BMW Loves Tebow

Just purchased a new IPA recipe for brew #8 at our local homebrew store. Brewmaster's Warehouse is awesome. Fresh high quality ingredients, good prices and helpful staff. If you aren't in Atlanta area, visit them at http://www.brewmasterswarehouse.com

Brew #2 - Fat Tebow Ale

Tebow's not fat, he's just big-boned!   

We brewed this beer back in October, 2011 and I only have 1 left in my fridge. This was the last extract recipe that we did before switching to partial mash. There were several reasons I decided to call this the Fat Tebow Ale, but none have to do with Tebow's weight. The TD Brewing Fat Tebow Ale was a New Belgium Fat Tire clone. Both are Colorado products - New Belgium is in Fort Collins and Tebow is in Denver. It was our 2nd homebrew and Tebow's 2nd season. It tastes somewhat like the original and Tebow looks somewhat like an NFL quarterback. Both this beer and Tebow are very sweet but some people would say they are full of crap.

This beer isn't really full of crap - it is full of yeast sediment. Everything went normally on brew day. However, we ended up with far more yeast sediment in these bottles than we should have, approximately 1/4". We let the beer ferment in the primary for 3-4 weeks. We didn't cold crash the primary or use a secondary fermenter and we were a little careless (aka tipsy) on bottling day and stirred up a lot of yeast into the bottling bucket. I know many homebrewers have great success not using a secondary, but this was the only time we didn't do it and for our process we have found that we get much better results with 3 weeks primary and 1-2 weeks secondary, depending on the style and gravity of beer.

To drink the yeast, or not drink the yeast? Generally, you do not want to drink the yeast from the bottom of a homebrew bottle. The best practice is to decant - slowly pour the beer into a glass, leaving the yeast sediment stuck on the bottom. If the yeast is looser and not stuck to the bottom, you can see it "catch" at the shoulder of the bottle and then stop pouring. It is fine to drink a little bit of yeast - some people enjoy the added flavor and it contains healthy B vitamins that are said to help reduce the effects of a hangover. But NEVER drink 1/4" of yeast as shown in the photo above. If you're dumb enough to try it (like me) you will regret it a couple hours later as you are racing to the bathroom.

Todd

AHS Fat Tire Amber Ale (New Belgium) (10B) [03567]
Extract: 7 lb Liquid Malt Extract, 1 lb Base Grains, .88 lb Specialty Grains 
Brewvint 1% Alcohol Boost - 55% maltose, 45% glucose
Wyeast American Ale II + Brewvint Yeast Fuel

Cheap and easy homebrew bottle preparation

I've read other homebrewers rant about the difficulty of bottling and rave about the joys of kegging.  I really don't find the bottling process difficult at all and don't have much interest in getting into kegging.  I love the option of being able to give a bottle of my homebrew to a friend or take a 6 pack of it to a party.  Kegs, while easier to fill, are also expensive and cumbersome to deal with. If you are a beginning homebrewer or have struggled with bottling in the past, you should try following this process that has been cheap, easy and highly successful!

Necessary supplies to prepare bottles for a 5 gallon batch of homebrew:

1. (50) Poptop Beer Bottles - You can't use twist offs, but long necks or short necks are fine
2. (3) 5 gallon buckets - $3-4 each at Home Depot.  You could also just use 1 bucket and fill it multiple times but I like to do all 50 bottles at once.
3. Oxiclean (unscented) - I bought the 3.5lb tub Kroger brand for around $7.
4. Scouring Pad - $1
5. Bottle Drainer Tree - Optional but HIGHLY highly recommended, $20.
6. A dishwasher
7. A friend

TOTAL EQUIPMENT COST: $20-$40

STEP 1 - COLLECT 50 POP TOP BEER BOTTLES - How? By drinking beers, of course.  If you are in a hurry to get bottles and don't want to drink 50 beers at once, you could ask friends for their bottles or dumpster dive for them at your local recycling center (gross to me, but people do it.)  You could also buy 50 bottles, but why would you want to pay $.60 for an empty bottle when you can pay $1.20 for a full bottle?  Buy a 12-pack and save the cardboard box.  Rinse the empty bottles.  I always double rinse - fill the bottle 1/3 with water, put my thumb over the opening and shake it vigorously a couple of seconds, empty, and repeat.  When you have consumed and rinsed the entire 12-pack, put the empty bottles back in the original box.  Watch out for some beers that use industrial strength stickers and not paper & glue labels.  For example, Cigar City uses labels that are IMPOSSIBLE to get off.  You should drink the Cigar City, love the Cigar City but recycle the bottles - it's not worth the hassle or time to deal with them.  


STEP 2 - SOAK THE BOTTLES IN OXICLEAN FOR 1-2 DAYS - A standard 5 gallon bucket can hold around 18 bottles.  I have some taller buckets (originally for storing batting practice baseballs) that can hold 24 bottles.  If you want to prep enough bottles at one time you're going to need 2 or 3 buckets.  Put a scoop  of OxyClean in the bucket, fill it about 80% full with warm water, and then start dunking your bottles.  I dunk and then quickly rinse my hands and have never had issues with skin irritation, but you might want to wear rubber gloves.

STEP 3 - SCRUB AND RINSE THE BOTTLES - After a day or two in the Oxiclean, the labels will fall right off.  As you empty the Oxiclean water from the bottle into the sink, scrub it quickly with the scouring pad to remove any glue residue that is left.  There is usually very little and it comes off easily. Keep the trash can handy to throw the labels away - it's best if they don't slip down the garbage disposal, trust me. Double rinse.

