I purchased an aquarium pump with an air filter at Modern Homebrew Emporium. Yeast is a living organism. Technically it is billions of living organisms. Those billions of tiny yeast cells ferment the sugars in wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide to make beer. As with most living organisms yeast needs oxygen. A wort without sufficient oxygen will not attenuate fully.  One of the consequences of boiling wort is that most of the oxygen in solution is boiled off. 

Boiling off oxygen in extract or partial-mash brewing is a bit of a non-issue when only doing a partial-boil. The top off water should have plenty of oxygen still in solution. Aerating the wort becomes more imperative when doing a full boil. In my case that is when I brew three gallon batches at home, or when Andy and I brew five to ten gallon batches. 


The air we breath is mostly hydrogen and only around 21% oxygen. You can introduce some oxygen to your wort by agitating your fermenter, splashing the wort when you transfer it to your fermenter, running your wort thru a strainer, or otherwise agitating it. 


For awhile I used pure oxygen. I purchased an oxygen regulator, oxygen tank, and diffusion stone to oxygenate my beers.





This setup worked decently enough. Having to go to a big box home improvement store to buy the oxygen tank was a minor inconvenience. Unfortunately by the time my tank was empty the regulator had rusted onto the empty tank. When this happened I decided to try the aquarium pump.


No tanks are needed, just plug the little guy in and let him pump away! The air filter makes sure contaminants in the air aren’t pumped and diffused into your beer. As long as I take reasonable care of the thing this is a one-time purchase other than replacing the filter one a year or so. 


The main advantage to the tank is that it is pure oxygen. The tank with regulator does not take as much time to diffuse the wort as the pump. With the tank I would let it rip for anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes. The instructions that came with the pump suggested leaving it in for 30 to 120 minutes.


I used the pump for the first time the other day. I didn’t mind the time it took. Once I cooled down my wort and transferred it to the fermenter, I plugged in the pump and let it do it’s job while I finished cleaning. 


A propperly aerated wort will start fermenting more quickly than a wort that isn’t. My first batch was going within 12 hours. That’s even more impressive since I was using dry yeast. So far, the pump feels like a solid investment. 


See Oxygen – How to Brew


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Thomas Brady’s Ale is a barleywine inspired by the original barrel-aged beer Thomas Hardy’s Ale. In the five weeks since I brewed the beer, Tom Brady only added to his legacy by leading the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. If nothing else, my choice in name has been vindicated. .

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The first ever batch where I employed a partial mash, a process that involves obtaining a percentage of your batch’s fermentable sugars from mashing grains, and then topping that off with malt extract, was a beer called Bases Loaded Bock.

My planned double brew day never materialized when I didn’t give myself enough time to make two large yeast starters. My ingredients for the new bock sat for around a month. Finally I decided to just use harvested yeast from Endicott Red and get it over with. After winning a medal in a lager category, and tasting other lagers brewed with WLP810 San Francisco Lager yeast, I think it should work just fine. My friend and occasional co-worker at Modern Homebrew Emporium Nate brewed a schwarzbier with this yeast and it tasted like a lager to me.

For good measure I also threw in two expired packages of Wyeast 2308 Munich Lager. This was the yeast I originally intended to use. The Munich Lager has a higher attenuation than the San Francisco Lager, and I am hoping that it will help here. It is easy for a big, malty lager like this to finish heavy and sweet.

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Even with the holiday season being over, I am still filling in one day a week at Modern Homebrew Emporium in Cambridge. This past week I worked my regular job, poured for Newburyport on Friday night for a couple of hours, and then worked an eight-hour shift on a Saturday at the shop.

Anyhoo, my manager at the shop remarked that whenever someone buys a five pound bag of priming sugar that the brewer is lulled into a false sense of security, and that the bag always runs out when it is least expected. Alas that has happened with my blog posts. After having several in the can, which is a bit rare for me, I haven’t had any #content ready to go.

The past week or so I have been devoting most of my energy to helping to organize my homebrew club: The North Shore Brewers’ competition. The club hasn’t run a competition since 2011. Over the years the club had had difficulty finding a venue and recruiting judges. Danielle, our club president wanted to bring the competition back as a way to help club members get feedback on their beer, and to increase the club’s profile in the beer and brewing community.

The first thing Danielle did was reach out to Chris Lohring at Notch Brewing to see if he would be willing to brew the Best of Show (BOS) at Notch. Not only did Chris agree, but he offered up the taproom as a venue for the competition. Danielle then asked me to be Competition Organizer. According to the BJCP Competition Handbook:

• Organizer – The organizer is basically responsible for planning and running the
  competition, including making sure that every aspect of the competition is completed on
  schedule and according to the rules. Some of the duties performed may include setting
  the date for the competition (which may be done with staff input), securing a venue and
  handling all venue issues, registering the competition with the BJCP, advertising the
  competition, setting up competition guidelines (with input from staff, if desired), setting
  up and troubleshooting the on-line entry process if one is being used, ordering awards,
  procuring prizes if a raffle is being held, fielding questions, and overseeing task progress
  and completion by staff members. During the competition, the organizer oversees the
  competition as a whole and pitches in where needed. After the competition, the
  competition report must be completed filed, and scoresheets/awards sent to the entrants.
  Any of the above tasks can be delegated to other staff members, or additional staff may
  be added to complete some of the tasks.
  The organizer should not judge, but can help in an emergency provided that the organizer
  does not have knowledge of the association between entries and entrants. In any event, no
  additional points are awarded to the organizer for judging or performing

Holy crap, I am kind of in-charge of this thing. We set up a Slack channel for organizing the competition with me, Danielle, Danielle’s husband Tim who is club Vice President, and Jason G.who volunteered to be the registrar for the competition. 

