Podcast Brew Day

Brewing the first iteration of this beer with
Grant Wood of Revolver Brewing

This weekend I was very fortunate to have Atypical DFW Podcast's Jason & Caitlin Tyree on staff at New Main as assistant brewers. The weather was pleasant, the house was clean, and the fermentation chamber empty, so I decided to brew my very own batch of Grant Wood's Black IPA. Judging from conversations with Grant, this will be a nice, clean, hop forward beer that looks as great as it tastes.

Unfortunately, Amanda could not brew with me Saturday morning since she was working. I did however wake up before the crack of dawn to send her on her way which forced me to get ready for brew day. After dusting off my full complement of brewing equipment, I kicked the tires and lit the fires.


Not Out of the Woods Yet Black IPA
Substantial Recipe Credit: Grant Wood
5 gal

Malt:
8.5lb Pilsner
1.8lb Munich 10L
0.5 lb Black

Added 1 tsp gypsum & Campden tablet to strike water
Mash at 154F for 90 minutes

Hops:
0.25oz Apollo FWH
1.5oz Saphir 90 min
.13oz Palisade 60 min
1.5oz Saphir 60 min
0.13oz Palisade 45 min
0.5oz Mandarina Bavaria 45 min
.75oz Palisade 5 min
1oz Mandarina Bavaria 5 min

1 tsp Irish Moss @ 15min

Yeast:
White Labs Dry English 007
Ferment @ 64F to 80-90% FG, then ramp up to 70 to finish. Cold crash to 34F & keg.

I went with 007 mainly because I had a Pure Pitch pouch left over from another beer I never got around to brewing. From my experience with mainly stouts, porters, and English ales, 007 finishes pleasantly dry but with a pronounced malt backbone. Yes, I know this is an IPA and the hops should shine through, but I think the maltiness will compliment the citrus and floral notes well. Kind of the bass below the treble.

Each hop charge weighed & measured

I haven't had the chance to brew with any of these hop varieties before, so I'm not quite sure what the finished product will taste like. The Mandarina Bavaria hops are relatively new, being developed in Germany only a few years ago. As the name suggests, these hops impart a sweet citrus flavor akin to tangerines. Saphir is a very mild hop with similar citrus notes and a slight spicy character, making it popular in Belgian ales.

Apollo is a high-alpha variety, meaning it's best suited for imparting bitterness using minimal amounts of hop material. If we had used any towards the end of the boil, it would lend similar citrus character, but with a decidedly more resinous twang. Lastly, Palisade is a variety that has moderate bittering with a fruity-floral quality that I think will pair well with all of the citrus in this beer.

Almost hypnotizing...

The malt bill is deceptively simple with nearly all of the fermentables coming from good ol' fashioned, clean Pilsner malt. A dash of light Munich adds a little toast and grain flavor to liven up the Pilsner. Lastly, we throw in just enough black malt to give this style its signature "black" without making it roasty or burnt-tasting. Contrary to popular belief, black IPAs should not be hoppy porters or stouts. They are first and foremost IPAs, meant to showcase clean or complex hop flavor and aroma. While I love a good roasty porter that wallops you with piney resin, that's just not what this particular style should do. If you want to go that route, substitute the black malt for roast barley and maybe some chocolate malt for classic porter flavor underneath the punch of hops.

I think this will be an interesting beer, and I'm anxious to log tasting notes on this hop profile. When Grant and I brewed the original version of this beer at Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab last month, he brought large Ziploc bags of each of these hops except Palisade for people to smell and compare. When the brew was done, he kindly gifted these bags of hops to me, which was no small gift. Aside from relative rarity of some of these hops, they are one of the most expensive ingredients in beer. I was given about a pound of each! Here's to many more brews with these exciting hops!

As usual, I will keep y'all posted on the progress of this beer. I have a couple more brews planned to harness the sweet citrus qualities of these hops, so stay tuned to discover which lucky batches will be blessed with these fine flowers.

Finally, I want to add a new segment to each blog post to keep everyone apprised of what we have available for consumption. This will help me keep stock of what's fresh, what needs to be replaced soon, and which styles I should explore next. I'll also try to have the recipe for each beer available for any of you playing along at home.

