The gravity of your beer is one of the most critical components of recipe formulation. The gravity of distilled water is 1. The more soluble sugars make their way into solution, the heavier the wort. It then goes to say that the heavier the wort, the more alcohol you will probably get out of your beer when fermentation is complete.

As a brewer, the gravity will tell you a lot of things. How efficient is your mashing process? Did your predicted gravity match up with your actual? Is fermentation started? Is it finished? When brewing beer, you live and die by this number as it has the most significant effect on your overall brewing process.

In order to figure out where you should be when your boil is finished, you can either do it the easy way by using Beersmith or another brewing app, in which case this will be a very short series, or you can use a few formulas to plug into excel or OpenOffice or whatever your preferred spreadsheet app is.

Your gravity is best determined if you think of your malts as contributing gravity units. For example, when you look at a malt profile, you will see some numbers like Dry Extract CG or Dry Extract FG. These are fine grind and course grind numbers, and they are both usually listed as a percentage like 80%. If this number was 100%, 1 pound of malt would contribute 46 ppg (points per pound per gallon). With Canadian 2-row malt, that number is more like 80%, or 37 ppg. To convert to how this would be read by the hydrometer, divide by 1000, then add 1000. The result is 1.037. It is one of the more simpler calculations to make and can be done visually with relative ease.

When thinking of the calculation as gravity points, your volume of water doesn’t matter. Whether you are brewing 5 gallons or 5000 gallons of beer at once, your total gravity points will not change. It does matter when determining original gravity. The volume of beer produced affects the dilution of those gravity points.

An example calculation:

8 lbs 2-row @ 37 ppg = 296 gravity points
2 lbs munich @ 37 ppg = 74 gravity points
0.5 lbs chocolate malt @ 33 ppg = 17 gravity points

Total gravity points = 387

If you were to divide this into a 5 gallon batch, you would simply divide 387 by 5 and you would get 77.4, or 1.077. As some experienced brewers might point out, this seems a little high for 10.5 lbs in a 5 gallon batch, and it is. This doesn’t account for mash efficiency. Since a good number to expect for home brewers is about 75% efficiency, we will work with that number.

75% of 387 gravity points = 290.25 gravity points

290.25 gravity points / 5 gallons = 58.05 or 1.058 estimated starting gravity.

To be most accurate, maltsters provide the dry extract figure with every lot of grain they malt. If able, try to get this information. Knowing this number is accurate can make things much easier if you are trying to dial in calculations to your equipment.

While this is only your starting gravity, there is also the final gravity number. I won’t get too much into this because there are numerous factors that affect final gravity, such as yeast, mash temp, other sugars, oxygenation and fermentation conditions, which are outside the scope of this presentation.

What is important to note though is that the final gravity is used in conjunction with your original gravity to calculate your ABV. Say we decided to brew that 1.058 beer that we came up with, and fermented it down to a final gravity of 1.013. The formula is:

ABV% = (OG – FG) / 0.00753

Or:

(1.058 – 1.013) / 0.00753 = 5.98% ABV

With all of this information put into a spreadsheet, you can build everything that has to do with the malt, excluding predicting your beer colour, which we will get to after we go over IBUs.

In this article, I wanted to go over some of the issues I’ve had to deal with coming from a brewing background and moving over into the world of mead. First off, if you are unfamiliar with what mead is, it is simply water and honey fermented into a wine. Where you go with it from there is up to you.

One of the things that threw me off a bit when it came to mead making (or wine making in general), is that when brewing beer, we are used to doing yeast starters, which are essentially small batches of beer using malt extract (usually) to propagate your yeast cell count prior to pitching it into your sweet wort. When I looked into yeast starters for mead, information was few and far between. The simple assumption would be to simply make a 2 litre starter with honey, then pitch. Probably not a bad idea, and I might do that next time I do a batch. Most of the information I came across involved the use of lots of yeast nutrient, aeration, aeration and more aeration.