Life saver

STEP 4 - DRY BOTTLES ON BOTTLE DRAINER TREE - This is the best $20 a homebrew bottler can spend.  Let the bottles dry overnight (or as long as you want really) to make sure the insides are completely dry.  The nice thing about this model is that it has a handle on top so once you load it up you can easily carry it to another out of the way room.  Once the bottles are dry, I pack them back up in their original boxes until bottling day.  However, if you're not going to need the bottle drainer tree again you could just store the bottles right on the tree.  The only minor glitch here is that this tree holds 45 and you want 48-50 so I just dry the remainder upside down on some paper towel.  (If you don't have a bottle tree yet, you can dry all your bottles upside down on paper towel.)


I will post a follow up next week with our bottling day process after we bottle our next brew.

Todd

Brew #1 Tasting - APA vs. Moe's Backroom Pale Ale

Since I finally got the blog up and running four months after we brewed this, I decided it would be a fitting celebration to drink the final Adrian Peterson Ale (APA) and conduct a basic a taste test.  The APA wasn't a memorable brew, but it was definitely beer and beer is good.  I didn't want to aim too high in my taste test comparison so I went to Kroger and bought a sixer of the Moe's Backroom Pale Ale.  Welcome to Moe's!  It is a decidedly average pale ale - better than a commercial light lager and still falls well short of something like a Sweetwater 420. In the photo, the TD APA is the darker beer on the left and the Moe's is on the right.

I didn't refrigerate this bottle until a few days ago, which means it lost the nice bit of hop taste and aroma that it had back in November/December.  I enjoyed drinking it, but I won't be writing about it like the guys on BeerAdvocate.  It "poured an amber caramel color with a one finger head that dissipated quickly into micro thin lacing that reminds me of my grandmother's favorite negligee..." (I'm not that magniloquent with my beer reviews.)  I know an APA shouldn't be this dark and it had a slight haze so the Moe's has a better appearance. Welcome to Moe's!  But we were novices and didn't create the recipe.  Otherwise, these 2 beers were very similar in smell, aroma, and mouthfeel.  Very average with malty flavors and a little too bitter without much hop presence.  I would rate them both a 2.5/5 in overall drinkability.  If I had to choose which beer to buy, I would buy the TD APA because it was fun to brew and cost $.95/beer compared to the Moe's which was $1.15/beer.  WOOHOO!  I saved 20 cents/beer.  The most important lesson from this first beer was: we made something on our FIRST TRY that tasted significantly better than commercial lager piss and approximately the same as an average ale.

Final score: not a Touchdown brew, but a solid 40 yard field goal. 

Todd

Brew #1 - Adrian Peterson Ale

The Adrian Peterson Ale (APA) was nothing fancy - just a straight forward first beer, just like AD's running style.  (Also the Purple Jesus has been the #1 overall fantasy football draft pick and this was our #1 overall beer.)

TD decided to start out with a simple recipe to test our equipment and processes so we selected the Austin Homebrew Supply Session Series American Pale Ale (10A).  Everything went smoothly and although the beer was not very memorable, I think it accomplished it's purpose and we learned some important first lessons:

1. 'Tis best to strain the hops - For this first brew, we threw the  bittering hops directly into the boil.  After cooling the wort, we dumped everything into the fermenter.  Of course, as I impatiently waited day after excruciating day for my first taste of home brew I was reading message boards and blogs and had that moment of "OH MY GOD we should have strained out the hops."  (RDWHAHB).  Turns out, it wasn't a big deal - the beer turned out just fine for a first effort. However, TD has strained every beer since with better results. (More on this topic in future blogs.)
2. Wait 3 weeks from bottling for first tasting  - AHS advertises this recipe as a session beer that can be ready in 3-4 weeks total.  We had it in primary for 1 week, secondary for 1 week and of course started tasting the bottles way too soon after only 1-2 weeks.  The comforting part was that  we found out that indeed, we had made BEER!  But it had a pungent green, sour apple taste as well as a lot of unfermented priming sugar.  

We let it condition another week or two and it became a very drinkable session pale ale.  Not amazing, but a solid B-/C+ for the style.

AHS Session Series American Pale (10A)
TD Brew Date: 10/01/11
Specialty malts: 1.0 lb total combined of pale chocolate malt, Crystal 20L, Crystal 60L, Carapils® 
Featured hops: Galena (the most widely used commercial bittering hop in the U.S.)
Extract -  Liquid: 6 lb Liquid Malt Extract
Other additives: Malto Dextrin, BrewVint Yeast Fuel, BrewVint Alcohol Boost 
Yeast - Wyeast American Ale 1056


Todd

4 months of homebrewing, day 1 of blogging

TD Brewing is the home brewery of Todd & Dave - neighbors and brewing buddies from Marietta, GA.

• TD Brewing generally brews on weekends while watching our favorite football teams score TD's.  (TD Brewing appreciates double entendres almost as much as double IPA's. )
• TD brews at Dave's house because he has a temperature controlled basement and Todd does not.  
• TD brews in the garage because Dave's wife hates the smell of a good wort boil.  
• TD's mission is 1) learn how to brew some damn delicious beers; 2) drink other excellent beers as we brew; and 3) try not to drink so many other beers that we get drunk and brew beer that sucks.

We officially launched TD Brewing on 10/1/11 and my initial plan was to start the blog at that time, but we were having too much fun brewing.  We also have busy lives outside of making and drinking beer.  In the last quarter of 2011, we brewed and bottled our first 4 beers, so I am going to kick off this blog with a quick recap of those early beers.  We have ramped up production and already brewed 3 more batches in January 2012.  I expect to get things going with a flurry of activity to catch up on the last 4 months, and then it will even out.

Relax. Don't worry. Have a homebrew!
Todd