The Mad Fermentationist

Brewing Sour Beer at Home

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:23:00 +0000

After almost three years of blogging about sour beer (among other things fermentational) I think most of what I have learned about brewing them at home is buried somewhere in the roughly 250 posts on this site. That said there isn't anywhere on the blog where the bulk of my opinions and experiences have been coalesced for easy reference. I did put up a lengthy post about Brettanomyces a year or so ago, but that covered just one aspect of sour beer production.

What follows is essentially based solely on my experiences, so I won’t talk too much about things I do not have first hand experience with (like biology, pH levels, traditional practices etc…). Enjoy the data dump and please let me know if I failed to cover any topics that you think should be covered here.

Base beer (brewday): In brewing sour beers and tasting many those made by the great number of American craft and homebrewers now trying their hand at it I have realized that you really don’t need to do anything special on brewday. Pretty much any well made base beer can serve as the foundation of a sour beer. The only beers to avoid souring are those that are aggressively bitter/roasty/spiced because these flavors will be exaggerated by the low finishing gravity of a sour beer.

I have brewed and tasted good sour beers based on numerous classic style, including: English Brown/Mild, Porter, Wee Heavy, Imperial Stout, Wit, Belgian Pale, Saison, Biere de Garde, Belgian Blonde, Dubbel, Tripel, Quad (Belgian Strong Dark), Gruit, and Old Ale. Not to mention the classic sour styles, Berliner Weisse, Lambic/Gueuze, Flanders Red, and Oud Bruin.

Completely off-style brewing is welcome for sour beers as well, but in general you want to make a beer with a reasonably high final gravity (to feed the microbes) and low hop aroma (hops will fade and oxidize over the long secondary fermentation). Some of the more out-there beers I have soured include: Honey-Peach Wheat, Orange-Rosemary Dark Saison, a blend of Saison and Biere de Garde, Bourbon Barrel Wee Heavy, Butternut Squash Brown, and Cherry Quadrupel. Not every idea is going to work out perfectly, but there are many sour beers out there to be made that aren’t found in the style guidelines.

You can use the same basic techniques during the mash/sparge/boil that you would for any other style; you don't need special procedures unless you are trying to replicate a classic/historic style (turbid mash for a lambic, no/short boil for a Berliner Weisse etc…). The only thing I would suggest in general is to try to mash a bit hotter than you would otherwise to ensure that there is plenty of residual extract left for the other microbes to chew on after the Saccharomyces is finished.

I have not found aged hops to be a necessity for any sour beers including inoculated-lambics. Since you are adding the microbes yourself you do not need to worry about protecting the beer from wild invaders as lambic brewers must when they are slowly cooling their wort in a coolship, exposed to the microbe-laden air. If you are looking to do a spontaneous/ambient fermentation then aging hops is something you should look into (several years before brewing...).

I do not do much with the water for my sour beers. Just enough to control the mash pH if need be. I do not see a need to mess around with the flavor ions (chloride, sodium, sulfate) in a beer that is already so complex.

Types of Microbes (bugs): Just like a regular beer brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces) is responsible for most of the alcohol production. The following microbes are responsible for the bulk of the souring/funking after that:

Brettanomyces (Brett) – The king of wild yeasts in the brewing world. It helps to breakdown dextrins (chains of sugars too long for Saccharomyces to ferment) and can add a wide range of characteristic esters and phenols to sour beers. These can range from nice ones like pineapple, apple, and pear; through ones that may or may not be appreciated like horse blanket and farmhouse/barnyard; to the vile smoky, Band-Aid, and fecal batch ruiners. These flavors depend mostly on the strain of Brett, but are also influenced by the types of acids and alcohols available.

Pediococcus (Pedio) – Produces most of the lactic acid in most sour beers. It often takes several months to really get working. Certainly strains can cause your beer to become “sick,” that is to become very viscous for a period of time (this has only happened once to me, but it passed after a couple months leaving a nicely sour beer). It can make your beer taste buttery for a time as well, but the Brett will clean this up in time (never use Pedio without Brett). Pedio also plays a role is the production of some traditional sausages.

Lactobacillus (Lacto) – The only time lacto plays a big role is in Berliner Weisses, the rest of the time the IBUs are high enough to keep it at bay (>8 IBU). It can sour a beer faster than edio, and is also the dominant player in yogurt production.

Acetobacter – Generally its role is kept to a minimum. It needs oxygen to convert the ethanol (alcohol) into acetic acid (vinegar). That should be some good motivation to keep your airlocks full and your barrels topped off. You can always add a bit of acetic character by adding some vinegar at bottling.

There are plenty of other minor microbial players (particularly in spontaneous fermentation), check out Wild Brews for a more comprehensive listing and descriptions of them all.

I like to use a combination of commercial cultures and bottle dregs (the fresher the better). In general it seems like the cultures sold by Wyeast and White Labs are less aggressive than those from bottle dregs, but they serve as a good base since you can't be sure what you are getting out of a bottle. Getting a wild range of microbes into your beer will give you a better chance at a balanced character and a relatively quick aging period.

Sanitation: These days I keep a second set of post-boil plastic (tubing, auto-siphon, bottling wand, bottling bucket, and thief) for my sour beers. There is no need to have a separate mash tun, boil kettle, wort chiller, or anything else that touches the wort when it is still hot. I do use the same pool of Better Bottles for fermentation and glass bottles for storage for all of my beers.

I clean all of my equipment with a long soak in hot tap water and Oxyclean Free. Once it is completely free of visible debris I rinse it in hot water, then soak it in cold water and either Iodophor or Star-San (I alternate them to keep the microbes well behaved). I have had two infected batches over the five years I have been homebrewing, but these may or may not have been the result of sour beers (the first one probably was, but I suspect the second one was not).

There is no reason to segregate your fermenters into different areas during fermentation/aging. I have my clean and funky beers on different sides of the same room just to ensure I don’t disturb the sours while I am moving the clean beers around.

Inoculation: I have gotten the best results adding all of the microbes at the start of the fermentation together with the primary Saccharomyces strain. I don’t generally make a starter for the bugs unless I am using pure cultures (for something like a 100% Brett beer). This is because the different microbes have different required conditions for growth. Yeast strains (including Brett) need oxygen, Pedio on the other hand can’t deal with oxygen. pH can also be an issue since the acid produced for bacteria can damage yeast cells (remember this when considering waiting to pitch a primary yeast to give the bacteria a head start).

