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Lactobacillus: From Yogurt to Beer?
Objective and Hypothesis The objective of the experiment was to isolate lactobacillus (LAB) cultures from store-bought yoghurt and see if they could be used in a beer. I hypothesized that I would be able to isolate at least three different mixed LAB cultures from different yogurts. Of the LABs that were isolated I predicted only one of them would be able to manage maltose to the degree that we could use it for a sour beer. I did not think that most of the cultures…
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Sourdough Bread and Hydration Levels
Background This project started very ambitiously with the intent to see the effect of different levels of hydration in the dough. I started the process with three levels of hydration: 80%, 100%, and 120%. By hydration I mean the percentage of water content to flour content. For example, if I had 1000g of flour and 800g of water this would be 80% hydration. This resulted in a messy flour soup for the two higher hydrations and after baking didn’t result in anything that resembled bread.…
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Session Mead: Raw vs Baked Honey Experiments
Objectives There were two objectives to my experiment. The first objective was merely to find out if my knowledge of beer creation could translate over to mead creation. Specific to this case, the creation of session mead, a lower alcohol variant that contains only 3-6.5% ABV. The second objective of the experiment was to examine the differences between raw honey and baked/dried honey in the creation of mead. Hypothesis Our hypothesis was thus. We believed that we would succeed in creating a session mead regardless…
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Cabernet Franc Trials
Grape Processing, Fermentation, and Aging This fall quarter for my Craft Brewing Practicum project I decided to make wine. I have recently been thinking about what kind of career path I want to take after graduating this spring, so this project has been my version of a test run at being a winemaker! Essentially my goal for this project was to see if I could make wine from grapes to fully fermented, oaked, and aged wine. I predicted if I was given the resources, I…
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Strawberry and Lemonade Wheat Beer – What Yeast Strain Is Better?
I wanted to find out what yeast strain works best with different fruit flavors of wheat beer. My question is what yeast strain works with what fruit better? Saisonstein Monster or the English yeast? Will the head retention/ carbonation hold up in the English yeast or will we have to force carbonate off the bat? Based on brewing an apple wheat beer a few months prior I suspected that the English yeast may be better because the carbonation/head retention lasted longer in the long haul.…
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The Mead Calculator
Hi! I’m DJ Johnson, and this quarter I wanted to make mead. Last Spring, I made braggots (a beer/mead fusion) and during that process I experimented with The Mead Calculator from https://gotmead.com/blog/the-mead-calculator/ and noticed that it gave some interesting options for additional sugars. In fact, it had so many options that I wanted to test just how accurate it could possibly be. The calculator wasn’t exactly easy to use in my experience and additionally, it had so many options for additional sugars that I doubted…
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Internship at Wildman Brewing
Hello, my name is Gerrick Sweet and during the 2023 Fall Quarter I had the opportunity to do an internship with a brewery close to my hometown. The brewery is Wildman Brewing Company and I did my internship under Ryan Porter. He is the head brewer at Wildman and was incredibly accommodating to me and able to teach me a ton not just about brewing but the business side and the other factors at play (like having proper floors and water usage!) Ryan didn’t just…
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Bourbon Perry Cider
Hi, my name is Cody Barthels, and I have been working on making a Perry cider at my work Wheel Line Cider. I wanted to do something different than I’ve done before, so instead of brewing a beer at home I took my practicum to work to make a cider. I thought making a pear cider would be really fun since I love pears and they turn into a great cider. So on one of our pear pressing days we filled up one of our…
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Rueben’s Brews Internship through the Mosaic State Brewers Collective
Hi! I’m DJ and this past summer I took part in an internship at Rueben’s Brews in Ballard as part of their packaging team at their production facility called “The Canning Line”. I had this amazing opportunity because of a few connections through scholarships which led to me meeting the owner of the Metier Brewing Company, Rodney Hines, who was benevolent enough to allow me to get connected with the Mosaic State Brewers Collective, a little later than I should have. The MSBC is a…
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Wheel Line Cider Internship
Working at Wheel Line Cider has given me a lot of experience, specifically working hands on with big fermentation tanks, pumps, lab work, and being up in an orchard! My first week there was such a great experience, my boss Nate had just finished up on a hibiscus cider that he had made. The coolest part about that week was that I was able to sit down with him and taste and smell the cider and write down any notes that I caught from the…
