This week we discuss the pilsner parade with Aaron Bandler and Ryan Pachmayer. This has been a months long brewing project. We discuss the beers and their methods of making them.
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Transcript
This is AI driven and will have a ton of errors:
Colter Wilson
On this week’s episode of Home Brewing DIY. We’re just back and it feels good. It’s been a long sixmonth break and it feels good to be making podcasts in now. This week we have Aaron Bandler and Ryan Pacmeyer, both on the show. We’re going to talk about their six month project that they’ve been doing the entire time. We haven’t been making the show called The Parade of Pills Nurse, and it’s going to be a fun little project to go through. So stick around while we discuss it this week on Home Brewing DIY.
Colter Wilson
And welcome back to Home Brewing DIY, the podcast that takes on the do yourself aspect of Home Brewing gadgets, contraptions and parts. The show covers it all. On this week’s show, we’re going to be talking about The Parade of Pilsners. I have Ryan Pakmeyer and I have Aaron Bandler, both on the show. We’re going to talk about their ongoing six month long project that they did over the winter where they made all kinds of different types of Pilsner, all using the same yeast cake. It’s a great conversation and I hope you stick around for the show. But first, I’d like to just really discuss the reason why we had to take a long break. It’s been kind of a long six months for me. I obviously have a job and my job workload doubled and that was really tough. And then on top of that, my mother had been diagnosed with cancer and she was in another state and it was a lot to deal with. So in all reality, something had to give and it had to be the podcast for a while. Now, that said, I am on the other side of all of that. The sad news is that my mother’s cancer didn’t end well and cancer is a bitch and does what it does. But in the end, one of the cool things that I can say on the other side is that now that I have more time and can actually invest in doing a podcast, I’m excited. It’s definitely something that I’m passionate about doing and I’m excited to just get back to it. So for those of you who are listening to the show right now, I’m just glad that you stuck with me through a pretty long hiatus of me not making episodes. But that said, I am in the process of right now having more episodes coming out on a weekly basis, and I’m excited to get them put out. I have some great interviews lined up and stick with us because Home Brewing DIY is only going to be better. Also, a couple of things that I’ve also made decisions on. I’m actually going to pull back on some of the ads. I think that it’s one of the things where I’ll probably do ads at the very, very beginning and very, very end. But for the most part, I’m actually going to pull back on just ads on the show in general. I feel like it’s one of those things where it’s there, but I don’t know. I just want to do podcasting for the love of it. It’s not some plot to make money, even though it does help in having some income in saying, hey, all of the money that has ever been invested into this podcast just goes right back into the podcast. So just note that. But head on over to Patreon. You can donate there. I will have a little bit of ads, but I’m definitely going to cut back on the amount of ads you hear. And so hopefully that helps for everything and helps for everyone that listens. All right, so I guess we should just hop into the episode. It’s time to get into the interview where we’re going to talk about the Pilsner Parade.
Colter Wilson
I’d like to introduce Ryan Pakbier and Aaron Bandler to the show. They’ve both been on the show in previous episodes, never together, but I’m excited to have them both. And here’s the thing, Ryan. He’s a BJCP certified judge. He’s a contributor to Home Brewing DIY, and he’s also a renowned beer author. I’m going to say you’re now renowned. We also have Aaron Bandler, who you’ve heard on shows such as our Homebrew Hack show. And he’s also my neighbor across the street. And he has really come into his own. I got to admit, Erin’s making better beer than I’ve ever made. And so I’d like to welcome both of you to the show. How’s it going, guys? Thanks for having us. Thank you. It’s great to be back. It’s great to be together, Ryan. Finally together alive. Since we don’t brew together, we just make batches. Split batches. Yeah. That’s good to. Yeah. Ryan comes up with the recipes and supplies the ingredients, but I do all the work. So that’s the arrangement we have currently. Yeah, exactly. That’s a good intro into why we have you both on the show. One of the things that it’s been a while since I’ve made a podcast, I’m excited to be back. And the entire time that this show was on hiatus, you two have been doing this really cool project. You call it the Pilsner Parade. And why don’t want to you just explain what the Pilsner Parade is and how you kind of came up with this idea. Erin can explain it. Since he came up with the name. I came up with the name. The Pilsner Parade is just what it sounds like. It’s a parade of pilsners, one after another after another after another after another. So the back story here is that Ryan approached me around. So we’re recording this in April. Ryan approached me back in like, I think it was December, maybe even November. I can’t remember now, but he said, hey, I want to do this French style Pilsner using all French malts and all French hops. And I had never heard of a French style pills. And I said, okay, that sounds cool. So we did that. And then while that one was fermenting, he was like, hey, I kind of want to try this other Pilsner. I want to try the Japanese style Pilsner. And I was like, Ryan, what are you smoking? No one’s ever heard of a Japanese style pillsner. And he was like, no, it’s a thing. It’s the same similar, but we use