Justin Dunham

A winning combination of solid beer + solid marketing ("Occam's Razor Ale: If this beer's no good, the simplest explanation is that we're no good")

Action shot!

Note: this is a followup to this post.

Having met with little success in our last homebrewing attempt, my friend David and I tried again, with the goal of having something ready in time for a Wharton homebrewing competition. This time we made several significant changes:

• Brewing a whole batch instead of a half-batch
• Buying bottles and bottlecaps well in advance
• Paying close attention to brew start/end dates

I also noticed a general increase in the level of confidence and understanding of what we were doing – we probably spent only about half the time on this batch. Can any instructions, no matter how good, compensate for developing an intuitive understanding or “feel” for what you are doing?

Though we didn’t win any awards, the beer came out well enough this time that it is actually a pleasure to drink! I also made some snazzy labels to go along with it; we named this batch “Occam’s Razor”, on the basis that if the beer is bad, there are many explanations we could offer but the simplest is that we are incompetent. I made some Guinness-flavored (and also philosophy-themed) marshmallows to go along with the beer, too, which I’ll write an entry about later.

For our next beer, we are considering Nietzsche’s Abyss Stout: “As black as the soul of man.”

Making the wort from "scratch".

Sanitizing bottles with iodophor.

Completed! We are thinking of calling it "Kirin".

Note: This is a followup to this entry.

Shortly after arriving in Philadelphia, I decided to try brewing another batch of beer with a friend of mine. This time, to save on materials and on wasted beer (yes, it happens), we decided to brew a half-batch.

Brewing in Philadelphia gave us a chance to take advantage of Philly’s awesome homebrew beer scene. The people at Home Sweet Homebrew (see also later entry) have always been incredibly helpful, so we went by there to get the ingredients. They apparently don’t like the homebrew “kits” you can get on e.g. Amazon, like say this one, so they sold us the malt extract as well as hops to be used for flavor as well as aroma. Part of making beer is boiling the wort with the hops in it, which brings the flavor and aroma out. Boiling them for longer increases hoppy flavor, since this is provided by resins that take a long time to extract, boiling them for a shorter time increases aroma, since this is provided by oils that evaporate quickly. Anyway, we added “flavoring hops” at the beginning, and then “aroma hops” at the end of the boil.

I’m a slow learner, so despite this being my third time out, I had to consult the instructions a lot. I haven’t found any quality homebrew instructions by the way – many instruction sets contain confusing, or even contradictory, instructions, which is painful for inexperienced brewers. I attribute this to the inability of most instruction writers to understand a novice’s perspective – they take a lot of knowledge for granted, for example, or give instructions that can be interpreted several ways unless you already know how things should be done. I’m working on solving this problem with some other projects I’m working on, too; it’s an important step to helping people try new things.

Though I am finally beginning to develop a more intuitive sense of how the brewing process works, we still brewed somewhat haphazardly and I think this led to a relatively poor final outcome. As one example, I didn’t realize that all the homebrew shops in Philly are closed on Monday, which was our bottling day. So I ended up having to buy beer (Kirin was the cheapest, sadly) so that we could use the bottles. OK, fine. But we were also out of decent bottlecaps; many had rusted. We tried to use only ones that were clean, and of course sanitized them, but I have no idea if that may have been a factor.

Also, we still didn’t have a good grasp on how important the timing of the various beer stages is (e.g. how many days do you have to / can you wait before bottling?), which again may have caused problems.

On the plus side, I finally learned how to use a hydrometer.

A picture, for ambiance.

(Note: this is a followup to this post.)

I wrote my last beer post having just finished bottling a new batch of beer.

After bottling, I waited a few more weeks for sediment in the beer to settle, and for the bacteria in the beer to convert the priming sugar (which I added just before bottling) into carbon dioxide.

Then – it was time to try it out! I’m not sure what to make of the results.

• Most of the beer tasted pretty good, especially for the price ($30 of materials for 24 beers – let’s leave the time part of the calculation out, OK?). It definitely had a good amount of flavor, more than low-quality popular beers, though in general it definitely was not as good as any professionally-brewed beer I’ve tasted.
• It’s not clear how high the alcohol level was! Nobody seemed to get a buzz off it, including me, and I’m pretty sensitive to alcohol. (When I made a batch last year, it definitely had some alcohol, though the flavor wasn’t as good).
• Much of the beer was very well-carbonated. I wonder if I added too much sugar at the end, which perhaps even stopped the fermentation process? (To check: whether yeast prefer to metabolize priming sugar)
• A few of the bottles, despite my concerted efforts, didn’t get capped properly. These bottles usually lost carbonation or had weird sediment in the bottle; though there is very little risk of dangerous contamination with beer, we didn’t open them.
• There was a time lag of a couple weeks between the first couple bottles we tried, and the next ones. The beer seemed to improve somewhat in this time, though it’s not clear if this was instead due to differences in the contents of the particular bottles.

Overall, this was another good learning batch, but I apparently have a way to go before I produce beer with real culinary value. The fact that there were problems with carbonation level and alcohol content – and the fact that the alcohol content seemed to change as the beer aged – suggests to me that I need to develop a better understanding of the fermentation process and wait longer, in general, before bottling.

I also would like to learn how to use a hydrometer, which would give me information about the progress of fermentation, and alcohol content. As things stand now, I tend to just follow the instructions, whereas it is far more reliable to let actual measurements guide any process like this.

Finally, I am going to look into small batch brewing, and whether this is even possible. Rather than spend hours on brewing a massive batch once a year, it would be great if I could brew a batch of 4 – 6 bottles every month or so, to perfect my technique.