Black Alley Brewing

The Beers of NHC!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 04:49:00 +0000

The National Homebrewers Conference is less than a week away and it just can’t come fast enough for me. I’ve never attended the conference before and from what I hear, it’s the event of the year for anyone who geeks out on all things homebrew. My club (The Homebrewers Guildof Seattle Proper) and I have been preparing for it since about February of 2011 when we started our sour barrel project and since then, we’ve been brewing up a slew of beers that we’re all excited to share with the conference attendees. Out of the 45 kegs of beer that we’ll be bringing, here are a few highlights:

Opacity – A collaboration Russian Imperial Stout brewed with Naked City and aged in a Woodinville Whiskey Co barrel (Pro-Night and Club Night).

We’ll also have a homebrewed clone that was aged in one of the 8-gallon Woodinville Whiskey barrels that they sell to homebrewers (Club Night).

Amalgamation Autonomous - An American wild ale aged in a Marsanne white wine barrel that can be had along side the same beer that was aged in a stainless corny (Club Night).

GABF Pro-Am Series – A number of brewers in our club have been selected by breweries for the GABF Pro-Am competitions and we’ll showcase 4 of them during our 1^st hospitality suite shift.

Fountain of Younger Series – 4 brewers, using different recipes, all took a shot at cloning Pliny the Younger (Club Night).

7 out of the 15 beers that made it onto the 2^nd round of the National Homebrew Competition will be served throughout the conference.

Although there are only 8 active members in our club, we’ve all been extremely active and focused on NHC. Because of the copious amounts of beer we’ve brewed, we were allocated two hospitality suite shifts as well as two taps during the Best of WAHA shift after the awards ceremony. Here’s where you can find us along with my personal beers that will be served at each event:

Pro-Night – Be sure to stop by Naked City’s booth and sample our Naked City collaboration brew, Opacity. Don mentioned that it’s the best stout he’s ever brewed and we all agreed that it turned out amazingly well.

Hospitality Suite shift #1 – Right after Pro-Night: Thursday from 11pm to 2am

Polecat Porter – The latest rebrew of my Pro-Am winning Baltic Porter.
Leon Phelp’s Chocolate Query – My chocolate rye lager.

Hospitality Suite shift #2 – Friday from 4:30pm to 6:30pm

Paroxysm – Honey Rye Brett Beer (100% Brett Fermented).
My Yammy Spice – My latest Autumn Maple derivative…aged on oak with rum and maple syrup.
Old Clubfoot – A comparatively low ABV eisbock.

Club Night – Friday from 8pm to 11:30pm – Just look for our logo…you won’t miss us.

The Polar Vortex – My eised version of my first Polecat Porter re-brew.
Mattæus – My Hair of the Dog Matt clone.
Amalgamation Autonomous – Our club sour barrel project.

Best of WAHA Hospitality Suite – Saturday after the awards ceremony.

Eight the Baby! – The 8 members of our club contributed a portion of beer and communally came up with a blend that is complex with hints of roast, bourbon, vanilla, dark fruit and rich caramel.. About 7% of the final blend is myBlack Tuesday inspired Russian Imperial Stout.

You can see the full list of beers that everyone is bringing to all the events by clicking here.

Polecat Porter Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:27:00 +0000

It’s been said that one of the marks of a good brewer is repeatability. As long as you have some basic processes down, it’s possible to get lucky now and again and produce a fantastic beer. To be able to make that exact same beer a second time though, one that’s not just close but a mirror image, well, that’s a different story. Back in August of 2011, I attempted this by re-brewing my Polecat Porter for the first time and even though I followed my recipe and processes to a tee, the end beer was a far cry from the original. It lacked body, color, malt complexity and just ended up being an overall disheartening experience.

Looking over my recipe and notes, it was hard to tell exactly where things went wrong. The mash was identical, I hit all of the same numbers, and the fermentation proceeded in the same manner. The only place where there was any room for differentiation was in the grist itself. Even though I used the same recipe, I never recorded which maltsters supplied my grain and with chocolate grain as an example, SRMs can vary from 300 to 650 depending on which variety you select.

With NHC being a huge focus of mine for the last year or so, my brew schedule was pretty tight and I wasn’t planning on re-brewing my Polecat for the event. However, since my homebrew club (The Homebrewers Guild of Seattle Proper) picked up a second Hospitality Suite shift, we decided to re-brew and showcase all of our previous Pro-Am winning beers during the Thursday night shift. Only being two months out, I was low on time for a Baltic porter since I normally would lager it for at least 3 months, but I selected the maltsters with the most appropriate grains (based on what was lacking in my original re-brew) and set to brewing.

As expected, the beer is and will be a little green on Thursday, June 21^st, but it’s significantly closer to my Pro-Am version than my first re-brew. If you’re coming out to NHC, come by the Hospitality Suite after Pro Night on Thursday, give it a sample, and let me know what you think. I also managed to salvaged my first re-brew by eising it and I’ll be serving that at our booth on Club Night as well. Try ‘em both and see what you think.

Recipe Specifics

------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 6.5
Total Grain (Lbs): 19.88

Anticipated OG: 1.087
Anticipated SRM: 32.8
Anticipated IBUs: 37.2

Wort Boil Time: 90

Final Gravity: 1.021

ABV: 8.8%

Grain/Fermentables

-------------------------

57.4% - 11.5 lbs Munich Malt (Weyermann)

33.7% - 6.75 lbs Pilsner (Weyermann)

2.5% - ½ lb Special B (Castle)

1.9% - 6 oz. Carafa 3 (Weyermann)

1.2% - ¼ lb CaraMunich 3 (Weyermann)

1.2% - ¼ lb Chocolate Malt (Crisp)

1.2% - ¼ lb Crystal 80 (Breiss)

0.9% - 3 oz. Molasses (Grandma's)

Hops

-------

60 grams Czech Saaz (pellets, 5.0% AA) @ 65 minutes

20 grams Hallertau (pellets, 4.1% AA) @ 25 minutes

Yeast

-------

Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager (2nd Generation, from Chocolate Rye Lager)

Water Profile and Additions

----------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash: 0.5 g/g Calcium Chloride, 1.5 g/g Baking Soda
HLT: 0.1 ml/g phosphoric acid
Boil Additions: 1 g/g Calcium Chloride, 0.35 g/g Epsom Salt

Mash Schedule

-------------------

60 minute rest at 151°

15 minute mash out rest at 168°

Sparged with 170° water

Notes

--------

4/5/2012 – Racked Chocolate Rye Lager off of the yeast and washed. Placed in fridge.

4/8/2012 – Brewed solo.

Doughed in at 157° and mash settled at 151.5°. Mixed mash every 20 minutes for a total of 60 minutes before raising temp to 168°. Sparged with 170° water for a long time, collected 7 gallons of 1.078 wort, and topped off to 8 gallons.

Boiled for 90 minutes. All hop additions were placed in their own hop sacks with plenty of room inside, but I pushed the sacks down and around every 15 minutes or so with a long spoon. Molasses went in at 30 minutes. Ended with 6.3 gallons of 1.087 wort.

Chilled down to below 60° and then moved entire kettle to fridge with temp set to 40°. In the morning, I racked over 5.5 gallons of clear wort and oxygenated for 60 seconds. Since the yeast slurry was kept in the same fridge, I decanted any liquid on top, added some of the Polecat wort, swirled around to thin it, and then pitched it in to the carboy. Temp set to 50°.

5/1/2012 – Raised temp to 59°.

5/3/2012 – Gravity down to 1.023. Slowly started lower temp to 35 over the course of the next 7 days.

5/13/2012 – Transferred to a keg for lagering (34°). Gravity down to 1.021.

6/7/2012 – Racked over to new keg and carbonated.

Chocolate Rye Lager

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:57:00 +0000

Back in mid-February I made the journey down to LA to visit an old friend and while there, we headed over to the Bruery to sample some of their offerings. Alright, the real reason I went down was to pick up my 2011 Bruery Reserve Society beers, but I sound much less like an insanely beer-obsessed nerd if I play the friend card before the beer. Oh well, a spade’s a spade I suppose. Anyway, while there, we tried a number of their on-tap beers and one that really surprised me was their Chocosaurus Rye. This collaboration brew with the guys at Bootlegger’s is a dark rye lager that they then aged for a bit on cacao nibs and vanilla beans. Honestly, the description sounded more like a mess than a masterpiece to me, but they pulled it off and I was impressed with how well the chocolate melded with the rye (probably due to the slight vanilla in there and the low roast character). Since I wanted to build up a large volume of lager yeast for my next iteration of Polecat Porter, this seemed like a fun beer for replication.

Developing the recipe for this beer was fairly simple since there’s quite a bit of information in a video that they made on brew-day. It’s difficult to tell whether they mention “base and Munich malt” or “base of Munich”, but regardless, I’m 10 steps ahead of starting completely blind. Aside from the grist, the only real deviation that I made from their mentioned recipe is the yeast. While it sounds like they use a German lager strain, I wanted to re-purpose the yeast for my Polecat Porter and since I’ve used Bohemian for that in the past, I decided that I’d start with it for this beer.

While I’m confident that the base will turn out decently given the amount of information they’ve reported, aging the beer on cacao nibs will be a bit of a gamble. My last foray with nibs, a chocolate pumpkin porter that I brewed years ago, might possibly be the worst beer I’ve ever brewed and I haven’t been too excited to play with them ever since. I did make the mistake of aging the beer on raw nibs, and probably for too long as well (a month and a half), which resulted in a harsh bitterness that wasn’t present before the nib addition. This time, after researching various methodologies and talking to friends about their failures and successes with the nibs, I plan to use roasted nibs from a local chocolatier (Theo), presoak them in a bit of vodka as a vehicle for extracting some of the non-water soluble flavor and aroma compounds, and aging the beer on the nibs for a short period of only 3-7 days. Hopefully using this method will impart the natural bitter-sweet chocolate flavor that I’m looking for and by sampling daily, I’ll be able to transfer the beer off the nibs before any negative flavors start to develop.

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 6

Total Grain (Lbs): 16.75

Actual OG: 1.067

Final Gravity: 1.015

Anticipated SRM: 36

Anticipated IBUs: 25

Wort Boil Time: 60

Grain Bill

30.2% - 4.75 lbs Breiss Rye Malt

28.6% - 4.50 lbs Weyermann Munich Type 2

27.0% - 4.25 lbs Gambrinus 2-Row

7.9% - 1.25 lbs Flaked Oats

6.3% - 1.0 lb Breiss Midnight Wheat

1.0 lb Rice Hulls

Hops/Spices

40 grams Styrian Goldings (pellets, 5.2% AA) @ 45 minutes

4 oz. Theo Organic Roasted Cacao Nibs @ secondary for 3-7 days

1 Tahitian Vanilla Bean (Split) @ secondary for 3-7 days

Yeast

Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager

Water Profile and Additions

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash Additions: 0.5 g/g Calcium Chloride

HLT Additions: 0.1 ml/g Phosphoric Acid (0.75ml)

Boil Additions: 1 g/g Calcium Chloride and 0.35g/g Epsom Salt

Mash Schedule

90 minute rest at 146°

15 minute mash out rest at 168°

Sparged with 170° water

Notes

3/1/12 – Added two packets of Wyeast 2124 to 2.5L of starter wort and placed on stirplate at 54°. After 36 hours, another 1.5L of wort was added. 36 hours later, started was placed in fridge to crash cool and drop the yeast.

3/11/12 – Brewed solo.

Doughed in at 153° and mash came to rest at 147°. Made mineral additions and mash pH came in at 5.16 and HLT at 5.26.

90 minute mash and a long sparge. Collected 5.25 gallons of 1.082 wort with final runnings stopping at 1.046. Topped up to about 7.3 gallons.

Boiled for 60 minutes (post break) and since only 1 hop addition, I used a hop sack. Finished with 6.25 gallons of 1.067 wort.

Chilled down to 48° and let rest for about a half hour. Decanted yeast starter and added about a quart of wort from the kettle. Placed both yeast and carboy in fermentation chamber at 47° and let rest for 30 minutes.

Oxygenated for 90 seconds and then pitched in yeast. Set fermentation chamber at 49°.

4/1/12 – Sampled and gravity down to 1.0155 so I bumped up temp to 58° for a diactyl rest.

4//4/12 - Crash cooled to 33°

4/712 - Racked over and onto 4oz, by weight, of Theo Cacao nibs (which had been soaking in Bend Distillery's Crater Lake Vodka for 24 hours...just enough to cover the nibs) and 3/4 Tahitian vanilla bean (split and seeded...and also had been soaking in 5ml of Vodka for 2 hours).

Sangiovese Flanders Red

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:11:00 +0000

Nearly a year and a half ago, I brewed up a fairly standard Flanders Red. Having never brewed one before, I started with Jamil’s recipe and modified the grain percentages based on my preference for a few of the malts. Since it’s fairly common for homebrewed beers to lack the desired, intense level of acidity when they undergo a primary fermentation with a basic saccharomyces strain of yeast, I pitched in the Roeselare mix right from day 1 hoping that without having to compete against a primary strain of yeast, the bacteria can replicate faster and in the end, yield a more highly acidic ale.

Since the Flanders Red style is really the only one where it’s acceptable to have moderately high levels of acetic acid present, it’s common for homebrewers to try to replicate this by using a wooden oak dowel in the neck of the carboy. In theory, the contact surface-to-volume ratio is supposed to be similar to that of the Foudres that Rodenbach uses and the permeable oak is said to allow a similar transfusion of oxygen into the beer. This all seems somewhat gimmicky to me and although I’ve tried a few that employed this technique, I’ve never been impressed enough with the results to go through the trouble of using it myself. Instead, I plan on cheating a bit. While the main batch of beer has been fermenting and maturing in a standard carboy with bung and airlock, I kept about a quart in a separate vessel covered only with tinfoil. With the excessive levels of oxygen present, the acetobacter should be having a field day and basically turning the small amount into malt vinegar. When the time is right, I’ll be able to blend this back into the main batch until I reach my desired level of acetic acid.

After 15 months of aging, the beer was developing nicely but still lacked both the lactic punch and complexity that I was hoping for. I probably could have let it continue on its own, but I decided that I’d experiment with this batch and age it on some fresh Sangiovese grapes from Walla Walla, Washington. While domestic versions of this grape tend to lean more towards the fruity side than those of Tuscany, the Washington state Sangiovese grapes are known for their spicy, tart cherry flavors with supporting background notes of tobacco, all of which seem like highly complementary flavors to a Flanders Red. Additionally, although the grapes themselves have high levels of acidity, adding the sugar-laden fruit to a batch of beer with a high level of bacteria and wild yeast should help to amplify the overall acidity of the batch in a relatively short order.

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 6

Total Grain (Lbs): 14

Actual OG: 1.059

Final Gravity: 1.006

Anticipated SRM: 13

Anticipated IBUs: 15

Wort Boil Time (Mins): 90

Grain Bill

43.0% - 6.0 lbs Vienna Malt

21.5% - 3.0 lbs Munich Malt

21.5% - 3.0 lbs Pilsner Malt

4.5% - 10 oz. CaraMunich 40

3.6% - ½ lb Special B

3.6% - ½ lb Wheat Malt

2.2% - 5 oz. Aromatic Malt

Hops

33 grams Liberty (pellets, 3.0% AA) @ 90 minutes

Yeast

Wyeast 3763 Roeselare Blend

Cantillon dregs starter & East Coast Yeast brett blend #9 (Added at 15 months along with grapes)

Water Profile and Additions

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash Additions: 0.25 g/g Chalk, 0.6 g/g Calcium Chloride, 0.25 g/g Epsom Salt, 0.5 g/g Baking Soda, and 0.2 g/g Salt

HLT Additions: 1.2 g/g Calcium Chloride, 0.25 g/g Epsom Salt, 0.5 g/g Baking Soda, and 0.2 g/g Salt

Mash Schedule

60 minutes @ 155°

15 minute mash out rest @ 168°

Sparged with 170° water

Notes

11/6/2010 – Brewed with Blake.