flaked rice in the malt bill, whatever. So anyhow, we ended up coming up with these two pilsners. And I thought, you know what, Ryan? Why don’t we since I’m doing all the work, I want to save myself some work. I said, what if we just transfer the first Pilsner out of the tank on the same day as we? And by we, I mean me brew the second batch and we’ll just chill it from the kettle right onto the yeast cake from the first one. And we’ll just pitch it right on top of the yeast from the first one. Right. And so we do that. And then I’m like idea goes off. And I’m like, how many of these do you think we can do? And Ryan says, according to my calculations, I think we could do five to ten. And I said, all right, let’s shoot for five. So fast forward a couple of months. We now have our fifth beer in kegs, and we got five essentially pilsners. The last one isn’t quite a pills there, but we got five batches out of one pitch of 34, 74, 70 was what started at the beginning. And we just pitched what’s the word? We transferred one rack. I guess we racked one beer right on top of the yeast cake, one after another. And that was the Pilsner parade. So five pilsners. Let’s talk about the first Pilsner, which is the French style Pilsner. Ryan, since you came up with the recipe, what inspired this beer, how did you come up with the idea? And what were all the ingredients in this beer? And by the way, everyone who’s listening, I have had I think all of these beers at this point, except for maybe the most, you’ve not had the last one because it hasn’t been packaged yet. It’s still carbonating. But don’t worry, you’ll get it. Yeah. So I’ve had four of the five beers here, all of them solid. I mean, killer, killer, killer pilsners here. And so let’s talk about the French Pilsner and what the ingredients are there. Maybe like a year ago, Dan Moore, who’s been on for Pressure Fermenting Loggers, been on your podcast before. Dan Moore and I were talking about different types of loggers and pilsners. And we were talking about a French style Pilsner where it’s basically a German Pilsner with all French malt, the Franco Belgian malt. And then using French hops. I think Dan used different kinds. He made one, but I wanted to use the Strassel spot hops because they’re super low Alpha acid, which is very similar to it’s basically like a Noble German hop, but it’s French and it adds a lot of flavor and it’s not going to be harsh or too sharp at all. So it’s basically making a German pillow with all French ingredients. At some point in the last year, Beer and Brewer Magazine came out with an article from Notch Brewing in Massachusetts, and they make amazing loggers where they talked about an actual historical French style Pilsner. But that beer had corn in it, and if you want to use heirloom corn or something, that’s fine. But I’m not a big fan of corn and blogger, to be honest, so I’d never consider going that route. But I pitched a bunch of pills and ideas to Air and I’m like, hey, let’s do another Pilsner. Here are six ideas for pills. Nears which one do you want to do? And he’s like, let’s do the French one. That sounds fun. So it’s the same exact thing you would do for a German pillsner, just with French pills and stressful spault hops and the stressful spault hops, they add a little more fruitiness and a little more floral maybe than you would get from German hops, but nothing out of bounds like it tastes just like a pillsner. It’s a really good tasty pillsner. Well, stressful spault tends to be, at least in my past uses of it. It’s been around like 2.5 acid. I’ve seen it down as high, as low as 1.5 Alpha acid. What were the Alpha acids on the stressful spots that you use for dispatch? It’s below three. Do you remember, Aaron? I want to say 28, but I could be just making that up. I have written on my brew father 2.2%, but I’m not sure if that’s the default value or if that’s actually the one that we use. I don’t know that I don’t recall, but it wasn’t far off because it was somewhere around in the mid two s probably. But I do want to interject. This is close to a smash beer, but we ended up with targeting an Ibu of around. 38 and we used some Magnum as a biddering edition. That’s right. We did have half the biddering, I think was Magnum. They want to do all the biddering because I think it come across a little harsh. But we supplemented because we didn’t have nearly enough stress of spault to bitter and it would be a lot of hot material at that
point. I was going to ask is yeah. So if you use all Magnum, which is high Alpha acid, I worry about it being too sharp and harsh. If you use all stressful spot, which if it’s at 2.2, it’s super low or like Tet anger can be really low too like that. If you use all of it, then it can get kind of like vegetable or even too grassy, just too much hot material, potentially depending on how much you filter and stuff. So this is kind of like splitting the difference. And I think it came out good. Yeah. That was actually the question I was going to ask was if you’re using such a low Alpha acid, how did you keep it from getting grassy to get it to a higher Ibu? But Magnum makes sense because clean cut, it neutral bitter. Right. That’s like what you get from Magnum. Magnum is that secret hack if you need bitterness but you don’t want to use a lot of vegetable. Hey, 13% Alpha acid. Magnum will get you there. And it doesn’t impart a lot of flavor. It’s usually just straight bitter. And if you want to be cheap, you can use all Magnum and it’s not bad. But if you use all Magnum again, you get kind of like this sharp. It’s more sharpness than you want from a pills there. I think so. I never like to go all Magnum on the biddering editions. I try to use as much low Alf acid varieties as possible, but cutting it, especially in a lot of if you’re going really bitter. I think ours was like what, 36, 38? I views is pretty bitter cutting. Yeah. Around there. Magnum, I think makes sense. Yeah. And then this is a ten gallon batch. Everyone just because when they’re saying, hey, there was 3oz of things in there. Yeah. This is a ten gallon batch. And so looking at this particular beer, let’s talk a bit about the process of how you guys generally make pilsners just normally. Right. One of the things that I’ve noticed about your pillsner parade and what’s made it so just really awesome to be next to and drinking the beers from is that all of these beers came out Crystal clear. I mean, just golden beautiful. Very little haze. What are you guys doing to get such clear, clean pilsners through this entire process? I think Aaron can answer that pretty well because he’s the one filtering it. And I agree doing a damn good job at it. