State of the Brew 2013

With the end of March approaching, this post is nearly two months late; it's been busy 'round these parts.  As you can tell from my general posting output this year, I've been brewing less, due to scarcer time and funds available for the hobby.  School and a range of activities outside brewing have kept me more than a little preoccupied over the past twelve months.  I'm not planning to get out of it; this is just a period of zymurgical slowdown for me.  Fortunately, a spell of late-winter illness has given me some downtime to finally return to the blog.  Even at this late date, wrapping up the year still seemed like a good idea: it helps me reflect on what I've accomplished, what I'd like to improve, and how I'd like to plan my resources for what comes next.  Without further ado, then, here's a little statistical rundown for (mostly) 2012.

Total posts: 21
Total beers brewed: 16

Original Gravity
0.0% - 0 small beers (<1.040)
62.5% - 10 low gravity (1.040-1.055)
12.5% - 2 medium gravity (1.056-1.070)
25.0% - 4 high gravity (>1.070)

A solid trend here for sessionable (if not always textbook "session") beers, though nothing at the very bottom of the scale.  Given the small number of brewdays for the year, turning out just a few big beers ended up constituting a significant portion of my overall output.

Colour
12.5% - 2 pale (<7 SRM)
62.5% - 10 amber (7-17 SRM)
25.0% - 4 dark (>17 SRM)

Nothing surprising here; I find it pretty easy to brew right in the middle of the colour scale, from amber to brown.  I'm happy I managed to fit in a couple of pale beers; I have plans to work more at this end of things, trying a few more stripped-down, possibly historically-inspired beers in the coming year that may consist solely of pale malt.

National style
50.0% - 8 American
37.5% - 6 English
12.5% - 2 Belgian
0.0% - 0 German

Lots of pale ales and IPAs this year, often with pretty neutral American yeasts. It certainly didn't feel like I'd made so many of them, though that's probably directly related to my success rate below.  Still questing after a fine bitter recipe of my own, which contributes significantly to my English output.

Dominant character
37.5% - 6 hoppy
12.5% - 2 malty
12.5% - 2 roasty
12.5% - 2 balanced
12.5% - 2 yeast-derived
6.25% - 1 sour
6.25% - 1 fruit

Yup, lots of pale ales/IPAs.  But a good mix of other flavours running through the mix this year; I do like variety.

Brew support
100% solo brewed

While I had visitors stop in during brewdays from time to time, it's been lots of concentrated brew time for me.  While I really dig my LHBS here, I haven't met up with any local like-minded brewers with whom I've been inclined to share a wort production event yet.  Missing my Chicago brewing compatriots; brew strong, brothers.  I have one friend, though, who just moved to the area and is very interested in taking part, so I expect to have more company in the coming months.

Success rate
56.25% - 9 good
31.25% - 5 poor
12.5% - 2 undecided

I'm not sure if it's due to me getting out of practice with more time between brewdays or if I'm just getting sloppy, but my success rate has not been fantastic over the past year.  Fortunately my beers brewed in the last few months have all been pretty solid, so hopefully I've turned a corner.  The undecided samples include a Burton ale, which I won't even touch for another couple months, maybe not even until a half year from now; and my second Flanders red attempt, which I'm just letting sit for a good long while, though the samples have been very unflattering.

Meads/ciders brewed: 6
60% - 3 melomels
20% - 2 straight cider/perry
20% - 1 fruit cider

With DeAunn going off gluten last year, meads and ciders have become a new area of interest and excitement for me.  The melomels, including my first cyser, have been pretty terrific; the straight cider I made with apples we harvested ourselves was very dry (as expected) but with a great floral apple aroma (big ups to WLP775).  Looking forward to messing with honey, fruit, and spices even more coming up.

Non-brewing posts: 5
40% - 2 on hop growing
40% - 2 tastings
20% - 1 on home toasting grain

My "resolution" last year was to do more tastings; I haven't really made the inroads I'd planned there, but I'm going to redouble my efforts.  The home-toasted grain posts from the past couple years seem to see a lot of traffic; I hope they help other homebrewers experience the same success with them that I've had.

I have a couple more fermenters full of fermented (or fermenting) goodness on which to report, including a cyser with whole cherries and a rebrew of last year's popular (in these parts) session sour.  Stay tuned.

1st Blogiversary - State of the Brew

As I mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to give a kind of wrap-up to the first year of this blog.  While there would certainly be value to putting up numbers and figures relating to the traffic on this site, I thought that instead it might be more fun (and more informative for my future brewing) to tally the stats relating to what I've brewed and blogged about this past twelve months.  Hence, here we go...

Total number of posts (including this one): 39
Total number of beers brewed: 24

Colour
58.3% - 14 amber (7 to 17 SRM)
37.5% - 9 dark (18 SRM and above)
4.2% - 1 pale (6 SRM or less)

I'm not surprised that most of my output falls squarely in the middle of the colour spectrum; I don't brew a lot of really light beers, like kolsch or light lager.  I do like to brew darker beers as well, though (and DeAunn especially likes to drink them), so they're pretty well represented too.