Apparently I didn’t have my water adjustment methodology down back then based on all the additions I made…both to the mash and sparge tanks.

Collected 7 gallons of 1.051 wort and topped off to 7.5 gallons. Boiled 90 minutes and then chilled down to 65 degrees. Ended with 6 gallons of 1.059 wort.

Did not oxygenate and pitched in straight Roselare pack. Fermented at 66 degrees.

12/5/2011 - Racked off yeast cake and into secondary (keg w/ airlock) along with ½ oz of French Med + oak stave. Placed down in my basement where depending on the season, temp shifts between 58 and 70.

11/5/2011 - De-stemmed 10lbs of fresh Sangiovese grapes. Vacuum sealed and placed in Freezer.

1/25/2012 - Defrosted grapes and mashed into carboy. Flushed with CO₂and then racked over Flanders Red. Added about 1 cup and a half of a starter made from the dregs of various Cantillon beers as well as a bit of the East Coast Yeast blend #9. Left down in basement with current temp of 59°.

Polecat Porter Tasting

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:29:00 +0000

Standard on left, eised version on right.

It’s rare that I brew the exact same beer twice: typically if I am doing a re-brew, I’ll tweak something in either an attempt to update the beer more to my liking or to try out a new process/flavor ingredient. My original Baltic porter exceeded my expectations though and instead of trying to create an even better beer, I wanted to replicate the original so that I could proudly serve one of my favorite beers that I’ve made at NHC. Unfortunately, I don’t think that will be the case this year…or at least in its intended form.

Although the standard version turned out to be a great tasting beer in its own right, it’s certainly not my original Polecat Porter and probably is a far cry from even being classified as a Baltic porter. For whatever reason, the beer is lacking in the malt depth/complexity that the original possessed, the color is slightly lighter, and the body is much weaker than it should be.

I try to keep thorough notes when I brew and after looking over both brew sessions, it appears as though my processes were identical. It’s possible that I accidentally left out or incorrectly measured a malt, but I’m starting to think that maybe the difference lies in the brand of malts that I used. I never really recorded this in the past and, as an example, with SRMs of chocolate malt ranging from 350 to 600 depending on the maltster, not using the exact same grain as before really can alter the outcome of the beer. I’m not sure if this is what happened with my beer in or not, but going forward, you can bet that I’ll be recording all of this information so that I can eliminate this variable should the problem rise again.

The good news is that, while technically still not a Baltic porter, the eised version turned out be fantastic. Since my standard version is still lagering uncarbonated in the fridge, I plan to eis the entire keg. It may not be the original beer that I intended to serve at NHC, but it’s a unique option and one that I think a lot of people will enjoy.

Appearance:

Standard – Very clear, dark brown with a sort of ruby highlight when held up to the light. Sandy head that fades quickly.

Eised – Very clear, more of a dark chestnut color, almost tobacco, and less of the ruby highlights. Very difficult to get any head.

Taste:

Standard – Very clean and smooth with a mild chocolate flavor. Quite a bit of soft fruit flavor from the Special B, but not in a sweet way. Almost no roast, but there is considerable breadiness and slight toffee notes. Clean bitterness without any hop flavor.

Eised – Compared to the standard, there’s less chocolate and more toffee/caramel. Slightly sweeter too, but not overly so or in a cloying manner. There’s also some warming alcohol, but no heat whatsoever. Very rich flavors, but they’re extremely smooth and have meld together quite well.

Mouthfeel/Drinkability:

Standard – Too thin and dry to be categorized as a Baltic porter. Sample was carbonated too quickly and needed more time to really integrate well. No astringency.

Eised – Medium-full bodied with moderate carbonation that kept the beer from being too heavy on the tongue. No astringency.

Overall:

Standard – If I didn’t tell you that it was supposed to be a Baltic porter, I think it would be a highly enjoyable beer….sort of a nice, malty lager with background chocolate flavor. To me though, it’s completely flawed because it’s not what I wanted it to be and it's hard to get past that.

Eised – This beer is great…loads of layered flavors with rich complexity. It’s totally different from the base beer, and as expected, my original intentions, but in its own right, it’s unique and highly enjoyable.

Naked City Collaboration RIS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Courtesy of club member, Nick L.

Back in the fall of 2011, the Washington Homebrewers Association (WAHA) sent out an email to all of the Washington AHA registered homebrew clubs to see if there was any interest in working on their own commercial collaboration brew for the NationalHomebrewer’s Conference ( Bellevue, WA in June 2012). Our highly motivated club, the Homebrewers Guild of Seattle Proper, jumped at the opportunity and responded right away. Unfortunately it seemed as though WAHA wasn’t quite as ready to begin the process as they originally expected, and so rather than waiting until their anticipated start date of Spring 2012, we began the process on our own. One of our first choices, and a favorite brew pub among many of our club members, NakedCity seemed like the ideal candidate for such a collaboration project.

Courtesy of club member, Nick L.

Although we would have been more than happy to brew anything with Don, the brewer and owner of Naked City, we decided that as a club, we should come up with a few ideas to present to him beforehand. One club member had recently picked up a 30 gallon whiskey barrel from the Woodenville Whiskey Company which was recently drained of their Harvest Release American Whiskey. We had been planning on using it for a club project, but with the advent of a collaboration brew and a little time on our side, we thought it would be fun if we could brew a larger batch of beer on Naked City’s system and then age a portion of it in our whiskey barrel. If it comes out too strong, we can use some of the standard version to blend back and if not, we’ll have a fun, 100% barrel aged collaboration brew to serve at NHC.

Courtesy of club member, Nick L.

With the decision made to use the whiskey barrel for the Naked City project, the 8 of us in our club next debated about what to fill it with. A multitude of ideas were tossed about, but in the end, Don and the other members of our club decided to go with the always-popular-among-beer-nerds Russian Imperial Stout. Fitting of his completely laid back style, Don left the recipe formulation completely up to us and so in designing the grist and recipe, we went with a combination of grains that leaned towards a chewy, chocolate base with a mild residual sweetness and just enough clean bittering hops to keep it from being cloying. One of our secret ingredients that we were planning on using was Golden Naked Oats, which is a mild caramel malt that adds a touch of nutty sweetness along with a velvet like texture. Unfortunately on brew day, after adding all the grains to the mash tun, we realized that flaked oats were added instead of Golden Naked Oats. With 7% of the grist once scheduled for this caramel malt and now substituted for flaked oats, it’ll be interesting to see if the roast is now running strong in the forefront or if there’s enough residual sweetness to balance out the hops. We ended up mashing at 154° instead of the originally planned 149°, and with the increase in temp, hopefully the slightly less fermentable wort will result in body and sweetness closer to what we originally intended.

All in all it was a great brewday at Naked City and I can’t wait to see how both the barrel-aged and standard version turn out. If by chance you’re headed to NHC this year, come check us out and see for yourself what you think of our collaboration brew.

Opacity

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 100

Total Grain (Lbs): 427

Anticipated OG: 1.110

Actual OG: 1.100

Final Gravity: 1.024

Courtesy of club member, Bob Y.

Anticipated SRM: 57

Anticipated IBUs: 121

Wort Boil Time: 120 minutes

Pre-Barrel ABV: 10.2%

Grain Bill

48.2% - 206 lbs Gambrinus Pale Malt (2-Row)

28.8% - 123 lbs Gambrinus ESB Malt

7% - 30 lbs ~~Golden Naked Oats~~ Flaked Oats

4.4% - 19 lbs Roasted Barley

3.6% - 15 lbs Chocolate Malt

3.6% - 15 lbs Pale Chocolate Malt

2.3% - 10 lbs CaraMunich 40

2.3% - 10 lbs Special B

Hops

1400 grams Magnum (pellets, 14.0% AA) @ 60 minutes

300 grams East Kent Goldings (Pellets, 5.0% AA) @ 15 minutes

Yeast

White Labs WLP039 Nottingham (Slurry from Naked City’s Mayfield Mild)

Water Profile and Additions

Mash: 1.0 g/g baking soda (see notes below)

Boil: 1.2 g/g Calcium Chloride, 0.35 g/g Epsom Salt

Mash Schedule

60 minutes @ 154°

Notes

1/13/12 – Brewed with the club and Don at Naked City

Don had all the grains milled and ready to go. Doughed in and settled at a rest temp of 154°

According to our calculations, we needed about 2.0 grams per gallon of baking soda to reach our target mash pH of 5.3. Taking it slow, we added in half the amount (145 grams) and then measured the pH…6.0. It should have been way below this, so we opted to not make any more additions. After realizing the grain issue, we speculated that the lack of 30 lbs of crystal malt caused our initial pH to be higher than expected. Adding the 145 grams of baking soda only increased it further, so without it, we probably would have been in about the perfect range.

Boiled for 2 hours with mineral and hop additions as noted above. Minerals went in at 60 minutes.

Whirlpooled for 30 minutes, and then chilled as we racked off (using plate chiller). Oxygenated inline and pitched yeast at about 70 degrees with fermentor set at 68.

2/9/12 - Beer was transferred out of fermenter and into barrel and brite tank.

Bière(s) de Garde - (Le Trois Mandragores)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:58:00 +0000

For whatever reason, I’ve never really had a shortage of patience in my life. I have no problem lagering a Baltic porter for months on end or waiting for oak to impart its subtleties into a bourbon tripel. However, when it comes to brewing a wild ale, it’s not the fermentation/maturation period that kills me but rather the decision to dedicate an entire brew day to something that won’t be ready for years. How does one choose to spend 8 hours of their day for an acidic ale that won’t be ready for a few years when you could use the same amount of time to brew something that will be ready in weeks? I’ve struggled and pushed back many a wild ales because of this, but my solution as of late has been to brew two beers in one day using the same base.

While there are a number of base styles that could work for this strategy, for my latest batch, I chose to go with a brown bière de garde. Being more malt driven and less hop-focused, I’ve always enjoyed the fruity character with the biscuit/bread backbone in the standard style. For the diluted portion that I’ll sour, the high gravity should provide lots of food for the organisms to feed on and the low bitterness won’t clash with the subtle, sour flavors (I’m not concerned about the impact on hop-sensitive Lactobacillus as I’m planning on most of the acidity being generated by pedio).

The idea of creating two beers out of one was simple enough, but unfortunately the brew-day was not without problems. Since I only have a 10 gallon boil kettle, my plan was to finish with 7.5 gallons of highly concentrated wort (1.146 SG) which would then be split and diluted into two batches: 6 gallons of 1.075 gravity wort for the standard and 6 gallons of 1.065 for the sour portion. In order to pull this off, I filled my mashtun with 34 lbs of grain and 9 ½ gallons of water…which brought the total volume in my tun up to about a half inch below the cutout where my recirculation hose re-enters. With my mashtun maxed out, the grain bed compacted and my recirculation was compromised. Before I realized what was happening, the pump had sucked all of the wort from underneath the grainbed and pumped it back on top…which resulted in the liquid level rising in the tun and a small amount draining out through the recirculation intake cutout. It was a slow process to mix them in, but luckily the pound or so of rice hulls that I had on hand was able to loosen the grain bed enough to allow for the liquid to once again flow freely through.

In order to hit 6 gallons of 1.075 wort and 6 gallons of 1.065 wort, I needed to transfer over 3.08 and 2.67 gallons into their respective carboys. As I was working on the 3.08 batch, even after a 2 hour resting period, an inordinate amount of break material was carried over. Since this material shouldn’t count in the 3.08 gallons of wort that I needed, I decided to rack over an additional ¾ gallon or so. From there, it was sort of guesswork. Earlier in the day, I boiled 5 gallons of water, chilled it down, and transferred it over to a keg. From this keg, I filled up each carboy to about the 6 gallon mark and somehow ended up with 1.088 in one and 1.071 in the other. Needless to say, it was very frustrating to not hit my intended marks after a long day of brewing.

The plan from the beginning was to start the fermentation for each with Wyeast 1338 European ale yeast at 59- 60 degrees (current ambient temp in my basement). Thinking that the 1338 might not leave the standard version dry enough, after a few days, I’ll pitch in a packet of Wyeast 2565 Kolsch yeast to finish the job. At the same time, I’ll stop the fermentation in the soon-to-be sour version by crashing it at 30 degrees. Not only should there be plenty of residual sugar left over since attention should only be about 50% complete at this point, but the oxygen will be fully scrubbed out and the pH will have dropped. Hopefully both of these conditions will provide for an environment that’s more hospitable for the bacteria and one that won’t be too conducive to brett reproduction. Some brett growth will be fine, but I’d hate for it to rip through all of the residual sugar quickly, leaving nothing behind for the bacteria to acidify over time.

Various Sour Starters

Using the 1.088 batch as the sour version, after dropping the 1338 yeast I’ll rack over 4.25 gallons into a new carboy, top off with 1.5 gallons of water, and pitch in my brett and bacteria. This should have the same effect as if I were originally starting with 1.065 wort. Using the remaining 1.088 wort, I’ll be able to rack over 1.5 gallons into another carboy, top off with 1.25 gallons of water, and basically have another sour beer with an OG of 1.048.

In the end, even though the brew day itself was fraught with issues and frustration, I’ll walk away with about 5 gallons of finished Bière de Garde and 8.5 gallons of various wild ales.

Bière(s) de Garde (Le Trois Mandragores)

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 7.5

Total Grain (Lbs): 34 ¼

Anticipated OG: 1.147 (pre-dilution)

After Dilution: Standard Version (Seigneur de Mandragore) – 1.075

Sour 1 (Plissement de Mandragore) – 1.065

Sour 2 (Boules bleues de Mandragore) – 1.048

Anticipated SRM: 26 (pre-dilution), 12.6, 11, and 8 after dilution.

Anticipated IBUs: 52 (pre-dilution), 25, 22, and 16 after dilution.

Wort Boil Time: 210 minutes

Anticipated ABV: 7.2%, 8.6%, and 6.3%

Grain/Fermentables

30.5% - 11 ½ lbs Vienna Malt

26.5% - 10 lbs Maris Otter

23.8% - 9 lbs Munich Malt (10L)

7.9% - 3 lbs Light DME

4.0 % - 1 ½ lbs Aromatic Malt

2.0 % - ¾ lbs Biscuit Malt

1.3% - ½ lb Carafa Special II (420L)

1.3% - ½ lb CaraMunich 60

1.3% - ½ lb CaraVienne

1.3% - ½ lb table sugar

Hops

60 grams Northern Brewer (Pellets, 9.8% AA) @ 60 minutes

20 grams Saaz (Pellets, 5.5% AA) @ 30 minutes

20 grams Hallertauer (Pellets, 4.1% AA) @ 15 minutes

Yeast

Seigneur de Mandragore (Standard version) – Wyeast 1338 European Ale (2 packs into 3500ml starter. Decanted, and pitched about half). 3 days later, added a swelled pack of Wyeast 2565 Kolsch.

Sour base (pre-split and dilution – 1.088 gravity) – Added 2^nd half of Wyeast 1338 European Ale starter.

Water Profile and Additions

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash Additions: 0.4 gram/gallon Calcium Chloride, 1.0 gram/gallon Baking Soda (based on 9.5 gallon mash) – pH came to 5.41

Sparge Additions: Adjusted pH down to 5.3 using phosphoric acid (@150°) – 0.8ml per 7.5 gallons.

Boil Additions: 0.3 grams/gallon Calcium Chloride, 0.8 grams/gallon Epsom Salt, and 0.75 grams/gallon Salt (all based on 7.5 gallons final volume)

Mash Schedule

Doughed in @ 161° and mash settled at 150°.

90 minutes @ 150° (due to stuck mash/recirculation issues)

30 minutes @ 168°

2 hour sparge @ 170° - Started boil as soon as there was about a gallon in the kettle.

Notes

1/8/2012 – Added 2 packs of Wyeast 1338 European ale to 3500ml of wort and placed on stir plate for 48 hours. Placed in fridge to drop yeast.

1/14/2012 – Brewed solo.