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Bale Breaker Summer Internship
Entry 1: Weeks one and two have been the craziest and the most overwhelming experience. I moved all my things to Yakima for the summer the day before I started, unpacked, and started getting ready for work the next day. June 8th is when I began at Bale Breaker and I ended up having a 102-degree fever, but I went to work anyway because I didn’t want to miss my first day and make a bad Impression. I later found out I had a really…
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Soft Pour vs Hard Pour
Hello everyone, I am Cameron Nelson and for this quarter I decided to test if you could achieve a lower carbonation output by changing your pouring style to a hard pour instead of a soft pour when pouring a beer. For reference a hard pour is poured quickly down the middle of the glass and a soft pour is down the side of the glass slowly the reason I decided to take on this task was because of a common issue amongst all beer drinkers.…
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GLUTEN-FREE BEER! Part 2
I ended my last post with me bottling my beer and putting them into a dark space for about 2 weeks. I explain further more towards the end! Hello, my name is Cody Barthels and I am a senior at Central Washington majoring in Craft Brewing. The idea of this project was to create a 100% gluten free beer for my wife, who has Celiac, to be able to try and drink. For this gluten free beer I decided to use sorghum for the grain, but…
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Impact of Temperature on SCOBY Growth Part 2
Hello, my name is Molly Spurrell and this is an update post on my SCOBY experiment. This was an experiment that looked at the relationship between temperature and SCOBY growth, as well as the microbial growth from the SCOBY solution (the sweet tea mixture that the SCOBY was growing in). The original post can be found here. To do this, I kept three jars of sweet tea mixtures at different temperatures (64°F, 72°F, and 80°F) all of which had been inoculated with GTs Pure kombucha.…
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Brewing a Bale Breaker Field 41 Pale Ale Clone, Part 2.
At the end of the last post I was talking about kegging if “it all went well,” which “it” did, becoming terminal on schedule and without any major off flavors. In this post I’m going to go over the packaging, conditioning, and sensory analysis process. You can read about the recipe research and brewing here. This beer was by far the most hopped ale I’ve brewed thus far. All in all in my 5 gallon batch I included 3 oz of Simcoe, 1.5 oz of…
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Sensory: Nature vs. Nurture
Hi there! My name is Kaylan Meyer I am a senior at Central Washinton University. I am currently working on two degrees in Craft Brewing and A Wine Industry Management Specialization, and a minor in business. This quarter I chose to do my Craft Brewing Practicum on sensory, specifically how much we are able to train our sense of smell and taste when it comes to beer sensory. I want to see how much I can hypothetically improve my tasting skills, and truly see whether…
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Brew Kits Part 2.
So what I have done for this practicum was perfect the recipe that will potentially go into a kit that will be sold to help support the brew club. I also was able to calculate how much each kit will cost based on research online and going to Ace Hardware in Yakima to evaluate where we would want to buy our supplies from. Below is a list of items going into the basic kit along with how much each of these items will cost. Funnel: …
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Ale Yeast Fermentation Trials.
This spring quarter I decided to do a project on different brewing yeasts and their sensorial differences in the final beer. In the past couple years of school, I have tasted a wide range of beer styles that were fermented with different yeast strains, which gave me a good idea of what characteristics some yeast strains may show in beers. A general understanding of these differences between, let’s say, an English yeast strain and a German wheat beer yeast strain was not satisfactory enough for…
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Braggots, Done Two Ways.
Hi, I’m DJ and I’m a craft brewing major here at CWU. However, I am more interested in mead than I am beer (but more interested in beer than I am wine), so I decided to have my practicum centered around braggots, a beer-mead hybrid, and I looked specifically into the process of how they are made. Most (if not all) braggot recipes call for you to add your honey after you’ve boiled your standard beer wort, mostly because you lose out on many of…
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Brewing a Bale Breaker Field 41 Pale Ale Clone, Part 1.
Growing up in Bellingham, WA meant that I’ve been surrounded by craft beer my entire life. I can remember my parents and their friends drinking at Boundary Bay, or bringing a six-pack of Full Sail over for a BBQ, but it wasn’t until years and years later that it fully clicked in my head that craft beer in Washington was something really special. My dad came to visit me for the weekend when I lived in Seattle, and he claimed that he’d brought his favorite…
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