CHICKEN. The Rubber Chicken. NEXT MEETING: Mushroom Head Malt 7658 Jackson Rd. Saranac Competition 6:00, Meeting 7:00 May 16, 2018.

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1 The RUBBER CHICKEN NEXT MEETING: Mushroom Head Malt 7658 Jackson Rd. Saranac Competition 6:00, Meeting 7:00 May 16, 2018 The Rubber Chicken folded into an envelope and then physically mailed to the membership. Mail? What is mail? Google it. Thus the club newsletter was formed. The what? We have a newsletter? Yes we have a newsletter. It is called the Rubber Chicken, if you are reading this, you probably know that. But what is the Rubber Chicken? The RC gets its name as homage to a beer recipe in Charlie Papazian s book, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, which in turn gets the recipe from a British brewing book published in 1899 called, The Flowing Bowl. This recipe is for a Cock Ale. Here is the recipe: In order to make this take 10 gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better. Parboil the cock, flay him and stamp him in a stone mortar till his bones are broken (you must craw and gut him when you flay him), then put the cock into 2 quarts of sac [sixteenth-century dry Spanish white wine], and put to it 3 pounds of raisins of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, a few cloves; put all these into a canvas bag, and a little before you find the ale has done working, put the ale and a bag together into a vessel; in a week or 9 days bottle it up, fill the bottles but just above the neck, and give it the same time to ripen as other ale. Feel free to try it out. To my knowledge, no one has. Gross. Now you know, so stop asking. (By the way, this bit was copied straight off the webpage. See, everything really is on the webpage.) The RC s exact origins are lost in the mists of time and are as much club legend as they are fact. The oldest newsletter I have in my possession is from Its purpose was no different then, as it is now. Now it is less important than before. Way back before the internet, there was this stuff called paper. People would scrawl letters and words onto it as a means of conveying information and ideas. Every month, enough information and ideas concerning the club and its interests would accumulate that the officers, in their infinite wisdom, felt it important to record this info and disseminate it amongst the club members. This news was organized as a letter addressed to the members of PTB. The letter of news was The content over the years may have dwindled, the type of content has remained. Mostly you will find articles by members about things near and dear to the club, recipes, news about PTB and the beer scene, and ideas and techniques to better your craft. Three things that are always in the Rubber Chicken: A column from the president, the announcement of the time and place of the next meeting, and the current rankings and scores of the Homebrewer of the Year Competition. Every month, the secretary reminds the president that an article is due, then scrounges around to find content that is germane to the times, and finally puts it all together with some minutes from last meeting. This is a much underappreciated labor. Everybody pat Chad Zomerlei on the back and tell him he is a swell guy. Recently, we have tried to get more member involvement. The losers of the monthly style comp are expected to make a contribution to the RC. They can write about anything they want. But, cajoling and nudging people that don t like to write can be exhausting. I heartily thank those of you that did the right thing and paid your debt with dignity and honor. Who reads the Rubber Chicken? Who knows. Does anybody? Chad does still mail paper copies out to all our sponsors that have given an address. I have been asking some of them if they are aware they receive a Rubber Chicken. Several of them actually said they do, and they look forward to its delivery every month. No shit. Hopefully all of you members also read it. Provided you are literate, it can be an entertaining and fulfilling read. It also is a good exercise in being a human. Read up on those ideas, local happenings, and new ideas. Better yourself and better you beer. If ever anyone has something they would like to share via the printed word, please do not hesitate to reach out to your esteemed officers and let them know. We always need new thoughts in our collective. --DT

