Portrait of Peter Zien. Photo by Sam Hodgson

“Brewmaster Peter Zien took over Alesmith Brewing Co. in 2002 and has presided over a rise in output from 800 barrels a year to 2,000 barrels a year since then. Last year, the Mira Mesa-based brewery won the coveted Small Brewing Company and Small Brewing Company Brewer of the Year awards at the Great American Beer Festival.” Read The Article at voiceofsandiego.org…

SweetWater Blue Label

Beer Name: Sweet Water Blue
Brewery: SweetWater Brewery
Brewery Website: www.sweetwaterbrew.com
City of origin: Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Awards: World Beer Cup Bronze medal winner, 2002 Great American Beer Festival: Small Brewery of The Year .
Label Description:
“Don’t Float The Mainstream.” – SweetWater Blue is a unique light bodied ale enhanced with fresh blueberries and all natural flavors. This euphoric experience begins with an appealing blueberry aroma and finishes as a surprisingly thirst-quenching ale.

Appearance: 3/3

Thick white head with Good head retention, light in colour and very good crisp clarity.

Aroma: 7/12

Strong blueberry aroma, smells like wild fruit as apposed to artificial flavourings which is a very good thing, but gives the aroma an almost feral quality that you don’t expect in such a crisp, light beer.

Taste: 19/20

Just as the label claims, the primary flavour is a strong taste of fresh blueberries, at first this fruity taste is a little too sweet, but it is soon balanced by a hoppy bitterness which cuts through the sweetness and balances the flavour profile perfectly. The surprising thing about this beer, is the fact that the blueberry taste does not at all overpower the beer; many fruity pale beers taste unbalanced and artificial, but SweetWater Blue manages to balance the sweetness of the blueberries with the bitterness of the hops perfectly.

Mouthfeel: 3/5

With regards to the ‘mouthfeel’  (I wish the brewing community could come up with a less… gross sounding way of describing the texture of a beer!), Sweetwater Blue falls slightly short of the bar in my opinion. This is mainly due to the high level of carbonation. When it comes to Pilsners and European lagers being highly carbonated is great; but I can’t help but feel that SweetWater Blue’s carbonation is far too ‘rough’ on the tongue for a beer with such a delicate flavour profile. When the fizziness subsides the beer has a very syrupy body which is to be expected from a fruity ale, but perhaps is a little too syrupy for such a crisp, light beer. Overall the mouthfeel is not unpleasant, it just seems to take something away from the blueberry flavour.

SweetWater Blue in Glass

Overall Impression: 9/10

It’s very hard to review a beer in an informative and unbiased manner. That said, reviews are by their very nature, biased. With that in mind, I’d like to say that I absolutely bloody love this beer. Just to give you some idea of how good it is: I’m terrified of flying after being in a plane which caught fire 30,000 feet over the Nevada desert, but this beer could very well convince me to confront my demons and go visit my brother in Atlanta, just so that I can visit the SweetWater brewery! Until them I’m limiting myself to one bottle a week which should keep me happy for another month at least! Even if you hate the idea of brewing with fruit, please give this one a go, in fact even if you’re a monk somewhere in Germany who worships the “ancient” reinheitsgebot laws, please give this one a go; you will be pleasantly surprised!

- Henry Carless

P.S. If anyone from SweetWater is reading this; feel free to thank me for this review by sending me a crate of your lovely beer!

What I do want to talk about though, is the heavy butter taste that my beer has half way through fermentation. It tastes like butter popcorn and buttered bread – not a great taste in a 2% pale ale!

After some research online, I discovered that this buttery taste was caused by the chemical Diacetyl. According to Wikipedia, Diacetyl is a main flavour component in Butter. At low levels, diacetyl contributes a slipperiness to the feel of the alcoholic beverage in the mouth. As levels increase, it imparts a buttery or butterscotch flavor. Diacetyl is produced by the yeast as they turn the sugars into alcohol.

Once I knew what was causing this buttery off-taste in my beer, I needed to find out how to get rid of it. After searching through www.homebrewtalk.com forums I found that the most common advice for fixing diacetyl flavours was to bring the beer to a slightly warmer temperature for a few days after Primary fermentation is complete. This supposedly gives the yeast a chance to ‘clean up’ after themselves by reabsorbing the Diacetyl and other waste products before falling into the yeast cake. This is called a ‘Diacetyl Rest’.