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that we did a couple of different techniques or rather a couple of different combinations of the same techniques throughout the course of it. Some of it was fairly standard. Just like cold crash it in the tank and let everything drop out of the tank and then transfer. I was using biofine clear as the finding agent in the kegs. And I use like worldwidec and the boil and such. But yeah, mostly just like pretty standard cold conditioning. Other times we were actually bringing the beer down to about 40 or so. Not quite a full on cold crash and letting it condition in the tank at about 40. And then I would transfer it at 40 and then fine and cold crash at that point. And all of these things had similar results. I think the two biggest things are some sort of finding agent and very cold temperatures and that’ll get you there. And time as well. Patience and time. Yeah, time. Patience is hard for me with these loggers. We didn’t rush any of these beers, though. I think was the youngest one, like eight weeks, probably for brooday to drinking it.
I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe five or six from when we actually kegged and drank it.
I don’t know if you’re Aaron, he’s just drinking them. The whole. Yeah, that’s right. We have a different perspective. Right. Because Aaron will be like, yeah, it’s drinking good. And then like, two weeks later, we’ll can some of it because the Homebrew club got a canner that’s a piece of info that might be relevant to that. And then we’ll split the tag up and I’ll put it on my draft and not drink it for another week. So by the time I’ve tapped it, it could be like two and a half months old. I do a decent amount of sampling. I like to do quality control or quality assurance. I like to sample it throughout the cold conditioning process just to kind of observe the changes that happen. And then eventually it’s helpful because I can sort of track the general clarity of it over the course of a week or so. And eventually it’ll drop fully bright. And then I’m like, okay, it’s ready. And I’ll usually let it sit another few days until I can get organized to do a Canning run. No, I love getting a message at like eight at night. It’s just like, hey, this Beer’s tasting pretty good right now. Yeah, that’s the one back. It’s dropped up.
Yeah. I’m the one who controls the supply. So we started with the French, and that was all basically a smash. Should we go on to the Japanese one, I think, Ryan. Yeah, the Japanese one. Yeah. Talk about the recipe, because I had this beer, and I got to admit, your Japanese version came out really solid. Obviously very different than a Sapporo or something like that. I don’t think that’s actually what you were going for. Yeah. That’s probably an important distinction for us to make. That’s not what this was at all. Yeah. So essentially, like, you almost call this like a rice pills there. You don’t even have to use the word Japanese necessarily, because when people make Japanese pills, they often use the. What’s the name of that stupid hop that separate invented. Yeah. So every time someone makes Japanese. No, it was invented by a Japanese, but they don’t even use it. And it tastes like crap, at least in my opinion. Yeah. Sorry. A lot of people don’t like it, including me, obviously. So anytime you have something called Japanese, it’s like, oh, this hop isn’t very good. So I wanted to take the approach of like, it’s like a rice lager. It’s like 20% flaked rice. So it’s going to dry the beer out more. It’s going to give kind of this light, like nutty is too strong of a word for the flavor on it because it’s just white rice liked rice, but it gives kind of, like a different sort of flavor to go along with that Pilzer malt, that grainy Pilsner malt. And then we use Idlebice hops, which are a special blend of hops from this guy. I forgot his name. He’s in the Pacific Northwest, and he runs a company called Hop Heaven. And he’s like a BJCP national or master guy. And he’s really known for picking out really good hop. Lots and a lot of people have talked about how great his hops are over the years. So we decided to order some. And the Edelweiss blend is a blend of American and German, I believe. And he blends them to taste or to smell every year. And he releases this special blend called Edelweiss. So we ordered a pound or two of that, and we put a bunch of hops in there. I want to say it was like 30 ish low, 30s IBU’s, so a little bit less bitter than the French one because the flaked rice is going to thin it out a bit. We didn’t want it to be overpowering. A little bit of flavoring hops, I believe, as well. And then we just. Yeah, good memory. Go ahead. 32 Ibu and bone dry. This is the driest lightest one that we made. Sorry I cut you off there. No, that’s fine. So pale. It was like six or something or something. It finished really last. Let me look at the batch history here. I could drink it fine now, but when I first tasted it, I had this dryness at the end that took like four sips to get used to. It was just so much dryness at the end. But now, yeah, I finished around like seven or eight.
