Guest Blogger: Lee on Chuckanut Brewery

“Chuckanut Brewery represents a convergence of technical and engineering concepts developed from over two decades of professional involvement with craft brewing both home and abroad. Many ideas and techniques implemented are not commonly, if at all, used in America. It is a small facility, but it has features which are large in capability. For example, most everything is computer controlled and driven. The precision and variability (e.g. all motors) provide for ease and efficiency of production.”

                                                                       –Will Kemper, Owner and Brewmaster, Chuckanut Brewing

  

Dudes. I'm seriously blown away by this operation. When I first got word of Washington Beer Open House earlier this week I was kind of like "Ehh, I'm s till hung over from last weekend."

By Thursday the winds changed and I was hankering for some Northwest Micro. The crazy thing about Chuckanut is they are brewing beer unlike anything my palette has really embraced yet. When I transitioned from drinking Pabst and Old English to Pliny and Occidental (shout out St. Johns!) I mostly made a transition that put hops rich beers on a pedestal. Beers without a robust profile and that Northwest known and loved bitterness were looked down upon. My taste buds can be real pricks sometimes.

Chuckanut is making German beer. Before I drank beer at Chuckanut I thought the only good thing to come out of Germany was Claudia Schiffer's legs and those little hot dogs that Rodney likes to cook up in a crock pot.  I was wrong. And Lager isn’t a bad word in the beer world. American Lager? Maybe it’s no good. But the kolsch, alt, and German Pilsner that Chuckanut brews are damn tasty. So what makes Chuckanut special? Well, as a guest blogger I’m damn lucky to have scored a trifold brochure that answers those very questions.

Here are the highlights of Bellingham, Washington’s best kept secret:

1. Ingredients: They are importing German Weyermann specialty malts and hops from a small hop farm in Germany. According to their website: Sie haben ihn angetreten, den weiten Weg aus der Ukraine nach Bamberg….So you know it’s good!

2. Technology: How about remote access to all brewery operations? Yep, Will Kemper, (that Kemper) can realize while he sits on the pot at home that he forgot to open a valve and do so. When on site at the brewery he sits at what appears to be a “Dude You Got a Dell” era PC at the corner of his brewery and commands Starship Chuckanut.  Almost every part of the brewing process he can complete with the click of a mouse. Very few breweries in the world are utilizing this type of technology and doing so allows him and his wife to run a tight ship and minimize error.

3. Will Kemper: Reign Man, Owner and Brew Master of Chuckanut. This dude has done it all and lived to enthusiastically tell the tale. Degree in chemical engineering. Founded Thomas Kemper brewing and got dicked by his partners. Went south of the border and opened Mexico’s first brewpubs, later opened Turkey’s first brew pubs. Along the way had roles at a dozen or so well regarded breweries.  In 2008 he opened Bellingham’s best brew pub and got a bunch of gold in the process.

A few of those gold medal beers at GABF  in the last couple years that I had the chance to suckle:

Dunkel (smooth as a Jamal Crawford stop and pop)

Kolsch (fruity, gentle, complex)

German Pilsner (a real reason to reconsider Pilsners if you aren’t a fan)

My favorite beer being brewed by the team at Chuckanut is their Alt. This earthly, brown headed bastard of The Rhineland ,was full of flavor and would make a fantastic session beer. It poured beautifully and I couldn’t help taking a picture of Claire through its handsome glow.

All in all our visit to Bellingham to visit Chuckanut was a great trip. Highly recommend snagging a pint of theirs the next time you are in Seattle or Bellingham. Unfortunately that’s as far as their distribution reaches at this time.

Check out the video:

More Wedding Beers!

Another full brew weekend.  There's a boil going as I type this - yay for live blogging!

 Yesterday was a full brew day with a full worth double batch two hour boil.  Long day to say the least.  It's getting about that time to upgrade the equipment already now that I've got some space.

It is very nice to be sitting next to 5 bubbling beer babies (carboys) just fermenting away.  I haven't had my carboys full for a good 2 months now.  

The last of the main beers for Justin & Krista's wedding was a success so far.  I went with a German wheat style Hefeweizen.  I personally am not a huge fan of the banana flavor in most wheats, so I went with a yeast strain that was just strictly clove.  For my wedding, I did basically the same grain bill, but used a more traditional weizen yeast strain and I wasn't 100% happy with the results - though others might disagree.  We're all so critical of our own work I guess.  Still have a small 5 gallon batch of a German Maibock left to brew for their wedding, but the main goodness is bubbling.

