Flanders Red 2021

Today I'm brewing up 10 gallons of base beer that will go into my 30 gallon Red Solera (Aging Barrel #04). I previously filled it with recipes based on the Rare Barrel's Red base, but this round it's closer to my original Flanders Red base. This means I'm also getting ready to do the first pull off the Solera, so this is replace the amount pulled off (plus a little extra for an occasional top off. Here's the recipe as I'm brewing it today:

6.5# Root Shoot Pilsner Malt
4.0# Best Malz Chit Malt
10.5# Avangard Vienna
2.00# Weyermann Munich II
1.0# Best Malz Spelt
1.0# Monastique Aromatic
1.0# Weyermann Caramunich III
1.0# Castle Special B
Yeast Nutrient
56g Aged hops (60 mins)
Inland Island Brett Barrel III

Mash at 158F, 90 minute boil, ferment at room temp.  

Water Profile
I don't go too crazy on my sour beer water profiles. For today, I used about a 50/50 blend of RO water and carbon-filtered tap water.  

Brewing Notes
No issues. Since this was a larger batch, I used my 20 gallon Blichmann Mash Tun. Starting mash temp was a little low at 152F, but I was able to raise it to the desired 158F fairly quickly. I ended up with a little under 10 gallons total.

Readings
Beginning mash pH	5.29
Ending mash pH	5.26
1st running gravity	25 (1.102)
Pre-boil gravity	16.2 (1.064)
Post-boil gravity	19 (1.076)

Update 9/25/2021

I'd grown up a super healthy pitch of the Brett Barrel III yeast and had a blow-off the morning after pitching. Fast forward to today and I'm swapping out the blow-off for an airlock. I haven't taken a gravity reading yet, but there's still an occasional glug out the airlock.

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NZ Pils 2021 with NZH-107

Today I'm brewing a variant of my New Zealand Pilsner. The primary difference this round is I'm trying out some new hops, NZH-107. As stated on the BSG website:

NZH-107 is a proprietary experimental hop blend developed jointly between New Zealand Hops, Ltd. and Brewers Supply Group and showcases intense tropical fruit and citrus character.
Sensory:
Intense tropical fruit (guava/passion fruit) and citrus (grapefruit/lime) aroma characteristics.
Brewing Application:
NZH-107 is an excellent hop solution for many applications from first kettle to dry hop additions. Given the big character of NZH-107, early trials are focused on intensely hop-forward styles like IPAs, pale ales, and dry-hopped pale lagers.

I figured my hop-forward NZ Pils would be a good candidate to showcase this hop blend. I'm also dialing the amount of hops back a bit; just an experiment.

Here's the recipe as I'm brewing it today:

6.75# Root Shoot Pilsner Malt

0.75# Avangard Pale Malt

0.3125# Weyermann Cara Red

0.25# Weyermann Pale Wheat Malt

1.0g BrewTan B

3ml Hopshot (60 min)

4.66g BCAA

35g NZH-107 (1 min)

2g Loral Cryohops (1 min)

63g NZH-107 (Whirlpool @170F)

4g Loral Cryohops (Whirlpool @170F)

(2) Saflager S-189

Whirlfloc

Yeast Nutrient

56g NZH-107 (Dry-hop

7g Loral Cryohops (Dry-hop)

Mash at 150F, 90 minute boil, start fermentation at 47F then ramp up to 52F over a few days.

Water Profile - To 10 gallons of distilled water, add:

4.0g Gypsum

2.8g Epsom Salt

4.8g Calcium Chloride

Brewing Notes

Usually I set up my brew system the night before. I didn't do that this time, so I'm a little later starting my brew day than normal. 

No real issues during this brew session. I didn’t have quite as much boil-off so the gravity is a little lower than normal. I chilled down to 72F and decided to use the ferm chamber to finish the chilling. I’ll pitch once it’s chilled to 47F.

Readings
Beginning mash pH	5.20
Ending mash pH	5.33
1st running gravity	13.2 (1.052)
Pre-boil gravity	8.6 (1.033)
Post-boil gravity	11.1 (1.043)

Update 9/12/2021

I left this batch to cool overnight. Wort was aerated and yeast pitched this morning.

Update 9/13/2021

Slight gravity change and an occasional glug this morning.

Update 9/14/2021

Gravity is down to 1.036 this morning, so fermentation is moving right along.

Update 9/16/2021

Gravity is down to about 1.020 this morning. I'll probably start ramping up the temp tonight for a diacetyl rest.

Update 9/18/2021

Gravity is reading 1.006 this morning. Dry hops added.

Update 9/25/2021

I swapped out the blow-off for my CO2 reservoir and started cold crashing this morning.

Update 10/5/2021

I kegged this beer tonight.

Update 10/13/2021

I haven't put this beer on tap yet, but I forced carbed it in one of the fermentation chambers. I pulled a sample using a picnic tap and there's some really nice hop flavor and aroma. I'm kind of thinking I'll be fine dialing the hop rates back so that I'm not wasting hops on this style.

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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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