Grow Your Own Hops

This year I took advantage of the Northern Brewer sale on hop rhizomes and planted some hops. Northern Brewer had a nice selection of hop roots (rhizomes) and the only requirement was that you had to buy at least two. I ordered a cascade rhizome and a fuggle rhizome. Cascade is one of my favorite all-purpose bittering and flavoring hops and fuggle was, well . . . something else. Fuggle is an English flavoring hop and I make English ales from time to time, plus I needed to order a second rhizome and voila, I picked fuggle. Yes, the silly name had something to do with it . . .

So, the rhizomes are shipped to your mailing address about the time your area gets its last frost. Once the last frost is gone, you are supposed to dig two to three foot holes and fill them with a good mixture of well drained soil (I used equal parts top soil, potting soil, and peat moss). You then put the root stock in the ground, vertically, about two inches below the top of the soil. I planted mine in early May and hoped for the best.

Both hop plants have come up fairly well, with the cascade doing a little better than the fuggle (cascade is on the left, fuggle on the right). The first year the plants don't grow to full size or at full speed, as they are establishing their root system. But because they are sending out shoots, I decided to put up my hop trellis last weekend. Hop plants are vines and will grow up to 20 feet up a structure (trellis, tree, house, pole, etc.) in a season, if they are able to. So, you need to create some kind of structure to hold them, or else they don't go anywhere. The higher the better, in general, but the structure has to be able to hold a fair amount of weight, as the hops vines get fairly heavy before they produce their flower cones. You also need to be able to get the hop vines down to the ground in order to pick the flowers, so most designs use string that you can replace every year (the hop plant dies back to its roots every winter).

My trellis is based on my friend Jamie's "ghetto" design. It is not pretty, nor is it extremely tall, but it works well for him and can be easily constructed. The design is basically a 12 foot tall pressure treated 4x4 post, which is then crossed by a 2x4 board on top. I notched the top of my post to provide extra strength and then put screws to hold strings along the cross bar. I sank the post two feet into the ground for extra support and thus it is only 10 feet tall. But it should do for my needs and I can still reach the top on a normal sized ladder (very important because we live on a slope).

Only time will tell how well this experiment will work, but I am excited to potentially brew with my home-grown hops.

I racked the NoopleTucker into the secondary fermenter last night. I use a clean and sanitized 5 gallon glass carboy as my secondary fermentor. I try to do secondary fermentation on most of the beers I make. Secondary fermentation simply means that you siphon (or rack) the beer off of the lees (yeast sediment) at the bottom of the primary fermenter. This is an important step for two reasons:

• The first reason is that over time, the lees begin to decompose. This occurs because the lees consist mostly of dead yeast cells and cold break protein compounds. The decomposition can add to off-flavors in some beer styles. So, racking the beer into a secondary fermenter buys you time if you can't bottle your beer right away (you can leave your beer in secondary for a couple of weeks). As I often travel for work, I will take any time flexibility that I can get. Because of this extra time, most people recommend that you use a glass vessel as your secondary fermenter, as plastic allows some oxygen transfer over time and can oxidize your beer.
• The second reason is that it helps the beer to clear better. Basically, when you move the primary fermenter around, some of the lees gets stirred up into suspension. This gets transferred to your secondary fermenter, where it again has a chance to settle out. If you were to bottle straight from the primary fermenter, you would be more likely to pick up sediment that goes into your bottles.

The NoopleTucker tasted very good for this point in the fermentation. I could still taste some yeast, but because this is a wheat beer, that is almost a good thing. I detected no off-flavors (so far) and the beer had a nice smooth nuttiness to it. I was not expecting this last element at all, but it tastes great. The beer as a nice dark brown color to it, almost mahogany. I am very excited about this beer. I will keep you posted.

NoopleTucker Dunkelweizen

On Saturday 6/7/07, I started a batch of German dark wheat beer. The style is called a dunkleweizen and was my favorite German beer from my trip to Heidelburg a couple of years ago. I had no idea what went into the beer until I was reading through The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, by Charlie Papazian. This is book is the textbook of homebrewing, and if you have not read it, I suggest you pick up a copy. This is true regardless of your experience level. He explains things very well.

