Norseman Brewery and Mead Hall

04/29/2020

Been awhile since I’ve posted. A new house and a big move make it hard to brew. Been dragging out the equipment and cleaning off the dust in preparation of making a scotch ale.

12/11/2018

As craft brewers continue to make waves in an evolving market, the Brewers Association looks back on the craft brewing community’s contributions, highlights, and defining beer moments of 2018.

02/18/2016

02/16/2016

Strong fermentation going on. Nice krausen.

02/16/2016

Another benefit to all grain - chickens love brewers grains!

02/16/2016

Presidents Day brew day was a success! Overall a much better effort than the previous all-grain brew. My efficiency was over 75%, and the post boil volume was spot on.

After reviewing what went right (and what went wrong) during my last brew, I settled on a few process changes. First, I did a much better pre-heat of my mash tun. This prevented the thermal losses when I added my strike water. Second, I used spring water - which kept my pH lower. These revisions helped quite a bit. The mash held steady for 70 minutes right at 154*, and the pH was almost spot on at about 5.7.

By not adding additional water to adjust the mash temperature, I was able to keep my volumes accurate, and ended up with a perfect 5.5 gallons after the boil. From here, I will continue to tweak my process. I hope to get up to 85% to 90% efficiency and get the pH to 5.5. This may require water treatment and/or crushing my own grains.

02/15/2016

Presidents Day brew day! Brewing a Rye IPA.

01/26/2016

Copper dip tube installed, now we're ready to brew.

01/24/2016

Part of the allure of being a homebrewer is designing and building your own equipment. Sure, there are many kits available, but where is the fun in that? To that end, I have performed a few upgrades on my boil kettle. With the help of a friend and his sandblasting cabinet, I have added gallon marks to the kettle. We measured gallon by gallon, calculated the correct spacing and cut out a negative on vinyl. Next, I added a weldless bulkhead and valve. All it needs is a soft copper dip tube, to draw liquid from the bottom of the pot.

01/24/2016

Making a yeast starter is the best way to ensure yeast are empowered to ferment your homebrew, and we'll show you how to make one!

01/07/2016

Enzymes in beer convert starches to soluble sugars. Understanding and manipulating how these enzymes work will help you create better, more flavorful beer.

01/07/2016

My assistant brewer and I ran into some issues during the last all grain batch. There were several reasons for this. First, mash temperature is critical to activate the enzymes responsible for sugar extraction. We had trouble hitting the correct temperature of 152*F, only reaching a max of 150*F after adding additional boiling water. This also increased the amount of water to 1.6 qt. per pound of grain, which is a bit thin. New equipment was partially responsible for this as I did not preheat the mash tun correctly, and did not account for heat loss through the copper siphon apparatus. Additionally, we found (at a most inopportune time) that my thermometer was not reading correctly. Thus, we did not hit our original gravity target. In the end we were at 1.039 instead of the 1.045 that we wanted. It will still be good beer, but not quite like I hoped. A plan is in place for the next brew, taking into account lessons learned here.