South Bay, Los Angeles County, California

Hops, malt, yeast, equipment, procedures, evaluation and enjoyment-the sessions at "A Beer Odyssey" covered all aspects of homebrew. Thirty sessions over the conference's three days covered about two-dozen different topics on beer. Although a handful of seminars were conducted twice, most seminars were only given once. With the exception of Thursday, two or three sessions were held concurrently, forcing attendees to make some tough choices among the topics. In addition to holding concurrent sessions, the conference also scheduled the second round judging of the National Homebrew Competition during the presentations on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, forcing judges to choose between judging and attending the sessions.

Steve Casselman, the conference organizer, described the sessions in the program as made up of three tracks. I'm not sure what he had in mind, but I would split the sessions into a group of technical sessions, a series on beer styles, and a third group that was focused on beer enjoyment, beer evaluation and various other topics.

The technical sessions covered every aspect of beer ingredients and the brewing process in detail. The style series covered nine beer styles, including Stout, led by John Maier of Rogue Ales, Real Ales, IPA and Big Beers, with Byron Burch, three-time Meadmaker of the Year, leading the session on making mead. The third group of sessions included such diverse topics as Beer Evaluation, Cooking with Beer, and Beer History.

As expected, attendance at the sessions was a little variable. For example, about 50 or 60 people sat through the Thursday afternoon sessions, but only 20 or so beer lovers wanted to get out of bed the morning after the LA Brewer's Open for one of the Saturday morning presentations.

Regardless of the size of the audience, most of the speakers had an extremely large amount of information to share with their fellow homebrewers. Since much of the information doesn't depend on actually attending the sessions, a series of reports from NHC will be published in the Dregs in order to pass along this information to SBC members. Look for the articles starting this month.

Two of the sessions I attended were excellent hands-on workshops: Beer Evaluation and Hop Characteristics.

Tom Nickel of Stuft Pizza & Brewery gave the seminar on Beer Evaluation. At the start, he polled the attendees and found that there were a fair number of BJCP judges in attendance, despite the judging going on down the hall in the San Diego Room. Similar to our BJCP class two years ago, Tom discussed beer flavors, how to evaluate beer, and the BJCP program. He had a series of doctored beers that were tainted with some substance or procedure to produce an off aroma or flavor. The first, a wheat beer, was allowed to sit for 24 hours before being pitched with yeast. Although the beer had some of the characteristic spicy, phenolic aromas expected in a Bavarian weizen, there were enough other unpleasant aromas present that made the beer just not quite right. The Scottish ale at the session was intentionally soured, but I found that the beer had such a high level of dimethyl sulphide (DMS) that the canned corn aroma was overpowering and a little unpleasant.

Coors was used as the base for the remainder of the doctored beers. As Tom explained, it's very light and shows the defects easily. One sample was doctored with apple juice to simulate the green-apple aroma of acetaldehyde. Another had artificial butter flavor (diacetyl), and a third had listerine added to it to give it a phenolic character. A final beer was tainted with nail polish to give it an ethyl acetate aroma. Remember, brewers, don't drink this sample (you know who you are).

The problem with using Coors as the base for doctored beers is that it's really easy to push the negative beer flavor way over the threshold of perception. Some of the doctored beers we tried during the session had overpowering levels of the defect. Doctoring your own beers, though, remains one of the best ways to learn about beer defects. While it was not mentioned at the conference, if you want to try this yourself, one resource can be found at http://brewery.org/brewery/library/DrBeer.html.

On Saturday morning, John Oliver of BJ's gave a great seminar on Hop Characteristics. His workshop was moved up an hour due a change in schedule resulting from absent speakers, and attendees were sampling BJ's rather strong Jeremiah Red Ale perhaps a little too soon after the LA Brewer's Open than some would have wished.

Jeremiah Red Ale is bittered and flavored exclusively with Northern Brewer hops. It has a strong malt character, with a very strong caramel malt aroma. The balance is definitely tipped towards malt, and since it doesn't have much of a hop aroma, it forms a great base beer to dry hop. Between the Jeremiah Red and two other beers, John had seven different beers at the session, including six that were each dry hopped with different varieties of hops. John filled a set of Cornelius kegs with beer, dropped in four (yes, four) ounces of hops, and let the kegs condition warm for eight days. The beers were then cooled, carbonated, and consumed at the conference. Dry hop conditioning is best done when the beer is warm, since the absorption of the essential oils into the beer slows at colder temperatures. Four ounces is more than most brewers would use in a five-gallon batch, but John wanted to really give each beer the distinctive character of the hops.

