Helping Out at Laughing Dog

I woke up very early last Friday morning so that I could make it from my girlfriend’s house in Newport to Ponderay, Idaho in time for mash-in for my first opportunity to assist with brewing at Laughing Dog. I arrived a few minutes early and Skip was already there getting started on cleaning kegs. Dave and Duane were soon to arrive and after some preliminary work with the hot liquor tank, Dave and I went upstairs to open up the bags of grain and start mashing in. I made sure to keep the hopper for the mill fed while Dave tended to some other things downstairs but we switched as the mash tun was nearing full so that I could hand-stir the last bit of grain as it hit the water. Fred had arrived as we were mashing away, but he was busy preparing for a visit from a group of representatives from the distribution company based in Virginia that is handling Laughing Dog’s East Coast accounts.

Dave and I began the transfer over to the kettle, adjusting the flow rates accordingly and then I assisted Duane in reclaiming yeast from a fermentation tank. Many commercial breweries reclaim and re-pitch their yeast for numerous generations before the little guys are worn out but it is not something that I have done whilst homebrewing. A pretty straight forward but important process, the reclaiming went quickly so I was next sent up a ladder to dry hop an earlier batch of Pale Ale. When I was finished with the task, Fred and Skip were getting the CO₂ line ready to bleed off the bourbon barrels they were opening that they had been aging their Imperial Stout in for nearly a year. Meant to impress the Virginia boys, we brewers and assistants were also allowed a taste. Being warm and un-carbonated, the resiny bourbon taste was intense and the heat of the alcohol hit my ears and cheeks quickly but you could tell that things were headed in the right direction and with just a little more tender care, that beer will be a beauty.

The transfer was completing, so Dave weighed out the boil hops but allowed me to add them to the kettle. With no hops to add until the end of the boil, it was time for lunch. The Virginia crew left after a tour of the new brew facility Laughing Dog is building and will be moving to by the end of summer and I got to share a few words with an exhausted Fred. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the crew returned from lunch and it was back to work.

Dave and I set to work cleaning out the mash tun, greatly aided by the paddles. As we filled large garbage cans dedicated to the purpose, Dave would then load them on the forklift and dump them into a trailer set out back for a local farmer to come pick up. The paddles could only the get the mash tun so clean, so I was set to work with the rake and hose. I didn’t get myself too wet and the mash tun was clean in no time, but due to a slight variance in the floor lay out, I then had to squeegee the grainy water that was surrounding the mash tun on the floor.

Clean up was nearing an end as the boil completed and Dave set to transferring the wort to the fermentation tank that already had a batch of the same beer from the day before in it, bringing it to a full 34 bbl. It was Friday, so extra cleaning was in order. Donning our protective glasses and gloves, Dave and I handled the caustics and cleaned the brew house, plate chiller and all of the hoses.

Some well-earned beers were in order, so a move to the tap room out front ensued. A family was visiting from Houston, so I accompanied Dave and Skip as they gave them a short tour of the brew facility in back and finished up my pint. A little bit more beer geek talk and then I got back on the road to return to my girlfriends house, smelling of wort and hops like a good man should.

If you are in the Spokane area (or on the East Coast) in about a month and see a Laughing Dog IPA on the shelf or on tap, I invite you to sample the product of our labor. Sláinte!

End of an Era

A short but beautiful partnership in brewing ended last Wednesday when my good friend Brian moved back home to attend graduate school at LSU. Yet, one tasked remained; so I enlisted my girlfriend to assist me in bottling the Granfalloons Tripel that Brian and I had brewed.

We set to work moving the carboy with the beer in it upstairs and then cleaning another carboy and all the implements of bottling. A small snafu manifested itself in the form of a nearly empty iodophor bottle, but there was just enough to fill the carboy with sanitization fluid.

Finally, the time had come for a wet and low-down battle with bottles. Half of the bottles were ones I had recently accumulated so I knew that they had been rinsed well. However, they did possess the bane of a homebrewer’s existence: stubborn labels. The rest of our crop of bottles were donations from a friend of Brian’s that were label-less but dusty. We checked the latter group for any hardcore gunk or suspicious growth and rejected a few on those grounds. After much scrubbing, peeling and rinsing, we had enough bottles for the batch.