Pretty much any standard yeast will do for primary fermentation. I have made great sour beers with American/English/Scottish/Belgian Ale, German Lager, and Saison strains. Some character from the primary yeast may remain in the finished beer, but most of the esters will be destroyed by the various other microbes (primarily Brettanomyces) over the long secondary fermentation. The biggest impact the primary yeast will have on the finished beer is the attenuation level (low attenuating strains will leave more sugars for the other microbes leading to beers with more sourness and funk).

I have not gotten enough sourness by doing a clean fermentation followed by microbes in secondary. This seems to work in barrels where the bugs are receiving some oxygen through the wood, but in a carboy the resulting beer generally lacks the sour assault that I crave. Adding microbes after primary fermentation is a fine idea if you just want some funk because Brett seems to be able to produce esters without a lot of gravity change.

I usually rack sour beers on the same sort of schedule I would a regular ale. I wait until primary fermentation is mostly complete and a good deal of the yeast/trub has settled out (2-3 weeks). Then I rack to a Better Bottle (or barrel), add the oak (if any), and slap on a stopper and airlock. Not much more to it than that.

If after 6 months or so the beer still has not shown any signs of souring I will often add the dregs from a few more bottles or sour beers to try to kick things off. As a last resort I may also add some malt extract to feed the microbes.

I would save ambient fermentation for after you get a good number of sours going. I have not tried it, so for the time being I don’t have much to say about it except that it is riskier than pitching known cultures either from a lab or bottle dregs. Even the best lambic breweries blend most of their barrels to reduce variability, if you try an ambient fermentation try to get several going so you have some blending options.

You can and should repitch yeast cakes from sour beers. Each time you repitch you will get more funk and sourness because the bacteria will grow faster than the yeast. It does not have a huge batch to batch impact in my experience, but it is something you will notice if you do for multiple batches. I generally only repitch 1-2 times, but that is more because I only generally want to do some non-sours as well. I have a friend who has been repitching and saving the same mixed culture for years without any problem.

Wood/Oak: A classic component of sour beers is the wood (almost always oak) barrel. Ideally you would get a group of friends (or a big enough system) and brew enough to fill an entire used commercial barrel (50-60 gallons). Used wine and bourbon barrels are relatively cheap and easy to find (generally for around $100). While this may seem like a lot of beer and effort, in my experiences using full sized barrels can create sour beers with flavors that are simply not possible in any other way.

However I realize that this is not an option for everyone on every batch (including me). You should also consider:

Small barrel – I have not used these, but for better or worse they will let in proportionally more oxygen and lose more beer than a large barrel due to their higher surface area to volume ratio and thinner staves. The smaller the barrel the more this will be a concern.

Oak cubes/chips – Cubes/beans are your best bet because they take longer to give up their flavor due to their lower surface area. Around an ounce of cubes is a good place to start for a mild oak flavor. I boil them for about 10 minutes to removes some of the harsh fresh oak flavors that are usually stripped out by whatever is in the barrel before the beer. Sour beer can be pretty delicate and thin and it can be easily overwhelmed by harsh tannins or oak flavors. You can always add more after a few months if you want more oak character.

If you want to mimic wine/bourbon/port/brandy barrel aging you beer just soak the cubes in the alcohol before adding them to the beer (adding some of the alcohol of choice straight to the beer can also help boost this character). In general wine pairs best with sour beers, but a spirit can work well with bigger/bolder sours.

Wooden dowel, chair leg, peg - I played around with these for awhile, but never got results I couldn’t replicate with cubes. In my experience this setup can cause problems due to pressure build-up and cracked carboy necks due to the wood swelling. You can get around some of these problems by putting the oak through a stopper, but so far I haven't tasted a beer to make me think it is worth the effort.

Aging Vessel: If you aren't going to go with a barrel, there are several options to consider when deciding what vessel you want to age your sour beer in. Since the beer will age for so much longer than a standard beer things that wouldn't matter otherwise like the amount of oxygen that can diffuse through the material start to matter.

Better Bottle - What I use because they don't have the risk of breaking that glass carboys do. I also like the wider opening for getting fruit or hops in/out. They may let a negligible amount of oxygen in, but opening the stopper once will let more in than months of aging.

Glass Carboy - Just make sure you don't break one full of year old sour beer. The big advantage of these is that no oxygen can get in and they are easy to sanitize.

Bucket - I have yet to try aging a sour beer in one, but my friends who have do not seem to be getting objectionably acetic results as some people suggest (due to their high oxygen permeability). It may depend on things like temperature and specific microbe varieties. I also don't like the fact that you have to open them to look at the beer.

Conical/Keg - I don't use either, but the advantage of stainless is that like glass it is easy to sanitize and impervious to oxygen. If I had the money for a conical I probably wouldn't tie it up for several years with beer. A keg on the other hand seems like a fine place to do your sour beer fermenting if that is something you are interested in if you don't mind the obstructed view.

Aging: The longer you can age a sour beer in the fermenter the better, as they will almost always improve for a couple years. A moderate temperature is best in my experience (anywhere from the low 60s up into the 70s). A higher temperature will encourage more rapid souring, while a lower temperature will lead to a more balanced (less aggressive) beer.

A pellicle is a sign that there is oxygen in the head-space more than anything else. I have had fantastically sour/funky beers that never grew more than a light skin, and terrible beers that grew huge pellicles because too much oxygen was getting in. In general it is not something I would worry about too much either way (unless you are trying to brew a clean beer).

Just like any other beer you are best off aging sour beers where they get as little light as possible (I generally just use the boxes they come in or a pillow case with a hole cut to let the airlock through). It is also nice if you can keep them somewhere out of the way so they are out of sight and out of mind, making it easier to wait for them to age.

Fruit: Pretty much any fruit can work in the right sour beer. That said berries (sour cherry, raspberry) and stone fruits (apricot, peach) are the classics. They have a good balance of acidity, sweetness, and flavor. For the most part I like getting fresh fruit from the farmer’s market, but whatever is the most cost effective and tasty for you will work. For small fruits/berries I simply freeze them (which breaks their cell walls) until I am ready to add them to the beer. I let them defrost in a fermenter before racking the beer onto them. For larger fruits I will generally slice them up, then either freeze them or give them a bit of a muddle with an auto-siphon before racking a beer onto them.

In addition to adding a distinct flavor, fruit adds sugar, and acids as well. Most of the sugars added by the fruit are eaten by the bugs and critters which in turn cause them to produce more acidity and boost the production of other flavorful byproducts. The acids add a different character to the sourness since they are either malic or citric, both of which are a bit sharper than the lactic acid produced by the microbes in beer (malolactic bacteria will convert malic to lactic acid, so that is something to consider if you do not like the acid character of a fruited sour beer). In addition to their main constituents fruit also adds anti-oxidants, that’s right the same compounds that help prevent damage to your DNA from free-radicals also prevents oxygen molecules from creating off-flavors in your beer as it ages.

