The Sinamar Saga - Part I

As mentioned in a previous blog update, one of my upcoming brews will be of an experimental nature.  I would like to create a black lager, and am modifying a known recipe by adding a liquid malt extract that is designed to darken the beer without changing its taste or any of it's outward chemical properties - alcohol content, bitterness, and color.

The product in question is Sinamar which is made in Germany and is only sold through a very small number of retailers here in the US.  From the manufacturer's website:

"SINAMAR is perfectly suited for coloring foods such as: baked goods, beer, non-alcoholic drinks, spirits, pharmaceutical products and tea etc. Use 1.25 fl.oz. to darken 1bbl of beer or wort by 1° Lovibond. [Note, "bbl" here means "beer barrel", which in the US is 31 gallons]. Unopened containers have a 18 month shelf-life. Once opened, contents should be used immediately and stored cool."

It is sold domestically in 4 oz sealed containers, and one such container is enough Sinamar to for 99.2 gallon-SRMs worth of darkness.  In other words, if I dumped the whole container in 99.2 gallons of beer, it would darken it 1 SRM.  If I dumped it in 1 gallon, it would darken it 99.2 SRM.  For my 2-gallon fermenter, the whole bottle would yield 49.6 SRM - or 12.4 SRM for every ounce.

Okay, I'll knock off the math now.

Anyway, my package arrived today.  But when I opened it, I found that the product had leaked out of the bottle.  I lost about 1/4 of the liquid, which from the photo above you can see made a mess of things.  Worst yet, the reason it leaked was because the bottle wasn't sealed.  So here I have a food additive, unsealed, and likely contaminated.  The manufacturer says it should be stored cool once opened, but the shipping box sat on my 80-degree porch all day while waiting for me to return home.

I've contacted the seller for help, but this particular bottle of Sinamar will not be touching any of my beer.

Watch for Part II when I get a response.  I've never dealt with this seller before, but they do a LOT of home brewing mailorder business - I am certain they'll make it right if given the opportunity.

First Pour of Shaved Amadeus Vienna Lager

Rock Me (again) Amadeus!

The fourth Buzzard's Brew has made its world debut tonight. "Shaved Amadeus" is a light and tasty butterscotch-amber colored Vienna Lager. It makes a nice counter-point to the darker and more dour Irish Stout that popped out of the cavernous Man Cave cellars last week.

This has an alcohol content of only 3.7% and it's color is a 9 using the Standard Reference Method (SRM) which makes it just a little lighter than a Bass Pale Ale.  However, on the International Bitterness Units (IBU) scale it weighs in at a hefty 23, making this the second-most bitter beer I've brewed thus far.  Altogether, this is a Class 4 Lager.

Just to see whether I could do it or not, I snapped a video of the first pour this evening and have just posted it to YouTube.  If I can't figure out how to cross-post it to the blog, here's a direct link:

First Pour of Shaved Amadeus Vienna Lager

On a related note, bottling of BB-VI Farty Monk Belgian Dubbel took place last night.  All 8 quarts are in the conditioning cabinet sitting next to 8 quarts of BB-V New World Czech Pilsner and the 2nd half of the Shaved Amadeus batch.  I'd like to say that I've set back those 4 Pilsner quarts to give them extra conditioning to enhance the flavors by allowing the hops to come forward and generate exciting esters that will, uhh, increase the manifest destiny of the beer enjoyment quotient.... Well, that'd just be a pile of BS, the real reason I kept 4 quarts of BB-IV back is that there wasn't enough room in the cold conditioning unit for the entire batch plus 6 or 7 quarts of Irish Stout.  Extra conditioning won't hurt the beer at all, so if there's no room in the mini-fridge, it can stay in the conditioning cabinet an extra week or two.

Logo Update

The original "company" logo I created a couple of weeks ago was based on an image I found on the Interwebs for the Buzzards Roost Seafood Restaurant and Grill in Key West, FL.  I cleaned up their artwork a little, and using the simplest editing tool I had available to me (MS Paint) I added a couple of text elements to update it.

Now that I've had a few minutes with a much more proper photo editing tool (MS PhotoDraw) I have done even more cleanup to the original image and have modified the text elements to make them look a little more "snappy".

This is the result. Hope you like it.

For the present, I am going to stick with this logo and use it in conjunction with my byline.... "A family tradition since February, our beers are brewed using only the easiest to find mail-order ingredients and fresh Bloomington tap water."

And On Deck....