Collecting Hot Chiller Waste Water For Mash

Boiled 6 gallons of water and chilled to 70 degrees. Used hot, waste chiller water in mashtun. Racked chilled water into a sanitized keg.

Doughed in @ 161° and mash settled @ 150°. Due to volume and weight, the mash stuck and I lost about a cup or two of wort out of the recirculation return cut-out. Cut recirculation, removed about 10 cups of liquid into a bowl to make some temporary room, and then slowly mixed in 1 – 1.5 lbs of rice hulls. After they were mixed in, I restarted the recirculation and added back the previously removed wort.

Slow sparge (2 hrs). Started flame when there was about a gallon in the kettle and boiled all the way through 9 gallons. Added a few NB pellets a little before first sign of boil. After an hour, gravity wasn't high enough, so I collected an extra gallon of sparge (final runnings after last gallon had SG of 1.051) and added it to the boil. Added in 3 lbs of light DME and a 1/2 lb of table sugar.

After 2 hours of boiling during the sparge, I boiled for another 1 ½ hrs to reach 7 ½ gallon volume. Hop additions added as mentioned above, boil mineral additions @ 40 minutes, recirculation @ 20 minutes, yeast nutrient @ 10 minutes, and whirlflock @ 5 minutes.

Chilled to 64° and let settle for 2 hours. Ended with 7 ½ gallons of 1.146 wort.

Racked into 6 ½ and 6 gallon carboys. Due to excessive break/hop material in first carboy, I added more than I initially intended. Used the water that I previously boiled that morning to dilute each and ended up with a little over 6 gallons of 1.088 wort and 5.75 gallons of 1.071 wort. Aerated both for 60 seconds with pure oxygen and then pitched in the decanted 1338 yeast starter. Moved both carboys down to basement with ambient temp of 59°.

No sign of yeast activity @ 24 hours. 36 hours in, krausen starting.

1/17/2012 – Swelled packet of Wyeast Kolsch yeast and added to 1.071 batch. Although fermentation was extremely active, I moved the 1.088 batch to the fridge to crash the yeast and halt fermentation.

1/22/2012 – Boiled and kegged more water for dilution.

1/25/2011 – Pulled 1.088 batch out of the fridge.

5 lbs of Blueberries

Plissement de Mandragore (Sour bière 1) – Racked 4.25 gallons into a Co2-flushed 6-gallon carboy and topped off with 1.5 gallons of previously sterilized water. Pitched in a quart starter of Cantillon dregs, a pint of Wyeast pedio starter (3 months old), and about a half cup of East Coast Yeast Brett Blend #9 starter. Also added ¾ ounce of American heavy toast oak cubes that had been boiled for about 20 minutes to remove a lot of their flavor.

Boules bleues de Mandragore (Sour bière 2) – To 5 lbs of vacuum sealed fresh/frozen blueberries (bought at farmers market at the end of the summer), I flushed the carboy and berries with Co2 and racked 1 ½ gallons of the 1.088 batch. Because of all the blueberries, I was only able to top off with ¾ gallons of sterile water. I then pitched in a pint starter from the dregs of RR Supplication, Temptation and De Dolle Oerbier Reserva 2010 (2 weeks old), a pint of Wyeast and White Labs Brett Lambicus/Pedio starter (Saved from B2Barrel Project), and a cup of the pedio starter. I also added ½ oz. of the same boiled American heavy toast cubes.

After racking the 1.088 batch into their respective carboys, I measured the gravity of the remaining, original beer. Unfortunately it appears that I crashed it a little sooner than I was hoping for as the gravity was only down to 1.068. In retrospect I should have taken a gravity reading before crash cooling it, but at the time I was fearful of over-attenuation (based on my goals of having lots of residual sugars for the brett and bacteria to work on). So, with the higher-than-expected gravity, after dilution, the brett and bacteria in Plissement de Mandragore will have a 1.050 beer to finish out while the microorganisms in Boules bleues de Mandragore will have to ferment out a 1.045 batch (excluding the sugars that the berries add).

3/8/12 - Seigneur de Mandragore (Standard version) - Although the airlock is still bubbling very very slowly, I checked the gravity and it was only down to 1.027...way too high for nearly 2 months of fermentation.

3/11/12 - Seigneur de Mandragore (Standard version) - Racked off the yeast cake and split the beer into two carboys. To each, I added a mix of 5 packets of rehydrated Nottinham yeast as well as 2 cups of freshly washed, thick yeast slurry from my imperial red ale. Yeast wast given a 2-hour reactivation period first in 2 cups of highly oxygenated starter wort before adding. Moved carboys up to my 70° office.

3/25/12 - Seigneur de Mandragore (Standard version) - All signs of fermentation stopped (was quite active for the first 4-5 days after adding additional yeast). Checked gravity and it was down to 1.0155, so I moved the carboys down to the fridge to crash cool and drop any suspended yeast.

4/1/12 - Seigneur de Mandragore (Standard version) - Kegged and returned to fridge for extended lagering period.

Pre-Dilution

Glacial Eis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:57:00 +0000

Every year I look forward to the various beer festivals in the area, but one more than all the others keeps me waiting in anticipation: Brouwer’s Big Wood. The local beer haven Brouwer’s is known for having an exceptional line-up of 60 taps plus a very deep cellar of over 800 bottles, but for their Big Wood fest, they pull out all the stops and fill the taps with unique wood-aged beers of all different varieties. A number of the selections are often commercially distributed offerings from various breweries (FW Abacus, RR Supplication, Vintage J.W. Lees, various Cantillons, etc.), but others are one-offs that are nearly impossible to find anywhere else (FW unblended Velvet Merkin, Hair of the Dog Fred Flanders, etc.). It’s always a great time sorting your way through the extensive lineup and although there were numerous beers worthy of high praise at this year’s festival, one of the many that I walked away being highly impressed with was Glacier Brewhouse's Maker’s Eisbock.

I haven’t had a whole lot of Eisbocks, and maybe this was one of the reasons why this beer grabbed my attention, but regardless, I couldn’t help but revel in the luxuriousness of the sweet, smooth maltiness that melded so well with the vanilla/coconut and mild alcohol heat. While it seemed that a lot of the other beers were either very bourbon forward or wrapped up in a complex layer of roastiness (neither of which are necessarily a bad thing), the full flavored, yet simplistic, Glacier’s Eisbock was a wonderful change of pace. The long lagering period and eising removed any trace of the typical rough edges a beer this big might possess and it quickly became the inspiration for my next homebrew.

Fast forward two weeks and I’ve got the mash paddle in hand and the burners lit. Doppelbocks (the common base for an Eisbock) are often brewed using a decoction mash, but since I was low on time and feeling a bit lazy, I went with a standard single infusion. To offset the flavors that a decoction can add, I included a bit of melanoidin malt in the grist and I upped the CaraMunich by about 10% over what I probably would use if I were doing a decoction. Whether it’s just expectations or actuality, I also often hear people say that decocted beers have a smoother, more integrated flavor profile. Maybe it’s just my own perceptions, but I feel that a light dose of oak in a big beer can really help to meld the flavors together as well. Usually I would add this in the secondary, but for this beer, I wanted some Hungarian oak in the primary to not only help with flavor integration, but also to help provide more structure in the mouth feel. It might be overkill with a beer this malty, but at only 14 grams of med +, it was worth the risk.

While I did enjoy the slight bourbon character that the Maker’s barrel imparted on Glacier’s Eisbock, I’ve brewed a number of beers recently using bourbon and so for this beer, I wanted something a little different. I considered simulating aging the beer in a Sherry barrel, but after trying a few samples of fortified wines around the house, I ended up going with a blend of 1 part Amontillado Sherry, 1 part Marsala Fine I.P., and 1 part Marsala Superiore L.P. The resulting mixture had a great balance of earthy nuttiness and semi-sweet smokiness that I think will complement the malty base and add a very subtle complexity to the background. At only three ounces in the primary, I expect some of the sugars from the wine to ferment out and the residual flavor to hide in the shadows. I’m imagining this minute amount leaving you with the feeling that it might be there, but yet you’re just not quite sure.

Recipe Specifics
Batch Size (Gal): Pre-Eis – 6.0, Post-Eis (estimated) – 3.5
Total Grain (Lbs): 17.50

Anticipated OG: 1.075

Anticipated SRM: 16.1

Anticipated IBUs: 27.1

Wort Boil Time: 90

Anticipated ABV: Pre-Eis – 7.5%, Post-Eis (estimated) – 9.0%

Grain

48.3% - 8.5 Lbs Munich (10°L)

17.0% - 3.0 Lbs Pilsner

17.0% - 3.0 Lbs Vienna

6.3% - 1.10 Lbs CaraMunich (55°L)

5.7% - 1.00 Lbs Crystal 20L

2.8% - ½ Lb Cara-Pils

2.8% - ½ Lb Melanoidin Malt

Hops

40.0 grams Hallertauer (Pellets, 4.0% AA) @ 90 minutes

10.0 grams Czech Saaz (Pellets, 5.5% AA) @ 30 minutes

10.0 grams Czech Saaz (Pellets, 5.5% AA) @ 5 minutes

Yeast

Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager (3 packs into 2500ml starter)

Water Profile and Additions

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash Additions: 0.4 gram/gallon Calcium Chloride, 0.75 gram/gallon Baking Soda

Sparge Additions: Adjusted pH down to 5.6 using phosphoric acid – about 0.5ml

Boil Additions: 0.9 grams/gallon Calcium Chloride, 0.35 grams/gallon Epsom Salt, and 0.2 grams/gallon Salt (all based on 6 gallons final volume)

Mash Schedule

Doughed in @ 161°, mash settled at 152°

45 minutes @ 152°

15 minutes @ 168°

Sparged with 170° Water

Notes

12/20/11 – Dropped 14 grams of Hungarian Medium + toast oak into boiling water for two minutes to remove intense oak flavor. Oak was then wrapped in muslin sack, along with a weight, and placed in a small 4 oz. jar. This was then run through the pressure cooker to sterilize. After it had cooled, I added 3 oz. of a mixture that consisted of 1 pt. Amontillado Sherry, 1 pt Marsala Fine I.P., and 1 pt Marsala Superiore L.P.

12/27/11 – Added 3 smack packs of Wyeast 2124 to 2500ml of 1.035 wort and placed on stirplate @ 50°. After 60 hours, I removed and placed in the fridge until brew day.

1/02/12 – Brewed Solo

Doughed in @ 161° and mash stabilized at 152°. Added mineral additions and pH measured 5.28. Rested for 45 minutes and then increased HERMS temp to 168°. After a 15 minute rest at 168°, increased sparge temp to 170° and started sparge.

Collected 5.25 gallons of wort with a total of 450GUs. Topped off to 7.5 gallons and started the burner.

Boiled for 90 minutes with hop additions as stated above. Boil additions went in at about 30 minutes. Recirculator started @ 20 minutes, chiller dropped in @ 15 minutes, and yeast nutrient and whirlflock added @ 10 minutes.

Chilled wort down to 54°. Let sit in my 48° garage for 4 hours covered. Racked into carboy along with and oxygenated 60 seconds with pure 0₂ . Decanted yeast and pitched. Also added muslin sack of oak and the 3 oz. of Sherry/Marsala mixture that the oak had been soaking in.

Fermenting @ 50°. After primary (4-6 weeks).

2/25/12 - After a 48 hour diacetyl rest, I crash cooled the beer and racked over to a corny keg for lagering.

4/7/12 - Transferred beer to a new keg to get it off any sediment. Replaced beer-out dip tube with gas-in dip tube and then stuck in the freezer. After 5 hours, I swirled the keg every hour. At 12 hours, there was substantial ice slurry so I then switched the dip tubes back and racked over to new keg. I was able to pull out about 4 gallons of beer and the remaining gallon had a gravity of 1.013. Estimating that ABV of eised beer is a little over 8%.

Autumn Maple Clone(s) Tasting

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:36:00 +0000

From left to right, '09 Clone, '09 Bruery's Autumn Maple, and '10 Clone

Although I brewed my first attempt at an Autumn Maple clone over 2 years ago and my 2nd attempt about 1 year ago, in all that time never once did I taste either side by side with the real thing. I also never compared my two versions to one another at the same time. It’s crazy to think that I allowed that much time to pass without conducting the tasing, but after realizing this, I decided it was time to put them to the test.

Last week I hosted our monthly homebrew club meeting and it ended up being the perfect opportunity to present the three-way comparison. Since only a few of the members had previously tasted my versions and not everyone had had the chance to try the Bruery’s Autumn Maple, I thought it would be fun to make it a blind tasting. Since my first batch was nearly 2 years old, I was afraid to open up a fresh commercial bottle of Autumn Maple in fear that the alcohol and spicing intensities might be different. Luckily enough, I happened to have a bottle from '09 that I squirreled away in my cellar that was perfect for the occasion.

Appearance: Even though I poured the glasses and knew which beer was in which glass, it was clear to see which one was not like the others. The Bruery’s beer showed significantly more carbonation, which resulted in a small layer of foam that lingered around the edge of the glass long after all the others had faded. The two versions that I brewed were crystal clear with a slightly more orange hue than the commercial beer. What really surprised me though was that my two clones were practically identical looking even though I used nearly twice the amount of yams in my '10 clone. I'm not sure whether it was due to them bottle conditioning their beer or not, but the commercial version was slightly cloudy (mine were force carbed and bottled with a counter-pressure filler).

Aroma: The differences here were very subtle. I’d say my original clone attempt (’09) smelled nearly identical to the Bruery’s ’09, but my ’10 clone maybe had a bit of a milder spice composition.

Taste: I was extremely surprised at how similar the flavors were between my ’09 clone and the Bruery’s ’09 Autumn Maple. Comparing the two, the spices in the Bruery’s version might have been a little more round with maybe a touch more molasses cookie flavor, but if so, the differences were extremely subtle. With the '10 clone, the spices seemed even a bit more subdued and more importantly, it had this very nice warm, caramelliness/toffeeness to it. Maybe it's due to the lower alcohol than in my first clone or maybe it's from the addition of yams in the boil, but regardless, the flavors in this beer seemed to blend together in a smoother manor than all the others and for me it was the most enjoyable to drink.

Mouthfeel: Although the Bruery’s beer showed more signs of carbonation, I’m not sure if I really felt a difference in my mouth. One member of our group mentioned that they thought the Bruery’s version had a slightly fuller mouthfeel maybe from less attenuation.

From left to right, '10 Clone, '09 Bruery Autumn Maple, and '09 Clone

Overall: Overall I was shocked at how close my two beers came to the original. When you have them all in front of you and you're trying to determine ways in which they differ, yes, you can find minor variations. However, between the '09 clone and the '09 commercial version, those differences were so subtle that I would be willing to bet that if I were to hand someone familiar with Autuman Maple my own ’09 clone and tell them that it was the Bruery’s beer, they'd never even suspect that it was anything but the original (aside from the clarity). The same thing might happen with the ’10 clone, but because it had the nice rounder spice and toffee note, I wouldn't feel as confident.

Since the above notes are more of a comparison between the beers and not actual descriptions of their components, you can see what some BJCP judges wrote about them by clicking here: ’09 Autumn Maple Clone and ’10 Autumn Maple Clone

Summertime Gose Tasting

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:23:00 +0000

A few months back, I came across a post on Beer Advocate in which the OP was searching for various Goses for a tasting that he was going to be hosting. Not only was he interested in commercial versions, but he also mentioned that he’d love to include some homebrewed varieties. Since I’ve really only tried one other example of a Gose, I’ve never been sure how my Summertime Gose compared to the standard and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to find out. So, in exchange for an honest critique, I sent off a bottle to UrbanCaver and the results came back a week or two later. You can read the full post here (http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/4136632#4150881) or just browse his review below.

Review of SonicAlligator's homebrew:

Appearance: Pours light pale yellow. Lighter then all of the other Goses except the Portsmouth which is similar. Lots of nice white head. Well carbonate. Pretty clear.

Smell: Smells the best of all the goses sampled. Lots of coriander adds nice lemony characteristics on the nose. A distinct smokiness on the nose. Much more complex than the other Goses but far less smokey than CCB Gose.

