Irish Red Ale OR just an Celtic/Irish Ale – All Grain Recipe 5 Gallons

Posted on April 6, 2014 by ray kodiak

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5 gallon batch:

If you want a classic Irish Red, don’t use the Special B, replace with CaraRed 20. If your local brew store don’t carry CaraRed, look at a substitution chart for grains:

http://bsghandcraft.com/resources/malt_cross_reference_chart

Standard 60 minute mash (we use batch sparge).

OG – 1.058 – Brew Date: 04/12/2014
FG – 1.018 – Racking Date: 04/17/2014

ABV 5.25%

Golden Promise – 7 lb
Munich Malt – 3 lb
Special B – 8 oz – For Red Ale look (switch this to CaraRed 20 or use a substitute chart above)
Crystal 120 – 6 oz
Roasted Barley – 4 oz

Hops:

Once you achieve a rolling boil, set timer.

At 45 minuted add 1.5 ounce of Fuggle Hops
At 55 minutes add 1 ounce of East Kent Goldings & some Irish Moss

Yeast:

Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale Yeast – starter was prepared ahead of brew date.

65 ~ 68 F fermentation temperature.

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Golden Ale All Grain Recipe

Posted on January 25, 2014 by ray kodiak

golder_ale_kodiakbrewing

A quick and short post, recipe only.

Total volume of brew water used 8.5 gallons in this recipe, we used batch-sparge with 2 phases.

OG – 1.058 – Brew Date: 01/26/2014
FG – 1.014 – Racking Date: 02/01/2014

ABV 5.78%

This is for 5 gallons..

Cara Pils – 0.5 lb
Crystal 20 – 0.5 lb
Golden Promise – 7 lb
Munich Malt – 3 lb

Hops:

Once you achieve a rolling boil, set timer.

At 30 minuted add 1 ounce of Cascase Hops
At 45 minutes add 1 ounce of Willamette Hops
At 55 minutes add 1 ounce of Willamette Hops & some Irish Moss

At 65 minutes stop boil, reduce heat through cooling to a safe 70 ~ 75 F.

We used American Ale #1272 Wyeast.

Notes:

About the “Golden Malt” – An early-maturing spring barley, it is the Scottish equivalent of Maris Otter. Though brewers north of the English border claim that its sweet, clean flavor is superior to Maris Otter. Golden Promise malt has a depth of flavor that makes it the ideal base malt for both UK and USA-style IPAs. Golden Promise is also used extensively by premium whisky distilleries such as The Macallan.

This is a test pour out of the conditioning tank 3 weeks after racking, already looks nice and clear on its own.

golden_ale_test_pour_condition_week3

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How To Transfer beer between 2 Kegs

Posted on January 11, 2014 by ray kodiak

How To Transfer beer between 2 Kegs, video link below:

Tip: Using the Out for both Kegs, prevents beer foaming into the incoming keg as the beer fills in slowly from the bottom of the keg.

If you connect into the incoming Keg using the In – that will cause beer splashing and foaming inside the Keg.

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5 Tips to a New Home Brewer!

Posted on December 24, 2013 by ray kodiak

Tip #1 – It’s all about Kegs Man! (but don’t abandon bottling) to build-up your cellar reserves.  All brewers will quickly realize that it takes quite a bit of time to do a brew session (all day) and later even more planning needed to bottle, (cleaning, sanitizing, actual bottling time), space for all the bottles – so most people quickly switch to kegging their beer.  You can literally keg an entire 5 gallon batch in 5-10 minutes and be done with it.  But you also sooner or later realize that there are benefits to bottling, (you can give to friends, co-workers [check your local laws for giving out beer to people]), you can cellar beers for years like wine (not all beer styles apply) and create your very own private reserve label.

Buy bottles that can be cleaned and re-used, like the Grolsch-style swing-cap bottles, or just re-cap a regular beer of your choice.

Tip #2 – Don’t underestimate your brew batch size!  Most home brewers do 5 gallon batches and that is all fine and dandy, but soon your realize after all that hard work and time endured, that 5 gallons don’t last long especially when some friends come over for a party.

