How I Got Started: Erik Howell

Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Erik Howell. I’m an Indianapolis native that recently moved to Portland, OR and have been brewing for just over 10 years. I love all forms of fermentation, and would consider myself a “maker/survivalist”. Haha. Sounds better than “doomsday prepper” doesn’t it? I first got introduced into craft beer in the early 2000’s when I was in college. There was a craft beer bar just down the street from my house called The Heorot Pub and Draught House that had an excellent selection of great beer from all over the country/world. They had a mug club that allowed you to get a special mug if you bought one of each beer they offered in the bar. I tried as many different beers as I could afford, however there was no touching that achievement 🙂

I remember a friend’s misfortune with his Mr. Beer kit in college, and I was absolutely certain I could do better. I ended up with the same Mr. Beer kit as a Christmas gift in ‘06 and went absolutely nuts. I did a bunch of reading (The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, How to Brew, Radical Brewing, etc) and went a little overboard on sanitizing. In the very beginning I was literally wearing a facemask and covering my countertops with Saran Wrap sprayed down with StarSan solution. It was like a scene out of Breaking Bad. My roommate at the time was super inspired, and footed the bill for a 5 gallon kit from Great Fermentations that I started using pretty regularly. I was an extract brewer for a long time (admittedly the first 5 years). The beer I was making was OK. I continued to acquire equipment and fine tune my brewing practices and things got much better over time.

I started a small beer tasting group/blog in 2012 called Beer is My Passion or B.I.M.P. We organized blind tastings in an effort to educate ourselves about what we liked and disliked about different styles of beer. Later I formed a homebrew club out of the group, and started pouring homebrew at beer festivals. It was so much fun! Right about this time I met my soon to be wife Jenn, and we started brewing together. We got involved in competitions, more beer festivals, and networking in the Indy beer community. We were officially out of control. Soon we were branching out into cider, wine, pickles, etc. Beer turned into a gateway for all things fermented.

After a few years running BIMP, I found that many of my friends were more interested in the blind tastings than they were in brewing competitions. I was now working part time at my local homebrew shop, and was meeting other like-minded homebrewers that were also entering competitions. We were all competing independently even though we supported each others successes and failures. Ultimately this new group of brewers grew into Circle City Zymurgy. Now that I’m in Portland, I certainly miss my friends, the meetings, and social events that CCZ hosts. I still have a small hand in maintaining CCZ’s website, and still enter beers via our club. Recently I’ve been making various meads, wines, and beer in my new home. I’m hoping to build steam for the coming year’s competitions, and who knows maybe I’ll see some of you at NHC in Portland next year!

Mash of Wonder Competition Update

Last month, Circle City Zymurgy conceived their first-ever homebrew competition. The Mash of Wonder was going to take all the nerdiness and excitement of brewing and tabletop games and combine them into one of the more interesting, unique competitions around. Since then, the competition ballooned into something bigger and more ambitious than anyone in the club could envision. In the end, 32 teams of brewers registered to participate in The Mash of Wonder, including our wonderful sponsors at Great Fermentations, Imperial Yeast, and the Cone Keepers Hopyard!

Getting my DM on

Last week, everyone gathered at the Noble Order taproom in Zionsville to roll for their fates. It was a fun, exuberant affair. I very much enjoyed being the “DM”, presiding over the event and informing my fellow homebrewers of their fates. Each favorable throw was met with groans from bystanders, and each disastrous one met with shouts of approval (yours truly somehow ended up with basil, cardamom, and sarsparilla…FML).

Game Faces

You can view the results of everyone’s throws by following the link below. The plan is to provide continuing updates on the competition as we go along. If you missed the deadline to register and are still interested in participating, you can still come to the November 8 club meeting at Great Fermentations Indy, where we will announce the results and you can sample some of the beers yourself. We are also still looking for volunteers to steward the event. If you want help out and see how homebrew competitions work, stewarding is an excellent way to do so. Email me at events@circlecityzymurgy to sign up to steward. Thank you so much to everyone who signed up and to all our sponsors. This is going to be a fun next few months.