The focus on the aeration part told me that you don’t necessarily need a yeast starter. There is a lot of sugar to chew through in mead, so the risk of over oxygenating the must is quite low. Generally, this would cause oxidation of ethanol molecules, which will start to leave off flavours, but since in my case, I was just pitching 70 billion yeast cells into a 1.115 wort, the yeast were going to be hungry for oxygen and all the goods of yeast nutrient. Any alcohol the yeast produce wouldn’t have a chance in hell to bind with the oxygen since the yeast are actively looking for food.

Since my first batch of mead is just really kicking off in its fermentation process, I’ll describe the steps I took and some mistakes on bad advice, and my thought process on where things might go as fermentation finishes.

When I started, I did something just plain and simple. Honey and water. I ended bringing them up to about 150F for about 15 minutes, mixed in some yeast nutrient and threw in a couple cinnamon sticks. My goal in the end is an apple cinnamon mead. After letting the must sit in a carboy overnight to cool down to room temperature, I pitched the yeast and aerated.

The next day, I aerated again, adding more yeast nutrient, but it wasn’t until today where I decided to check the pH levels. I could tell that fermentation was happening, but not necessarily as vigorous as I would have liked. Having read that fermenting mead can get quite acidic, I didn’t realize how acidic, though it can depend on the water you use to begin with. Mine was down to 2.9 pH. Ideally you should be around 3.7 pH, but upon talking to Neil Bamford from the Vineyard, he’s been sweeping all medals in the mead categories at all the homebrew competitions, and he sticks things around 3.4 pH.

Thus begins my quest to raise the pH of my must. I popped over to the local homebrew shop in town and was looking initially for potassium carbonate, which I knew to be an ideal mineral for increasing pH. While they didn’t have it, the only thing I saw for pH adjustment was “Acid Blend”. I figured I’d get it anyways since I knew I might use it, but after talking with the man of the shop, he mentioned to use the blend, following the instructions on the package. I figured it was counterintuitive, but hey, maybe he knew something I didn’t. Sure enough he didn’t and I ended up dropping my pH level down to 2.4.

Well this sucks. I talked to Neil about it and I was told to use calcium carbonate, or chalk. I was hesitant to, and here is why:

The molar weight of CaCO3 is different than that of K2CO3. Second, the balanced chemical equations are not the same. Those  differences mean that concentrations of the constituents are not the same – per unit weight. Moreover, CaCO3 is insoluble in water; whereas K2CO3 has a solubility of 112g/100ml. This means that any CaCO3 added to the must does not dissolve as quickly as the potassium based carbonate, and (because of the slower reaction rate) is likely to lead to over-adding; resulting in a chalky taste contribution to the product.

More Info

I went with it anyways and brought the pH level up to 3.4. No noticeable chalky flavour.

Now, the predicament this brings up, though it could be a bonus to some depending on how you look at it.

The acid blend is a combination of citric acid, mallic acid and tartaric acid, though it tastes like more citric than the others. By adding these acids, you lower the pH, but you also add the flavours from the acid. If added during fermentation, especially the early stages, you need to bring the acidity back up to 3.4 or higher (up to 4.2). With the addition of these acids, you will need more buffer to counter the additional acidity, which can lead to off flavours. Because you have now counteracted the acidity of these acids, the flavour still remains.

This brings up a good and a bad. The good is that later during the mead making process, you can further add more of these acids to enhance the flavour. Since you need some acidity to work with the the overall flavour and balance, you can get that lower pH, while really pushing the flavour to the forefront. The bad is that if you were not wanting to use any of these acids, or did but wanted to balance the acidity properly with the flavour, you can’t now. The flavour will be there, but the acidity will not. You are now in the middle of a minor mistake with limited options without affecting other factors in the balance of your mead.

I figured if anything, I could show how a mistake can be turned into something good, since the idea of using acid for its flavours, but neutralizing some of its acidity can be used as a method of enhancing flavours down the road. In my case, not the best idea early, but you never know.

The bottom line is that you will need to control your acidity, and you will also need to ensure proper food for your yeast. After correcting for acidity, my fermentation has started to take off in a hurry. My plans are to keep an eye on the gravity, but continue to aerate and feed nutrients until the gravity has reached around 1.070. Any more aeration after that, and I risk oxidization.