The acid of the beer really helps to make the fruitiness pop in a way that most "clean" fruit beers do not. The actual amount of fruit you need will depend on the variety of fruit, quality/freshness, base beer, and amount of fruit flavor you are aiming for. In general .5 lbs per gallon is the low end (good for assertive fruits like raspberry), and 2.5 lbs/gal is the high end for more subtle fruits, or if you have a bigger/darker base beer.

You will not get a sweet-fruity sour beer unless you kill the yeast and bacteria present using heat/chemicals/filtration before adding the fruit (this is what Lindemans does to make their lambics). If this seems too difficult you can add fruit juice to a plain sour beer in the glass (this is a good way to soften the beer for people who do not like something so dry and sour).

I generally like splitting a batch leaving half plain and adding fruit to the rest. This way I get two beers for the effort of one. It also makes for some interesting comparisons. Sometimes I like the fruited half more, other times the plain portion does it for me. I usually wait for at least six months before adding fruit, this gives me a chance to taste the beer and see which fruit I think would work well with it and it give the bugs a chance to get established so they are the ones fermenting the fruit sugars and not the primary yeast.

Bottling: Before bottling I wait until airlock activity has ceased, the gravity has not changed in at least a month, and the flavor is where I want it. I have never had an issue bottling while my beers still have a pellicle, but it can be an indication that something is going on. I would also be cautious bottling any sour beer with a gravity over 1.010 (unless it has a high ABV, or had other extenuating circumstances).

I generally reyeast with wine or neutral ale yeast at bottling. 2 grams of dry yeast rehydrated in 90-100 degree water is my standard rate for 5 gallons, but a little extra won't hurt anything. This ensures timely carbonation and not much change in flavor immediately after bottling. I generally use cane/beet/table/white sugar, it is cheap, effective, and doesn’t impart a flavor of its own. Candi and corn sugars are also fine choices, but tend to be a bit more expensive. I try to avoid using any variable agricultural products for priming like honey, maple syrup, or malt extract since it adds some guesswork (particularly when you are talking about a multiple microbe culture).

Some sour beers, particularly those aged in wood barrels or with the oak dowel/peg can be completely flat at bottling time. This is different than the usually assumed .5-.8 volumes of CO2 most priming calculators assume the beer is holding onto. As a result if you beer tastes wine flat you should consider adding some extra priming sugar (or be willing to accept a lower carbonation level than the your calculations might predict).

The carbonation level is up to you. Higher carbonation tends to increase the sense of acidity (dissolved carbon dioxide is carbonic acid) and give you the impression of body in very thin beers. In general I aim for moderate-low carbonation, but that is the way I like most of my beers. In the end it is just about what you think would taste good for your beer.

In my pale sour beers (especially those with wheat) I often get an odd cereal/cheerio finish for a few months after bottling that wasn’t there in the bottling bucket. It fades with time, but it is annoying while it lasts. In general if a sour beer doesn’t taste good give it more time (recently the brewer at Bullfrog Brewery told me how terrible his Gold Medal winning Beekeeper Honey Sour Saison was for several years, to the point he considered it lost, before it turned the corner).

Once the beer is bottled it will age like any other. Lower temps will slow aging, while higher temps will produce faster changes in the flavor. It is worth hanging onto bottles for many years. Most of my sours seem to be getting better and better as time goes on, some are now at nearly three years in the bottle.

General Tips: Be patient. Try to avoid taking samples too often, it introduces oxygen and steals good beer from your future self.

Get a new sour beer going every few months to build up a pipeline if you can. It is easy to look forward a few months to the next beer that will be ready, but it will drive you insane thinking about the fact that the beer you just brewed won't be ready to drink for at least a year. If you have a big enough system it just steal 5 gallons (or even less if you have some smaller fermenters) of wort now and then to sour. Having plenty of beers souring also opens up the world of blending (which pretty much every good production sour brewery does) when you have multiple batches ready around the same time.

Don’t skimp on ingredients. Spending a bit more now is worth it in the end, especially when you are investing such a huge amount of time/effort/thought into a beer. This is especially true of things like fruit, spices, and sugars, go to places that specialize in the ingredient, Ethnic Markets, Spice Shops, Farmer's Markets etc...

Make friends with other homebrewers interested in sours, particularly those who live near you. Try their beers and have them try yours, some of the best sours I have had have been fermented in the basements and closets of other homebrewers.

Try as many commercial sour beers (for inspiration and microbes) as you can and ask questions of any commercial brewer who makes sours you enjoy. Most of them are very passionate and happy to help an equally passionate homebrewer. Asking about technique rather than recipes will generally get you more useful information.

Take as many notes on your beers as you can. These will help you to avoid mistakes or recreate successes in the future. With sour beers your technique evolves slowly since the feedback loop takes years instead of weeks like clean beers. My sours have steadily gotten better, but I still have beers aging that I made mistakes (or miscalculations) on that I have fixed in more recent batches.

If you want a hoppy sour beer, go with dry hops right before bottling (or in the bottle or keg). This will give you the mature acid/ester profile with the fresh hop kick.

Sour Beer Links:

A Liddil Lambic Lesson: The Cult of the Biohazard Lambic Brewer Jamil Show

Brewery Rodenbach: Brewing Sour Ales

Brewing Sour Beers at Home Using Traditional & Alternative Methods

How to Make Sour Ale: an inquiry

The Jamil Show

The Homebbbrew Board

Brettanomyces Masters Project

Please post any additional suggestions/tips that you have discovered for brewing sour beers at home.

Which clear/white sugar works the best in pale Belgian beers?

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:27:00 +0000

Starting with the publication of Brew Like a Monk a few years back there seems to have been a shift in the way American homebrewers view the use of sugar specifically, and adjuncts in general in their beer. There was a time when it was assumed that adding any sugar to your beer was a betrayal of the principles that the home and craft brewing revolutions were founded upon (and a good way to make it taste cidery). Almost everyone now sees the value in using flavorful sugars like dark candi syrup, unrefined sugars, and sugars derived from things like dates, cacti, and palms. In addition many people even see the value of using a refined sugar to thin out the body of a high gravity (particularly Belgian) beer.

After doing two rounds of experiments with the more interesting sugars the question remains, which of the many plain/white/clear sugars available makes for the best beer? Most of the result will be determined not on the actual flavor of the sugar (pretty much every last molecule of each will be converted to ethanol by the yeast), but on the byproducts the yeast produce while fermenting.