As soon as I clear out some of the backlog - which does not means after I go on my next drinking binge - it will be time to get the beer pipeline up and running again.

Right now, I'm drinking an Irish Stout and have a Vienna Lager that will be ready to drink by this time next week.  Then the Czech Pilsner, and after that is the Belgian Dubbel.  Not counting the empty I created on the Stout's debut night, that's ONE THOUSAND OUNCES OF BEER!

Well... 31 quarts is 992 actually ounces, but ONE THOUSAND OUNCES sounds so much more impressive!

At the rate of a pint a night, it will take me two months to burn through everything.  And since it takes a month from start to finish to brew up a drinkable batch, I'm about a month away from needing to get anything started.  So most of what follows is really quite unnecessary, but I just can help it.

The next beer that I'll be making will be a Blonde Ale I'm calling Nimblejack.  Nothing special here, just a standard Mr. Beer Blonde Ale kit.  But while making more complicated dark beers, I like to mix things up so that I've got a decent variety of brewskis to drink or share. I try to avoid brewing consecutive similar beers, and since the previous beer (Farty Monk) was a Class 5 Belgian Dubbel, brewing something from the other end of the spectrum should work fine. Stat-wise, it will measure 3.7% ABV, 3 SRM, and 18 IBU, which makes this a Class 1 beer - light and nimble.  Hence the name.

Following that will be the Browncoat Ale.  It is based on a stock MRB Pale Ale recipe but will also include the Pale Export UME.  This will add color depth and kick the alcohol up slightly, and will result in a Class 3 Ale - 4.6% ABV, 5 SRM, 22 IBU.  I'm kinda eager to get to this one - I really dig the label.

And to round-out the next three, I will be going off into uncharted territory to try an experimental beer.  I have recently been enjoying Guinness Black Lager and want to see if I can brew something similar.  Based on the success I've had with the Irish Stout, I am more than confident enough to give this a shot.

The recipe starts with the MRB High Country Canadian Draft HME, then adds the Creamy Brown UME and US Goldings hops to create a Class 5 Lager with 5.9% ABV, 28 SRM and 22 IBU.  But what I really want is a 40 SRM Class 6 Lager, so during fermentation I will be adding a liquid malt extract that should darken the beer without affecting flavor, body or clarity.  Essentially, food coloring for beer.

The name of this tenth beer will be "Ten If By Giant Robot", which makes sense only if you didn't sleep through your Revolutionary American History class - the part about the Old North Church in Boston and Paul Revere's ride and how very differently the War For Independence would have gone if the Tories had successfully fielded their giant, church-smashing robots.

Fetch The Comfy Chair!

Happiness is a glass full of tasty beer.

Sadness is an empty bottle.

Thus ends the run of the Comfy Chair.  From the first bottle to the last, this Nut Brown Ale did nothing but get better as more cold conditioning time was invested.  There are a lot of other beers in the queue, but this one is guaranteed to be my first repeat brew.  Look for Comfy Chair 2 to be ready sometime in August - just in time for tailgating!

Embrace The Dark Side

Thought about the Dark Epiphany debut all day.

Worked late.

Made a side trip after work that required I drive around a whole lot of construction.

Stopped at the grocery store.

Walked the dog.

Fed the dog.

Updated my blog about the side trip after work.  :)

Fixed dinner.

Ate dinner.

Cleaned up the kitchen.

Pulled BB-III #1 out of the back of the primary refrigeration unit, grabbed one of my favorite pint glasses, and took a deep breath while I flipped open the lid.

"Ka-phwump!"

Okay, I probably should have expected a pretty powerful blast of pressure as the bottle lid was released.  After all, this was the first recipe I had carbonated in Grolsch glass bottles, and they're not exactly designed to let stuff out accidentally.  But when I cracked the seal and the lid was fairly forcefully shoved out of the way while all the gasses shot out, I was a little worried that I was moments away from having a beer gusher on my hands.  So while I immediately moved to the sink with the bottle, I completely neglected to enjoy the wonderful beer/yeast aroma that had just filled my kitchen.  Oh no, that won't happen again!

First pour (see photo).  Well, it certainly looks good!

Tasting....  <takei> Oh My! </takei>

Fantastic!  Wow. I mean..... Wow! If not for the absence of a waterfall just after pouring and a slightly "softer" aftertaste than the commercial product, I would not be able to tell you that I was not drinking a Guinness. And I've got TWO GALLONS!!!!

