What began as a state-owned brewery late in the life of the Soviet Union (on death’s doorstep as it turned out), has become the largest brewer in Russia, under the control of the Scandinavian group BBH. Other than making excellent beer, one of the things that make Baltika unique is that each of its products is described not so much by name, but by number. The lower the number, in general, the lower the alcohol content and the lighter the malt. I have not yet tasted every one of their products (starting with the non-alcoholic “0″ and ending with the dark, heavy “9″), but the ones I have had have been from average to excellent.

“6″ is a nice, malty Baltic Porter, lighter in alcohol content than the Polish brews from Okocim, Zywiec, and Witnica, but still on the heavy side as it should be. Great for cold weather (hey, it’s from Russia). “8″ is a yeasty hefeweizen that works well on summer night, probably brewed for the endless days of high summer in northern Russia, the “white nights.”

Baltika is headquartered in St. Petersburg, where the main brewery is also located. But they have acquired and built 3 other breweries throughout Russia. The country is immense so shipping distances have to be reduced to make a product affordable. It appears the newest brewery is in Khabarovsk in the far East.

If you’re looking for something different, this company’s beers are worth a shot. “Russian” and “beer” are not words commonly paired, but the company have done a good job of rectifying that. Anything they do from here on out will definitely be better than the Soviet brew they produced in their first year of production.

I’m sure someone has tried to drink all of the numbers in one night. That can’t have been a good idea. We recommend drinking by number… but slowly.

Za Vas!

One of the best things you can do to brew great beer from the very first batch, is to skip brewing in a single stage and go right to two stage brewing. What does that mean, exactly? Instead of brewing your beer all in the same fermenter, part way through the process you move it over to another fermenter, leaving behind a thick layer of sediment in the first container. In practice it means you need little bit more equipment than you would for single stage brewing, but the payback is much clearer and tastier beer. We believe you should brew great beer to start with, not only because it tastes better, but because it’s more motivating when your final product is good. This is a good way to help insure that happens.

If you look at the kits we review, you’ll see that we specifically mention which of those kits can be used for two stage home brewing. In many cases you’re not really paying any more for a setup to do this than for a single stage setup. If you’re piecing a kit together yourself, then you really want a siphon pump (otherwise known as a siphon starter), and you need a second bucket with a lid (or carboy) to use as the secondary fermenter.

The process is not complicated. Part way through the fermentation process, you move the beer to the secondary fermenter, and let it go from there. When bottling you simply use the primary fermenter–we recommend a bucket–as the bottling bucket. That’s it!

What you get is clearer beer, with fewer particulates, and less sediment. It also helps prevent certain tastes that can form from the breaking down of spent yeast or other material left over from the brewing process.

Trader Joe’s–a discount imported and gourmet foods store in the United States–has been issuing a yearly Belgian style Vintage Ale for the last few years at Christmas time.  These are brewed in Quebec, Canada by Unibroue, who have an excellent reputation.  We’ll do a feature on them another time.  This particular Vintage Ale is in the Belgian Dubbel style and carries a 9% ABV punch.  I wasn’t sure what to expect at first, but this is really a top notch beer, and unmistakably Belgian.  Unibroue have done an excellent job.  And it’s cheap for what you get.  $4.99 lands you a nice Belgian style beer.

Because this is a good one, I suggest going right down to Trader Joe’s (if you can in your region) and picking up a bottle.  I don’t always appreciate people trying to review a beer and naming lots of fruits and spices they detect in the beer.  I’ll save you that.  I’ll describe it in terms of other beers and what you taste.  The smell is that of a European hefeweizen.  The taste is heavier than a hefeweizen, however, and you can definitely taste that it is packing a punch in the alcohol level.  Not overpoweringly, so.  There is definitely a wheaty taste but the beer is substantially darker brown, so the wheat content is low.  If you like Belgian beer and want a nice light tasting drink with a punch for a winter night, this is a good one.

