Several weeks ago, Malin and I did a side-by-side tasting of my recent home-made Old Humperdink Barley Wine against Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot (2010).

Both beers are very similar in color and clarity. In this photo, Bigfoot is the one on the right – with the bigger foam. Both beers are remarkably smooth and drinkable considering their dangerous strength: 9.6% for Bigfoot and a whopping 10.8% for Old Humperdink.

Both are hoppy, but Bigfoot is noticeably hoppier. It is also richer and more complex in malt character. I wonder how they achieve such an amazing profile – a pleasant blend of breadiness, caramel, chocolate, and residual sweetness. Old Humperdink is no slouch, but it lacks some of the depth – particularly in the hints of dark malt character. Perhaps a touch of chocolate malt should go into the next barley wine we make.

Sierra Nevada’s website says that Bigfoot is hopped with the three C’s: Cascade, Centennial, and Chinook. Old Humperdink is hopped 100% with Zeus hops (part of the CTZ family: Columbus-Tomahawk-Zeus).

Sierra Nevada is brimming with sweetness and complex malt flavors, but is tempered by an equally huge hop bitterness and immense evergreen and grapefruit hop flavor. Old Humperdink on the other hand is a little more light-handed. Despite our beer being bigger and stronger, it doesn’t punch you in the face (or in the palate rather) quite as firmly as does the sasquatch. Old Humperdink has a straight-forward maltiness with some caramel and toffee notes and a very spicy and resiny hop profile that has a touch of evergreen, wads and wads of tropical fruit, and a hint of mint and herbs.

I personally think I have a ways to go before I make a barley wine as good as Bigfoot, but Malin actually liked mine better. I’m planning to send Old Humperdink to both the Peach State Brew Off and to the NHC. I think it could fare pretty well.

Beermuda Triangle Homebrew Competition

Speaking of contests, we entered La Brabançonne Grand Cru, Old Humperdink Barley Wine, and Back-Breaking Brown into the Beermuda Triangle Homebrew Competition, hosted by Hop City, Octane Coffee, and Five Seasons Brewpub.

All three beers made it to the semi-finals (top 20), and Back-Breaking Brown landed in the finals (5^th place). The top five finishers, me included, received gift cards for the three hosting businesses. We used the Hop City gift card today.

I plan to use the Five Seasons Brewpub gift card in a few weeks once the winner is on tap. Yes, the winner of the contest gets their beer brewed by Five Seasons and served on draft at the brewpub. From what I heard at Hop City today, it should be pouring in four weeks’ time.

Yankee Doodle

We’ve cooked up three batches of beer so far in 2010. Back-Breaking Brown – an Imperial India Brown Ale – was the inaugural batch and is amazing. We used 1/2 pound of whole leaf hops for that one: Magnum, Nugget, Simcoe, and Chinook. The beer finished at about 8.9%abv, and is deadly smooth for that strength. If I do say so myself, it masterfully blends the perfect amounts of malt complexity, dark malt character, residual sweetness, and raging hop flavor.

The second batch of the year was sort of like a scaled-back version – a hop-bomb American brown ale. We call it Hump’s Yankee Doodle Brown. It stands at around 5.8%abv and was made with over four ounces of whole leaf hops: Magnum, Amarillo, Cascade, and Crystal. It has a very pleasant citrus and peach fruitiness to the hop profile, a strong bitterness, and a dry malt backbone that has just enough sweetness to keep the dry bitter finish from being brutal.

Our most recent batch is Hump’s Irish Dry Stout. I don’t want to rename it again (last attempt was not nearly dry enough, so we renamed it and reformulated a better recipe for this title). But I might have to. It did not finish dry enough. I still want to warm it up before coming to the final verdict (it’s at 64 deg.F; maybe 70 deg.F can squeeze out another point or two of attenuation). Either way, it tastes good, so we’ll be sucking some down on St. Patty’s Day.

