Brewed At Birth

When I started homebrewing about 10 years ago I didn't think it would become the obsession that it has. I didn't know what good beer was until I was at college and had Newcastle and Pyramid Hefeweizen for the first time. I admit I wasn't a big beer guy before that. It wasn't until I had Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale that really got me into the obsession. I remember getting all different "style" beers by Sierra Nevada to learn the basics of what that style was. I already had a taste for Newcastle and Guinness so after I graduated college, read my HOW TO BREW book, I bought a basic brewing kit and two extract beer kits, a brown ale and a stout.

Now when I started brewing there wasn't the community that there is now, there was some online content but truthfully I wasn't aware of it. Those first two kit beers I made were not good. After that I sort of slowed down and focused on music and my band so homebrewing took a back seat. One random day I found an old bottle of my stout and remember I homebrewed, I tried it and it was an awful, undrinkable mess but I let a family friend try it anyways and he enjoyed it. He would almost drink anything though so I decided to brew another beer at his request. It was going to still be an extract kit, this time though at a newer store with fresh yeast and hops. I brewed up an Oktoberfest beer kit, well actually an Aletoberfest beer because I couldn't lager at the time. That beer turned out great and I really enjoyed it, this beer was brewed for him so I didn't get much of it, but this got me really interested in homebrewing again.

- First Wort Thoughts - 

Two of my favorite beers of all time are Zombie Dust and Gumballhead by 3 Floyds. I really wanted a hop forward, easy drinking, Pale Ale that had characteristics of both those beers. I wanted to go all grain eventually and knew I could make good beer out of extract, so I decided to see if I could design and brew my beer ideas, Brewed at Birth was spawned.  I didn't take great notes then so this is all from my memory.

This was ready to be bottled

Recipe:

Malt:

2-Row Pale Malt Extract - 60%

Amber Malt Extract - 40%

Hops: (I don't really remember the amounts but I did the best guess, I was doing 30, 15 minute hopping then.)

Warrior - First Wort

Amarillo - 30 minute
Citra - 15 minute

Dry Hop:
Citra
Cascade

Yeast:
Wyeast - 1056 - American Ale Yeast

- Brew Day -

Above are about the only notes I have on the brew day, I remember the brew day, it was pretty simple, I remember not having any issues except it took forever to get the wort down to temp (please note this is an ongoing theme with me, not until recently have I had better success.) I did take pictures of the bottling day as I had some help on that day.

Tim - Brother in Law and artist of label filling bottles.

Just transferring into the bottling bucket.

My Buddy Keith's picture of the final beer..

Final Thoughts:

Since I didn't have a proper tasting and all that I'm going to wrap up this beer. This beer turned out pretty well, nice bitterness and it reminded me of Zombie Dust meets Gumballhead which is what I was going for. This beer peaked in the bottle about a month in and then I remember it falling quickly.  Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I was ready to move to all grain.

- First Official Recipe -

A lot changed from that first extract recipe up until this point: I had moved, given all my brewing equipment to a friend, was focusing on moving my career along and didn't have a place nor time to brew. The drive was still there so in that interim time of not brewing, I had been reading and gaining a lot of knowledge on brewing, recipe design, understanding yeast, water, malts, hopping rates etc. I packed years worth of brewing knowledge and trial and error into a short 3/4 year span of reading and keeping up with the "scene". My palate had changed and grown a lot over those years, I knew I didn't want to exactly mimic 3 Floyds but rather find my own voice. I'm a huge fan of easy drinking Pale Ales and I wanted to create a beer that would have the hops shine and be king but I wanted a nice malt back bone. I wasn't patient though and I sort of rushed it...

- First Wort Thoughts -

I changed this up over the years and after an attempt to mimic the extract version to all grain I decided all I really wanted was a Zombie Dust or a Gumballhead. For my version I wanted a soft pillowy mouthfeel, This was before the "NEIPA" craze so I was more thinking of something that would be soft but still had a little bite at the back end. I still wanted a clear, crisp beer, with a strong malt build, something that I could change the hops every time and create something little different as to not get bored. 