I was around eight. Okay, around 5%. I’ll call. But, yeah, that one, I don’t know, on my board, I think it’s to call it a rice lager, but it’s basically it. We use some of that French pills normal in this one, too. We had a mix of Heidelberg and Bells. Bells. Heidelberg is the super pale pills, remote from best malt. German malt. We’re just using what’s on hand because, I mean, there’s no Japanese pills or malt, so we’re just using good quality European malt, what we have around. And
I want to say, when you have, like, a German Pilsner, it has this very deep golden color. And with that 20% of rice, it actually became a very it was definitely gold, but it was almost like a kind of a whitish gold. It was much lighter. Yeah. I think Heidelberg is literally the Payless German malt, too. Yeah, I’ll share that. For better or for worse. My non craft beer drinking friends, this was their favorite, one of the pilsners that they tasted. It’s the dryest the most, like, I guess the least hoppy, you’re at least bitter, even though it’s like 30. Whatever.
Exactly.
American lightlogger drinker. It was 5%. It was really pale, it was clear, it was super drinkable. They’re all super drinkable to me. But I guess when you start getting like 40, I views now, one of the things this is the first beer you guys repitched onto the yeast cake. Let’s talk about like, yes, we’ve all made loggers, right? And when you make a logger and you pitch it like 48 degrees, right. That’s in an ideal world, we want to be in those low 50s for the fermentation. But you’re going to pitch cold and bring up to warm. Right. And so when you’re pitching that cold, it takes a while. Right. Even if you do a big pitch, let’s say you do a three liter yeast starter, you drop it in, it’s going to have a lag time because you’re just pitching so cold, no matter how healthy the yeast is. But one of the things that I think was cool about this experiment is that as each generation went and the yeast got more healthy and got used to actually brewing beer, what was that lag time like when you pitched onto the east cake? It was incredible. I am a convert now. I used to only pitch fresh, dry yeast into every batch that I did. For some reason, I had in my mind that fresh yeast is going to be better and I could not have been more wrong. The first batch that we did had a long lag time and it really dragged on. That primary dragged on and on and on to the point where we were like, is it stuck? Is it still going? What’s going on here? And that second one, it just took off like a rocket and it finished in less than half the time of the first one. So overall, as we got through this parade, if you will, the attenuation got quicker and quicker to the point where the last one was almost like Kavike type of time frame. It was done inside of five days for a logger. For a real logger, I was pitching on top of £15 of yeast. So that’s how much trouble was in the bottom of the tank at that point. But it was really impressive. Another good reason for filtering.
Just thinking through. Let’s talk about beer number three. Yeah. What was number three? Check pills there. Right. Number three was a sort of traditional Bohemian pillar virmin floor malted bow pills. And we didn’t use saws, though. We used
97 and a half percent floor malted bow pills and two and a half percent Munich just for that little slightly more copper. So now we’re getting a little darker. I’ll say sort of if we had it to do over again, not that it would really make a difference, but I would have started with the Japanese pills. We didn’t really know that we were doing this project, and we started it. But generally for something like this, when you’re repitching on the same yeast, there’s always a little bit of the last beer that gets left behind. So start with the lightest one and then go from there. We did that only slightly out of order, but by the third one, we had the rest of our stuff planned out. So now we’re getting a little bit more, a little darker, and quite a bit happier. This one, the Ibu, is targeting, like 45. Sorry. I was going to say there was one thing that when you mentioned cleanliness, I do pressure transfers as best I can. My tank doesn’t hold proper pressure, but basically I hook up my CO2 tank. I have a little ball lock post installed on the lid triclamp fitting, and I like to basically transfer so that there’s no oxygen introduced to the beer. And so I end up going through a lot of CO2. But basically, when I’m done transferring, the tank is empty, the yeast is at the bottom, and the whole tank is filled with CO2. And I don’t open the lid until the next beer is going in. So there’s really not much opportunity for contamination or oxidation or anything like that until the next beer goes in, and then the yeast is eating all that oxygen and stuff. So that was just something I wanted to point out, process wise, that I thought was important for keeping the yeast healthy and for keeping everything kind of moving nicely. Yeah, it keeps all the beers fresh, too. I think it’s super integral to how well these beers came out. They’re super clean, super flavorful, I’ll say. As a side note, Coulter introduced me and said, I’ve come into my own. I appreciate that. I’ll say the number one thing that I credit towards, like making more consistently good beer, is limiting oxygen in post fermented beer entirely. Like every single style now, every single Bachelor that I do now, doesn’t matter what it is. It never touches air. Once the lid goes on the tank, even when I dry hop, I’m purging with CO2. For your listeners out there who are wondering, what should I focus on to make better beer reliably, that was the thing that worked the most for me. So just a little tip. I agree. Cold site oxidation is like the thing that I think that if you’re trying to make commercial quality beer, that’s a thing we should all be focusing on. Right. And I’ll