Oppigård Amarillo, third batch

Oppigård Amarillo, third batch

This recipe is also from the book [1] and the third batch of this beer and it is one of my favorite hopier beer. I think it is fun to brew single hop beers since you learn to recognize the taste and aroma of a single hop at a time. The aroma of Amarillo is described as flowery, spicy and citrus-like with a distinct orange bouquet.

/media/amarillo-3.jpg

Result

The beer was a success even this time. It has been two weeks since brewday and the beer is already really good, but I think a week of storage will make it even better.

Recipe

Brewer:Marcus Folkesson and Kent Gustavsson
Batch size:23.00l
Boil time:70.00min

Measurements

DESCRIPTION MEASURED ESTIMATED
Original Gravity 1.060 1.060 SG
Final Gravity 1.0150000 1.011 SG
Alcohol By Volume 5.9 % 6.4 %

Ingredients

Hops

HOP ALPHA AMOUNT USE TIME NOTES
Amarillo 9.20 percent 9.55 grams Mash 60.00min Discovered and introduced by Vigil Gamache Farms Inc. in Washington State. Character similar to Cascade. Often used as a late kettle or dry hop addition to American style Pale Ales and IPA’s due to its signature aroma characteristics. Used for both bitterness and aroma. Used for: IPAs, Ales Aroma: Intensely fruity (citrus, melon, and stone friuts), floral, tropical notes. Substitutes: Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe Storage: Good 8-11% AA / 6-7% Beta
Herkules 14.50 percent 4.30 grams Boil 60.00min A German high alpha cross variety, bred in Huell and released in 2005. Imparts robust, hoppy tang flavors. Used for: hoppy German-style ales or lagers Aroma: Spicy floral and hop notes, with hints of pine, lemon and black pepper. Substitutions: Unknown Storage: Good 13-17% AA / 4-5.5% Beta
Amarillo 9.20 percent 13.38 grams Boil 30.00min Discovered and introduced by Vigil Gamache Farms Inc. in Washington State. Character similar to Cascade. Often used as a late kettle or dry hop addition to American style Pale Ales and IPA’s due to its signature aroma characteristics. Used for both bitterness and aroma. Used for: IPAs, Ales Aroma: Intensely fruity (citrus, melon, and stone friuts), floral, tropical notes. Substitutes: Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe Storage: Good 8-11% AA / 6-7% Beta
Amarillo 9.20 percent 13.38 grams Boil 25.00min Discovered and introduced by Vigil Gamache Farms Inc. in Washington State. Character similar to Cascade. Often used as a late kettle or dry hop addition to American style Pale Ales and IPA’s due to its signature aroma characteristics. Used for both bitterness and aroma. Used for: IPAs, Ales Aroma: Intensely fruity (citrus, melon, and stone friuts), floral, tropical notes. Substitutes: Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe Storage: Good 8-11% AA / 6-7% Beta
Amarillo 9.20 percent 11.46 grams Boil 20.00min Discovered and introduced by Vigil Gamache Farms Inc. in Washington State. Character similar to Cascade. Often used as a late kettle or dry hop addition to American style Pale Ales and IPA’s due to its signature aroma characteristics. Used for both bitterness and aroma. Used for: IPAs, Ales Aroma: Intensely fruity (citrus, melon, and stone friuts), floral, tropical notes. Substitutes: Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe Storage: Good 8-11% AA / 6-7% Beta
Amarillo 9.20 percent 11.46 grams Boil 15.00min Discovered and introduced by Vigil Gamache Farms Inc. in Washington State. Character similar to Cascade. Often used as a late kettle or dry hop addition to American style Pale Ales and IPA’s due to its signature aroma characteristics. Used for both bitterness and aroma. Used for: IPAs, Ales Aroma: Intensely fruity (citrus, melon, and stone friuts), floral, tropical notes. Substitutes: Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe Storage: Good 8-11% AA / 6-7% Beta
Amarillo 9.20 percent 5.73 grams Boil 5.00min Discovered and introduced by Vigil Gamache Farms Inc. in Washington State. Character similar to Cascade. Often used as a late kettle or dry hop addition to American style Pale Ales and IPA’s due to its signature aroma characteristics. Used for both bitterness and aroma. Used for: IPAs, Ales Aroma: Intensely fruity (citrus, melon, and stone friuts), floral, tropical notes. Substitutes: Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe Storage: Good 8-11% AA / 6-7% Beta
Amarillo 9.20 percent 36.00 grams Boil 0.00min Discovered and introduced by Vigil Gamache Farms Inc. in Washington State. Character similar to Cascade. Often used as a late kettle or dry hop addition to American style Pale Ales and IPA’s due to its signature aroma characteristics. Used for both bitterness and aroma. Used for: IPAs, Ales Aroma: Intensely fruity (citrus, melon, and stone friuts), floral, tropical notes. Substitutes: Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe Storage: Good 8-11% AA / 6-7% Beta