We usually here unless the batch is experimental, do by default 10 gallon batches, we split the 10 gallon into a 5 gallon Keg, 2.5 gallon Keg and the rest we bottle for friends and add to our aging cellar with a label imprinted and a date.

With each good confirmed batch, I bottle and put away a few bottles or maybe even a batch for long term storage.  I usually do this with higher gravity beers, because those keep well better over time like wine.  The higher alcohol percentage protects the beer from bacterial infection and overtime the chemicals interactions change the beer for the better.

Tip #3 – Age most beer styles correctly before giving it out for consumption!

Some Belgian styles need to age for 6 to 12 months! Some beers are good after about 2 months!  I did tests by opening a beer bottle at 1 month, 2 and 3 and trust me the 3 month old bottle was substantially better than the 1 month old bottle.

Even if you use the best, award-winning recipe that was repeatedly brewed for 1,000 years! – If you don’t wait and age it correctly before giving it out, people will think sub-par thoughts about your beer and your brewing skills.  Make sure to say when the beer is under-aged if you must give it out, so that people are aware.

Tip: Some aging time can be cut by filtering the beer, but there are pros and cons.

Yes there are some beers that don’t age well for longer periods of time, usually these are beers that use a lot of hops, like IPAs.  Use brown Bottles and try to cellar where temperatures are stable and there is no to little light.  Light overtime will give beer a skunky smell, so unless you brewed a hemp beer, you probably don’t want any skunk in it.

Tip #4 – Not everyone wants to join a brew club for a variety of reasons, maybe you are not that social of a person or don’t want to deal with the politics at brew clubs, fees, etc… etc.. etc.  There is plenty of good brew forums, blogs and communities for beer discussion (Google+ has many great beer communities and they are all free, just join), and watch your skills get better much faster and sooner than if you brewed alone for the next 20 years, trust me – communities have a lot of experienced brewers of all kinds that will quickly answer your questions, and point you in the right direction – saving you lots of time and money $.

Tip #5 – if you have a friend who brews, don’t be shy and ask them for help, they probably already have developed relationships with other brewers and you could get a hookup and deals on used equipment or new equipment and overall a lot of helpful tips!

Whatever you end up doing, please take extra time to think things through, SAFETY is #1.

Happy Holidays 2014!

 

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Brown Ale – All Grain Recipe

Posted on December 13, 2013 by ray kodiak

2015 brew: this year we brewed it again but we decided to split the batch in half and treat one with American Oak chips.  The beer came out fantastic with a smooth velvet clean taste, the oak came through slightly in the background – only in secondary for 3 weeks as we didn’t want an overwhelming oak profile.

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If you want a lighter Brown color, ease back on the chocolate malt.

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we also did a version treated with American Oak chips – it turn the beer velvet smooth and delicious.

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Our Recipe is based on Ellie’s Brown Ale…  We post it as is for now and then update it later with our tweaks.

Credit Link – http://averybrewing.com/brewery/recipes-for-homebrewers/

( they have others posted as well and were kind enough to share them with the public, beautiful! )

Anytime we try a new recipe that we have never brewed before, we try to look-up and use some award-winning recipe first, so that the effort is not wasted and we end up with good beer and we will consider tweaking it here and there or changing things up and down.

Also keep in mind that your local brew supply store might not have the exact grains called for in a recipe, so just adjust to the closest grain available that they have, if not sure, just ask for help, usually brew stores have knowledgeable staff.

Also, ask your self what you like in whatever style of beer you want to brew, in a Brown Ale, do you like it a darker tone of brown for the color, spices or no spices ?

OG – 1.054 – Brew Date: 01/12/2014
FG – 1.014 – Racking Date: 01/19/2014

ABV 5.25%

Hops in this recipe are rated using AAU’s, it stands for (Alpha Acid Unit), the math is to divide whatever AAU you need by the acid level printed on the label of your hops (per 1 ounce).  For example: Norther Brewer 8.6%.  So 7 AAU’s of Norther Brewer is 7 / 8.6 = 0.81 ounces of Northern Brewer (so you will need a scale), you should be fine if you round-off, but then you lose exactness of the formula, you can easily transfer the formula into Excel or some other open-source software and keep track of it there or your favorite brewing software.