Here is what visitors to this site thought about the question:

They all work fine - 44%
Clear Candi Syrup - 14%

Clear Candi Rocks - 12%

Cane/Beet/White/Table Sugar - 9%

Corn Sugar - 5%

Better to leave them out - 3%

I am planning on doing a third in my series of Belgian sugar experiments in the next few weeks using just those sugars. I'm not sure how it will turn out, but I suspect there will be some subtle differences between the batches. More details on the methodology and of course results to come in future posts.

Sour Cider

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:01:00 +0000

After good luck with a relatively straight forward cider last year it seemed like it was time for me to give a cider with some funk a shot (I am the Mad Fermentationist, right?). Some traditional apple ciders do have a bit of a wild yeast character because they were made from unpasteurized apples (the peel of most fruit are covered in sugar loving microbes), and if it doesn't work out I'm sure I could put 5 gallons of apple cider vinegar to good use...

As always hard cider is one of the easiest things to ferment at home. Just dump the cider into a carboy, add some pectic enzyme (I've used 1/2 tsp per gallon in the past, but this time backed it down to 1/4 tsp to see if I could still get a crystal clear finished cider), and pitch the yeast about an hour or two later.

In this case though instead of a clean cider/ale/wine strain, I used some of the slurry from the Wine Barrel Flanders Red (it started out life as Wyeast Roeselare Blend and Lost Abbey Red Poppy dregs ~18 months ago, but I have no idea exactly what is in there now). When fermentation didn't appear to have started after 48 hours I decided to pitch some hefeweizen yeast left over from my Weizenbock. Hefeweizen yeast may seem like a strange choice, but it is a somewhat popular choice these days. The idea is that the fruit esters will boost the aroma of the cider, and you won't get much clove spice because apples lack the precursor needed for the yeast to produce it.

My concern with the general concept of a sour cider is that the sourness will seem too aggressive since cider ends up so dry. That said, because cider is so easily fermented there may not be that much residual sugar for the bugs to eat. Sour beers are generally brewed to have lots of complex sugars that the primary yeast strain can't ferment, but cider can easily get down close to 1.000 even with a regular ale yeast. We'll see how it turns out, if it ends up too sour I may blend it with a malty ale for further aging (New Glarus Apple Ale is the only similar beer I am aware of).

I probably won't really know the results of this one until next fall, but I'd love to know if anyone out there has tried something similar.

Sour Cider

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 5.00
Anticipated OG: 1.048
Anticipated SRM: 6.2

Juice
-----
5 Gallons Pasteurized Kime's Cider

Extras
------
1.25 Tsp Pectic Enzyme

Yeast
-----
Flanders Red Slurry
WLP 300 Hefeweizen Ale Yeast

Notes
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"Brewed" 10/25/09 with Audrey

Added 1/4 tsp of pectic enzyme to each gallon jug about 2 hours before pitching yeast.

Pitched 16 oz of slurry from the wine barrel Flanders red.

10/27/09 Not much activity, so I added ~8 oz of slurry from my Weizenbock. Good fermentation after 12 more hours.

The Bottle: Wine Barrel Flanders Red

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:32:00 +0000

Saturday the DC Barrel Guys got together to bottle our first sour beer, the Wine Barrel Flanders Red we racked into the barrel last November. The year had been good to the beer, after a brief period of sickness (the pediococcus getting moving) the beer has developed a bright acidity, and huge fruit (cherry) and oak complexities (look for a full review in a couple weeks once it carbonates.) Of course I forgot to bring my camera, so I don't have any pictures from the actual event, but I am sure Dan (City Brewer) and Nathan (Des Jardin) will post some pictures and their own takes on the day soon.

We debated the amount of priming sugar for a long time. Originally we were working on the assumption that the beer would be wine flat, based on this quote from Vinnie Cilurzo (BYO Jan/Feb 2008) "Remember that if you are bottle conditioning, you'll need to add more sugar than normal, probably 1 cup of sugar per 5 gallons (19 L). This is because the beer has lost all of its CO2 during barrel aging. It is as still as wine when it comes out of the barrel." The beer tasted a bit carbonated though, so we decided to hold back on the sugar a bit, 149 g of corn sugar per 4 gallon batch was decided to be a good compromise (adding 2.45 volumes of CO2 to the beer). We also added some rehydrated champagne yeast to each bucket (20 grams total) to ensure timely bottle conditioning.

We needed to find a way to get the beer out of the bottom of the barrel without lifting it or disturbing the sediment. Noah rigged up his march pump with a 90 degree turned pickup in the barrel. It worked perfectly as we pumped 33.2 lbs of beer into bottling buckets set on Tim's postal scale (easier to divide the beer for priming purposes than volume.) This was the step I was most concerned about, but it gave us no problems.

Noah (Redcar) took a time-lapse video of the barrel emptying/filling, one shot every 15 seconds. Not that you'll be able to pick up too much of our technique, but it is a fun 1:43 (not sure who we should blame for the bucket halfway through).

Overall the day was surprisingly quick and smooth. With that many people we were able to run three bottling stations at a time. From the time we started emptying the barrels to the time all the beer was in (~350) bottles and 20 gallons in carboys and kegs it only took 2.5 hours (and that was with some delicious beer samples from our BrewLocal tour of Bullfrog Brewing and Selin's Grove, and some excellent fried eggplant pizza from Pete's Apizza in Columbia Heights where Dan works).

I took half of my 8 gallon share in bottles (everyone who took bottles got 1.5 cases of 12 oz bottles, and six 22 bombers). Not a bad return on a 5 gallon investment.

I also took a six-pack of my share and added some bottle hops. I was inspired by a bottle of El Rojo Diablo from Bullfrog (a sour red dry-hopped with Amarillo). I decided to go with a combination of Amarillo, Simcoe, and homegrown Cascade (about one hop cone of each), I thought the citrusy character would match well with the acidity. New Belgium does something similar as well with their La Folie to make La Terroir.

My other 4 gallons was racked onto 2 lbs of sour cherries I bought at the local farmers market and froze back in July. In addition to boosting the cherry character of the base beer it should renew fermentation, boosting the funk and acidity. I'll probably let it age another 3-4 months before putting it into bottles.

After three hours of bottling we still had the task of racking the next beer (Sour Single) into the same barrel. We did not clean out the barrel, but we did suck out all but ~1 qrt of the slurry (for use in other batches). 20 gallons of the Single had stopped fermenting around 1.020, 10 had just been brewed in the last 36 hours, and 25 gallons had fermented out completely 1.006-1.012. The resulting blend was around 1.030, lots of residual sweetness, but that will be gone pretty quickly (the airlock was starting to bubble just a couple hours after we finished). This beer will probably stay in the barrel until this time next year.

