. On Friday we went to Odd13, Left Hand, Purpose, and Maxline. On Saturday, we hit Odell, Wiley Roots, and Weldwerks. It was a great trip especially after a year of COVID isolation.

As you can probably guess, I got to try some of Weldwerks Achromatic Stouts (which were amazing...especially the Coconut Achromatic) and after realizing I hadn't brewed an Imperial Stout for some time, I decided to brew this one one today. This recipe is based on the one published in Beer & Brewing which comes directly from Weldwerks head brewer, Neil Fisher. I've adjusted the grain amounts to account for my system efficiency and what was available locally. 

Here's the recipe as I'm brewing it today. I was planning on brewing this as a 5 gallon batch, then decided to scale it up to 10. The original recipe called for WLP001/A07, but I decided to do a split batch with half going on A07 and the other half on A01. Deviating from the published recipe, I'm cold steeping the dark malts; this can help ensure a smooth roast character in the finished beer rather than a harsher acrid roast character.

10 gallon batch

OG: 1.105

FG: 1.030

IBUs: 45

ABV 10%

27.25# Mecca Grade Lamonta

1.75# Simpsons Chocolate Malt (*cold steeped)

1.75# Weyermanns Chocolate Rye Malt (*cold steeped)

1.75# Crisp Pale Chocolate Malt (*cold steeped)

1.75# Simpsons DRC

1.375# Simpsons Light Crystal

1.375# Flaked Oats

0.375# Simpsons Roasted Barley (*cold steeped)

Imperial A07 Flagship (5 gallons)

Imperial A01 House (5 gallons)

84g Magnum (FWH)

Yeast Nutrient

Mash at 153F, collect ~12.33 gallons pre-boil volume (assuming boil-off rate of ~1.16 gallons/hour), 120 minute boil. Start fermentation at 60F, ramping up to 65F over 5 days.

Note: This recipe is based on the Chocolate Achromatic Stout, but I'm considering doing a Coconut variant. For the Chocolate version (5 gallons), add 8oz of roasted cacao nibs and one vanilla bean after fermentation is complete. Leave cacao in for 1-3 days (taste daily) and remove when desired character is achieved. Leave the vanilla bean in for 2-3 weeks then transfer for packaging.

Brewing Notes

No issues. The gravity came in right between 1.101 and 1.102, so only a couple points short of target. Mash pH started out about 5.4 and I used about 4.5ml of phosphoric acid to drop it closer to 5.2. I ended up with about 4.75 gallons in each fermenter. I aerated for 2 minutes at 0.5l/m before pitching yeast. If I'm not seeing active signs of fermentation in the morning, I'll probably hit it with another dose of oxygen. The wort tasted amazing. 

Update 5/15/2021 7:50AM

Both fermenters are showing active signs of fermentation with a glug about once every 5-14 seconds, so I'm going to skip additional oxygen this morning.

Update 5/16/2021 1:45PM

Fermentation seems to be rolling right along. The A01 half was actually blowing yeast off this morning.

Update 5/17/2021 10:00AM

As of this morning, I've had to dump my blowoff reservoir three times on the A01 half due to a very active fermentation. I actually held off on ramping up the temperature because it was so active, but I'm ramping up to 63F today on both fermenters.

Update 6/7/2021

I kegged both versions a little over a week ago. There are definitely noticeable differences between the two. The A01 House is a little smoother with a rounder roast character. The A07 Flagship definitely accentuates the roast character more. I didn't expect the yeast to have any impact on the roast, so this was interesting. Both versions have some residual sweetness, but neither is cloying. I decided to dose the A01 half with chocolate and Tahitian vanilla beans (2) and I ended up doing it as a tincture since I've had really good results in my Golden Milk Stout with tinctures.

Update 11/21/2021

I entered both the Cacao/Vanilla and TX Bourbon versions in a local comp (Utah Brew Fest Homebrew Competition). The TX Bourbon version took a silver medal for American Imperial Stout and the Cacao/Vanilla version took Bronze for Spice, Herb, Vegetable Beer.

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