Start with a base weight of say 10/11 LB for each 5 gallons or use your brewing software to tune it in more exact, [if you are ODD or just like details] and then divide/multiply the weight by the percentage needed (use basic math).

Example of a quick Excel sheet to compute totals:

quick_excel_sheet

Grains:

Pale 2-Row – 80.5%
Munich – 6.4%
C-120 – 4.2%
Honey Malt – 2.3%
Chocolate – 6.6%

Hops:

60 min – Bullion (7.6% AA) – 0.13oz
30 min – Sterling (5.1% AA) – 0.32oz
0 min – Sterling (5.1% AA) – 1.01 oz

Use your house strain for yeast, original recipe used California, but we plan to use English.

Fermentation temp – 68F (from our experience if you are not spot on, you will still get good beer, as long as you stay within an acceptable temperature range).

Happy brewing!

 

 

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Kodiak’s British ESB Pumpkin Porter

Posted on November 16, 2013 by ray kodiak

2014 Rapsberry Porter Version below (the beer was only 3 weeks old, looked great and tasted great!)

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2013 Pumpkin Porter Version below:

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A 5 gallon batch recipe for a nice Pumpkin Porter, based on the recipe of a Edmund Fitzgerald porter clone with our tweaks.  We wanted to give it a British theme, so that’s the pale malt we used, but any pale malt suitable for use in porters or stouts should work well.

In addition we are providing you a link to a very good article on the subject of porters in general, a recommended read – by Brew Magazine:

http://byo.com/porter/item/1260-practical-porter

Grain:

  • 8 lb Pale Malt – we used (British pale malt)
  • 3/4 lb Crystal 60 L Malt
  • 1/2 lb Chocolate Malt
  • 3/4 lb Roasted barley Malt

Hops:

Hops are rated using AAU’s in this recipe, it stands for Alpha Acid Unit, the math is to divide whatever AAU you need by the acid level printed on the label of your hops (per 1 ounce).  For example our hops were: Norther Brewer 8.6%, Cascade 6.7% and Fuggle at 5.3%.  So 7 AAU’s of Norther Brewer is 7 / 8.6 = 0.81 ounces of Northern Brewer (so you will need a scale), you should be fine if you round-off, but then you loose exactness of the formula.

  • 7 AAU’s or 0.81 ounce /  Northern Brewer @ 0 minutes (from start of boil)
  • 4 AAU’s or 0.75 ounce /  Fuggles @ 30 minutes
  • 8 AAU’s or 1.19 oz / Cascade @ 60 minutes

Pumpkin:

Add in at last 10 minutes of rolling boil, if you want more pumpkin flavor try adding at last 5 minutes or at end of boil.

A good chunk of either fresh or frozen organic sugar pumpkin is the best, you can substitute for canned pumpkin that you can buy in the store, but………  If you have a little property, try growing some sugar pumpkins, those are the best – or buy them from your local farm and prepare your own pumpkin meat.

In our recipe we used a 2.2 lb chunk of a earlier prepared frozen pumpkin meat!  Article on how to do that here: https://kodiakbrewing.com/wordpress/?p=1364

Spices:

What about the spices that typically go along into a regular pumpkin ale ?  We didn’t use it in our recipe, but you are more than welcome to try if you want :- )

Mash:

We did the standard mash at 152 F for 60 minutes using the batch sparge method.

video of mashing phase:

video of mash out:

Yeast:

We used – WYEAST London ESB #1968, use your house strain if it is suitable for a Porter.

Fermentation:

A recommended temperature is about 65 F – but there exists various different techniques, so do some research if you want to know more.

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Preparing your own pumpkin for beer brew day

Posted on September 29, 2013 by ray kodiak

pumpkin_1 pumpkin_2 pumpkin_3

Each pumpkin will give you lots and lots of seeds, more than you will ever need.

pumpkin_seeds

Pumpkin Ale – is a special type of beer, highly in demand, for the good stuff!

The best fastest way is to buy canned pumpkin and then use that in the beer recipe to brew your beer to learn, but if you want to do it the right way, the proper way is to use fresh pumpkin and then baking it to get the pumpkin meat prepared for the brewing session.

Nothing beats a fresh 100% organic pumpkin grown in your back yard and it is fairly easy to do as well!