admit, ten years ago when I first started home brewing, we were just getting away. Like, at that time, people were just getting away from doing secondaries and carboys. Right. Remember those days and oxygen, they were like, oh, don’t stir it up. Try not to get as much oxygen. There’ll be a later. Take the lid off, throw the hops in the beer with the lid off, and then put the lid back on. Bottling buckets remember the bottling buckets day, right? Yeah, I’m getting rid of two of those now. Nobody wants them. They’re going in the recycling. No one wants my bottling buckets. So, yeah, these are the things that, if you want to make better beer, cold site oxidation is huge, right. I just think that it’s an easy way to improve your beer quite quickly. And I would actually put that up almost above. I would actually put cold side oxidation is something you could do without a huge equipment investment. Right? You’re looking at it’s, things like, hey, if I want fermentation control, there’s a big equipment investment there, right? I’ve got to have a fridge. I’ve got to figure out a way space. I got to figure out ways to keep things cold. The whole process with maybe some sort of algorithm to keep it into check. Right. Or at least a dual mode temp controller. But the thing here is that cold site oxidation. You could use kegs. Like, if you’re to kegging, you could literally just use ferment and kegs. Use a splendid valve. You could transfer from keg to keg, and you could be. That’s what I do most of the time when I make beer on my own, I just do it in the kegs. I cut off the bottom half inch to one inch. And that’s why I use for primary and then into another. And you can even use this funding and you can hook it up to the second tank while your primary fermenting. And that can purge your second tank for you. Exactly. Cool. Me too. I use the SS brew tech. The brew bucket. Not the fancy unitank ones, but the one that’s got the conical bottom. But it’s the stainless steel bucket. And they have the sell, like an aftermarket lid for it that has, like, a Dome shape and has a triclamp fitting on the top. And I got a little ball lock post triclamp attachment, and I can basically hook up my tank to that. And that’s how I do it. It doesn’t hold pressure like a keg, but it gets the job done. One or two PSI. Yeah. You’re looking at one or two PSI for a transfer. It’s not like you need. I don’t have much trouble with transferring. All right? The only downside is you can’t naturally carbonate. That’s true. Sorry. Well, I’m in the box, but I don’t have, like, $900 to blow. The unit tanks are beautiful. If I wasn’t using kegs, that would be what I would jump to next unit. I love you today. If any of your sponsors are listening and they want to send me a unit tank, I’ll come on the show and talk all about it.
Check. Are you listening? Spike is not listening. Last thing about the check beer. So the two and a half percent Munich mall. Sometimes people put, like, Melanoid in there, and it sweetens the beer, and they try to replicate decoction. We actually did a decoction on the check beer, but we wanted to kind of make it different because all these beers are going to have all pills remote for the most part. So it’s like, let’s use a little touch of Bunuk malt. It’s still very formatable. We’ll still get a really well attenuated beer. Let’s cut it in half with Ro water so it softens the beer up just like the beers in Chekia. We already have soft water, but we want to soften it some more. So this is just a way to differentiate when you’re making five beers of the same style and just try to get they’re all using the same yeast already. So we’re already working against that. We don’t want five beers that taste like the same house character. So one we decoct, we throw a little Munich malt in use some arrow water to change it up. These are just ways to kind of vary it so that all the beers taste a little different on tap. Let’s assume that somebody here doesn’t know what a decoction is. If they’re listening, what is that process, and how did you do it? So typically, a decoction is you’re doing a step match already. So you might match in at, say, 144 deg. You would take one third of the mash out after your 40 minutes rest, and you would boil that and you’d boil it for five or ten minutes, for example, maybe 15 minutes, constantly stirring so you don’t scorch it. If you scorch the beer, you basically ruin the beer. And then you add it back to that mash and it raises it from like 144 to, say 160 degrees or 155 degrees, depending on what kind of volume you have and what you’re doing and what that does, in my opinion. It’s so subtle, but it adds kind of this little graininess. Traditionally, they would do that in order to do a step. Back in Germany, it was like a traditional way to go up the steps, but it adds kind of a graininess you’re already getting high attenuation from the step mesh. So maybe you’re getting a little more from the decoction, maybe not, but you add a little more body, a little more graininess, a little more maltiness. But what we did is a different type of decoction that our friend Jim does. It’s a little bit more efficient, I think. And what he does as he goes through his steps, 144 deg for 40 minutes on this kind of beer, 160 degrees for around 30 minutes, 168 degrees for five or ten minutes mash out. And then he raises the entire beer to a boil and just simmers it for five or ten minutes or so instead of the whole mash. So you don’t have to take it out, bring it back in. You don’t have to worry about outside oxidation as much if that’s something you’re worried about, which I think is the thing. You don’t have to worry about a second vessel. You don’t have to worry about things. Cooling disagree about what hot side oxidation. We could do a separate show on that. I’ve had Brian Rave from Low Oxygen Brewing, who would beg to differ on the show.
