Start a hops growing Co-Op?

Growing hops

Growing your own hops requires several pre-requisites:

1. Time.  Planting, watering, fertilizing, insect and weed control, and building the trellis all take a large chunk of time.  Harvesting will also take some time.
2. Money.  Money is needed to buy rhizomes, fertilizer, trellis equipment, etc.
3. Land.  Somewhere in the sun with enough room for a trellis system.  Also needs to be near a reliable source of water.
4. Skill.  A green thumb, some knowhow for constructing a trellis system, maybe even some experience setting up a watering system.

There may be other factors involved.  Some of you experienced hop growers may want to chime in there.

Anyhow, I'd like to grow my own hops.  However, I have absolutely zero of #3 and #4, and on some weeks I'm short on #1 as well.  I'm sure there are other people in a similar situation.  Maybe some people have plenty of time on their hands, but don't have the yard space or money required.  Maybe others have extra yard space.

So the question is, if a large group of people banded together into a Co-Op, could hops be grown on a larger scale, while filling all 4 pre-requisites for everyone?  Someone in the group provides the land.  Others have extra time to maintain the crop.  Some handy people can help build the trellis system.  A few other people chip in to buy rhizomes and equipment.  If the hops are grown on a large enough scale, then there will be enough to go around for everyone in the Co-Op.

Making things even better, the costs go down after the first year.  Rhizomes and most of the equipment only needs to be purchased the first year and can be re-used.  After everyone gains experience with the hops, they can run through tasks such as pest control and harvesting more quickly.

I'd like to participate in something like this.  Anyone else interested?

Make beer, not _____ ...

 Fill in the blank.

I've apparently created both.  The "Mexican Creveza Lager" aka: "Corona Clone" lagered great this fall.  It turned out so well that I chose to bottle it instead of keg it, so I could share with friends.

When bottling, I added the requisite 3/4 cup of corn sugar.  The brew had been through so many mishaps and frozen-carboy adventures that I decided the yeast was probably either dead or mostly-dead, so I added fresh yeast.

Apparently I was right about the yeast being dead.  My theory is that a lot of unfermented sugars have suddenly fermented along with the 3/4 cup corn sugar.  Several of these have exploded after 3-4 weeks of aging.  They're sitting in the garage now, chillin' like little exploding villains.  On the bright side, it's carbonated well!

How the pepper beer turned out...

I turned the American Wheat brew into a pepper beer, as mentioned in this post.  I ended up priming and bottling it about three weeks ago.

It tastes like flowers.  No, not like hops, the good kind of flowers.  The bad kind like your grandmother's house.  When I blogged about adding cinnamon and vanilla beans to the mixture, I had thought they would impart little if any flavor to the beer.  To the contrary, they were way too much and ended up mixing with the peppers in such a way that the beer smells and tastes like a fresh bouquet of flowers.

On the bright side, some people apparently like that taste.  I brought some over to family members and they liked it, so I left my entire supply there!  As a future brewing note, test any spice combinations before adding them to your brew.

The apple cider takes revenge. (aka: The Keg Incident)

About a year ago I brewed some cider.  I didn't give it much love or attention.  I left it sitting for months at a time without notice.  Long story short, it quickly became the red headed step child.

Sometime over summer, I decided to bottle it.  The yeast appeared to be dead, the bottles didn't carbonate, and the cider was too dry to be drinkable.  I blogged about this problem in August.  Thanks to a helpful suggestion from gregclimbs on the comments, I was able to save it by splitting it into two kegs, back sweetening with fresh cider, and force carbonating.  Before adding the fresh cider, I even attempted to "re-start" the fermentation in some mason jars, just to see if any yeast was still alive.  Nope, no activity in the mason jars, regardless of which sugars I tried.  After a week of testing, I felt pretty confident that the yeast wouldn't re-ferment.

I ended up bringing both kegs to my sister's wedding in September for everyone to try.  Unfortunately, the other beers I had available, and the Mango Melonade, were far more popular.  By the end of the wedding, I brought home both kegs of cider minus about 4 cups.

It sat in the garage for some time after the wedding.  The garage temperatures in September probably ranged from 95 degrees to 50 degrees, depending on the day.  The cider sat around like the red headed step child again.  Sometime last month I began to feel a bit bad about my 'orphaned brew' and shoved it into the fermenter/freezer.  I thought "hey, maybe I'll actually drink this stuff for fun".  Both kegs sat in there until last week when I decided to free up some space, and put one of the kegs out of it's misery.

I brought the single keg up to the kitchen, intending to dump it out, but completely forgot.  It sat there in the kitchen, the red headed step child yet-again.  Finally, the cider had had enough.  A couple of nights ago myself, my girlfriend, and my cat, were all startled to hear a very loud hissing sound.  We ran into the kitchen to see the keg sitting there making noise.