BJCP Style Guideline for Category 1A – Lite American Lager

This series will cover two main topics as it pertains to building your homebrew recipe from scratch. We will use a BJCP style guideline to illustrate these points.

When I build a recipe looking at these style guidelines, I always look at the vital statistics of the beer first. This is where you get your fancy abbreviations like OG, FG, IBU, SRM and ABV. For the sake of clarity:

OG = Original Gravity, typically used to describe the weight of the wort before fermentation. This will generally indicate total soluble sugars in the wort, but will not tell you the kind of sugars.

FG = Final Gravity, typically used to describe the weight of the wort after completed fermentation. This will generally indicate the body of the beer after fermentation and can be used in conjunction of the original gravity to determine alcohol content.

IBU = International Bittering Units, typically used to indicate the bitterness of the beer. This is primary calculated through hop usage using their alpha acid numbers, but in many cases, most people don’t account for bitterness that may be attributed by darker malts, or other ingredients like coffee beans or cocoa.

SRM = Standard Reference Method, typically used to indicate the darkness of the beer and is generally the same as the Lovibond scale. This is calculated through amount of malt and their colour, accounting for volume. While it accounts for colour, it doesn’t differentiate between browns or reds.

ABV = Alcohol By Volume, typically given as a percentage of alcohol by volume of total liquids. This can be generally calculated using the difference between Original Gravity and Final Gravity, but is not 100% as accurate, primarily because of the density of alcohol.

These statistics are called vital statistics because they set boundaries for the style to work within, which takes me to the first few parts of this series, the science of recipe formulation.

These are just all numbers, but they tell you little about the flavour of the beer and what a judge would expect smell or taste. That is what the rest of the BJCP guidelines for a style is for, and this is where the artisanal nature of brewing beer comes into play. These numbers will give you a general idea as to the colour, body, alcohol content and bitterness, but it is aroma, appearance, flavour, mouthfeel, overall impressions and comments that start to build the story about what the character of that beer is. This is where things are open to interpretation and experimentation. This is where brewing can truly become an artform.

Brewing is as much of a science as it is an art. We are going to cover them both and how they work together.

Overview

We will first go over the science of recipe formulation. This will include how you determine how much sugars you will extract from your malts, which will contribute to your original gravity, how to calculate your bitterness, and even how to determine the colour of your beer. This information is not necessary if you are using applications like Beersmith, but it is always a good idea to have a solid foundation as to why things are doing what they do. We won’t touch much on fermentation, or mashing, but we will go over how the yeast can affect the body of the beer as well.

Finally, the artistic nature of brewing. The secret to a good recipe is to pick the right ingredients for the style you want to brew. There are nearly unlimited combinations of things you can do when trying to build a recipe from scratch, but how do you know certain malts or certain hops will work together? Here I’ll talk about some of the things to expect with certain malts and hops, as well as how to experiment a bit.

As an addendum to this, I’ll touch a bit on the beer purity laws and why it should have no place in your home brewery if you truly want to be crafty and try some new things. I’ve personally found that the use of spices, adjunct sugars like honey and cane sugar, and fruits (among other things) can really transform your beer from something great into something truly special. A good example of this is my gold medal winning imperial stout recipe.

Most of their homebrews were attempts at braggots, but bucking the trend of what one would call a braggot. For those not in the know, a braggot is essentially a beer where at least half of the fermentables is honey. When trying out some of their beers, there was one that stood out to me. A stout. The only thing I knew about the recipe was that it used honey, and that Colin had accidentally used more roasted barley that was typical in stouts. Somewhere north of a pound or two when a few ounces or half a pound was typical. This got my mind chugging on how to go about building this recipe.

The thought process was to say “screw it” to conventional wisdom about how much roasted malt one should use in a stout, and likewise, it was time to play with honey. Leaving the meadery, I picked up a 7 kg pail of honey, which I have since used in many other homebrew beers with great success. The goal was to make this an extreme beer by using so much roasted barley and chocolate malt, mashing it high to get a ton of body out of it, then once that was fermented out, dump a load of honey directly into the fermenter. There wasn’t really a rhyme nor a reason to how I put the recipe together, but I knew it was going to be darker than dirty oil, roasty as hell but have a very unique character contributed by the honey.

To be honest, this is one of the most simple recipes I’ve done, so there is something to be said for simplicity. I wasn’t necessarily trying to brew to style when I did it, and to be honest, I was thinking it should have been a category 23 beer (which it probably wouldn’t have won any medals), but at the recommendation of Drummond Brewery’s brewmaster David Neilly, I did go ahead and enter it as an Imperial Stout.

The brew stats may not be too accurate as the honey was added into the fermenter AFTER the maltose had fermented. Like with most of my beers, a good base malt is generally key and I went with Canada Malting Company’s Superior Pale Ale malt, with chocolate malt and roasted barley from Bairds. The honey in this case was purchased directly from the Fallen Timber Meadery here in Alberta. Other honey will probably do fine, but it is best to ensure you are using a wildflower honey.

Brew Stats

Original Gravity: 1.061 (Pre-Boil – Mash Only)
Estimated Original Gravity After Honey: 1.091
Final Gravity: 1.020
ABV: 9.3%
SRM: 73.4 (estimated)
IBUs: 79 (calculated)
Volume: 5 US Gallons (19 Litres)

Recipe

Quantities based on 75% estimated efficiency. Percentages based on amount of sugars contributed.

10 lbs (55.6%) – Canada Malting Superior Pale Ale
2 lbs (11.1%) – Bairds Roasted Barley
1 lbs (5.6%) – Bairds Chocolate Malt

5 lbs (27.8%) – Honey

2.5 oz – Centennial hops (11% A/A) (60 min)

White Labs 013 London Ale yeast

Mashing

Grains should be mashed in a single infusion mash at 158ºF. Feel free to experiment with lower temps to make a slightly drier beer, but 158ºF seemed to do well for this one, given the amount of honey that was going to be used. Let mash for about 45 minutes. Sparge according to your equipment setup.

Boiling

Bring wort to a boil. Add Centennial hops at the 60 minute mark. Honey in the case of this recipe was not added at any time during the boil or prior to fermentation. Add yeast nutrient and/or kettle finings as desired.

Fermentation and Finishing

Pitch your yeast or yeast starter, then aerate or oxygenate your wort. Room temperature is ideal for fermentation. I was around 65ºF for fermentation. It may finish fermenting for a few days. Once fermentation is shown to be complete after a few days of testing, add the honey. I did it by weighing out and dumping into a funnel. The honey was not treated, heated or frozen. Oxygen was not much of a worry because there is a blanket of CO2 on the top of the beer. It will continue to ferment, but once this is done, it can be left to sit indefinitely. After about a month, I racked the beer from the carboy into the keg, put the lid on, purged the oxygen with CO2, then pressured it to around 25 psi at room temperature and let it sit for a couple weeks. You could shake the keg to get it in faster, but I was in no hurry as I wanted to age this longer anyways.

This is a beer style that does do very well with age. I originally brewed this recipe on June 17, 2011. It currently is mellowing nicely in its flavour. I could imagine that this recipe could be one of those that could get constantly better with age;

Special Note

With this beer, it was bottled into sparkling wine bottels and left to store in a cellar. When submitted to competition, one of the bottles was opened and emptied into smaller bottles.

Serving Notes

This beer is very sensitive to temperature in that colder temperatures affect its flavour negatively. As it warms up, some of the more floral and sweet flavours from the honey begin to shine. It tastes much better at room temperature than cold, but its ideal temperature is around 10 to 15 degrees celsius. While this is also the case with many beer styles, this beer seem to have more drastic swings in flavour with temperature.

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11.16.2009
inside SC09

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By: Warren Frey
Published: October 20, 2009

Supercomputing is the engine that drives our science, commerce, and communication. Giant search engines trawl the net with billions of queries, molecules are modeled and modified in massive simulations, and deep under Wall Street hulking processors trade massive blocks of money at the speed of light. But the era of the giant, room-spanning supercomputers may soon have some serious competition in the form of a small Calgary-based startup bringing supercomputing to the masses.

Calgary is known throughout Canada as the center of the country’s oil and gas industry, a booming city buoyed by the bubble-swelled profits of 20th century fossil fuel excess. It’s a prosperous if not especially cosmopolitan urban hub on the Canadian prairies. But tucked away in an unassuming office in the suburbs of this middling city, Tycrid Platform Technologies has been quietly putting together desktop systems boasting terahertz level horsepower under the hood since it was founded in 2008.

Miniaturization and Moore’s law have shrunk the components, but supercomputers still share one trait with their ancient, less powerful brethren; the ability to take up an entire room. The world’s fastest and most complex thinking machines may crunch stupendous amounts of data but they also take up a lot of space and require a surfeit of energy.

This beer was brewed originally to work with the thanksgiving season. The season from my perspective, falling between the Canadian and United States thanksgiving holidays. What I think was nailed in this recipe was the apple cinnamon flavour. The pie crust flavour needs a little work, but it is almost there. Not far at all from being perfect.

As usual, the base malts involved was provided by Canada Malting Company, which included both their Superior Pale Ale malt, and their Wheat malt. The wheat beer format was chosen because wheat flour tends to be used in pie crust. To accent that flavour a bit more, I decided to introduce some Dingemans Biscuit malt. As a bit of a signature that I tend to do with most of my beers, I added honey malt and a touch of honey to the recipe to add some nice body and honey flavour into the beer.

Finally, the apples and seasonings. Typically when I brew with cinnamon, I add it as cinnamon sticks and treat them like hops. You can boil them or you can “dry hop” them. But since you aren’t going to get much bitterness from cinnamon, add it close enough to the end of the boil to extract flavour, but not so close that there is minimal contribution. In this case, I added spices in the last 5 minutes. I also added cinnamon to secondary. The apples were golden delicious, and in this recipe, I will point out the weight of them after roasting, since the weight dropped by quite a bit. I went with these apples because I didn’t want the apples to contribute any tartness in the beer.

I did have fairly bad efficiencies in this recipe (little over 50% instead of 68%), so I’ll post what the OG should have been and what the FG was.

Brew Stats

Original Gravity: 1.056
Final Gravity: 1.013
ABV: 5.6%
SRM: 8.5 (estimated)
IBUs: 22 (calculated)

Recipe

5 lbs (45.5%) – Canada Malting Superior Pale Ale
3.5 lbs (31.8%) – Canada Malting Wheat Malt
1.25 lbs (11.4%) – Dingemans Biscuit Malt
0.75 lbs (6.1%) – Gambrinus Honey Malt

0.5 lbs (4.5%) – Honey

1 oz – Sterling hops (6.7% A/A) (60 minutes)

1 stick – Cinnamon (5 minutes boil)
0.5 tsp – Nutmeg (5 minutes boil)
2 sticks – Cinnamon (secondary)
1.5 lbs – Golden Delicious apples (secondary)

Wyeast 1010 American Wheat

194.7 billion yeast cells estimated minimum requirement

Mashing

Grains should be mashed in a single infusion mash at 152ºF. Add an ample amount of rice hulls into the mash as well to aid in lautering. Do some googling and you’re likely to find a lot of stories of stuck sparges involving wheat malt. Add rice hulls. Lots of them. helps efficiencies too. Let mash for about 60 minutes. Sparge according to your equipment setup.

Boiling

Bring wort to a boil. Add your hops at the beginning just to add a touch of bitterness. At 5 minutes remaining, throw in your cinnamon and nutmeg. At flame-out, or immediately prior to chilling, add honey if it is solid honey. Add honey to the fermenter with wort if it is in liquid form. My honey was in solid form so I added it at flame out, which was also immediately prior to immersion chilling.

Fermentation and Finishing

Pitch your yeast or yeast starter, then aerate or oxygenate your wort. Room temperature is ideal for fermentation. I was around 65ºF for fermentation. It may finish fermenting for a few days, but let it sit for about 2 weeks. Be weary of exploding yeast. Wheat beers with wheat yeast, especially if you pitch a lot of it, will develop a massive krausen. I didn’t use a blowoff tube and had the biggest mess in my cabinet on the first day of fermentation.