2 BETWEEN TWO BEERS BY DICK THUNDER The Accidental Brewer Maybe his mom told him he was an accident. Maybe he accidentally finished High School. Maybe he was in a horrific industrial accident which gave him the super natural ability to see the future. More likely is that his best beers are accidents. This time it is Tom Malkewitz s turn to be scrutinized. made the move to all grain brewing when a savvy salesman at O Connors Supply sold him on the idea. Since he can type really fast, he Binged homebrew clubs in the area and found us. Slim had no idea that there was even a thing as a club for this sort of thing. Really? He has a super-secret nerd safe place for a computer thing that he made up but can t fathom a brewing group? His reason to join the club was to find face to face knowledge and comradery. Well, I m not sure about the knowledge part, but we will talk shit to him and make him feel special. Coffee would be the drink of choice of this typist should he be unable to imbibe beer. Good thing that s not the case. You can often find him at Mitten Brewing, his favorite spot to go, or GRBC. According to Tom, GRBC is currently making the best commersh in the GR area. When buying bottled beer, he is really into Deschuttes product now, but if he could only drink one beer for the rest of his life, it would have to be everyone s standby, Two- Hearted Ale. No one knows where Tommy was born or raised, all we do know is that he graduated from Wayland High School some time ago. He aimlessly worked construction until his wife got him and made him do something else. A fine product of the infamous PC Pro Computer Schools, he now works in IT. Since then, he makes the big bucks because he can type really fast. Tom has an innate love of building things. As a construction worker he would build and remodel homes. As an IT guy he enjoys building and developing his own Brewpi automatic temperature controller. He is building a blog page detailing his build. You can also find a write up in the Rubber Chicken about his Brewpi project. Nothing is ever good enough for Mousekewitz. He doesn t like most brewing software so he has started to make his own. He is a scripting nerd, a term I am sure only the deepest darkest of closet computer nerds would know. He made his own clandestine scripting nerd group. I imagine it is like 2 or 3 insufferably awkward men that meet in the woods somewhere and speak in code like Harry Potter nerds making up their own spells in a make-believe language. Google, you say? The self-proclaimed Windows fanboy insists Bing is better. Whatever. Tom loves data. Yeah, he said that. He whiles away his spare time logging fermentation data from his beers. I bet he loves to count sand too. At the time of this article, Fievel has been brewing for about 8 months. He got into it when a friend of his got a kit and they decided to give it a go. He says it wasn t horrible. I m sure if someone else had made it, he would say it was garbage. He immediately As far as what he is making, he feels his best product is his dark beers. Porters and Stouts are what turns out the best. The best beer he ever made was a total accident. He had a friend bring him a bag of wet hops of an unknown variety and he threw some stuff together Swedish Chef style and, viola! Beer. Good beer. To date his best beer. Will it ever be reproduced? Not likely. He wishes he could make a decent IPA or NEI- PA. He is in good company, because apparently nobody can make a good NEIPA in this club. I suggested he read up on water treatment, since that can have a major bearing on hop perception in beers. He said he can t read. Maybe he can get his computer dorks to wizard a decent IPA for him. Anyway, Tommy Mousekewitz, we are happy to have you and your always enthusiastic wife Alena with us. Keep learning new things and sharing them with us. Let s all improve our craft. --DT

The Calm before the Summer April recap: Trial balance: $2,118.

PrimeTime did order stronger/more durable Club stickers to give out as swag look for them at the PrimeTime booth for Big Brew Day.

