Having just been on the topic of bottling, this seems like a good time to address the age old question about which base to use for priming your bottles, corn sugar, or dry malt extract?  There are, of course, other sugars that people use for this purpose, including molasses, table sugar, brown sugar, priming drops from various manufacturers, and a whole lot more.  But the two main staples are the two in the title of this post: corn sugar and dry malt extract (DME).  To understand which is better for your purpose, you need to understand what you’re doing when priming.

Bottled conditioned beers are carbonated by the gas produced by a final stage of fermentation.  The yeast is given some sugar to eat, it produces carbon dioxide, and the close confines of the bottle force the carbon dioxide into suspension in the liquid since there is nowhere else for it to go.  We’re not trying to change the taste of the beer here, nor produce more alcohol (though a little is formed).  The chief concern is getting the yeast to efficiently generate carbon-dioxide, while not affecting the high quality of our beer.

So lets analyze corn sugar and dry malt extract for that purpose alone, initially.  Corn sugar is made of simple sugar, all of which is fermentable.  There is nothing in corn sugar that will produce additional sediment beyond the yeast cells that will form no matter what sugar you prime with.  Corn sugar is easily and very efficiently consumed by the yeast to produce carbonation quickly and reliably in all bottles.

Dry malt extract on the other hand is made of several sugars, some of which are not easily fermented (or at all in some cases) and will take longer to produce carbonation.  It also costs significantly more than corn sugar, which is quite inexpensive by contrast.  DME will leave some leftovers in the bottle.  Some people claim these help with head retention in the resulting beer, but in our experience this is not noticeable.  On the other hand, in some cases a krauzen forms in the bottle when bottling with dry malt extract and that can be undesirable for the potential drinker of the bottle.  It is also more difficult to evenly distribute the DME in all of the bottles, resulting in less even carbonation among bottles.

It’s our opinion that in nearly all cases corn sugar is superior to DME for bottling.  This is not to say there is anything wrong with using the extract, simply that we don’t believe it works as well as corn sugar for this purpose.  As with anything in brewing, people will do what they want.  But our results have always been better with corn sugar, and we believe logical analysis is on our side.

In the future we may do a back-to-back comparison where we brew a single batch of beer, divide it in two at bottling time, and use corn sugar for half and DME for the other half.  If you’d be interested in seeing that, leave a comment.

Cheers!

One of the great satisfactions of brewing your own beer (and bottling it) is to look at the final product, all neatly in a row, waiting ready for a few weeks of bottle conditioning, and tasting it as it goes into the bottle.  This weekend we bottled a batch of lager we brewed at the end of November and had let ferment in the darkest corner of the basement for the last five weeks, first in the primary, then in the secondary.

When you bottle your beer, you always have to taste it.  Sure, it’s flat, but this is the first reward you get for the labor you’ve put forth so far.  And this batch was good.  Really good.  Assuming it tastes as good carbonated as it does now, this recipe will be going in our recipes section shortly.

Here’s a little shot for inspiration.  Remember, our guide has all the info you need to get started homebrewing great beer from the very first batch!

In our guide we describe the bottling process using a capper and steel bottle caps with standard beer bottles.  This is really best done as a two person job.  But lets say you’ve decided you want to keep homebrewing and you don’t want to have to find a friend every time you need to bottle beer.  There is a pricier alternative that makes life easier and requires fewer hands to do the job quickly: the easy cap bottle.

You are most likely familiar with these bottles from beer like Grolsch and Virgil’s root beer, among others.  In fact the Virgil’s and other brown bottles work well for this purpose.  We don’t recommend green bottles because of the light damage that can skunk your beer (sometimes this is desirable, but not generally).

At most homebrew shops, you can also buy these brown easy cap bottles by the twelve pack.  They are generally a couple of dollars per bottle, substantially more than their lesser brethren.  But if you brew a lot these are worth it.  You just replace the rubber seal every couple of batches.  Follow the same sterilization procedures that you do for normal bottling.

These can really make your life easier if you have to bottle solo.  It’s not the cheapest solution, but it might be worth it if you find yourself brewing often.  Just make sure you get them back from your friends.

I first had a Black Boss porter several years ago at a German restaurant here in Portland, known for their excellent import German beers: the Berlin Inn.  Black Boss, however, is a Baltic porter from Poland, the flagship product of Browar Witnica.  It’s heavy and thick, and delicious, packing a ABV in excess of 9%.  Other Baltic porters are excellent, but this is my favorite.  It’s common to describe other kinds of flavors found in beers.  I normally find that’s not terribly helpful, but in this case there really is a chocolate taste to the beer.  Being a Baltic porter, there is no burnt flavor, replaced instead by a heavy maltiness.

These are sipping beers, meant to last for an hour, not session beers to be drunk back to back.  If you drink it slowly, it’s a very enjoyable beer for an evening.  Don’t drink it in the afternoon unless you want to be asleep by 5 o’clock.

I’ve since had Black Boss several other places, including at the Krakow Koffehaus near my house in Portland.  But no one else have ever served it in a way that I first saw at the Berlin Inn.  As a float, with ice cream.  Yes, it sounds terrible and you’re now questioning my sanity.  But in all seriousness it’s great this way.  If you never thought you’d have a beer for dessert, with ice cream, no less, then you ought to pick one up and try it.  If you can find it.  It’s worth a search.

There are lots of things you can do to make your brew clearer when that quality is desirable for the style–and it’s not always.  But if you’re brewing a lager or pilsner and want to have the brew cleared there are a few simple things you can do that will help.  There are also additives you can put in your beer while fermenting, but we’ll save those for another time.  What we’re talking about here are things you can do whlie brewing to help out with clarification.

What causes cloudy beer?  Generally there are three main factors:

1. Proteins left from the malt and specialty grains that are suspended in the wort.
2. Small clumps of yeast that remain suspended after fermentation.
3. Yeast clumps in the bottle from bottle conditioning.

The first of these issues is most easily addressed at the time of the brewing. The simplest thing to do is to add Irish moss to your brew just about 10 minutes before the end of the boil.  This is a natural algae that grows along the ocean in Northern Europe and other places.  It attracts proteins from the brew and helps keep them clumped to the moss so that they strain out of the wort when you put it into the fermenter.  It’s called a fining agent, which is anything that is added to clarify beer. This stuff is not expensive and you only need about 1 tbsp. of it for a 5 gallon boil.

The second thing you can do about this issue is to cool the wort as quickly as possible, which helps the proteins drop out of suspension.  Fancy brewers do this with a wort chiller.  In our guide we provide some solutions that are simpler and several orders of magnitude cheaper.

So what about #2 and #3 then?  Several factors can affect that.  The primary one is which yeast you are using.  If your style is a clear one, then you ought to use a yeast that has high flocculation.  That’s a brewing term that means “high clumping factor.”  Basically the larger the clumps the yeast form, the more easily they drop out of suspension.  White Labs and Wyeast post this information about most of their strains, and some other yeast suppliers do as well.

In commercial brewing of bottle conditioned beers it is not uncommon to use a different strain of yeast to handle the bottle conditioning, one that produces less sediment.  That’s a bit extreme for home brewing, and not something we ever bother with.  If you’re hardcore you could experiment with this.  We advocate simple solutions, so we won’t go into it here.

As I said before there are other things you can add to the fermentation process to clear your beer and we’ll get into those another time.  Generally this is not needed.

Keep in mind that clearer beer is not always desirable.  Many styles look and taste better with a bit of clouding.

EDIT: Also see Part 2 in this series.

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!