Off Flavors: DMS

I popped open a bottle of batch #11, my all grain wheat recipe from Brewing Classic Styles. I thought this batch was a disaster, at first because I overpitched, then because I thought it overattenuated, and yet again when I thought it was infected.

Things have definitely changed. It is by far the most beautifully pale beer I've ever made. The head is huge and fluffy and lasts forever. Before stirring up the yeast, it was beautifully clear. It looks great in my hefeweizen glass. The flavors are definitely different than my first wheat; my last one tasted very much like banana. This one doesn't taste like banana at all. Instead it has a spicy flavor and something else that is slightly funky that I can't put my finger on.

And one more thing.

It tastes slightly like cooked corn.

Sure, it is subtle. But I'm pretty sure it's there. Cooked corn flavor. I looked over my records, and I only boiled 60 minutes.

Listen up kids, here's the lesson for today.

Always boil any recipe with a significant percentage of pilsner malt for a minimum of 90 minutes!!!

DMS stands for Dimethyl sulfide. It has a pretty low taste threshold and tastes like cooked corn. The more lightly kilned a malt is, the more DMS precursors it has in it. A 60-minute boil is generally enough to drive off all DMS from darker malts like 2-row. Pilsener malt, however, is as light as you can get, and thus produces a ton of DMS when boiled.

What do I mean by 'drive off'? DMS precursors turn into DMS when heated. However, this is counteracted by a 'vigorous' boil. As it is created, the DMS is circulated up to the top of the water and driven off into the air. This only works if you have a rolling boil and you do not cover your pot while you boil. If you ever wondered why all the literature tells you to have an uncovered, rolling boil, now you know. It doesn't have to be leaping up at you, but the water has to be circulating in the pot and evaporating. For a pilsener malt, it takes at least 90 minutes to get all that stuff out of your wort.

Now I have a bunch of corn hefeweizen. Oh well, I'm probably the only one who can taste it. Besides, I boil *all* my beers for 90 minutes now in order to have more water for sparging.

Note: You can supposedly get DMS from cooling to slowly. I cool via ice bath, and have never had a problem with DMS before. Also, some people practice a no-chill method of cooling wherein they leave their wort overnight in a sealed container to cool. I haven't run into DMS from using an ice bath, but be aware that it is *possible* to end up with DMS in your beer if your cooling method is too slow and you use very light malts.

All Grain Recipe: #17 Janet's Brown Ale

Janet's Brown Ale is a hoppy American Brown Ale originally designed by famed home brewer Mike "Tasty" McDole. The story goes that this was a favorite of Mike's late wife, Janet, and he named it for her.

Mike also brewed this for the 2009 GABF ProAm and was invited as a guest brewer to Russian River Brewery in Santa Rosa, where they made a full sized batch of the stuff.

Style-wise, it is somewhere in between an American Brown and a Black IPA. Whether "Black IPA" should even be considered a style is up for debate, as some consider Black IPA to be nothing more than an American IPA with a bit of black patent thrown in. This recipe is definitely too hoppy to be a brown, and too 'roasty' to be an IPA.

I haven't had Russian River's or Mike's version of this recipe, but mine is definitely the best beer I've ever brewed. Flavor is incredibly clean with a light, roasted background flavor. The body is thick but drinkable and the bitterness is high but balances perfectly. Finally, the massive centennial flavor is presented so well here that it has now become my favorite hop. This is the first brew to make me consider 5 gallon batches, and my first beer that I think could win an award.

Below is the recipe scaled to my system, followed by the original recipe from Brewing Classic Styles.

All Grain: Grain Absorbtion

BeerSmith has incorrectly calculated my pre-boil volume for several batches now and I finally decided to figure out why.

Normally, I use the tools in the recipe screen to calculate water volume (i.e. equipment profile). I hunted around and I found the "Water Needed" tool under the Tools section. I plugged in all of my equipment profile data and saw that it was calculating grain absorbtion. Since that was the only place that water could mysteriously disappear, and I hadn't been considering it in the past, I figured that was the place to look.