MoW Results

10 Step Strawberry Rhubarb Melomel Tutorial

I recently came into possession of 5lbs of fresh garden grown green rhubarb and wanted make a special batch of mead this summer. I’ve been trying to hone in my mead making abilities and thought that a strawberry rhubarb melomel may be the best way to use all of this fresh rhubarb. Now all I needed were a few extra ingredients. I picked up a case of fresh picked organic strawberries and some fresh spring harvest honey from the Canby berry farms South of Portland at the local farmer’s market. The honey was light and had a slight brightness to it that I think will pair perfectly with the fruit.

 

Step 1: Wash the fruit, chop, vacuum seal, and freeze.  I filled the kitchen sink with a mixture of distilled white vinegar and water to wash the fruit (1 cup of distilled white vinegar to 8 cups water) using a brush to gently scrub everything. Some people include dish soap into these washes, however I do not do this. Fruit washes in a vinegar solution are a great way to extend the life of your fruit as it kills off native yeast, mold, and bacteria on the fruit. Once washed, I rinsed the fruit and started cutting it into smaller pieces. I cut the strawberries into halves and chopped the rhubarb into 2 inch pieces and weighed them. I used 3lbs of strawberries and just under 4lbs of rhubarb (which approximated to the same ratio I found in a strawberry rhubarb pie recipe online). I then threw them into vacuum sealed bags and froze them. Looking up pie recipes inspired me so much that I plan on making my next batch of mead using whole fresh baked fruit pies (cherry pie, huckleberry cobbler, or possibly even blueberry pie).

Step 2: Thaw fruit and refreeze This step is something I’ve only recently started doing. By freezing, you burst the cell walls of your fruit which makes juice more available. By freezing twice you further break up the fruit. Once it has thawed a second time, the fresh fruit now has a consistency of canned peaches.

Step 3: Thaw fruit and prep for brewday. Measure out yeast energizer, yeast nutrient, and pectic enzyme for 3 gallons of finished melomel and place them into a small bowl. I use half the recommended amount of yeast energizer and nutrient so that I can add more a few days into fermentation. Prep a rinse bucket and sanitizer bucket for your brew station. Set up brewing kettle and burner, measure out 5 gallons of filtered water, and set up your cooling workflow (I run a chugger pump into a counterflow wort chiller to quickly zapp the boiling liquid down to fermenting temperature and push it directly into my primary). Because I’m working with honey, I placed these beautiful jars of fresh honey in the sun to heat up and become less viscous (100°F outside today in Portland, OR. Ouch…).

Step 4: Test the system with boiling water to sanitize and work out any kinks. Once your water is boiling, cut the propane on your burner and connect your chiller setup to the ball valve on your kettle. Open the valve and let it flow into your chiller.  I power on the chugger pump for a few seconds to help start the siphoning process into my chiller before turning it off and letting gravity drain the water level down to 3 gallons. Once it’s reached 3 gallons close the ball valve on your kettle. Running boiling water through your chilling setup ensures that you are killing any yeast, bacteria, or mold that may be housed in your equipment.

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Step 5: Pour in your honey and stir to dissolve it into your heated water. My preheated honey pours just like warm motor oil. Make sure your heat is off while stirring in your honey to prevent scorching the sugar. I used a ratio of 2.5lbs of honey per gallon of water for a total of 7.5lbs of honey that will finish out at around 10.6% ABV (If I were to do this again I would have used 1.5lbs of honey per gallon to bring the ABV down to around 6-6.5% ABV).

Step 6: Chill your mead down to fermenting temperature and clean. I kick on the hose pushing water through my counterflow wort chiller, open up the valve on my kettle, and then power on my chugger pump. This draws my mead into my chiller and out of the system after passing through my Blichmann Thrumometer. I can adjust the temperature of my cooling mead by adjusting the kettle valve on my pot or the additional valve installed after the pump just before the chiller. This slows the flow of the mead while in the chiller which increases the contact time with the copper cooled by the water in system. I pumped my mead into my primary at 70°F.

