Hops - Burrs that Jingle Jangle Jingle

Honestly, a week or so ago I wasn't sure what the progression of hops growth was. So I looked it up and found a picture of what to look for in burr production. Little did I know, I actually had some (or at least I believe they are). I went out and saw that pretty much all the plants are showing some signs of burrs with the Mt. Hood doing the best.

From the pictures I saw and reading, they looks like little off shoots from the vine right underneath the leaves. Now we'll have to wait and see what happens next!

Brew Day - Cream Ale #2 - Swamp Cooler

A friend of mine was really interested to see how homebrewing worked, so we decided to brew up the Cream Ale since what I had left of the first batch was quickly crushed at a party a few weeks ago. He asked a ton of questions and I may have converted him. Time will tell!

Pretty standard brew day with all of it going as planned. I have a rather detailed checklist that I use for my brew day and I found that now that I have a few AG batches in that I didn't look at it often. It was a good feeling to know that I'm becoming so comfortble with the process and that I can start to focus on refining it.

If you are interested in the recipe, you can find it here. The only thing I did different was add a 1/8 lb of Golden Light DME at 30 mins. I did this because I use the DME to make starters and there wasn't enough to make another starter and it was getting older, so instead of just tossing it, decided to add it to the wort.

Temperature in my storage area were hanging out near 70 and I'd like to ferment a cooler. Temperatures are also supposed to climb to near 90 into the week so I figured I'd set up a swamp cooler so I could keep the beer at a constant temperature.

Checked it this morning and we had good activity in th airlock and the beer was sitting around 67ish. I'm happy with that. I'm monitor the temps and put a frozen quart jug in the tub if needed to keep the water cool.

Hops - Nutrient Deficient?

Its been around two months since my hops went into the ground. The Cascade and Mt. Hood are not doing to bad, but the Willamette and U.S. Tettnang are definitely lagging behind. I took a look in "The Hombrewers Garden" to see what my next steps are as the season continues. There was a section on nutrient deficiencies that caught my eye.

Most of my plants have yellow leaves toward the bottom and in some cases like the Tettnang it is starting to climb up the vine. I also feel like the plants growth has slowed down a lot even though you'd think this would be the time for them to shine.

The book suggest for stunted growth and yellow leaves before the end of the season to add nitrogen. Forms of nitrogen are fresh compost, manure, or fertilizers like fish emulsion or blood meal.

For lower leaves that turn yellow and then brown and start to die up the vine that the soil may be lacking magnesium. Epsom salt is a good source of magnesium.

Both of these seem to be my issues. So I did some research on the web to find out how much of the nutrients I would need to add. I decided to go with fish emulsion (which I found at Lowes) and an epsom salt combination as suggested by one forum. I used a water solution of 1 tablespoon fish emulsion fertilizer (per the label) and 1/4 tsp epsom salt per gallon of water and made two gallons (doubled the nutrients). The post said "Magnesium is the first micronutrient that hops crave when the pH of their root environment is too high. If you are only tending a small hop garden, try using fish emulsion with your water to acidify it. This will make magnesium in your soil more available to the plants."

We'll see over the next few weeks if I've made the right call by adding these nutrients. More to come.....

Ranco ETC-111000 Wiring

A few weeks back I was able to score a chest freezer off Craiglist for $25. Less than 10 years old, works fine and the previous owner just had no use for it and wanted it out of the way. Even though I have a Haier Kegerator, it only houses 2 kegs (had to convert it from one, http://fourleafbrewing.blogspot.com/2011/03/kegerator-upgrade.html) and I'd like to be able to have at least 4-5 beers on tap. When I convert this chest freezer, that will allow me to do so.

However, you can't just put kegs in the freezer, they will freeze....duh! So you need a way to override the thermostat. That is where a temperature controller comes in. I decided to go with a Ranco ETC-111000, unwired. I bought one on Ebay for under $50. Now it was time to wire it.

I will save you all the details of the wiring in my blog cause someone else has already done an excellent job.
http://www.susanminor.org/forums/showthread.php?644-Ranco-ETC-111000-000-120V-Wiring-Guide


The only thing that I did differently was I used a power strip vs. just a female end of an extention chord. Honestly, didn't have any great reason to do that way, just saw that is what others have done and I figured the extra protection of the strip couldn't hurt.