Week 3, prepare your apples. Buy lots of them. I bought 8 lbs of apples, cut out the core and sliced them into thin and small slices. The apples were baked on a clean cookie sheet at 400ºF for about 15 minutes. You will most likely have to do this multiple times as that is a lot of apple. By the time roasting was done, I had about 1.5 lbs of soggy apple. Stuff all this apple into your secondary carboy with 2 sticks of cinnamon, then rack your beer on top. Let that sit for a week.

After this is complete, bottle or keg, carbonate, and enjoy a good thanksgiving beer!

Part of what went into the making of this recipe started with my love of Gambrinus Honey Malt. I have used it in many different beers, and one of the most noticeable contributions was in my pale ale. As a matter of fact, the concept of this recipe stemmed almost exactly from what I did in my pale ale, but I took some lessons from my use of Weyermann’s CharaMunich III malt in a caramel pilsner, and included it in this recipe. It did leave a beautiful caramel like flavour. Almost candy like. I figured that candy like carmel flavour when combined with wildflower honey, and one of the ultimate in northwestern hops would probably lead to something amazing.

The methodology of hopping I used isn’t something new. The concept was essentially pioneered by Sam Calagione , using continuous hopping during the boil. Though I didn’t really have a device to do it, I just worked it out to 0.2 ounces of hops every 5 minutes from 60 minutes to 0. Then of course later dry hopping. The hop variety I used in the boil is Falconer’s Flight, a fairly new pellet hop that combines a number of northwestern hop varieties into a single pellet. Some say that it includes hops like Amarillo, Cascade and Simcoe. Dry hopping was later done with Citra.

The goal was to make a very west coast style IPA, but play with things a little bit on the malt side of the equation. The Honey Malt and CaraMunich III malt do make a huge impact on the recipe, but as usual, my base malt of choice for almost everything is Canada Malting Company’s Superior Pale Ale malt.

Brew Stats

Original Gravity: 1.063
Final Gravity: 1.012
ABV: 6.6%
SRM: 14 (estimated)
IBUs: 68 (calculated)
Volume: 5 US Gallons (19 Litres)

Recipe

Quantities based on 68% efficiency. Percentages based on amount of sugars contributed.

7 lbs (61%) – Canada Malting Superior Pale Ale
1.5 lbs (12.2%) – Gambrinus Honey Malt
1 lbs (8.2%) – Thomas Fawcett Crystal Malt I
0.75 lbs (6.1%) – Weyermann CaraMunich III

2 lbs (16.3%) – Honey

2.8 oz – Falconer’s Flight hops (10.5% A/A) (continuously hopped)
1 oz – Citra hops (13.4% A/A) (Dry hopped 7 days)

Wyeast 1056 American Ale or White Labs 001 California Ale or Safale US-05 yeast
214.3 billion yeast cells estimated minimum requirement

Mashing

Grains should be mashed in a single infusion mash at 152ºF. Feel free to experiment with lower temps to make a slightly drier beer, but 152ºF is ideal for most beers in a single infusion mash. Let mash for about 60 minutes. Sparge according to your equipment setup.

Boiling

Bring wort to a boil. Begin adding Falconer’s Flight hops in 0.2 ounce increments every 5 minutes in the boil. At flame-out, or immediately prior to chilling, add honey if it is solid honey. Add honey to the fermenter with wort if it is in liquid form. My honey was in solid form so I added it at flame out, which was also immediately prior to immersion chilling.

Fermentation and Finishing

Pitch your yeast or yeast starter, then aerate or oxygenate your wort. Room temperature is ideal for fermentation. I was around 65ºF to 72ºF for fermentation. It may finish fermenting for a few days, but let it sit for about 2 weeks. Week 3, begin the dry hopping. The method I used was to put 1 ounce of Citra leaf hops into a hop sock and chuck it into a keg. I racked the beer from the carboy into the keg, put the lid on, purged the oxygen with CO2, lightly shook the keg then let it sit at room temperature for a week.

After dry hopping, bottle or keg, carbonate, and drink up!

