This Time, I'll Explain the Name For Sure

It occurs to me that this is the third time I've written about the beer I call "Azog the Defiler", and although I've promised each time I'd explain the name, I still haven't yet.  I intend to remedy that with this post.  The last two posts were all about my travails in brewing the beer--this one will be about the beer itself.

I mentioned before my fears about how this beer would turn out.  When I sampled it during gravity tests and during bottling, it was downright unpleasant: the first thing noticeable was a hot, solventy flavor.  It smelled like rubbing alcohol and tasted like I'd rinsed the bottling bucket with turpentine.  I thought I could detect some nice malty cereal notes beneath the alcohol, but they were masked very well.  The mouthfeel was slick and strangely chewy.

The mantra on homebrewtalk.com is "RDWHAHB", which stands for "Relax, Don't Worry, Have a Homebrew".  It's not elegant, but it's an all-purpose statement that sums up their reaction to anything that goes wrong during the brewing process.  They'll tell you that time will cure almost any problems with a beer.  That's why I chose to bottle it rather than pouring it down the drain, but it was a close thing.  I didn't even bother soaking the labels off the bottles I put the beer in--it didn't deserve it.  It was a rough, ugly thing, and deserved bottles to match.

From my tastings, it was obvious that this beer wasn't anything like Grandma's oatmeal raisin cookies--at least not my grandma's.  Maybe it was like your grandma's, if she hates you and tries to kill you by putting Drano in your cookies.  Your mileage may vary.  However, it was clear that a name based on the cookie idea wasn't really going to work.  I needed something new.

In discussing the beer with friends over IM and texts, I started abbreviating it ORC (for Oatmeal Raisin Cookie).  Being a Tolkien fan, I immediately thought of the horrific monstrosities that Tolkien called "orcs".  Hmm, maybe there's something there?  Like the orcs, the ORC was harsh, it was ugly, and any good person would consider it an abomination and a crime against nature.  Even the beer's home, the bottles, was rude and unfinished, like an orc's dwelling.  Maybe we're on to something.

Azog the Goblin was the orc who killed Thorin Oakenshield's grandfather in the Mines of Moria.  He was powerful, scornful, and disrespectful.  In the recent film adaptation of The Hobbit, he is named The Defiler.  I couldn't think of a better name for this beer.

I've tried the beer again, maybe five months after bottling it.  I won't say it's a great beer, but it's drinkable.  Most of the particulate matter has settled, though it will never be anything like clear; and the alcohol isn't nearly as harsh.  This in turn lets the malt shine through.  It's still a bit challenging, but it reminds me more of an Old Ale or a Barleywine than a brown ale.  Not surprising, since the recipe comes out at 8.2% ABV, twice the maximum of the BJCP style guidelines for a Southern English Brown Ale (which should be 2.8-4.1% ABV).

So I'm really not sure what to call this in terms of style.  It isn't nearly bitter enough to be called an English Barleywine, and the yeast rules out any Belgian style.  Maybe it almost fits as a Wee Heavy, though there's no roasted barley in it, and certainly no peat notes.  Maybe I'll just call it an Imperial Southern English Brown Ale, and hide it from the light of the sun.

The Perils of Partial Mashing, or How Azog the Defiler Got His Name

Thus begins the second part of the story of the beer that would become known as Azog the Defiler.

As described before, this beer was originally conceived as a Southern English Brown Ale, with toasted oats and underlying raisin notes, and was supposed to remind the drinker of eating an oatmeal raisin cookie.  This was my first custom recipe, but I had high hopes.  Alas, it was not to be.

It was a Murphy's Law sort of brewday, which only compounded my trials as I ventured into the world of mashing. As I mentioned in a previous post, it appeared that Mosher's book was calling for a partial-mash recipe.  It was called a partial-mash, anyway; there was no extract or extract-with-specialty-grains recipe listed, and Mosher gave specific instructions for how to do a partial mash recipe.  So, despite the fact that it looked to my untrained eye like an extract-with-specialty-grains recipe (which just requires steeping the grains for a little bit before the boil), I followed Mosher's instructions for partial mashing.  I followed them, in fact, even though BeerSmith was setting off alarm bells, saying that if I treated it like a partial mash the original gravity was going to be way too high.  Besides, so what if the OG is a little (or a lot) high?  It will have a little extra alcohol.  Nothing wrong with that, right?