Tracy (the greatest welder evar!) came over to assist me in the brew day so that he could get a better idea of how the process works.  He's been helping design a brew sculpture with automated temperature control and the whole works!  Basically once it's done, I'll just program a desired temperature into the controller, hit go, and the stand does the work.  I'm really starting to not like all the heavy lifting and transferring, etc during the brew day.  Not to mention, my weak little arms can't even pick up a double batch keg and lift it up to a height high enough to run it through my chiller.  I want to focus more on the recipes rather than the process - though the process is pretty fun too. 

The Citra IPA seems to be doing great.  I transferred into secondary on Friday night, dry hopped, and let it go.  It tasted spot on.  And Danny, the little mishap with the hose coming off didn't matter - they all tasted the same once blended.  

Can't wait to put these in kegs and serve them up!

 Mmm, mash.

 First run - heading into the kettle.

 Every brew day starts with a cup of the force for good measure.

Gotta get a better system going - but works great for now!

Wedding beers are bubbling

It has been some time since a post - and since I've brewed for that matter.  Britt and I are finally settled in our house and I can start brewing again!

A shout out to Justin and Krista for getting married in March and letting me brew all their beer for the reception!

They wanted a half barrel of Citra (for good reason), and a half barrel of a weissbier.  Danny came up and we started out the weekend by getting the Citra done.  Let me tell you - having the room to spread out and brew is fantastic!  No more apartment brewing!!

I woke up pretty giddy on Saturday.  Britt kept asking me how many beers I'd had and I kept telling her 'none, I'm just excited to be brewing again'.  

We got some info from the local homebrew shop on how to tackle a double batch when you have the capacity on your kettle, but not your mash tun.  So we tried it out and it saved us about 3 hours that day.  I'm really starting to like all of the efficiency things we're learning as we go.  We started out by mashing the first batch.  Once we mashed out and sparged, we just let the wort sit in the kettle with a lid on it.  Instead of putting it directly to boil like we normally would, we mashed out our second batch and then added that to the existing wort to make about 13 gallons (boils down to 10 for fermentation).  This batch was flawless.  Everything went as planned and no hiccups.  We needed a third batch to reach the half barrel mark when all said and done so we had to do another batch separately because my equipment doesn't have the capacity for it all (yet).  Everything in this batch was pretty flawless as well except in the end when we went to chill it, the hose popped off going into the chiller and we lost about a gallon and a half of wort going into the fermenter (note to self, don't leave anything unattended, ever).  We just topped the batch up with water, and we're hoping that once all three batches are blended, it will all pan out.  We added about a pound and a half of dextrose to hopefully make up for the lost sugar we would have lost and diluted with water.  

Side note update - I took a bottle of our pumpkin beer 'Cinder-Ale'a' to the homebrew supply store to get some feedback and opinions from the guys and they loved it!  One of the guys doesn't like pumpkin beer at all and he said 'you made a liar out of me today'.  Now if they were actually telling the truth - who knows, but it was nice to hear from the pros anyway.

 Garage Brewing, finally!

 Mashing out.

Mash mash mash.

 Chilling.

 Chilling.

 Transferring/chilling.

That sweet sweet wort.

DIY - for the labor of lovers

Quick little update - nothing too fun, just something on the mind.


A good friend Tracy is an amazing welder and started the works on my new single tier brew system.  I don't have the room yet or the funding for a full blown brew sculpture, but I figured I could be using the brew kettle part of it until then (house soon!). 


I picked up three kegs on craigslist for $5 each!!!  They usually go for $50 to $60 each.  The guy was just looking to get rid of them and I was lucky enough to be the first caller.  I was seriously watching CL for a good month trying to score some and was always too late.  


They'll all be converted to a system much like this:

The automation on the right side will be a little different for my system - I plan on using LOVE controllers and it'll be less fancy/expensive.  Plus It'll be more rewarding to put this together myself.  


The irony of it all is that I'll be making 'good beer' in MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch kegs. 


The progress on the welding for the brew kettle below.  So happy about this - full wort boil double batches, and hopefully soon - no more apartment brewing!

