The State of Homebrewing in the Philippines

It would be nice to hook up with some other homebrewers here in the Philippines so I can learn where to find stuff. I can't seem to find anything. The phone book is useless, the online directory is very poor and my limited local knowledge makes it hard to find things. I wanted to find a shop today that sells specialty restaurant supplies and after looking for a while we gave up and went grocery shopping. Like I said in an ealier post I have not been here for very long. I guess it's fair to say that you have to live somewhere for a while to get to know where everything is. Having a few brewing old-timer locals would be just the ticket.

The neighbors have been helpful in many ways, you know... go to such 'n' such street in the city. Unfortunately, the only map I have of the city has only the main streets named.

I have Googled just about every keyword combination to find a brew club here and the closest one that I can find is in Singapore! Hey I am not that good a swimmer mate!

Perhaps it's time to start the club now. What should we call it? I'll have a meeting with myself and hammer out a name, ok?

Done, it shall be known as HAP or the Homebrewers Association of the Philippines . I guess I am the President too. Please email me if you want to join. We have an opening for a secretary and treasurer. My first executive order as President is to set the membership fees to 500 pesos to cover postage and photocopying. All in favor say aye. I'll make a proper charter and set the date of the AGM when I get some time. For the record, today is Monday, March 12, 2007.

Please email me if you want to join the HAP.

I'd like to thank my brewing friends at Bodensatz for their advice and support.

Cheers,

Homie!

The Night The Power Went Out and Rice Beer

Interuptimus Powericus
Last night the power went out for about 6 hours here. It was so nice and black here and the stars were fantastic. It's the first time I've seen the big dipper in over 5 years. The big dipper is prominent in Canada. So in the darkness we used candles and luckily it was not too hot to sleep. This morning the power is back on and fridge is working hard to make things cool again. I have some bottles of water to freeze for my experiment.

Today I will go into the city to buy groceries and look for supplies. My neighbour told me about a restaurant supply store that has many specialty items for chefs including thermometers, hard to find ingredients and spices. I hope to go there before getting some groceries. The trip to the city proper and back takes a few hours. If we stop and have some lunch and go to the mall it can easily turn into an all day event. LOL

Rice Beer from Malted Rice?
Yesterday, I found a research paper on the net from the Philippine Rice Research Institute that details making beer from rice. The paper provides some very interesting details for the home brewer. The link to the document in PDF format is here. The preamble explains the the economic reason for their experiments, but the meat of the process and the evaluation of the product is attractive to me. Instead of using hops, which are not grown here, the researchers used a blend of locally produced bark extracts called tangal and duhat. These are used to adjust the bitterness and colour of the beer. Tangal and duhat extracts have also been used as anti-bacterial agents in fruit wine production.

Rice in the brewing world is known as an adjunct and usually not a principal ingredient in beer. Normally only barley, hops, yeast and water are a real beer's ingredients. Sometimes brewers, (moreso in lighter American beers) use rice, Budweiser for example. In Indonesia there is a traditional drink called brem that is made from rice. Of course we all know of sake. I have used rice only once as an ingredient in a homebrew and it was only used a small amount of rice flakes. Rice adds to the alcohol content to your brew without adding much in terms of body.

I am curious to try malting some rice of my own to try it. The rice that we need is not the typical white, polished store-bought rice. We want to find the unmilled rice or palay as it's called here in Tagalog. The palay has the husk on it still and will need to be soaked and germinated. Once the rice is modified (sprouted) we are going to have to dry it. Drying is a good job for the sun here as it's hot enough to dry, but not so hot as to kill the amalayse enzymes. Drying is done a lower temperatures, like 50°C for until the moisture content is below 10%. I will be roasting some smaller amounts so I have darker malts to play with.

Speaking of roasting, a few Filipinos have told me of native coffee which is made from roasted rice. I have never tried it before but I have read of some commercial successes and even a rice coffee shop in Manila. Wow, lookout Starbucks?

Why go through all the trouble? Malted barley is an imported item here and in small amounts is expensive. If malted rice can cut my grain bill in half I am making a less expensive brew. It's worth the experiment. And hey, I like experimenting. I keep forgetting that rice is a grain like wheat, rye and barley.

Time to go into the city now. Best wishes.

Getting Homebrew Supplies from the USA

It's a scorching Sunday afternoon and I am happy today as I placed my order at Homebrew Heaven in Everett, Washington USA. I have been friends with Ralph and his team at Homebrew Heaven there for over four years. I asked him if they ship to the Philippines. Ralph says says they ship quite a few orders to the Philippines. The sad part is they ship only USPS Air Parcel to the Philippines and it's expensive; but... at least I know it will get here. By expensive I mean about the same in US dollars as my order. Example, I ordered $50 worth of supplies and the air freight was $48.40. Oh my! Well, most of my order is heavy on hops and yeast as they are difficult to find here. I also got a few pieces of hardware like a bottle filler, fermentation thermometer and a tiny (4 pounds) of dark Dry Malt Extract or DME as it's called in the trade.

We've had a few brown-outs (black outs in the rest of the world) but I have a laptop and I can keep blogging. Maybe I should walk to the sari-sari and get a Pale Pilsen or two to fight the heat.
Oh I want to take lots of pictures when the stuff arrives. I expect it in about 10 business days.

Wish me luck, it's like Pasko di ba?


Cheers....

Keeping the Wort Cool in Hot Climates

Son of a Fermenter Chiller - (SoaF)
In the last post I was looking at ways to keep the wort cool during fermentation and conditioning phases of brewing. Some homebrewers I chatted with told me about the "Son of a Fermenter Chiller" which is an insulated extruded polystyrene box which can be easily made from a 4x8' sheet of 2 inch polystyrene.

