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Brew Report: California Common

Jun 012010

1.25L yeast starter

It all starts with a starter. Saturday night I cooked up a 1.25L starter to get my yeast ready for a Sunday brewday. Usually I make my starters a week or so in advance, letting them ferment out completely and then crash-cooling them, but this time I decided to try something different. I’ve read that making a starter the night before (or even morning of) brewday allows you to pitch the yeast at their most active. The only downside is you are adding the entire starter volume to your wort, but I figured 1.25L wouldn’t hurt the final product in any meaningful way. The starter preparation went down without a hitch, and I readied for brewing the next morning.

The beginning of the brewday went very slowly – I had to do a lot of cleaning and prep work since my brewery had sat dormant for so long. After a few hours of getting organized, washing equipment, and grinding grain, I was ready to mash in. I was using my recipe for Engine 97 Steam Beer, which calls for mashing at 154°F for one hour. I stirred and measured the mash temperature every 15 minutes.

Mashing in

I batch sparged and wound up with a little over 10 gallons of wort. I had measured my water in and out of the mash very carefully (using a scale to weigh it) since I am trying to lock down the loss numbers for my system. This brew lost appx. 1.5 gallons to grain absorption and another half gallon or so to tun deadspace. These numbers were a bit off from my assumptions, and this (along with poor efficiency) caused me to miss my OG by quite a bit. During the next brew, I will try and pin down my efficiency problems, although I have a suspicion that my Corona mill is to blame.

Starting to boil

After the mash was complete, I transferred the wort to the kettle for boiling. Everything from here on in was pretty textbook – 90 minute boil, with hops additions at 60m, 15m, and flameout (all Northern Brewer pellets).

Northern Brewer hops

I set up for chilling by adding the IC to the boil with 20m remaining, along with a Whirfloc tablet. I also started recirculating wort through my March pump to sanitize it. The pump is great – it allows me to chill faster by moving the wort around the chiller in the kettle, and then lets me transfer to the fermentor with ease.

I chilled down to about 68°F (took about 20 minutes), racked to the primary, and added the yeast. Set it up in the fermentation fridge to ferment around 58°F. There was airlock activity within 24 hours, and the beer is now happily bubbling away.

Chilling the wort

I wound up with an OG of 1.042 (reading taken before adding the starter wort) – my target was 1.055 or so, so this is going to be a bit lighter beer than intended. I wound up with an efficiency of around 55%. I’ll need a few more brew sessions of data before I can really figure out where my losses are occuring, but I am tempted to try the same recipe with malt milled at the homebrew shop to see if I get a big jump. I have a love/hate relationship with my Corona mill, but I just don’t know if it is consistent enough to get a good crush. Seems I am either getting uncracked kernels or flour, and it is very hard to find that middle ground.

I will be using this batch’s yeast cake to brew another few batches of this beer – I have been told the yeast doesn’t reach its peak until the third batch or so. Hopefully I’ll be able to get my system dialed in and have a perfect batch of California Common by that third time around.

May 2008 WoT – California Common and Apricot Pale Ale

Homebrewing No Responses »

May 162008

One of the features I’ll be doing every month is What’s on Tap – a discussion of some of the beers I’ve brewed and am enjoying that particular month. This month is the premier of WoT, and I currently have two kegs I’m working on emptying.

Engine 97 Steam Beer
This is one of my house beers and a favorite among my fans. It is brewed in the style of a California Common (BJCP category 7B, Amber Hybrid Beer/California Common Beer), also called steam beer. The quintessential commercial example of a Cal Common is Anchor Brewing’s Anchor Steam. This style calls for a medium-bodied amber to light copper colored ale, with a moderately malty taste and pronounced hop bitterness. The style showcases the Northern Brewer hop variety, which produces woody, rustic, or minty qualities. In addition, light caramel and fruity notes are acceptable.

My version is brewed using one of Jamil Zainasheff’s recipes, and I like it better than Anchor Steam. It adds a nice amount of malt complexity with its varied grain bill, and has that nice hop punch you want from a Cal Common. The batch I am currently drinking was brewed in early April and is conditioning nicely in my beer fridge – however, I doubt it will have time to reach its true peak, since I have been steadily attacking this keg!

Only “problem” with that brew session was that I was adjusting to a bunch of new equipment and missed my original gravity by quite a bit, causing this batch to be lighter in body than I expected. As a result, the caramel notes aren’t really there, the beer tastes a lot hoppier than usual (sort of like a baby IPA), and the alcohol content is low (somewhere around 4% ABV). Of course, these aren’t really problems – the beer still tastes great and the lower ABV makes it a nice session beer. However, these are things which would get me dinged in a competition for straying out of style.

Client #9
This beer was designed to be a clone of Magic Hat’s #9. Magic Hat describes that beer as “not quite pale ale”. Technically, this would fall under the rather broad style of Fruit Beer (BJCP category 20, Fruit Beer). Basically, all the style holds you to is having the fruit you used come through in the aroma and taste, have the fruit flavor be supportive and not artificial or overpowering, and have a well-brewed base beer backing it all up.

I brewed this one in late March, right when the Eliot Spitzer scandal was breaking, so I named it in his honor. This beer was another victim of my new equipment breaking-in period, so the original gravity also came in on the low side. It’s a little lighter-bodied and has a touch less alcohol than planned, but the apricot flavor fills it out nicely. It was racked onto a can’s worth of Oregon apricot puree (Oregon makes seedless, sanitized fruit purees without added sugars or fermentables which are available at homebrew shops and online – they work great. The purees you find in the supermarket should be avoided!) for two weeks and then kegged. The beer turned out very nice – a medium-hopped, unassuming pale ale in the background, complemented by a nice, fresh apricot nose and taste. I have it carbonated on the higher side and it is a nice, refreshing springtime beverage.

This keg is just about done. My girlfriend loves this stuff, preferring it to Magic Hat’s brew. The keg would be kicked already, but we are having company for Memorial Day weekend and they want to try some. I have already been contracted for another batch, but I might try a different flavor, like blackberry.