Brew day for the stout was a serious pain in the neck. The grist included a decent bit of unmalted barley (1 pound of flaked barley, 1 pound of unmalted roasted barley), and the manifold on our mash/lauter tun didn’t like it. After fighting what was almost a stuck mash, we finally got it through. Based on the mash schedule – which included a protein rest and a few decoctions to heat it up to what still amounts to a low temperature saccharification rest – I expected it to attenuate very well. Alas, it was not meant to be. It got down only to 1.015 (shooting for 1.012 or lower). Perhaps a warmer climate will help it finish…

I used Grade B maple syrup this time. My experience is that Grade A, the more common grade (though still less common than “pancake syrup” which is just high fructose corn syrup with maple flavoring), doesn’t leave enough maple flavor. Since maple syrup is mostly sugar, like honey, it dries a beer out leaving it stronger and lighter in body. So simply using more maple syrup isn’t the solution to getting more flavor since that just leads to a stronger, lighter-bodied product that can easily get too dry to make good beer. That avenue would simply require too much syrup to get a nice, rich maple flavor, and the result would be a maple braggot – closer to mead than to beer.

Grade B has more “impurities” in much the same way that dark brown sugar has more impurities than does light brown sugar. In brown sugar, the impurity is rich and beautiful molasses. In maple syrup, the impurity similarly is the strong-flavored undertone that makes maple syrup taste “mapley”. Grade B is what is typically called for in baking to provide a good maple flavor, so it makes sense that it should also be the syrup of choice for flavoring beer.

I also used a different variety of smoked malt than in past smoked beers. In the past, I’ve only used peat-smoked barley malt. Peat smoke has a very earthy dirt character to it that can lend a pleasing earthiness to the final smoked beer. It is also intensely smokey. You only need a few ounces in a 5-gallon batch to get a noticeable smokey aroma and flavor.

Award-winning brewer Jamil Zainasheff, however, recommends never using peat-smoked malt in beer. He instead suggests to stick with German smoked barley malt known as rauch malt – which is smoked with beech wood. I originally concocted my recipe to use the Jamil-certified rauch malt, but a discussion with Doug, the homebrew store owner, led me into another direction. He said that he has problems moving rauch malt for two reasons:

1. Home brewers use smoked malt far less frequently than other specialty grains.
2. The consistency in commercial rauch malt available here is terrible.

He has observed it himself and has received complaints from customers about the smokiness of rauch malt varying considerably from one bag to the next. For that reason he only sells rauch malt in 10-pound quantities (the size of the bags that he gets from his supplier). I told him that I didn’t mind buying a 10-pound bag since I have other smoked recipes and could probably use it up after only 4 smoked batches (which admittedly would likely be spread out over a year or more since my palate probably couldn’t handle four smoked beers in a row). He then directed me to a better alternative: fresh applewood-smoked barley malt. He smokes it himself at home using English Pale malt as the basis. The intensity he acheives is a little more consistent than he’s found with German rauch malt, and – like peat-smoked malt – it is much stronger in smokiness than the German alternative. So instead of using two pounds of rauch malt (which admittedly could be too much or could be insufficient – depending on how smokey was the bag of rauch malt I’d acquired), I would only need to use about 6 ounces of Doug’s applewood smoked malt. And I didn’t have to buy ten pounds of it – just the six ounces that I needed.

Applewood works well with bacon and sausages, so why not barley malt?