Grain

GRAIN ORIGIN AMOUNT NOTES
Pale Malt, Maris Otter United Kingdom 5.74 kg Premium base malt from the UK. Popular for many English styles of beer including ales, pale ales and bitters.
Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L US 0.26 kg Adds body, color and improves head retention. Also called "Crystal" malt. Very Dark

Miscellaneous

NAME USE IN STEP AMOUNT USED FOR NOTES
PH 5.2 Stabilizer Mash 17.97 grams Water Agent PH 5.2 Stabilizer by Five Star is a prioprietary mix of phosphate buffers used to lower the PH of your Mash to 5.2 for brewing.
Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) Boil 7.60 grams Water Agent Reduces PH of water for mashing and sparging. Alters water profile -- used to harden soft water. Use the BeerSmith Water Profile tool to determine amount to add.
Epsom Salt (MgSO4) Boil 4.00 grams Water Agent Water agent used to modify water profile. Use the BeerSmith Water Profile tool to determine amount to add.
Chalk Boil 0.40 grams Water Agent Chalk (CaCO3) can be used as a water addition to adjust mineral content for mashing.
Irish Moss Boil 1.50 grams Clarity Fining agent that aids in the post-boil protein break. Reduces protein chill haze and improves beer clarity.
Yeast Nutrient Boil 5.99 grams Fermentation Gives yeast nutrients for healthy fermentation. Not needed for most beers, but good for those with a high percentage of adjuncts. Add before yeast.

Yeast

NAME TYPE FLOCCULATION
American Ale Yeast Blend Ale Medium

Mash

STEP TYPE TEMPERATURE TIME
Mash Step Infusion 60.00 C 65.00 min
Mash Out Temperature 10.00 C 75.56 min

Fermentation

STAGE TEMPERATURE DAYS
Primary 22 14
Secondary 18 10

St:Eriks Pale Ale, second batch

St Eriks Pale Ale, second batch

The book "Klona öl" [1] ("Clone beers" in English) has collected recipes from many Swedish breweries. One challenge is to brew a recipe and then buy a bottle with the same beer and compare, hope

This is the second time we brew a St:Eriks Pale ale, which is a pale ale with a lot of citrus aroma from the Citra and Simcoe hop. The body is quite light and it is a perfect summer beer.

Comments from my wife on the first batch was "Wow, tasty! Tastes like Fanta". I'm not sure if that is high score or not. She usually do not like beer.

There is a few differences since the first batch.

  1. We were using Fermentis Safale S-04 instead of Safale S-05 witch should attenuates lower and leave more residual sweetness
  2. Primary fermentation in 18 degrees Celsius instead of 19, which should give us a more clean taste without many esters

Both Safale S-04 and S-05 are dry yeasts and I did not bother to make a starter.

We did not adjust the PH of the mash water nor sparge water this time, but it did not affect the mash efficiency that much.

/media/st-eriks-1.jpg

Result

The taste was a little too clean. I miss the maltyness that the Maris Otter base malt usually gives and fruitiness from the S-04. I think the primary fermentation at 18 degrees was too low. Only a degree make huge difference on the production of esters.

Still a good beer though.

