Jensen Haus Home Brewing

With the final results back, I did better than I could have possibly hoped in the Granite City Brew Off competition. I placed 3rd in the Fruit Beer category with my Chocolate Raspberry Porter and I placed 3rd in English Brown Ale Category with my English “Mild” Brown Ale. I should get all of my score sheets back in the next week or so. That’s really what I’m looking forward to after this contest. Reading through all the comments will be awesome.

Speaking of beer, I have been enjoying my batches of English Bitter and this years Slammin’ Shandy. I have a batch of Mocktoberfest going currently. Its a pretty big experiment as I’m using “steam” yeast to get lager flavor without the cold fermentation. If it turns out, I hope to brew a large quantity of it for this fall. I also have a basic porter going that will have jalepenos added to it during the secondary fermentation. Yes, a Jalepeno Porter. Tentatively called Fire in Your Hole. Next up on the brew list is to see if I can duplicate the success of my extract version of Dead Dog IPA with an All-Grain batch. I also want to do another batch of Saison this summer. Such an amazing beer.

Hey all, I know you’ve seen me link to Toppling Goliath Brewing and its Proprietor, Clark Lewey. I’m a HUGE fan of what Clark is doing and I want you to go drink his beer the next time you are in Decorah. DO IT. DO IT NOW. I’m headed to Decorah the weekend after Easter and plan to do exactly that (and hopefully bring back a few Growlers of TGBrew for Sioux Falls folks to try).

It was a most glorious event. Sitting in a camp chair in the garage, drinking a tall glass of Jessica’s Red Wench Irish Ale while waiting for the strike water to get hot to brew a batch of beer. Plus, the sun was out and bathing us in a much missed warmth. I always say I like Winter until I feel that bright sunshine on me come Spring. Anyway, with my waxing lyrically aside, it was a great day to drink good beer and brew good beer. JB and I made a highly experimental batch that I’ve dubbed “Black Hops”. Its a “Cascadian Dark Ale” aka a “Black IPA” and at its core in grain bill not unlike an Imperial IPA. I modeled it after the grain bill for Midwest’s Furious clone kit but I added about a half pound of de-bittered black patent malt and its a very dark brown/red color. This sucker is also loaded up with hoppy goodness. With a total of 7oz of hops and an estimated 80IBU, this is for all you hopheads out there. 2oz of Ahntanum Hops at the beginning of the boil and then 1oz of Amarillo at 20mins left, 15mins left, 10mins left, 1/2oz at 5 and 1/2oz at 2mins left. Once the beer goes to the secondary, it will be dry-hopped for two weeks with 2oz of Willamette pellets, 1oz of Tettnang and an oak stick for oaky goodness. I used a Wyeast smackpack of London Ale #1028 and it was bubbling away merrily this morning.

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Well, I think I’ve “hit my stride” so to speak in dialing in my upgraded All-Grain Rig, my water treatments and my cleaning/sanitization. My first batch to come out of my new rig was a Flanders Sour Ale test batch that was honestly really bland BUT it didn’t have that awful nasty flavor that I have been dealing with. I expected it to be bland. My hop additions were very minimal and the yeast was a really bland yeast. It really was a way to prove that I’ve fixed my issues. Last night, I kegged my most recent version of my Romancing the Porter. This time it was a “Milk” chocolate porter that had 4oz of cocoa powder and a pound of lactose added. Tasted great and again didn’t have the nasty flavor so I’m tentatively optimistic that I’ve solved that problem. The real test will be the much “lighter” Saison that I transferred to the secondary last night. Dark, robust beer will some times hide water problems that will show up in paler styles. I think I’m going to bottle the Porter half with Raspberry Extract and half without and then submit it as two different beers to the contest. One a Robust Porter and the Raspberry version as a “Specialty Beer”.