Good thing it's a work night. I'd hate to have to count my servings in "dog beers" this evening.

He Shoots, He Scores!

Today on SlickDeals.net I saw that someone had spotted the full Mr. Beer Premium Brewing Kit at their local Sears as a clearance item for 50% off.  This is the exact same kit I purchased months ago and contains everything you need to get started except (a) water, (b) a stovetop, (c) a spoon, and (d) a refrigerator.

Interestingly enough, though I don't need another kit - after all I have already purchased two and have a third fermentation keg now for the long-term Christmas Stout brew - my son had indicated that he might want to get a kit for my ex- as a Mother's Day or Birthday gift down the road.

I went online to Sears.com to see if my local Bloomington store had any in stock.  Yup, they sure did.  The only thing was that online it was showing as $44.99.  There was no guarantee that the deal I saw was going on at all Sears stores nationwide or if it was only at the one store that the poster had visited.  Oh, what the heck, it's only another 10 minutes tacked-on to my 40-minute commute.....

Yes.  My store not only had four of them, but they were also on clearance for the same $25 price.

I bought two.

The kits include a fermentation keg (normally $15 online, though MRB has them on sale right now for $10), a standard refill kit (West Coast Pale Ale + Booster + Yeast + Cleanser, $16 online), 8 one-liter PET bottles ($14 online), plus instructions.  Heck, the bottles and the refill alone are well worth the $25 price of admission, so getting a spare fermenter (which makes my 4th) in the deal makes this a no-brainer.  Having extra bottles on hand will be nice in case I decide to give some beer away to a friend or take some to a tailgate - while I'd certainly like the bottle back it wouldn't cramp my style if I lost it.  And considering that the only real risk to using the PET bottles and fermenter during the brewing cycle is the unsavory side-effects that can happen if any of the surfaces that come in contact with the beer get scratched (hello bacteria!), having extras around just cannot hurt one bit!

As far as the 2nd kit goes - well, I can talk to my ex- discreetly to see whether she'd be interested in it as a gift.  If not (which I suspect) I can hang on to it to give to a "friend-to-be-named-later".  Or, if any of my Bloomington or Dayton peeps want it and have already tried/failed to get a kit on their own, I'm certain we can work something out.

Labels? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Labels!

Yeah, I've spent probably too much time over the past 3-4 weeks obsessing on unimportant things like names for my beers, artwork for labels, and so forth.  But considering that I only get to spend maybe a total of 2 hours interacting with any particular brew during the (typically) month-long process of turning ingredients into something I can drink, the only creative outlet I have ready access to has to do with naming and labeling. So, let me share a few things I've learned along the way.

First, there are a TON of resources on the Interwebs that can help a fledgling picobrewer such as myself to address naming and labeling.  For starters, there's the Beer Name Generator (yes, that's a hyperlink - click it to open it in a new window).  The names are complicated and convoluted, but if you don't like the one it gives you, just smash the "Generate!" button to get another.  If Manatee-Crackhouse Porter isn't your style, there's always Red Kwanzaa American Light Lager, Frisky Schwartzbier, or even Mothra's Unbefreakinglievable Amber Tribles Altbier.  Do it often enough and soon you'll have ideas in your own head begin to form.  For me, the BNG was responsible for the name I gave to my third beer - Dark Epiphany Irish Stout - the one I'll be drinking at this time tomorrow.  Play with it, I'm sure it'll inspire you as it did me.

So whether you've used the BNG to come up with a name, or have a name already in mind that you really want to see on your beer, how do you take the next step if you're not artistically inclined?  Believe it or not, there are pages that can help you generate labels on the fly.  Here are a few of them:

Beer Labelizer - This site offers 12 basic label templates, each in 3 different colors, that can be customized easily with your own text and in a few cases graphics.  3 of the templates are available at no cost whatsoever, and for a small $5 donation you can use all of the templates with impunity.  Printing and/or saving your labels as high-quality Jpegs are both supported.  Nearly all of my first six beers, and many of the others, all sport labels designed at Beer Labelizer.  (The author - Andy Biggs - also has a sister site for printing labels for jars of jam - Jam Labelizer.  There are 5 basic designs, again in 3 colors each, but alas your Beer Labelizer membership does not carry over - it's another 5 bucks if you want to use everything.  Still, the two templates that are available for free are still nice and simple. If you just want the beer to do the talking, this might be perfect for you.)

