The Next Step

First off, a big congratulations to Baird Brewing, in Shizuoka Japan!

Gold medal winner 'Saison Sayuri'

Baird took home no less than three gold medals in the recent World Beer Cup, 'the most prestigious beer competition in the world.' This is the biggest competition in the world, and includes all the major breweries. Our local team took home more gold than almost anybody (even Pabst), and the Saison Sayuri pictured above ('09 bottle) was one of them. Nice work gents and ladies of Baird. You make us all proud. I don't know too much about saisons though. Are they supposed to be that foamy? Well, drinking this all I could think was, "Mmmm, the champagne of beers!" T'is a masterfully crafted beverage, indeed. (Ed: the brew pictured above is actually a 2009 bottle, which has simultaneously clarified and carbonated over the past year. The batch on tap now is much cloudier, sweeter, and with that sweet/sourness that characterizes the Belgian style. I must say that I liked the aged one better, in spite of the increased carbonation.)

So, on to the main topic. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the next step in my brewing career. I've been in quite a quandary.

I have wanted to go into all grain (AG) for a while. On my second batch I did what I thought was steeping specialty grains, but ended up misunderstanding the recipe or something, and added grains that you're supposed to mash (2.5 kg of Maris Otter pale ale malt); I 'steeped' at mash temps for a whole hour--essentially I mashed by accident. Since then I've just gone with that style, even though I know I'm not getting the constant temps that I would with a mash tun (cooler), or keeping close tabs on my  gravity, or getting a grain bed filter to clear up my wort before the boil, or some of the other controls that AG brewers employ to make really nice beer.

I've kept thinking, man, I gotta do it, I gotta do it. And then I make the mental list of stuff I need for AG (cooler to mash in, bigger pot--stainless or aluminum?--tubing and clamps, a grain mill, etc.), and then I remember all the other stuff I want to get like a glass carboy to replace my plastic fermenters (and gotta get a carboy handle, cap, brush to clean it, thing to drain it...), and kegs--my god, kegs!--that's a whole other set of expenses; ah yes, don't forget the expenses. And I start adding up the cost just of the AG stuff, and I think whoa, no way that's all happening at once, so OK what's the most essential, the thing that I can get once and still be using 5 or 10 years on, or just a technique change I can make to improve my beer?

I put some of these nagging questions out to my brew pals, and got a whole slew of different points of view, all valid, all persuasive. The most prevalent opinion seemed to be to do full boils, as opposed to doing partial boil wort concentrate which you then add sterilized water to later to dilute and get up to your target volume. So...that gave me my big decision. I'm getting a bigger pot!

Yaaaay! (Hope all that buildup was worth it.)

The bigger pot plus the 'brew-in-a-bag' method will put me in the intermediate stage towards proper AG brewing, until I can afford the other stuff. That shouldn't take more than a couple of months though. I can say goodbye to extract forever (if I want). My current brew kettle will become my hot liquor tank eventually, for heating up the mash/sparge water. And I'm gonna get both kettles fitted with stainless ball valves which I can connect hoses to, which will mean less lifting and carrying, not to mention risk of oxygenation. I can just transfer the water or wort via the hoses rather than pouring or siphoning.

Next on the list after the mash tun will be a grain mill so I can start ordering my grain in bulk. Uncrushed grain will last a long time, whereas precrushed doesn't; right now I have to do a separate order for every batch and those delivery costs add up. I'll want a false bottom for my brew kettle too, to strain out hops and other break material as the wort goes into the fermenter. It's good for keeping grain bags off the bottom of the kettle too, where they can get holes burned in 'em, as has happened to me already. And let's not forget that plate chiller, sometime waaay down the road--but maybe sooner than I think.

This whole thing stems from my desire to find a way past 'that one taste' that has ended up in my beer every time. I'm pretty sure it's the extract twang that people talk about. To me it's not very twangy, but it is objectionable, even in small amounts, and I'm getting more and more sick of it. Especially as my beer continues to improve in other ways, that one taste really gets to me.

So, I realize this is probably the most boring post ever. But I wanted to write this down anyway, journal style, as a point of reference for the time when I figured out something important about what I wanted out of brewing, and how to go about getting it. A milestone, if you will.

Keep you posted.