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Saturday I went to the Columbus Brewing Company's Big Brew. CBC mashed a large quantity of wort (using an East India Pale Ale recipe) and gave it away for free to homebrewers that showed up. The homebrewers were encouraged to boil the wort in the CBC parking lot using their own equipment, and a potluck lunch was planned for after the beer-making.

In all, about 40 people showed up. There was a huge assortment of equipment on display, as each homebrewer had a slightly different setup. Some guys used plain stockpots, some guys used dedicated brew kettles with outlets and thermometers, and some guys used converted kegs ("keggles"). Some guys took gravity readings before and after the boil, some guys used spectrometers, and some (like myself) only took a single post-boil reading. I saw several styles of immersion chillers, counterflow chillers, and more.

I followed the hop schedule from the recipe, but lots of guys went off-recipe. I used pellet hops, but others used whole leaf. Some added malto-dextrine, some added other stuff I didn't catch. It was really interesting to see so many different techniques for producing essentially the same result: beer.

Most of the brewers were members of the Scioto, Olentangy and Darby Zymurgists club. I've been on the mailing list for some time, and have learned a lot from simply watching the dialog between more experienced brewers. It was particularly reassuring to me to see so many of these more experienced brewers at the Big Brew doing the same stuff I do. It's not that I think I'm deficient in my brewing -- rather, it's nice to know that these more experienced brewers don't have any specific tricks or techniques unknown to me.

My post-boil beer had an original gravity of 1.072, so it should be a pretty healthy beer. I'm looking forward to kegging and dry hopping it. I don't know if I'll be able to be patient enough to let this condition for the recommended several months before drinking it!

After filling my keg for the first time last year, I swore I'd never bottle beer again. Filling the keg is as simple as siphoning from the fermentation vessel into the sanitized keg. It's one easy process. Carbonating the keg is as simple as connecting the CO2 tank and opening the valve to the desired pressure, then waiting a day or two.

Contrast that with filling bottles. You need to clean and sanitize dozens of bottles. Boil two cups of water and add an amount of sugar to that, then cool it and dump it into the bottling bucket. Siphon the beer into the bottling bucket, then attach the bottling wand onto the bucket's spout. Fill each of the dozens of bottles, and then cap them. Then wait a week or more before natural carbonation completes.

Bottling is a laborious, time intensive process. It's also been a pretty messy one for me, with no small quantity of beer spilled over the sides of the bottles and onto the floor. Cleaning up after bottling takes almost as long as the actual process of bottling itself.

Unfortunately, sharing kegged beer with coworkers and friends can be a little tricky. My friend Adam purchased for me the Blichmann Beer Gun, which allows me to fill bottles from my keg. This is a great option for sharing small quantities of kegged beer; but there are still times when kegging beer is not the best option. For example, I recently brewed a barley wine which is supposed to bottle condition for several months. I don't want to dedicate one of my kegs to this purpose for several months, and I'm not sure I'll want to drink the 5 gallons of barley wine with any regularity, so bottling it makes more sense.

Since I got my first keg, I've bottled just a couple of batches. I've taken steps to make it an easier process, like investing in liter bottles with flip-top (Grolsch-style) caps. I've also acquired a couple of half-gallon growlers. These mean less bottles to sanitize and fill. The avoidance of capping is also a tremendous time saver. But it's still a pain to bottle.

I recently moved into a new house. One of the amenities of this new house is a dishwasher. I've only ever lived in one residence with a dish washer before. That was the first house I bought, in which I lived for only three or four years. I'd read on various "how to brew" discussions that one can use a dishwasher to clean and sanitize bottles prior to filling them. I decided to try this technique with my barley wine, in order to save time.

While researching the process, to ensure I did it right, I found another little time-saving tidbit: fill the bottles over the open door of the dishwasher. Brilliant! Any spillage that occurs would simply land on the dishwasher door, which is supremely easy to clean. Armed with this new knowledge, I approached my bottling task with renewed enthusiasm.