The actual brewing was mostly uneventful. It seems, however, that something has to go wrong every batch of late. This time it was the manifold of my mash/lauter tun. Apparently it wasn’t fitted to the tun’s opening at the bottom very well. Stirring the mash, I felt the brew spoon hit something plastic that wasn’t on the floor of the tun like it should have been. Stirring a little more revealed the manifold, freely drifting in the mash. So when the saccharification rest was complete, I had to pour the mash into the kettle, re-attach the manifold in the tun, and then pour the mash back into the kettle. This, of course, results in bubbles and aeration, which is generally bad with hot wort as it can lead to possible oxidation in the finished product (which means shorter shelf life and greater chance of stale flavors like wet cardboard). I’ve “poured” the mash before and never noticed any significant level of oxidation in finished beers, so I’m not really too worried about that…

Also on Sunday I kegged Hump’s Bitter. I think this is probably the best example of the style I’ve ever whipped up. Past examples have ranged from being too bold and hoppy – like an American Pale Ale instead of an English Bitter – to being too dry and not malty enough. This one strikes a nice balance of bready maltiness with a firm but far from overpowering hop bitterness. It still tastes a little green, so it will likely taste even better after another few weeks.

My first problem was, like nearly all brew days unfortunately, a late start. I didn’t really get started until 3pm which was about 2 hours later than ideal.

My second problem was encountered upon opening my mash/lauter tun after pulling it up from the basement: it was covered in mold – disgusting. I had to scrub it out and then rinsed everything in a solution of water and bleach (only 1oz bleach per gallon water, so hopefully that was actually strong enough to kill the mold… I may need to do more cleaning with a more potent solution).

One thing actually went quite right: I hit my mash temperature almost perfectly. I think I just got lucky… I was going for 155 and hit 154. It was still around 154 after one hour per my handy thermometer calibrator, so it may have actually hit around 155 and just cooled off by one degree.

The third problem was something I should have realized beforehand. It wasn’t necessarily a problem – just a complication. My lauter tun only holds 10 gallons. The total mash+sparge volume would be around 12.5 gallons. The reason was twofold: this beer featured a lot more grain than usual so there would be more water lost in spent grains, and this beer would undergo a 90 minute boil, which means I need to start with more to compensate for more of it boiling off. The long boil is due to the extensive use of continental pilsner malt (about five pounds) – which needs a long boil to boil off DMS precursors. So I would have to do a double batch sparge (i.e. fill the lauter tun to 10 gallons, sparge, and then add more hot water, and sparge more)

The fourth problem would be the ultimate issue, overshadowing (and foreshadowing) the rest of my evening: a stuck mash. Bad. Really bad. I had not even collected a quart or two of wort by the time it stopped flowing. Usually I have to restrain the valve on the lauter tun to insure a slow flow, but even with the valve wide open it trickled and ultimately stopped. I was worried about this possibility due to the use of pumpkin (nearly six pounds of roasted [caramelized] pumpkin flesh). To mitigate this issue I had added 1/2 pound of rice hulls to the mash. Rice hulls help to form a filter bed, much like barley husks. When only barley is used, the husks alone provide a sufficient filter bed. But when large quantities of wheat, rye, or other starches (like pumpkin) are used, rice hulls are a handy additive to prevent a stuck mash. Apparently they didn’t do their job.

Now here’s where things started getting really messy. After fighting the mash for a while – stirring it up heavily and digging the brewspoon into the bottom of the grain bed to stir it up and jar it loose – I gave up and decided to transfer the mash to the kettle (the only vessel in the house big enough to hold all ten gallons of it). After doing this by hand, two quarts at a time, using a two-quart Pyrex measuring cup, I added my remaining 1/2 pound of rice hulls. I stirred them up, hoping they would resolve my stuck mash, and then transferred it again by hand – this time back into the lauter tun.

Problem number five: another stuck mash. At first the extra rice hulls seemed to work. The wort flowed. But the flow slowly decelerated and eventually came to a stop after only collecting about 2.5 gallons of wort.

I tried the same trick again, but this time I had no more rice hulls to add. I simply transferred to the kettle and back. I saved the 2.5 gallons of wort collected so far in another, smaller brewpot. But the goddess of brewing had turned a frown on me…

At this point, things were looking grim. I could not get any more wort. I even tried vigorously stirring up the wort and manipulating the grain bed with the brewspoon – with the valve open. I had decided I cared a little less about how clean the resulting wort would be. I just wanted to get on with it. It still wouldn’t work. I was being spurned by that cruel goddess.