Big Rock produces over 20,000,000 litres of beer per year. In Alberta, their most well known products are Traditional, an english style brown ale, and Grasshopper, an American style wheat beer. Their best selling products, however, don’t belong to any of their craft beer offerings. What some people don’t realize is that Big Rock also happens to produce adjunct lagers in the form of Alberta Genuine Draught, Co-Op Gold, Bow Valley Lager and other contract beers. These beers account for nearly half of their production volume.

Some make the argument that Big Rock is not a craft brewery simply because of their size. If that were the case, companies like Dogfish Head, Boston Beer Company (NASDAQ: SAM) and Sierra Nevada would no longer be considered craft breweries. As a matter of fact, it is thanks to Boston Beer that the Brewers Association now accepts the idea of breweries producing as much as 6 million barrels of beer (over 35 times more than Big Rock’s production), craft brewers.

From that standpoint, Big Rock produces great craft beers, and they also put out seasonal beers frequently. Whether people like them or not is another story, but you can’t say they don’t try being a little creative here and there. To be honest, with my experience brewing beer, having brewed nearly 40 batches of beer from scratch, there are only a small handful of recipes that I consider to be exceptional (A or A+ rated), and a larger number that I could consider sellable (B or C rated). Not every craft brewery will put out world class ales and lagers, and no craft brewery is an exception to this.

Where the waters get a bit muddy is in the manner that a significant portion of their beer is produced.

A brewer who has either an all malt flagship (the beer which represents the greatest volume among that brewers brands) or has at least 50% of its volume in either all malt beers or in beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor.

- Brewers Association

This caveat is included primarily because of how larger macro breweries produce their beers, and for what reason. Adjuncts such as rice or corn sugar are typically added to beers not only to lighten the flavour, but to reduce the overall cost of brewing, without regard to enhancing the beers flavour. This is also a typical strategy being employed in markets trying to sell beer as cheaply as possible. It isn’t necessarily a bad business model.

Mountain Crest made millions on buck-a-beer product. Drummond brewery used the busk-a-beer market to push their production volume to 10,000 hectolitres per year within a couple years. It isn’t bad business, but are you a craft brewer for it? No. This principle applies specifically to adjuncts, and it is usually a fair assumption that cheap beer uses adjuncts like corn sugar, because it costs less than malted barley.

Is Big Rock a craft brewery? Yes, and here is why:

• They still produces mostly craft beer and generates more of their revenue from craft beer than adjunct beers.
• They still focus their primary public relations and marketing towards their craft lineup of beers.
• Even as a public company, their annual reports put a major focus on their top craft brands.
• They put effort into creating new brands and flavours to increase the impact of craft beer in Alberta.
• They want to increase awareness of craft beer in Canada as much as any other craft brewery as more of their profit per unit of work is still within craft beer.

Some may disagree with me on this conclusion, but right now, we have decided that a brewery can either be a craft brewery or not. We haven’t really discussed or accounted for craft breweries who may either contract out, or brew cheap adjunct beers as part of their overall production volume. It isn’t mentioned in the definition set out by the Brewers Association. Beers like Alberta Genuine Draught and Bow Valley Lager may be cheap beers, but they aren’t branded as Big Rock beers, even though they are, which tells me that there is a huge value to the company to maintain the perception to the public as a craft brewer.

The caveat that I would put in place here is that a majority of a brewery’s revenue should come from craft beers, and that at least 80% of their marketing budgets are used to promote their craft beer related products and services to the public. This I think Big Rock falls within, and therefore should still be considered a craft brewery.

That being said, I would still like to see some collaboration beers come out of Big Rock that have been brewed with other Alberta based craft breweries.

There are those in Alberta that when they think Drummond Brewery, at least those who have heard of them… they think cheap swill brewed cheaply. Recently, they hired David Neilly, former brewmaster for Wild Rose Brewery in Calgary, and he has since been changing that perception, and recently, I’ve had the opportunity to see for myself first hand the work that goes into not only converting an adjunct lager into craft beer, but the process of taking my knowledge from the home brew scale to the commercial scale.

First, a little bit on Drummond. The brewery as it exists today is only a few years old, however, the Drummond name lives on for much longer than that. Drummond existed in the 1990′s, going out of business in 1995. Sleeman had purchased the assets and let the trademark on the Drummond name expire. A couple budding entrepreneurs decided to bring the brewery back to life in 2009, and since then, have been selling beer like hotcakes.

