BrewDurham 4 Is Saturday

Durham's biggest, baddest homebrew festival is this Saturday. The latest edition of BrewDurham features 30 brewers and about 70 beers, several of which are paired with food from some of the city's best restaurants.

Why should you go?

To taste just how deep the brewing talent is in this town. 

To experience a beer festival without suffering through the massive, sweaty, drunken throngs that threaten to swallow some of the bigger festivals. BrewDurham is held on a repurposed train platform at Golden Belt, which provides a decent amount of breathing room for brewers and tasters.

Those food pairings. We're talking Mateo, Toast, Dos Perros, and other local heavy hitters. Check out the list here.

To support The Scrap Exchange, a fantastic reuse center that's been a part of Durham for two decades.

BrewDurham 3 was our first ever public pouring, and we really enjoyed it---so much so that we're bringing five beers to share this time. If you join us Saturday, you'll get to try the robust porter we brewed with our friend Andrew and split across four yeast strains (we're bringing all four), as well as a cask-conditioned IPA brewed with Mosaic, Nelson Sauvin, Columbus, and Simcoe hops. And yes, Lara made gorgeous labels. Look for us under this banner:

Head here to buy tickets. BrewDurham features two tasting sessions: 1-3 pm and 4-8 pm. A session will run you $35, and a designated driver can attend for $15. I hope you join us. It's gonna be damn fun.

Brew Day: Oak-Smoked Rye Saison

Maybe it doesn’t matter how many carboys you explode or wort chillers malfunction if the end result is a tasty beverage. This is what i’m telling myself today.

This brew, an amber rye saison with oak-smoked wheat, is the second of two beers we’ll be pouring next month at Brew Durham 3. I’m wary of smoked beers. Far too often, smoked malt dominates and completely overwhelms every other component in the glass. Instead of tasting yeast complexity or hops or the breadth of your malt bill, everything tastes like burning batteries.

If you use the words “bacon” or “barbeque” to describe your smoked beer, count on me ordering something else.

So what the hell are we doing? Our local homebrew shop ordered a mountain of oak-smoked wheat. After chewing on a few grains, we realized it would be the perfect addition to an amber saison for fall---oaky for sure but the smoke tasted mellow. In other words, it shouldn’t destroy the dark fruit and toasted nut flavors we’re aiming for with Special B and Belgian aromatic malt. We figured this would be more fun than adding .0001 ounces of really intensely cherry wood smoked malt to the bill and praying to St. Benedict that we don’t taste pork in 2 weeks.

Oh, and a pro tip for all the brewers out there: if you’re going to upturn a drying carboy anywhere near a stone wall, consider not letting it fall over and explode all over your equipment.

Batch size: 5.5 gallons
Grains: 13.2 lbs.
Estimated SRM: 13
Estimated IBU: 29
Estimated OG: 1.061
Estimated FG: 1.006
ABV: 7.2%

Grains
9.20 lbs. Belgian pilsner
2.25 lbs. Rye
1.00 lbs. Oak-smoked wheat
0.60 lbs. Special B
0.15 lbs. Belgian aromatic

Hops
1.50 oz. East Kent Goldings (5% AA)
1.50 oz. Saaz (4% AA)

Extras
1 Whirlfloc tablet
0.5 tsp. yeast nutrient

Yeast
Wyeast 3711 (French saison)

Mash: 4.95 gallons @ 147°F (75 minutes)
Sparge: 4.25 gallons @169°F (10 minutes)
Boil: 60 minutes

Hop Schedule
60: 1.50 oz. EKG
20: 0.75 oz. Saaz
10: 0.75 oz. Saaz

Pitched: 67°F
Fermented: 69°F

The fruits of Paul's negligence

Update on Friday, September 21, 2012 at 12:35PM by Paul

I know i'm not the only homebrewer who knows the special shame of destroying a glass carboy and having to spend 45 minutes picking shards out of the rest of your equipment, then recleaning and resanitizing everything. That doesn't dull the sting, though. Because I am, in fact, a clutz, I decided this morning to replace that shattered 6-gallon glass carboy with two plastic ones---one 5 gallons and one 6 gallons. I'll post an update when I find a way to destroy these, too.

Carboy-shaped atonement

Brew Day: Imperial Belgian IPA

We don’t know what this beer is. That’s now how we started out, of course, but we’ll have to wait and let the beer tell us exactly what it means to be.

Technically, it’s a Belgian-style tripel with lots of American hops, but we fell slightly short of the OG mark for a true tripel (a problem we’ll try to address during the back half of fermentation). That said, it’s too hoppy to be a strong golden ale and too boozy to be simply a Belgian IPA.

In other words, we’re struggling for a concise tag for the people who will wander past our table at Brew Durham next month. We don’t want to have to explain it, and people probably don’t want us to waste their time with so much beer to drink.

Ultimately, we’ll have to taste it and go from there.

We brewed with Houblon Chouffe as our inspiration. It’s the single best merger of Belgian technique and American hops i’ve ever tasted. Its brewers call it a “dobbelen IPA tripel,” a term that isn’t exactly friendly to discussion or festival signage. Tripel IPA just made things worse when we tried it, so how about Imperial Belgian IPA as a placeholder?

(The is the first of two beers we’ll be pouring at Brew Durham 3 in late October. The second, an amber rye saison with oak-smoked wheat, is on deck for later this week.)

Batch size: 5 gallons
Expected OG: 1.072
Expected SRM: 4
Expected IBU: 58

Grains
13.75 lbs. Belgian pilsner

Hops
1.50 oz. Columbus (a mix of 17% AA and 15% AA)
1.00 oz. Saaz (4% AA)
1.00 oz. Simcoe whole leaf (13% AA)

Extras
1.75 lbs. Blonde Belgian candi syrup (added at 20 minutes)
1 Whirlfloc tablet (added at 15 minutes)
0.5 oz. Yeast nutrient (added at 10 minutes)

Yeast
Wyeast 3522 (Belgian Ardennes)

Mash: 20 minutes at 140°F, 70 minutes at 151°F
Sparge: 166°F
Boil: 90 minutes

Hop schedule
60 minutes: 1.0 oz. Columbus (17% AA)
20 minutes: 0.55 oz. Columbus (15% AA)
7 minutes: 1.0 oz. Saaz
Dry hop: 1.0 oz. Simcoe

Hop clouds gathering during chilling

We pitched at 65°F and fermentation is healthy at 69°F. We’ll raise the temperature into the 70s as the beer moves into secondary fermentation.

As mentioned earlier, we fell short of our OG goal. Our yield was 4.8 gallons of 1.066 wort. I know some brewers like to add additional candi sugar during the back half of primary fermentation, so we may try that to bump us up above 1.070.

This is our first go with the Ardennes yeast strain. I’ve read that it’s highly flocculent and that it produces milder esters than some others we’ve tried. We’ve had excessive esters and phenols in some of our Belgian ales, so here’s hoping this strain working at a mellow temperature will give us that soft, fruity, spicy magic.