Problem number six (or potential problem at least): efficiency. A full 7.25 gallons of wort was supposed to have a gravity of 1.048. I assumed only 60% efficiency – less than the typical which is 68-70%. I assumed the pumpkin would provide less gravity per pound than would the barley (15 points per pound per gallon – vs. 37.5 points per pound per gallon for the base malt). But I think the real situation was even worse – either worse than 60% efficiency or way less than 15 points per pound per gallon for the pumpkin. The 2.5 gallon “first runnings” had a disappointing specific gravity of only 1.059. Considering I’ve read that you typically get 2/3 of the total gravity out of the beer using the first 1/2 of sparge water, this should have been a little thicker I think (although it’s hard to tell – I think I was expecting closer to 1.070, but I don’t have hard scientific data to support that expectation – I don’t even think I have sufficient knowledge/formulas to calculate the proper gravity at this point).

My last ditch attempt to get this beer brewing was desperate indeed. I got out my old mini-mash setup: a nylon grain bag and a metal colander. I tried to suspend the colander on the lip of the brewpot and pour the mash through it. This resulted in a spectacular failure: the colander was too small to safely hang on the lip of the new, bigger brewpot. It fell into the beer, ruining it with grain husks and rice hulls. And splashing sticky crud on every surface of the kitchen at the same time.

At this point in time, I had been fighting this batch for over four hours. It was nearly 8pm. I should usually be finished at this point – or at least cooling the wort by now, preparing to pitch yeast.

My wife was great help throughout – she offered assistance through most of this frustrating process. But it was to no avail. The kitchen was an appalling mess (even though we had already performed significant clean-up twice after the previous missteps). I had nearly thrown my back out – from lifting a full ten-gallon cooler up onto the counter not once but three times. And I had lost four hours of my life. Actually, I wish I had simply lost these hours. Instead I found four of the most infuriating and maddening hours of my adult life.

I gave up. I cried, “uncle!” to that wicked goddess of brewing, cursing her under every breath I drew. Probably over forty dollars worth of ingredients down the tube. Completely wasted. I might as well have withdrawn a pair of Andrew Jacksons and tossed them in my fireplace. And let’s not forget four frustrating hours of my life, also down the tube.

I was livid. Perhaps livid does not adequately describe my mood. It was all I could do to restrain from destroying something. If I did not have a wife and kid, my psyche’s id would have taken over in a most childish and destructive display of rage. But, thinking of my family and knowing that I had already scared Will enough (he could tell I was upset for a good bit of the evening as I tried to make things work – ultimately in vain), I remained calm. Mostly. Only a few muted curse words. And then I poured everything out into the backyard, washed and rinsed all of the equipment, and went to pour myself a beer. I resisted the urge to pour an entire pitcher – and the urge to pour an ounce of Crown Royal into the mug…

Blogging, it seems, can be a form of therapy. The ability to describe the evening – to reflect on it (in horror) and then formulate the words that might, hopefully, do it justice – is therapeutic unto itself. Knowing that someone will read it (okay – I don’t actually know that – but I have a feeling at least of one of my friends will peruse through it) helps, too – as if you, the reader, are my silent psycho-analyst.

My nightmare is over. I still have a starter of lager yeast in the fridge downstairs – nearly 300 billion little organisms, anxiously awaiting whatever sweet nectar I ultimately give them. I also have an entire other batch of ingredients down there – for the English Bitter that I will be brewing next weekend.

Who knows – perhaps there is still time for a holiday ale this year – if I brew it next weekend and postpone the bitter until December 6^th…
This time it will definitely not have any cursed pumpkin.

I now I bid thee farewell. I’ll let you have one last look at my vision of Christmas for this year. That vision has been dismantled through my miserable evening, but it was pretty – dare I say beautiful – while it lasted: