Spreading the Craft Brew Love

Even the hardest days of brewing are still better than any day at the office. Like most hobbies, we seem to be willing to work longer, perform menial laborious tasks, and put up with conditions that we wouldn't normally be willing to endure. Brewing is no different. Summertime brewing in Florida is hot, scrubbing labels and bottles is monotonous, and cleaning the gunk out of carboys and kettles is about like cleaning a dirty diaper. The perks are of course sipping on good beer, smelling the beautiful aroma of barley and hops, and enjoying the satisfaction of a successful brew.


This past Saturday, the OCBC had a long afternoon of bottling 2 batches and brewing a new one. We bottled the Amazingly Apricot and the Brunette Blonde, and we brewed one of the IPAs we are exploring. We were using the Northern Brewer, Dead Ringer Extract Kit with Specialty Grains. It is touted to be a copy of the Bell's Two Hearted, so we will see in 6 weeks how it tastes.

Luckily we had 7 of the 8 club members present to give a hand, so we were able to multitask. We had to clean and sterile the 100+ bottles, rack and bottle, and keep an eye on the kettle to watch for boil over and all the brewing steps. We also had several friends over to experience the brewing process, and hopefully have inspired a few out of town folks to take up brewing. I guess the saying could be

"Give a man a beer and he has one beer, teach him to brew and he'll never be thirsty". 

We shall see if the OCBC will have a few branches sprout up.

Will the real yeast please rise up!

From time to time it seems that you will eventually have one billion organic problems that set out to make sure you fail. Such has been the case on a couple of our latest brew adventures. First there was Craig's pilsner which failed to step up to the plate and, just this week, the first batch of our Oktoberfest. How to deal with it? Easy....call in one billion more replacement yeast warriors to battle it out in the fermentation process.

Flat and sad...

After stressing out over the fact that this new brew was flat we called upon our new friends at the Magnolia Square Market in Sanford, FL to assist us with purchasing some new yeast to help kick start the process. Now, the Oktoberfest is acting like it is suppose to and burping away happily. The only hard part now is waiting the better part of eleven weeks to drink it. It should be ready for the UF versus Kentucky game come September 23rd though which is good.

Fluffy and happy...

Also, this weekend we will be enjoying some good company and brewing some good new beers. Over the next couple of weeks we will have around 400 bottles ready for drinking and over 150 new beers hanging out in Paul and becoming good friends. So, all is looking good for the OCBC. Oh yeah, GO USA!

The Unsung Member - Paul

The Orlando Craft Brew Club would not have had the initial success or the ability to up the production without Paul, our Coldspot Chest Freezer. Being located in Central Florida gives us a slight disadvantage to our brew friends up north. We don't have basements because of our geology, or any locations in our houses that can store fermenting beer without major climate control devices.

We were fortunate enough to have 1 wine chiller at Micheal's house and Sugar was able to purchase another one for $20 at a neighbor's yard sale. Hoppes was our inventive member and built a chiller box from online plans, equipped with a thermostat and fan, and only requires the changing out of 1 gallon ice chugs every other day. Either way, that only gave the OCBC the ability to have 3 carboys in the mix at one time. With us having so many members and so many of us with great ambition about what we could be making, we needed another option.

The best solution that we could come up with was a large capacity chest freezer with a thermostat override. The only challenge would be to find one that was used, in good condition, and reasonable in price. Luckily for us, Craigslist has lots of cheap appliances and we were able to find a Sears Coldspot Freezer for $100. Perfect!

Sugar and I traveled across town and picked up the freezer from an older gentleman by the name of Paul, which the freezer has been dubbed. This freezer has been babied for the past 30 years and has been kept in mint condition. It appeared that it was being used to store enough frozen vegetables to survive the "zombie Apocalypse". Now it will get to spend its final days helping us brew fine beer.

The Northern Brewer thermostat allows us to control Paul to whatever temperature our brews require. We can now use the mini-chillers to brew our lagers and cold fermenting brews and keep the ales in Paul. Now all we need is another smaller chest freezer to get a keg and tap system going. Its only a matter of time.

The Orlando Craft Brew Club

The Orlando Craft Brew Club was founded in May 2011. March Madness had just ended and the founders of the club were wondering what we were going to do with our time. We were also wondering what excuses they were going to make to get friends together to enjoy good beer and fellowship. Brewing beer was proposed and immediately it seemed that nothing could stop the idea. Don't get me wrong, the idea wasn't new and it had been brought up before, but now seemed to be the perfect time and place to launch it.

