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A Beer Brewer Tries Making Wine

I’m going to take a shot at making wine this year. The books I have been reading say to pick good grapes, at the right time, and let nature take its course. I’m not planning on adjusting with sugar or acid, but I will takes notes on the original brix, fermentation length etc.

Getting Grapes:

September-October is grape harvest time. This year is late in Oregon.

Unfortunately for the home wine maker, getting access to good grapes can be a challenge. A local club was ordering grapes from California. I’ve been getting decent results searching craigslist and have a few options lined up. The local home brew stores also have bulletin boards with postings.

If the local grapes don’t come through the other option is to buy a kit. They yield more consistent results, but it is sort of like using malt extract in beer. I have read the aroma is flat from the kit because of the pasteurization process. There can also be a ‘kit flavor’ that some people detect as a flaw. I have grape starts out back and they will be bearing fruit in a few years. I want to get good at the whole process end to end.

Cost Breakdown:

A 6 gallon batch of wine requires approximately 100 pounds of grapes (the range varies pretty widely and that is a conservative estimate).

In the end I hope to get 30 bottles of wine (2.5 cases).

Pinot Noir grapes from a reputable grower off mature vines are running $1.00/pound. With yeast (Assmannshausen), Malolatic yeast (Wyeast), corks, and campden tables, the total for the batch is ~$120. That means I’m looking at $4.00 per bottle – not that economical compared to 2 buck chuck. However, a bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir goes for at least $10 and usually more. It will be 18 months before I know how this panned out.

Extra Equipment Needed:

If you are already brewing beer, there is not much extra equipment to deal with. The grapes will be crushed and de-stemmed at the vineyard. I’m using a 7.5 gallon bucket I already have for the primary fermentor. A fruit/wine press is on the way (I’ll be talking more about this in an upcoming article). The only additional item I needed was a warming device (FermWarp, $40) which wraps around the fermentor and keeps the temperature around 85F where the wine yeast perform optimally.

I already had a corker from a batch of mead I packaged in wine bottles.

More on the subject of wine to come (new category added). Brewer’s Friend has beer at heart and is mostly about beer and will stay that way! Wine is like a cousin, not a muse.

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DIY Project – The Beer Wagon teaser

Ever get tired of lugging a full carboy around? I sure do. I bought some straps that help to lift the carboy, but it is still a chore. I brew in the garage and ferment in a spare bedroom. It is a pretty long way between the two. Then I pull the carboy out and bring it into the kitchen for bottling or racking. To make life easier, I started building a beer wagon.

Whoever invented the wheel was an idiot. Whoever invented the axel was a genius.

Here is a snap of the build so far:

It will handle a 6.5 gallon carboy with ease. All it needs is more railing, the casters, and a few coats of finish. I have a scrap of linoleum for the base so it will be easy to clean and be pretty durable.

I’ll post more pics, dimensions, and examples of it in use when I get it completed.

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The Art of Tasting Beer

Home brew is a thing to be appreciated. Guzzling is not allowed. Sucking through a hose upside down, also not allowed. This applies even to the epic “first batch” which usually tastes good only to the person who made it.

1) Pour

If the beer is coming out of the bottle, make sure to decant it. This does not apply for kegged beer. Bottled home brew almost always has sediment, unless the beer was filtered which is a time consuming expensive process.

To properly pour home brew, hold the beer and the glass at 45 degree angles and slowly let the beer ease into the glass. Do not up end the bottle. Yeast will have settled in the bottom of the bottle and you don’t want that in your glass. FYI – brewer’s yeast can be a natural laxitive. A practiced pourer can stop at the last instant and get all of the beer and none of the sediment. I keep my eye on the neck of the bottle and watch for a dark cloud heading towards the glass. Usually about a ¼” of sediment is left in the bottle. I immediately rinse and scrub out my bottles with a brush kept next to the kitchen sink.

2) Look

The first thing you want to do when drinking beer is to look at it. Note the color, the bubbles, the head. Is it hazy, cyrstal clear, is there junk floating in it?

3) Smell

Before drinking, smell the beer. Deeply inhale with your eyes closed. Do not make yourself light headed. Note the aromatic qualities, which could be fruity, earthy, roasted, etc. Some styles should have certian qualities, for example porters have a roasted quality, some may be ‘nutty’. American pale ale’s might have a citrusy note (from the cascade / centenial hops). While a German lager would have an almost floury smell from the nobel hops. Beers with a high alcohol content > 10-12% will almost burn the nostrels. If it smells like ammonia, week old dung, or goats, look out.

