Maltose Falcons

 It happens to all of us at some time. That beer that you wanted brown is copper instead or maybe your stout is just a shade more brown than black. What's a light in the color brewer to do? Do what the Germans do and make up a homemade batch of Sinamar, which is a Weyermann malt extract product used to adjust color.

Many home brewers don’t have the room or desire to set up a three-tiered brewing system. Here is an easy way to eliminate the top tier—the hot liquor tank.

This tip comes to the Phantom Brewer courtesy of Dave Mathis of BJ’s Brewhouse.

    Many of us use candi sugar in our Belgian style beers, but dissolving it in our boil kettles can be a pain. More often than not, the crystals end up sticking to the bottom of the kettle and require vigorous stirring to fully dissolve and incorporate into the brew.

Kegging is one of those great Hallelujah moments for brewers. Why would I ever go back to bottling now? But while there's only one container to clean and sanitize, its mission critical to get the job done right.

    Here's a simple method that allows you to be sure that your kegs are clean, santized and ready to go whenever you need them. It also has the advantage of using less cleaners and sanitizers and purging your kegs of all that staling oxygen.

    We’ve all had that moment of panic and doubt. You brewed a beer that’s stuck up higher than you’d like. Was the beer just not as fermentable as you’d thought? Maybe you mashed warm, maybe your extract is poorly fermentable or maybe the yeast is in poor health. One important data point to obtain is the brew’s absolute terminal gravity. In professional breweries this information is known for their brews and the way to find it is the classic Forced Ferment Test.

 Those of us who brew big beers and pitch a lot of yeast know all about blow off. That wonderful frothy head that grows way beyond the confines of the carboy and blows through the bubbler and gets all over the place.

     The remedy you say is simple, use a blow off tube: a large plastic tube, one end of which fits and seals directly into the top of the carboy while the other end is put in a jar with some sanitized water in the bottom. This will let all that extra foam and CO2 be released from the carboy and avoids the mess.

 The Phantom Brewer has been quoted in the past saying that Aluminum Foil is duct tape for homebrewers.” This tip comes to us courtesy of Mike Dixon out of North Carolina.

  Thinking of turning an ordinary fridge into a kegerator? It is cheaper and easier than you think. First, find the refrigerator. Ask family and friends if they have an old one. If not, you can find them easily in the Recycler for about $50. The kind with a top freezer work best. Make sure the inside dimensions of the fridge are at least 16” deep and wide and 27” high in case you ever want to put a commercial keg inside.

The Phantom Brewer has seen some brewers in the club use an older technique of keeping a counterflow chiller (CFC) clean by filling the line with sanitizer. TPB has always been deeply troubled by this practice. The copper tubing used in chillers is sensitive to long term acid exposure. Also, many sanitizer solutions become ideal bacterial and mold breeding grounds as they drift from their effective pH range during long storage times. Nope, TPB doesn’t like this one bit.

 Many of us out there are forced by fate to brew on the meager fire of an ordinary kitchen range. Far from the jet-wash inferno of a good Cajun Cooker propane burner, ordinary stoves take forever to boil 5 gallons of liquid, and forget about trying to step up a mash before it goes sour. There are ways around this though.

TPB brings you two tips this month, both to help you get those carboys empty quick by avoiding the glugs. Those pressure equalizing bubbles of air slow down the voiding of liquid. So to speed up the flow, you must provide air to the interior of the carboy.

Something funny seems to happen when brewers get to the boil, they get distracted and disorganized. The Phantom’s seen it happen to many a brew partner and himself, so this month’s tips are some simple techniques to fight the fog of brewing.

Beerstone. No matter how much you much how you squeeze it, you'll never get beer from it. Beerstone, the colloquial term for calcium oxalate and water salts, is the ugly brown coating that grabs hold of the inside of your shiny brewpot. Not only is beerstone unattractive; it affects the performance of your kettle. Remember a clean brewery is a good brewery.

 A good rolling boil is important for a good beer. Lots of good stuff happens during the boil. Volatile, smelly sulfur compounds are expelled from the beer. Other compounds, alpha acids, that bitter our beer are only extracted by boiling. But get too vigorous a boil going, and you'll slop wort all over the place. Instead, try using your marbles.

 Summer time and the beer's flowing freely; or at least it will if you remember this Phantom Brewer's Tip.

  Who likes lifting heavy things? Right, so why lift, when you can simply turn on the gas? In his article on CO2 racking, Falcons' President Drew described how you can use CO2 to move your beer from Carboy to Carboy (or keg to keg). But why stop there? Let CO2 assist you when it comes time to bottle.

    What you need; you probably already have 90% of what you need if you have a CO2 setup:

    If you are a Falcon, odds are you brew often. Odds are even better that when you do brew, you make sure you have enough viable yeast to give your creation the best chance possible. Unless your roommate is the head brewer at BJs, this entails making a starter. And, since you're a Falcon you are going to want to step that starter up once -- possibly twice if you're doing a big lager. That's two to three hours out of your week when you could be with your family/feverishly refining your next recipe. But the Phantom Brewer has a trick for you.

    If you harvest and reuse yeast from your fermenter, you should try cold pitching. This is done by pitching the yeast directly from refrigerated storage, into wort that has been cooled to about 4-5 degrees below the optimal temperature for the yeast strain and beer style. Cold pitching can give you shorter lag times, more vigorous fermentation and more complete attenuation.

The longer you brew, the more technical you tend to get. Immersion chillers? That's for beginners. More and more brewers (especially us gadget crazy Falcons) are opting not just for counterflow devices, but for mini plate style heatexchangers, just like the pros use (only minus all that glycol). Therminators for all! Hydrometers? Get a refractometer. Glass Carboys? I'll take my conical in Stainless Steel, please. And on and on it goes until many of us have a full working small scale brewery sitting in the backyard. And some aren't so small!

The Phantom Brewer outsourced this month:

     Adding Rice Hulls when using a cooler as a mash tun. I pre-heat my tun with hot water so as to have a thermal mass close to zero when adding my strike water. If you are worried about the hulls affecting the amount of strike water needed, you should add them into this pre-heat water. After you drain the pre-heat water, you have pre-soaked hulls and a warm tun.