Without further ado, here's what's on tap at New Main:

What's On Tap:

Steel Main - British Dark Mild, 3%ABV (Collaboration w/ Kyle of Steel Rain Beer)
Bernoulli Brown - British Brown Ale, 4.5% ABV
Sassy Jester - American IPA, 5-6% ABV (blend)
Rio Bravo Breakfast Sout - 5.5% ABV (Pro-Am w/ Shannon Brewing Co.)

Conditioning:

Brettlinerweisse, 2-3% ABV - Summer
Vanilla 9*8*7 - Russian Imperial Stout, 8.5% ABV - Soonish
Chipotle 9*8*7 - Russian Imperial Stout, 8.5% ABV - Soonish
Birthday Barleywine - 10.5% ABV - November

New Main & Atypical DFW Podcast on location at Dr. Jeckyll's this Wednesday

The title says it all. This Wednesday evening, Atypical DFW Podcast (of which I am now officially a member) will head to Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab in Pantego for a show dedicated to this hole-in-the-wall homebrew shop, this off-the-wall 40 tap growler bar, this local music venue with great acts that will have you leaving wall-eyed, and a brand new brew kitchen that... has nothing to do with walls.

Owned and operated by daughter Nicole and father Pat Meyers, Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab has been the model of evolution for small business. Aside from its recent success with the addition of the 40-tap craft beer bar and growler fill station, Dr. Jeckyll's has been a staple in the mid-cities homebrewing community since the 90's.

As the local demand shifted, so has the Meyers family business empire, opening Mom's Liquor Cabinet and expanding the homebrew shop to a full service bar and growler fill location. Last year, Dr. Jeckyll's was able to double the overall footprint of the store allowing for a larger stage for local music acts, 3 league ready dart boards, a larger space for homebrewing supplies, and a special brew kitchen for brewing demonstrations each weekend. They will even have movie nights and a back patio beer garden.

Come on out Wednesday night and check out Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab in Pantego. While you're there, make sure to stop by our table and see what our podcast is all about!

Subscribe, Share, and Like Atypical DFW Podcast on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter @TyreeRadio, and our new website atypicaldfwpodcast.podbean.com. As always you can download each FREE podcast episode on iTunes, Spreaker.

Pro-Am Brew Session with Shannon Brewing Co.

We have been very fortunate lately to receive such amazing feedback and encouragement from all of our friends, family, and followers of the blog. I want to begin this post by thanking all of you for making this so much more than a hobby for us. It has evolved into a full-fledged passion, one that has provided endless opportunities in which to continue to learn and enjoy ourselves. For those of you who are interested, our offer stands: let us know what kind of beer you want, and we'll brew up a batch just for you. You can even come and brew it with us!

Thanks to our Best in Show win at Operation Bravo Homebrew Competition and Hero Appreciation Event held at Shannon Brewing last November, we had the privilege to brew our winning recipe with Shannon Carter this past weekend. Our beer was a robust porter called Rio Bravo porter. The first incarnation of this beer was made with roasted Hatch chile peppers. That beer turned out great, so last year we decided to brew the base recipe and see how it turned out. All we planned on at that point was having it on tap in the kegerator for Aggie football season.

When we learned about Operation Bravo, we thought it would be fun to participate. I've already detailed the fine work that Homebrew For Heroes does and how the event went for us, but I have to stress that I had no inkling that our football beer would win the day. In fact, when the judges announced the winners, they claimed my beer was a Dry Irish Stout. This is an easy enough mistake since it is common to group several dark beers (from porters to stouts) together at judges' tables. We're just thankful they liked our beer and gave us this rare opportunity to brew with the big boys.

At dawn... we brew.

We woke up early Saturday morning to make the trek from Arlington to north Keller (when I say trek, I mean the usual commute I make every day - the brewery is half a mile away from my office, which can be tempting). Shannon Carter, Jacob Prosser, and a Shannon Brewing volunteer named Connor greeted us warmly as we began to heat strike water and munched on some donuts and kolaches. We planned to brew about a barrel of the porter with a few minor tweaks so that it would work on their pilot batch system. I have only ever used the Brew in a Bag (BIAB) method of all-grain brewing, with pretty low efficiency and a much smaller collection of tools and equipment than most brewers I know. I would say I like to keep it simple, but the cold hard truth is I'm cheap and the tools and toys I want are not.