As mentioned in a previous post - here is the counterflow wort chiller - I call it 'Godchilla'.  It's essentially two 'Ts', 3" worth of 1/2" copper tubing, 2 compression fittings drilled out to 3/8", 23' of 3/8" copper tubing, and 25' of 5/8" garden hose.  The fittings are silver soldered together and the copper tubing actually runs inside the garden hose.  The way it works is the unfermented beer (wort) is running though the copper tubing, and then water runs in the opposite direction through the hose, never coming in contact with the wort and thus chilling it down to a pitchable temperature for the yeast. It chills the wort in the matter of time it takes to drain through the chiller and into the fermenter.  Usually this process would take 30-45 minutes depending on size, with an immersion chiller.  There's a little less risk of contamination with the immersion chillers because you leave them in the boil for 10 minutes, but your wort is also sitting outside of a fermenter longer, so it's kind of a wash.  Pretty cool stuff -

Mashing Pumpkins

Sorry this is late – I was meaning to get this published much sooner (Monday), but it didn’t happen.

What an epic brew weekend!  We like to call these some sort of basketball term when we do them.  This weekend was dubbed the triple single batch.

I drove down Friday night after work, getting in Eugene about 7:15.  We tried to catch some Pliny the Elder at 16 Tons before we brewed, but of course with my luck they ran out about a half hour before we got there.  I was somewhat OK with this because I got to try some Full Sail “Lupulin Fresh Hop Ale” which I mentioned in a previous post.  It was fantastic!  My nemesis Pliny would have to wait.  From there we went and got some food and then proceeded to brew up a batch of Citra, all the while sampling and critiquing the ‘Mystery batch’ that we were to brew up again on Saturday.  Every single time we brew we either have a slight disaster or we learn something – most of the time both.  You’ll see from the pictures below that the gravity fed cooler system is very ‘rigged’ to make it all work.  I was also very excited to try out my newly constructed wort chiller (the garden hose coil thing) that I had made two weeks prior.  It worked very, very well – saving us about 30 minutes of cooling time.  We pitched our yeast – which I did NOT forget, for those of you who were reminding me – and then headed to bed around 2:30am. 

Woke up around 10am (we were shooting for an early day starting at 8am – Ha!).  Guzzled down our extra strength 5 hour energy (these things are gross – I don’t recommend them) and started packing up.

The pumpkin process was a bit more challenging than we thought.  I can’t really speak for the experience because Danny definitely took over this part while I was getting things squared away with the ‘mystery batch’.  You’ll see the pictures below of the cooking/cutting/spicing process.  Starting around 12:30pm, I don’t think we wrapped up things until 11:30 that night.  The ‘mystery batch’ was a breeze – pumpkins however – not so much.  We decided to bake the pumpkins whole in the oven until the skin would come off with the scrape of a fork.  Then they were cubed up and baked again with seasonings until mushy-soft.  I started the mash water around 6pm and the pumpkins were ready by about 6:30pm to be mashed.  We decided to go with a mash and boil for the pumpkins so we’d extract as much pumpkin flavor as possible – not that wimpy taste you get from the Blue Moon Harvest Ale.  The mash smelled absolutely fantastic!  My only regret with that is not putting rice hulls in the grain bill to allow easy draining for the wort.  The sugars extracted from the pumpkin really clogged up the grain bed and made it hard to strain, but we managed to get enough wort through.  We then started up the boil and 20 minutes in we added the same pumpkin from the mash into the boil.  I really wish we could have bottled the smell and sell it.  We added a half ounce of cascade and a half ounce of citra right at the start of the boil to give it a little kick of hops, but not a whole lot.  The spices we added were cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg, all spice, sweet orange peel, and clove – all the last 5 minutes of the boil.  All in all we’re really looking forward to this one.  Check out the photos below (click to view full size)!

 I didn't forget the yeast!!!

 Awesome gravity setup once again - we really need a brew shed.

 Another awesome gravity set up - thanks kids for the use of your toys!

 'Mystery Batch' going in the carboy.

 Oh, yes - another gravity setup.

 'Mystery Batch'

 Pumpkin on the right, hops on the left - you can see the sugars on the top from the pumpkin.

 This is just what was left over from the pumpkins Danny cut up.

 The butcher - also matching shirts - we're that awesome.

 Holding the best pumpkin stout I've ever tasted!

 Galeux D'Eysines pumpkin

 9 lbs of pumpkin total went into this 5 gallon batch.

 Cinderella pumpkin.

Nephew helping out - he wouldn't touch the guts though. 

pumpkin time!

It's that time of year again - Pumpkin Ale season!  