Here is the NoopleTucker Dunkelweizen recipe from the book (all grain), modified by me to fit the grain available from Northern Brewer, http://www.northernbrewer.com (my favorite web-brew store):

- 4 lbs Pale 2 row malt (#G001C)

- 3 lbs Durst Munich malt (#G303C)

- 3 lbs Weyer dark wheat malt (#G353C)

- 2 oz Weyer Carafa II malt, smallest you can order is a lb (G357C)

- 1 lb rice hulls (#G011)

- 1 oz hallertauer hop pellets (#HP07)

- 1 Whirlfloc tablet (Irish moss)

- 1 package Wyeast Bavarian Wheat Blend (#Y3056)

I always buy my grains crushed from Northern Brewer, as I don't have a grain mill. I also added the rice hulls to the recipe to help prevent a stuck sparge, which can happen with that much wheat malt.

Here is a list of steps that I took, and some pictures of the actual brew day:

1) I measured out 3 gallons of water to be used for the mash, then heated it in my brew pot. The standard ratio is 1 quart of water for 1 lb of grain, but I have found that is too little water for my system so I add a half a gallon to the calculation. I heated the water to 175 degrees F, which is my strike temperature. Strike temperature is simply the temperature that the water needs to be that when it is added to the room temperature grains, it results in your mash temperature. The recipe calls for a mash temperature of 152 degrees F, so I used a handy web calculator http://www.tastybrew.com/) that resulted in the 165 degrees, and I have found that I have to add 8 to 1o degrees to this because my system absorbs a fair amount of heat (trial and error, gotta love it).

2) I poured this water into my mash tun. Then, as I slowly added the grain to the water, my wife stirred it well. Once everything was added (including the 2 oz of carafa malt), we checked the temperature, which was 151.7 degrees F - close enough for government work. I then screwed on the top of the mash tun and waited for an hour. During this time, the enzymes in the malted grains convert the starches to sugars. In fact, at the end of this process, if you taste some of the water, it tastes really sweet. This still amazes me!

3) While we waited in an hour, I heated 5 gallons of water to 170 degrees F. This is my sparge water, that will run through the sparge arm gadget I have. I heat 5 gallons because that is all my water cooler will hold, and we don't always use it all (better to have more, than not enough). This was put in the sparge water tank, which is the highest of the three tiers (sits up on a stool, which is on top of a table - very safe, huh).

4) Once the hour has elapsed we begin to vaurloff. I am not even sure if that is how you spell it, but it is a German word that means the first runnings out of your mash tun will have a bunch of bits of grain hull and stuff it in. To digress for a bit, the husks and bits of grain in the mash tun are suspended in water. As that water drains out, they form a sort of natural filter bed, on top of the false bottom in my mash tun (the stainless steel screen). This in turn helps clarify the water as it flows through the grain bed. So, we collect the first couple of cups of liquid out of the mash tun and then pour them back on top of the grain bed. We do this until the liquid coming out is clear, which take about 4 to 8 cups or so. This is called vaurloffing.

5) Next, we begin to sparge. All this means is that we are washing the sticky sugars that formed during the mash off the bits of grain. We do this by adding 170 degree water very slowly to the grain bed. We use 170 degree water because you want it as hot as possible, but any hotter than that will extract bitter compounds from the grain husks. I use a neat gadget called a sparge arm for this process (it was described in the last post). Basically, we use the ball valves on the mash tun and the sparge water tank to control the flow in and out of the mash tun. We want the equilibrium between these amounts to keep about an inch of water on top of the grains. I do this by just adjusting each one a little bit until I like the how it works. The water coming out of the mash tun goes into the brew pot. We sparge until we have our 7 gallons of wort (sugar water that has not been fermented), or the specific gravity reading from the sparge water coming out of the mash tun falls below 1.010. When if falls below this point, the sparge water starts to pull out bitter off flavors from the grain. In this particular brew day, I got the full 7 gallons - YAY! This is not always the case.

6) I now began the boil. This recipe calls for a 60 min boil, with 3/4 oz of the hops being added at the beginning of the boil, and the rest added at 58 min to give the beer aroma (more on hop usage another time). I add my hops in small muslin grain bags, as this helps keep the pellets from going everywhere and makes clean up easier. I also added a whirlfloc tablet at 50 min, to help clarify the beer later. We have about 6 gallons of beer at this point, as a gallon of water evaporated during the boil.