Taste: Tastes lemony and tart. Can definitely taste the lacto (maybe a bit too much) Other than the CCB Gose this is by far smokier than the rest. Coriander spice is strong in this one. Gives lots of lemon zest to the brew. Combined with the lacto tartness and its a bit much in terms of lemony fruitiness. Salt is detectable but doesn't detract from the brew.

Mouthfeel and Drinkability: Well carbonated mouthfeel. Thick and a bit more "full" of flavour than I would like for this style. Part of the thing I enjoyed about the Portsmouth and Leipziger Goses is that they were light and very refreshing. While this one is a more flavourful complex beer it is not as refreshing as others.

My own notes: Overall, I’d say I’m fairly happy with the way this one came out. For my own personal preference, I think the balance of acidity and saltiness is spot on and if I were to brew it again, I might cut back slightly on the coriander. At the moment it’s present but not overpowering, but I think I’d like it to be a little bit more subtle. I also agree on the “fullness” as reported by UrbanCaver. While the beer doesn’t sit heavy by any means, I’d prefer it to be a little lighter feeling so that it would be more refreshing (maybe cut back on the salt?). Additionally, and this is kind of odd, even after going back and searching for the flavor, I never really was able to pull out the smokiness that they reported. This probably came from the few cardamom seeds that I threw in, but the flavor comes across to me as a maybe a bit more minty than smoky.

The 2nd Barrel: Pediococcus and Brettanomyces Lambicus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:48:00 +0000

Back in May, I made the long drive over to Prosser, WA to pick up a freshly emptied white wine barrel from Maison Bleu Winery. When I arrived though, the barrels were in such great shape and at such an affordable price that, considering the effort I went to in order to locate such a barrel, it only made sense that I come home with two. At the time I didn’t have a plan for the second barrel (B2), but knowing that I had a number of homebrewing buddies eager to delve deeper into the world of sour beers, coming up with a plan would be a piece of cake…or so I thought.

For the first barrel project, Amalgamation Autonomous, each brewer worked within a group-defined set of guidelines to come up with their own recipe that, when combined with the other batches, would hopefully create a unique beer that would possess all the complexities that we intended to achieve. Everyone’s beer was slightly different than the others, but on fill day, one of the batches stood out a bit for already being quite sour with an underlying lemony Brett funkiness. Because this batch showed promise, was unique in that it was pre-soured with only Pediococcus and then fermented with only Brettanomyces Lambicus, it seemed like a solid candidate to base our B2 beer off of.

144 lbs of Grain

With a world of options to consider, we all seemed to like the idea of the Pedio/Brett beer for its simplicity, repeatability, and uniqueness. Even though everyone agreed to the concept of Amalgamation Autonomous when we were designing it, down the road there was some concern about it being too much of a hodgepodge “throw everything into a bucket and hope for the best” type of beer. With B2, we wanted to eliminate that worry by designing the beer from the finished product backwards using only one grain bill. In doing so, we still wanted to incorporate a significant portion of unmalted wheat so that there would be plenty of long chain dextrins for the bugs to work on over time, but we also wanted the brew day(s) to be relatively simple by only using a single infusion mash. In addition to the wheat, we wanted to differ the base beer from B1 by starting with a higher gravity and a bit darker color...which we partially accomplished by the addition of CaraMunich 40 and Special B.

Darker color than B1

As for the souring organisms, we liked the idea of only using Pedio and Brett. According to most material I’ve read on brewing lambics and other wild ales, Pediococcus seems to be the bacterium that’s responsible for the majority of the lactic acid production and yet when you talk to other homebrewers/brewers, it’s rarely mentioned as an element that people focus on. So, in order to highlight this critical critter of acid ales, we thought it would be fun to use it as the sole souring element in our beer. Pedio does produce a ton of diacetyl though and without any other wild element in the beer, it would be rather one-dimensional. To rid the beer of the diacetyl and provide the funky complex background, we decided to ferment the beer out with both Wyeast and White Labs’ strains of Brettanomyces Lambicus.

Ideally we would have liked to have pre-soured as much of the wort as possible with pedio before pitching in the Brett, but due to some logistical constraints, we had to come up with an alternative method. After much debate and planning, we came up with a schedule that hopefully will still yield the same results yet is a little less risky. Below is a condensed version of our brewing plans, but if you would like to see the full thing, you can view the entire document by clicking here.

20 gallons of Brett Lambicus beer waiting for the barrel

· Brew 10 gallons of wort, chill to 90 degrees and transfer into C02 flushed corny kegs. Inoculate with 1 liter of pedio and hold at 85 degrees until the first barrel fill day.

· Brew 20 gallons of wort and split into two, 10 gallon batches. Pitch Wyeast Brett Lambicus into one and White Labs Brett Lambicus into the other. Ferment at about 80 degrees.

· Barrel fill day. Brew 30 gallons of wort and transfer directly into the barrel. To this, add the 20 gallons of Brett fermented beer while reserving a little bit of the Brett yeast cake. Transfer the pedio beer onto the leftover Brett yeast in the now empty carboys.

· After primary fermentation has resided both inside the barrel and inside the carboys, rack the pedio/Brett fermented beers into the barrel and seal.

1 liter commercial pack of Pedio

One of the reasons for pre-souring the beer with pedio was not only just to lower the initial pH, but also to increase the overall amount of pedio in the beer. It’s an anaerobic organism that typically doesn’t compete well with other microorganisms and really doesn’t get to work in a lambic until after the all of the oxygen has been consumed in the beer and the other organisms have completed the majority of their cycles (4-12 months). Because of this, we wanted to give it as much of a head start as possible by introducing it as the sole organism in an oxygen free wort with the best possible nutrients for reproduction. From talking with a few microbiologists, it sounds like bacteriological peptone is the perfect nutrient for propagating bacteria, but since none of them were able to provide me with any and the online suppliers only sell to labs/companies, we had to go with option number 2. Apparently bacteria also love freshly dead yeast (provided their nutrients are accessible), so at the time of inoculating the wort with the Pediococcus, we also added about a half cup thick yeast slurry that was pressure cooked to burst the cell walls. It certainly didn’t smell great and I’m slightly worried about how it’ll affect the end beer, but since Brett is great at cleaning up autolyzed yeast over time, hopefully it will go to town on the pressure cooked yeast as well.

Barrel #2

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 70

Total Grain (Lbs): 144

Anticipated OG: 1.055

Anticipated SRM: 10.0

Anticipated IBU: Less than 10

Wort Boil Time (mins): 60

Anticipated ABV: 7.25%

Grain

48.6% - 70 lbs Pale Malt

24.3% - 35 lbs Flaked Wheat

16.7% - 24 lbs Vienna Malt

8.3% - 12 lbs CaraMunich

2.1% - 3 lbs Special B

Hops

Varied. Any variety added between 60 and 30 minutes contributing 10 IBUs or less.

Yeast

White Labs 653 Brettanomyces Lambicus

Wyeast 5526 Brettanomyces Lambicus

Wyeast 5733 Pediococcus

Mash Schedule

60 minutes @ 154°

15 minutes @ 168°

Sparge with 170° water

Notes

9/17/2011 – Nick brewed 10 gallons of wort, cooled to 75° and inoculated both carboys with Wyeast Brett Lambicus. The yeast had been going on a stir plate for the past week and a half with 1 liter of 1.035 wort.

10/1/2011 – I brewed 10 gallons of wort and once it was cooled to 85°, I racked it into two C02 flushed corny kegs. I then added the 1 liter commercial pack of Pediococcus that a local brewery ordered for us from Wyeast. This all then went into my fermentation chamber where it was held @ 85° until the first barrel fill day.

10/2/2011 - Bob brewed up 10 gallons of wort, cooled to 75° and then inoculated both carboys with White Labs’ Brettanomyces Lambicus.

10/9/2011 – Paul, Ben, and Brendan all brewed up 30 gallons of the wort, chilled to 70° and then racked directly into the barrel. The yeast was roused in each of the four Brettanomyces carboys and all but about a cup from each was racked into the barrel.

To make room for fermentation, about a third of each pedio corny keg was transferred into a third corny keg so that all three of them were filled to about 2/3rds the way full. The 4 or so cups of Brettanomyces yeast slurry was then divided equally between the three kegs and they were allowed to ferment at 75°.

10/26/2011 – Activity from primary fermentation had slowed dramatically in both the barrel and the kegs, so we stirred up the kegs and transferred the remaining 10 gallons into the barrel. We ended up with only about a quart of extra beer that didn’t fit in the barrel!

Hair of the Dog Matt Clone

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 02:46:00 +0000

With NHC approaching, my brewing focus lately has been centered on creating beers to serve at either Club Night or in the Hospitality Suite. I’ll still probably enter a few into the competition for fun, but I get so much more enjoyment out of creating something that’s unique and complex rather than crafting the best possible example of a certain style. Since I’ll be serving my beer to the public, I obviously want to lead with my best foot forward and what better way to do that than to attempt to recreate a beer that, to me, is very possibly the best I’ve ever had…Hair of the Dog’s commemorative beer Matt.

Matt is a beer that was originally created to honor the 10^th anniversary of one of Seattle’s best bottle shops…Bottleworks. This sinfully delicious concoction is absolutely unique in that it’s an intensely malty, relatively sweet beer with flavors of caramel, chocolate and dark fruits balanced with a hint of smoke from both peat and rauch malt. The beer was then aged in 30 yr bourbon barrels and Eau de Vie de Pomme casks from Clear Creek Distillery in Portland before being blended for the final product.

Alan Sprints, the owner/brewer of Hair of the Dog Brewery, has been very generous in giving out details about his more commonly produced beers such as Fred, Adam, and Doggie Claws, but locating information relating to Matt was a bit more of a challenge. According to numerous unconfirmed web sources, Matt was based off of the grain bill for Adam and this served as a starting point for me (Alan produced an Adam recipe for Sean Paxton which you can view here). According to Alan though, Matt is produced using two Munich Malts, 2 smoked malts, and 2 Belgian sugars and so Matt clearly isn’t just a scaled up, barrel aged version of Adam.

Knowing that Alan likes to use Gambrinus malts, I decided that I too would use their Pale malt as a base with significant portions of their 10 and 30 lovibond Munichs. Two Munichs, check. Unsure of which Belgian sugars are used, I opened up a bottle of Matt and tried to pick out the various flavors myself. With so much going on in the beer, it was difficult to pinpoint the specific flavors exactly, but there were definitely a lot of caramel/toffee notes along with some underlying raisin-y/fig type flavors. In the end I decided to go with a 50/50 mix of D1 and D2 Belgian Candi Syrup (D1 for the more caramel/molasses flavors and D2 for the more rich fruit flavors). Two Belgian sugars, check.

Determining which smoked malts to use and the corresponding amounts caused me a bit of debate. Adam definitely uses peated malt, along with rauch malt, but my sensitivity to it is pretty strong and the last thing that I wanted was for my Matt beer to come out tasting like band aides from all the peat phenols. Alan mentions in the July 31^st podcast of the Sunday Session that he does use peated malt, but that the phenol levels are quite different between the different maltsters (primarily Simpsons and Hugh Baird) and you have to be careful with what you choose. After researching the two, I was excited to learn that the Hugh Baird variety only had a phenol level in the 4-6ppm range whereas Simpsons was up near 12-24ppm…but this excitement quickly vanished after an exhaustive search to locate some HB failed to provide any results. In the end, and after doing a side by side taste of Matt and Adam, I decided that I would still use the Simpson’s malt, but just cut down the overall level. If 3.2% of the grist from Adam is the Hugh Baird variety of peated malt, which has an average phenol level of 5ppm, I treated this as 16 units of peated phenols (3.2 x 5ppm = 16). So, with only access to Simpsons malt, I knew that I wanted the overall peated phenol level to come in at about ½ to 2/3 the amount of that in Adam and so I ended up making only 0.55% of my grist Simpsons peated malt (0.55 x the average phenol level of Simpsons malt…18 = 10 phenol units).

As for the remainder of the grist, I tried to stick with either ingredients that Alan would use or malts from the various maltsters that he likes (i.e. Crisp crystal malts). There’s an important distinction though between trying to replicate a recipe and replicate a result. In the case of Matt, I wanted the result and so even though I’m sure Alan didn’t use all of the same ingredients or proportions that I did, my choices were based on the experience that I’ve had with these ingredients of the flavor contributions that I thought that they would impart.

With the grist settled, it was time for brew day. One of the ways in which Alan generates such rich, full bodied beers is through the use of a high temperature mash. It seems counterintuitive to create such a high gravity beer starting with a 157° mash, but with a large pitch and a generous dose of oxygen, hopefully the Scottish Ale strain will be up for the challenge. During the mash, I decided that I would leave the roasted grains out until mash-out so as not to have to adjust my water too much. When I added them though, after 10 minutes the color was nowhere near the nearly opaque blackness of the original beer. I was hesitant to add more grains since I didn’t want the end product to have any sort of roasted harshness, but after tasting the wort, there was definitely room for a second addition.

With a long, four-hour, melanoidin-producing boil, my Matt brew day turned out to be one of my longest on record. Even though Alan pitches at 75° and ferments at 68°, the Scottish Ale strain is relatively clean and rather than risking any additional alcohol heat, I ended up pitching at 62° and fermenting at 60°. As the fermentation slows, I’ll gradually increase the temperature up to 68° to finish and then rack half onto a half ounce of oak with Clear Creek’s 8 yr Eau de Vie de Pomme and half onto a half ounce of oak with Maker’s Mark. After six months of aging, hopefully the beer will show some slight resemblance of the original Matt.

Hair of the Dog Matt

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 6.3

Total Grain (Lbs): 23.54

Anticipated OG: 1.108

Anticipated SRM: 37.8

Anticipated IBU: 74

Wort Boil Time (mins): 240

Anticipated ABV: 11.1%

Grain/Fermentables

56.6% - 14.0 lbs Gambrinus Pale Malt

15.2% - 3.75 lbs Gambrinus 10L Munich

11.1% - 2.75 lbs Gambrinus 30L Munich

4.0% - 1.00 lbs Crisp 77L Crystal Malt

3.2% - 0.8 lbs D2 Candi Syrup

3.2% - 0.8 lbs D1 Candi Syrup

3.0% - 0.75 lbs Crisp 45L Crystal Malt

1.5% - 6 oz. Crisp Chocolate Malt (See Notes Below)

1.0% - 4 oz. Weyerman Smoked Malt

0.5% - 2 oz. Crisp Black Malt (See Notes Below)

0.5% - 2 oz. Simpsons Peated Malt

Hops

28 grams Northern Brewer (9.4% AA, Pellets) @ 95 mins

28 grams Northern Brewer (9.4% AA, Pellets) @ 50 mins

35 grams Styrian Goldings (5.2% AA, Pellets) @ 45 mins

Yeast

Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale

Water Profile and Additions

Charcoal filtered Seattle water

Mash Additions: 0.5g/g Gypsom, 0.5g/g Baking Soda

Sparge Additions: Adjusted pH down to 5.6 using phosphoric acid

Boil Additions: 4.5 grams Calcium Chloride, 2.1 grams Epsom Salt, 1.2 grams NaCl

Mash Schedule

60 minutes @ 157°

20 minutes @ 168°

Sparge with 170° water

Notes

Brewed solo on 10/22/11

10/16/11 – Made yeast starter with 2 liters 1.035 starter wort and 2 smack packs. Placed on stirplate for 36 hours and then crashed in the fridge. After 12 hours, decanted spent wort. On brew day, I added another liter of fridge-temp wort to the yeast and placed flask on stirplate @ 60°.

10/22/11 – Doughed into 8.5 gallons at 165° and came to a rest at 156°. Temp at 157° after 3 minutes. Added mash minerals and took a pH reading which came out to be 5.31. Also added phosphoric acid to sparge tank until pH reached 5.6.

After 60 minutes, I adjusted the temp regulator to bring the mash up to 168° and at the same time, I added in the chocolate and black patent malts. Color was nowhere near dark enough, so I tasted the wort and added in another 3 oz. chocolate and 3 oz. black patent.