We transferred the sanitization fluid to the bottles and then transferred the beer to the clean, empty carboy. Then the sanitization fluid got dumped into a bucket with all of the tubes and bottling implements and the bottles got a final rinse, thus concluding the battle of the bottles with the brewers emerging victorious. We celebrated by filling our vanquished foes with golden liquid.

A quick gravity reading and then in with the priming sugar and off we went. I filled the bottles while my girlfriend capped and stirred the beer to keep the dextrose in equal suspension. The actual bottling went incredibly fast and we yielded twenty-three 22oz bottles and one 330mL champagne bottle. After the final clean up, we packed all of my gear into its respective boxes and loaded it into the car.

It is sad to see Brian and I’s brewing adventures come to an end, but I have talked another friend into allowing me to brew at his house with him and even though he has only brewed a few batches, he is quite knowledgeable about all things beer.

The reward for all of our labor came in the form of tasting the first bottle of Brian and I’s first batch, the Bagombo IPA. Pouring golden yellow and pretty clear, the bubbles were a bit sluggish, but I expected the carbonation to be a little low only two weeks after bottling. Grapefruit and fresh flowers fill the nose and the first sip reveals much of the same with a sweet candy finish. Another taste reveals complexities in the malt backbone while pine and cut grass accents come out in the hop profile. Not as overwhelmingly delicious as I remember previous batches, but a solid citrusy IPA none-the-less. A little more time resting peacefully in the bottle will help round this one out. Lucky I am leaving for California tomorrow so I am not tempted to drink them as is.

Thirsty Zymurgist Score: 39/50

Brewing an IPA

Since being announced in front of Congress in 1988, National Homebrew Day has been celebrated by brewing enthusiasts and beer lovers around the country and the globe. The AHA organizes a yearly “Big Brew,” a commemorative recipe meant to be brewed around the world simultaneously and which yielded over 13,000 gallons brewed by over 5,000 people in six continents in 2009. My friend has never brewed a batch and offered up his home as a brewery if I agreed to teach him what I know, so we seized the occasion to brew our inaugural batch together. Admittedly, we would be brewing our own recipe for an IPA and we would be three days late, but life comes before beer more often than we would like and we would be contributing our five gallons to the greater cause none the less.

Having procured the last few pieces of equipment and the ingredients the day before, I was ready to head over to my friend’s house at 9am. We got the equipment in order, did the preliminary cleaning and then began bringing our water up to temperature. Once there, we began steeping the grains and I was happy to once again fill a house with the smell that comes off of a brew kettle; bready, sweet and inviting. After a nice long bath for the grains, we sparged them and began bringing the water to a boil. We then removed the kettle from the burner just long enough to stir in the malt extracts and, once the brew was back on the burner and up to a boil, we added the bittering hops.

Forty minutes until the next hop addition gave us plenty of time to clean and sanitize the rest of the requisite brewing paraphernalia. That done, we added the hops and went to the basement to utilize fifteen minutes to ready the carboy. One final hop addition and a five minute finishing boil and then we whisked the brew kettle down stairs to be dunked in an ice bath (in lieu of a wort chiller). Down to pitching temperature, we funneled and filtered the wort into the carboy and added water to top off the volume. A final transfer back upstairs to the pantry and then we pitched the yeast and set the blow off tube.

After a final round of clean up, my friend and I headed out to get some lunch and he remarked how he felt like we accomplished something and was surprised at the combination of skills that goes into brewing. I couldn’t agree more.

At its finest, the art of brewing owes much to the worlds of both refined scientific knowledge and practical know-how that, once combined with wholesome ingredients and honest labor, produces a precious liquid gold that nourishes the body and fortifies the soul. Seek the Alchemist, indeed.

It may not be possible for everyone to celebrate National Homebrew Day by actually brewing. If you are counted among that lot, my recommendation is to start assembling your kit for next year, seek out a new friend that homebrews or go to your local brewery, buy a pint or five and thank the brewer.

Actually, that last recommendation stands pretty much every day of the year. Sláinte!