Gowanus Brewery

Many thanks to the members of the New York City Homebrewers Guild and to Friar Smith for helping to refine this recipe.

Based on their advice, I’m reducing the total amount of Liberty malt and hops, as well as adjusting the hop schedule. It was suggested that these ingredients might be overpowering and I want to ensure that this brew is still recognizable as a wheat ale when all is said and done. Also, Friar Smith made me aware that, at least in his experience, a little honey goes a long way, even at half the volume I intended to use. So, I’m cutting that down as well.

8 lb. Wheat malt
8 lb. American 2-row
2 lb. Flaked wheat
1 lb. American victory
1.5 oz. Newport (13% AA, 60 min.)
1.5 oz. Argentina Cascade (3% AA, 15 min.)
1.5 oz. Argentina Cascade (3% AA, 0 min.)
1 lb. Basswood Honey (boil flameout)

Mash 145-155 degrees Fahrenheit, 120 minutes; boil 90-120 minutes; age six months.

For this beer, I have to use a modified mash schedule. That’s because mash efficiency tends to be lower for higher gravity beers, which requires collecting more wort than usual. High gravity beers also require substantially larger yeast starters that have volumes in the .5 to 1 gallon range and must be figured into your final volume. With those two factors in mind, this is the plan:

1. Collect Water: In the primary kettle, add 6 gallons water and bring to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In second kettle, add 4 gallons of water and bring to 170 degrees.
2. Add Grain and Heat: Add grain to primary kettle, heat to mash temperature of 150 degrees. Hold for 120 minutes.
3. Mashout and First Sparge: Raise temperature to 170 degrees and collect 4 gallons wort.
4. Second Sparge: Add the 4 gallons of water from the second kettle. Collect 4 gallons wort.
5. Boil: Boil 8 gallons wort down to 5 gallons, adding hops and adjuncts at appropriate times.
6. Pitch Yeast: Pitch .5 gallon yeast starter for final target volume 5.5 gallons.

This brew will represent many homebrewing firsts for me. I’m anxiously looking forward to getting started on it.

Friar Smith was kind enough to address a couple of concerns I had regarding our hop garden and to share some general wisdom, based on his own experiences.

On my hop trellis design:

Your first-year hops will not bush-out much at the top, so being 14″ apart at the top is not an issue for now. Next year, you may want to add some type of divider along the top two to three feet of your trellis to keep the plants apart. Be a ruthless pruner: if you are disciplined and keep your bines limited to 3-4 per plant (that’s so hard when healthy ones pop out!), you will keep the bushing-out to a minimum, limit the expansion of the root mound (read: keep the thing contained and under control), and really increase the amount harvested. I usually let the first 7 or 8 bines grow to about 18 inches, then keep the 4 healthiest.

You should consider installing at least one staked guy-wire perpendicular to the orientation of the hangers at the top to safeguard the pole during windy days.

After-planting tips:

The first sprouts should break ground in 21-28 days, depending on weather.

Rather than participate in the clockwise/counter-clockwise debate, consider first the path of the sun relative to each plant. The tip of the plant will follow the sun and wrap in that manner. If you are unsure, wrap the bine in the way it grows naturally. Fighting it is useless, because they will either unwind themselves or start to grow their own way anyway… which is probably best.

Remember, July is mini-skirt month. Once your plant grows 5-7 feet and starts to send out lateral growth (where the cones will set), thin out the foliage on the bottom four feet of each bine so you just see the twine and bine. This will discourage mildew, aphids, and will focus more of the plant’s energy towards the top section and those precious cones.

The two products below probably can be ordered online, and you might find them at a hardware or nursery that sells organic fertilizer. I’ve never seen these at HD or Lowes. They are simply awesome for hops. Two lupulin-covered thumbs up…

Fish emulsion: Mix one tablespoon in a gallon of water. Apply once each week to the base of each plant until you get lots of burrs (around July 1st). This stuff stinks (it’s ground up fish and fish excrement from hatcheries) and is hard to wash off your hands, so wear some kitchen gloves.