At sparge, first runnings were 1.075. Collected 8 gallons with a total of 594 gravity units. Final runnings ended at 1.064.

Started boil and after 20 minutes, pH was at 5.13. After 60 minutes of boiling time, sugar and mineral additions were added. Boiled down to 5 gallons adding hops at the appropriate times. With about 45 minutes left to go, I topped off to about 6.75 gallons. Yeast nutrient, whirlflock, and immersion chiller were all added in the last 15 minutes.

Chilled down to 65°, rested for one hour, and then racked into carboy. Carboy was placed in the fermentation chamber @ 60° and after 2 hours, temp had dropped to 62°. At this point, I aerated with pure 0₂ for 60 seconds and then pitched entire yeast starter.

10/25/11 – Raised temp to 62°

10/27/11 – Raised temp to 65°

10/29/11 – Raised temp to 68°

11/5/11 (expected) – Assuming that the beer has completed fermentation by this date, I plan on splitting the beer into two kegs. Into keg one will go a half ounce of oak (11 American Heavy Toast cubes, 3 French Med+ cubes, and 2 charred American Heavy Toast cubes) and the 4 oz of Makers Mark that they’ve been soaking in. In the other keg, I’ll add the same variety of oak and the 4 oz. of Clear Creek Distillery’s 8 yr Eau de Vie de Pomme that they’ve been soaking in for the last three weeks. This will all go down into my basement (~60°) and rest for six months. I’ll taste along the way and add more oak/spirits if needed.

Brettanomyces Experiment Results

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:52:00 +0000

Back in April, using Chad Yakobson’s Brettanomyces Project dissertation as a backdrop, I began an experiment to determine which concentration of starting lactic acid would yield a brett beer with the most desirable ester profile. Yakobson’s empirical data showed that, basically, as the initial level of lactic acid increased, the level of attenuation increased while the secondary metabolites decreased. While this information is extremely fascinating to me, it didn’t tell me where that perfect middle ground would be, or if there even would be one from a completely subjective taste perspective. To find out, I replicatedthe study using a smaller sample size and this last week, I finally was able to look at the results.

After fermenting and aging for about four months, I decided to open up each brettanomyces lambicus sample and take the fermentative measurements. Oddly enough, all six of the White Labs samples finished out right around 1.0043 specific gravity while all of the Wyeast samples finished out at 0. Granted that each of my samples fermented for about 3.5x the length of those in Yakobson’s study, I still was a little surprised that the initial concentration of lactic acid didn’t play a bigger role in the final gravity of each beer. In his Wyeast sample, there was nearly double the percentage of apparent attenuation between the 0mg/L sample and the 3000mg/L sample and yet in my results, they ended up nearly identical.

Although the disparities between the two are not strikingly large, the Wyeast beers did end up with slightly lower pH than the matching White Labs beers. I’m not sure if this is telling that the Wyeast strain produces slightly more acid than the White labs version or if it has to do with the slightly different levels of attenuation. If the White Labs beers were able to ferment all the way down to 0, would the pH be more similar?

As fun as the empirical data is to look at, my main reason for this experiment was because I wanted a subjective view of the flavor. So, on September 15^th, six of my homebrew club friends, each with sophisticated palates, gathered for a blind tasting. Although I knew that a few of the participants had read Yakobson’s dissertation, I wanted to keep the details of my experiment a surprise and so prior to the tasting, only one other person in the group was aware of what we would be sampling. I also wanted to be able to participate blind and so at the time of bottling, I randomly selected samples from the batch and transferred them into consecutively numbered bottles (I did keep index notes though). Four weeks later at the tasting, when I poured each bottle into the individual sample glasses, I had long since forgotten which bottle was which beer.

Each participant was given one sample from each of the 12 variants at the same time along with a score sheet to record their perceptions and preferences. Since Yacobson’s study showed dramatic changes in four ester concentrations based upon the initial levels of lactic acid, I included these four flavor profiles (Ethyl Acetate – Solventy, Ethyl Lactate – Buttery/Creamy, Ethyl Caproate – Fruity/Wine, and Ethyl Caprylate – Fruity/Apple) as well as two other characteristics (Goaty/Funky and overall sourness). In addition to these flavors, I also asked the participants to rate each sample based on what they determined to be the overall “Brettiness” of each sample as well as their overall satisfaction with each one. All ratings were based on a 5 scale with 5 being the highest.

For each of the samples below, I compiled the scores, threw out the high and low, and then averaged the scores for each concentration level. The results are as follows:

Mean ethyl lactate scores for Wyeast seemed to increase as the initial concentration of lactic acid increased, but after 1000mg/L, the perception of the ester dropped off. A similar occurrence happened with the White Labs strain except there was a near equal level of detection between the 1000 and 3000mg/L concentrations. This is interesting to me because in Yakobson’s study, there was a clear correlation between the acid and ester and the concentration of the ester seemed to increase at an exponential rate as the acid increased. In my results, we didn’t really see that and in fact, the overall highest perception occurred at 1000mg/L.

The mean ethyl acetate scores for my results differ considerably from what Yakobson found in his study. Similar to ethyl Lactate, from an initial concentration of 100mg/L of lactic acid, there was a slight correlation between the ester and the acid concentration. We see a somewhat similar patter with the White Labs strain starting at about the 500mg/L concentration, but with Wyeast, at the same mark the two are basically inversely correlated.

Interestingly enough, my results for Ethyl Caproate are almost entirely opposite of what Yakobson found. In general, this is one of the esters that he basically found to decrease in concentration as the amount of initial lactic acid increased. My results show that our perception of the ester generally increased along with the lactic acid concentration. It’s interesting to note that again Wyeast peaked in flavor around the 1000mg/L mark whereas with the White Labs strain, starting at the 100mg/L mark, there’s a pretty consistent increase in ester detection as the lactic acid increases.

A somewhat similar ester to Ethyl Caproate, our Ethyl Caprylate detection varied by strain. It appears as though we had a growing detection of it up until the 500mg/L point with the Wyeast strain, after which the level fell closer to the mark at 0mg/L of lactic acid. With the White Labs strain though, our perception of it was all over the map and it does not appear that there was any correlation to the lactic acid concentration levels. Both of these results were contrary to what Yakobson found though.

In addition to looking at the specific, individual esters, I asked my participants to taste each sample and rate them based on their contentment of the overall “brett” flavor. This is difficult concept to quantify since each participants’ perception of what brett really tastes like can differ and their individual preference for certain esters associated with brett vary, but overall, I wanted to see if there were any noticeable trends. It turns out that with the White Labs strain, there definitely appears to be an increase in perceived “brettiness” up until the 1000mg/L mark after which the perception essentially levels off. Although there was a big drop between 0 and 100mg/L acid concentration, starting at the 100mg/L mark we see a similar pattern with the Wyeast strain. It appears that perceived “brettiness” increases with the lactic acid concentration up to about the 2000mg/L mark.

So how does all of this add up? Assuming that these results were repeatable every single time, I suppose if you wanted to tailor a beer to have a certain flavor profile, you could look above for the ester that you want to profile and then choose the initial concentration of lactic acid which resulted in the highest perception of said ester. If you want a mixture of the esters resulting in the best flavor profile, what’s the best method? With the data that I gathered, I went about this in two different ways.

In the first method, for each level of initial concentration, I took the six flavor profile scores and created one overall mean score. As you can see in the Wyeast results above, it appears as though people thought that the greatest concentration of flavors was to be had at the 500-1000mg/L initial acid concentration level. With the White Labs strain, the results were a little more mixed. In general, flavor concentrations were greatest at, or above, 1000mg/L with the highest overall flavor rating at the 3000mg/L mark.

In addition to aggregating the individual flavor ratings, I also asked each participant to rank their top three favorite samples based on overall flavor and general satisfaction. To compute a final score and rank, for each 1^st place vote, I awarded 3 points, 2^nd place I awarded 2 points, and 1 point for each 3^rd place vote.

Although the Wyeast 3000mg/L sample came in first in terms of total number of votes, based on the scores, the top preference was actually the White Labs 2000mg/L sample. Even though these results don’t match perfectly with the aggregated scores above, the White Labs result is fairly close since the 2000mg/L sample tied for 2^nd in terms of highest score with the aggregates above. To me though, it’s maybe more interesting that the 3000mg/L Wyeast sample received the most votes when that sample above had five other samples with higher aggregate scores. My assumption is that this has to do with my participants’ general preference for increased acidity. Whereas the ratings above were based on ester/flavor concentrations, the votes and scores were based on which sample they liked the best. Since the 3000mg/L sample had a fair amount of aggregated flavor and a higher level of acidity, it makes logical sense that they might rate it higher than say a sample with a slightly higher level of combined flavors but with much lower acidity. Unfortunately this theory doesn’t hold up so well when you look at the 3^rd and 4^th place samples…

Overall, the experiment was a lot of fun to conduct even though the results didn’t mirror those that Yakobson found. I was expecting to see stronger correlations between the esters and the initial levels of lactic acid, and although we didn’t, I think the results that I found proved that perceptions don’t always match up with reality.

Even though I attempted to recreate Yakobson’s project as best I could, I’m still fully aware that my experiment was not without flaws and the two don’t match up perfectly. If I were to replicate it again, I definitely would like to take fermentative readings at the 35 day mark to see if the attenuation rates ended up closer to what Yakobson found. As for the tasting, profiling six different esters between twelve different beers is a big challenge and I think I would restructure the tasting a bit to help with this task. First, I might break the tasting down into two sessions of six samples. While it was fun to try the White Labs and Wyeast samples side by side to see how they differ, I believe that if we were to only judge the six samples from one strain at a time, we wouldn’t run into palate fatigue as quickly and our scores might have been spread apart a bit more than they were. Related to this, I think that using a 5-point rating scale clustered the results too much and for future ratings, a 10-point scale would allow for a little more variation. Lastly, I failed to provide everyone with a benchmark sample first. Without this beer to calibrate our palates, the first sample that each of us tried probably averaged three points across the board since we didn’t have anything to compare the concentrations of flavors against (it’s impossible to know though since I asked everyone to start at different samples and move about the group randomly).

Imperial Red with Rye Review

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m always somewhat hesitant to write up formal reviews of my beers…not because I’m afraid of unjustifiably glorifying or castigating them, but more so because I don’t feel that I can adequately convert my thoughts/sensory perceptions into words. It’s a real skill that I admire and I only wish I had such a talent. When I sample a beer, although I know what components I do and don’t like about it, translating those thoughts into expressions is a significant challenge. In time and with experience, hopefully my verbal quiver will grow and it’ll become easier to detail the highs and lows of each brew.

Back in March when we brewed this ImperialRed w/ Rye, it was a strategic play in hopes of being selected by a local brewery through the Puget Sound Pro-Am competition. Although the competition has come and gone, and unfortunately this beer was not selected (results here), I’m still happy with the strategy that we attempted since the best of show beer turned out to be a Rye PA. We were on the right track, but sadly we didn’t execute well enough to be selected. Overall though, I’m very pleased with the way this beer turned out.

Aroma: Big citrus hop nose…lots of your typical grapefruit, orange, and pine with maybe a bit of bit of herb? Solid maltiness with a bit of caramel and slight chocolate. No alcohol warmth.

Appearance: Leans more towards red than copper (maybe tawny red?) with a nice off-white head of tight, small bubbles. The head lasts longer than I anticipated for such a big beer, but when it fades, it leaves nice lacing on the glass. Originally the beer was quite clear, not brilliant, but the one in the picture was the last draw from the keg which unfortunately picked up a bit of sediment. It's also a pretty wide and deep glass, so the beer appears much darker than it really is.

Flavor: This beer is big on all fronts…huge hop flavors and a big malt backbone. The citrus/piney flavors meld really well with the toasty malts and they strike a balance that’s really enjoyable. There’s a bit of caramel in there too…not sweetness, but a richness that sort of tempers the bitterness from all of the hops. I’m not the best at picking out rye, but I don’t really sense any…maybe a bit in the mouthfeel? There’s a slight warming from the alcohol, but it’s not hot or unpleasant at all and in fact it adds just another layer of complexity. There’s a bit of a lingering bitterness from the hops on the finish, but as the beer warms, this seems to fade.

Mouthfeel: With the solid attenuation, the beer isn’t heavy or thick on the tongue. It’s more medium-bodied. It’s very smooth and creamy with a medium level of carbonation.

Overall: I’m very happy with this beer. The rye didn’t come through as much as I was expecting, but the beer is no worse for it. There’s something really pleasant about the way the rich caramelliness acts as a platform of expression for all the bold hop flavors. They compliment each other extremely well and the smooth, creamy body makes it a really enjoyable beer to drink.

For a more ‘authentic’ review, you can see our pro-am score sheets for this beer by clicking here.

Amalgamation Autonomous

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 04:15:00 +0000

Between June 21^st and 23^rd of 2012, the National Homebrewer’s Conference will be held in Seattle….or actually, our sister city across the lake: Bellevue. While I can’t speak from personal experience, I’ve heard that it’s the mother of all beer events for anyone interested in beer and needless to say, I’m eagerly waiting for next summer. As a home brewer, one the exciting things about the conference is that you and your club have the opportunity to serve your creations to the masses, both during club night and during your allotted time in the hospitality suite. Year over year the conference has been growing in attendance, and with last year’s volume at nearly 2000 people, it’s very telling that we’ll need a lot of beer on hand to dole out.

While I’m sure that each member of our club will work independently on their own contributions, together we wanted to produce something that represented the mission and character of our club and a sour barrel project seemed like just the ticket. While we knew that other clubs in the area were receiving barrels from the Washington Homebrewer’s Association, we made the assumption that the majority would be of a red wine variety since most white wine barrels are repurposed for red after their oak properties have been fully extracted. So, in order to be a little different, we set our sights on acquiring a freshly emptied white wine barrel. The process was intensive and after contacting nearly 60 regional wineries, we lucked out when Maison Bleue Winery told us that just two days prior, they had racked their award winning Petite Joie Marsanne from the barrel. After a seven hour round trip and 200 bucks poorer, I was back home with two beautiful French oak barrels (more on the 2^nd barrel later).

Determining what to fill the barrel with proved to be an even more complicated task. Rather than generating one recipe, we took a unique approach by first determining what components we wanted the beer to have and then allowing the six contributing members to create their own recipe that, when combined together in the barrel, would possess those qualities. To prevent a complete mess, each brewer had to develop a recipe that fit within this list of group-determined guidelines:

· The grain bill needs to be generally light in flavor so as not to mask the flavors of apricot, peaches, and marzipan that the wine that was once in the barrel exhibited.
· Wheat should be used in significant quantities so that there’ll be plenty of long chain dextrins for the bacteria and brett to feed on during the long fermentation/maturation process (~30%).
· IBUs should be kept below 12 so as not to inhibit any lactic acid production from lactobascillus.
· Original gravity should be kept around 1.042-1.043.
· To enhance complexity, the greater the variety of strains of bacteria/wild yeasts the better (so long as they’re proven).
· Individual batches should be inoculated with souring organisms no later than primary fermentation.
· SRM should be no higher than 4.

In the end, eleven different batches of wort were brewed and each was fermented at home before the barrel fill day. The data on each individual recipe, as well as aggregated barrel stats, can be viewed by clicking here.

On June 7^th, we all transported our beers to my friend Paul’s house where the barrel had been previously set up in his garage. Since the barrel had been emptied and gassed with sulfur dioxide only 6 days prior, it was recommended to us by Vinnie at RR that we fill up the barrel with water the night before so as to help flush out any lingering gas which would otherwise potentially inhibit the growth/reproduction of our desired souring organisms. So, after draining the barrel of the water, we then flushed it with C02 and racked in our different beers.

Depending on how it matures, we’re hoping that in late spring of next year we can rack out 30 or so gallons of the beer to age on some freshly frozen apricots (going for that sort of Fou’foune thing). The rest of the base beer will then be divided between the contributing members for each to once again put their own spin on it.