Dry Hopping about 3 gallons (DUH)

Recipe:

Beersmith File ||  XML

Malt:

3.5lbs - 2-Row Pale Malt (35.6%)

5lbs - Pilsner Malt (52.6%)

1lbs - Caramel 60L (10%)

Hops:
Amarillo - Single Hopped

Times:
1.50 oz - 20 mintues
.50 oz - 10 mintues
2.00 oz - 5 mintues
4 oz - Dryhop

Yeast:
California V Ale  - #WLP051

- Brew Day -

Playlist: Savatage

Now, this whole idea of writing about my homebrewing experience really starts with this beer and the disaster in a way it was.  Like I had stated before, there was a large gap between when I moved until I was able to brew beer again, so me being me I was impatient and wasn't fully ready. If I would have just waited another month or so I would have had everything I needed. Sometimes when it comes to beer you don't need everything in order to make something delicious. I live on the top floor of my building and had to Mash inside my apartment, then carry down that heavy pot to boil the wort and then bring it back up those stairs to cool the wort down. The full pot was heavy enough, but imagine it being 210 degrees of boiling wort you have to carry up a flight of stairs as well and that wasn't even the difficulty I had with this beer.

Pre-Dryhop Sample

I started my day like any other, I used my stove to heat up my mash water and mashed in no problem. My LHBS (local homebrew shop) didn't have PH meters so I had to buy those strips. They are worthless, don't waste your time. They also only had those cheap thermometers so I had to pick one of those up. I decided to go to a different shop to get my ingredients as I felt the one near me didn't have much and it was an excuse to see what this shop had. It was a little awkward as the guy didn't really say much and usually I'd collect my own grain and mill it myself at the shop. This guys just asked what I needed and collected it all and milled it for me...

I didn't originally plan to add the caramel malt to the mash but was only going to use it to steep it in the boil, as I didn't want that "Midwest" IPA thing. The guy milled it in before I could stop him. Oh well, not the biggest deals, I've used that much and seen that much in the mash before so not the end of the world. I didn't have any salts so I just went with distilled water, my thermometer broke at some point in the day and I'm not too sure when it happened. It took a long time to get the wort down to pitching temp with just using my immersion chiller and groundwater.  As you can see above, unfortunately, I had my numbers wrong in Beersmith so I didn't get the yield I needed. 

Fermentation was sluggish and at times I felt like it wasn't going to finish. This being the first time fermenting in my closet at this location, I had a learning curve. Yeast rules and regardless of my fears the beer fermented out and finished.

Tasting Notes:

This beer was a grapefruit bomb and I'm not surprised by that at all. Despite what it looks like, it wasn't yeasty and was pretty smooth. I did get the mouthfeel I wanted and overall it was enjoyed by me and many others. To me the strongest comparison I could make is Goose Island IPA, which I'm not the biggest fan of that beer, I feel that's the caramel providing that memory to me. Grapefruit dominated the palate, with slight pine at the end but not much. The mouthfeel was spot on though.

- Final Thoughts -

Despite me getting the mouthfeel I wanted, I didn't get the beer I was intending to get. Given all the mistakes and madness I had, this beer turned out good. I'd like to revisit this malt build in the future with kicking back the caramel to more like 5% or something like that. I've updated this recipe..

- Brewed at Birth #2 -

Read below for final results. Final look of beer!

- First Wort Thoughts - 

I wanted to try something new out on this version. I felt that using just one specialty grain would produce something that is too one dimensional for what I'm looking to get out of this beer. Though I commonly use really simple grain bills, this time I wanted to "stack" the specialty malts, using different malts with similar characteristics at low percentages to hopefully balance each other out. My idea is rather than just using one type say Vienna malt and 2-Row, you only get those two characteristics, but with using multiple types, I'm hoping to add some depth to the malt character. Vienna and Honey malt impact both color and help with some malty sweetness. Chit malt and Golden Naked Oats to help build up the body. Golden Naked Oats are said to bring a berry-nut flavor to the beer. Adding with the English yeast and Citra hops, I'm hoping for a smooth, full-bodied, complex beer that gives you something on every aspect of that sip. With only adding small percentages of each, I think I might be on the correct path. I chose to switch to an English yeast strain rather than an American this time to come back to that "3 Floyd's" taste. I believe 3 Floyd's uses an English yeast as their house strain so I'm trying that as well. At this point the beer is completely different, but above is how I got to here.

