Red Special Ale

Grains

This one might be named after my redheaded son Oliver (born about a week before the first batch was brewed) or it might be named for Brian May's guitar. Either way, it is what passes for an American Pale Ale around my house. A toast malt background with a hint of sweetness, topped by a lot of hop aroma but not too much bitterness. I think that a lot of brewers forget that hops offer more than bitterness - they offer a complex host of complex flavors, in the case of this beer, primarily those of citrus and tropical fruit.

8 1/2 lbs of your favorite pale malt - I've used Maris Otter but am by no means married to it.

1 lb of Caravienne - or substitute a 20 Lovibond crystal if you must.

1 lb of Briess Victory - no substitutions allowed!

Adjust the amount of pale malt if necessary to get a post boil gravity of about 1.060 with your efficiency numbers. These calculations are for 75%.

Mash in at 152 and let rest for 60 minutes or until fully converted if you are an iodine-testing sort of hombrewer. Sparge using your favorite technique so that you get a bit over 7.5 gallons in the boil kettle. You'll end up with a lot of hops in the kettle after this brew, so system losses tend to be pretty high.

Hops

90 minute boil and note that all hops are whole leaf

At boil (90 minutes remaining) add

• 1/3 oz Magnum (I use whole leaf from freshhops.com at about 17% alpha acids. Your milage may vary)

At 70 minutes (20 minutes remaining) add

• 1/2 oz Cascade
• 1/2 oz Citra
• Any clarifying agents you want to use

At 80 minutes (10 minutes remaining) add

• 1/2 oz Cascade
• 1/2 oz Citra

At 90 minutes (flame-out) add

• 1/2 oz Cascade
• 1/2 oz Citra

Vary the 90 minute addition of Magnum to match your particular alpha values. Target 36 IBUs.

Fermentation

Pitch Wyeast 1098

Ferment for 7 days in primary at about 64-66 Fahrenheit.

Transfer to secondary and ferment for 7 days at about 62-64 Fahrenheit. Dry hop with the following:

• 3/4 oz Cascade
• 3/4 oz Citra

Transfer to keg and carbonate to about 2.25 volumes or bottle condition as fits your style.

Note

This recipe involves a lot of whole leaf hops, which soak up the wort like there's no tomorrow. My final results have always ended up falling a little short of the five gallon target 4-4.5 gallons so I'm fiddling with the initial volumes a bit to try to make that up. These particular numbers should take you pretty close to 5 gallons finishing volume.

Happy brewing!

KL-7 Cryptic Porter

KL-7 Cryptic Porter

Porters are mysterious and ill defined. Ask a dozen different brewers or beer drinkers to define a porter and you'll get a dozen different answers. They are ciphers. So KL-7 is named for what is probably the culmination of electromechanical cipher machine design.

Grains

10 1/4 lbs of your favorite pale ale malt (I use Maris Otter or a Belgian, depending on my mood)

3/4 lb of Briess Special Roast (this can be a little tough to find, I buy it through northernbrewer.com)

3/4 lb of Crystal 80

3/4 lb of Crystal 120

1/2 lb of Chocolate (use the 350 Lovibond stuff)

Adjust the amount of pale ale malt to get about 1.070 specific gravity based on your efficiency

Mash in at 158 Fahrenheit for 60 minutes or until fully converted. Sparge however you like to sparge to end up with 7.5 gallons in the boil kettle. Light the fire.

Hops

At boil (90 minutes remaining) add

• 1/2 oz Chinook (I use whole leaf from freshops.com at about 15% alpha acid. Your mileage may vary)
• 1/2 oz Crystal (about 3% alpha acid)

After 70 minutes (20 minutes remaining) add

• 1/2 oz Chinook
• 1/2 oz Crystal
• Any clarifying agents you wish to use

After 80 minutes (10 minutes remaining) add

• 1 oz Crystal

Vary the 90 minute addition of Chinook if you need to fiddle the quantities to hit target IBUs (41)

Fermentation

Use Wyeast 1098 or equivalent

Ferment for 7 days in primary at about 64-66 Fahrenheit.

Transfer to secondary and ferment 7 days at about 60 Fahrenheit.

Keg/bottle and allow to age for about 2-4 weeks to hit optimum.

The Virtues of Experimentation

So this is a rant.

It is a rant about something that I see all too often on homebrewing forums:

"So I'm trying to make a clone of..." where some decent craft or microbrew is then named, followed by a recipe that may or may not seem like a close approximation of the target beer.

All the forum regulars then chime in, suggesting in turns that the original question asker add some crystal (rarely), use less crystal (more often), use (or not use) Carapils,

We're brewing beer here, people, not transplanting kidneys (to paraphrase an old co-worker of mine). I don't want my renal surgeon to say "hey, I'm fresh out of kidneys, so I think I'll pop a spleen in here instead...spleens look kind of like kidneys." But if I'm out of C20 and I substitute some Caravienne...I mean really, what's the worst that is going to happen?

Perhaps the beer won't be quite the same. Perhaps no one will notice the difference. Perhaps it'll be a little less sweet or a little more complex or a little more caramel and a little less burnt sugar. Or whatever.