7/29/13 - Racked all of the beer out and into kegs. Barrel was rinsed out and immediately refilled with fermented and inocculated wort (similar grist and structure to AA). In time, I'll add a post about this beer, but for now its temporary name is B1b.

4/5/14 - Took 1st place in the 1st round of the 2014 National Homebrew Competition NW division. It was entered under category 17 as a Gueuze.

6/4/14 - Brought home the silver medal in the final round of 2014 NHC.

Polecat Porter

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:56:00 +0000

With a limitless number of beers to be created, it’s rare that I’ll spend the time re-brewing something I’ve made in the past. If I do, it’s usually because the first batch wasn’t quite right and I want to tweak the recipe to see if I can make the final product match my expectations. With our Baltic Porter however, the first batch was so delicious that I’d rather not make any adjustments to it and rather just see if I can replicate it exactly.

Back in early 2010, we designed this beer for entry in to the Puget Sound Pro-Am. While we fanaticized about having our beer brewed on a commercial scale, we figured the odds were against us and the chances long. As luck would have it though, not only did a brewery select our beer, but our favorite local brewpub at that: Elysian Brewing. Although the beer didn’t place in the top three in the pro-am competition at the 2010 Great American Beer Festival, the commercial version turned out just as good as we could have hoped for.

Whether or not it’s due to the history that I have with this beer or because of my general liking of the style, our Polecat Porter easily has edged its way into my top 3 favorite beers we’ve brewed. It’s probably a little less roasty than a classic example, but I think that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much too. Hopefully this re-brew will not disappoint and once again we’ll have managed to capture lightning in a bottle.

Polecat Porter

Recipe Specifics

-------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 6.5

Total Grain (Lbs): 19.88

Anticipated OG: 1.085

Anticipated SRM: 25.9

Anticipated IBUs: 39.1

Wort Boil Time: 90

Anticipated ABV: 8.7%

Final Gravity: 1.0195

ABV: 8.7%

Grain/Fermentables

-------------------------

57.4% - 11.5 lbs Munich Malt

33.7% - 6.75 lbs Pilsner

2.5% - ½ lb Special B

1.9% - 6 oz. Carafa

1.2% - ¼ lb CaraMunich47

1.2% - ¼ lb Chocolate Malt

1.2% - ¼ lb Crystal 80

0.9% - 3 oz. Molasses

Hops

-------

60 grams Czech Saaz (pellets, 5.0% AA) @ 65 minutes

20 grams Hallertau (pellets, 4.1% AA) @ 25 minutes

Yeast

-------

Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager (3^rd generation slurry from a 10 gallon batch)

Water Profile and Additions

----------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash and HLT Additions: 1.3 grams/gallon of Calcium Chloride

Mash Schedule

-------------------

60 minute rest at 151°

15 minute mash out rest at 168°

Sparged with 170° water

Notes

--------

8/27/2011 – Yeast slurry had been in my fridge for 2 weeks, so I decanted off what little beer was sitting on top and transferred the yeast to 4000ml flask with 1600ml of fresh starter wort.

8/28/2011 – Brewed solo

Doughed in at 157 and came to a rest at 151. Added mineral additions and then let rest for 60 minutes. Sparged until I had 8 gallons of 1.0745 wort. Because of the higher efficiency, I replaced a half gallon of the wort with filtered water.

Boiled for 90 minutes with hop additions as noted. Molasses added at 20 minutes, Irish moss and yeast nutrient were added at 15. After the boil, I ended up with exactly 6.5 gallons of 1.085 wort.

Chilled wort down to 60°. Air temp was about 75, so I didn’t want to let it sit and settle for as long as I would normally like. As a result, when I racked into the carboy, a bit more hop material made it in. Carboy was then placed in fridge and left overnight until temp reached 53°. Aerated for 60 seconds with pure 02 and then pitched in all but a small amount of trub in the yeast slurry (which was also at 53°).

Brewing our Polecat Porter with Dick Cantwell at Elysian Tangletown back in June 2010.

10/1/2011 - Racked over to secondary. Gravity down to 1.021

12/16/2011 - I needed the carboy, so I racked over to a keg. Gravity down to 1.0195. Since there was about 1.5L left in the carboy, I sanitized and C02 flushed a 2L bottle fitted with a carbonator cap, and then transfered in the remaining volume. I'm low on time, but when I get the chance, I'll try eising the remainder.

1/2/2012 - Placed 2L bottle in the freezer and swirled about every hour. Once a significant portion of the mixture was frozen, I placed it in the fridge while I prepared for bottle conditioning. I mixed 100ml of sterile water with 1/4 tsp dry t-58 yeast and let bloom. From this mixture, I placed 0.5ml into each of my 4 bottles. Next, I mixed 5 oz of table sugar into 8 ounces of boiling water, which resulted in 10 oz total volume, and then placed 6ml of the solution into each bottle. From there, I flushed each bottle with C02 and then racked over the eised beer.

After the ice melted in the 2L bottle, the left over beer had a gravity of 1.011. If the alcohol transfered over in the same manner that the gravity units did, then I expect the Baltic Eis to have about 10.5 - 11% ABV.

2/19/2012 - First Tasting

Wort Convenience

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Over the years, few things have helped improve our brewing more than fermentation control and proper yeast management. Pitching the appropriate level of yeast for each batch is key; if you under-pitch, the cells are forced to maximum reproduction and in doing so, produce off-flavor byproducts. The cells also run the risk of an incomplete fermentation. If you over pitch, the cells won’t have to replicate much during fermentation and the end beer potentially can be lacking in complimentary esters and phenolics.

In order to assure that you’re brewing with the correct cell count of healthy yeast, a starter is often key. A lot of books recommend that you mix up a small batch of wort for a starter a day or two before brewing. I did this for a long time, but the inconvenience eventually got the best of me and I’ve since moved on to canning wort so that I’ll have it on hand at all times. One of the great things about doing this is that once they’re canned, they can be stored at room temp for an indefinite period of time.

Typically when I make a up a batch, I’ll brew up about 8.5 gallons and fill various sized mason jars (24 quart, 12 pint, and 12 half pint).

Here’s the process that I use:

Determine the total volume of wort needed to fill all of your canning jars.
Using the lightest extract available, mix up an unhopped extract batch of 1.025 - 1.035 wort, add yeast nutrient, and boil for 10-15 minutes to create whatever minimal hotbreak might occur.
Chill down to room-temp.
Fill up each of your jars, leaving any break material behind.
Run jars through your pressure cooker for about 15 minutes at 15psi. It’s amazing how the wort darkens and becomes so clear after this step.
Allow to cool, and then store at room temp in a dark place.

In theory, you could just mix up your batch of wort and fill the jars without running the liquid through the boil/chill process first. The pressure cooker will sterilize everything, but I’ve found that you’ll be left with a lot more hot break in your canning jars. Regardless of your method, nothing beats being able to create a starter in a few minutes, or add to an existing one, using the stockpile of canned wort that’s now always on hand.

Right: Pre-Pressure Cooker. Left: Post-Pressure Cooker

Summertime Gose

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 01:35:00 +0000

As a home brewer, people are naturally interested in what you’re making. It’s always fun to share your beer, but one of my favorite things about the hobby is introducing people to flavors in beer that they never knew existed or even could exist. Since my brewery is located off of a well-traveled alley, I constantly get people stopping by to ask questions and sample some of my beer. It’s a lot of fun…not only because I get to meet people and talk beer, but it’s a great feedback loop to have while being able to introduce folks to random styles of beer.

For the warm months of summer (the few that we actually get here in Seattle), I wanted to have something that would be refreshing, yet unique, on tap. Since Goses are rarely seen, except by those that seek them out, I thought it would fit the bill nicely with its lemon tartness and orange flavored nuttiness from the coriander. Add in a little salt to the mix and you’ve got a brew that is sure to turn a few heads.

For my first batch of Gose, I decided that I wanted to stay fairly traditional. I kept the grain bill pretty simple and standard by using about 60% wheat malt and just a touch of Munich to add a little depth to the malt profile. In addition to the sea salt and Indian coriander, which I lightly toasted in a pan and pulsed with a coffee grinder prior to adding, I threw in a few black cardamom seeds for that sort of smoky, mintiness that I feel they sometimes give off. Hopefully it’ll intrigue and not disappoint.

Traditional Gose

Recipe Specifics

----------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 6.5

Total Grain (Lbs): 9.25

Anticipated OG: 1.046

Anticipated SRM: 3.3

Anticipated IBU: 6.2

Wort Boil Time: 90

Anticipated ABV: 4.8%

Grain

-------

59.5% - 5.5 Lbs Wheat Malt

32.4% - 3.0 Lbs Pilsner

8.1% - ¾ Lb Munich

Hops/Spices

----------------

20 grams Libery (Pellets, 3.0% AA) @ Mash Hop

15 grams Indian Coriander seeds (toasted and pulsed) @ 10 minutes

24 grams Sea Salt @ 10 Minutes

10 Black Cardamom seeds @ 10 minutes

Yeast

-------

WLP Lactobascillus (400ml starter)

Wyeast 1007 German ale (750ml starter)

Water Profile and Additions

-------------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle water

Mash Additions: 1 gram/gallon Calcium Chloride

Boil Additions: 2.5 grams Calcium Chloride, 2.1 grams Epsom salt

Mash Schedule

--------------------

Doughed in @ 139°

Immediately raised temp to 149° via HERMS, rested there for 90 minutes

15 minutes @ 168°

Sparged with 170° H20

Notes

--------

5/2/11 – Added WLP Lactobascillus to 400ml of starter wort and left at ambient temp (68°).

Brewed on 5/7/2011 solo

Doughed in at 146° and mash stabilized at 139°. Immediately raised the HERMs control to 149°, which took about 6 minutes for entire mash to reach. Left for 90 minutes before raising HERMS for mash out.

Collected 5.5 gallons of 1.054 wort. Topped kettle to 8.15 gallons so that after the boil I’d end up with 6.5 gallons of 1.046 wort.

Boiled for 90 minutes with spice additions at 10.

Chilled down to 120° and let rest covered for 45 minutes. Temp dropped to 112° after which I racked the clear wort into a carboy and then pitched in the lacto culture. Moved into the fermentation chamber with temp set to 110°.

5/9/2011 – Dropped temp dial down to 68°. Created a 750ml starter for the German Ale strain.

5/10/2011 – Carboy down to 68°, so I pitched in the German Ale yeast.

6/7/2011 – Transferred into a C02 flushed keg since I needed the carboy space. Keg was moved up into my office which was about 70° and left unpressurized.

11/11/11 - 1st Review/Tasting

Autumn Maple II and the Yambic

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 May 2011 04:01:00 +0000

Back in October of ’09 when we set out to clone the Bruery’s Autumn Maple, we were experimenting with a strain of yeast that we hadn’t worked with before…the Bruery’s house yeast. With commercial strains, you can review the fermentation specs before hand and expect the yeast to maintain those same properties, allowing you to craft a beer to your own desires. With unknown strains though, aside from scouring the internet to find another brewer who captured and brewed with the same strain, you’re basically left to assumptions and experimentation. Those assumptions led us to brew a 13% abv beer when, in fact, we intended to only brew a 10% beer.

Although the 13% version of Autumn Maple turned out to be a fantastic beer in its own right, it wasn’t what we were aiming for and before settling on the recipe, we wanted to make some adjustments to hit our initially intended goal. Two things come to mind: 1.) gravity/abv and 2.) flavor profile.

First the ABV. With the ’09 batch of Autumn Maple, we made the assumption that the Bruery’s house strain of yeast would act in a similar manner to most commercially available, high-gravity Belgian strains of yeast and attenuate somewhere in the range of 74-78%. With this assumption in mind, we crafted the beer to have an OG of 1.100 so that at 76% attenuation, we would end up with about 10% abv. After fermentation completed, we discovered that the yeast could tear through the wort and was capable of attenuation rates closer to 98%. With this knowledge in mind, for batch two we decided to scale down the OG to 1.080 so that at 98% attenuation, we’d end up with a 10% beer.

Second, the flavor. A complaint that I often have with pumpkin beers is that you only taste the spices and not the pumpkin. With our first batch of Autumn Maple, the spice mixture was at a perfect level and although there was a touch of yam flavor, it didn’t stand out as much as we wanted it to. Whereas with the first batch we only added the cooked yams to the mash, for batch 2 we decided that not only would we increase the amount of yams in the mash but we’d also add some yams to the boil. With the increased volume in the mash and the new addition in the boil, hopefully the yam flavor will shine through and elevate the beer to new levels.

Autumn Maple II / Yambic

Recipe Specifics

---------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 6.0

Total Grain (Lbs): 13.5

Anticipated OG: 1.080

Anticipated SRM: 14

Anticipated IBUs: 23

Wort Boil Time: 90

Anticipated ABV: 10.0%

Grain/Fermentables

---------------------------

46.5% - 9.0 lbs Domestic 2-Row

20.7% - 4 lbs Munich Malt

26.1% - 5 lbs Cooked Yams

3.2% - 10 oz. Grade B Maple Syrup (added at secondary)

2.8% - ½ lb CaraMunich

0.6% - 2 oz. Dark Molasses

Hops/Spices

---------
65 grams Libery (pellets, 3.0% AA) @ 60 minutes

1 ½ grams Allspice, freshly ground @ 2 minutes
¾ gram Cinnamon stick, broken into small pieces @ 2 minutes
¾ gram Nutmeg, freshly grated @ 2 minutes
1 Tahitian Vanilla Bean, split and seeded @ 2 minutes

Yeast

---------------

Bruery house strain – cultured from a bottle of Orchard White

Water Profile and Additions

------------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle water

Mash Additions: 0.1 gram/gallon baking soda

Boil Additions: 1.2 g/g Calcium Chloride, 0.25 g/g Epsom Salt, 0.2 g/g table salt.

Mash Schedule

--------------------

15 minutes @ 135°

60 minutes @ 151°

20 minutes @ 168°

Sparge with 170° Water

Notes

--------

Brewed on 9/26/2010 with Blake and Paul

9/13/2010 – Started growing up the dregs from an Orchard White. Same process was used as in the first batch: Harvested the dregs from a bottle of Orchard White and mixed with 10ml of 1.035 worth. Once fermentation started, I added another 20ml and then 24 hours later, another 50ml. 24 hours after that, I stepped it up to 250 ml, then 1000ml, then 2000ml, and then 4000ml all with about 24 hours in between each step.

9/26/2010 – Placed about 5lbs of washed yams on the BBQ and 5lbs in the oven for about 45 minutes. After the yams were cooked, we mashed them all up, skins and all and measured out 5lbs to add to the mash (shortly after dough in).

With the additional yam content, we ran into a few issues where the mash stopped recirculating. We were able to get it started again each time by stirring the mash and back-pressuring the line. Next time, we’ll add rice hulls.

Other than the few stuck mash times, the mash went smoothly and our efficiency was great. Collected 7 gallons of 1.069 wort and topped off kettle to a little over 7 ½ gallons.

Hops added at 60 minutes.

Molasses added at 20 minutes.

Whirlflock and yeast nutrient added at 15 minutes.

Spices were added at 2 minutes. Same amounts were used as during the first batch: 2 parts allspice, 1 part cinnamon, and 1 part nutmeg (3 grams in total). We also added one whole Tahitian vanilla bean which we split and seeded.

90 minute boil. Wort chilled to 68° and 60 seconds of pure 02 was dosed. 6 gallons of 1.081 wort in total. 5 gallons went into one carboy and then the Bruery yeast was pitched.

Yambic

Yambic - About ¾ of a gallon of the pre-pitched wort went into a gallon jug. To this jug, we added a ½ cup of a sour starter that we had on hand (starter contained the dregs from numerous beers: Deviation, Vagabond, Isabelle Proximus, Girardin Gueuze 1882, etc). Should be interesting to see what it can do to such a high gravity wort.

Primary fermentation took place at 68°.

10/6/2010 – Racked to secondary and 10 oz. of grade B maple syrup were added. Beer was moved up to my office which had an ambient temp of about 70°.

