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#10 (499 lines):
Date: Monday, 20 December 1993 03:00 est
From: homebrew-request at HPFCMI.FC.HP.COM (Verify address before sending)
Subject: Homebrew Digest #1302 (December 20, 1993)
Reply-To: homebrew at HPFCMI.FC.HP.COM (CHANGE THIS IF NECESSARY)
To: homebrew at HPFCMI.FC.HP.COM
Errors-To: [email protected]
Precedence: bulk

HOMEBREW Digest #1302 Mon 20 December 1993


FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator


Contents:
Al again? (Barry Nisly)
yards & 1/2 yards ("Daniel K. Yee")
Re: Flat Dinosaurs, BJCP,etc. (Chuck Cox)
Samual Smith's quest (Bill A. Danforth)
raspberry flavoring (LLAPV)
Pike Place cask-conditioned ale ("when the cold winds blow, it'll ease your mind 17-Dec-1993 1611 -0500")
Re: #1(2) Homebrew Digest #12... (pblshr)
a holiday cider recipe... (Nick Cuccia)
crown-capping champagne bottles (Dick Dunn)
Re : Cheap do-it-yourself kegging system... (Conn Copas)
Brewery Geo/High Grav Brewing/Topping Up the 2ndary (John Eustace)
Receipe for Belgian White Beer (Celis White Clone) (yeebot)
Secondary in Stainless Probs (Phil Brushaber)
RE: Hydrometers and SG (Bill Szymczak)
White Plastic Homebrew Keg? (bcyr)


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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 12:44:55 PST
From: [email protected] (Barry Nisly)
Subject: Al again?

Regarding the recent (eternal?) discussion of aluminum stock pots,
I found this while leafing through the William's Brewing Catalog:

Stainless steel is neutral to acidity, which means it
will not react with the relatively acid wort. Aluminum,
on the other hand, will react with any acid food, be it
wort or tomato sauce, possibly contributing to off-
flavor development, particularly in lighter flavored
beers. Though aluminum is economical and usable in a
pinch, it should not be purchased for use in brewing.

FWIW. No affiliation - just a satisfied customer.
Now if I only had $160 for that 38 qt Vollrath...

Barry
[email protected]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 15:34:01 -0500
From: "Daniel K. Yee"
Subject: yards & 1/2 yards


Hi all,

I've been thinking of getting a yard or 1/2 yard beer glass (with stand)
for my brother as a birthday gift. What are the best deals out there?
Thanks in advance.

Dan "Sven" Yee



------------------------------

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 15:25:55 EST
From: [email protected] (Chuck Cox)
Subject: Re: Flat Dinosaurs, BJCP,etc.

Marc Hugentobler sez...
>
> I personally have some questions of the forum many of who seem to be
> certified beer judges. Is there any more information about The BJCP exam
> available besides the outline available by anonymous ftp? More sample
> questions and sample answers would be very helpful. I desperately want
> of qualify but find myself confounded by the amount of information.
> Personal Insights would also prove valuable. Thanks in advance!
>

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to plug JudgeNet...

- --------------------------- JudgeNet info ----------------------------

JudgeNet - the Beer Judge Digest is an Internet mailing list dedicated
to the discussion of issues of interest to beer judges and competition
organizers. Anyone with an interest in judging or organizing beer
competitions is welcome to join.

submissions: [email protected]

administrative requests: [email protected]

Please send subscription and unsubscription requests to the
administrative address.

- ----------------------------------------------------------------------

- --
Chuck Cox List Administrator
SynchroSystems / Riverside Garage & Brewery - Cambridge, Mass.

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 14:18:42 PST
From: [email protected] (Bill A. Danforth)
Subject: Samual Smith's quest

Hello all,

I am looking for recipes to make clones of two of Sam. Smith's brews.
I would like to brew a Winter Welcome clone and an _Old Brewery Pale Ale_
clone.

As I am currently on Paternity leave (a new boy), email to me would be the
most preferred way to send me the recipes (cc to HBD would also be cool I
think).

Thank you very much in advance,
Bill Danforth


------------------------------

Date: Friday, 17 December 93 16:05:25 CST
From: [email protected]
Subject: raspberry flavoring

Howdy,

About a week ago I said that I had some hesitations about the fruit flavorings
available on the market for homebrews. Well, the raspberry wheat beer that
used the flavoring available from St. Patrick's of Texas was entered in the
Hill Country Brew-Ha-Ha last month, & I recieved my results yesterday. It
actually had very good scores & comments, with positive notes about the
raspberry note of the beer. I guess my expectations were a little too high.