3 The Calm before the Summer April recap: Trial balance: $2, Active members: 44 Club activity slowed this past month, in anticipation of a full slate of upcoming PrimeTime events this Spring/Summer. PrimeTime did order stronger/more durable Club stickers to give out as swag look for them at the PrimeTime booth for Big Brew Day. The club also solicited interest in an Off Flavors seminar (roundtable like discussion) to be conducted during the regular July meeting. It appears as if there is enough interest to move forward with the course. Members that participate are asked to donate $5 to cover the cost of the kit. Look for a sign-up sheet for the course at the regular May meeting. The club has a healthy bank account balance currently, and projects to have excess funds available at year end. Club Officers have toyed with the idea of a capital purchase for the benefit of all members. The topic will be brought up at the Regular May meeting, and members may be asked to vote. If there is consensus, member suggestions for new club equipment may be solicited. Obligatory Tasteless Accountant joke: What do accountants suffer from that ordinary people don t? DEPRECIATION. Treasurer Moss Yeast: Use and Propagation Eric Fouch How do you treat your yeast? How does your yeast treat you? The answers to these questions are probably strikingly similar. Here s a primer on how to treat your yeast in order to induce it to treat you better: Whether you use dry yeast, smack packs, tubes, or culture from a bottle, one rule of thumb stays true: More is better. I ll give my opinions on yeast management starting from the easiest to the most difficult, in my humble opinion. Starter wort Most directions call for a starter wort gravity of to For bigger beers, you should use a bigger (higher gravity) starter. Don t use table sugar, corn sugar or honey for your starters. You are growing generations of yeast, and training them as to what to ferment. Grow them up on sucrose (table sugar) and when they hit your wort, they ll spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to do, and may suffer from performance anxiety. Use malt extract or all grain wort. Dry yeast First, select good, quality, fresh dry yeast. If you buy a kit, and it comes with a packet of dry yeast, the very best thing you can do with that yeast is throw it in the boil. Provided you take it out of its packet first, it makes good yeast nutrient, and that s about all it s good for. When checking out homebrew shops for dry yeast, make sure they are storing it in the cooler. Even dry yeast stores better and retains more viability when stored cool. Select a strain of dry yeast that matches the style of beer you are brewing. Typically, pitching one 5 gram packet is sufficient for a five gallon batch. Some brands sell their yeast in 7 or 14 gram packages. Remember- more is better. Now on to pitching. The directions on the packet say to rehydrate the yeast using boiled water that has cooled to 105F. This is supposed to reduce the osmotic shock on the yeast, so they don t wake up in a relatively high concentration solution of sugar. While I know this works for most people, for some reason I have had bad luck rehydrating yeast. Maybe my thermometer is off, or it s because I m a water sign (Pisces), but I never get good fast activity from the yeast when I rehydrate it. I have never had a problem just throwing a packet of dry yeast straight into the cooled wort. If you re worried about loss of viability due to non-rehydrated yeast, toss in two packets. Liquid Yeast The same selection criterion as dry yeast applies here. Try to get the freshest smack pack you can find. I ve had good luck with old smack packs; they just take longer to puff up after smacking. A good rule of thumb is to expect one day per month past the packaging date for the pouch to fully expand. Even the so-called pitchable smack packs should be stepped up. I ve had more than 24 hours of lag time with pitchable smack packs when not stepping them up. The rule of thumb for growing yeast is to pitch into ten times the volume you re pitching from. If the smack pack is 1 oz, once it has puffed up, pitch it into 10 oz of wort. When that is fermented out, step it up to 100 oz. This should be more than enough to pitch to 5 gallons of beer. You could even step from 10 oz to 64 oz for a decent pitching rate, but what do we already know? More is better. Pitchable yeast tubes have worked better for me in the past, but I still tend to pitch these into 64 to 128 oz (1/2-1 gallon) to start the yeast, especially if the tube is a bit old. Propagating yeast from a bottle of commercial beer Sometimes it s worth propagating a yeast strain from a bottle of your favorite brew. Most bottle conditioned beers condition with the same strain as they ferment with. Some filter out their proprietary fermentation strain, and condition with a common yeast, like 1056, or a lager strain. Beers I ve had very good results using the

4 yeast from include, but are not limited to: Widmere Hefe and Bells Oberon. Once again, the freshest bottle you can get will work the best. Beers imported from across the pond probably won t yield a decent culture, due to the perils of shipping beer that far. Here s how I go about propagating yeast from a bottle: After selecting your beer, sanitize the top of the bottle and the cap as well as possible. I use a spray bottled filled with iodophore mixed to about 24ppm. Hose it down good, and let it sit for a few minutes. Mr. Obvious says don t turn the bottle upside down to get under the rim of the cap, as that will disturb the sediment. Carefully open the bottle in the most sanitary fashion imaginable, and just as carefully pour off the beer (without touching the bottle to the glass) without disturbing the sediment. For those of you who used to live in Broward County Florida, this is called decanting. Now, equally aseptically, add.5 to 1 oz of sterile wort to the bottle, and affix an appropriate airlock. Watch the bottle for a few days for yeast activity. You may wan to factor in bathroom breaks, as sometimes it takes several days for bottle yeast to recover. After it looks like the yeast has recovered, start stepping it up in 10x increments as usual. If the yeast has successfully revived, it will now behave like a normal starter. remaining sludge or trub into a quart mason jar. Top off the jar with sterile water, and cap it. Gently swirl it around (with the cap a little loose- you may get some CO2 off gassing) to get good suspension of the trub. After a few hours or days, you should see two or three distinct layers. The uppermost, typically whiter layer will contain the best yeast. When you can, decant the whiter, cleaner layers into another mason jar and top off again with sterile water. This can be stored in the fridge for several months, revived a day before brew day, and off you go! Yeast experts recommend only doing this once or twice before getting fresh yeast. Another technique would be to grow up a gallon of starter from a liquid pack, let it ferment all the way out, and divide it into 4 or 5 pint bottles, and store them in the fridge. Lager yeasts When using lager yeasts, I have had the best results doing the following: Step it up to a gallon at room temp, as usual. The day before brewing, cool the starter down to your pitching temperature. Some people pitch the yeast at room temp, let it get started, and then cool it down to fermentation temps. This can cause a lot of off- flavors, and the need for lengthy lagering. Here s what I do (OK, I stole the idea from Wolfgang Kunze): After brew day, when I ve got the sweet wort in the fermenter, I ll put the fermenter in the fridge and cool it down to 45F. At the same time, I ll decant the spent wort from the starter, which I already cooled to 45 the day before, and add about a half- gallon of wort. I let both the starter and the sweet wort sit in the fridge for a day. This gets the starter going good, and allows the wort to continue to settle and clear. The next day, I ll re-rack the wort to a clean fermenter, aerating it again, and pitch the starter, all at 45F. Increase the temperature of the fridge about 1-2 degrees per day. When you hit 56F, the fermentation should be done, and DMS and other off- flavor compounds will have been minimized. Gentlemen, Start Your Starters!!! Yeast Conservation Save the yeast! Short of yeast ranching, which is a bit of a pain in the ass, there are some easy techniques to get a few more brews out of your yeast purchase. You can wash and re-use the yeast cake from a previous brew. This works perfectly for barleywines, which need more yeast to start with than normal strength brews. After racking or bottling from your primary or secondary, dump the March Meeting Notes: Not much in the way of news from the last meeting, as I wasn t able to attend. I heard it was cold. Big thanks to Farmhaus Cider for hosting. Send PayPal payments to: primetimebrewersmi@gmail.com