It turns out that is not the case; different strains of yeast have different tolerances for alcohol and differing abilities to chew up sugar in the wort.  In addition, a heavy alcohol presence can be hot or solventy if you don't handle it correctly, and it's also not appropriate for most styles (barleywines being one of the exceptions; more on them later).  But that's a problem that I didn't have to deal with until later.

The first step in transitioning to partial-grain or all-grain brewing, of course, is getting the right equipment.  I had gotten a pretty large (7-gallon) brewpot with my original equipment, so I was sitting pretty there, and I figured I could use kitchen pots for my sparge water.  All I really needed was a mash/lauter tun.

For anyone who's unfamiliar with all-grain brewing, the central vessel is called a mash/lauter tun, or MLT.  This is the vessel that holds the grains--you steep them in carefully temperature-controlled water for about an hour, depending on the style (it's possible to get much more complicated, with steps and rests and multiple temperature changes, but it's generally just one steep in water between 150-155 F).  This is called the mash.  A decent MLT will have a drain valve and a false bottom to keep the grains away from the valve.  Draining the liquid out of the MLT is called lautering.

In addition to the MLT, you need a vessel capable of holding and heating several gallons of water for sparging, or rinsing the grains in the MLT, and another vessel capable of holding the total volume of liquid for the boil.

At this point all I really, really needed was an MLT.  I decided to go with a round cooler-style 5-gallon homemade tun.  The advantages were that it was relatively inexpensive, easy to assemble, and flexible.  The only real downsides were that there was some assembly required, and I would need to get a bigger one if I got into doing large all-grain batches (bigger than 5 gallons) or high-gravity all-grain brews (like barleywines and the like).

Finding the cooler wasn't particularly difficult, but like with all projects the cost I found was a lot higher than online guides said it would be.  Assembling the brass for the valve, on the other hand...I spent a week and easily a hundred dollars buying, testing, and arranging connectors.  My local Home Depot and Lowe's didn't have all of the pieces I needed (particularly washers), and being relatively new to brass plumbing features I underestimated how many similar-but-incompatible styles there are.  Thankfully Home Depot will accept returns even of opened items, but I still ended up with probably $20 worth of brass that I couldn't find the bags for despite careful organization.  I eventually broke down and ordered a $25 pre-assembled kit.  It was about twice what it would have been had I been able to find all the parts, but a quarter of what it cost me to try it myself.

Finally my mash tun was assembled, and I ordered the ingredients from Northern Brewer for my Oatmeal Raisin Cookie brown ale.  I've had good experiences with them overall, but this time I opened the box and everything was there...except for the pound of rolled oats, which is kind of central to the recipe.  So off to the store I go.  My local homebrew store (MyLHBS) was closed by this time, but I'd heard that quick oats would work just as well.  Turns out Quaker Quick Oats are just about a pound, so it was perfect.  I poured them on a baking sheet and popped them into the oven for a few minutes.  They browned a lot quicker than I'd been told to expect, though, so I might have overtoasted them a little.  I'm not really sure.  After toasting they need a couple of days rest to get rid of some nasty aromatics, so I stuck them in a paper bag and let them rest.  (Addendum: NB was very quick to send me out a pound of rolled oats as soon as I alerted them to the problem.)

I was oh-so-careful in starting my yeast starter.  Exactly eighteen hours before I anticipated needing to pitch I started my starter.  I boiled up the correct amount of dry extract, cooled it, pitched the yeast, and stuck it on the stir plate. 

The next day I got everything set up.  I added my grains to the mash tun and started heating up my mash water.  Once it hit the target temperature (167.5 F, which should cool to 156 F once it was added to the grains) I added it to the grains and stirred.  It seemed rather thick; I suspect I fell significantly below the 4.75 quarts during the boil (a lot of water probably boiled off).  After about five minutes the temperature was below 150, so I boiled another several cups of water and added it.  Five minutes later it was still low, so I repeated the process.  I checked halfway through the mash, and the temperature was way too high (maybe in the 170's?), so I added some cool water.  I don't recall the exact numbers or times but it was a mess.  Temperature control was probably my single-biggest problem during this ordeal.

I say that temperature control was the biggest problem I had with this brew, but whether that's true depends on whether you think a lack of temperature control was responsible for what happened next.

Generally what happens next is you open the tap part-way and collect what are known as first runnings.  The first stuff out of the mash tun generally has a lot of husk and other particulate matter in it.  You collect it and pour it back into the tun until it runs somewhat clear.  Mine never really did that.

In fact, mine hardly ran at all.