Mor-Bloom: Mix at the same ratio, but start weekly applications around July 1st through harvest. Does not stink!

After-harvest tip:

After your harvest, don’t cut the vines down until a week or so before your first heavy frost, which for the east coast, is probably sometime in October. This will encourage further root growth until the ground freezes. Then cut the bines about knee-height and cover them with compost and leaf litter.

Thank you Friar Smith!

Six months from now–when it’s once again dark and dreary–it will be time to indulge in this new brew, the Gowanus Strong Wheat.

You need at least six months aging time for a strong ale, which according to the BJCP guidelines, is “usually the strongest ale offered by a brewery… Normally aged significantly prior to release. Often associated with the winter or holiday season.”

Although I haven’t fully committed to the proportions, the final grain bill will closely resemble the following:

8 lb. American 2-row
8 lb. Wheat malt
2 lb. American victory
2 lb. Flaked wheat
2 lb. Basswood Honey
1 oz. Newport (13% AA, 60 min.)
1 oz. Newport (13% AA, 45 min.)
1 oz. Newport (13% AA, 30 min.)
1 oz. Argentina Cascade (3% AA, 30 min.)
1 oz. Argentina Cascade (3% AA, 15 min.)
1 oz. Argentina Cascade (aroma)

This will (theoretically) produce a wort with a starting gravity near 1.115 and a final alcohol content in the neighborhood of 12%. Because the alcohol content on this style of beer tends to be so high, it’s common to see them referred to as barleywines or barleywine-style ales. Of course, this particular beer would be best described as a wheat wine, owning fully 50% of its total weight to malted and flaked wheat.

This isn’t strictly about big beer and big alcohol. I’m interested in pushing the limits on my technique and equipment and continuing to experiment with wheat beers. It’s also an opportunity to experiment with a new adjunct: honey. I’m adding honey to provide some complexity and to unify the overall beer aroma and flavor, but it will also provide additional fermentables and color. This particular type of honey is supposed create a lingering flavor similar to green ripening fruit.

I’m happy to report that Gowanus Brewery is more efficient than I hoped.

I’m cutting a new recipe from whole cloth, a strong wheat ale, and that requires taking stock of our mash efficiency. Mash efficiency, in short, is a measure of the amount of sugar extracted from grain compared to the total sugar potentially available. This information is useful to predict, among other things, alcohol content. I won’t complicate this post by discussing precisely how mash efficiency is measured, but, simply put, for one pound of malted grain mashed in one gallon of water it is possible to extract a fixed amount of sugar.

With our set-up, I’m extracting 78% of available sugar.

Home brewers typically have a mash efficiency in the ballpark of 75%, so we’re doing fine. I’m surprised because we cut some corners in certain equipment-related decisions we made months ago, but still… we’re ahead of the curve!

UPDATE: I made an apparently classic mistake by using the post-boil specific gravity, rather than the pre-boil. What’s the difference? Well, we have the same amount of sugar at both points, but a different volume and that means a different concentration. Bottom line, I figured 78% and it’s more like 68%. That’s a bummer, but we’re still in the ballpark of 75%. Kind of.

The verdict is finally in on the Gowanus Raspberry Wheat Ale: damn good.

Sunday was our first warm sunny weekend day this season, so I celebrated with a couple hours of yard work and a nice long bike ride down to Brooklyn’s famous Prospect Park. By the time I got back from the bike ride, I was tired, hot, sweaty, and looking for just one thing: an ice-cold, refreshing beer. I found it in the Gowanus Raspberry Wheat Ale.

Just as planned, it’s light, tart, and dry. The wheat and raspberries are present in the aroma and flavor. The mouthfeel is thin but, at least for those bottles that are carbonated well (not all of them are), champagne-like.