The Barrel Aged Wee Heavy is also coming along nicely. It has a nice bold acidity, but without much funk. It has a solid barrel/oak character, but not too much bourbon character. Hopefully it will be ready to bottle in the next few months, an Imperial Porter is the leading candidate for the next beer into that barrel.

Weizenbock Recipe

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:00:00 +0000

With a yeast cake of White Labs 300, Hefeweizen Ale Yeast, left over from my Extract Hefeweizen sitting in my fridge I wanted to brew something with it. I considered doing a Dunkleweizen (Dark German Wheat) or a Roggenbier (German Rye), but with cold winter weather approaching I decided to step it up and do to my first Weizenbock. This is a rich, generally dark, wheat ale typified by Schneider Aventinus. Rather than having the big banana character of a Hefeweizen, Weizenbock has a more complex fruit character with banana mingled with dark fruit and a firm Bock-ish Munich maltiness.

I decided to go with a pretty moderate gravity for this batch (1.075), I wanted it to be big and flavorful, but not so big that I couldn't enjoy a pint on a weeknight. In general I like beers in this middle range (6.5%-8.5% ABV) sitting between session ales and the big monster alcohol bombs.

For most of the malt I went with a pretty standard mix of dark Munich, Vienna, and wheat malt. Instead of adding pilsener malt for the rest of the base I added some Marris Otter, which will add a bit more depth of maltiness that I don't get from pils in such a rich beer. I also added some Simpsons Extra Dark Crystal which added a wonderful character to the lagered Wheat Tripleboc k I brewed last fall. It adds a nice combination of dark fruit with just a hint of coffee, as well as some nice color. I went a bit lighter on it than I did in the Triplebock because this is a lighter beer that I want to be easier drinking.

I kept the fermentation pretty cool (58-60 ambient) to ensure that this beer turns out pretty moderate in terms of alcohol and ester character. After fermentation finished I gave the beer some time at 45 to allow the yeast to drop out and the flavors to meld.

Weizenator

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 4.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 11.63
Anticipated OG: 1.075
Anticipated SRM: 17.2
Anticipated IBU: 20.6
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70 %
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Grain
------
6.00 lbs. German Wheat Malt
3.00 lbs. German Dark Munich Malt
1.50 lbs. Maris Otter
0.63 lbs. German Vienna Malt
0.50 lbs. Simpsons Extra Dark Crystal (~155L)

Hops
-----
1.75 oz. Czech Saaz (Pellet @ 3.10% AA) 45 min.

Extras
-------
0.25 Tsp Yeast Nutrient @ 13 Min.
0.50 Whirlfloc @ 13 Min.

Yeast
-----
White Labs WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale

Water Profile
-------------
Profile: Washington DC

Mash Schedule
-------------
Sacch Rest 60 min @ 152

Notes
-----
Yeast cake saved from extract weizen when it was racked to the keg 9/25/09

Brewed 10/03/09 By myself.

Fly sparge. Collected 6 gallons of 1.055 wort. Added 1/4 tsp of CaCl to the runoff to drop the pH and ensure a good hot break.

1 Year old hop pellets reduced from 3.5% AA.

Cooled down to ~70, put into 58 degree fridge.

Pitched after ~4 hours with 60 seconds of pure O2. Good fermentation by 8 hours.

Good hard fermentation, a bit of blowoff after 2-3 days.

10/05/09 Upped temp to 60 to help it finish.

10/14/09 Dropped temp to 45 to help clear.

10/25/09 Still pretty hazy, balanced fruit character, some caramel. Down to 1.016 (79% AA, 7.8% ABV)

10/27/09 Racked to a three gallon secondary. Took out of fridge, left at basement temp.

Adam Clone First Tasting

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:38:00 +0000

With the cold weather arriving in DC early (I already saw my first snow of the year a couple days ago in Williamsport PA) I thought it was time to dip into my stash of big beers for this review. Six months ago I brewed a clone of Hair of the Dog Adam, a terrific, but uncategorizable dark ale with a kick of peat smoked malt. For more details on the recipe and beer check out my initial post on the brew.

The carbonation still hasn't shown up in this one, but it has enough residual sweetness and body to still be tasty. That is something my liquor spiked barleywine (which finished a few points lower) was not able to handle (incidentally the carbonation is finally coming along on that one).

Adam Clone - 10/19/09

Appearance – Dark, dark, dark brown... ok black. Clear when held at a steep enough angle to gaze through the otherwise opaque body. Thin, coarse, tan head. Despite the lack of carbonation it has decent head retention.

Smell – A combination of coffee and earthy peat malt take the lead. The smoked character is very well integrated into the rich caramel malt. Certainly some alcohol, but I wouldn't call it hot. Nice dark fruit character as well, prunes in particular.

Taste – Well balanced, thick maltiness balanced by bitterness from both the hops and the dark malt/smoke. The smoke and coffee/chocolate/biscuit malt notes blend perfectly. The hops are not as potent as the 65 IBUs might suggest, but that may be a result of the clean Galena and Super Styrians used for bittering. Not much hop aroma is left from the Tettnanger addition at 10 minutes. A clean ethanol bite, not too surprising from a ~10% ABV at cellar temp ~60 F.

Mouthfeel – Rich and full, honestly it has enough body to hold up without carbonation, but it still would be better with some fizz.

Drinkability & Notes – I'm really pleased with this one, but at 5 months in the bottle it will probably take some additional yeast to get any carbonation. I think the original Adam is a smokier beer, so if you are looking for a true clone I would up the amount to what was originally called for, but it is great as is. Not much I would change if I brewed it again, but the sample of Cherry Adam from the Wood I had a month back was enough to convince me that cherries (subtle) and bourbon soaked oak would be a good addition to this one.

Extract Weizen and Single Tasting

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:01:00 +0000

After a few weeks under pressure in the kegs my first two "return to extract brewing" experiments are ready to taste. Both of them turned out well, clean (no mythical extract twang) and surprisingly pale.

If you are an all-grain brewer I'd suggest giving an extract batch a shot if you are short on time some day. You may not have quite as much control as you are used to, and it may cost a bit extract, but it can certainly produce excellent results.

Extract Hefeweizen

Appearance – Slightly hazy golden-orange body. Certainly lighter in color than most people think an extract beer can be, and certainly no darker than my decocted all-grain hefeweizen (if anything it might be a bit lighter). Nice looking creamy white head, with good retention, but not much lacing.