For various reasons, I was unable to actually start the dishwasher to clean and sanitize the bottles until close to midnight. The cycle ran, and finished up much later than I expected. I prepared the priming sugar, and sanitized the bottling bucket, auto-siphon, and bottling wand. I racked the beer from my Better Bottle carboy into the bottling bucket, and placed this above the open dishwasher door. I simply removed one bottle at a time from the dishwasher rack, filled it, placed a cap on top of the bottle (I used regular 12 ounce bottles, not my flip-top liter bottles) and then placed it on the kitchen counter, next to the bottling bucket. I filled and prepared six bottles at a time, then affixed the caps to these bottles with the capper, and placed the bottles in six pack carriers.

The entire process was smooth, save for one brief moment when the bottling wand came off of the bucket's spout. With the spout in the fully open position, beer began to pour out onto the dishwasher door. I closed the spout, firmly reattached the bottling wand, and resumed work. The total amount of beer spilled -- from the opened spout as well as over-filled bottles and drippings -- ended up being negligible. Cleanup was quick, thanks to the dishwasher! I completed the whole process just shy of 3 AM, which was much later than I would have liked, but I really can't complain about the process.

Given the time-saving power of modern technology, I expect I'll bottle more beers in the future.

I entered three of my beers into the Ohio State Fair Homebrew competition. I got the results back last night. While none of my beers won any awards, all three scored reasonably well. The fair's contest used the Beer Judge Certification Program to evaluate and score all entries. Presumably all the judges were certified -- or on their way to being certified -- according to the BJCP. I admire all the people whose palates are sufficiently robust to be able to identify and quantify the different tastes present in a beer: that's not a skill I expect to ever have. Even with the BJCP guidelines in place, though, I think there's simply too much personal opinion involved in beer tasting to make me want to try to compete again.

Each of my beers was judged by three different judges, and each provided his or her own notes about their impressions. The hand-written remarks were extremely hard to read, which I found frustrating. Moreover, the scoring charts were not consistently filled out, so it's hard to compare one judge's impressions of beer against another judge's in any kind of uniform way. The raw point values assigned to each category, and the final cumulative points awarded to my beer, didn't really mean a whole lot to me. I know they're supposed to be the result of a somewhat objective comparison to each specific beer style, but not being very conversant with the BJCP program it was all a bit ambiguous to me. And the ranges assigned to my beers reveals that there's an awful lot of subjectivity from each of the judges.

I didn't expect to win anything with my beers. I entered in the hopes of getting decent feedback about my brewing techniques, to alert me to any significant problems or shortcomings of which I might not be aware. A few remarks provided helpful guidance about fermentation temperatures, but most of the remarks I found to be laughably off-base. Two of the beers I entered were from kit recipes, and not of my own creation. Both of these were dinged for not having enough base maltiness. I was told to increase the grain bill to remedy that problem. I suppose that's a fair complaint, since the recipes didn't include any mention of how closely they fit the BJCP guidelines for the style of beers they were.

The one beer I did enter that was my own recipe was the result of me changing a commercial recipe due to the availability of grains and hops at my local homebrew store. Two of the judges commented on their detection of a grain I didn't use (chocolate). All three judges gave me contradictory suggestions for ways to improve the recipe in the future (more hops, less hops, etc). Clearly what makes a beer good -- as well as what makes it fit the BJCP style -- is a matter of personal opinion.

Despite my disappointment with the relative quality of the feedback, I'm glad I entered the competition. I learned that I don't care to compete when it comes to my beer. The subjective nature of the responses affirmed my previous stance that I I brew for myself. I don't brew to ensure that my creation perfectly fits within the guidelines of some arbitrary standard. I brew because I like to drink beer. I brew because I enjoy the process of brewing. If I like the beer I create, that's more than sufficient for me.

I've recently stepped up to all-grain brewing, which isn't terribly more complicated than extract brewing. Instead of using a prepared mix of grain extract (either powder or goopy liquid), you simply soak crushed grains in hot water, and then boil the resultant run-off. It takes a little longer to do, and it requires a little more equipment (which further increases the time involved to clean and sanitize), but in theory it allows for a little more precision in the brewing process. When using extract, your beer will be whatever the extract was made to produce. When using all-grain, you can control the temperature of the water applied to the grain to vary the resultant beer, if you so desire.