I liked it.  I think this spring I may work up a recipe for a similar beer and give it a shot.

Edit: The more I look into this list, the more I find wrong with the whole thing.  California has nine breweries listed on this list but doesn’t even make the state by state summary.  This list clearly put together in haste and not done well.  The original is here.

Earlier this year the Brewers Association released a list of the top breweries in the country and a separate list of the top craft breweries.  Interestingly Widmer didn’t make the craft list (which is odd) but is listed on the overall list.  It was interesting to see Colorado and Oregon tied with 5 of the largest craft breweries in each state considering that Widmer should have been counted for Oregon.  The breakdown was as follows:

• Oregon: 5 (minus Widmer)
• Colorado: 5
• Pennsylvania:4
• Minnesota: 3
• New York:3
• Wisconsin: 3
• Illinois:2
• Massachusetts: 2
• Missouri: 2
• Vermont: 2
• Washington 2
• Alaska, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas: 1 each

There were no statistics about total volume from those producers, nor did they classify them by where there operations are actually located.  Pyramid, for example has a large brewery in Portland (formerly Portland Brewing).  Also, these were only the largest 50 craft beer producers.  By sheer number of total breweries, and thus the diversity of the beer produced, Portland is number one in the world.  But it looks like in the United States, Oregon is still in the very top tier of craft producers, even without some facilities being counted.  Hey, we’re proud to be here.

Happy Holidays from One Hour Brewing!

We’ll be taking a two day break to celebrate our own holidays with our families.  Hope you enjoy any holidays that you may be celebrating with your own families.

No fear, we’ll return on the 26th with more beers, breweries, and home brewing information.  In the meantime feel free to check out the last few posts, if you’re new to the site.

Cheers!

I answered this in brief format on WikiAnswers recently, but I’ll go into more detail here. If you follow the instructions in our guides you shouldn’t have this problem.

So what happens if you pitch the yeast and nothing happens?  There are several reasons this could happen:

1. The yeast was dead to begin with.
2. Something is wrong with the conditions for the yeast (temperature, infection, pollution, under-aeration, failure to rinse out sanitizer).
3. The yeast was under pitched and is growing so slowly you can’t tell.
4. You pitched the yeast when the wort was still too hot.

First lets assume you waited 36 hours before making this assessment.  You need to wait at least that long to be sure.  Maybe give it a few more hours in case the yeast is one of the slower varieties to get started or some condition slowed it down.

The best way to tell if the beer is fermenting is if bubbles are coming out of the airlock.  I’ve heard many experienced brewers say that this is a bad measure of whether things are working or not.  Not true.  If you have set your equipment up properly this is an excellent tool.  The chemical process forms carbon dioxide.  It will come out the top: it has to.  Be sure your seals are all nice and tight.  Check that first.

But, if you have a hydrometer, it’s still a good idea to take a reading at this point to see if the beer really is not fermenting.  Some people are militant about this, but frankly this is not a requirement.  Just be reasonably sure nothing is happening before you decide to do something about it.  No one had hydrometers for centuries of brewing.  Once you’ve determined that something really, truly went wrong, you have to decide what might be the cause.

The solution to numbers 1, 3, and 4 is to re-pitch the yeast as soon as it’s apparent that the yeast is not growing.  Use a good sized yeast pack like the ones from Wyeast.  You want to give your yeast as much of a head start over any possible infection as possible.  Yes this is another $6-8 but you could lose $15-30 worth of ingredients if you throw out the whole batch.  The beer still could end up ruined in the end, but it’s worth trying to save it.

The solution to number 2 is to correct any environmental problems (like temperature, aeration) and re-pitch the yeast only if really needed. If the problem is infection or pollution, however, the batch of beer is basically done for. You may not find this out until the re-pitched yeast also fails to grow.

Yeast storage problems are usually the cause of number 1. Be sure to keep liquid yeast packets refrigerated until hours before they are ready to be used.  Check yeast expiration dates carefully before purchase.