According to Designing Great Beers, page 64, the amount of water trapped in the spent grain is predictable: 80% water, 20% spent grain. He says that while you can weigh your spent grain, it is safe to assume that the grain weighs 40% of its original weight after mashing and sparging. You then multiply this value by 4, since there is 4 times more water in their than grain.

Let's use a recent batch as an example. I started with 7.03 lbs. of grain. After mashing, it should weight 2.812 lbs, and have absorbed 4 times that amount in water: 11.248 lbs. Water weights 8 lbs. per gallon (also according to Designing Great Beers, page 64), so that means I lost 1.406 gallons, or 5.624 quarts. I then used the BeerSmith "Weight to Volume" tool to find that water weighs 8.35 lbs. per gallon, and confirmed that value with a google search. So the real amount lost to grain is 1.347 gallons or 5.39 quarts. he also has a table that you can refer to (Table 8.1, page 64). When you look up '7' under 'pounds of grain mashed', you get 1.5 gallons, or 6 quarts. This is even more off than the hand calculation, which itself was pretty flawed.

Now let's try BeerSmith's "Water Needed" tool. I plugged in 7.03 lbs of grain and got 3.37 quarts of water lost. According to BeerSmith, they use a static amount of water lost per pound of grain and you can't change it. This is a shame because, as we are about to see, everyone's system loses different amounts of water to grain. BIAB, in particular, loses less water.

What did I actually get in practice? Let's go over my method. I mashed in with 10 quarts of water, lifted the bag out and held it over the pot while it drained. Then I placed it over a bowl on top of a cooling rack to drain while I poured the sweet wort into a bucket. Whatever drained into the bowl (a couple of ounces) gets tossed in too before I stirred and took a gravity reading. I repeated this same thing with both sparge batches. I did not squeeze, poke or otherwise fiddle with the bag.

I started with 20.5 quarts of water. I ended up with 17.75 quarts of water in the kettle. Loss to grains was thus 2.75 quarts: significantly less than either calculation. That means I lost 0.3912 quarts per pound, while BeerSmith assumed I would lose 0.4794 quarts per pound and Mr. Daniels suggested that I would lose a whopping 0.8 quarts per pound.

The lesson here is that you should not assume your system will *ever* produce the same results as someone else's, no matter how predictable they claim the value is. Take recommendations with a grain of salt, use them as a starting point and DO YOUR OWN EXPERIMENTS.

Why is this even important? If you end up with more water in your kettle after mashing, that means you either have to leave some out, thus lowering your efficiency, or boil longer, or end up with more beer with a lower gravity. Boiling longer is the only choice if you want to try and create the same beer you were aiming for, but that can be pretty unpredictable too.

edit: My new calculation of 0.3912 quarts of grain loss per pound worked flawlessly. On the very next batch, I got the exact boil volume predicted, give or take a few ounces measurement error.

Infection False Alarm

I opened a two-week-old bottle of batch #11, my Hefeweizen, only to have it overflow all over the counter!

Yes, my first gusher. A 'gusher' is, as you probably guessed, the term used when your beer is overcarbonated and spills out when uncapped. To be a true gusher, you can't have shaken, dropped or frozen the beer beforehand, and it doesn't really count if it only lasts a couple of seconds. A real gusher will pour out what seems like an endless amount as time slows down and you think about all the beer you're losing.

What the hell went wrong? Carbonation was calculated perfectly. The beer was refrigerated. My sanitation was as good (read: paranoid) as ever.

I recalled that my refractometer measurement had put this beer's FG at 1.006 - pretty damn low, but I figured it was just a super active yeast. Furthermore, the yeast used in this batch was a repitch from a previous batch.

My thoughts went immediately to a gusher infection - wherein wild yeast invades your beer and starts to ferment the stuff that your normal yeast won't ferment. When this happens, your beer continues to ferment down to the point where it is nothing but alcohol and water, continuously producing CO2 until your bottles eventually explode from the pressure.

I started to freak, and assumed that I had gotten wild yeast in my WLP300 when I washed and bottled it. To test my hypothesis, I opened up a bottle of batch #12, the Pliny the Elder clone I brewed with a repitched WLP001: GUSHER.