The other big difference between extract and all-grain brewing is the size of the boil you use. Most extract recipes are geared toward about three gallons of boiling water. At the end of the brew process, you add water to bring the final volume up to five gallons. The recipes all account for this intentional dilution. With all-grain, you generally boil a little more than five gallons of wort, expecting to have some boil-off that will reduce your final volume to five gallons.

Of the handful of all-grain batches I'd previously brewed, I always had boil-over: the water boiled up and spilled over the sides of my brew kettle, creating a big mess. The brew kettles I've used are all just a little over five gallons, so I've never really been able to brew correctly according to the all-grain recipes I've tried. My beers have all been adequate, but the effort and headache involved have been inordinately high.

I've been eyeing a number of larger brew kettles lately. My thinking was that if I were to get, say, a fifteen gallon pot I could do a full ten gallon boil, which is basically the equivalent of two of my normal batches of beer. And I could easily do a full five gallon boil without having to worry about boil-over.

Yesterday I brewed a barleywine all-grain recipe, and I borrowed a friend's twenty gallon pot for the boil. While I was able to avoid boil-over, I found the entire brew session to be much more cumbersome than I expected: a twenty gallon pot is simply too big for a five gallon brew. It was overly heavy and awkward to lift. It took a lot longer to reach a boil on my burner, likely because the surface area on the bottom of the pot greatly exceeded that which could be heated by my burner. My immersion chiller worked less efficiently because less of the coils were submerged in the hot wort, which made my delay pitching the yeast a lot longer than I would have liked.

Reflecting on yesterday's experience, I've decided to scale back my purchase to a ten gallon pot. The reality is that I'm not likely to brew a full ten gallon recipe any time soon. The idea that it's an option available to me is a red herring, and not worth pursuing. Simply being able to avoid boil-overs is sufficient for my brewing experience right now.

I found a homebrew recipe for Stone Arrogant Bastard, and thought I'd try my hand at brewing it. I like Stone's beers a lot, and the Arrogant Bastard is probably one of my favorites. To be able to replicate it on my own would be no small personal accomplishment.

I happily took the list of ingredients to Gentiles, my preferred local homebrew supplier. Alas, I was informed by the clerk that their ingredient selection was pretty slim, as there had recently been a larger-than-normal interest in homebrewing. Gentiles didn't have any of the Chinook hops called for in the recipe, only half the required 2 Row Pale Malt, and none of the CaraMunich.

I waffled for a bit whether to throw in the towel, or whether to try to alter the recipe based on what was in stock. After some deliberation, I finally settled on the latter, thinking that this was a good opportunity to learn a little more about the complex interactions of malts, hops, and yeast. Rather than recreating Stone Arrogant Bastard, I would create a beer "in the style of" Stone Arrogant Bastard.

I replaced Chinook hops with Galena, since they're close to the same alpha percentage. I used seven pounds of 2 Row Pale Malt, and six pounds of Pale Ale Malt. In place of the pound of CaraMunich malt, I used a pound of Crystal 40L. I also bumped up the Aromatic Malt to a full two pounds, since that malt was only sold in one pound packages.

I'm sure this will dramatically alter the flavor of the beer, but that's okay. This will be my beer, as opposed to Stone's beer. I'm not sure what to expect, flavor-wise, so this will be a good learning experience. As long as it doesn't completely suck, I'll be happy!

The mash and brew process was largely uneventful. I had a little boilover at the start of my boil, but that was quickly remedied and the remainder of the boil went smoothly.

In a couple of weeks Elevator Brewery will be hosting a "collaborative brew". They supply the wort, and homebrewers bring their gear to brew on-premise. The recipe they're making is Poor Richard's Ale, which looks pretty good. I'm hoping to get in on that.

I still have a German Super Alt fermenting -- I just racked it to the secondary yesterday -- so is looks like I'll have a number of beers going at once here. When these all settle down, I hope to try to brew a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA recipe or a Bell's Two Hearted recipe.