So I take back what I said.

Happy brewin',

Alan, Austin

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 16:17:56 EST
From: "when the cold winds blow, it'll ease your mind 17-Dec-1993 1611 -0500"
Subject: Pike Place cask-conditioned ale

For those of you who get Brewing Techniques, there was an article in the
last issue that featured cask-conditioned ales made by Pike Place Brewing
in Seattle.

I just happened to be out there on business this week. I called 'em up
and asked where they were served. I went down to the 74th Street Ale House
and sure enough, it was there - served much like the english style: hand
pump at about 50F or so. I enjoyed a few pints of this stuff - great brew,
but not quite as nice as the pub cask-conditioned ales served in England.
So far, it is the best I've had in the US that approximates the English
style c-c ale - perhaps more pubs will ask for this stuff!

In addition to that, they had 17 others on tap - this is something us
East coasters (at least me!) are not used to! Lots and lots of winter
ales, some very nice wheat brews by Hale Brewing (?), etc.

Great brews in the Seattle area - local brew was served all over the
place, even in the Red Lion hotel bar I stayed at.

JC ferguson


------------------------------

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 93 23:13:16 EST
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: #1(2) Homebrew Digest #12...

Re: The request for a GIF or PCX of Barney with tire tracks for your
"Barney's Flat Oatmeal Stout," America On Line has the file in its graphics
library, if you have access to that source.

If not, E-mail me, and I'll arrange for some kind of transfer.

Tom Finan (member, St. Louis Brews)

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1993 12:13:07 -0800
From: Nick Cuccia
Subject: a holiday cider recipe...

No, not a recipe for cider, but a recipe that uses cider...

Nick's White Sauce
- ------ ----- -----
2 cups chicken stock
2 Tbsp flour
1 lb butter
1/4 cup minced mushrooms
2 cups hard cider
1/2 lb minced shallots
1.5 Tb minced tarragon
Nutmeg

In a double boiler, melt 2 Tbsp of the butter. gradually mixing in flour until
well-blended. Gradually add chicken stock, stirring constantly, and place
mixture directly on burner on low heat. Stirring constantly, bring to a boil,
and continue stirring until sauce starts to thicken. Remove from burner,
add mushrooms, and simmer for about an hour, stirring occasionally.

While the first mixture is simmering, cut the remaining butter into 1T chunks.
Mix cider and shallots in a saucepan, bring to a boil, and reduce to a glaze.
Remove this pan from heat, and slowly add butter, one piece at a time. The
butter should not melt completely; the resulting mix should have the consis-
tency of a Bearnease. Add tarragon and set aside.

Take the original mixture and strain through a fine sieve into a bowl. Add
the shallot/butter mixture and a pinch of nutmeg, and season to taste.

This sauce is good on chicken, warm or cold veggies, or as a dipping sauce for
bread.

Enjoy!
- --Nick

------------------------------

Date: 19 Dec 93 00:46:36 MST (Sun)
From: [email protected] (Dick Dunn)
Subject: crown-capping champagne bottles

Regarding the question (sorry, lost the actual reference) on using
sparkling-wine bottles for beer: You can cap American bottles with
standard beer-bottle crown caps. American bottles are one size; European
bottles are a slightly larger size and won't work. If you're scrounging
bottles, you don't usually run across stray Champagne (*real*, as in the
particular region of France) bottles, but you're likely to find Spanish
bottles from inexpensive stuff like Freixenet or Cordoniu.

Specifically, you can *sometimes* manage to cap the European bottles. It
depends on the particular capper and caps you're using...you might succeed
99 times out of 100, or you might fail every other bottle. The failure
modes I've seen or heard of with European bottles are:
- Cap doesn't seat properly, bottle leaks.
- Capping breaks off a piece of the crown. The probability of the
broken-off piece of glass going into the bottle is equal to the
probability that the bread lands on the floor jelly-side-down.
- During capping, bottle and cap jam inside capper--leading to
dilemma of trying to free bottle without cracking it.

(Digression: Sparkling wine bottles are interesting to brewers because
they're about twice the capacity of a regular beer bottle, and because
they're designed to withstand a lot of pressure.)