Beer Label Builder - Mindbogglingly simple to make text-based beer labels, though not very flexible. The site hopes you'll design a label and then order some via mail order, which of course you're free to do.  Some of the designs, though uncomplicated, are still pretty nice.  It all depends on whether this is your style or not.

Labeley - A java-based tool that you can use to combine several basic elements (shape, color, background texture, foreground graphic, ribbons, text, etc) to make some nice, or some fugly, labels.  You can save up to 5 labels per day and then print them out on your own, or share them with friends.  No fuss, no muss, no cost.

My Own Labels (Beer) - Another "design-and-ship" website.  They give you about two-dozen basic designs, many of which can be modified on-screen, and several that also support uploading your own graphics.  They seem to be geared more toward "event" brewing, wherein you brew up a batch of beer to give out to friends at a party or a wedding, and the on-screen depiction of the "final" label you come up with is of a lower resolution than what you get if you pay them to print and ship a sheet of them to you, but it's fun to play around with and brainstorm ideas for your own use.  And you can do a screencap and then import that into your own graphic software if you want a starting point.

Labels On The Fly (Beer) - Yet another "design-and-ship" site. Their designs are much more simplistic than MOL, but in many ways they're just cleverer or more appealing.  I counted 32 different base designs, each coming in 3 or 4 different sizes/shapes.  That's quite a wide selection of starter labels imo.

These are just the first half-dozen tools I've come across - I am certain there are others.  I've added links to Beer Labelizer and the Name Generator to my link list over in the toolbar.  If you come across one that you like that I've not listed, please let me know.

Movin' Things Around

In anticipation of Dark Ephipany's debut tomorrow night, I transferred one of my eight quarts from the downstairs refrigeration unit (the mini-fridge in the Man Cave) to the primary refrigeration unit (the Sears Kenmore fridge in my kitchen).  I also grabbed the final bottle of Comfy Chair and plan to stare at it for the rest of the week before succumbing to temptation by cracking it open on Thursday or Friday.  I sure am gonna miss that when it's gone, but I will need the bottle within a week when Farty Monk is ready for carbonation.

Both of the Mr Beer kits came with eight quart-sized plastic bottles.  Well, technically the bottles are liters and are made of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), which is perfect for this application since they're recycled/able, are chemically inert, and can be cleaned chemically or with ordinary water (provided you don't let anything dry out and cake).  The only downside is, well, they're plastic.  They're nice platic, and they're hugely practical, but they're just not as aesthetically appealing as a glass bottle would be.  Nevertheless, I have 16 of these, which means I can set back two entire batches in the bottles I have been provided.

During one of my trips to Butler Winery's downtown Bloomington tasting room -slash- beermaking supply store, I splurged and dropped fifty smackers for a case of twelve liter-sized dark amber Grolsch-style bottles.  You know the kind, they have a hard ceramic lid that is held on by a wire mechanism that allows the bottle to be repeatedly resealed after opening. I only needed eight of them for a batch of beer, leaving me with four extras.  So natrually, during Butler's recent sale, I bought another case.  This brings me to a total bottling capacity of 10 gallons - 16 PET bottles and 24 Grolsh glass bottles - which is both liberating and limiting, since it keeps me from going crazy by making more beer than I can bottle and store.

At present, seven of the PET bottles stand empty.  The entire eight-bottle run of Angry Weasel and seven of the PETs that held Comfy Chair have been used and cleaned.  Of those 15, eight were pressed into service this weekend to allow the Czech Pilsner to begin carbonating.  Since Farty Monk will be ready for bottling this coming Sunday, I am going to have to empty out the final bottle of Comfy Chair to ensure nothing gets wasted.  The 24 Grolsch bottles are already accounted for: eight are holding Dark Epiphany, eight more are holding Shaved Amadeus, and the rest are reserved for when I bottle the Christmas Stout on or about June 1st.

An interesting side note: The Pilsner (BB-V) was a very different beer than anything I had brewed/bottled to-date.  Unlike other beer mixes which combine an HME with either powdered Booster or UME, this mix required two HMEs.  When put into the fermenter everything looked great, although the mix inlcudes a large number of hop "flakes" that float in the beer for quite a while before precipitating to the bottom.  Well, when I moved the keg from the fermentation locker to prep it for bottling, I jostled several of those flakes, resulting in the final two bottles getting some in them.  I ended up with a few in #7 and a LOT in #8.  As I always do, I made a small mark on the lid of the final bottle from each batch so I would know which one was most likely to be "unusual", but I am expecting that BB-V #8 will be quite funky when I uncork it.