Does it work? I don’t know yet. I’ve got a few days left of primary fermentation, so we’ll be doing a test here – I’ll seperate a small amount of the wort after primary fermentation. I will bottle the small amount of wort and try a diacetyl rest with the main batch of wort. I’ll post back in a week or so with my initial findings! If you have any tips for removing the diacetyl’s buttery taste, please leave me a comment!

Happy Brewing (and Happy Easter!),
Henry

Boulder, CO – March 25, 2009 – Yesterday, Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. of Utah signed into law legislation that makes homebrewing beer legal. The “Exemption for Alcoholic Beverage Manufacturing License” was sponsored by Representative Christine A. Johnson and made Utah the 46th state to legalize homebrewing. The US Government made homebrewing legal on a federal level in 1978. Since then all but four states; Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Oklahoma have made homebrewing legal.

“Home-brewing is a healthy and vibrant hobby in Utah as evidenced by the outpouring of support HB 51 received in the 2009 Legislature,” commented Rep. Christine A. Johnson. “Many thanks to the American Homebrewers Association for thorough education, great committee testimony and association members who flooded elected officials with emails of support.”

But it’s not just homebrewers who are excited about the change. Jennifer Talley, brewmaster for Squatters Pub Brewery/Salt Lake Brewing Co in Salt Lake City, says the relationship between professional and amateur brewers has always been a tight one and legalizing homebrewing will allow this relationship in Utah to evolve and grow.

“Homebrewing is truly an art and most professional brewers I know were once homebrewing in their kitchen. Utah beer enthusiast will now have the freedom to express their deepest beer desires through perfecting the craft of homebrewing in their own kitchens,” says Talley.

The American Homebrewers Association estimates that there are approximately 750,000 homebrewers in the United States, including 7,000 homebrewers residing in Utah. Utah is the only state to have legalized homebrewing in the last ten years.

Read the full article at Beeradvocate.com

Here’s to Utah *raises glass*!
- Henry

I bought a fridge on ebay for £5 (approx $10USD), and was surprised to find that it was in near new condition! I then purchased a fantastic cornelius keg, brand new co2 bottle, co2 regulator and 2 chrome through-door beer taps from a nice chap called Norman. If I tried to explain how good his service was, how superior his products were, and how happy I am to have chosen to buy my kegerator parts from Norm, I’d be here all day. Check out his kegerator parts ebay shop.

My Home-built Kegerator!

The build was pretty simple, the only thing that went wrong was when I tried to spray expanding foam around the tap shanks to insulate the rather messy hole that I had made in the fridge door’s insulation. Stupidly I ignored the can’s instructions to wear latex gloves or put your hand in a plastic bag when using the expanding foam, and I was soon left with two hands absolutely covered in the impossible-to-remove white gunk. No amount of soap, paint thinner, white spirit, or any other cleaning chemical would remove this stuff from my skin – I eventually found that acetone would disolve it, but the only acetone I had was my mums tiny nail-polish remover pads, of which she only had two left! It took hours but I finally got my hands clean, but by this time I was so bloody fed up I went to the pub!

Needless to say I eventually got back to work on the fridge and all worked out fine – I now have a working beer fridge! but unfortunately, until me and my girlfriend move out in the summer, it’s staying in my mum’s shed. If you have any questions about the kegerator, or are thinking about building one yourself, feel free to comment and I’ll do my best to reply asap!
- Henry

I decided to stick to an extract recipe for my first brew, as I was not confident enough to start mashing grains with no prior experience. I used BeerSmith software to help build my recipe; the interface is fantastic and makes for easy calculation of IBUs, gravities and alcohol content. I based my recipe on the BJCP style guide for Extra Special/Strong Bitter (Style number 8C), although Beersmith calculated the colour as 8.2EBC which is under the style guidelines for Extra Special Bitter, the beer turned out exactly the right colour for the style. Here’s the recipe I decided upon:

Batch Volume: 3 Gallons/15 litres
Boil Volume: 2 gallons/10 litres

3kg Cooper’s Pale Ale Liquid Malt Extract
40 grams Fuggles 8.5%AA – 60 minute boil
10 grams East Kent Goldings 4%AA – last 15 Minutes of boil
10 grams Fuggles 8.5AA – last 5 minutes of boil
1tsp Irish moss – last 15 minutes of boil
1 packet Munton’s Premium Beer Yeast

Original Gravity: 1.060
Final Gravity: 1.014
Bitterness: 35.8 IBUs
Alcohol By Volume: 6.00%ABV

Miraculously my first brew day went without any problems at all! The best decision I made was to buy some hop bags at the homebrew store, these worked just like teabags and meant that I didn’t need to filter the wort as I poured it from the pot to the fermentation vessel. I also put my irish moss into the hop bag with the Goldings (although I’m not sure that this is best practice).