Empirically, an American sparkling wine, and a beer bottle, seem to have a
27 mm crown. A European sparkling wine bottle seems to be 29 mm at the
maximum diameter. This is less than 10% difference, but with some practice
you can spot the wrong bottles quickly even if the labels are missing. If
the labels are still on, you should be able to get it right away...I've
never seen an American bottle of the "wrong" size nor a European bottle of
the "right" size. (I'd be glad to know of any counterexamples!) It appears
to be strictly national--the American arms of French Champagne houses use
American-gauge bottles. (Somebody can probably get a term paper out of
that fact!)

If you're scrounging lots of bottles, you can easily cut a notch in a block
of wood, plastic, etc, to slip over the crown and check the size...getting
2 mm precision isn't hard. Or if you've got a dial caliper (even a cheap
one) that will work.
---
Dick Dunn [email protected] -or- raven!rcd Boulder, Colorado USA
...Simpler is better.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 14:00:50 GMT
From: Conn Copas
Subject: Re : Cheap do-it-yourself kegging system...

Steven writes about using 2 Cornelius kegs, and no CO2 bottle, as a low-tech
means of kegging. My reaction? great to see such innovation. Dave Line actually
proposed storing the pressure from the _primary_ fermentation for later use,
which would overcome the need to prime with triple the normal
quantity. I presume that some commercial brewers must be salvaging their CO2.
The idea of using 2 kegs in harness illustrates a more general point:
that of the importance of having a relatively large headspace when attempting
to dispense using natural conditioning alone. So, in theory, if we had a
suitably large keg (say 15 galls), then we could probably dispense 5 galls of
brew without ever needing to re-pressurise. Even better if the keg was
collapsible, so that atmospheric pressure could maintain a near constant
serving pressure.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 11:51:03 EST
From: John Eustace <[email protected]>
Subject: Brewery Geo/High Grav Brewing/Topping Up the 2ndary

Hi All,
Thanks to all who responded to my question about pitching to 180 gals.

However, I didn't get any response to my query about brewery geometry. Again,
I'm interested in any information you might have of the effects kettle geo-
metry and fermenter geometry have on the brewing process, from hop utilization
to rate of fermentation. Even a list of sources to explore would be helpful.

I'd also be interested in more information on High Gravity Brewing. Dr. Fix's
article on Diacetyl production in BREWING TECHNIQUES sparked my interest. The
idea is to keep FAN levels up by brewing at optimal gravities (1.048) and then
diluting the result at bottling. I believe he mentioned this practice in ref-
erence to the British Brewing industry. My questions then, have to do with
when and how one does such a dilution. For instance, do I do this just before
bottling, or when I rack to the secondary? Will the dilution raise the pH of
the beer? And if so what effect will that rise have?

My final question has to do with topping up the secondary. I've been trying to
manage my boils and fermentations such that I have enough beer to fill the se-
condary, leaving less than an inch between the fermentation lock and the beer.
However, sometimes this doesn't quite work out, and I have to make a choice
as to whether or not I should add brewing water at this stage to top up the
carboy or leave the space in the carboy and hope the beer is still producing
enough CO2 to protect it from oxygen. What is the consensus on this? Is
topping up detrimental to the beer or is it at least less harmful than oxygen?

TIA and Cheers
JE

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 15:40:40 EST
From: [email protected]
Subject: Receipe for Belgian White Beer (Celis White Clone)

NOTE: PLEASE IGNORE IF ALREADY RECEIVED!!!

Good to see a fellow Hoegaarden lover out there!

I have a full mash recipe I copied off of AOL that was uploaded by Dr Who2959
(We miss you on AOL; how's GEnie?) who in turn captured it off of the SW
Campus of the Homebrew U. BBS Network. It was a conversation between Tony
Storz and Steve Daniel (who seems to know Pierre Celis!) that occured at the
end of September. I hope I didn't forget anyone/thing. Now for the recipe:

Steve writes:

I have talked to Pierre and came up with this recipe:

2.25# 2 row
2.25# 6 row
4# unmalted wheat (hard red)
4 grams orange peel
4 grams corriander
1 ounce Hallertau leaf hops

As you can see, there is a lot of unmalted wheat to convert, therefore
a full mash is needed to make something similar to the real thing. If
you are uable to do full mashes, try substituting 5 pounds of plain
light extract, and make a mash with 2 pounds each wheat and 6-row. This will
not be nearly as wheaty as the real thing, but that's life. Add
the crushed spices and all of the hops only 15 minutes before the end of the
boil. Stay away from honey and sugar! They are cheap, but not
worth tainting the flavor of your beer to save a few pennies.