Recipe

Brewer:Marcus Folkesson and Kent Gustavsson
Notes:Forgot to add PH stabilizer to mash and sparge water
Batch size:23.00l
Boil time:70.00min
Measurements    
DESCRIPTION MEASURED ESTIMATED
Original Gravity 1.054 1.048 SG
Final Gravity 0.009 1.009 SG
Alcohol By Volume 5.9 % 5.2 %

Ingredients

Hops

HOP ALPHA AMOUNT USE TIME NOTES
Northern Brewer 8.50 percent 3.85 grams Boil 60.00min Also called Hallertauer Northern Brewers Used for: Bittering and finishing both ales and lagers of all kinds Aroma: Fine, dry, clean bittering hop. Unique flavor. Substitutes: Hallertauer Mittelfrueh, Hallertauer Examples: Anchor Steam, Old Peculiar,
Citra 12.00 percent 17.69 grams Boil 15.00min Special aroma hops released in 2007. Imparts high alpha/oil content but low cohumulone. Aroma: Adds interesting citrus and tropical fruit character to the beer. Substitutes: Unknown
Simcoe 13.00 percent 17.69 grams Boil 15.00min High alpha bittering hops with good aroma characteristics. Used for: IPAs Aroma: Citrus and pine-like aroma Substitutes: N/A
Simcoe 13.00 percent 35.38 grams Boil 2.00min High alpha bittering hops with good aroma characteristics. Used for: IPAs Aroma: Citrus and pine-like aroma Substitutes: N/A
Citra 12.00 percent 35.38 grams Boil 1.00min Special aroma hops released in 2007. Imparts high alpha/oil content but low cohumulone. Aroma: Adds interesting citrus and tropical fruit character to the beer. Substitutes: Unknown
Citra 12.00 percent 69.00 grams Dry Hop 4.00 days Special aroma hops released in 2007. Imparts high alpha/oil content but low cohumulone. Aroma: Adds interesting citrus and tropical fruit character to the beer. Substitutes: Unknown

Grain

GRAIN ORIGIN AMOUNT NOTES
Pale Malt, Maris Otter United Kingdom 3.41 kg Premium base malt from the UK. Popular for many English styles of beer including ales, pale ales and bitters.
Pilsner (2 Row) UK United Kingdom 0.97 kg Pilsner base malt
Carared US 0.49 kg Adds body, color and improves head retention. Also called "Crystal" malt.

Miscellaneous

NAME USE IN STEP AMOUNT USED FOR NOTES
Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) Mash 7.60 grams Water Agent Reduces PH of water for mashing and sparging. Alters water profile -- used to harden soft water. Use the BeerSmith Water Profile tool to determine amount to add.
Epsom Salt (MgSO4) Mash 4.00 grams Water Agent Water agent used to modify water profile. Use the BeerSmith Water Profile tool to determine amount to add.
Chalk Mash 0.40 grams Water Agent Chalk (CaCO3) can be used as a water addition to adjust mineral content for mashing.
Yeast Nutrient Boil 2.00 grams Fermentation Gives yeast nutrients for healthy fermentation. Not needed for most beers, but good for those with a high percentage of adjuncts. Add before yeast.
Irish Moss Boil 15.00 grams Clarity Fining agent that aids in the post-boil protein break. Reduces protein chill haze and improves beer clarity.

Yeast

NAME TYPE FLOCCULATION
Safale American Ale Medium

Mash

STEP TYPE TEMPERATURE TIME
Mash Step Infusion 1.00 C 60.00 min
Mash Step Temperature 30.00 C 65.00 min
Mash Step Temperature 30.00 C 72.00 min
Mash Out Temperature 10.00 C 75.56 min

Fermentation

STAGE TEMPERATURE DAYS
Primary 19 4
Secondary 19 10

BEER2RST - my first attempt with golang

BEER2RST - my first attempt with golang

I'm using Beersmith [1] a (non-free...) software to create my beer recipes. It's written in Java and runs well on Linux. One of the biggest benefits with using Beersmith is that my brewing house [2] is taking exported recipes as input and setup mash schemes automatically - really comfortable.

