New Year, New Beer

Happy New Year to the great fans and followers of C'est Bon Biere! We enjoyed a great evening with friends, both old and new. Many of them got to enjoy our homebrewed beer, where we served Frostbite Winter Warmer, and Hakuna Mahopa Black IPA. I know many of you want to sample some of our delicious home brewed concoctions, so just get in touch with us. We will be more than willing to have people over to enjoy some brews.

At C'est Bon Biere, we decided to start the year off with a brew day. January 1st began with the brewing of our first attempt at a lager. We decided to brew a California Common, also known as a Steam Beer. It is very similar to Anchor Steam, from the oldest craft brewery in America (they claim since 1896)! We are calling this one Common Sense, because everyone can use a little common sense in 2015.

In order to brew a lager, we needed two vital pieces of equipment: a refrigerator and the equipment to make a yeast starter. There are two broad categories of beer, ale and lager. Ales are top fermented and ferment at warmer temperatures, while lagers are bottom fermented at colder temperatures. We are currently using our kegerator to ferment the lager, and keep a constant temperature.

Even after three days, you can already see the result of fermentation in the glass carboy

Another oddity about lagers, is that they require more active yeast cells to fully convert the sugars to alcohol. It seemed like the best time to get some equipment to make a yeast starter.

A 2L Erlenmeyer flask with a magnetic stir plate. The chemical engineer in me is excited!

Usually, we buy packages of yeast from the homebrew supply shop, and pitch those packages directly into the wort. These packages, on the manufactured date, contain 100 million yeast cells. As the package gets older, the number of active yeast cells decrease. A yeast starter is essentially a small batch of beer that is made a day or more before the scheduled brew day in order to activate the package of yeast.

After a day of refrigeration, the yeast cells rest at the bottom of the flask, ready to be pitched into our brew.

The yeast will become active and multiply in the sugary wort. After refrigeration, the yeast cells will settle to the bottom of the flask, ready to be pitched. For Common Sense, we pitched 65 million yeast cells into the starter, and two days later pitched 200 million yeast cells! The number of cells can be controlled based on the amount of starter wort made.

C'est Bon Biere is going to have a busy year, and we look forward to keeping you updated on our brews and educated on beer science and the growth of craft beer in the Louisiana. One of these days, we look forward to moving out of the garage, and become the first microbrewery in Gonzales, LA!

Coming up next, we plan on collaborating with a homebrewing friend of ours to make two beers for the upcoming homebrew competitions, a blonde ale and a saison. Our black IPA will also be entered in the competitions. More information to come when we get these recipes written, creative names are thought of, and the brew day starts.

Until then, drink local. Drink good beer. Cheers!

Keg Stands are for Poor College Kids

I love talking to people about my hobby of homebrewing. Usually the first question is "Is it any good?" or "How much does it cost?" To these I always say that it is easy to make beer, but it takes some effort to make good beer. The cost is much cheaper than your average night at the bar. On average, a 5 gallon batch costs just under $1 per 12 oz. beer. One time I was even asked "Can you make _____ Lite?" To respond, I turned to the water faucet and filled an empty pint glass. I handed it to that former friend and said "Here you go". I say 'former' in the nicest way possible.

 



Won't see this in our hallway

Sam and I finally took the plunge and dug deeper into our homebrewing hobby. Part of me was tired of manually capping 50 bottles of beer at a time, and part of me was tired waiting 2 weeks for the beer to carbonate. So instead of bottling, now it's time to start kegging. Now I know what some of you are thinking...

But you won't find any red Solo cups in this house. Sam and I recently purchased a three tap keezer with three 5 gallon kegs. Keezer is how us beer people lazily say "keg freezer". It's essentially an old box freezer with an external temperature control attached, to regulate the temperature. It can hold all three kegs at once.

 

And we still call this room "the office"

With this kegging system, we carbonate the beer inside of the kegs using a CO2 tank. The process is called "forced carbonation" The CO2 is pumped into the keg to pressurize it. Using this method, the beer can be carbonated and ready to pour anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks. This means the process can be much faster than carbonating in individual bottles.



It has been fun making labels for all of the beer bottles, but we plan on still designing labels. It gives us something to do in our spare time, and gives me something to post other than pictures of ourselves. (Although I don't hear anyone complaining about that).

 

Sam and I have two homebrew competitions coming up in January/February. We will be entering two beers in these competitions. First is Guilty Pleasure, our milk stout, or sweet stout. It is flavored with unsweetened cocoa, and fermented lactose sugar. Second, is Double Fault, an American Pale Ale. You can see the label for this beer on our last post. This will probably be the lightest beer in color we have brewed to date, but by far the hoppiest.

 

With most of our beer being kegged now, I guess that means more people will have to come to visit us in Baton Rouge to drink our beer. Be sure to leave a comment if you want to try some of our brews, exchange recipes, or just have something important to say. Next scheduled brew will be an Irish Red Ale. We will keep brewing, so I hope you keep following.

Cheers!

Authors Note: To any college kids, keg stand lovers, or the easily offended: Please do not be offended by the title of this post. If you are, just relax and enjoy a homebrew. Don't have any homebrew? Enjoy a local craft beer.

Say Hello to C'est Bon Biere

Thank you to everyone who voted for the new name of our concept brewery. After a close vote, the winner is:

This will be our main logo, so remember it. Someday you will see more of it at beer festivals, homebrew competitions, and one day local bars.

The beer labels will be different for each beer, but here is our first C'est Bon Biere Label, the Double Fault American Pale Ale:

We still plan on keeping the idea of "His and Her Beers" when Sam and I make our own recipes. This is noted in the top of every label.
Let us know what you think about the logo and the label. Happy New Year! Drink a homebrew, or a local beer as you bring in 2014.