In competitions, judges smell the beer first, then analyze color, head and carbonation.

4) Taste

Take in an average sized mouthful. Keep it in your mouth for a few seconds covering your tongue.  Swallow then wait a bit for the next sip. In tasting there are three things to consider, the initial hit on your tounge, the finish during swallowing, and the after taste, which stays around.

For beginners, contrast an IPA with a pale ale, it should be fairly obvious how the IPA biterness first hits your tougue, how the finish is richer in the IPA, and how the bitter after taste is substantially stronger in the IPA. Another good comparison is betwen Guiness and a micro brew stout, they should be very different, though they are techncially the same style.

5) Mouth Feel

Mouth feel has a lot to do with carbonation, the types of sugars present, and temperature. For example, compare a beer on nitro with a beer on CO2, or a dunkle larger to a stout. The more sugars there are in the beer, the less crisp, and the more creamy it will feel. Nitro makes a beer extremely creamy.

6) Belch

After writing the first five steps, I realize I may come across as a beer snob. That is NOT the case. If it pleases you and your company, belch loudly. Don’t bother analyzing the flavor, unless you are also tasting that spicy burrito you had for dinner for a second time. I belch with a fist pull!

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Beer Glass Cabinet in Brewery

The latest addition to the brewery is a custom beer glass cabinet.  It is made of mahogany and red oak paneling.  I inherited a melamine cabinet from a neighboor friend, face framed it, added panels, added a shelf, and built the doors.  

In total the project was  under $10 out of pocket because the cabinet was free and the wood was from pieces that had been collecting dust in the shop.  All I had to buy was the hinges. The cabinet is positioned above the keezer, such that the keezer can still be opened without interference. It took several measurements in advance to get it just right.

It is convenient to have the beer glasses on hand next to the keezer. This cabinet freed up a considerable amount of shelf space in the kitchen.  It also makes use of dead wall space above the keezer.

For stability, the cabinet is mounted to the wall with a French cleat.  Attached to the cabinet horizontally there is a 45 degree angled piece of wood.  The wall has a companion 45 degree angled piece mounted to the wall.  When the cabinet rests on the cleat, gravity takes care of locking it in place. I also use heavy screws to secure everything. See diagram below:

I may add a wall mount bottle opener to the brewery in the future.

This is one of my favorite beer quotes:

“Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy.” – Benjamin Franklin

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Randall Enamel Test For Even More Hoppiness in Your Beer

In recent years, craft brewers (especially in the Pacific Northwest) have tried to push the envelope on hop flavor in beers, from increasing the aroma and flavor hops to aggressively dry-hopping. For fans of that style, there is one more step that can be taken to add extra hop flavor to beer, and that is using the Randall.

The Randall sits between a pressurized keg of beer and the tap; the cylinder is filled with hops, and the finished beer is forced through the hops before being drawn from the tap. The alcohol in the beer strips the resins from the dried hops; the combination of pressure & alcohol essentially creates a “hop tea” with the beer. The final product has a unique hop flavor & aroma, as well as a distinct mouth-feel. Nicknamed the “Enamel Animal”, the Randall gives the beer a tremendous hop punch, as well as giving an odd sensation on the enamel of one’s teeth.

One charm of the Randall is that any beer can be used with any hop; not only does the Randall expose non-brewers to the role of hops, but home-brewers wanting to learn how a specific hop smells & tastes have no better resource.

The Randall has a few significant drawbacks that make it an exotic item. (I had to make a special appointment with the brewmaster at Hopworks Urban Brewery) As pointed out by Hopworks Brewmaster Christian Ettinger, the hops in the chamber provide a lot of nucleation sites for the dissolved CO2. In non-brewer speak, the beer is incredibly foamy coming off the tap.

As the beer flows through the hops, it compresses them, which means the hoses often can become clogged. And, since the Randall has a fitting to both the tap line and the keg line and runs pressurized beer, extra care needs to be taken in fitting all the components together. Rare is the Randall set-up that doesn’t leak.

Lastly, the hops in the Randall do need to be changed out after a few quarts. Given the price of hops to most home-brewers, unless you’re buying in bulk, or growing your own, it’s a costly treat.

Still, with all these downsides, is it worth it? If you are at this website, the answer is most certainly yes!  If you are a hophead, (if you love the smell & taste of hops), it’s the purest pleasure you can have.