The first thing we had to do was coordinate with Notch to schedule a date/time to have the judging. Since their taproom opens to the public at 12:00 p.m., we decided to have two morning sessions on Saturday May 6 and Sunday May 7. Once we had that settled, I registered the competition with the BJCP. We got it in there just in time for it to appear in Zymurgy. 

I checked the BJCP competition calendar several times to try and ensure we wouldn’t be competing with any competitions in the area. Unfortunately another local club, The Boston Wort Processors also scheduled their competition on May 6. The Wort’s president politely asked if we could move the date of our competition to make sure we both have enough judges. We were too far along to even consider it.

In planning out the competition I looked at the results from the club’s last competition in 2011. Firstly I had a chuckle when I saw that Paul Gentile, owner and brewer at Gentile Brewing finished third in the light lager category. Additionally Max Heinegg who went on to be co-founder of Medford Brewing Company finished second at his table having brewed a robust porer. Five years ago there were 154 entries. For our first year back we wanted to keep things manageable so we capped the competition at 150 entries. From there I broke it down accordingly:

150 entries

8-10 beers per judging flight

15-17 flights

7-9 flights per session

Not including myself, we will need to find at least 7-9 qualified judges per session. From there I can pair the experienced judges with non-BJCP judges in the club who will hopefully volunteer. Like the BJCP handbook suggests, I’ll save myself as an emergency fill-in

Once we had the dates nailed down, we started reaching out to sponsors. A well-run competition has plenty of gifts and prizes for the judges, stewards, and volunteers. This is where sponsors can make or break a competition. Our first year back it is important that the judges and volunteers have a good experience so they want to volunteer again next year. 

Danielle works at a local bottle shop, so I asked if she could reach out to some of the brewery and distributor reps she works with. Beyond that I emailed every type of business I could think of: local craft beer bars and restaurants, homebrewing equipment and ingredient suppliers, distilleries, breweries and brewpubs that Danielle might not have a relationship with. The response better than I could have imagined.After a couple of weeks we already have 22 sponsors.

Working prototype of our poster. We ran out of room for sponsor’s logos.

As we were reaching out to potential sponsors, Tim updated and uploaded the competition software onto the club’s website. After ironing out a couple of kinks and an ill-timed servier migration, we were able to edit all of the competition information: upload all of our sponsors, add in our drop-off locations, and other details.

The entry window has been open for three days. So far we have nine entries which isn’t too shabby at all. Our competition committee will be meeting this week to go over a few things. I am also working on a special brew to enter just for this competition.

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In my recent post Making hard cider at home, I admitted that the only medal I had ever won in a competition was for a cider. I was hoping to change that last year as I vowed to enter more competitions. I didn’t brew quite as much in 2016 as I had in 2015. A lot of what I brewed last year was for events like Jamboree and Ales over ALS. Entering more of my beers into competitions was one of my Brew Year’s Resolutions.

I had gotten great feedback on my latest batch Pa’s Lager. Before that I entered Pa’s Lager and Curly’s Pumpkin Milk Stout into a competition in Portland, ME: the Groundhogs Day Homebrew Competition 2017 run by the Portland Mashing Maineiacs. Additionally I volunteered to judge in the competition. I’ll take a built-in excuse to visit Portland. I made time to stop by Foundation and D.L. Geary’s before heading home.

The competition wasn’t huge with only around 100 entries. The categories were grouped into six different “tables” from which awards were given. I judged American Ales, American Porters, and American Stouts with a brewer and judge named Doug who is from nearby Swampscott, Mass. He was also a Certified BJCP judge and additionally he is a Certified Cicerone. Our scores tended to diverge a bit, but we were able to reach easy consensuses for the winners of both flights we judged.

Of the two beers I entered I probably had higher hopes for the Pumpkin Milk Stout. I was really happy with how that beer came out, and I thought it was a more forgiving beer and would better mask any flaws or off-flavors. After Doug and I finished our flights, I was milling around and saw the table where all of the judged beers were lined up. As I looked for my entries and any hopes I had of the Pumpkin Milk Stout placing were dashed. I found the bottle of Pumpkin Milk Stout with dried foam on the outside. If my beer gushed, there was no chance it would win anything.

The steward from that table told me the beer didn’t gush when opened, but it did slowly foam after opening. I took a swig from the already judged bottle. It didn’t taste offensive, but it clearly had fallen off from even a month earlier.

What I didn’t find was Pa’s Lager. The Best-in-Show judging was being conducted in a separate room that I could see into through a large window. I saw the bottles in contention for BOS on a table and I was pretty sure I saw a bottle with a yellow cap with the top filled in with black ink. Was that Pa’s Lager? It certainly looked like it.

I made sure not to let myself get too excited, but as soon as I got home I kept refreshing the competition’s website waiting for the winners to be announced. Finally, late on Monday night I saw this:

I have several projects I am working on at the moment. A couple of them are beer-related so check this space for details. The key is balancing work, brewing, and life in general. I need to keep my pipeline of fresh beer churning if I want to keep doing well in competitions. If I want to go to the next level, a closet full of medals will only help the cause and give me credibility.

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