That being the long and short of it, they do have a really cool brewery. Since David Neilly has been brought in, he has since removed corn sugar from their premium lager by improving mash efficiency to around 85% (though I think they could hit just north of 90%), and added more flavour and aroma hops. A glass of Drummond Premium lager now has a nice light flavour with noticeable hop aroma and bitterness.

My experience at Drummond was my first experience being involved in the brewing process at a commercial scale, from mash in to transfer to the fermenter, and reloading the malt hopper above the mill. A special thanks for David Neilly for inviting me out to enjoy the experience.

The start of the day began with preparing the mash, as it usually does. In this case, we were mashing in 900 KG of malted 2-row barley to kick out about 5000 litres of wort. This is a lot of malt, and it did take a lot of time to fill the mash tun with both water and malt. During this time, we had filled the kettle with water to mix a caustic solution. Heck, because of how long it took to fill the mash tun, we got a fermenter cleaned up as well to be ready to take in some fresh wort.

The caustic cleaner was heated up in the kettle, then pumped through some of the pipes near the kettle and throughout the brewery to sanitize everything that was going to touch the beer. It was at this point that I finally got to see how fermenters were sanitized given their large scale. This was through a CIP (clean in place) process. It worked in this case by pumping about 1000 litres of caustic into the fermenter. A pump inlet was attached to the bottom of the cone on the fermenter, while the output was attached to the CIP. This allowed the caustic to be circulated through the fermenter, sanitizing everything thoroughly. We had let this run for a few hours.

Of course, during the CIP cycle on the fermenter, we did spend time keeping an eye on the mash. Once the mash tun was full, we had let the mash sit for a bit. Do to the size of the tun though, I’m pretty sure we could have began lautering the moment it was full, but we let it sit another 45 minutes, probably to let some enzymes work to avoid the dreaded protein rest.

As you can see if you are a home brewer, there isn’t really anything out of the ordinary. As a matter of fact, the entire brewing process doesn’t change from the home brew scale to the commercial scale. The main concerns end up being methodologies of moving liquid from point A to point B, the heating of water and the boiling of wort. Typically, water is heated in a hot liquor tank then used for doing the mash infusion. In the case at Drummond, there was a hot and cold liquor tank. This equipment varies from brewery to brewery, but the process is largely the same.

As we were sparging, we were draining the mash tun directly into the kettle. As the kettle was filling, we had the steam jacket on the lower half of the kettle on, heating wort as we fill the kettle. If this wasn’t done, it could have taken hours to get a boil going. Even when running the steam jackets, it still took a while to bring the wort to a boil. The steam jacket is essentially piping within the walls of the boil kettle that carries steam. Some kettles can still be direct fired, but in this case, steam is pushed through to heat the wort.

It took about 20 minutes once the kettle was full before it finally started to boil. This was when we added a kilogram of hops. One thing I will note next that home brewers tend to have a good idea of… boil overs. While there didn’t seem to be an imminent boil over in this case, it did happen about 15 minutes into the boil. Unfortunately, neither David or I were paying attention, and one of the packaging staff ended up finding me. The boil over essentially looked like a foam waterfall coming from the opening of the top of the kettle. Nothing a little spray of water couldn’t take care of. After this, the boil was relatively uneventful.

Like some people do for home brewing, kettle finings were used and yeast nutrient was added. This was in between a couple additions of finishing hops. As the boil was finished, we began to pump the wort into the fermentor.

The process involved with pumping the wort involved two parts. The first was the chilling of the wort down to fermentation temps. The second was infusing oxygen in line, into the wort to aid in effective fermentation. Oxygen is typically a better bet than aeration when it comes to yeast health, and can help the beer ferment to a lower final gravity.

Finally… fermentation. We essentially had a keg ful of yeast ready to pump into the fermentor. Once the wort was in the fermentor, the yeast wasn’t far behind.

It was an interesting experience, and I had the opportunity to kick out about 10,000 litres of beer. It is an experience that does help me out as I continue to study the brewing process, and refine some of my own processes, and maybe someday soon… start a brewery of my own.