I’ve just never experienced it anyhow. I’m sidetracking it we’re talking about. Let me say, let me say one thing about hotside accident, though. There are many studies that back up that it is a thing like it’s not a theory and it’s not like a new thing. But to the extent of what it matters is a big debate. Is it something just tiny? Is it something big? My personal opinion is,
but I’m going to say my theory is this hot side oxidation matters at a brewery scale. Right. When you’re making 3000 gallons of beer or you’re doing let’s just say you’ve got a 200 barrel batch you’re doing in a giant scale. Oxygen means something because there’s a lot of it. Right. The thermal mass is a much different experience when you’re talking about those scales. And I can see where studies, because you have to also realize that when they do studies on beer, it’s always at that giant commercial scale, because that’s who has the money to do a study. Right. You’re absolutely correct. It’s never done at like a small home brew scale of five gallons of beer. Who does those studies? It’s like rulosophy. That’s about as deep as you get. Those are super small data points. Yeah. Take this with a grain of salt. Take with a grain of salt. One data point doesn’t mean anything. Right. Not insulting at all. I love them. But yeah, they expressly say that. Yeah. And they say that because they understand that when you do a rigorous study, you have to have repeatable results. That is kind of how all of that stuff works. My point is to get back to the low oxygen brewing thing is. Yeah, I think that the studies actually do say that there’s a hot side oxidation thing that can happen, but it’s all done at a giant brewery scale in German breweries that are making thousands. And I don’t think it’s like Coldside oxidation where if you have cold side oxidation, you get a bad beer. Basically, you get a flavorless beer. Clearly, there’s tons of American breweries making great pills there that are obsessed with hot side oxidation. Same with German breweries. I’ve had probably a good German beer that doesn’t use low oxygen on the hot side. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a good versus bad thing like cold size oxidation. It’s just like, do you want a multi or flavor? You can preserve that malt flavor by having a lesson. There are German beers with open fermentation, but that’s usually just a primary where it’s pushing everything out anyways. But yeah, sure. I got you. True. Anyway, that could be a whole podcast we’ll talk about. I derailed the parade there. It’s all good. That’s all part of the shower. Number four Italian Pilsner. And this is essentially a dry hopped German Pilsner. But we went a little different on this one. Again, we wanted to vary it because we’re making five pills. Five pilsners ish I think we used Hartop middle fruit and Hartop Blanc. I know we use Hollytop Blanc. Maybe it was Spalter was the other one, but we want to use Holler top Blanc. What was Blanca Blanc and tattooed? Tattooer. Okay, I had tattoo, that’s why. All right. But we wanted to use some Holly Tab Blanc because Holly Tab Blanc is one of those Noble adjacent hops. It’s like kind of Noble, but it has a little more flavor, and you get kind of like nice grape flavor from it a lot of times. And I get some nice sort of like, Dank Diesel from it as well. Like this Italian pills. It’s not super heavily dry hops. Like, Italian pills is not supposed to be super dry hops, but this, to me, is, like, on the cutting edge, like, what you would call it, Italian pills versus, like, I don’t know, hoppy pills or something. It’s really nice. And even Jim, who’s one of the most traditional brewers you’ll ever meet, he liked it. So I think it’s still within the Italian pills range. But, yeah, a lot of hot flavor, very tasty, very different from the first three. What was your take on it, Aaron? How did you dry hop? It explained to them well, my overall take is that this is actually my favorite of the bunch. Maybe I just really like the style because I’m sort of a hop head in recovery who’s now moved to Loggers. But, yeah, small dry hop. We did it a little differently than I dry hopped in the past, which was kind of interesting. So we raised the temperature on the fermentation and did a diasporable rest at, like, I don’t remember 60, something like that. I could look, but it doesn’t matter. Diaspora rest at whatever temperature. Oh, wait. Actually, this is interesting. No, it was at this one didn’t really get a D rest. This one went for a long time at 54 deg,