Recipe:

Beersmith || XML

Malt:

9 lbs (72.3%) - Simpson Golden Promise (2.5 SRM)
2.35 lbs (18.9%) - Vienna Malt (3.5 SRM)
8 oz (4%) - BEST Chit Malt (1.3 SRM)
5.6 oz (2.8%) - Golden Naked Oats (9.1 SRM)
4 oz (2%) - Honey Malt (25 SRM)

Hops:

Citra

Timings:

1 oz - First Wort
2 oz - Steep/Whirlpool 30 Minutes
2oz - Dry Hop

Yeast:

Imperial Yeast: Pub - (A09 Pub)

Water:

Calcium 110.7 ppm || Chloride 127.7 ppm || Magnesium 13.1 ppm || Sulfate  114.0 ppm || S/C 1:1

  - Brew Day -

Playlist: White Moth Black Butterfly

This was the first beer on my double brew day. The night before I prepped everything, cleaned anything I needed and I placed everything in one location, which has always been an issue with me. After figuring out how to time both these beers out, I woke up at 4:45am and was mashed in by 5:15am, on a Saturday! This was a long mash, 75 minutes but only a single infusion making it painless and simple for my system. This allowed me to focus on prepping the next beer. I messed up and mashed in at 157F rather than 154F and my SG numbers were about 5 points off, but I've adjusted my efficiency to fix this. It could have been the higher mash temp which slowed conversion or the fact that I had my losses correct, though with the use of the bag, this allowed me to get more wort out, (I did something dumb) meaning the 5 points could be the dilution rate of adding the calculated losses back in or a little bit of both. It wasn't much and It was just a littler lower, I'm okay with that, I like low ABV beers. I only had a first wort and a Flameout/Steep hop addition so during the boil I was just prepping the next beer and I started to heat the strike water. I started the last step of the mash as I did a hop steep for 30 minutes. After this, I transferred the beer to a fermenter, placed the beer in the chest freezer to get to temp and continued with the second beer.. It was nice and cool in Los Angeles so I had an Ice bath and the windows open to maintain a fermentation temp of about 61-63 degrees. Since it was a double brew day I didn't take a lot of pictures and was just trying to get the beer finished and done correctly. Overall the brew day went great, it was a long day yet it was worth it. I was able to really test my system in terms of how quickly I could brew a beer.




Sunday Morning and the yeast is rocking. Lucky for me it's cool in LA, sort of why I choose to ferment "uncontrolled". I pitched the yeast when the fermenter's thermometer read about 55/57 degrees. The reality is the wort inside probably isn't that and it's reading the water/iced temp. Once the yeast starts to stir that wort up then the reading on the outside of the carboy is probably a little more actuate.






Sunday, January 20th, 2019 - 8th day of fermentation:

Hydrometer reads 1.016 which = 1.010 with my .006 offset. Since I believed it was complete (it was) I threw in 2oz's of Citra hops for the 4/5 day dryhop. I checked after the dryhop - no change, time to bottle.

First reading at 8 days of fermentation

Clean, Sanitize, purge, add beer, fill bottles.

I used the Blichmann beer gun to bottle condition the beer. Adding the sugar solution to the clean and sanitized keg, purged with C02, then transferred the beer into the keg. I then just used co2 to push the beer out of the keg when bottling. I had a little problem due to a leak in the keg, I switched some stuff up and we were back at it. It was really easy and I feel like I could walk away for a few minutes and then come back and continue bottling, something I never did with the bottling bucket. I always was in a rush to fill and limit oxygen exposure.

 

 Tasting Notes:

I had promised to provide some of this for a super bowl party, I also let this beer ferment out and dry hopped a little later into fermentation and let sat for a few days... This means people will taste this at 10 days in the bottle rather than the preferred 14-20 days. I noticed slight changes in the beer as it progressed during the early stages of carbonation:

First bottle : 6 days in the bottle:

Citrus and pineapple notes huge in the aroma, they follow in the flavor. Zero to very faint bite. Mouthfeel is a little oily.

Second bottle: 8 days in the Bottle:

Flavor and Aroma still the same, Bite seems to be there just a hair more and the mouthfeel is no longer oily and has a slight dryness to it. Could a be a bit thin, though have to wait until finished.