The first dry-hopped beer had Sterling hops, a 7% alpha acid hop that is a cross breed between Saaz, Cascade, and Brewers Gold. The aroma was herbal and spicy, with a little citrus in the background.

Santiam hops are a Tettnanger-type tiploid, bred from Tettnang, Hallertau Mittelfruh, Cascade, Brewers Gold, Early something or other, another German aroma hop, and something else that they just don't know. The alpha acid was 9% and the aroma very pleasant, but since the stability is rather low, growers are not very excited about it and this variety may not be around in a few years.

A cross breed of Chinook and Cascade, Simco is a high alpha hop with a citrusy, piney character. At 15% alpha, it seems like a great hop for barleywines. Look for it under the alternate spelling of Simcoe. The fourth beer was dry hopped with Northern Brewer, producing a beer with a single hop variety. At the four-ounce level, the hops gave the beer a very earthy aroma.

John added a combination of Cascade and Chinook hops to a keg of BJ's Piranha Pale Ale. The aroma of this beer had an extremely strong resinous, pencil-shaving type aroma. This was possibly my least favorite beer of the session, since a Ticonderoga No 2 is not my favorite aroma in a beer. The last beer of the session was a keg of Owens IPA, dry hopped with leaf Centennial and Ultra hops, which produced a soft, slightly earthy aroma.

The most technical session of the conference was Modeling Lauter Flow in the Grain Bed by John Palmer and Brian Kern. Early discussions of fluid flow in a lauter tun assumed that the flow converges to the drains, leaving untouched areas of the grain. The objective of this work was to determine through experimental and analytical techniques the best design for a lauter tun. In this case, best is defined as the design that rinses the most sugars from the grains with a minimum amount of over-sparging.

John conducted a series of experiments that used ground up corncobs as a substitute for barley malt (the two do have similar properties). He used an aquarium tank as a substitute for the rectangular mash tun, and fitted a number of copper pipe manifolds in various positions in the bottom. The tank-turned-mash-tun was filled with wet corncob particles with a dye layer at the top, and as sparge water was allowed to flow into the "grain bed", the progress of the dye through the corncobs was observed through the tank walls.

The results of the experiments showed that a manifold in a horizontal or v-shaped configuration above the tank's bottom results in areas of the grains unwetted by the sparge water. The flow rate of the sparge water was found to not have an effect on the shape of the convergence of the dyed water towards the drains.

In the other half of the presentation, Brian presented results from a numerical model in which he simulated the flow of the sparge water through a lauter tun using a computer. Using equations for flow through porous media, his model calculates the lautering efficiency and quantity of over-sparging given the dimension of the lauter tun and the size and location of the manifold or false bottom. He assumed that the amount of sugar extracted from the grains is proportional to the amount of sparge water passing through the grains up to some maximum, at which the brewer is now over-sparging that area of the grain bed. He also assumed that the grain is not absorbing water, and that the properties of the grains are constant (and therefore, the temperature is constant). Brian conducted a very large number of numerical experiments on rectangular-cooler, cylindrical-coolers and converted Sanke-keg lauter tuns.

Rectangular and cylindrical coolers with false bottoms give perfect or near-perfect results-which is defined as 100% efficiency with no over-sparging. For rectangular coolers with pipe manifolds, the best configuration has a balanced pipe spacing, in which the distance between the pipes and the walls is half the distance between the pipes. Smaller pipe spacings gave better results than larger pipe spacings, and deeper grain beds were always found to be better than shallow beds. The slot orientation, pipe diameter and pipe height have a much smaller effect on the efficiency and uniformity of the sparge.

For converted Sanke-keg lauter tuns with a false bottom, the efficiency increases as the screen diameter increases. As the screen diameter approaches the keg diameter, the lautering efficiency approaches 100%. For small screens about 5 inches in diameter, the efficiency drops to about 87% in a 10-gallon batch. Like the rectangular cooler, deeper grain beds are more efficient. For a circular manifold in the keg, the best efficiency was calculated for a 10-inch diameter pipe. This is near the point where half the volume of the keg is on each side of the manifold.

The bottom line of this analysis is that for sparging, nothing beats a false bottom. If you are using a pipe manifold, balance the pipe spacing for both rectangular or circular mash tuns.

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