Smell – Pretty mellow aroma, a slight hint of banana and some spice. It is lacking the bready/yeasty character that great hefes have, but that may be more a result of the kegging (and the lack of yeast) rather than the extract. As the beer warms it begins to show a hint of sulfur, hopefully that will pass with a bit more age.

Taste – The flavor is similar to the aroma, very subdued. The ester character is only banana and a pretty restrained one at that. It is supported by some classic clove notes (not as much as I like though, the ferulic acid rest certainly seems to have boosted the clove in the all-grain compared to this). Pretty dry with just a touch of hop character to balance the slight sweetness. It has a slight carbonic bite to it from the high carbonation, which adds a touch of acidity to the beer.

Mouthfeel – Moderate-thin body with a nice firm carbonation. As it warms and the carbonation beings to wane it comes across as thin, but fresh out of the tap it is just refreshing.

Drinkability & Notes – A solid beer, but it doesn't have the complexity that my all-grain version did. I would like to try this recipe again to a bit higher gravity and with Wyeast 3068 (rather than White Labs 300) which seemed to give me a more complex ester profile.

Extract Single

Appearance – Another really great creamy head with great retention, and nice coating lacing. The body is a shade darker (probably due to the liquid extract) and a bit hazier (probably because it is a week younger than the hefe).

Smell – Great complex nose with notes of pepper, and lemon. There is even some breadiness from the malt, or maybe that is just a bit of suspended yeast.

Taste – Great complex phenol character, clove, cinnamon, and pepper. Almost saison like, but not quite that dry. There are some esters as well, pear with a light touch of banana, but the low fermentation temperature kept them moderate. Good balance with just a touch of herbal hop, not as much as I expected from an ounce of hallertau at 5 minutes. It could be a bit drier, but I wouldn't call it sweet.

Mouthfeel – A bit fuller than the hefe, with moderate carbonation. Could be a touch thinner/crisper, but it is very drinkable as is.

Drinkability & Notes – One of the better non-sour Belgian beers I have made, good balance with plenty of complexity. I'll be interested to see where this one goes with a bit more age, hopefully it doesn't clean up too much in the keg. I'll certainly be brewing this one again, although I might boost the sugar to help it finish a bit drier.

Solera Barrel Interivew with Basic Brewing

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:41:00 +0000

A few weeks ago James Spencer recorded an interview with my buddy Nathan and I about our experiences doing solera brewing and aging beer in oak barrels (we are bottling our first effort next weekend). It was just posted and worth a listen if you've got the 50 minutes.

I also put together a spreadsheet (download) that gives you the average age of a single barrel solera system with different pull period, rate, and time before the first pull.

Nathan and I have been talking about putting a barrel in my basement to house a two man solera operation, replacing probably 10 gallons every six months or so. We are thinking of a pale sour (lambic-ish) beer in a white wine barrel, but there will be more details to come on that as the time gets closer.

Anyone else out there have barrels or a solera going?

Extract Belgian Single

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:56:00 +0000

Along with my extract hefewezien I wanted to get another quick extract batch off to put on tap in my keggerator. I settled on another yeast forward style, Belgian Single (Enkel). These are beers traditionally made for the daily consumption by the monks at Trappist monasteries. They are normally pale, dry, and hard to come by outside they walls of the monastery. Some examples include Westmalle Extra, Westvleteren Blonde, and Chimay Dorée. Some are pretty hoppy like the Westvleteren and some are spiced like Dorée, but they all are fermented with the estery/phenolic house strain from their respective brewery. There are some secular versions, like Smuttynose Star Island Single, if you can't make the trip to Belgium.

The recipe I went with was modified from one posted by Homebrew42 on the BeerAdvocate forums. He called for dry pilsner extract, but I used liquid extract because that is all the homebrew store had. I also used the White Labs equivalent of the Wyeast strain he called for (both are supposedly from Chimay). I also doubled the hops because I felt that 12 IBUs was too low for the style, it also served as a good way to further differentiate this beer from the hefeweizen. Finally I switched the cane sugar to corn sugar as I had some extra on hand for an upcoming experiment (the poll will give you a clue to what I am planning).

Nothing too interesting about this batch except that it came out very pale (I did a full boil with half of the extract added late) and seems like it will be very tasty once it is fully carbonated (spicy, peppery, almost saison like now). I'm planning on doing a full tasting of both this and the weizen next week once I get back from a long weekend in Massachusetts and before I head to Pennsylvania to visit Bullfrog Brewing, Selin's Grove, and probably a few others places for BrewLocal.

Lazy Monk's Single

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 4.75
Total Extract (Lbs): 7.22
Anticipated OG: 1.054
Anticipated SRM: 6.4
Anticipated IBU: 20.8
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Extract/Sugar
---------------
6.60 lbs. Briess Pils LME
0.63 lbs. Corn Sugar

Hops
-----
2.00 oz. Hallertau Hersbrucker (Pellet 2.30% AA) @ 60 min.
1.00 oz. Hallertau Hersbrucker (Pellet 2.30% AA) @ 5 min.

Extras
-------
0.50 Tsp Yeast Nutrient @ 10 Min.
1.00 Whirlfloc @ 10 Min.

Yeast
-----
White Labs WLP500 Trappist Ale

Water Profile
-------------
Profile: Distilled Water

Notes
-----
9/12/09 Made a starter to be split with the barrel aged single.

Brewed 9/18/09 by myself

Brought 5 gallons of distilled water to a boil. Added 1 can of Briess Pilsen Light LME. Brought to a boil and added 2 ounces of Hallertau (adjusted down from 2.8% AA because they are about a year old). Boiled for 50 minutes. Added the corn sugar, yeast nutrient, and Whirlfloc. Boiled 5 minutes. Added the second can of LME. Brought back to a boil and added the last ounce of hops. Chilled to 75.

Bitterness should be slightly higher than calculated because of the lower gravity of for most of the boil (~26 IBUs).

Placed in the freezer set to 64 degrees. After several hours of cooling I gave it 60 seconds of pure oxygen and pitched the last half of the starter.

Good strong fermentation, but it never developed much of a krausen.

9/19/09 Boosted the temperature up to 68 to make sure fermentation finishes out.

9/24/09 Dropped the temperature down to 35 to help clean the beer up.

10/01/09 Racked to a keg and put under 11 psi to carbonate. Stole 1/2 gallon to top-off the barrel aged single.