Original gravity
33.3% - 8 low gravity (1.040 to 1.055)
29.2% - 7 medium gravity (1.056 to 1.070)
25.0% - 6 high gravity (above 1.070)
12.5% - 3 small beer (below 1.040)

Mad Fermentationist Michael Tonsmiere commented in a post just a couple days ago on the over-the-top arms race of sorts in the craft brewing community, focusing on super high-gravity, barrel-aged juggernauts.  The same seems to hold true in homebrewing circles at times; I know that most of my first recipes came in at 6.5% ABV or above.  Since that initial rush, though, I've really come to appreciate (as have many others before me) the virtues of flavourful, lower-gravity session beers.  That doesn't mean I eschew the bigger beers; looking at my upcoming brew docket, most of what I'm planning for the next few months will be heavyweights.  But I definitely like to keep drinkability in mind when I'm making my schedule; I certainly like having around a few batches of which I can enjoy more than half a bottle in an evening.  I didn't do a lot of really small beer brewing this year, but I do have one snuck in amongst all those big beers to make this spring.  Past that, I'd like to continue to concentrate on those session strength beers that still deliver a lot of flavour.

Yeast/national style

45.8% - 11 British
33.3% - 8 American
12.5% - 3 Belgian
8.2% - 2 German

This was a tough one to categorize sometimes; some beers were hybrids of a multiple styles, like the all-Citra special bitter I made for my friend Ted's wedding.  Even considering the split, I've made a lot of British-style beers in the last year. The American-style beers included pale ales and IPAs as well as most of the sours; the Belgians were all saisons of one sort or another.  The Germans included one that was actually to style (the alt) and one that wasn't (the summer rye).  I expect that this balance will stay mostly in place in the coming year.

Character
45.8% - 11 malty
25.0% - 6 hoppy
16.7% - 4 balanced
12.5% - 3 sour

I do love hoppy beers, and have especially been missing them this winter, which is why my next brew will be an American pale ale.  Beers that are more malt forward, though, seem to fit more situations and tastes, and thus ended up being brewed more.  To be fair, I did use this as a bit of a catch-all category, when I didn't think any of the other descriptors really fit the beer in question (such as with yeast-driven beers like saisons, spiced beers, etc.).  Next year I might make that differentiation; for now, I'll just let it be.  Beers that strike a balance of character don't go unappreciated in this house, though.  As I get a better handle on brewing sours, particularly how to age them in our current cellar-less living arrangement, I expect the number of them on hand to increase.

Brewing method
91.7% - 22 all-grain
8.3% - 2 extract

Yes, I'm an unrepentant all-grain brewer.  One of the extract batches was really a yeast starter; the other was a full batch brewed with my father, who's an extract brewer at this point (though he has big plans for expanding the size and scope of his brewing once my parents eventually move out of their current house).  I've been very pleasantly surprised by the quality of his beers; they're certainly an improvement over those I made early in my brewing life, and I'm continually tempted to try another full extract batch.  The lower cost and higher level of recipe "tweakability" keep me in the grain bins for now, though.  We'll see what I manage to sneak in this year.

Brew support

83.3% - 20 brewed solo
16.7% - 4 brewed with friends

Most brewdays I set up and execute on my own; it's just how the schedule usually works out.  It's always enjoyable to have folks over to help, or just with whom to hang out and enjoy a beer while brewing.  It was great having a few really good friends with whom I'd brew (at my place and theirs) in Chicago; I've introduced a few of our SLC folks to homebrew, and look forward to having more of them over more often to do it as well as drink it.

Success rate
87.5% - 21 good
12.5% - 3 dumped

Sometimes my grandiose pipe dreams just don't end up working; this year, it was my wheatwine, Scotch rye, and chocolate mint oatmeal stout.  The the first two were, in their own ways, too big for their own good; the stout suffered from not understanding my extra ingredients well enough.  The good news, though, is that there were only three this year that didn't turn out this year, which means I had a lot more great beer to drink and share than I did bad beer to dump; that I've learned from all these experiences and can make concrete changes to my process to fix them; and that nothing had to be dumped due to infection.  I have more strange brewing plans for the future, but I'll apply the lessons I've learned from these failed batches to cut out some of the possible issues before they arise.

Non-brewing posts: 17
47.1% - 8 "other"
23.5% - 4 hop growing
17.6% - 3 tastings
11.8% - 2 cooking

There's a little bit of everything in this category.  I'd like to experiment more with cooking with beer and brewing ingredients, so hopefully there'll be an uptick there; if you have a favourite use for beer in a recipe, a novel use for spent grains, etc., please share it with me!  I may also post updates on my hops more often this year; I enjoy checking on their progress climbing the lead lines about as much as I love sniffing airlocks.  (Side note: I have some rehab work to do on one of my plants, as someone ran into the container and broke open the front a little while ago.  I can't even recall which plant it is; hopefully I'll be able to figure it out from my blog pictures!) The biggest increase I plan to make this year is in tasting notes.  I don't feel very confident describing beers, but the only way I can think to improve that is to push myself to do it more often.  Let's see if I stick to it.  A lot of my "other"-type posts will probably shift over to the Nonic Pint blog my Chicago folks and I have established, but much of the rest will still be here.

If you've lasted through all these notes, then bully on ya.  This has helped me understand where I'm coming from this past year, and I look forward to how it will inform me in the coming year.  Feel free to share any other observations you've had or other ways you think the blog could be improved.  I hope you'll enjoy what's coming even more than what you've already read.