Brown Ale: one small misguided step for homebrewer's everywhere

The brown ale mistakes were similar to those committed during the brewing of the Belgian Witbier.

The only other mistake we made aside from those mentioned with the Belgian (No straining, etc.), was that we did not fill the carboy to 5.25 gallons! meaning we skewed the recipe to a higher sugar content, meaning the beer was ultimately more alcoholic(by volume) than desired.

Pictured: the unfiltered Belgian Witbier and the underfilled and unfiltered Brown Ale (it should ideally be about 4"-5" higher).

The Problem With Belgians...

The Belgian beer was made following the directions on the instructions sheet packaged with the Buenes Diaz Witbier kit from the Wine and Hop shop. However, several key elements of the process were left off of the instructions and they ultimately caused several problems.
By now, our sanitation process was thorough and we experienced no direct problems associated with poor cleaning practices. However, our problems came from some of the brewing basics we had not learned. Firstly, we were unaware that we were supposed to grind the coriander supplied with the kit prior to adding it to the wort. Much of the coriander flavor, then, never made it into the beer.

More importantly, though, was that by this point in time we did not know that we had to strain the contents of the wort before putting it into the fermenter! Thus, the wort entered the fermenter with wheat husks from the adjunct grains, and all of the coriander and orange peel sat with the beer in the fermenter for about a week before it was siphoned into the secondary fermenter.
Here, you can see the chunks of orange peel floating around in the fermenter

These reasons are why we believe the flavor is off in the Lumiere D'oranges beer we turned in for the assignment were less-than-desirable.

Working Backwards: What Made Our Best Beer Great

In order to understand the progression of our beers, we've deemed it helpful to present things in reverse-chronological order. Why? because we made many mistakes with our first beers, so starting from our beer that was the least wrought with mistakes will create a better foundation for explaining what we did or did not do to our first beers that made them less than perfect.

With that, Let's jump right in:

Our third and final beer was the combination of the Badger Amber Ale from the Wine and Hop Shop, but with a modified hopping schedule, and the addition of cinnamon, ginger, and allspice to the wort boil. No adjuncts were used in this brew, mainly because we wanted the spices to be the predominant flavor underlying the basic amber ale.

The process went like this...

 we sanitized all of the needed equipment for the boiling and transfer processes. We added 6 quarts to the brewing kettle, and brought it to a boil. We then added the malt syrup from the kit and brought the wort to a boil. heating the extract syrup in hot water before hand (pictured below) was a helpful tip we picked up from the directions as well!

The directions said to follow this schedule:
@ boil, add 1oz Willamette hops
Boil 30 minutes
@30 minutes, add 1/2oz Kent Goldings hops
Boil 8 minutes
@38 minutes, add the other 1/2oz of Kent Goldings Hops
Boil 2 minutes and remove from heat

Our plan looked like this:
Boil 6 quarts water and add malt extract syrup
@10 minutes, add .25oz Kent Golding's hops
@25 minutes, add .25oz Kent Golding's hops
@30 minutes, add 1tsp Irish Moss (first time using Irish moss- the stuff is brilliant!)
@40 minutes, add 1tsp allspice, 1 tsp ginger, &3 4" sticks of Ceylon cinnamon.

we then cooled the wort in an ice bath and added it to the sanitized (with Onestep hydrogen cleaner) 6.5gal carboy through a two-layered straining system. This is the first time we strained the wort prior to entering the carboy for fermentation. This straining coupled with the use of Irish moss clarified the beer wonderfully!
We pitched the pre-activated bag of Wyeast Labs Belgian Witbier Yeast, topped the carboy off at 5.25 gallons (as per the instructions), placed the airlock on the carboy and moved the carboy to the dark basement for fermentation.
After 14 days, we racked the beer to a secondary fermentor (set up pictured below) to let it resettle for several hours before bottling.

The beer bottling went flawlessly. we devised a way to fill the bottles higher to eliminate threats of oxidation while the beer was in the bottles. The bottles were boxed and kept in a basement at about 67 degrees, and sat until the project due date.

Everybody has to Believe in Something…I Believe I’ll Have Another Drink!- Amberine Huda

You know you’re in Wisconsin if you’re being taught how to brew beer. I distinctly remember that Keystone was the poison of choice my freshman year of college. Before I fell into the deluge of micro-brews, I had my heart searching to re-connect with one magical beer I tasted long ago, on my 17^th birthday in London. My sister took me to a Belgian restaurant that, strangely enough, looked like a monastery. The monk – who seemed to be our waiter – informed me that I could choose any fruit and they would have that beer. As he disappeared into the foyer shaped like a pew, my curiosity to connect the beer to the monk grew stronger. The moment the mango beer I requested hit my lips I instantly made the connection. I wasn’t sure whether I should thank God for what He had given me or go to the confessional right next to the Men’s restroom. Simply put, it was the holiest beer I had ever tasted. I learned about Abbey ale and the Trappist monasteries, and I knew I needed another experience. Four years later, I came across Lambic’s Framboise, a Belgian fruit beer sold in Trader Joe’s. That year, I was also recommended to stop complaining and learn how to make my own beer.

            When I saw that monk disappear behind the foyer and bring out the most delicious beer I had ever tasted, I never thought it was possible for me to recreate the miracle. You need big machines, an entire team of people who have been brewing for generations, not three college students who recently received legal permission to drink! It wasn’t until I helped a friend of mine – and former ILS student – bottle an entire case of beer he had made in his Madison home that I realized it was possible. Our group decided to take on the adventure with the help of Charlie Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Home Brewing. The rate at which the activating yeast grew pretty much sums up our anticipation for how these beers would turn out. Sanitizing the equipment, stirring for an hour straight, sanitizing the equipment, putting the yeast in, sanitizing, stirring, sanitizing, stirring…and finally, weeks later, tasting the product we made the most mistakes on – it was even more delicious. Each of us got to put our own spin on our respective beers – our attempt at brewing the Belgian wheat ale of my dreams exceeded every expectation I had for beer, and for myself.