12/11/10 – Moved both the Yambic and the Autumn Maple down to the basement where temp is about 63°. Gravity at 1.002.

3/6/2011 – Kegged the autumn maple. There’s definitely more yam flavor than the first batch, but the beer is also more cloudy. With the lower alcohol, it’s smoother than the first beer initially was but it also doesn’t taste as complex or rounded. We’ll see what it’s like with carbonation.

11/17/2011 - Tasting and review

Brettanomyces Experiment - Initial pH, Attenuation, and Secondary Metabolites

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:44:00 +0000

Over the years, I’ve found that new brewers typically fall into one of two categories: those that like to jump in with both feet and learn from experimentation or those that like to research as much as possible before making the leap. I certainly fall into the latter category and so as expected, when I started venturing into the world of wild fermentations, I scoured the seemingly limited, publicly available information.

When I came across Chad Yakobson’s dissertation on brettanomyces, I was really intrigued. In his “Brettanomyces Project”, one of the things that he examined was the effect that varying amounts of lactic acid concentrations have on attenuation as well as secondary metabolites. Depending on the strain that he was studying, he basically found that, “higher initial concentrations of lactic acid had a significant effect, increasing the level of attenuation observed in each strain while generally decreasing the secondary metabolites produced” (Yakobson). As a career analyst, the myriad of data fascinated me but as an intrigued homebrewer, I was left without a subjective view. If the amount of ethyl lactate production is correlated with the initial lactic acid concentrations yet ethyl caproate is inversely correlated, what’s the initial lactic acid concentration that would give me the appropriate balance of flavors that I want in my beer? What about attenuation? Is the reduction in ethyl caprylate worth the increased attenuation? As much as I value Yakobson’s numerical findings, these are the questions that I, as a homebrewer, want to find the answers to.

Even though I don’t have a home filled with sophisticated lab equipment, I wanted to try and replicate Yakobson’s experiment as best I could in order to determine my own subjective opinions. The Brettanomyces Project dissertation examined the results of eight different strain profiles, but in order to keep things relatively simple, I decided to only work with two commercially available strains of brettanomyces lambicus: Wyeast 5526 and White Labs 653.

Even though I could have kept the grain bill of the base beer extremely simple in order to showcase the subtle nuances of the brett fermentation, I opted not to since most likely my future 100% brett beers will not have such a simple wort. Since the point of this experiment is to find out what flavors I’ll want in future beers and the lactic acid concentrations necessary to arrive at such levels, I decided that using a base beer similar to what I’ll be brewing in the future will provide me with the most realistic results. There’s no point in using a simple pilsner malt base if later I’ll be brewing with other specialty grains that could mask the very subtle flavors only apparent with a pilsner base. In the end, I went with a grist of Maris Otter, Munich, Carahell, and Crystal 40.

Once the mash and boil were complete, I filled 12 one-quart mason jars with 28oz. each of clear wort. These were then split into two groups of six, one soon to be inoculated with Wyeast 5526 and the other with White Labs 653. In Yakobson’s study, he examined the fermentation at 5 different lactic acid concentrations. Since I had six jars for each brett strain, I decided to replicate the lactic acid concentrations that Yakobson used plus one additional point. After determining the g/L of lactic acid in the 88% solution that I had on hand, I was able to calculate the amount of acid needed to dose each 28oz mason jar to reach 0, 100, 500, 1000, 2000, and 3000 mg/L concentrations.

Concentration (mg/L)	ml of Lactic Acid Dosed	Initial pH
0	-	4.95
100	0.093	4.55
500	0.463	4.05
1000	0.925	3.75
2000	1.85	3.41
3000	2.776	3.08

Unfortunately I don’t have access to equipment necessary to count the number of yeast cells per ml of wort, so when it came time to inoculate the jars, I tried to be as consistent with each as possible. Four days before my actual brew date, I made a 600ml starter for each strain. Since I only have one stir plate, I rotated between the two starters every 24 hours. When it came time to pitch the yeast, I used a sterile syringe to suck up the yeast from each starter while it was still spinning on the stir plate so as to get a homogenous mixture for each test batch. By dosing 15ml of homogenous starter to each jar, hopefully I ended up with roughly the same cell count in each batch.

After fermentation resides in a few months, I plan to measure the final gravities and pH. I should be able to be get two 12 oz. bottles out of each batch and soon after bottle conditioning, I’d like to hold one blind tasting with one bottle from each of the 12 experimental batches. Hopefully the results will be obvious and conclusive, but if not, a second blind tasting after another year or so should provide another opportunity for critique.

Batch Specifics

--------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 5.0

Total Grain (lbs): 9

Anticipated OG: 1.050

Anticipated SRM: 5

Anticipated IBU: 17

Wort Boil Time: 60 minutes

Anticipated ABV: Varies by initial pH / Lactic Acid concentration

Grain

--------

89.2 % - 8.0 lbs Maris Otter

7.4% - 0.66 lb Munich Malt

1.7% - 2.5 oz. Carahell

1.7% - 2.5 oz. Crystal 40

Hops

-------

60 minutes – 20 grams Cluster (Pellets, 5.0% AA)

Yeast

-------

Wyeast 5526 Brettanomyces Lambicus

White Labs 653 Brettanomyces Lambicus

Water Profile and Additions

-------------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle water

Mash Additions: 0.65 g/g Calcium Chloride, 0.35 g/g Epsom Salt (based on 3 gallons)

Boil Additions: 0.65 g/g Calcium Chloride, 0.35 g/g Epsom Salt (based on 3 gallons), and 0.2g/g Salt (based on 6 gallons)

Lactic Acid – dosed into individual batches at rates mentioned above

Mash Schedule

--------------------

60 minute rest at 152°

15 minute mash out rest at 168°

Sparged with 170° water

Notes

--------

4/6/2011 – Started Wyeast 5523 starter (600ml) and placed on stirplate

4/7/2011 – Started White Labs 653 starter (600ml)…unfortunately it didn’t arrive the same day as the Wyeast. Swapped Wyeast for White Labs on the stirplate.

4/8/2011 – Switched starters on the stirplate.

4/9/2011 – Switched Starters on the stirplate.

4/10/2011 – Brewed solo.

Hit strike 152 mash temp dead on. Added mash mineral additions.

Collected 5 gallons of 1.060 wort. Topped off to 7 gallons with filtered water, boiled for 60 minutes, and ended with 6 gallons of 1.050 wort.

Whirlflock and yeast nutrient were added at 15 minutes remaining.

Whirlpool chilled to 70° degrees and then let sit for about an hour and a half covered, waiting for the wort to completely settle.

Used kettle valve to fill 12 quart jars with 28 oz. of clear wort.

Remaining wort was used to fill another mason jar and a 1 gallon jug, both to be placed in various spots in my brewery to test out spontaneous fermentation.

For the 12 test batches, a 1ml syringe was used to dose each of the jars to the appropriate lactic acid concentrations (see grid above). After lactic acid concentrations/pH levels were correct, 15 ml of brett were added…Wyeast to 6 jars, White Labs to 6.

Test batches were placed in closet where ambient temp is about 70°.

8/17/2011 - Bottled each sample

9/15/2011 - Blind Tasting Results

Pro-Am Imperial Red with Rye

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:02:00 +0000

Although it was a lot of fun in the beginning, I rarely submit our beers to competitions anymore. There was a point when I felt like judges’ feedback was the only place where I could get honest, constructive criticism, but now, with a large group of obsessed beer nerd friends, my options have expanded and the opinions of the judges no longer seem to hold as much weight as they used to. With the homebrewing world growing and more and more brewers interested in passing the BJCP exam and later judging, I also found it extremely frustrating when you received two contradictory judging scores and notes. That said, there is still one competition that I like to enter each year…the Puget Sound Pro-Am.

Although the Pro-Am competition is initially judged according to BJCP guidelines, it differs from other competitions in that local breweries select beers of their choosing to be scaled up and brewed at their breweries. They don’t always select the top beer in each category and often they’re only looking for beers of a certain style. If they do end up selecting yours though, the commercially brewed version will most likely be submitted to the Pro-Am competition at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver.

With the limited time and planning that we had, deciding on a brewing strategy for the competition was not a simple task. Granted that we had some beers on hand that we could submit, we wanted to brew a few beers specifically for the competition that we believed could give us a leading edge.

One thing that helped define a strategy for us was to look at what the trends were last year. In years past, it seemed like whatever did well at the GABF would do well at the local Pro-Am the following year. Two of last year’s winning GABF beers included rye and the 1^st place beer was an imperial red ale with rye (Red Velvet). Given that rye’s a unique enough ingredient to make a beer stand out, yet it’s still easy to work with and produces repeatable results (as opposed to spices or the like), it seemed like a good option to incorporate into a recipe. About a year ago, we brewed an imperial red ale that, as far as all our hop-forward beers went, turned out to be one of my favorites that we’ve produced. Incorporating rye into the recipe seemed only natural and when the recipe for Red Velvet was printed in the November issue of Zymurgy, it turned out that our own recipe was extremely similar (with the acception of the rye addition).

With a few modifications to our imperial red ale recipe, we essentially were killing two birds with one stone. I guess only time will tell if it’s a smart move or not, but using a unique-enough ingredient like rye and mimicking a winning style from last year seemed like a strategy worth trying.

Holden's Red

Recipe Specifics

---------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 6.0

Total Grain (lbs): 18.13

Anticipated OG: 1.087

Anticipated SRM: 17.3

Anticipated IBU: 90

Wort Boil Time: 90 minutes

Anticipated ABV: 9.5%

Grain

-------

69.0% - 12.5 lbs Maris Otter

16.5% - 3.0 lbs Flaked Rye

5.5% - 1.0 lb Crystal 60

5.5% - 1.0 lb Munich Malt

2.1% - 6oz. Crystal 120

1.4% - ¼ lb Pale Chocolate

Hops

-------

75 minutes – 40 grams Magnum (Pellets, 12.1% AA)

30 minutes – 30 grams Simcoe (Pellets, 11.5% AA)

10 minutes – 25 grams Amarillo (Pellets, 7.1% AA)

0 minutes – 40 grams Centennial (Pellets, 8.5% AA)
0 minutes – 20 grams Cascade (Pellets, 5.6% AA)

0 minutes – 15 grams Amarillo (Pellets, 7.1% AA)

Dry – 40 grams Amarillo
Dry – 40 grams Cascade

Dry – 40 grams Centennial

Yeast

-------

Wyeast 1056 American Ale (1500ml starter)

Water Profile and Additions

------------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash Additions: ½ gram per gallon Chalk, ½ g/g baking soda.

Fermentation Addition (see notes): 6 grams gypsum, 2.4 grams Epsom salt, 3 grams table salt.

Mash Schedule

--------------------

60 minute rest at 152°

15 minute mash out rest at 168°

Sparged with 170° water

Notes

--------

3/4/2011 – Made 1 liter starter of 1.035 wort.

3/5/2011 – Added 500 ml to starter.

Brewed 3/6/2011 with Blake.

Doughed in at 158° and hit our 152° mash temp dead on. Added mash mineral additions and hit 5.2 pH.

Rested for 60 minutes and then sparged until we had 7.5 gallons in the kettle with a total of 638GUs.

Boiled for 90 minutes and with 15 minutes left, we added whirlflock and Wyeast yeast nutrient.

Chilled down to 66° and racked beer into carboy. Started to oxygenate with tank 02 and airstone, but our tank was low so we only got about 10 seconds of 02 in there. After realizing this, we shook the crap out of the carboy for another 5 minutes.

Started fermentation at 66°.

3/7/2011 - Realized we didn’t add the boil kettle mineral additions, so we boiled up a cup of water and added the minerals that we would have added into the kettle. Water was cooled and then dumped into fermentor.

3/10/2011 – Raised temp to 68°

3/22/2011 – Needed the space in the fermentation chamber, so I brought the carboy up to my office. Ambient temp, ~70°.

3/23/2011 – Added dry hop additions to primary.

3/30/2011 – Wanted to get the beer off the dry hops, but since the beer was still very slowly fermenting, I transferred the beer to a C02 flushed carboy instead of kegging.

4/8/2011 – Crash cooled beer in basement fridge. FG: 1.017

4/10/2011 – Kegged and carbonated to 2.6 volumes.

Tasting Review

Bourbon Wood-Aged Tripel

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 02:05:00 +0000

Every beer geek can probably remember back to the first craft beer they had that opened their eyes to the vast array of flavors that can be present in a beer. For me, that beer was Chimay Grande Reserve. Unlike anything I had ever had before, it drove my curiosity to explore other Belgian styles and before I knew it, Tripels became my new favorite. To this day, I still love how the spiciness from the yeast and alcohol plays well on top of the soft malt character while the high carbonation helps to aid in a dry, slightly bitter finish.

As a homebrewer, brewing a Tripel isn’t the most exciting beer in the world to make. Granted that it can be difficult to achieve the dryness and the right characteristics from the yeast without producing an overly hot beer, a grain bill comprised of mainly pilsner malt and cane sugar just doesn’t hold the same appeal that maybe a barleywine does. To up the ante a little bit, I wanted to add another layer of complexity by incorporating the flavors that a beer often receives during extended aging in a bourbon barrel.

Before getting too excited about the simulated bourbon barrel aging, I wanted to make sure that the base beer wasn’t neglected and that it still retained the properties of a high quality Tripel. To me, a lack of dryness and excessive alcohol heat are two of the most common flaws in this homebrewed style and so to combat this, I wanted to make sure that the base beer had plenty of easily fermentable sugars and that the fermentation temps were restrained. The grist of primarily German pilsner malt was mashed long and low at a temp of 147° and then to the boil, nearly 18% of the total fermentables were added in the form of cane and candi sugar (it would have been fine with 100% cane sugar, but since I had a 1lb bag of clear candi syrup on hand, I decided to throw it in). As for the fermentation, I pitched a 1500ml starter of Wyeast’s Trappist High Gravity yeast to the wort at 64°. Even though this strain of yeast can handle much higher temps, I decided to keep it low initially to restrain the heat and excessive phenolics. After a period of 36 hours, the temp was raised 1° per 24 hours until a max temp of 72° was reached to finish out the beer.

After primary fermentation, I started the simulated bourbon barrel aging process. The beer was racked into a keg which contained 1 oak stave that had been soaking in Makers Mark for about 2 weeks. I knew that this would not be quite enough oak or bourbon to impart the desired flavors, but I wanted to take it slow. Part of my problem with other Bourbon Aged Tripels is that the bourbon is too forward and the subtleties of the base beer are lost. I wanted this beer to be a quality Tripel first, with just a hint of bourbon and oak on the finish. After three months, you really couldn’t perceive any bourbon or oak character, so I added two more oak staves and an 8^th of a cup of bourbon. With another two weeks passing, the bourbon still wasn’t quite where I was aiming. After letting the beer rest for one more week, I pulled out a glass and using a 1ml dosing syringe, I continued to add more bourbon until the appropriate balance was reached. Scaling this amount up for the volume that I had in the keg, I ended up adding another 12mls.

Bourbon and Oak aged Tripel

Recipe Specifics

------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 5.5

Total Grain(lbs): 10 ¼

Anticipated OG: 1.070

Anticipated SRM: 4.5

Anticipated IBU: 32.0

Wort Boil Time: 90 minutes

Anticipated AVB: 9%

Grain/Fermentables

--------------------

78.4% - 10.0 lbs German Pilsner

11.8% - 1.5 lbs cane sugar

7.8% - Clear Candi Syrup

1.5% - 3 oz. Aromatic Malt

0.5% - 1 oz. Biscuit Malt

Hops

-------------------

60 minutes – 40 grams Styrian Goldings (Pellets, 5.2% AA)

10 minutes – 20 grams Czech Saaz (Pellets, 5.5% AA)

Yeast
-------------------

Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity (1500ml Starter)

Water Profile and Additions
-----------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle Water

Mash Additions: 1 gram/gallon Calcium Chloride, ¼ gram/gallon Epsom Salt, 0.085 gram/gallon Baking Soda, and 0.2 gram/gallon Salt.