I found the plans online, in PDF format, by Googling "son of a fermenter chiller". After reviewing the design, I have come up with something similar, but my idea uses two cardboard boxes and that junky white polystrene that is found in electronics and appliance packaging.

By placing a cardboard box inside of another larger cardboard box we create a gap that can be filled with broken bits of beadboard (white styrofoam). The R value we want can be determined by the difference in the box sizes. The SoaF design uses dense 2 inch extruded polystyrene which has an R value of 5 per inch. [R Value Table] The table at the web site suggests that beadboard has an R value of 4 per inch. An effective and efficient R value would be above R10, so I will try for a gap to fill of better than 3 inches. Four inches of beadboard would give an R value of 16 which would be super for the warm temperatures here.

The chiller is "powered" by ice. More accurately, old PET bottles filled with water, capped, then frozen in the freezer. The SoaF designer recommends "gallon" bottles, which are very big for our Philippines sized freezer, so I will try for 1.5 to 2 litre sizes. These can hold about 70% of the water capacity to allow for the ice to expand.

With the cooled wort in the chiller, bottles of ice are added to keep the temperature cool for fermentation in the yeast's recommended temperature range.

A thermostat and small fan from a computer surplus shop, connected to a DC adaptor can be used to circulate the cool air inside the chiller. It's low voltage, safe and cheap to run.

This fat walled, two box design (at R16) should prove to be very efficient and will need less ice than the standard SoaF design, therefore saving on the electric bill too. I also like the idea of re-using that ugly white garbage that floats around the country and takes 300 years to breakdown in the landfill. We can all do a little bit more to keep the country beautiful di ba?

Working the Temperature Differential
The SoaF can be routinely used to create temperature differentials (from inside the chiller compared to the outside the chiller air temps.) of 17°C. This means on a warm day of 35ºC here, a relatively cool temperature of 18ºC can be maintained. This would be most effective for ale yeasts and should produce good results.

By selecting yeasts with higher maximum fermenting temperatures, we can take advantage of the energy savings too. A good ale yeast (saccharomyces cerivisae), from lets say Wyeast, DCL, or White Labs will typically have fermenting temperature ranges of 16 to 24ºC. The higher the temperature during fermentation the more fruity esthers and undesirable by-products are produced, so keeping to the low end of the temperature range will produce the results we want.

Lager yeasts (saccharomyces uvarum) operate a much lower temperature and will require much more energy going into making ice bottles. Perhaps, we can maintain temperatures (8 to 12ºC) for a week or two, but is it really worth the extra energy? In my experience, lagers don't usually ferment as quickly as ales in their respective temperature ranges.

When I get the basic design done on the chiller, I will do some temperature experiments and post the results.

Tomorrow I'll be working on locating equipment and reseaching some sources of ale yeasts online.

Cheers and happy brewing.

Ambient Temperatures in Brewing Ales

Today, I am researching the effects of higher than ideal fermentation temperatures and simple "homemade" solutions to overcome some of these problems.

I recently listened to a podcast from Basic Brewing Radio featuring homebrew author John Palmer. The host James Spencer and John talked about issues of high fermenting temperatures. The gist of it is: High temperatures during fermentation can produce off flavors, but the most important time to have a cooler wort is when pitching. Increases in temperatures after the yeast's growth phase are acceptable, but not too high. From what I have gleaned from research and that podcast is that 90° F (32.2° C) as the absolute maximum temperature, of course this will depend on the yeast used. When I say absolute maximum this is not what I consider an ideal fermentation temperature.

What is deemed most important for hot climate brewing is the pitching temperature. With an ice bucket pre-chiller and immersion wort chiller I will certainly be able to get the wort to 20° prior to pitching the yeast. If I wrap the primary fermenter with some insulation the wort temperature should remain low and fairly constant until the yeast growth phase is complete. After the growth phase is complete the brew temp can increase as long as it doesn't get too warm.

I would like to build an insulated box with a place for an ice tray. I'd need a week's worth of ice, but can make a few bags of ice a day to keep the system cool. This box would allow me to use lager yeast and brew at cooler (10° C) temperatures, but I'd be happy with 15 to 17° C and a nice ale.

So as I build my mini brewery, I will be on the lookout for ways to keep things cool with ice. My shopping list now includes some lengths of copper pipe, a few pieces of garden hose, fittings and a sheet of rigid polystyrene. I know I can get the plumbing parts, but the 'am not sure about the polystyrene. I have seen plans on the web for a brew box that's made of polystyrene. It's rigid and easy to work with. I could also buy or build a wooden box and line it with something. Perhaps something native or spray the inside with insulating foam spray. More things to keep my eyes peeled for.

My next research project is about malting. There is a grains dealer about 4km from the house here. (we're semi-rural) I saw a bag of barley the last time we went past on the jeepney. Hmmm, home malted barley? Pwede!

'till next time...cheers.

Welcome to my new blog on my experimentations with home brewing. I have lived in the Philippines for a while now and have not yet come across any homebrew stores, home brewing clubs or really anything related to home brewing and/or wine making at all.

I hope to one day start a homebrew club in the Philippines and maybe have an online forum where the members can exchange ideas, recipes, tips and advice.

I will be posting some of my research as I develop recipes with a distinct Pinoy flavor. I will be malting some rice while I gather my brewing gear. So far gingerbeer is the only thing I have started as barley and hops are tough to come by.

If you have any information on suppliers in the Philippines or want to drop me a message please do.

Best wishes and hope to see you soon.