There are many web sites that will give you a good idea of how to prepare the pumpkin and then how to bake it in the oven, here are the steps:

  1. clean the pumpkin well with warm water
  2. cut the pumpkin in half and remove all the seeds in the middle with a sharp good knife
  3. save the seeds for next year, each pumpkin will give you many of seeds
  4. add some water into a bake dish 1/4 ” and place pumpkin there, cut face down
  5. bake in oven at 350 F for about 40 – 45 minutes until soft, like a potato (poke check)
  6. remove and let cool down
  7. peel the outer skin, cut into chunks, place into plastic bags (suck out oxygen) and freeze

some more pictures (after baking is over):

pumpkin_baked

pumpkin_bag

Let the bag cool before putting into freezer!

Cheers!

 

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Beer Hops growing from start to finish, with pictures…

Posted on September 21, 2013 by ray kodiak

This short post shows with lots of pictures the progression of growing a hop plant, harvesting hops and drying them out.

Remember!!! – Hops are deadly to Dogs, so keep them away from your pets at all times, through all phases of dealing with them once you pick them off the plants, and even while on plants, isolate them with some fencing, just to be on the safe side.

Also, you probably won’t get much if any hops the first year after planting from root, the first year is all about the plant establishing it self (this is normal).  If you plant a hop plant from a plant (not a root) early enough in the season, you might get some hops the first year.

Hops peaking out from a fresh root.

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Hops growing up and climbing the trellis (made from cow fencing) on it’s side.

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Hop plants climbing the top of the trellis and transitioning to a grow rope.

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Hops are starting to flower, buds are visible.

hops_starting_to_flower

Buds are almost mature and ready for Harvest.

hops_on_plant

Dried hops after harvest.

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Bottom of the dry box, loose yellow lupulin clearly visible.

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For more information on Hops see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hops

Also, this is a really good resource with lots of details and identifying pictures to help you id which hops you might have, if you don’t know:

http://www.usahops.org/userfiles/file/HGA%20BCI%20Reports/HGA%20Variety%20Manual%20-%20English%20%28updated%20March%202011%29.pdf

Thanks for reading and Cheers!

 

 

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Howto convert a beer keg into a Fermentor, 15.5 gallons

Posted on August 22, 2013 by ray kodiak

If you have an extra standard beer keg, with a little effort, you can turn it into a 15.5 gallon stainless steel fermentor.  In this video I show you how I did it.  Benefits are the adoption of something existing that you have with little extra cost, versus buying expensive kits that sell for a few hundreds of dollars $$$

Not to say that there is anything wrong with them, they are in fact very nice kits, you just end up saving some money.

The beer won’t know any different, it will come out the same…

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Portable Home Beer Brew Pump March/Chugger ON/OFF switch with GFIC protection

Posted on August 10, 2013 by ray kodiak

Tips:

1) make sure that the pump you get does not have a one-way-rubber-valve installed on the inside of the output plumbing… this will put a resistance on the output and reduce your flow considerably… by more than half!!!

2) air trapped in your output tubing will also severely impede the output rate especially when it is longer (which we like to use, gives you flexibility), its best after connecting the wort/water input into the pump, by putting the your output hose flat on the ground  // below your input – turn the pump on and this will force easily all the water out mixed with the air bubbles ( you will be amazed how much better, even a small pump will work ), like the one in this tutorial – very good flow and almost no noise… a 1/2 gallon growler fills in under 10 seconds.

3) as you are heating up your strike water – have some of that hot water run through your pump system to clean it out, so try to account for that by adding this extra water for your total water needed (mash + sparge) // use a online calculator to help your self out!  Google it 🙂

4) you can control the speed of the pump with the ball value on your kettle (start at a lower speed when you re-circulate to clear up the beer after mashing…).  Increase the speed when you are transferring beer for bigger batches like 10+ gallons…

Main video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu71HXeITMg

Main Article:

With a pump system you can do:

  1. use it to re-circulate the wort after mashing to clear up the beerPreview Changes
  2. use it to transfer larger brews of 10 gallons+ // no need to move or lift heavy brew kettles full of hot liquids and a gravity based system is no longer required…

You are looking at a portable GFIC protected march pump connected to ON/OFF switch – with extra GFIC outlets, nice to have for future needs.