Now that the brew day is over it’s time to clean. Make sure to scrub down your equipment, rinse, and dry everything. I also run additional boiling water through my chiller one last time to clean the inside of the chiller and heat up the copper to stave off bacteria before closing off the system. As you can see, I have Pedro’s approval that all is clean and ready to be packed away.

Step 7: Add your fruit and pitch your yeast. Now that you’ve transferred all of your mead into your cleaned and sanitized fermenter, add your fruit. Give the mixture a stir and take a gravity reading. The mead I made today was 1.080. Pitch your yeast on top of your fruit along with your nutrients and pectic enzyme. I use half the recommended amount of yeast energizer and nutrient, and add the other half after about 4-5 days. This helps provide the yeast with nutrients that it needs to continue powering through all that sugar. You can add the whole recommendation of pectic enzyme though. You want as much pectin to settle out as possible during the fermentation process to improve the clarity of your finished mead. There are a lot of different yeasts you can use for mead. Red Star Pasteur and Lalvin EC-1118 are both champagne yeasts and will ferment out dry without too much characteristics from the yeast itself. Wyeast Sweet Mead or Dry Mead are two liquid options that I’ve had a lot of luck with in the past. Today I’m using Mangrove Jack’s MO5 Mead yeast.

Step 8: FermentWhen I make beer/cider/wine I like to make sure I give the yeast plenty of time to do its thing. Don’t rush your mead through the system. The more times you open your fermenter, the more you expose it to Oxygen which will oxidize your finished product. That said, your mead is actively fermenting in the first 3-5 days. That’s a perfect time to throw in the rest of your yeast nutrient. Once you’ve done that, leave it alone for at least a couple of weeks at the proper fermenting temperature and then take a gravity reading. If the mead still has a way to go give it another week. Your final gravity should be 1.005 or lower. This will ensure it is not too sweet and ensures that the yeast has finished fermenting. If you are higher than 1.005 that is ok, it will just be a little on the sweet side.

Step 9: Rack your mead off the fruit and store in glass carboy for aging. Unfortunately this step can get a little messy. Above is a picture of a nectarine mead I recently racked into a 3 gallon glass carboy. The nectarines were so mushy they were easily pulled up into my racking cane and over to the secondary. It’s not the end of the world, but I’ll likely rack over to another carboy to remove the rest of the fruit and sediment. When racking your mead off of the fermented fruit, use extreme care. Your fermenter will likely have fruit still floating on top, and yeast accumulating at the bottom. You want the good stuff in the middle. Before you start transferring your mead over to a sanitized carboy I would recommend using a sanitized spoon to remove the floating fruit. Use care to not stir up the yeast at the bottom of the fermenter while removing the fruit. Transfer the mead over to glass with an autosiphon and age in glass. Over time you will notice that your mead will start clarifying, and yeast/fruit particles that will start settling out. If you are a stickler like I am you will likely rack your mead over to another carboy to further clarify your mead. Another thing to note is that I purge out the Oxygen in my fermentors when I open them up with CO2 from my kegging system. It’s a great way to decrease oxidation from taking root.

 

Step 10: Keg or bottle your mead. I prefer kegging my ferments as I can bottle directly from the keg using my Blichmann Beer Gun. This allows me to purge CO2 from my bottles before corking/capping my bottles. There is nothing wrong with bottle conditioning, however I prefer to force carbonate over conditioning in a bottle. You have officially made yourself some delicious mead! Chill and serve in your favorite glassware or in my case a fancy 2L drinking horn.

Mead has been made for thousands of years. Don’t feel like you have to buy a bunch of equipment to make it. I’m literally using equipment that I have accumulated over 10+ years homebrewing. Make sure you are using the freshest ingredients you can find. Use good sanitation practices. I would suggest using a glass carboy to age the mead in. Tuck your mead away and forget about it for a year (although make sure to keep the airlock filled) so that it can mature. I’ve found that cider and mead that have been aged for one year are much better than “hot” mead that was rushed into a bottle.  Consider aging some of your mead with liquor soaked oak cubes or maybe even adding some other microbes to the mix to create new and exciting flavor combinations. You can even blend finished meads together with cider or fruit wine!