The OCBC was started with 8 paid memberships that got it off the ground. All members paid $50, we ordered the Deluxe Beer Starter Kit from Northern Brewer, an 8 gallon kettle, and our first ingredient kit. The Club brewed 4 trial beers to get the kinks out, and to see what craft beer was all about. Needless to say, we couldn't stop. We invested in mini fridges and "Paul", an 8 carboy capacity chest freezer, for fermentation storage in the hot Florida climate. We also expanded the number of carboys and upped production to our full capacity.

Members of the OCBC can pick whatever beer recipe they want to try, brew it, and sell it to the members or keep it for themselves. This way club members get to try lots of different types of beers, we can efficiently keep the numbers of beer high, and the overall costs low for club members.

Who knows what the OCBC will grow into. Visions of kegs, taps, our own swag and recipes are all so close at hand that they don't seem like goals or visions, but rather just the next logical step. This blog is to report our progress, let you know what we are drinking and finding in our brewing, and to help share the art of craft brewing.

Brew on!

First Brew - Palm Pale Ale

The OCBC's inaugural brew was the Northern Brewer AK47 Pale Mild kit with specialty grains. Since we are down in Florida and we brewed it on Palm Drive, we dubbed it the Palm Pale Ale. This beer was perfect to to give everyone an idea of what we were getting ourselves into, and we only had to wait 4 weeks to reap our reward.

The brewing was easy, but with it being our first time we were overly cautious and double checked every step. We started by soaking the 0.5 lbs Simpsons Caramalt and 1 oz Fawcett Pale Chocolate in 5 gallons of water until it reached 170 degrees. We then brought it up to a boil and added 3 lbs Munton’s Light dried malt extract. I think that I love smelling the boiling wort almost just as much as I do drinking beer. It was an awesome aroma that was spread throughout the house, and the Brew Club enjoyed taking peeks under the kettle lid and sipping on good brews.

Once the malt was stirred in and boiling, we were ready for the 60 minute hop boil with 0.75 oz East Kent Goldings for 60 minutes and 0.25 oz East Kent Goldings at the last15 minutes of the boil. We then finished it off with 1 lb corn sugar before we began chilling the wort down to 70 degrees. Luckily we invested in a copper wort chiller and had access to a bunch of ice packs, because cooling down 5 gallons of boiling hot liquid took just as long as getting it up to boil (about 45 minutes)! We bought the Wyeast 1945 NeoBritania smack pack and pitched it, aerated it by hand, and sealed it up.

What we learned from the first batch...
The first thing that we didn't do properly was popping the internal yeast pack of the smack pack. We smacked it, and it appeared to swell up, but it did not break the pouch and the yeast expanded from the warmer temperature. We pitched the yeast anyway, and it did work.

We also forgot to add the sugar to the wort, before we had already chilled it down to 70 degrees. It would have been ideal to mix it in when the water was boiling, but it slipped our mind as we were being attentive to sterilization and keeping the steps straight. Again, we did add the sugar and it apparently dissolved fine and had no bearing on the brewing.


I really didn't know what to expect after we placed the carboy in one of our "single" chillers, but it was like waking up on Christmas morning 8 hours later. One of my dogs woke me up early that morning and I heard a bubbling/thumping sound that I had never heard before. My first thought was that we had a leak in my house, but then I remembered the fermenting beer and the bubbler airlock we had used. I rushed to open the chiller and saw and heard the glorious sound of yeast multiplying, converting the sugars into alcohol, and producing CO2 that was bubbling through the lock. it was an awesome feeling of success.

The brew fermented for 2 weeks and then we bottled it and left it to condition and carbonate. When that 2 weeks was up, we chilled them and then got to experience the feeling of drinking a beer that we had made ourselves.

True, most mild beers are like little brown ales, but pale versions have existed and still do exist. This beer is an homage to one of the "relatively" famous ones, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, but we felt that it turned out to taste quite a bit like a Sam Adams Light . It was lightly hopped and light-bodied, but not at all boring. The beer was ready to drink quickly, obligingly chuggable, and remarkably complex for barely 3% abv.