            As I sip on a Lambic Framboise, I think of all that we put into the carboy – our fears, a prepubescent education about beer, our passion and ambition to create something of quality, and a whole lot of yeast. This journey reminds me of a quote that the great Winston Churchill once said: "Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” Indeed, I will never forget all that I have taken out of beer, and how much it has taken out of me.

Adventures and Misadventures in Beer-Kellen Abraham

Believe it or not, before this year I thought I did not like beer. I relegated every beverage under this title to a category of watery, mild, boring, luke-warm liquids. My first few experiences of college parties are to blame for this unfortunate perception. By some miracle my uncle sensed the situation and came to my rescue with some of his recent homebrews. My first taste was from one he called Speckled Heifer-what I now recognize to be a play on the popular Wisconsin beer Spotted Cow- and it was DELICIOUS! That was last summer and since then I have tested my palate with various brews from the Great Dane, Brickhouse Barbecue and other Madison establishments.

This project has been a journey of discovering my beer preferences as well as an intense, hands-on learning experience. I had absolutely no idea what went into beer brewing; from choosing the grains to discovering what the yeasty beasties actually do.

At the outset my partners and I faced a trail overgrown with inaccurate, uneducated, or plain old incorrect information on beer brewing on the internet. Little did we know that a clear, smooth path was inches away paved by a lovely little book called The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. It was from reading this Beer Bible that we identified the myriad of brewing crimes we had committed. That’s the thing about beer, though, once it’s in the carboy, there’s not a whole lot you can do to alter the brew...you’ve just got to let the yeasties do their thing and hope for the best!

Despite our various mistakes we were very thorough and conscious when it came to the  sanitization of all the equipment, about which the scripture insists, “SANITIZING YOUR EQUPMENT IS ONE OF THE EASIEST AND MOST FUNDAMENTALLY IMPORTANT THINGS THAT YOU WILL DO.” (Papazian p.20) 

Now, here, at the end of the adventure-what is really just the beginning of the life-long adventure I plan to enjoy with beer- I am extremely proud of the beer we produced and I feel confident that I could explain the beer brewing process and teach someone else to spread the joy with me!

Playing God with Single Celled Organisms is More Complex Than I Thought- Brian McFadden

Until two months ago, I was an average college student, satisfied with using my key-chain mounted bottle opener to crack open a mass produced bottle of beer. I had never really given any thought to how exactly beer was made. Sure, I knew there were some large kettles, fermentation, yeast cultures, etc...But I never really thought about how it all came together. Beer, in essence, was a delicious end product that I paid "too much" for at local establishments and grocery stores whenever my mini-fridge ran dry.

When I discovered this class had an option for beer brewing as part of the course, I was elated. My desire to learn "hands on" and my previous knowledge of cooking made me confident that I could brew a decent beer. I found two partners, helped to write out a proposal, and off we went.

I went down to my basement ( I am the only member of our group to live in a house with a sufficiently private and dark basement) and found the location photographed above to be suitable. However, the blurriness of the image, in my mind, directly relates to just how hard it was to truly understand this project. My basement was always a basement, until it became a basement with 10 gallons of beer being brewed within it that needed to be kept un-oxygenated, unmolested, sanitized, temperature controlled, monitored, regulated, and transferred and processed in a timely manner. My basement will never be the same.

Of course, jumping in head first seemed like a good idea at the time. I left Charlie Papazian's "The Complete Joy of Home Brewing 3rd Edition" sitting idly in the box of equipment we purchased for the Wine and Hop shop on Monroe. It never occurred to me that, oh, you know, they gave us the book for a reason!
That night in late September, our group set forth in producing our first beer, a Brown ale, whose ingredients were purchased from the Wine and Hop Shop.

Though later posts will discuss in great detail the processes which we used to create our beers, I feel that it would be helpful if I described some of my overall feelings towards this project:

The title of this blog to me is a both a parody and an homage to the quote from 1 Corinthians 13, "Through a Glass Darkly". As I have always interpreted the quote, I believe that the concept of "God" is that of uncertainty. We do not see God within magnifying glasses, binoculars, or through microscopes...Yet society throughout it's history has claimed that God is inherently present in all of these places. Without a tool to truly analyze and understand the Almighty, society was left analyzing the images they perceived as "Godly" or "of God", trying to piece together an endless puzzle.

This project, by a method of role reversal (however blasphemous), has allowed us to play God. Yeast is our society. Beer is their environment. Together, the yeast face environmental and population pressures which we ourselves cannot interpret precisely enough to intervene in order to produce our desired outcomes. We merely set the ball forth rolling, and were forced to sit back and watch quietly through the dark, murky, swirling primitive soup. The lesson itself is not biblical (nor do I intend on elaborating any further on the nature of religion in the absence of understanding, it is merely my framework) in nature, but rather, it is a social construct that seems to befit the situation, as it fits many other so well.

This project, by a method of role reversal (however blasphemous), has allowed us to play God. Yeast is our society. Beer is their environment. Together, the yeast face environmental and population pressures which we ourselves cannot interpret precisely enough to intervene in on, in order to produce our desired outcomes. We merely set the ball forth rolling, and are forced to sit back and watch quietly through the dark, murky, swirling primitive soup. The lesson itself is not biblical (nor do I intend on elaborating any further on the nature of religion in the absence of understanding, it is merely my framework) in nature, but rather, it is a social construct that seems to befit the situation, as it fits many other so well.

If I am God, then this is Adam and Eve...and 999,999,999,998 of their closest relatives