Spent Grains

Switching to the all grain brewing process presents a new waste stream in our household. A waste stream of sugarless barley, wheat, oats, and other grains. So far we have come up with 2 great ways to help us reuse this waste stream into something else.

The first and easiest way to reuse our spent grains is to compost them! Leah and I have been composting our kitchen scraps for well over a year now. We had purchased 2 60 gallon pickle barrels from Mt. Olive pickle company for $5 each! That's about 10% the cost of buying them brand new! They still had a bit of pickle smell in them, but a good rinsing, and a week out in the sun made them smell good as new.

Before last week, our compost was aerated about once a week by turning the barrel on its side, and rolling it about the yard. This however failed to mix the compost up properly, and also failed to introduce oxygen to the lower half of the barrel. Oxygen is necessary for composting bacteria (kinda like aerating the wort).

Composter Design

A couple weeks back I designed a tumble style composter that rotated about an axis in the middle of the barrel. You can see the design I created in Delcam Powershape (free for personal use) to the right.

The materials included 38 ft of 2x4s, 12 1/2" bolts, and a 1 1/4" conduit pipe.

Scott and I built the whole thing in less than 5 hours.

The finished product looks and works great! The barrel tumbles with little effort, and mixes anything we add to the it in just a few turns!

The brewing grains we have added to the composter so far have broken down in a matter of days. The bacteria in the compost bin LOVE all the residual sugars in the grains. We've also been adding our trub (sediment and yeast left behind after fermentation) to the composter as well. The yeast and sediment are extremely beneficial to the compost process, and help to break everything down even faster!

Completed Composter!

Grains in the Composter Mix in Perfectly After a Few Turns!

In addition to composting, Leah has taken up baking dog cookies with the spent grains! The grains make a perfect low calorie & high fiber treat for the dogs since most of the carbohydrates from the grains have been removed. When she has perfected her recipe, I'll get her to post it.

Other ideas for recycling grains such as granola, bread, cookies, or tofu burgers can be found from the Seven Bridges Cooperative website. This was the company we purchased our all organic ingrediants from!

All Grain Brewing

Last night Leah and I brewed our first all grain beer! One thing is for certain. All grain brewing is a lot more fun then just brewing extract!! You definitely get a sense of actually creating your beer with all grain rather then just the "beer in a can" method of extract. While both have their pros and cons, I'm happy that we switched.

The Mash

Everything is Ready to Go!

Mashing In

The first step to begin the mash is the heating of the strike & tun preheat water. Instead of trying to preheat the mash tun, add the strike water, and then try to adjust to proper temp, I heated the strike water about 15° warmer then what it should be. The extra heat will then go to preheat the mash tun. Once the strike water has cooled to it's proper temperature (169°), we began the mash in (left). Beersmith, which by far is the most handy tool a brewer could have, calculates my strike temperature for me, by taking into account how much the grain will cool the water to the proper mash temp (154°).

The grain absorbs and cools a large amount of the water in the tun, as we mixed it in. My mash temperature for this recipe is 154°, and the grain cooled my water down to only 156°, so I ended up having to add a bit of cooler water, and then stir it up again to cool it by those last 2 degrees. The mash time for this beer is 60min. The round cooler worked perfectly, and only dropped 1° for the entire mash!

The Sparge

Collecting the First Runnings

After the 60 minute mash is complete, it is time to rinse the grains. The reason you need to rinse the grains is because there are large amounts of residual sugars that are stuck to the grains. If you don't rinse these off, you end up losing them.

The sparge technique we chose is known as "No Mashout, Double Batch Sparge".

From John Palmer's How to Brew, which is the most extensive online resource for home brewers, "Mashout is the term for raising the temperature of the mash to 170°F prior to lautering. This step stops all of the enzyme action (preserving your fermentable sugar profile) and makes the grainbed and wort more fluid." Instead of doing a mashout, we are using hotter then normal sparge water (180°). This will raise our mash temperature and stop our enzyme action, while at the same time saving us a step.

Leah Mixing the Mash/Lauter Tun

A Batch Sparge is a sparge technique where by the brewer will drain all the mash water out of the mash/lauter tun and into the boil kettle. The tun is then filled again with the sparge water, mixed throughly for 5 minutes, then is again drained completely into the kettle. Each time the tun is drained, less and less sugars are being removed, and the runnings are clearer. We will be doing a double batch sparge, which means our tun will batch sparged twice.