10/14/09 1st tasting, great yeast character. The beer ended up around 1.012. Not too bad at 78% AA, but I would have liked to see it a few points lower.
-------------------------
Recipe based on this recipe from Homebrew42:

3 lbs Pilsen DME (60 min)
1 oz Hallertauer (60 min)
3 lbs Pilsen DME (5 min)
1/2 lb Table sugar (5 min)
1/2 oz Hallertauer (5 min)
Wyeast 1214 Belgian ale

Late Summer Vegetable Soup

noreply@blogger.com (Fermentationette (Audrey)) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:13:00 +0000

Aaaand... we're back with the lunch posts! Between Mike's move and my preparations for applying to grad school (GRE = thumbs down), August/September was a little hectic, though we did manage to keep up with the Sunday lunching for the most part. At this point, we've had numerous Sundays to explore the Takoma Park Farmer's Market and settle into a mindset for some cozy autumnal recipes.

A few weeks back when we made this hearty vegetable soup, the weather had just made its first chilly snap of the season ("chilly" here meaning maybe 65 degrees), which naturally put us in the mood for a hot, rich bowl of soup. In this case, we opted for vegetable, given that the summer growing season (at least a few weeks ago) still had a little time left before morphing into squashes/gourds and apples. The key, it seemed, to really kicking up the flavor in this soup was spending some extra time on the broth. Our base started with some roasted mushrooms, tomato paste, leeks and garlic, which complimented without overshadowing the handful of heartier late-summer vegetables we bought at the market.

Farmer's Market Booty
Lima Beans
Corn
Sunflower Seed Multigrain Bread (Atwater's)
Tomatoes
Escarole
Garlic
Leeks
Potatoes

Pantry Staples/From the Supermarket
Portabello Mushrooms
Low-Sodium Vegetable Broth
Tomato Paste
Kosher Salt
Pepper
Butter
Olive Oil
Dried Thyme

Now, sometimes you get a vegetable soup with a light, unobtrusive broth, which certainly has its time and place, depending on the season (spring to mid-summer) and available produce. We chose to make a broth with heartier substance given the cold snap of late summer. We didn't want to go through the effort of making the broth completely from scratch; so we started with a box of vegetable broth, but from there spent some time to deepen the flavor, tossing olive oil (2 tablespoons), mushrooms (half a pound), and tomato paste (1 tablespoon) together in a cast iron pan. To that, we added an entire head of garlic with the excess papery skin removed and top cut off to expose most of the cloves to the heat. This all went into the oven at a toasty 450 degrees for about 25 minutes, until the mushrooms had given up most of their moisture.

Once the mushrooms et al became all good and roasted, we added them (yes, including the head of garlic) to a cast iron dutch oven with roughly chopped leek greens (cleaned well to get all the grit out!), two quarts of low-sodium vegetable broth, a pinch of thyme and a few grinds of pepper. At this point we didn't add any salt due to the content in the broth as well as in the roasted mushroom mixture.

The broth simmered away for about 30 minutes, after which we strained it to collect all the liquidy goodness (sans mushrooms and leeks, see below). Then, it was back to the stove, ready for the vegetables.

... but not before we used tongs to squeeze the tender, sweet morsels of roasted garlic from their singed papery pods, mashed them to a paste, and added them to the broth.

Once the broth came back up to boil, it was simply a matter of adding the vegetables, which we did in steps to keep the more delicate ingredients from turning to mush. In the first round, we added the lima beans, potatoes cut into small chunks and chopped tomatoes, which then boiled for about 20 minutes. After that time passed, we added the kernels from one ear of corn, and a big bunch of roughly chopped escarole (which cooks down a great deal). Five or so minutes later, we had a delicious vegetable soup to enjoy.

And so down we sat, cozying up to brimming bowls of rich, robust, steamy vegetable soup, of course accompanied by the requisite thick slices of crusty sunflower seed multigrain bread. Now that it's soup season, Mike and I are looking forward to many more soupy Sunday lunches just like this one.

Unfortunately for those of you who read this blog for the beer, this Sunday lunch was a "beer-pairing fail." Luckily, the rest of the season should present many more tasty opportunities for pairing.

Digging the farmers market lunch posts?

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:20:00 +0000

Yes 67%
No 8%
Don't Care 24%

Glad to see that most people are enjoying the food posts (and more importantly that very few people dislike them). Audrey and I have a couple more posts in the works at the moment (Veggie Soup and Mushroom Crepes), but Audrey is hard at work studying for the GRE and applying to Grad schools, so postings will be pretty erratic.

If you have tried any of the recipes (or if they have inspired you to get creative, which is the real goal) let us know.

Imperial Cider - Two Ways

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:35:00 +0000

Well the fall, and with it cider season, is here once again. Last fall in addition to my annual batch of standard cider I did a batch of ice concentrated cider. Part of the ice cider was blended with a strong cider made by fellow homebrewer Steve Gale, which got its boost from the addition of a thick caramel syrup made by boiling down cider.

I've got a pretty bad flu at the moment (not sure if it is porcine or not), but I did this tasting over the weekend while it was just starting with a stuffy nose. As a results I may have missed some of the complexity. That said I though both ciders tasted excellent and I would highly recommend either method over adding sugar to your cider which adds alcohol, but does not enhance the apple flavor.

Collaboration Hard Cider

Appearance – Big initial head formation, but it drops to almost nothing in just a few seconds. The cider is a nice burnt orange, much richer than any other cider I have seen. It displays some legs in my snifter as well, a sign of both the high alcohol and sweetness.

Smell – Big caramelly apple nose with notes of ethanol. Much fruitier than a standard cider, which tend to be light on the apple character. Pretty clean overall (not much yeast character) or other aromas.

Taste – Very nice balance between sweet and tart. I can certainly taste some of those cooked notes from the apple syrup, it is similar to the sugary syrup that you end up with in an apple pie (minus any spices). A bit on the sweet side, but it isn't cloying. Still tastes very fresh, no oxidation (either positive or negative).

Mouthfeel – The carbonation does a lot to prevent this from being too sticky sweet. The body is much bigger than a standard cider, in beer terms this would certainly be an English barleywine (but it is more sugary than that).

Drinkability & Notes – A dangerous cider to be sure, the sweetness helps to tame the alcohol, and the carbonation tames the sweetness. I think these two blended together very well, thanks to Steve for coming up with the idea to match these two.

Ice Cider -Apple Champagne

Appearance – Almost no head formation despite streaming carbonation. This one is perfectly clear and a beautiful golden yellow (not much darker than a standard cider). Slight legs visible running down the side of the snifter on this one as well.

Smell – Moderate fresh apple aroma with some fresh bready/yeasty notes. There is also a slight sulfury character that may be from sitting on the yeast a bit too long. Not particularly complex (although that could just be the cold I am starting to develop).