What yeasts to use?

Slants of the Celis/Hoegaarden yeast are floating around the
homebrewer's community. I think there may be some in the Foam Ranger's Yeast
Library. I've heard that Wyeast has a sample of that strain, but
they haven't put it into production. If you can't find a white beer yeast or
are not ready to make a yeast starter from a slant, you might try the Wyeast
Bavarian Wheat Ale yeast.
This may be one of my crazier ideas, but I think it might get you closer
to Celis than using a regular ale yeast. The Wyeast Wheat Ale yeast haso
some Lactobacillus Delbrukii in it which would simulate the secondary
lactic fermentation that Pierre and company do. What do the rest of you
out there think?
P.S. I tried making a white beer yeast starter from some Steendonk
dregs, once. It didn't work.

He continues:
The secret is in the yeast, though. I'm guessing they said to use amylase
enzyme in the mash as a supplement. It's not needed in the full mash recipe,
but any more than 50% unmalted wheat will need it.


Now my caveats:
I haven't tried it yet, as I cannot do full mashes right now. I'm starting
small/cheap and currently have Papazian's Hoegaarden "clone" (with a few
minor variations) bubbling happily away in primary. I have also heard rumors
that a lactobacillus bacteria is needed to actually generate something that
can called a "clone". As I am VERY interested in someday brewing a true
Hoegaarden clone, I would like anybody else thoughts/ideas. Good luck. Keep
me informed, I'll tell you how the Pap Wit turns out!

Michael Yee/[email protected]
Angst Brewing Co.

"Just a glass of wine with dinner, ossifer."

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 17:01:44 CST
From: [email protected] (Phil Brushaber)
Subject: Secondary in Stainless Probs

I've had this problem before and I'm afraid like they used to
say in Poldegeist.... It's baaaaack!

I know that many of your secondary in stainless steel cornelius kegs.
I like to do this as it takes up less space in my lagering refigerator.
This summer I encountered this off-taste problem with a couple of
American Lager's I brewed, did the primary in glass and then the
secondary in stainless. The off-taste is hard to describe. At first
I thought it was astringency, but it is more like a yeasty, metallic
taste. The taste persists even after filtering through a .5 micron
filter. It has happened when I've secondaried in stainless (about
5 total batches) but never when I've secondaried in glass (about
2 batches).
Has anyone else had problems developing off-tastes in
secondary? Or, I suppose it might be the hops. Has anyone experienced
these kind of tastes when using 100% Cascade hops? I really would
appreciate your insight. I would rather not be crossing by fingers
with each batch.
Finally, In case I don't get another chance... A Merry
Christmas to all the brewers on HBD. Or as some homebrew wag once
suggested. "A Beery Christmas to all, and a Happy New Beer!"

- -----
Internet: [email protected]
UUCP: metronet.com!pro-storm!philb
Bitnet: philb%[email protected]


------------------------------

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 20:29:40 EST
From: bszymcz%[email protected] (Bill Szymczak)
Subject: RE: Hydrometers and SG

Brian Cole writes

>> This means that if a hydrometer has to cover a range of specific
>> gravities from 1.000 to 1.100 using a linear scale, there will be
>> a 10% error in the measurement from one end of the scale to
>> the other (due to the delta_SG**2 term).

and Ed Hitchcock responded:

>So, why don't they make homebrew hydrometers with a NON-LINEAR
>scale? Would that make too much sense?

I thought the same thing as Ed, and so I checked my hydrometer
and sure enough, the markings are non-linear, with shorter
distances between higher gravity levels. And this is the
no-frills hydrometer that came with my homebrew starter kit 2
1/2 years ago.

Bill Szymczak

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 23:17:34 -0800
From: bcyr%[email protected]
Subject: White Plastic Homebrew Keg?

Fellow Homebrewers,

I'm thinking of buying a white plastic 5 gallon keg, that I saw
in a local beverage store. The keg is designed for homebrewing
and has a small replacable CO2 cartridge that goes inside it.
Has anyone tried a homebrew keg similar to this with good
(or bad) luck?

Thanks in advance, Bryan
Lisbon, Maine

------------------------------


End of HOMEBREW Digest #1302, 12/20/93
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