Vorlauf

Before each draining of the tun, a brewer will want to do what is called a "Vorlauf". A vorlauf is a fancy German word for recirculating the first few quarts of runnings back into the top of the tun. The grainbed will act as a natural filter when draining the sparge water, however, the first few quarts that exit the tun after mixing will be filled with large amounts of sediment. By collecting this sediment filled wort, and returning it back to the top of the tun, we can use the grainbed to filter this out.

The brewer will need to vorlauf each time the grain bed is disturbed. In our case, we had to do it after collecting the mash water, and then once with each sparge.

Batch Sparging!! (yes I brew barefoot)

There's Something Sexy About a Woman Brewing!

The Boil

Boiling in the Turkey Fryer

Boiling an all grain beer is exactly the same as an extract brew, except for the fact you're boiling a lot more! The burner had a tough time keeping the kettle at a rolling boil with how hard the wind was blowing. We had a preboil volume of 6.5 gallons, and expected a gallon and a half to boil off. However, we only got down to 5.5 gallons. This may leave our beer a little bit weaker then we were expecting. Beersmith had our ABV estimated around 4.8%, however we likely may only reach close to 4.0%. The beer should come out of the primary in a week, so we shall see then.

Just About to Boil!

Earth Day Organic Ale Recipe

So I've come up with the first original recipe to try. Well...Beersmith helped a lot!

9.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain
0.50 lb Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM) Grain
0.75 oz Pallisades [5.00 %] (60 min) Hops 13.9 IBU
1.25 oz Pallisades [5.00 %] (5 min) Hops 4.6 IBU
California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) [Starter] Yeast-Ale

April 22nd is the official brew day! Stay tuned for details!

All Grain

So we've decided to all grain for our next brew! The Earth Day Organic Brown Ale will be our first attempt at an all grain beer. I've just completed my Mash Tun and Hot Liquor Tun. Both were created using 5 gallon igloo drink coolers from Walmart ($21). Eventually I'd like to upgrade these to 10 gallon coolers, but for the next few years, I think I'll keep the batches under 5 gallon, and if I want to do a high gravity brew, I'll just have to use some extract as well.

The New Tuns!

Mash Tun Steel Braid

I will also be purchasing a turkey fryer as my new boil kettle. Ace Hardware online has a great deal on a 30qt Bayou Classic Turkey Fryer . This unfortunately will not be used for turkeys...

Since we will be doing 5 gallon full boils now, we will also need a better method for getting our wort to pitching temp. Here comes the wort chiller!

I still have to look into how I want to sparge though. I can't decide on Fly or Batch sparging, and have to weigh the pros and cons soon.

Everything will be ready by April 22nd!

Prost!

Jeremy

Bottle Tags

We spend a good amount of our time trying to get labels off (We hate Amstel Light bottles). The process is relatively easy...just soak in Oxyclean Free and water for 24 hours, but it's still a pain in the but especially for labels that still won't come off. I like the idea of hanging bottle tags for now. I read about them from a post by Revvy on the HBT Forums. They essentially are a tag that slips around the bottles neck, and under the cap. This way you can still show your beer information, while still saving you loads of time on label application and removal. We hope to have our first tag done by the time the Earth Day Organic Ale becomes ready

Revvy's Hanging Bottle Tags

Prost!

Jeremy

Next on Deck

So I couldn't sleep last night, and as my mind wandered about what gadgets to get next, or what new brews to do. I thought about the size of the All Grain sculpture I'd like to have, and perhaps I could contract Leah's bro Nate out to build it for us! Nate is a savant when it comes to working with his hands. The work he did with our wedding arbor was amazing.

Nate, You Rock!