Sparge Additions: 1.3 gram/gallon Calcium Chloride

Mash Schedule

----------------

60 minute rest at 147°

15 minute mash out rest at 168°

Sparged with 170° water

Notes

----------------

10/28/2010 – made starter with 1 liter of 1.35 wort.

10/29/101 – added 500ml of wort to starter.

Brewed 10/30/2010 – solo.

Hit dough-in temp of 147 exactly and rested for 60 minutes.

Whirlflock and yeast nutrient added with 15 minutes to go in the boil.

Chilled down to 64°. Ended with 6 gallons of 1.070 wort. Aerated for 60 seconds with pure 02 and pitched yeast starter. After 36 hours, temp was raised 1 degree per day until 72° was reached.

12/11/2010 – Transferred to secondary. Added 1 oak stave (1 inch by 1 ½ inch by ¼ inch) that had been boiled for 10 minutes and then soaked in Makers Mark for 12 days. Secondary was moved down to the basement which was about 63°. Gravity down to 1.005.

3/6/2011 – Bourbon and oak are extremely subtle…almost non-existent. Added two more oak staves (both had been boiled) and about 1/8 cup of Makers. Moved to fridge to lager.

3/11/2011 – Added 1 more oak stave.

3/29/2011 – Taste wasn’t exactly where I wanted it, but I started carbonating to 2.4 volumes anyway knowing I would add more bourbon later.

4/10/2011 – Using an 8oz sample, I gradually dosed bourbon until the right balance was reached. After scaling this up to the full batch, I ended up adding another 12mls to the keg.

Bourbon Aged Russian Imperial Stout

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 04:08:00 +0000

Although not my favorite style in the world, a well made, nicely balanced bourbon barrel aged Russian Imperial Stout definitely holds my respect. It’s a curious style that’s captivated my interest, not only because I like how the bourbon, roast, and sweetness meld, but because the commercial offerings vary wildly and they’re often regarded by beer connoisseurs as the best in the world (currently 13 of the top 25 beers on Beer Advocate are one form of an imperial stout or another).

Last year, when we brewed our Imperial Autumn Maple, we discovered that the house yeast used by the Bruery is capable of extremely high attenuation rates (the gravity plummeted with that beer from 1.099 to 1.001). Knowing this, along with the rumor that the Bruery uses this strain to ferment out their near 20% abv RIS Black Tuesday, we decided to experiment with the yeast and see if we could come up with our own RIS… hopefully with an ABV upwards of 17%. Brewing such large beers can be a daunting task though, and, even though there are numerous accounts of how some commercial breweries choose to do so, when designing the recipe we decided to accept a few tips and forgo others.

Especially in high gravity worts, yeast is your critical factor. Most breweries who attempt to make 15% or higher ABV beers start with initial gravities around 1.100 and then continue to feed the yeast sugar throughout the secondary fermentation for three reasons: 1.) to avoid initially high osmotic pressures, 2.) to force the yeast to convert the more complex long chain dextrins before working on the simpler sugar additions, and 3.) to keep the yeast active in the increasingly toxic environment. I’d like to say that we factored all of these considerations into our design, but since we knew we were working with an extremely high attenuating strain of yeast, we decided to roll the dice, forgo the osmotic pressure issue, and brew up a starting gravity of 1.135.

As for creating easily fermentable sugars, we had a tough time deciding at what mash temperature to conduct the main saccharification rest. On one hand, we wanted a wort with as relatively simple sugars as possible so that the yeast would have an easier time chewing through them (requiring a low mash temp), but on the other, we were dealing with a yeast that had a history of completely fermenting out high gravity worts and we didn’t want to be left with a thin bodied RIS. If we mashed with too high of a temp, the yeast could have struggled with the longer chain dextrins and we might have ended up with a syrupy sweet mess. In the end, we decided that doughing in at 146 degrees and then quickly raising our HERMS temp control to 153 would work out well. With 30lbs of grain in the mash tun, raising the temp via the HERMS recirculation would not be an instant change. The grains on the top would hit 153 quickly while those on the bottom would be slower to adjust. Overall, it took about 15 minutes for the system to reach equilibrium which hopefully resulted in a good balance of simple and slightly more complex sugars.

Although we didn’t want to feed our beer up from 1.100, we did decide to make one sugar addition during primary fermentation. After a vigorous nine days of fermenting, signs of slowing started to occur. Based on experiences with the yam beer, we knew that this yeast would take about a month to slowly finish up the remaining sugars and so rather than having the highly alcoholic beer sit on the autolyzing yeast cake for the duration, we racked the beer over to mix with 1 lb of maple syrup patiently awaiting its demise in the secondary. The suspended yeast made quick work of the new sugars and within 3 hours, a small krausen had formed on the surface.

Finishing Hydrometer @ 1.024

A month later when we racked the beer into a keg for long term maturation, the gravity was down to 1.024. To simulate aging the beer in a bourbon barrel, we also added in oak staves and about 2.5 cups of Makers Mark. I’ve heard rumors that about 3% of Black Tuesday’s ABV can be attributed to remnant bourbon in the barrels, but in order to achieve that same 3% addition with our beer, we would have had to add about 11 cups of bourbon. That seems excessively high, so rather than just making the assumption, we tested different amounts in a sampling glass before scaling up to the full addition. At 6ml per ¾ cup, the flavor was just starting to make an appearance and so we decided to scale up that amount to 2.5 cups for the 5 gallon batch. In another month or so, we’ll taste test and add more as necessary. I’m expecting the beer to be able to handle probably another 2 – 3 cups and with that amount, we should finish up with a brew right around 17% abv.

Bourbon Aged Russian Imperial Stout

Recipe Specifics

----------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 6.0
Total Grain (Lbs): 30.13
Anticipated OG: 1.147
Anticipated SRM: 81.0
Anticipated IBU: 97.4
Wort Boil Time: 90

Anticipated ABV: ~16.0% before bourbon, 17%+ after

Actual ABV: 16.1% after fermentation, final TBD

Grain

---------------------------

64.3% - 20.0 lbs Maris Otter

12.9% - 4 lbs Munich Malt

5.6% - 1 ¾ lb Roasted Barley

3.2% - 1 lb Flaked Barley

3.2% - 1 lb Maple Syrup

2.4% - ¾ lb Black Patent

2.4% - ¾ lb Chocolate Malt

1.6% - ½ lb CaraMunich 40

1.6% - ½ lb Special B

0.4% - 2 oz. Dark Molasses

Hops

------

80 grams Magnum (Pellets, 12.5% AA) @ 60 minutes

Yeast

-------

Bruery house strain – cultured from a bottle of Orchard White, grown up for our batch of Exploited Belgian Pale, and then pitched directly onto yeast cake.

Water Profile and Additions

------------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle water

Mash Additions: 1.9 g/g baking soda and 0.25g/g chalk

Boil Kettle Additions: 1.0 g/g calcium chloride and 0.35 g/g Epsom salt (based on final volume of 6 gallons)

Mash Schedule

-------------------

Doughed in at 146

Immediately raised temp to 153 via HERMS, rested there for 90 minutes

15 minutes @ 168

Sparged with 172 degree H2O

Notes

-------

Brewed on 1/29/2011 with Blake

Doughed in to hit 146 as initial temp. Immediately raised temp on HLT so HERMS was recirculating at 153. With 30lbs of grain, the average temp of the mash for the first 15 minutes was probably right around 149. Mashed for 90 minutes before raising the temp to 168. After a stabilized temp was reached (30 minutes), temp was raised to 172 where we started the sparge.

Colorful foam right before the boil

Collected 8 ½ gallons of 1.126 wort. Since our boil kettle is only 10 gallons, we had to boil for an hour to reduce the volume before we could add more. At that point, we sparged another gallon of 1.065 wort.

Whirlflock, molasses, and yeast nutrient added at 15 minutes.

Chilled down to 66° and racked directly onto yeast cake. After 60 seconds of pure O2, carboy was then placed in fermentation chamber set to 66°. 11 hours later, massive blow-off was occurring. We removed the blow off hose and gave the wort an additional 30 second dose of pure O2.

2/8/2011 – Gravity down to 1.034 and there’s a bubble coming out of the blow off hose about every 2 seconds.. Taste is still very sweet and thick. Racked over to secondary with 1 lb (12 oz. by volume) of grade B maple syrup.

3/6/2011 – Gravity down to 1.024. Racked over to keg and added 2.5 cups of Makers Mark and 3 bourbon soaked oak staves (about 29 sq. in. of surface area). Will taste again in a month and add more oak and bourbon as necessary.

The body at this point has really thinned out and is just about perfect for an RIS. There’s also a lot of boozy heat though that hopefully will mellow considerably in the months to come. Although I like the mouth feel of the beer right now, the yeast really kicked off a lot of phenolics that I was not expecting. I knew that it’s a Belgian type strain, but in our Imperial Autumn Maple, you don’t pick up on it that much. With this beer, I was hoping that the roast notes would hide the phenolics a lot more than they apparently have. We might have to rename this to a Bourbon Aged Belgian Imperial Stout…

4/28/11 - Sampled beer and there was very little bourbon flavor. Added another 1 3/4 cps. This brings the AVB up to about 17.2%.

11/21/11 - Sampled beer again and it's amazing how the Belgian character has faded...it's nearly gone. The bourbon and oak character still was below where I wanted it, so I added 0.6 oz (19 cubes) of American heavy toast oak and 12 oz. of Maker's Mark.

Exploited Belgian Pale Tasting

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 01:56:00 +0000

Normally when I’m brewing with an element that I haven’t used before (a strain of yeast, a new adjunct or specialty malt, etc), I try to find out as much info as I can about other brewers’ past experiences with it. With this Belgian pale ale though, we were experimenting with a cultured strain of yeast from the Bruery where such information was basically non-existent. Overall, I think it turned out alright though. It’s not necessarily my favorite beer, but the flavors are enjoyable and the balance between sweet, bitter, and spice are just about spot on. It’ll be great in the warmer months of summer and I’ll look forward to revisiting it again then.

Appearance – Very clear with a color somewhere between a dark golden and amber. The thick, white, rocky head faded relatively quickly, but the mild foamy bubbles stayed on the surface and clung to the glass through the last sip.

Aroma – Solid malt nose and toasted grain with a bit more clove and spice than I was expecting. No hop aroma whatsoever.

Taste – I’m getting a lot of grainy/biscuity malt at first, bordering on too much for my own preference. Next time, if I were to brew this recipe again, I think I’d cut the biscuit addition in half. There is a nice sweetness up front that I like with this style, but it’s not over the top and it’s balanced well with a clean, smooth bitterness on the finish. I like the spicy yeast phenolics, but for a pale, they might be accentuated a bit too much. Although it’s very, very mild, I’m also picking up a slight orange fruitiness.

Mouthfeel – Even with such a low final gravity, this beer had a nice medium body. No alcohol warmth and carbonation is about medium. I’d probably like a touch more, but it’s not at the point where it’s noticeably low.

Drinkability and notes – Overall, I think it’s a nicely balanced beer with a lot of great flavor for the alcohol content. It’s not perfect by any means, and there are things that I would change for next time (reduction of biscuit, possibly lower fermentation temp, etc). That said, I like that it has a lot of the flavors that you typically associate with the higher alcohol blonde Belgian ales, yet is lower in abv and lighter on the sweetness. It’ll be a great sessionable beer for a hot summer day.

The Exploited Belgian Pale

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 02:29:00 +0000

During the fall of ’09, our attempt at cloning the Bruery’s Autumn Maple led us to an interesting discovery: whatever yeast they use is a complete ass kicker and unlike any other commercial strain we’ve played around with before. The beer started out with an original gravity somewhere in the ballpark of 1.100 and after a month-long fermentation, it finished at an astonishingly low 1.001. Not only was it impressive that the strain could chew through so much sugar regardless of the increasing alcohol content, but the beer itself still retained a decent amount of body without being overly thick or chewy. It’s an incredible strain and one that we’ve wanted to play around with ever since.

Fast forward a year later and we’re at it again. Whether or not the Bruery uses their house strain to ferment out their near 20% abv RIS Black Tuesday, we decided that this would be a great style to inoculate with their strain to test out its limits. With the relative ease that the yeast converted our autumn maple wort into a 13% abv beer, I’m confident that we’ll end up with a stout upwards of 16%. In order to produce such a beer however, we’ll need a massive amount of yeast at pitching time.

According to the pitching rate calculator on Mr. Malty.com, a beer with an OG of 1.135 would need about 441 billion cells of yeast to complete fermentation. Since we’re playing around with yeast harvested from the dregs of a bottle, stepping up a starter to achieve that amount of cells would not only require about 1 ½ - 2 gallons of starter wort, but it would also be risky since at each step-up period we’d open up an opportunity to unintentionally introduce a spoiler organism. Rather than taking that long and risky route, we decided to build up a starter until we had just enough yeast to ferment 5 gallons of 1.050 wort and then later use the yeast cake from said beer for the big RIS experiment.

Although the spices and high alcohol content of our autumn maple clone somewhat masked the flavors from the Bruery’s yeast, it is a Belgian strain that does produce a moderate amount of phenols. With this being the case, it only seemed appropriate that, for the purpose of this cell development beer, we brew a simple Belgian Pale in order to let the flavors of the yeast shine through and be a star for a brief moment in time.

The Exploited Belgian Pale Ale

Recipe Specifics

----------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 6.0
Total Grain (Lbs): 10.0
Anticipated OG: 1.050
Anticipated SRM: 6.7
Anticipated IBU: 23.2
Wort Boil Time: 90

Anticipated ABV: 6.4%

Actual ABV: 6.0%

Grain

---------------------------

77.5% - 7.75lbs German Pilsner

10.0% - 1.0 lbs CaraVienne Malt

5.0% - ½ lb Flaked Oats

5.0% - ½ lb Biscuit Malt

2.5% - ¼ lb Aromatic Malt

Hops

------

30 grams Czech Saaz (Pellets, 5.0% AA) @ 60 minutes

10 grams Czech Saaz (Pellets, 5.0% AA) @ 10 minutes

Yeast

-------

Bruery house strain – cultured from a bottle of Orchard White

Water Profile and Additions

------------------------------------

Charcoal filtered Seattle water

Mash Additions: 0.5g/g gypsum, 0.5g/g calcium chloride + 2ml Lactic acid

Boil Kettle Additions: 0.4 g/g gypsum, 0.4 g/g calcium chloride, 0.5 g/g Epsom salt, 0.3 g/g salt (based on final volume of 6 gallons)

Mash Schedule

-------------------

60 minutes @ 152

15 minutes @ 168

Sparge with 172 degree H2O

Notes

-------

Brewed on 1/15/2011 with Blake

1/8/2011 – Used an inoculating needle to grab a few cells from a slant of Orchard White yeast that was plated back in October of 2010. Cells were mixed with 10ml of 1.035 worth. Once fermentation started, I added another 10ml and then 24 hours later, another 20ml. 24 hours after that, I stepped it up to 50ml, then 250 ml, 1000ml, and eventually, 2000ml. All steps had about 24hrs in between. Starter was placed in fridge about 24hrs before pitching.

1/15/2011 – With the known high attenuation rate of the yeast, we increased the amount of CaraVienne to 10% in order to prevent the beer from seeming completely dried out.

Mashed at 152 for 60 minutes.

Efficiency was higher than anticipated and we collected 5 gallons of 1.060 wort (added 2.5 gallons of filtered water so that after a 90 minute boil, we’d end up with 6 gallons of 1.050 wort).

Whirlflock and yeast nutrient added at 15 minutes.

Chilled to and pitched decanted yeast at 64°. After 60 seconds of pure O2, carboy was then placed in fermentation chamber set to 66°. After 48 hours, temp was raised 1 degree per 24 hrs until 70° was reached. Held at 70° for the duration (6 more days).

1/27/2011 – Gravity down to 1.004. Crash cooled.

1/29/2011 – Kegged and carbonated.

2/27/2011 - First Tasting