and then it was pitched. Yeah, we’re not concerned about Super Super low. We arose it to 54 after a couple of days. Right. So anyhow so then it sat for a while at 54, and then we started crashing it, and we brought it down to basically when we started crashing it. And I say I’m using the word crash lightly. We just brought it from 54 back down to 40, a couple of degrees a day back down to 40. And I dry hopped it when it was kind of the last day of being at 54, and it sort of dry hopped over the course of like two days. It was not more than 48 hours, as you can tell. I take very detailed notes as it slowly went down to 40. It was dry hopping during that time. And then I transferred it at 40. So it didn’t get a full didn’t get like a long dry hop, like an IPA or a big drive. It’s very small and pretty quick and pretty cold. Yeah. The more I don’t know. I mean, I know there’s different theories, different schools of thought, but the more I’ve looked into it, the cold dry hop is nice and there doesn’t have to be a lot of contact time to really get all the flavor out. That’s at least been my experience. Cold versus warm, I think, is more of an open debate, though. Some breweries do 66 68, some breweries do 50. I’ve heard a lot of 50 deg, dry hops, 60 deg. I don’t know. It’s a matter of preference or what they’ve experienced, I guess. But I’ve seen a lot of Dereks where they bring it up to 60 dry hop while it’s at 60. Yeah, we did some there. Yeah. We also rested some of these just to make sure they finished out and dried out enough. But sitting at 50 54 for a long time will also make sure you don’t get diasporal and 34 70, in my experience, as long as you don’t rush it, it doesn’t really get a lot of diacidal. I’ve never experienced it. After sitting for a couple of weeks, at least you will get some of the sulfur smell out of it, though, right? Sulfur happens, especially if you rush it, too. Yeah, get some sulfur. A little sulfur, I think is nice, personally, but, yeah, you get a really bad sulfur if you try to push it too short. Yes. I want to talk about this last one because it’s great. But by the time we got to five, it was just remarkable how quickly these things were going. But are we ready to move on to the last one, or do we want to keep. Yeah, let’s move on to number five. Go ahead. Okay, so number five, so many will this was a controversial one because it’s not really a pills there. This is more what you would call some would call the cold IPA, others would call the India pale lager, basically at this point. So for the Italian, we dryhopped a little bit. Now, remember I said earlier you always have a little bit of the last beer in your current beer. Well, I’m not like removing the dry hops or anything. So there was hop matter now in the yeast cake. So at that point, I was like, all right, we’re doing an IPL and then we’re done. And so we did the IPL got a huge dry hop because at that point it’s like, screw it. Let’s just throw a pound of hops in it and see what happens. But this one is I’m looking at my notes now and it’s phenomenal. So I pitched it at 55 deg.
No. Sunday, March 20 and by Tuesday, March 22, it had dropped to 1012. And by Wednesday it was at ten, nine. So from Sunday to Wednesday, it dropped from 1056 roughly to like ten in three days. Four days. And we’re using. Oh, yes. That’s good. I need to get some more of that from you. I like that. You got the hook up. Yeah. This one went really quick. So this one, despite Ryan telling me to dry hop at the same way as we dry hop to the Italian, I chose to ignore that suggestion. Despite Ryan you said despite Ryan.
Great. Despite Ryan telling me that we should dry hop this the same way we did the Italian kind of on the tail end. I ignored that. And I dry hopped it the way I would normally dry hop in IPA, which is this one we got did a long diaspora rest at 60 for about, let’s see, from March 23 until April 3. So that is what, like two weeks, maybe at 60. About in the middle of that two weeks is when I dry hopped it. And it was with a pretty big dose of cascade and Citra and some Amarillo, too, but more cascade and Citra. And then it kept going. I left it at that temperature again for about four or five more days. And then I did a proper cold crash all the way down to near freezing as quickly as possible. And so that was how I dry up this one. And it’s got a lot of since this one hasn’t been packaged. Nobody’s tried this one yet but me. But I actually just went and poured myself a sample of it while we were talking so that I could comment on it. But it hasn’t quite cleared up to the point that I’m hoping it does. But it’s clearer than it was when I last pasted it two days ago. And actually, I was expecting I made a lot of IPAs with Citra in the dry hop, and I was expecting it to be kind of a Citra bomb just because Citra is so overpowering and we use a lot of it. But I’m actually getting a lot of more of the kind of drier, pioneer cascade in there as well. So I’m kind of pleased to see that cascade was able to hold its own against Citra and the DryHop. So that was our I don’t know what should we call it a cold IPA? Is IPL out? No one likes IPL anymore. I don’t care. Hoppy logger hoppy pills there. The guy at Pizza Port in California has been making these for years. Just calls him IPA. So he’ll throw him on as an IPA draft because he’s tired of trying to label it for people who don’t give a shit. And people buy it because it’s IPA and it chase like an IPA. So I can see that, too. Right. I want to add one more thing. I want to add one more thing, which is that I got a bonus batch out of this. So in between the Italian and the Italian and the cold IPA, I carefully opened the lid of the tank and spooned out some of the yeast slurry. Yeah, thank you. I spooned out some of the yeast slurry and pitched it actually at room temperature in basically a dry stout recipe. So you could call it a black lager, or you