A drawback I’m realizing to a beer that is so thin is that, once it warms up and loses that carbonation, it becomes really unappetizing. That’s no big deal, though. This type of beer is at it’s best nearly frozen anyway.

Gowanus Brewery blog is rocking a new masthead for a new season. What do you think?!

Looking at these images reminds me that this blog has actually survived a changing of the seasons. We’ve been brewing and posting for–holy crap–six months. We’ve brewed somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 gallons of beer in that time. The blog has had over 3,700 unique visitors and comprises 58 posts and 80 comments. Our most popular post since day one with 167 unique clicks was Too Late to Dry Hop about my first and only experimentation with dry hopping. My personal favorite is probably the Arrogant Bastard v. Olde Nash!!! post from December where I pit my homebrew clone against its commercial counterpart (you can probably guess who won).

Anyway, here’s to six more months!

These are very basic drawings of the hop trellis I built a few weekends ago. It’s designed to support two hop plants, one on either side. They will grow directly up twine supports, which aren’t pictured, looped over the wrought iron plant hangers I bought at Lowes at the top. The twine will run down to a small roped cleat, also not pictured, attached to the post so I can let down the bines at the end of the summer easily.

These were drawn using Google SketchUp.

There are a few aspects of construction that are not obvious from the drawings. First, the plant hangers sit on the surface of the pole and are secured with two screws, despite appearing to sit in slots in the drawing. Second, I drilled a pocket into the post 1 1/4 inch in diameter (the figure in the drawing is not correct) in such a way that the pole fits snuggly inside it. By the way, the opening in a 2 inch flange is just less than 1 1/4″, so I cut the pole lengthwise like an old-fashioned clothespin to make up the difference. And the whole thing was cemented in place in a hole about 18 to 24 inches deep.

I’m trying to finish our Yeast Starter Method page, so I’m reviewing the various methods used to estimate how many yeast cells there are per unit volume yeast slurry and what volume yeast slurry you need for a given batch of beer and, oye, my head’s already spinning…

Obviously, there are simple rules you can memorize to avoid the headache of recreating the underlying calculations, but it seems worthwhile to go through the exercise at least once. I’m not sure how to organize this information, so I’m just laying out the most important relevant principles here:

Maximum yeast cell densities are not achieved until between 24 and 36 hours after pitching.

Cultures should be used immediately, or refrigerated for up to 1 week before using.

There are about 4.5 billion yeast cells in 1 milliliter of yeast solids (solids with no excess liquid).

Harvested slurry is typically in the 40% to 60% solids range.

For ales with a starting specific gravity below 1.060, pitch 6.0 million cells per milliliter wort. For starting gravities between 1.061 and 1.076, pitch 12.0 million cells per milliliter wort. For starting gravities greater than 1.077, pitch 18.0 million.

Pitch rates when using harvested slurry should be 1.5-2 times the rate of laboratory grade culture.

Most of this information comes from the Wyeast Home Brewing Technical Information Page.

Far too rarely do my favorite hobby publication and favorite hobby collide!

MAKE:Blog covered another impressive computerized home brew system, replete with Java scripting and a steam boiler.

I really want one.

Whipped up this label a few minutes ago and finished bottling the Raspberry Wheat Ale before that.

I haven’t had the free time lately to put more creative energy into my labels, which is why the last few have been so similar: background picture + cool font. It’s boring, but it’s the beer that’s important right!

Anyway, I tasted the raspberry wheat again while bottling and it still tastes very good. Any concern I had over using too few raspberries went out the window tonight. Overall, the beer is dry, light-bodied, and the raspberry flavors stand out pretty well. I think the primary reason halving the amount of raspberries you would typically add worked out so well is that I used an American wheat yeast, which ferments dry and clean. German wheat yeast produces rich flavors like bananas and cloves and would compete with the berries. Of course, I’m still curious how this beer would have tasted with five, or even ten, pounds of raspberries…