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I had to dump out the full keg of Honey Steam last night. It tasted horrible. I know, *sniff* a sad moment indeed. It was the last batch I made with my old All-Grain rig and my (apparently) disastrous water treatment regiment. My old rig didn’t have a proper sparge arm or a false bottom on the mashtun. I had a bazooka screen and a coiled rubber hose on top to whirlpool the sparge water on top of the grains. Because of the lack of procedural repeatability and what is a really shallow grain bed, I was getting extract efficiencies all over the board. Plus, I had been using Sodium Metabisulfate to clear the chloramine from my tap water and I think that I was overloading with Sodium which as leading to some pretty nasty flavors that I’ve detected in a number of my beers. (more…)

After a long winter here in South Dakota that involved feet of snow and some super cold temps, I’ve finally gotten back around to posting here on my site. Lots of things have happened over the last few months in regards to my brewing setup. Among the more important things is my move/upgrade to an All-Grain setup. I’ll be honest, I’m still trying to work out the kinks and learn the ins and outs of my new setup. I have to say though, I love the amount of control and variations I can create with this setup. Many thanks to Clark with Toppling Goliath Brewing in Decorah for letting me watch an All-Grain brewing session. It really demystified the entire process for me. All that said, I’m in a flurry of brewing right now for multiple reasons. Obviously I want a stockpile of brew on hand for the summer. That said, I also am scrambling to produce beer to enter in to the recently announced Granite City “Brew Off”.  On top of all that, I’m also hoping to take a variety of beer with me to Iowa in April when Jessica and I go to visit my parents. I love having friends family etc sample my brew to get general reactions. I was really hoping to give some samples to the aforementioned Clark with TGB but it sounds like he will be out of town at the Craft Brewers Convention in Chicago. Oh well, I’ll just secret shop his tasting room and drop off some bottles. Anywho, back to work. Check back as I hope I really can be diligent with posting and updating stuff here.

I apologize for the sudden flurry of updates. I’d saved a bunch of posts and forgotten and to publish them. Its been a crazy busy summer so far and I hope I can keep this site better updated.

With the arrival of Summer, it marks the arrival of the “Summer Beer”. Usually brewed with Wheat and assorted citrus flavors, these beers are awesome for hot weather and compliment a BBQ any time. As a Home Brewer, I love this time of year. Summer Beer is one of the easiest and most satisfying of all the things I’ve done as a home brewer. It doesn’t require a lengthy fermentation, its supposed to be cloudy and lends it self to “session” consumption. You and gaggle of fellow beer geeks can sit on camp chairs in the garage on a summer night and drain a 5 gallon keg (Craig, JB, Chris and I did just such a thing). This is exactly what I was hoping for when I tinkered with an extract kit from Midwest. Its called “Bavarian Wheat” and its a very basic recipe. On its own, this batch was pretty unremarkable but once I got done with it, it was amazing. After fermentation, I reconstituted some Minute Maid Lemonade and combined the beer and lemonade in the keg. After carbonating and settling for a few days, this stuff would give Leines Shandy a run for its money. Going to make another batch of this for Nordic Fest.

After 3 years of giving my wife crap about the Kingswood Rummage sales, I pilfered a few sales this year for some Home Brew gear and came out like a thief. Picked up a perfect sized fridge for kegging and promptly turned it in to a keggerator. I bought a Fridge Conversion Kit from Midwest and a two keg kit with a 2 valve regulator and CO2 tank. I should hopefully get some pics up on Flickr soon. At another sale, I picked up a 7.5 gallon turkey fryer pot and propane burner for $40. Its so nice to be able to boil an entire 5 gallons. Its a pain to try and cool the wort down this way though. Think I might have to invest in a wort chiller. This poses a slight issue come winter time as my outdoor water faucet is off limits that time year and I have a weird sink faucet and can’t use the sink adapters.

I’ve learned a valuable lesson in the beer brewing process. Just because you want to transfer the beer from the primary, and a full week has gone by, it doesn’t mean the beer is ready to transfer. I had a continued fermentation in the Secondary over the last two weeks. So, last night I transferred the batch to another carboy to settle for another week. If I make this beer in future, I will be using my 6.5gal carboy to do the primary fermentation so I can see it to make sure its done. I guess I should have expected this with this recipe. Given the addition of 1lb of candi sugar, I’m sure the yeast had a ton more to munch on. I did sample a glass last night though. Despite being flat, it was a tasty brew.