The most dreaded thing in all-grain brewing is known as the stuck sparge.  That's when the grains form a tight, compact bed and let very little liquid through, and the draining slows to a trickle.  I could hardly work my way up to that.  I would open the tap (part-way; opening it up too fast is one of the leading causes of stuck sparges) and get a slow flow for a few seconds, then a trickle...and then a drip.  Closing and re-opening it would restart this process as long as there was a lot of liquid in there, but mostly vigorous stirring/scraping of the contents of the tun is the only thing that got any liquid out.  What I did manage to extract was sludgy and thick with particulate matter.

I spent hours trying to drain this liquid.  I added the sparge water early in hopes that a higher liquid/grain ratio would ease things (it didn't).  I stirred.  I pleaded.  I adjusted the tap.  I begged.  Nothing worked.  Finally around 11pm I posted a query on HomeBrewTalk (God bless these people): am I doomed if I just cover the wort and do my boil tomorrow?  The quick consensus seemed to be I would probably be all right, although there was a slight possibility of some off flavors.  I laughed.  After this ordeal, their minor concerns were the least of mine.  I covered the kettle with aluminum foil and trudged off to bed.  Did I mention this was a weeknight, so I was getting up again in a few hours?

I mentioned earlier how carefully I timed the creation of my yeast starter.  I wanted to pitch it eighteen hours after I started it: no more, no less.  Except I'd just added another twenty-four hours to that.  Eighteen, forty-two; what's the difference?

My yeast had kind of a greyish color and smelled a little sour when I checked on it the next day, although it otherwise seemed healthy.  Hopefully that won't be a problem.  The boil itself was not so bad--even I can't screw up a partial-volume boil too badly.  Unfortunately, the stuff I ended up transferring to the carboy for fermentation was thick with particulates, and it was only the homebrewer credo of "relax, time can fix almost any problem" that kept me from pouring it down the drain.  Eventually I would almost come to wish I had.
To Be Continued...

An Unexpected Party, or a History of Azog the Defiler

I've always been eager to push boundaries and try something new (at least on my own terms), and I've never had much patience for doing the same thing over and over again in the name of learning.  I like it just fine as a routine, because it allows my mind to be otherwise occupied.  I can run the same reports and answer the same questions at work without a problem, but when there's a goal beyond the work itself, the wasted time and effort just chafes at me.

I used to give my second-grade teacher, Ms. Beneker, fits.  We would get those math worksheets with thirty problems on them, and I'd never finish them.  I would do enough to be confident I understood the process (if she was doing the first few on the board, doing them myself and getting the same answers was enough to satisfy me), then I'd get up and wander, helping my classmates.  I was constantly getting yelled at to sit down and do my work, and by the time the lesson was over I'd done each problem multiple times...but only a few answers ever showed up on my worksheet.  It was a constant battle.  (Those worksheets where the answers give you clues to a joke or something worked better, right up until the moment I figured out what the answer would eventually be.  Then I was wandering again.)

Brewing has been much the same for me.  I don't have anything against extract brewing per se.  Many, many homebrewers have gone their entire career doing extract brewing, my father included, and had great results.  to the extent that my goal in brewing is to brew tasty beers, I'm perfectly happy brewing extract.  But I have another goal: to learn.  I want to learn everything I can about this, and I've heard so much about mashing and sparging and lautering and the like, and it seemed like the natural next step in learning about the art of brewing.  (Note that my goal here wasn't to brew great beer, but to learn more about brewing.)

At the time I was reading Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass, as I mentioned in my first blog post.  And oh, did that book light a fire in me to experiment!  It's basically a big book of "here's a recipe for a classic beer style.  Let's talk about all the ways you can alter it to make it unique!"  I finally broke down when I hit his recipe for a Southern English Brown Ale (for those who aren't familiar, it's a relatively mild, sweet brown ale), and Mosher suggested putting a pound of toasted oats in to replicate the flavor of an oatmeal cookie.

It was as if the One Ring had taken hold of me.  This recipe was my precious, and I must have it.  I conceived of an improvement over Mosher's recipe: a pound of Special B in the grain bill.  Special B is a dark, flavorful crystal malt reputed to confer caramel and especially raisin flavors to a brew.  I would make no mere oatmeal cookie ale; I would be brewing an oatmeal raisin cookie brown ale.

The only snag: Mosher's recipe only came in partial-mash and all-grain versions; or at least, that was how it appeared to me.  Thus began my downfall.