Where my equipment profile lacks depth, Shannon's is overflowing with several options for implementing them in brew day. Shannon's pilot batch system is basically the proof of concept prototype for his full-scale 20 barrel fire-brewed system. The system has everything you could want to produce incredibly clean, clear wort ready for yeast to do their thing.

Our mash went through a protein rest phase to work on the flaked oats and then stepped up to saccharification to extract our fermentable sugars. The mash efficiency was so high, we ended up topping the boil kettle off with a little more water in an effort to keep our potential alcohol by volume within reason. It was at this point with beautifully roasty aromas swirling and high gravity in mind that we decided to call this beer a Breakfast Stout rather than a Porter. It even fits with the grain bill given the flaked oats added for mouthfeel and the coffee-like aromas generated by our roast barley.

We proceeded through the boil with minor changes in the hops because my original recipe was created at a time when I needed to use whatever extra hops I had lying around. In this case, my original bittering charge was Fuggles, which does not have near the normal amount of bitterness contribution that other varietals do (about 4-5% alpha acids). Had we gone with the exact hopping schedule, we would have had 2-3 times as much hop material in the boil to try to filter out of the beer during chilling. Smart money said to go with a higher alpha acid hop (more bitterness per ounce) and make brew day a little easier.

For fermentation, Shannon pulled his Blichmann Fermenator out for us to clean, sanitize, and assemble specifically for this batch of beer. Assembly felt like putting a rocket ship together, although after piecing together my first valve, I quickly learned where everything fit together on the vessel. If I ever have a few hundred extra dollars lying around, a Fermenator will be on my wishlist.

We also used a few pieces of equipment I've never really seen in action before. Attached to the pump "station" - for lack of a better word - were a plate chiller and a hop rocket. Plate chillers are souped up versions of other common heat exchangers like immersion or standard counter-flow wort chillers. Cold water is pumped through one side of it while hot wort is pumped through the opposite side to exchange its heat to the water. This totally sanitary process reduces the temperature of the wort MUCH faster than regular wort chillers or an ice bath ever could. We didn't even have to recirculate the out-flowing wort back through the boil kettle.

Also attached to our little station was a device called a hop back. More specifically, this was Blichmann's Hop Rocket (Blichmann Engineering makes all sorts of brewing apparatus and is pretty much the top of the line, with lifetime warranties to boot). Hot wort is pulled through the pump then forced through a mass of fresh Saaz hops in the Hop Rocket to impart an earthy, slightly spicy aroma to the beer without any risk of picking up oxygen while the wort is too hot. At high temperatures, oxygen pickup can lead to something called hot-side aeration, which can produce off flavors in your beer. The Hop Rocket is loaded with fresh whole-cone hops and purged of oxygen by carbon dioxide, so there was no risk of fouling the batch. Once the wort is cooled to pitching temperature, oxygen helps kickstart yeast activity, so Shannon hooked up an oxygenation stone inline to the fermenter. We flipped a switch and transferred the whole batch through the station right into the fermenter.

Getting to brew on such professional equipment with actual brewing professionals was a very fulfilling experience for us. We were able to ask questions, check out equipment we've never really had a chance to use before, and play with measurement devices that go above and beyond the ol' hydrometer floating in wort, all while being in the presence of true craft beer fans. Experiences like these don't come every day (well maybe if you actually work in a brewery they do) and I'm thankful that Amanda and I got to share this one with each other. What it really boils down to is passion. Passion makes excellent beer and even better memories.

I want to once again thank Operation Bravo and Homebrew For Heroes for hosting an awesome event and for allowing me to step further into my passion for homebrewing. I also want to thank Shannon Carter, Jacob Prosser, and Connor for giving up their free Saturday morning to brew with a couple of beer nerds.


We can't wait to taste the Breakfast Stout when it's finished! Y'all can taste it as well in a couple weeks when it hits the Shannon tap room. Once they have it tapped and ready to serve, we'll spread the news like wildfire so you have a chance to taste the small batch we made. I hope you enjoy it at least as much as we enjoyed making it for you.

Til then, Cheers!

If you want to learn a little more about David, here is a one-on-one interview with him on Atypical DFW Podcast (free on iTunes, Android, Spreaker, and any other podcast app you can think of). If you like what you hear, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and like Atypical DFW Podcast on Facebook!