Helping a First-Time Brewer

One of the great joys of this hobby is that there is a real support community to help brewers of all levels.  When I first started, a grad-student friend of mine invited me over to watch a brew day on his system and then helped me with my first brewing session.  So much information can be conveyed through watching someone work through their brewing process and by asking questions.  It goes a long way to take away the mysterious and intimidating aspects of the hobby and encourages people to take the first step.

I recently had the opportunity to "pay it forward" with a good friend of mine, Tres, who purchased a brewing kit.  He and I met at the Fermentation Trap and picked out some equipment and an English Brown Ale extract kit.  Later on, we got together at his house to brew the kit, celebrate with a few pints of beer, and enjoy each other's company.  Our wives and children are also good friends, so it was a very enjoyable afternoon.

Teaching a subject is one of the best ways to both demonstrate how much you know about a subject and determine how much you still can learn.  I find the act of explaining the brewing process, at least how I do it, and responding to questions helps me look at the steps in a new light and can lead to new ideas.  In this case, I had not done an extract brew in quite some time and had to dredge some of the steps up from memory (and the kit instructions helped as well).

If you ever have a chance to introduce someone to the hobby and share a brew session with them, I highly encourage it.

Thanks to Tres for the afternoon and to Cyndi for sending along the great pictures, some of which appear below.

Cheers,

TW

Adding the steeping grains 

DME sticking to the sides of the bag 

Hops added to the boil 

Hydrometer reading of the wort 

Pitching yeast 

Love the carboy! 

Happy Columbus Day!

For those of you here in the US, Lug Wrench Brewing would like to wish you all a Happy Columbus Day.  Here in New England, we've been blessed with outstanding weather on this holiday weekend.  Hopefully you and yours have had the chance to kick back, enjoy some good weather, and quaff a great beer while you do. 

And for those of you outside the US or other locations who don't honor this holiday, we wish you a ... um ... Happy Monday.

Slainte!

-JW


"Riches don't make a man rich, they only make him busier."
-Christopher Columbus

Mac's Brewbars - New Zealand

New Zealand has a burgeoning craft beer industry that defies its small overall population size.  Authors like Jamil Zainasheff have been writing about New Zealand's impressive, but little known, beer scene.  Breweries like Epic and 8 Wired Brewing Company have been gaining international attention for their products.

I am fortunate to have co-workers to periodically travel to New Zealand and bring me back stories about the beer they try.  With this latest trip, they were talking about a brew pub called Mac's Brewbar that they found while looking at a stadium being used for the Rugby World Cup.

From Mac's website, it appears that the company runs a franchise of brew pubs throughout New Zealand, with eight locations on the North and South Islands.  They feature a variety of different beers, including Gold All Malt Lager, Spring Tide Lower-Carb Lager, Hop Rocker Pislner, Sassy Red Best Bitter, Black Mac Dark Beer, and Great White Cloudy Wheat Beer.  In addition to bringing back stories, my co-workers carried several Mac's bar coasters with them.  I have included pictures of a few with this post.

I really like Mac's branding style.  It ties directly to the chalk boards seen at bars and breweries across the world, featuring the various beers on tap or bottle.  The chalky block lettering is apparent on the coasters, where one side features the beer's name and the other has a cheeky and sarcastic description of the beer.  The branding carries forward to the beer labels and even on the strange ribbing found on the necks of the beer bottles.  The website features similar fonts and looks great, even if it loads slowly from the other side of the world.

Thanks to my co-workers, Craig and Stephanie, for bringing the coasters and the stories back with them.

Cheers,

TW

Making Bread with Wort

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have a passion for making bread.  It is a process that is surprisingly similar to making beer and is, to me, equally satisfying.  Given the similarities in process (both use yeast, both are built from cereal grains, etc.), there must be ways of combining the two together.  I have had mixed success by making flour out of malted grain several times and working it into a bread recipe as part of the flour bill.  I have also tried to substitute beer as a portion of the water mixture in the dough composition.  This resulted in a very dense bread, where the yeast activity was likely impacted by the alcohol concentration of the beer.  While the resulting flavor was interesting, the technique seemed more suited to quick breads, where the leavening comes from chemical reactions instead of from yeast metabolism.

But I recently came across an idea on the Pizza Quest website that set my creative gears turning.  Pizza Quest is a great website that chronicles Peter Reinhart, one of my favorite bread authors, and his quest to find incredible pizza and those who make it.  The site features short webisodes that are recorded with various pizza makers and other chefs, as well as recipes, techniques, and other commentaries.  Pizza Quest has been working on a beer and pizza challenge with The Bruery that I plan to cover in another post.  That series generated a reader suggestion that said, why don't you use wort in bread?

What a fantastic idea!  It would remove the alcohol-retardation problem when finished beer is used directly in the dough.  Being a liquid, it would blend easier in dough, and if used in higher quantities, should not result in any kind of husky or grainy flavor.  I had to try it.

The next day, I set about making my favorite sourdough recipe, Norwich Sourdough, from the Wild Yeast blog.  I selected this recipe because I have made it literally dozens of times and I am familiar with how the finished bread tastes and smells, as well has how the dough responds during rise times.  I took the base recipe, and substituted the water for a mash made of malted grain, which I used a Cara-Red malt that I had in stock.  I used 15 percent by weight of malt, when compared to the water (90 grams of malt to 600 grams of water).  I ground the malt by briefly pulsing in a cleaned coffee mill.  I mixed the water and the grain together and heated the mixture to about 150 F, then let it cool to room temperature.  I then poured the mixture through a coffee filter, to separate the solids, and used that in the dough.  The grains absorbed about 140 grams of water during the heating process, so I added back normal tap water to make up for the loss.  The rest of the baking process followed the recipe as normal.

The resulting loaves were darker than usual.  The most noticeable difference was that the crust had an almost candy-coating like hardness.  It definitely took some work to get through it with the knife, but once through the outer layer, the bread crumb was a normal sourdough consistency.  Upon tasting the bread, the crust really crackled in your mouth, again like a candy-coating, but without the sweetness.  The bread flavor itself was not remarkably different, perhaps a little richer.

This is definitely something I plan to play with more.  The next attempt will probably use a darker malt, probably pale chocolate, in a lower percentage because of its more intense flavor.  I would encourage any of our baker readers to try to do the same and let us know how the bread turns out.

Cheers,

TW

90 grams of Cara-Red malt used to make wort for bread 

Separating the spent grain to use the wort in the bread dough 

Resulting bread dough is darker than normal