At this point I'm running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I open one more bottle of pliny and two more bottles of hefeweizen, all gushers. I of course drank them, which left me in a less than clear state of mind. Did you expect me to commit alcohol abuse? I think not.

---

The next day, with a clear head, I start doing some experiments to find the problem. If the infection came from yeast repitching, there shouldn't be an infection in batch #15 or #13, but there would be in #14. If the infection was in the fermentor, it would be in #11 (the hefe), #12 (pliny), #14 and #15 (brewed in the same fermentors as #11 and #12). If it was in the bottling bucket, then #13 would be infection free (and thus have a normal FG) until bottled.

It was then that I discovered that my refractometer readings were off. By a lot. Normally, you can get a gravity reading of fermented wort with a refractometer if you plug it into BeerSmith along with the OG. The problem is that when double checked against a hydrometer reading, the refractometer reading was coming up 1 plato short. Consistently.

Thus it was that I thought my hefeweizen had 88% attenuation and my pliny had 93% attenuation. When I added 1 plato to their FGs and plugged in the numbers, the hefe went down to 75% and the pliny went down to 85% - both normal. Batch #13 also matched the hydrometer's reading perfectly if 1 brix was added.

Note: the refractometer reads OGs perfectly, so I'm not throwing it out. In fact, I may keep using it for FGs if it is consistently off by 1, because I can just add 1 - duh.

So, if the 'infection' didn't cause my beers to overattenuate, why did it cause gushers? Well, apparently it didn't. A pliny I put in the fridge the night before poured perfectly (and tasty, if a little grassy). A hefeweizen I poured several days later after refrigerating for a night also came out very nice (and also the palest beer I've ever managed to make!).

It turns out that because CO2 dissolves better in cold liquids, it is possible to get a gusher simply because you didn't refrigerate your beer long enough. This doesn't explain why my first bottle gushed, but it may have been inadequate mixing in the bottling bucket. I guess I'll never know.

I learned several lessons here - double check your FG with a hydrometer, even if you have a refractometer, refrigerate your beer adequately, make sure your priming sugar is 100% mixed in on bottling day, don't open your beer any earlier than two weeks bottled and RELAX. I learned these lessons the hard way so you don't have to!

All Grain Recipe: #16 Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA

I finally tried Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA and I was floored. It has an incredible hop character, strongly pine-y and resin-y with hints of citrus. It is balanced by just enough malt sweetness to combine with the hops to create a candy-like, vanilla, date, cake sort of flavor. However, it is dry enough to not be cloying. It has a very similar character to Lagunitas Hop Stoopid and Green Flash Imperial IPA, but way drier. Where Hop Stoopid is thick and chewy and Green Flash is sweet to the point of cloying (I could barely finish the bottle), Union Jack manages to hit the same level of complexity without becoming overpoweringly sweet.

I immediately sought out a clone recipe and found that The Brewing Network did an episode of Can You Brew It on Union Jack. Huzzah!

Episode here.

It turns out to be a pretty complicated recipe.

The flavor is primarily tons of Cascade and Centennial in the boil, followed by a whirlpool aroma steep of more Cascade and Centennial, followed by two huge dry hop additions.

The mash is done really low (145) to dry out the beer, but then they use WLP002 English Ale yeast to maintain some residual sugar. Their mash is also a double infusion, where they raise the temp for the last 10-20 minutes to make sure it is fully converted.

Even their fermentation is complicated, requiring that you pitch at a low temperature and keep it there until yeast growth is complete (a day or so), probably to minimize ester production by the english yeast, then raise the temp (but still not too high).

The main thing I learned when making this beer is to always use a hop bag and make sure it is tied off super tight so no hops come out of the top. Holy shit was it a disaster!

The centennial I got from MoreBeer was not fully pulverized. Instead of a thick hop sludge, I had a chunky mass of hop leaves. Some got out because I didn't tie off my hop bag well enough and the hops clogged my siphon. I ended up just dumping the whole pot into the fermentor because I couldn't siphon it all out.

I also had the bright idea of dry hopping without a bag (note: I used a bag for batch #12, my last dry hop experience, and it was fine). I ended up losing close to a gallon of beer due to absorption by the hops and spigot clogging. To avoid losing even more, I ended up pouring from the top of the keg through a sanitized strainer into the bottling bucket. Bottling took forever.

I will never go without a hop bag again. I don't care if you get better extraction, or more flavor, it isn't worth the hassle.

Here's my recipe, immediately followed by the original 6 gallon CYBI recipe.

Water: Chlorine, Chloramine and Chlorophenols, my nemeses

I hate chlorine, and you should too.

Most municipal water is treated with chlorine or chloramine to kill bugs. This helps to guarantee that the stuff that comes out of your tap won't kill you. The problem for brewers is twofold: deadly organisms can't survive in beer anyway, and chlorines can do bad things to the flavor of your beer.

Chlorine isn't so bad. Chlorine is volatile, and will leave your water pretty easily. You can either boil your water to remove it, or you can just let it sit out overnight. Furthermore, you can taste the chlorine in your water; no nasty surprises.

Chloramine is stealthier. You can't taste it or smell it. You won't know it's there unless you read your city's water report. You can only see if it you fill a large, white container with a very large volume of water, and even then it is  a very faint blue-green color that you might not even notice. Even worse, chloramine doesn't dissipate as easily. In fact, that's why cities are using it now: it is more likely to stay in your water, so they can use less and be sure that it keeps killing things all the way to your house. However, this means that it won't come out of your brewing water as easily as chlorine would.

Even if you don't use chlorinated brewing water, chlorine can get in your water if you sanitize with bleach and don't rinse adequately. Don't use bleach, just use a proper no rinse brewing sanitizer like Star-San.

If it is soooo hard to remove, why bother? The problem is that yeast produce special compounds called 'phenols'. Phenols are okay in certain amounts and in certain styles. They give Belgians and Hefeweizens much of their character, for example. Phenols can have a spicy, plastic-y, medicinal or clove-like flavor. You definitely don't want too much of that in most beers, *especially* the medicinal, band-aid like flavor.

The problem is that yeast eat chlorine and chloramine and produce 'chlorophenols'. These phenols have extremely low taste thresholds; you can taste them even if they exist in only a few parts per billion. Your beer will have a difficult to define 'sharp' or chemical flavor, and usually a plastic or band-aid aftertaste, like you just stuck your nose into a first-aid kit. If the amount is low enough, you might only be able to taste it when you burp.

My first batch ever used tap water. I used it as top-off to a Mr. Beer Classic American Blonde kit. After two weeks carbing, the first thing I tasted was green apple (acetaldehyde, generally a sign that you used too much simple sugar in your beer and haven't let it age long enough to compensate). The second thing I tasted was medicine.

I started using spring and distilled water, and the problem went away. Starting with my first all-grain, however, I decided to go back to using tap water. I learned that Campden tablets (sodium metabisulphite) could be added to remove chlorine and chloramine at a rate of 1 tablet per 20 gallons, so I used 1/4 to 1/2 tablet per batch. I did the same thing on all future batches: 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. Then I cracked open batch 8, and had an unpleasant surprise. Yep, medicine burps. My friend swore he couldn't taste it, but there was no sign of the taste in batches 2-7, while batches 8-10 all have it.

Blah blah blah, TLDR, so how do you deal with it? Here are your options, in order of cost:

If you're using chlorine, put all your brewing water in a big container (bottling bucket, mash tun, whatever) and let it sit for a day or two before using it. This does NOT work with chloramine. Cost: None.

Use one campden tablet. Do not bother cutting it in quarters. They say you only need a quarter tablet for 5 gallons, but look how well that turned out for me? There is no harm in using a full tablet, and these things are dirt cheap. Let it sit for at least 5-10 minutes before brewing, or a few hours, or all night like I do. Cost: Pennies.

Buy an activated carbon filter. By all accounts, this thing is the ultimate solution. Activated carbon removes chlorine and chloramine if you run your water through it at a very slow rate, between 2 and 5 minutes per gallon. Start your water flowing at 5 minutes per gallon (experimentation and experience will let you know what that is), set a timer for half an hour or so and come back when it beeps. The guys at MoreBeer use this method on our EBMUD water with good results, and I decided to just go for it instead of worrying constantly about my water. You have to use an activated carbon filter, not a 'brita' or 'pur' filter, and you should NEVER run hot water through it. Cost: $42.95 for the first year, $8.25 for replacement filters every year after that.

Use RO water from your grocery store. I'm sure you've seen the big water vending machine inside or out in front of the grocery store. They usually charge between 30 and 50 cents per gallon and either sell RO (Reverse Osmosis) or 'spring' water. RO water is extremely pure and lacking in minerals, so if you go this route for all grain, make sure you add brewing salts to make up for it. Cost: I use about 8 gallons per batch, and brew a batch per week. If I brew around 45 batches per year and buy my water at 35 cents/gallon at Safeway, that comes out to $126 per year. I also need to buy and store a big plastic jug to carry that water in (two, technically, since they only hold 5 gallons each).

You can also install your own RO system in your kitchen. These are generally expensive, require a lot of setup, and a lot of space for the system itself and the water tank. This is probably cheaper in the long run than bottled water, and is worth it over a carbon filter if your tap water has too many minerals in it or tastes disgusting. I'm not 100% sure if RO removes chloramine.

TLDR: Remove chlorine and chloramine from any water that touches your beer or brewing equipment - that includes sanitation water, just to be safe. Dont' sanitize with bleach. Remove chloramine with 1 campden tablet per 20 gallons or (preferably) an activated carbon filter at a very slow flow rate. I use the MoreBeer filter and a tablet in every batch now. Remove chlorine by letting it sit out a day or two, or any way that works to remove chloramine.

If I can beat this chloramine problem, that's one foe down. All that will be left is temperature control, evaporation rate consistency and fermentation temperature control.

Water: Evaporation Rate Again

I've been having a really tough time getting a consistent post-boil volume on my all-grain batches. My evaporation rate is inconsistent batch to batch despite using the exact same boil time, process and equipment.

For example:

Evaporation test with water: 5.9 quarts in 90 minutes.
Batch #13: 4.1 - 4.2 quarts in 90 minutes, so I ended up with 13.75 quarts instead of 12.
Batch #14: 0.6 quarts in 15 minutes, which is about 3.6 quarts in 90 minutes.
Batch #15: 5.8 - 5.9 quarts in 97 minutes, which is 5.4 - 5.5 quarts in 90 minutes.

All done with the same Winware 5 gallon pot on the same burner of my electric stove, and even adjusted to the same location on the burner within a millimeter of error. Humidity is generally about 55% here, and the temp has been around 72 on every brew day.

The only thing I can think of that is different is boil volume. More water in the pot takes more energy to maintain a vigorous boil. Given the anemic BTUs generated by my stove, the more water there is the less vigorous the boil will be, and thus less evaporation. Let's follow this line of reasoning:

Evaporation test: 18 boil volume, 5.9 loss in 90 minutes (maybe longer, I didn't get a warning when the water hit boiling since my stupid thermometer has an auto-shutoff 'feature'). This also may have included cooling loss, though. Plugging into BeerSmith actually gives 20%/hour, 5.4 quart loss, 0.5 qt cooling loss. Doh! Real result is 18 to 5.4.

Batch #13: 18.5 boil volume, 4.15 loss in 90 minutes. This is an anomaly; it is way too low.

Batch #14: 8.2 boil volume, 3.6 loss in 90 minutes. You'd expect this to be higher, rather than lower, if the 'vigorous boil' hypothesis is correct.

Batch #15: 16.9 boil volume, 5.4 loss in 90 minutes. Consistent with the original evaporation test, but with a lower boil volume.

I'll keep taking samples until I get something that actually works. For my next batch, I'll try 17.5 quart boil volume and an assumption of 5 quarts evaporation in 90 minutes.

edit:
Batch #16: 17.75 boil volume (higher than expected due to less loss to grain than predicted by BeerSmith), 5.64 loss in 90 minutes. Will try 17.9 boil volume next time.

edit:
Batch #17: 17.88 boil volume, 5.85 loss in 90 minutes. Will try 18.2 boil volume next time.