If you have basic electric skills (i.e. installing/changing outlets, putting up ceiling fans or lighting, etc) you'll be able to do this project. As always with electric, BE VERY CAREFUL and read all the directions fully before you try this. Sorry, but I can't be liable for any damages just because you got the idea from my blog and you do this project at your own risk.

I plan to have the chest freezer converted and a collar built in the next few weeks (got the collar idea/specs from BYO's winter issue). I'll post details of that project after I'm done.

Hops - 2011 - Heat Does a Hop Good

Now that the rains have stopped and its getting very hot here in Southwest Ohio, the hops seem to really enjoy the new conditions. They are growing tall rather quickly and the leaves are definitely getting larger. The tallest bine is likely close to 6 feet tall. Here are the latest pictures of the crop.

Below is the Mt Hood. In this first season, I likely won't cut back any bines so I can give the roots a chance to really take hold this year.

For those of Irish descent out there, I thought you'd like the new center piece on the swing that separates the trellis'. Its a working claddagh weather vane we got for our wedding years back.

Yeast Harvesting - First Try - WLP001

In an attempt to start saving as much money as I can with this great hobby, I've decided to take a try at harvesting some yeast. This past weekend I rinsed the WLP001 that I used to ferment the Amber Ale I recently brewed. My hope is that I can use this rinsed yeast for the first time in a few weeks.

I pretty much followed BillyBrew's video. I found his tutorial to be super easy to understand.

SANITATION IS KEY THROUGHOUT THIS ENTIRE PROCESS!!!

To sum up the process, here is what I did. Earlier in the day before I racked my Amber Ale to the keg, I boiled 1 gal of water to santize it. I let it cool and even put it in the frig for a while. I had my bucket fermentor in the frig so I wanted to have the sanitized water and beer close to the same temperature not to shock the yeast. I cold crash all of my beers because I find that I get a nice clean, yeast free product into the kegs. I also wanted to settle out as much yeast as possible.

I racked my beer to the kegs as normal. After I had it kegged up, I poured the gallon of sanitzed water into the bucket and stirred it up with a sanitzed spoon to get it well mixed up. The reason for this is you want to get the various parts of the yeast cake to settle into layers. I gave it around 20 minutes to settle so I took that time to start cleaning equipment. The heaviest later will settle at the bottom and will have hop particles, dead yeast, proteins, break, etc and you'd like to do your best to separate that out from your harvested yeast. There is a middle layer that settles that is the healthiest yeast and then a light layer at the top of just left over beer and other light matter.

After 20 minutes I slowly poured the connects of the fermentor into a 1.5 gal pitcher leaving the darkest and heaviest matter behind. It was very easy to see what I didn't want to tranfer into the pitcher. It was very dark vs. the rest of the fluid.

Now that I had the yeast cake out of the fermentor and in the pitcher, I waited another 20 minutes for that to settle as I clean up other equipment. This time, there was little to no dark matter at the bottom, a nice creamy white layer of yeast in the middle and the light layer of beer at the top. Sorry, no picture of this step, as I forgot to take one. Maybe I'll put one up after I do this process again.

I then poured around half of the contents of the pitcher into 4 mason jars leaving any darker stuff at the bottom. I did end up pitching the rest this time.

This is what a mason jar looked like right after the pour. Very cloudy.

After filling the 4 mason jars. I put them in the frig. This is what they looked like after 12 hours...

You can notice the yeast starting to settle at the bottom but still a very cloudy mixture.

I labeled each jar with some tape on the lid to remind me when I harvest it (so you can estimate viability), the type of each and the generation. You can use yeast for several generation but I'm not going to get into that in this post and I'd like plan to use them no more than 4-5 times. You can find info about this on the web.

This was what it looked like after 2 days......

A pretty clean jar now with most of the yeast at the bottom.

These jars will sit in there until I'm ready to use them, which should be in a few week. One item I do need to finalize is to get an estimate of how many yeast cells I have. I read on one of the message boards that there are 30 million yeast cells per 1 oz of yeast. I've seen some conflicting stories. But this is my next task to learn how much of this yeast I need to pitch so I don't under or overpitch and if I need to make a starter or not. More to come on this as I learn more.