There are those tools you need to have to get a job done, and then there are those tools that make the job just that much easier.  This one is in the second category.  But it’s so nice to have that it’s worth talking about.  When you’re saving up used bottles to use for your next batch of beer (be they commercial bottles, or your own homebrew bottles), the best thing to do is to rinse the bottles out with water at the time you use them.  But you still have to wash them out before you can bottle.  That can be a fairly laborious process if the bottles weren’t cleaned thoroughly at the time the beer was drunk.  That’s where this tool comes in.  In both cases, with clean(ish) bottles and with fairly dirty bottles, you can blast all the sediment right out of the bottom of the bottle.  It’s probably fairly self-explanatory how you use it, but just in case, here’s how it works:

• Screw the bottle washer onto a laundry sink faucet or an outdoor spigot.  It will be inverted from the photo.
• Turn the water on full blast (none will come out).
• Slide the bottle over the brass end of the washer.
• Press the bottle down against the thin rod.  That opens the internal valve, and sprays a high pressure stream of water right at the bottom of the bottle.

This can be done very quickly for each bottle and really speeds up the washing process, even for clean bottles.  Definitely not a requirement for brewing, but a really simple add-on that’s worth having when you’ve decided you like brewing and want to brew more often.

I already covered some techniques for controlling the temperature of fermentation in your home brew.  Here are some additional ideas that you can use to your advantage:

• If you need to warm the ferment up a bit, you can wrap the fermenter (bucket/carboy) in a sleeping bag or old blanket you don’t care about, or a heavy cardboard box.  The internal heat generated by fermentation will be held in somewhat.
• If you have a basement or garage with a cold concrete floor, put the fermenter on that.
• Place the fermenter in a large plastic or steel tub filled with ice to cool it.

There are varying levels of practicality to these suggestions, but in combination with the techniques we discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 these can help you get your desired temperature range.

Good luck!

In Oxfordshire there is a brewery that has been operating for a small fraction of the time that Franziskaner has operated. On the scale of breweries in Europe this brewery is new, founded in 1849 in the Cotswolds region. While many of the older breweries have been heavily modernized, however, Hook Norton continues to brew in the same brew house with the same steam-powered equipment that has been used for over a century. This brewery is one of only a few dozen family owned and operated regional breweries in the UK.

The company brews a range of traditional cask aged English beers, what is now known as “real ale.”  They also produce bottled beers of similar quality.  If you’re interested in the history of this living piece of English brewing history, you ought to check out their website, which has a trove of historical information and a virtual brewery tour.

A lot of modern breweries got their start in a monastery many hundreds of years ago.  We owe monks an awful lot when it comes to drinking great beer.  They pioneered many of the techniques now taken for granted.  Not to mention the many strains of yeast they have cultivated and left for posterity.

Franziskaner is a beer that bears the name of a monastery, Franziskaner is German for Franciscan–meaning Franciscan monks, but the brewery actually grew up across the street from the monastery as an independent enterprise.  Or so the monks claim.  In any case there aren’t that many breweries older than this one.  Founded some time before 1363 when it was first officially documented, this brewery has given us nearly 700 years of great beer. If you can stay in business making the same type of product for 700 years, it’s going to be good.

The company produces what is called Weissbier, or “white beer” a reference to a long ago time when German beers were universally dark.  That’s certainly not true any more, but the name remains.  Weissbier has a high wheat content, and is made with top-fermenting ale yeast.  It’s generally light and smooth, and frequently cloudy.  Hefeweizen or “yeast white” is one of the most common varieties of this class of beer.  It is a huge class of beers, but Franziskaner is one of the leaders in this segment and produces several different types.  They’re all good.

Despite the fact that the brewery claims independence from the monastery they retain the name and the 1930’s era logo with the monk.  Classy old-time branding for one of the world’s oldest breweries.

Incidentally, in our recipes section we have a recipe that makes a pretty fair approximation of a Franziskaner Hefeweizen.