I brew beer several times a month and always takes notes of each brewing, both methods and results. The goal is to get reproducible results each time or to make small improvements. Instead of having all these notes in separate locations, it would be nice if I instead collected all of my brewing as blog posts.

With that said, this blog will probably evolve to contain non-technical posts as well in the near future.

In these posts, I also want to publish my recipes somehow. Beersmith is able to export recipes in a non complicated XML format and is quite straight forward to parse. All posts that I'm writing is in reStructuredText [3] format, so I need to create a tool that read the XML and export the recipes in reStructuredText format.

First glance at Golang

/media/golang.png

To be honest, I'm not really a fan of high-level programming languages as I can't take them seriously. But I guess it's time to learn something new. What I have tested with Go so far is rather impressive. For example, I cannot imagine a simpler XML parsing (I'm used to libxml2).

I also like the gofmt [4] tool to make the code properly formatted. Every language should have such a tool. It's also easy so cross compile the application to different architectures by specify $GOOS and $GOARCH. I have only tested with ARM and it just works.

Imports

Most languages has a way to tell what functionality it should import and be usable to your file. Go is using import and has the following syntax

import (
    "encoding/xml"
    "flag"
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"
    "os"
    "strings"
)

What makes it really interesting is when you do this

import (
    "github.com/marcusfolkesson/tablewriter"
)

I.e. point to a repository. You only need to download the repository to your $GOPATH location and then it's useable

go get github.com/marcusfolkesson/tablewriter
Notes:
I need to create tables for print the recipes properly. I found tablewriter [5] that is printing ASCII-tables. Unfortunately, it does not create tables in reStructuredText format so I had to fork the project and implement support for that. Hopefully the changes will make it back to the original project. There is a pending pull request for that.

Unmarshal XML

I really liked how easy it was to unmarshal XML. Consider the following snip from the exported recipe

<HOP>
 <NAME>Northern Brewer</NAME>
 <VERSION>1</VERSION>
 <ORIGIN>Germany</ORIGIN>
 <ALPHA>8.5000000</ALPHA>
 <AMOUNT>0.0038459</AMOUNT>
 <USE>Boil</USE>
 <TIME>60.0000000</TIME>
 <NOTES>Also called Hallertauer Northern Brewers
Used for: Bittering and finishing both ales and lagers of all kinds
Aroma: Fine, dry, clean bittering hop.  Unique flavor.
Substitutes: Hallertauer Mittelfrueh, Hallertauer
Examples: Anchor Steam, Old Peculiar, </NOTES>
 <TYPE>Both</TYPE>
 <FORM>Pellet</FORM>
 <BETA>4.0000000</BETA>
 <HSI>35.0000000</HSI>
 <DISPLAY_AMOUNT>3.85 g</DISPLAY_AMOUNT>
 <INVENTORY>0.00 g</INVENTORY>
 <DISPLAY_TIME>60.0 min</DISPLAY_TIME>
</HOP>

The first step is to create a structure that should hold the values

type Hop struct {
    Name   string  `xml:"NAME"`
    Origin string  `xml:"ORIGIN"`
    Alpha  float64 `xml:"ALPHA"`
    Amount float64 `xml:"AMOUNT"`
    Use    string  `xml:"USE"`
    Time   float64 `xml:"TIME"`
    Notes  string  `xml:"NOTES"`
}

There is no need to create variables for all tags, just the ones you are interesting in.

Later on, read the file and unmarshal the XML

content, err := ioutil.ReadFile("beer.xml")
if err != nil {
        panic(err)
}

err = xml.Unmarshal(content, &hops)
if err != nil {
        panic(err)
}

The structure will now be populated with values from the XML file. Magical, isn't it?

Conclusion

I have only used tested Golang for a working day approximately, and I like it. I used to use Python for all kind of fast prototyping, but I think I will consider Golang the next time.

What I really like in comparison with Python are:

  • The fact that it compiles to a single binary is really nice, especially when you cross compile to a different architecture.
  • No need for interpreter
  • Static types! Dynamic type languages makes my brain hurt

The result can be found on my GitHub [6] account.