If you read the post before this one you know that Dooney ended up at the same pumpkin patch as 10 Barrel's brewer Bobby, to pick up some deliciousness for our pumpkin brew this weekend.  I began experimenting with the different ingredients the other night.  I essentially made a tea of everything to get a taste and smell of everything separated, and then threw it all into a single vessel to see what it was like all combined.  

 'Tea' made with the different additives going into the brew.

Everything mixed together - smelled so good!  Chunks are sweet orange peel.

We wanted to make this brew pretty heavy on the spice so that you'd get more than just pumpkin.  

The recipe is as follows:

Cinder'Ale-a Pumpkin Ale:

Pale 2 Row Malt

Munich Malt - 10L

Victory Malt

Wheat Malt

Chocolate Malt

Clover Honey

Cascade Hops

Citra Hops

1 cinnamon stick

1/2 tsp. allspice

1/8 tsp. ground ginger

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

1/4 tsp. clove

30% - Cinderella pumpkin

30% - Galeux D'Eysines pumpkin

17.5% - Triamble pumpkin

17.5% - Jarhdale pumpkin

5% - Delicata squash

We decided to mash and boil the pumpkin so we're hoping to extract as much pumpkin as we can get between the different brew stages.  

We'll let you know!  

field trips.

Not sure if having a guest writer on here is blog ethical or not, but it's not really a personal blog, more of a 'beer geekery' blog if anything.  


Dooney took a trip over to ten barrel and I asked him to write about it!  Pretty awesome stuff from the sounds of it.  


More on the pumpkin beer later today - keep calm and carry on!

                This weekend I ventured off to Bend, Oregon in order to find the perfect pumpkins for the pumpkin ale Rooney and I were planning on making. At the time I heard from some local family members that the pumpkins in the area were exceptionally good. Though Saturday I discovered I was not the only person to seek the same pumpkin patch in order to make delicious beer.

                I had gone to the 10 Barrel Brewery Pub with my girlfriend and cousin to taste some of their beer and get some good food in the process, which I do have to agree with Rooney, they have some killer pizza. Anyways, after sampling pretty much everything 10 Barrel had on tap I ran into an old high school friend who just happened to be there with one of 10 Barrel’s newest brewers. So of course I quickly began asking as many questions as I could come up with. That’s when I learned that the brewer had just completed the very first Pumpkin Ale 10 Barrel has ever produced and it was fermenting as we spoke. So of course I had to ask to check out the brewery to see where all the magic happened. He was more than happy to take us over to the brewery and give a full tour.  So I finished my pizza, downed the remainder of my beer, and on we went.

When we got to the brewery and the bay doors opened I was immediately hit with a delicious aroma of fall spices.  The just completed pumpkin ale was one day into fermentation and it was like nothing I have experienced since I started brewing with Rooney. The blow off hose was engulfed in a large water trough and it was overflowing with krausen foam. I was even given the opportunity to try the soon to be beer right out of the fermentation vessel. It was sweet and rich with flavor. You can tell it was just starting to become alcoholic. It was amazing!

Now we were going to get the chance to tour the brewery, however there was a strict rule before doing so… That was to go over to the cooler and pour a nice frosty glass of beer. It was important to be continuously drinking beer as the tour took place. We started upstairs where they kept all the grain right near the grain mill. Downstairs consisted of the two kettles for mashing and the boil along with several fermentation vessels. It was quite the site. This was really my first tour of a brewery after I took up the obsession of being a home brewer. Unfortunately time was limited. After seeing all that I could get my eyes on and snapping a few pictures, the tour came to an end. Everyone around that was associated with 10 Barrel was very nice and welcoming. I mean, how can you not be when you have free beer to offer? The brewer was even nice enough to give me his email so Rooney and I could contact him with any questions we may have. With the tour ending and beer still left in my glass, I was told I could keep the glass as a souvenir along with a few free stickers that were thrown in too.

So that was the end of my tour. After everything was all done and said, I quickly realized that 10 Barrel was the real deal. It wasn’t just another one of these restaurants who make beer on the side to bring in customers. It was a brewery that’s sole purpose was to make amazing beer with some delicious food to pair it with. I eventually made it down to the nearby pumpkin patch (the same place 10 Barrel got their pumpkins) and managed to pick out a healthy selection of fresh specialty pumpkins and squashes. I even managed to pick up some organic clover honey to add to our soon to be batch of beer. Now all we need to do is brew!

 all kinds of goodness!