Amidst my futile dreams of awesome brew equipment, I thought of a new brew to do! I would like to do a Organic Brown Earth Day Ale for April 22, 2009. The recipe hasn't been started yet, but I'm working on it. Ideally I would have started this brew last month so it would be ready for Earth Day, however I didn't think of it until now! So instead we will brew the batch on Earth Day instead. Next year, we'll tweak the recipe to our liking and brew it for Earth Day! When we start coming up with labels, I would like to include some form of helpful tip that the drinker could use to help save the environment on each bottle. This is similar to the bottoms of Mickeys caps. I think this is a good idea, but obviously time will tell. However this definitely reminded me of a quote from Tim.... Peace and Beer Brewing- "Brewing Good Vibes since 2008". (I love this name for a brewery) (Right now it's Tim and my hypothetical business brainchild) :-)

I think I tend to think of names before actually coming up with a recipe to go with them.... I compare this to Duder sometimes coming up with the music before the lyrics. I'm definitely not comparing my feeble attempt at brewing to the amazing skills Duder has, just comparing similar styles. I've thought of a brew name I like. Gunnel Jumper Ale. Gunnel Jumping is the process by which someone who is stranded in a canoe without any paddles can get to shore. He/She stands on the sides of the canoe (gunnels) and jumps up and down without going airborne. This pushes the canoe forward. I've done this before in Boy Scouts, and it's actually quite fun to try! Just make sure you're in deep enough water... This brew name reminds me of the time I spent growing up in the Northwoods in WI.

I've also thought a great name for a brew would be Nuanaarpuq. It's an ancient Inuit word which roughly translates to "Taking Extravagant Pleasure in Being Alive." It's a word that could describe how everyone would like live. When I think of beer, I think of good taste, good friends, and good fun. It combines the grains that Earth gave us with the friends that God gave us with the social interactions we give each other. I definitely would like approval from the Inuit community before using this as a commercial brew name, but if I did, I would want to donate a portion of its profits to environmental protection efforts in Northern Canada.

Prost!


Jeremy

Organic Blueberry Wine

The nice thing about learning to brew your own beer, is that it opens you up to brewing your own wine too! There are obviously some differences, however the basic premise is the same. Sugar + Yeast = Alcohol. So Leah and I decided we would try our hand at becoming vintners.

We just received a package from Midwest Supplies. It included 2 new 1 gallon jugs. We wanted to try some wine, however we didn't want to go the 5 gallon route. So we thought that these could allow us to experiment a little bit more. It look as though our "brew couple" Tim and Kalli, have also purchased some experimentation vessels as well.

We started off with 4 bottles of Full Circle organic blueberry juice. The starting gravity on just the juice was 1.068. We figured that most of that sugar is likely simple sugar, it should ferment nearly all of it, leaving us with a FG close to 1.000. This would leave us with a ABV between 8 and 9%. The achohol tolerance of this yeast was I believe around 14%, so the juice should ferment out completely dry. We rehydrated our Lalvin D47 yeast, and threw it in the vessel with the juice. We figured we would not have to boil the juice because it came sealed in its containers. Low and behold less then 12 hours later. Our airlocks are bubbling away! We hope to eventually arrest the yeast after we've reached our FG, and then sweeten it up. (We both are not a fan of dry wine).

We also racked our Red Ale to its secondary fermenter. The final gravity ended up being 1.012. Unfortunately this is just a point or two higher then our expected FG. Beer Smith gave us our ABV of 4.7%, however the beer tasted quite watered down. Apparently others have seen this with the Brewers Best Red Ale Kit. However, I know we steeped the grains long enough. We shall see. I've read that a lot of times uncarbonated beer can taste quite thin. It has 2 weeks at least in the secondary and then 3 in bottles, so hopefully the flavor will shine through with age.

I've been reading more and more about the Kolsch style ales. Come to find out the proper way to age this beer is pretty much to lager it after the fermentation is complete. This will give you the true flavor of this beer. For our Kolsch though, we've had it in the secondary for over two weeks at room temperature. Since we're already so excited about this beer, we're not going to lager it. Instead, I've ordered the grains and malts, and we are going to try to replicate the beer, however this time, I'll lager it in the new fridge. This way in a few months, we can compare the beers to find out how the flavor changes from the lager. We'll

When we racked the Kolsch out of the primary I did notice a appley sort of flavor at last taste (It tastes like Budweiser). This is usually a sign of acetaldehyde. This will hopefully be converted out to ethanol, and this flavor will mellow out. We shall see though. The Kolsch gets bottled next week.

Also next week, we're going to start a batch of Edwort's Apfelwein. This recipe has produced over 12,000 gallons on the Home Brew Talk Forums, so I have to try it. Everyone raves about it.

Prost!

Jeremy