Fermentation was pretty violent and within 4 hours there was plenty of airlock activity – a 3″ thick krausen coated the surface of the wort after 48 hours and didn’t sink for 5 days. The krausen completely sank into the wort on the 5th day, and airlock activity halted. I tested the gravity using my hydrometer and it had not yet reached final gravity; in fact it took 7 days of primary fermentation to reach the final gravity of 1.014.

At this point I should have left the beer in the primary fermentation vessel for another 7 days for the yeast to clean up after themselves (this is called a Diacetyl rest). Instead, my over-eagerness got the better of me and I racked the beer to secondary. I added 1.5 grams of gelatin, dissolved fully in warm water (do NOT boil the gelatin!) as a fining agent which helped clear the beer greatly. I moved the beer in the secondary fermentation vessel into a fridge in my shed to cold crash it and clear the beer, then after two days I racked it into a Cornelius Keg and force carbonated it over 3 days.

"Spring Morning" 6%ABV Extra Special Bitter

Tasting notes:

Appearance:
Amber, almost red beer, slightly cloudy with dense egg shell coloured head. Fantastic head retention.

Body:
Almost syrupy – definitely not as light as I had intended but the carbonation balanced the syrupiness and made for a reasonable finish.

Aroma:
Instant hit of bananas and toffee – very heavy aroma.

Taste:
Strong banana esters, probably due to a high fermentation temperature. Also hints of green apple which suggest that I racked from primary into secondary too soon. The taste is almost banoffee, with a subtle brown-sugar taste. This isn’t what I was going for; in fact all of these flavours indicate improper brewing techniques. The most important thing to note though, is that it doesn’t taste at all bad! It’s very drinkable, and others have said that the fruity esters work well and do not spoil the beer. One thing to note is that you wouldn’t think that it was 6% from drinking it, although after the second pint you start to realise just how strong it is! The beer has a sweet, malty taste with the bitterness of the hops overpowering their aroma (stupidly I used aroma hops for both bittering, and aroma!). That said, the floral taste of the Fuggles hops cut through the bitterness and give the beer a clean, balanced finish.

Notes: Will definately brew this next March and learn from my previous mistakes.

So to recap, the first brew day went well and I ended up with a very drinkable first beer! I will be taking this along to my local pub and get a few second opinions from the staff and locals, but I’ll give it a few weeks in the bottle first!

Thanks for reading, and feel free to post comments; constructive criticism is always welcome!
- Henry Carless

Considering that I work as an online marketing consultant for an SEO firm in the UK, it’s pretty bizarre that I’ve never posted any kind of blog before. However, the time has come for me to break into the world of the almighty blog, and what better subject than beer?

I’ve not been homebrewing long, in fact I am somewhat of a rookie when it comes to brewing; my first batch was a hilarious disaster as I decided to have a shot at brewing an all-grain pale ale without any research into the brewing process! This resulted in a very weak (low-temp, 20 minute mash), extremely bitter (150IBUs anyone?), wheat beer (yep, I didn’t realise that wheat malt wasn’t barley!).

Following this disasterous ultra-bitter mess, I decided to do things properly. A quick trip to my local homebrew shop and a much lighter wallet later, I had a single-fermentation setup, capable of a 2-gallon boil (3-gallon batch) brew. This setup is the same that I now use, but will soon be upgraded to a full-boil setup when I buy a 5-gallon mash ton next month.

Now that I have the correct equipment to brew reasonable quality beers, I will be recording every brew day in this blog. I’ll also hopefully be showcasing real ale reviews, event reviews, and homebrew tutorials, so be sure to bookmark this page and subscribe to my RSS feed!

Thanks for reading,
- Henry