The point is, ultimately, that without at least some experimentation, nothing will ever change - for better or for worse. You'll never grow in your understanding of the flavors and interactions of the ingredients and techniques that make up brewing.

I once decided that British crystal malts sounded yummy, so I ordered a bunch of them at a rather considerable inconvenience. It turns out I really don't care for British crystal malts. I tried a couple in some really malt-forward beers and the results were OK, but not as good as the same beer brewed with American malts. Lesson learned. I used the rest up here and there in darker, fuller bodied beers that would have enough going on that the flavor of any individual malt was somewhat suppressed.

A few brews ago I used Caravienne for the first time. Love it, great stuff. Same thing with Victory, now it is a standard of mine.

Got a hold of some Summit hops a bit over a year ago. Totally disappointing - none of that "onion" thing that some people complain about, but really nothing there much at all. On the other hand, I gave Chinook a chance and it has now worked its way into half of my house beers.

Now this is my point - experiments work and experiments fail. Or perhaps I should put it this way - experiments may produce the expected results or they may not. And if the results diverge from expectation, they may in turn be better, worse, or simply different than expected.

So stop fussing and trying to clone your favorite beer (though I will say that the exercise of working up a clone is a great learning experience!). Stop relying on recipes published in books or online.

Go out there, plan your own recipe (use some software if you need, there is plenty out there). Try some malts you've never tried before and a new variety of hops.

See what you get!

The KL-7

This post is not about a beer.

It is about a machine, a machine that for something around two decades helped preserve the operational secrets of the United States.

This post is about a beer in as much as I brew a porter named after the KL-7.

And since porters are a cryptic, contrary, and ill defined style, what better name for a house porter than for the pinnacle of electromechanical cipher development?

Most people have heard of the German Enigma machine, that journeyman cipher machine of the various Nazi military and state agencies. The Enigma, as is pretty well known in popular culture, used a system of wheels with wires running through them to encipher messages. The wheels could rotate, and this changed the relationships among the different wired rotors. As the cipher clerk typed his message, each key press sent an electric current in through, and then back out of the "maze" of wires created by the rotors, eventually lighting a light bulb corresponding to the enciphered character. Each key press also stepped the rotors in different ways, changing the effective maze of wiring for every letter in a message.

In effect, the Enigma suffered from a very simple stepping mechanism - it was a realization of the great American cryptographer William Friedman that the complexity of the stepping (e.g. change in effective substitution as realized by the shifting rotors) was more important than the complexity of the wiring.

Anyway, I digress. This isn't about the Enigma. It is about the KL-7, and if I actually expect homebrewers to read about a cipher machine, I'd better get to the damn point.

The KL-7 was about the penultimate point of this chain of development. The American SIGABA was a marvel of mechanical complexity, and easily the best (and believed to be unbroken) cipher of the 2nd World War.

The KL-7 was the post-war follow on, using more sophisticated electronics and simpler mechanicals partially inspired by the British Typex. These machines both used a cam on the edge of the rotor that controlled the stepping. Each rotor provided two functions - a core of scrambled wiring that effected the message encryption and a notched circumferential ring that effected a complex algorithm to determine which rotors in the system stepped and which didn't.

The Typex just had each rotor's ring control the stepping of the next rotor in sequence (notch on ring = adjacent rotor steps, no notch = rotor doesn't step). The KL-7 made use of a sophisticated system that compared pairs of notch rings to determine if any particular rotor would step.

Some of this, by the way, is speculation. Much of the KL-7 remains secret. A good overview of what is know about the machine and the actual protocols for using it can be found here, on the site of the incomparable Jerry Proc. There is also an excellent conjectural simulator available as well as the "manual" (a pdf download) for that simulator that contains the best description of the concordance ideas about the actual wiring of the machine.

The KL-7 served, protecting the message traffic of the US Military and other services from sometime around the middle 1950's through the mid 1980's. By the early 1970's however, it was largely replaced by (fully) electronic devices that worked with baudot codes and teletypes. And a good thing too, since during the late 1960's the famous Walker family started selling, among other things, KL-7 key lists and rotor wirings to the Soviet Union.

The exact damage caused by this portion of the Walkers' treachery will probably be known. For most of the time they were selling details the KL-7 was working in a backup role, and it is likely that even then they didn't have access to all of the keys and rotors in use at any time (that is an element of security that the various US agencies have always had an excellent grasp of - don't use the same settings/keys/wirings in all areas at once and change all-of-the-above as often as possible). None the less, once the Walkers were found out, the last of the KL-7's went out of service, in 1983, after having put in at least two and a half decades of service - an eternity in cipher years.

And so my house porter (bringing it back around to beer) is named to commemorate this machine. Many remember it as a player in one of the most notorious spy stories of our time. But to remain secure and unbroken - save for the frailties of humans - and to embody the pinnacle of a particular arm of technology is an exceptional achievement.

So I raise a glass to you, KL-7, to the engineers who created you, to those who served with you, and to those you protected.