I was afraid it had over-pressurized and broke a seal somewhere.  But apparently the pressure relief valves are designed to automatically open before that happens.  After some time of listening to the cider hiss at me, it stopped.  I immediately walked over and pulled the relief valve to release more pressure.

I should point out that it usually only takes me a few seconds to evacuate gas from a corny keg at 40psi.  This time it took me about three minutes.  There was so much pressure built up that when I pulled the lid off of the keg, the cider was actually in a rolling boil, releasing co2.  I had somehow made a highly carbonated apple cider champagne.

The cider still smelled like fresh apples, and didn't show any signs of infection.  My theory is that all of the temperature changes finally woke up the yeast, and it's been slowly fermenting for some time now.  Anyone have an alternate theory, or had a similar experience?

Taming the freezer beast

So, twice now the freezer went so cold it froze my lager and the rest of the contents.  Both times were due to communication errors between the laptop and the power strip.  I wouldn't have noticed one of them if I hadn't been in the garage when some soda pop cans in the freezer started exploding from the pressure.  If they hadn't exploded while I was around I would have never known my lager was turning into ice beer.

There are a few disaster scenarios I can think of:

 * Communication to the power strip dies again.  I've now created a script in the laptop which monitors the power strip connection and alerts me if there are problems.

 * Laptop dies while the heat or freezer is on.  Since the laptop is dead it can't alert me to the problem, and can't control the power strip to turn off the devices.  I've set up a remote monitoring service, and a dead-man's script on the laptop to text my cell phone when this happens.  When the laptop stops responding, the remote monitoring service alerts me.
 * Freezer or heater stops working.  The laptop will now alert me if the temperature goes way above or below the desired threshold.

Hard Strawberry Breeze in the bottle.

I've gotten around to bottling the Hard Strawberry Breeze.  Does this drink have a celebrity name yet? If not, we should name the chilled version a "Lucille Ball".  It's a little bit red, can smack you around, and convinces you to do silly things.  Sound right?  "I think I'll have a Hard Lucille Ball with my key-lime pie please."  Way better than drinking a Hard Arnold Palmer.

I wasn't sure how much priming sugar to add, and I don't exactly have a scale to measure the priming sugar by weight.  However, most recipes I read recommend 3/4 cup of priming sugar for 5 gallons.  I'm using a 1 gallon batch, so I ended up boiling 1/5 of 3/4 of a cup (3/20 of a cup) of priming sugar.  Which turns out to be almost 2.5 Tablespoons.  Does that sound right?  The carbonation calculators I tried all measured in weight.  (sad, sad, face)

I guess I'll know in a couple of weeks whether 2.5 Tablespoons is enough to carbonate these Lucies.

By the way, you might be interested in knowing how I back sweetened, since the fermented mixture is terrible.  I actually boiled and added 3 cups of granulated baking Splenda.  The big fluffy kind that resembles snow flakes.  At one cup it definitely wasn't sweet enough, and at 3 cups, the girlfriend finally gave me the nod of approval.  Due to all the excess mass from the extra sugar and water, I almost ended up with a full 12 pack (one bottle short).  As another side note about the back sweetening, Splenda definitely has a lower gravity than sugar.  The recipe fermented down to almost 1.000 even.  3 cups of splenda only added 0.010 to the scale.  Granted, I added about a cup of water to each cup of sugar for boiling, so maybe that helped the gravity even out too.

I'll let you know how this tasty stuff turns out in a week or two.

There's a snake in mah boot

Well, replace 'snake' with 'pepper' and replace 'boot' with 'beer' and you'll have the correct topic. :)

I turned my American Wheat into American Pepper Wheat.  Or is it Peppy-wheat?  I ordered a variety of mild peppers, cinnamon, and vanilla beans to put in a mildly spicy holiday beer for Thanksgiving.  I used 4 vanilla beans, 4 cinnamon sticks, and 5 peppers (2 new mexico peppers, 2 chipotle morita peppers, and 1 guajillo pepper).  I wrapped them in tin foil with a few drops of olive oil and water.  I then heated them all up in the oven at 350 to help sanitize and bring out the flavors.  After several minutes of 'baking' I racked the American Wheat to a secondary, and dropped the goodies in.  I know I didn't add much in the way of vanilla and cinnamon, but hopefully the flavors they impart will at least be detectable.  The aroma coming from this mixture as I opened the tin foil, was amazing.

I'm curious how this will all turn out with a light beer like American Wheat.  Maybe I should have used a darker ale like a Scottish Ale, or a Porter?