Keeping beer cold.... A science project

There are a lot of ways to keep beer cold. But, what is the best?

Check this out to find out. I'm most impressed that they used PBR. It won a blue ribbon once!!!!

It turns out, a beer cozy made out of Rice Krispie bar is the best.

Don't ever tell me the internet isn't full of useful stuff.

My partial mashing method

For those of you interested, the following is my partial mash method. Feel free to critique. I went all-in on this technique by brewing 4 batches with this technique before ever tasting the results. I'm not worried. I'm sure the beer will be quite drinkable.

About 3 pounds of grains (pale malt, 2-row malt and/or others) are added to about 1.5 gallons of water at 164° F. The goal is to mash at 152° F for about 90 minutes. To maintain the temperature, I place my nearly full kettle with lid into a larger kettle and fill the larger kettle with water at 152° F. This larger kettle is meant to act as an insulator. It works pretty good. I usually need to heat the apparatus once during the 90 minutes to maintain the 152° F temperature.

After the mash, it is time to sparge (filter and rinse). I filter the grains by using a plastic colander lined with a muslin bag. See the following (the Michelob Golden Light can is there because that's what I was drinking around the 4th of July):



I use about 2 gallons of water at 168° F to sparge the grains. I slowly pour the hot water over the grains about 300 mL at a time.

This method seems to work well. I get to a reasonable original gravity. I have not calculated how efficient this method is. I need to first see if it makes good beer or not.

I'm back

I'm back. We survived a week of camping in the northernmost parts of Minnesota.



Time for reality to take over. I spent an entire week without using my computer once. That was nice.

I will post a few details about the trip later. Specifically, I want to sing the praises of DEET (Meta-N,N-diethyl toluamide).

Vacation time!!!!

Posting will be slow around here for a while. I am off on vacation with the family.

Hopefully, it won't end like:

Back in a week...

Brewing chemistry: Part 3- Mashing: Amylase

Once the barley has been malted and roasted, the grain is full of starch and enzymes. The grains are then dried and roasted. At his point, it is critical that the amylase enzymes not be denatured. Denaturation is any process that renders enzymes inactive. Heating (i.e. cooking) will denature proteins (enzymes are proteins). Roasting the barley too hot could destroy the critical enzymes. But, fear not, the folks who do the roasting know exactly what they are doing.

When the barley is roasted it is ready to be mashed. For extract brewers, this is something that isn't done. For all-grain brewers, mashing is a critical process. A screw up here and the whole batch could be ruined. Mashing essentially breaks up the starch into fermentable sugars. No sugar, no beer.

As I have mentioned before, I am now doing partial mashes (I'll post later about my method). In fact, all four batches featured recently were partial mash batches.

There are a lot of things that happen during a mash. I will focus on the action of amylase in the context of doing a partial mash.

During mashing, malted barley is heated in water. For partial mashing about 1 liter of water is used per pound of grain. The temperature control is critical since the amylase activity is dependent on temperature.

There are two main amylase enzymes at work. The enzymes are formed during the malting process thanks to the action of gibberillic acid. The two enzymes are alpha-amylase and beta-amylase.

They both break glycosidic bonds between the glucose molecules in starch. However, alpha-amylase does so randomly and beta-amylase starts at the end of the starch chain (the non-reducing end) and chops off two glucoses (maltose) at a time. The optimum temperature for alpha-amylase activity is around 158° F and that for beta-amylase is around 145° F. In all grain brewing temperature control is absolutely critical since the amylase activities must be balanced out. In partial mashing a temperature compromise is reached. At 152-154° F the activities of both enzymes are good enough to result in decent conversion.

The goal is to not convert all of the starch into glucose or maltose. Unless you are trying to brew a very dry beer with very low residual carbohydrate levels (i.e. T.A.L.L.). If beta-amylase activity is allowed to dominate, the result is a highly fermentable wort and a dry beer.

A great description of partial mashing is available on the BYO website

10,000 page views!!!!

OK, probably 85% of them are by me, but this simple little blog has just been viewed 10,000 times. Not bad for a blog that doesn't really say anything. Of course it is about beer.

Finally, my pipeline is full

With the end of semester craziness and beginning of summer craziness, my beer pipeline nearly dried up. I recently remedied this.

Behold, my brewing beer:



From left to right: bitter, pale ale, India pale ale, and honey wheat.

Another angle:



The bitter is in the secondary and the others are in their primaries.