PRIMETIME BREWERS COMPETITION PAGE 2018 Competition Schedule January: Oatmeal Stout (16B) February: Best of Cellar Beer (1-34) March: New England IPA April: Best of Cellar Cider (All) May: Wee Heavy

5 PRIMETIME BREWERS COMPETITION PAGE 2018 Competition Schedule January: Oatmeal Stout (16B) February: Best of Cellar Beer (1-34) March: New England IPA April: Best of Cellar Cider (All) May: Wee Heavy (17C) June: Beer and Food Pairing Dinner July: Standard American Beer (1A-D) August: Best of Cellar Mead (M1-4) September: Pilsner Extract Beer any style, no barley products but the extract. Corn, Rice, or Rye adjuncts allowed. October: Marzen, Vienna Lager, and Festbier (6A, 7A, and 4B) November: SMASH Beer any style December: Christmas Party Non-PTB Competitions can be found at: First Thursday Destinations Jan City Built Feb Founders Mar The Mitten Apr Railtown May Osgood Jun Cellar Jul Thornapple Aug Gravel Bottom Sep Two Guys Oct New Union Nov Pike 51 Dec Brewery Vivant SAVE THE DATE(S) 2018 Brewer of the Year Results Matt Moss 24 Jeff Carlson 16 John Applegarth 16 Ian Purvis 16 George Lawlor 12 Tom Malkewitz 12 Chad Zomerlei 12 Jeremy Gavin 8 Paul Curran 4 Jessie Colclasure 4 Future RC or Food contributors: Paul Curran Jessie Colclasure Ric Brown Club Officers President: Jeremy Gavin V. P.: Ric Brown Treasurer: Matt Moss Sec & RC Editor: Chad Zomerlei (jabrews@gmail.com) (ricbrown67@gmail.com) (mossford11@gmail.com) (zomerlcp@gmail.com) SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS THEY SUPPORT US!! May 5 Big Brew Day with Siciliano s at Trail Point May GLINTCAP May 19 Siciliano s Homebrew party Other events at: April Cider Club Competition Results: 1st Matt Moss 2nd John Applegarth & Ian Purvis 3rd Jeff Carlson & Jessie Colclasure

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The RUBBER CHICKEN. NEXT MEETING: Schmohz Brewery 7:00 pm Wednesday September 18, 2013

The RUBBER CHICKEN. NEXT MEETING: Schmohz Brewery 7:00 pm Wednesday September 18, 2013 The RUBBER CHICKEN WWW.PRIMETIMEBREWERS.COM NEXT MEETING: Schmohz Brewery 7:00 pm Wednesday September 18, 2013 Our brand new taproom and beer garden open to the public next week Monday! Super exciting.