Quantifying Beer

You may have noticed over in the margin where I've listed the current status of the beers I'm brewing and the planned future brews I aim to make, I have listed stats for each one.  While other brewers will recognize terms like SRM and IBU, not everyone will.  And I'm confident that nobody will know what the "Class" #s mean - mostly because that last part is something I've made up.  So here's a quick rundown of what everything means.

• ABV: Alcohol By Volume.  This is simply a measure of the alcohol percentage of the beer.  The simple kits, those involving only a Hopped Malt Extract (HME) and powdered booster, will all weigh-in at 3.7% ABV.  When you swap booster for an Unhopped Male Extract (UME), you get 4.6% ABV.  Adding other elements like hops or combining booster and UME will also increase the alcohol.  The highest estimated ABV I will be brewing this year is the Christmas Stout which is 6.5%.
• SRM: Standard Reference Method.  This is a measure of the color of the beer.  The lower the number, the lighter the beer.  For those technically inclined, the measurement of SRM involves calculating the attenuation of light of a particular wavelength (430 nm) in passing through 1 cm of the beer.  For comparison purposes, a pale ale has an SRM of 2, Newcastle Brown Ale is a 22, and Guinness is a 40.  Once you get past 40 there's little difference to see - black is black as far as I'm concerned - though Imperial Stouts tip the scales at 70 SRM.
• IBU: International Bitterness Units.  The IBU is based on a scale and measures the perceived bitterness of the beer, which is provided based on the hops used during the brewing process.  The higher the number, the more bitter the beer.
• Class: This is an measure I've invented that combines SRM and IBU into a single number.  The formula is a little complicated, but in rough terms beers with low SRM and IBU will be categorized as a Class 1 beer.  Those with very high SRM and IBU will be Class 6, which is the top end.  Beers in Class 1 and 2 (Blonde Ales, Pilsners, Golden Lagers, Pale Ales and Red Ales made with Booster, and Weizenbier) are light on the palette and aren't expected to be complicated.  Class 3 and 4 beers (Nut Brown Ales, Pale Ales and Red Ales made with UME, Vienna Lagers) are darker and more complicated.  Class 5 and 6 beers (Black Lager, Doppelbock, IPA, Irish Stout, Belgian Dubbel, Imperial Stout) sit up in your glass and bark at you.

The Stout Is (Nearly) Out!

BB-III was transferred from the conditioning cabinet to the refrigeration unit today. First tasting will be in 72 hours. I also brewed the currently-unnamed Christmas Stout this afternoon - it has an Irish Stout base, plus espresso beans and brown sugar, a blend of Williamette and Palisade hops, and a mix of fermentable and unfermentable sugars to that serve to boost the alcohol content. This one will take a long time - won't be ready to drink until after Thanksgiving, but I'm hoping it will be worth it.

Scheduled to bottle the Czech Pilsner (BB-V) tonight or tomorrow. Will have to hold off on making the next batch (BB-VIII - "Nimblejack" Blonde Ale) until I get someone over here to help me drink-up the backlog. Any volunteers? :)

Current status of everything in the pipeline:
BB-I - Angry Weasel Pale Ale - GONE
BB-II - Comfy Chair Nut Brown Ale - 2Q to go
BB-III - Dark Epiphany Irish Stout - 72 hours from being drinkable
BB-IV - Shaved Amadeus Vienna Lager - 1 more week of conditioning
BB-V - New World Czech Pilsner - ready to bottle
BB-VI - Farty Monk Belgian Doppel - 1 more week of fermentation
BB-VII - Unnamed Christmas Stout - 4-6 weeks of fermentation

"10-1/2 gallons of beer in the basement, 10-1/2 gallons of beer..."

Discussion:

• Mark O. : I need to come by
• Me: Be thirsty.  Be very thirsty!
• Mark B. : Address please  :-)

Browncoat Ale Label

Even though I'm jumping ahead a little (the Christmas Stout I'll be making this weekend is BB-VII), here's the prototype artwork for BB-IX. It's patterned after a much more well-known Brown Ale.


Credit for the original design is due to Stephen Sanderson, who modified the Newcastle Brown Ale logo for a t-shirt design - I tweaked it somewhat for my own plagiaristically shiny purposes. :)

Bye Bye Angry Weasel (snif!)

The last glass of the last bottle of my first ever home brew. RIP Angry Weasel Pale Ale. :)