Third Bottle: 10 days: Super Bowl

Flavor and aroma the same, still no bite, easy drinker and that "oily" mouthfeel is all gone.

Friends notes were similar to mine, Grapefruit was mention as being present, I believe we're picking up the same thing, I'm just noting it as pineapple, as that's what it reminds me more of (Taste like a pro) Also learn from the man that wrote the book: Ray Daniels

Fourth Bottle: 14 days in the bottle: "Finished/Fully Carbed"

Appearance: Straw to orange hue, slightly hazy due to large Dry hop charge and chill haze. Head pours about an inch and a half to 2 inches but reduces quickly to a fine line.

Aroma: Stone fruit, pineapple(very subtle), cantaloupe and melon notes seem to be the strongest overall. Grain isn't present other than maybe a slight sweetness from the malt that blends nicely with the hops. This could be why I get pineapple rather than grapefruit from the aroma, as I always searching for that malt character.

Flavor: As stated before the hops provide a lot of the flavor. Slight malty sweetness and I do perceive subtle berry notes in the back end but overall they all play with the fruity hop aroma and flavor. I get a strong sweet melon flavor in the front end. The bite is nice and doesn't linger but feels a little thin. As it warms the body becomes a little less thin, it's soft from the yeast and lack of bittering hops. I'm pretty sure this dried out due to the bottle condition. It sort of finishes like a Brut but with a little more body, it's definitely not at the 1.000 mark like a Brut, just what it reminds me of.

- Final Thoughts -

I plan on making this beer again without changing much, this recipe and the results really informed me on the slight changes I can make to achieve what I want out of a beer called Brewed at Birth. I enjoy how this beer came out, I love the drinkability of this beer, the strong hop forward aroma and flavor, without the intense bitterness, this beer ultimately has what I want out of it. I will not bottle condition again though, not until I get a process down for that. In the past, truth be told, I'd rack the beer a little earlier than it should have been, bottle and I'd usually get something not this dry. So when I bottle conditioned in the past, I was more like bottle spunding rather than doing a condition - meaning, the beer still had a point or more to go so it finished in the bottle, both carbing and finishing resulting in a less dry beer. I noticed on a few of my other beers that as I started to let them ferment out, they became drier in the bottle. I have no real want/need to bottle condition, so until I do some experiments, I'll stick to bottling off the keg when sharing is needed. I am curious why the 2nd version above didn't dry out as I did let it ferment out, I have my theories though...

I had a conversation with a friend of mine and I was explaining to him all the issues I had with brewing. I was pretty animated about it and he was like you should start a homebrew blog. My friend naive to the scene didn't know that everyone has a homebrew blog, so to me how could I make it different. Not having many ideas, but wanting to write, I started to just write the Proverbs as a little tongue in cheek thing about the beer scene, as I was doing that I thought about what my friend said and he was on to something. The issues I had with homebrewing were actual lessons and I grew from them. As I started to brew more, I found myself learning from all those mistakes but making new ones or just having dumb missteps along the way. I thought it would be different to talk about the journeys of these beers. These relatively simple beers ideas become journeys nevertheless. When I first started homebrewing sometimes reading or hearing about others mistakes or mishaps sort of put my mind and brewing at ease, because, at the end of the day, it's just homebrew.

I choose this beer specifically to write about first because it draws from my past: I loved craft beer, I enjoyed IPA's and Pale Ales - Zombie Dust and Gumballhead created an obsession. As I grew as a person, craft drinker and brewer so did my taste, wants and ideas. One idea didn't change - A single hopped, always on tap, American Pale that reminds me of home. I've abandoned many beer ideas, recipes, wants throughout my brewing, but this one never did, an no matter how long in between brewing I always stuck with this one. Had I kept brewing this with no growth, it might have been just a clone of Zombie Dust with Amarillo hops included. Had I designed this beer after the haze craze this might have been a NEIPA. Where I started and where I wanted to go stayed true with this beer and if it wasn't for that curve I may have fallen off track of what I ultimately wanted out of Brewed At Birth: An American Pale Ale and pays respect to what really sprung my love of American Pale Ales and IPA's - 3 Floyd's.

Go Brew!