could call it a dry stout, but it’s basically a room temperature fermented dry stout on 34 70. And that one same thing is finished in like three days or something. Was awesome. So we actually got a bonus six batch out of this because I split the east a little bit there. But anyhow, that was the pills in their parade, I want to do it every year. It’s a great winter time tradition. One of the things I wanted to add when we were talking about pitching on the yeast cake is that the hardest part for me for loggers is getting the wart to pitching temperature out of the kettle. I’m not used to brewing with the seasons. I do a lot of my brewing, like when the weather’s nice and in the summer and stuff, and I always have a hard time getting my wart cold enough in the summertime. We did this one through the winter and actually I was able to. I rigged up a fun little system that I was able to use, but I used a sump pump, like one of those submersible pumps in a cooler of water, and I would go out and shovel snow. We live in Denver, where it snows, so I’ll go out and shovel some snow off of my grass into the cooler. So I was pumping snow water through my counterflow chiller, and that was how I was able to get the wart down to pitching temperatures. So little home brew hack for you guys who live in cold climates where there’s reliable snow, at least in part of your yard, for the coldest months of the year, you can use that snow to get your chiller water extra cold, so you can get logger tents without having to sit and wait for it to drop. So because of that reason, that’s why I want to make this a wintertime tradition. But yeah, it’s super amazing how much the yeast will develop and how healthy it gets over time. It’s super clean, too. When I emptied out the tank after this cold IPA, so there’s maybe probably about 12oz of hot material that was added in there. But when I finally emptied the tank, I weighed it before and afterwards and there was about £18 of Trube in the bottom of the tank. So from a 100 grams, 34 70 pitch, we ended up. And that doesn’t include the stuff that I spooned out for the other beer. So there’s over £18 that was left behind at the end there. So that’s quite a lot. That’s absurd. I hope you get a unit tank for next year’s Pills and Parade just to hold all the yeast. That’s absurd. Actually, I tried the cold IPA, too, and I tried it from the fermenters. You tried it from the tank? Yeah. I agree with your assessment. It was very good. The citrus dominant, but the cascade is there, and it was a great blend, I think. I really like that combination. I’m going to use it in some West Coast IPAs, I think. Yeah, it works because it’s kind of a lighter body to beer. It’s not an IPA, especially. This is nothing like a hazy IPA where you kind of want those big Citra juicy bombs. This drinks much more like a West Coast, and I’m actually quite happy with it. The Citra is great. It’s there, but it doesn’t taste like Orange juice. I agree. Well, gentlemen, I have really enjoyed partaking through this entire process. It’s been nice. Just so anybody who’s listening, as well as not making podcasts for the last six months or so, I’ve also done a pretty bad job of home brewing. I’ve only been using my beermaker machine because it takes 15 minutes and I can push one button. I’m very soon going to brew a full five gallon batch. It’s been a while, and I’m very excited about doing that. My keg rater has been empty for far too long, and so we’re going to have to fill that puppy back up. But, yeah, I had to return all your stuff. I borrowed. I know. I felt bad. I was like, I’m going to brew back your beard. He was like, here, have all of your equipment. Back
when Aaron made that, I had an extra tail for this.
Yeah. Some neighbors borrow sugar, we borrow grain in electric home brew setups.
Yeah. Welcome to Colorado. So this is the funny part about being in the suburbs here in Colorado is that if you look at my one street, it’s like me and Erin, we live across the street. We brew Evan, who is in our club. He also lives in our neighborhood, but just on my street. I think half the dudes I know on this one street all have home brew set up, so it’s just like everybody brews. It’s kind of nice. So welcome to Colorado. Well, guys, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. As always, it makes me really happy to have you on the show. I’m stoked to have a podcast out. It’s been a while. It’s great to be back. And thanks for coming on the show again.
I’d like to thank Aaron and Ryan for both coming on the podcast. A great conversation as always, and just a great chat about beer. That’s what we do here. You can always find us on all of our socials we’re on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Look for us at home brewing DIY. We’ll be a little more active on those as well. And you can also head on over to home brewingdiy beer that’s where you’re going to find all of our blog posts. Our podcast episodes. Everything. You can subscribe there to your favorite podcast, whatever player. Whatever you want. You can also head on over to Patreon.com forward slash homebrewing DIY and there you can support us that’s it for this week we’re going to talk to you next week on home brewing DIY.