7) I then took the boiled wart and put it in an ice bath and hooked up the non-contact cooler. The goal here is to bring the temperature of the wart down to 75 degrees as fast as possible. We put the pot in an ice water bath then use tap water flowing through the non-contact cooler to cool the center of the pot. In about 15 min we had the wart cooled down to 77 degrees, which is close enough.

8) I now pour the wart through a strainer into a sanitized bucket (more on sanitization another time). This strains out some cold break material and any loose hops. I stir the wart like crazy to add oxygen to the liquid. Yeast need oxygen at the beginning of their life cycle to reproduce. The more you oxygenate, to a point, the quicker fermentation starts and you avoid infections.

9) Finally, I siphoned (technically called racking) the wart into a sanitized 6.5 gallon carboy and pitched the yeast. I then attached an airlock and put the carboy into a cool closet in the basement. I also wrapped a towel around it so that it would stay absolutely dark (light = skunky beer).

In the next post, I will talk about how this beer fermented and the next steps towards creating excellent beer.

Brewery Equipment

I figured I would start off by providing a quick tour of my basic brewing equipment. These pictures were all taken before the start of my last brew day (6/7/07).


I use a basic three tier all grain setup. The three tiers include a sparge water tank, the mash tun, and the brew pot. The sparge water tank and the mash tun are converted 5 gallon rubbermaid water coolers. I replaced the plastic push valves on each with stainless steel ball valves. The mash tun also has a stainless steel false bottom, so it can also function as my lauter tun. The coolers are connected by thick heat-resistant tubing.


My brewpot is a 7.5 gallon stainless steel turkey-fryer pot. Basically, I bought an manufacturer-returned turkey fryer from ebay. The equipment had never been used, but it was returned because it was missing some accessories. This allowed me to get a nice 7.5 gallon stainless steel pot and accompanying propane burner and stand for less than a new 5 gallon brew pot would have cost me. I have been very happy with the set up and it allows my wife to help for the first time in my brewing career (the smell of cooking hops in the kitchen gives her a head-ache, but out on the front porch, the smell does not bother her. It is exciting, really, to have her excited about brew days!).

The sparge arm setup is something I bought at a homebrew shop. It is a neat little gizmo that consists of a copper "T" suspended from a PVC tripod. The water comes down the the main section and out the arms of the "T." Because the drilled holes in the arms of the "T" radiate in opposite directions, the arm spins around like a sprinkler. Really quite an neat invention.


I use a non-contract copper cooler, along with a water bath, to quickly cool the wort. Cooling it quickly helps ensure that cold break proteins form and fall out of the wort, in addition to shortening the amount of time required before pitching your yeast. This is a crucial stage, as before the yeast gets going, there is a strong potential to get an infection in your beer.

My typical brew day takes about 5 hours and consists of the following steps:

1. Heat the mash water outside in the brew kettle (typically around 3 gallons)
2. Mash the grain with the mash water in the mash tun
3. Heat the sparge water and put it in the sparge water tank (typically around 5 gallons)
4. Vaurloff the first 8 to 12 cups of drainage from the mash tun (you basically drain a couple of cups full of mash water into a measuring cup, then pour it back over the top of the grains. This allows you to clarify the grain bed.)
5. Sparge with the sparge arm, while draining the water through the grains (this yields a total of about 7 gallons of wort)
6. Boil the wort, adding hops and other additives as called for by the recipe
7. Chill the wort quickly using a water bath and a non-contact copper cooler
8. Pour the wort through a strainer into a large bucket
9. Stir heavily to introduce oxygen for the yeast and rack into a 6.5 glass carboy
10. Pitch the yeast and hide in a closet

So, why a blog . . .

A friend of mine asked me if I could provide him with some information about my homebrewery. So, on my last brew day (7/9/2007 - dunkleweizen), I snapped a bunch of pictures and began to draft an email response. Then suddenly I thought, "perhaps I could turn this into a blog." Well, to be honest, my wife planted the idea in my head. She already has a blog about our two kids and has a ton of fun with it. Like many of the things in my life, this idea was either conceived or heavily supported by my wife.

So, over the next several posts, I will try to show off my home brewery through the pictures and supporting text of my last brew day. Then, I will try to post every once in a while about the different things I am doing and maybe even some pictures of us enjoying the fruits of our labors. I hope you enjoy!