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New Belgium Brewery Tour

I remember when Fat Tire ale came out and how awesome it was. New Belgium Brewing has carved out a respectable niche and I’m really glad I got to visit. It is located in Fort Collins, Colorado, about a hour north of Denver. By the way, the town is nick named ‘Fort Fun’ by the local college students who like to frequent New Belgium and two other local breweries nearby that give free tastings – daily! Essentially if you visit Fort Collins, no need to buy beer, you can get totally loaded for free on high quality brew.

The place is packed all the time (we went there twice). When you walk in get ready for a very youthful, loud, fun atmosphere. Beer everywhere – it is all they serve! You get to choose four 4oz samples from their menu, which explains the different varieties. You only get one shot per day so pick wisely. I was lucky to share with my wife. We both left there in high spirits.

Their lambic style was right in line with barn yard like flavors and ripe fruit. They also had a Belgian golden ale which was delightful, hints of white wine, but a mild bitterness, very refreshing. I was not a fan of the 1554 Ale, it seemed too light in body for such a dark beer. Apparently they used lager yeast on it, but I was searching for malty body and my tongue did not find it.

They also offer guided tours. I took some snaps of the behind the scenes.

Yes, those are cans, New Belgium is packaging in cans these days. Who’d a thunk it??

I sure would love to have a stainless steel canonical fermenter of that size (or any size for that matter)!

I don’t even know what these pipes are for but they look shiny and must be important.

I highly recommend visiting this brewery, it was a lot of fun, I learned a few things, and I got some free beer. Did I mention free beer?…..

By the way, if you want to piss off a Belgian, mix up the grammar. Say ‘wow you are from Belgin‘, man I’ve heard ‘Belgium beer is CrAzy’. As I was writing this post I mixed it up myself several times.

One of the things I learned there, the host/bouncer will “bounce you out of here like a golf ball in a Walmart parking lot” if he doesn’t like you. He felt obliged to let the entire room know this at one point. Thanks for reading!

Click here to read about the Coors tour we took on the same trip.

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Coors brewery tour

My wife and I took vacation recently in Colorado, specifically Fort Collins and Boulder which is about a hour north/north-west of Denver by car. There are several breweries that give tours in that area. One of them happens to be the largest single site brewery in the world, the Miller-Coors brewery in Golden Colorado. Hey, that sounds too good to pass up even if it is swill beer?

Miller-Coors pumps out an astounding 22 million barrels annual. A barrel has 31 gallons, so that is 682 million gallons, or 87.3 billion ounces of beer! It is hard to imagine all that beer. Sadly most of it is keystone light, Coors, and a few others. They have their own freight system which is pretty sweet.

The brewery is built right on the water source. They also own a glass bottle plant nearby. This all factors into why the beer is so inexpensive. The water there is reportedly very good for brewing, comes down out of the Rockies, must be pretty low in overall mineral content.

The tour starts on a bus that drives a few blocks through the town and then drops you off inside the complex. After they check you in, they take your picture. Later they try to sell it to you for $20. Then they give you a hand held device that acts as your tour guide. Like their beer, the tour was tailored for mass production.

Some of the inside of the facility is pretty neat, pictures provided.

They press their grains with these odd contraptions which they don’t explain. I imagine this is how they get an extra few percentage points of efficiency out of the brewing process, which probably amounts to millions of dollars annually.

Towards the end of the tour you get to see one of the packaging lines.

At the end, you can have three free glasses of beer, from about four different types too choose from.  We were not totally impressed and left most of it behind. Granted, we are discriminating beer drinkers. I wouldn’t say we are beer snobs, but our taste for beers has developed with our home brewing skills. One of the most notable flavors in Coors’ banquet beer is the sweetness. It dominates the flavor profile and squelches out any malt or bitterness. In the other styles we noted tannins, sourness, and oxidized flavors!

After the tour and the free beer, finally the best part – the gift shop. We had fun modeling cardboard keystone light and Coors hats made from the boxes the cans come in. They also make Coors Light bikini underwear, but we didn’t pick that up. I did bring home a $1 Miller-Coors plastic mardi gras chalice cup. I collect chalices and other beer glasses, so if figured for $1 what the heck!  It works good for ice cream.

Click here for the New Belgium brewery tour we took on the same trip, up in Fort Collins Colorado. Now that is worth going to. Fort Collins also has two other local breweries that give free tastings and a couple other brew pubs.

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