Adventures of a Beginning Home Brewer

 

Big Beers Need Big Yeast!

I have started dabbling in bigger beers. Most recently an imperial stout which will be the makings of this year’s Merry Cherry Christmas Stout. But, big beers need big amounts of healthy viable yeast. The answer? A yeast starter!

 

(Yeast Starter Kit)

A yeast starter kit is basically just a glass flask and a foam stopper. What you do is make a very small batch of unhopped wort using water and dry malt extract (yeast food!). Then just pitch your yeast into this and give it a few days. The yeast eat and reproduce in a happy healthy environment. Then just pitch it into your fermenter on brew day. But what is the point?

Yeast starters have several purposes. First is that it increases the amount of yeast cells for pitching into your brew. A yeast starter can take a 100 billion cell packet of yeast and turn that into hundreds and hundreds of billions of viable yeast cells.

This is important for several reasons. Higher pitch rates make better beers because under pitching causes stress on the yeast. Too much work for a small amount of yeast cells causes this stress, I think we can all relate. When yeast get stressed they can produce an off flavor and aroma.

Higher pitch rates of healthy viable yeast also increases the tolerance for higher concentration of alcohol. That is pretty important for making higher gravity beers. In line with this is that lower amounts of yeast may cause the yeast to ferment slowly or incompletely. Basically if you want a big beer, you will need big strong healthy yeast and lots of em!

 

(Yeast Starter in Action)

Another reason to use a yeast starter kit is that it reduces the lag in growth of the yeast. The sooner actual fermentation of your beer starts the less likely it is to be contaminated. Eliminating any lag lowers the chance of contamination. A healthy beer is a happy beer!

Yeast starter kits can be purchased at any homebrew store for around 20-30 bucks, depending on what size you want. They also have stir plates that you can purchase for these, but they are kind of spendy. According to the directions I received with mine you can just give it a good swirl every time you walk by and you should be fine. Also, feel free to throw in a drop of FermCap-S to eliminate any chance of over foaming.

On a quick side note, Beerploma was nominated for Best Beer Blog in the Growler’s Kind-of-a-Big-Deal awards. Thanks to those who nominated us! If you like what you read here, please take a second to go to www.growlermag.com/vote  and vote for beerploma.blogspot.com for best beer blog.





Take Me Out to the Beer Game

 

 

 

I will just come out and admit it… I am not a baseball guy. It just isn’t my sport. I need a sport that has violent collisions on a regular basis, like football, hockey, heck even NASCAR. I probably catch a combined total of one inning of baseball a year.

 

That said, recently I had a chance to go to Target Field to see the MN Twins try to play baseball for a work outing… Let’s see; sit at my office all afternoon or go drink some beer on a sunny afternoon at the ol’ ball park…. Easy decision!

 

Baseball aside, I was actually really excited to go. I had heard great things about the ballpark; the beer, the food, the views, and it didn’t disappoint.

 

Target Field itself is a beautiful ball park! It’s new, clean, and easily accessible. Even though we had the cheap seats the view of the field was great, and we didn’t need a Sherpa to get to them!

 

 

 

 

Blah, blah, baseball, ballpark… Whatever, lets get to the beer side of things! This place is a beer drinker’s paradise. It was great to finally go to a stadium and have options other than beers that start with the word Miller or end with the word Light.

 

My first stop was right inside the gate I entered, Twin’s Pub. Just a normal average looking hot dog, nachos, and beer type stand that is at every stadium I have ever been to except this one had tasty beers! I went for a bomber of Summit Extra Pale Ale. Nothing too adventurous obviously, but I have always liked this beer and never have ordered a bomber of it, so why not?

 

 

 

 

I walked through the concourses searching out other fun beer stuff and found Hrbek’s. Hrbek’s is a full service sports bar inside the ballpark named after former Twin’s first baseman Kent Hrbek… He played back when the Twins were good. Anybody remember that? I didn’t get a drink there because I was still working on my Summit, but the place looked nice and at least had leinie’s on tap.
 

 

After watching a couple innings of baseball with my coworkers I headed back out for another beer. I came across a small beer counter the size of a large walk in closet built into the wall called Twin’s Brews, Beers of Twin’s Territory. This little place was awesome! They had countless local craft beers. It was a cool touch to see the hometown team promoting hometown beers. We need more of that type of stuff if you ask me. I had a Lost Trout by Third Street Brewhouse. It was a little on the chilly side that day, so a good brown ale went down great!
 

 

The Twins lost, but I was really impressed with the wide selection of craft beer available at Target Field. The beer combined with some great food stands, like Foods of the State Fair and a variety of sausage vendors among other things, makes for a great fan experience, even if you are not a fan in the first place.
 

On a quick side note, Beerploma was nominated for Best Beer Blog in the Growler’s Kind-of-a-Big-Deal awards. Thanks to those who nominated us! If you like what you read here, please take a second to go to www.growlermag.com/vote and vote for beerploma.blogspot.com for best beer blog (category number 18). 

Welcome To Beerploma!

Welcome to Beerploma! 

It's been a little over year since we started out Blog here, so it might seems strange that we are posting a Welcome post this late in the game, but I will get to that in a second.  After one year of working on the Blog Beerploma has expanded into a growing Social Media empire.  Well today the Growler Magazine gave us with the honors of being nominated for the Best Beer Blogs award in their annual Its Kind Of A Big Deal.  So if you like our Blog feel free to head on over to their site and vote for us (it's poll #19).

And with that we are anticipating a lot of traffic coming into the Blog, so we thought we would take some time out and say WELCOME TO BEERPLOMA!

First off the blog is currently being run by myself, Will, and my cohort Andy.  Click here for more details.  Andy writes the Adventures of a Beginning Homebrewer, and I cover Beer Styles Learning Guides, and Rise of the Beer Baron.  Both of us cover Brew Reviews, and Brewery Tour exclusives.

But Beerploma goes beyond that.  Our organization is all about the education of craft beer, drinking locally, and supporting craft brewers.  In order to do this we have started putting together a great social media campaign.  We offer some great Videos regarding beer.  You can find us on several podcast directories including iTunes, and YouTube.  We offer two great show.  Our first is "2 Growlers" hosted by Lynn and myself.  It's about two guys, in a garage, growling about great local beers from Minnesota and beyond.  Check out one of our episodes:

We also have our "Brewery Tour" series podcast where we get an inside peek and the finest breweries of the Midwest:

And last but not least we have a great interactive network on Facebook and Twitter.  Feel free to drop us a line there and lest us know about your favorite beers.

So if you are new to our blog, or have been visiting us over the last year, I hope we let you in on our organization, and found some new ways for you to interact with us.

Until next time!  PROST!  And don't forget to vote in this year's Its Kind Of A Big Deal awards!