Adjust all of your ideas from reading any articles on our blog to your own situation and need, you don’t need to make it exactly the same as we did  😉

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The first thing you need to learn about is the basics of available pump types, the 2 major ones that are used to transfer beer are March pumps and Chugger pumps.  You want to buy a pump that is rated fitting for transfer of hot liquids and food grade safe.

Here we like to use March pumps because these are made in the US and we like to support made in the u.s.a. (whenever we can), so that is always #1 on our list, stay away from cheap chugger pumps made in china on ebay, not to say that there are not any quality chugger pumps out there… [ you get what you pay for ], but do your research.

Most pumps are rated for standard household 115Volts, that is your standard electrical socket at home, we would recommend that you stick with that, only more powerful pumps would require 230 volts, for bigger breweries – not home a.k.a hobby brewery.

The pump will have its rating printed on its side label, including how many gallons per minute it is rated for and stuff like that… March pumps come in small to medium sizes and even bigger sizes, so you need to think about your current needs and future needs (think about both).

Here will will show you how we wired a medium sized march pump that we use for re-circulation and transfer (can be used for anything really), into a standard 115 volt household 3-prong socket.

If you are not familiar with the 3 prongs, here it is:

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Basically Ground is used when there is an electrical fault – so that the electricity can be safely moved into ground.  The black wire is the HOT wire that delivers the 115 volt 60 Hertz A/C current.  The white is a (neutral) wire, that is used to complete the circuit loop to make the electricity flow when you turn things ON/OFF.  Without a loop, the principles of how electric current works and flow would not work, there is also a loop in D/C current too, but that is outside of this article scope.

We decided to use a heavy duty ON/OFF switch connected to the pump in-line with a GFIC outlet, so that if we need to plug-in additional things in the future, we can.

The GFIC provides ground-fault interrupt protection, and it will flip its self off without affecting the main electrical box in your house when there is a ground-fault.  These usually are installed in bathrooms and kitchens, etc… for like hair dryers (fall into water), etc… since beer brewing involves water, better be safe than sorry!

I made a short video on how this kind of works and how we wired this…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un5gFHIg14I

If you have never worked with GFIC connections, please watch a few videos on youtube made by electricians that will make it clearer, but basically its like this:

Get a 3-prong PC power cable (an extra one that you have) and cut-off the end of the female end of this cable, not the part that plugs into the a/c outlet (male end), clearly you are going to need that….  strip the wires and wire that into the GFIC in-line…

Then Connect the ON/OFF switch to the load of the GFIC (again watch those videos), the load extends the protection beyond the GFIC 2 outlets into whatever is connected to it, in this case our ON/OFF switch is, so it extends the GFIC protection to the pump through the ON/OFF switch.

The trick is to now correctly wire the ON/OFF switch – watch our video, but basically you need to realize that an ON/OFF switch in an A/C circuit was designed to connect one wire, like the HOT wire and the circuit is cut off with the switch, you NEVER want to wire in both the HOT and NEUTRAL wires to both ends of the switch – as soon as you flip the switch, your circuit breaker in the electrical box will flip off, this means that you done this part incorrectly……

Most people wire their switches and outlets to their brew stands, into permanent connections, but you can also set this up into a portable system – as most home brewers brew out doors using make shift setups of all kinds… so this will allow you to take it anywhere, including your friends house or a brew club or where-ever and not have it tied down to only one place.

In addition, you can extend this design, and buy another pump, a more powerful one, and mount it above the one in the picture and add an addition A/B switch to the ON/OFF switch, when you need various pump types because of whatever need.

Below is a video of a test that we did once the pump wiring was done (used an old wood pallet to make the stand), yes there are some small drips, we left that in the video to again show you some of the things that you will need to check, we strongly recommend that you do a dry test, and identify all leaks and fix them and next do also a hot-water dry test, without any malt and make sure everything works at the temperatures that you will actually brew at….

Also you might want to now consider quick disconnects for the connections, also make sure to use tubbing that is food safe and was also made to withstand your working temperatures…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FyEgzU9Bbs

Have fun brewing!

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