Taste – Great balance, with just a touch of sweetness neither bone dry nor syrupy sweet. The apple flavor is not really that pronounced, more of a light fruitiness than a specific apple flavor. It isn't too far off of champagne, but it has a nice apple peel character in the finish that reminds you what you are drinking. Not much alcohol to speak of, but there is a nice warmth in the finish.

Mouthfeel – Pretty thin, but not as light as I would have expected for ~93% AA. Solid carbonation, a bit spritzy but not fizzy.

Drinkability & Notes – A pretty solid effort, not exactly what I was aiming for, but a well balanced strong cider. I'll certainly be giving something similar a try this year, not sure if I will aim for a higher gravity or not.

Barrel Aged Single - Beatification Clone

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:11:00 +0000

With the DC Barrel Crew's Flanders Red almost ready to bottle after a year of aging in a red wine barrel the debate began over what the next beer into the barrel should be. There were plenty of suggestions, but most people wanted a sessionable sour beer. My mind instantly went to the best beer I have ever tried, Russian River's Beatification PH1 (aka their Belgian Single, Redemption, aged for 23 months in barrels New Belgium had used to sour La Folie before investing in larger oak tanks). That single bottle of Beatification I drank nearly three years ago was sour, but balanced; funky, but fruity; dry, but not thin; and just amazingly complex.

As a side note, after Batch 001/PH1 (001 was just aged in a different barrel) Beatification became a very different beer. It is now a spontaneously fermented American Lambic (Sonambic) aged in old oak wine barrels that have already had most of their flavor extracted by multiple batches of other more wood/wine forward Russian River sours. It is still a great beer, but neither batch 002 nor 003 were at the same level of complexity and balance that the original attained.

A few months back I saw a post on HomeBrewTalk that reported the recipe for Redemption straight from Vinnie, and having a now used Flanders Red barrel I knew what the plan should be (luckily I was able to talk the rest of the guys to go along with it). We tweaked the recipe slightly, dropping the late boil addition of Sterling hops since there won't be any hop aroma left after the time in the barrel. We also went with a hotter mash temp than I would have for a crisp dry beer like Redemption because the microbes in the barrel will appreciate a bit of extra fermentables.

It was also my first time using my new drill to run my Barley Crusher (no more sore forearms on brew days for me). It was easy to connect, just unscrew the manual handle and tighten the drill onto the shaft.

For my portion of the batch I switched the bittering hop from Styrian Goldings to US Fuggles, which are the same hop variety just grown in a different country. I also used some extra wheat malt because I was a short on pils. Finally I used White Lab's 500 instead of 530 because that is what I had on hand for another single I was planning on brewing. None of these substitutions should have much of an impact on a beer once it is soured.

The brew day for the beer went smoothly, and fermentation took off quickly. Now that fermentation has finished up I am giving it some cold conditioning until October 24th when we will be bottling the Flanders Red and then filling the barrel back up with this beer. It is on the right, next to a batch of extract single (left), which only looks a half shade darker (more on that one later).

If you don't have enough friends willing/capable to brew 60 gallons of beer, or you don't have a used wine barrel with microbes in tow then you could try brewing the beer and tossing in an ounce or two of French oak cubes soaked in red wine, add them along with the dregs from a few of your favorite sour beers to the secondary.

Barrel Aged Single

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 5.25
Total Grain (Lbs): 11.50
Anticipated OG: 1.052
Anticipated SRM: 3.7
Anticipated IBU: 24.3
Brewhouse Efficiency: 63 %
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Grain
------
9.00 lbs. German Pilsener
1.75 lbs. Wheat Malt
0.38 lbs. Sauer(acid) Malt
0.38 lbs. Vienna Malt

Hops
------
1.50 oz. Fuggle (Pellet 4.30% AA) @ 60 min.

Extras
-------
1.00 Whirlfloc @10 Min.
0.25 Tsp Yeast Nutrient @10 Min.

Yeast
-----
White Labs WLP500 Trappist Ale Yeast

Water Profile
-------------
Profile: Washington DC (carbon filtered)

Mash Schedule
-------------
100 min @ 154

Notes
-----
Brewed 9/13/09 By myself

3 qrt starter (wheat DME) made ~48 hours in advance.

Mash ran a bit longer than scheduled because the burner lost its flame while heating the sparge water, due to the wind. Moved into the garage (door open of course) and the problem was solved.

Collected 7.25 gallons of runnings with a fly sparge.

American Fuggles used from my SoFB winnings, AA% adjusted down from 4.8% as they are about a year old.

Hit gravity/volume well. Chilled to 78, then placed in the chest freezer overnight to drop the rest of the way.

Pitched half of the starter in the morning at around 64 degrees. Some fermentation evident after ~12 hours. Rocking fermentation 24 hours after pitching. It threatened to blow-off, but never did.

9/19/09 Boosted the temperature up to 68 to make sure fermentation finishes out.

9/24/09 Dropped the temperature down to 35 to help clean the beer up.

10/02/09 Racked to secondary. Topped off with some of my extract single to ensure that I had a full 5 gallons of beer to contribute. Left at room temp until barrel day.

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

Based on Beatification Batch 001/PH1

Commercial Description:
Blonde Ale aged in New Belgium La Folie barrels for 23 months. Batch 001 is softer on the palate than Batch 001 - PH1. The PH1 batch was aged in one of New Belgium's favorite barrels. Refermented in the bottle.

Notes from Vinnie on Redemption:
91 percent 2 row
3 percent acidulaed
3 percent wheat malt
3 prcent vienna malt

Bittered with Styrian Golding
Finished with Stering

OG 1.052

TG 1.012

Book Review: The Everything Homebrewing Book

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:36:00 +0000

The Everything Homebrewing Book: All you need to brew the best beer at home! by Drew Beechum is one of the most recent homebrewing books to be published (2009), so it seemed like a good idea to pick up a copy to read and review. It is from a series of books along the same lines as "For Dummies" (books by different authors with common formatting/graphics) which might make you suspicious, but it was written by one of the most active/vocal members of the homebrewing community. This is his first book, but Drew writes a monthly homebrewing column for BeerAdvocate magazine.

Content: As the title implies this book tries to cover just about every aspect of the expansive topic of homebrewing. Trying to cover the plethora of topics related to brewing beer at home from the simplest extract recipes through high gravity beers, equipment, process, history, etc... is a tall order for any book, particularly when there are already so many great books that specialize in a single area.

The book starts out like many, with a few chapters of basic information about beer, extract brewing, hops, water, yeast, and malt. The author does a solid job giving an overview of all the major options and ingredients available these days. He also does a good job covering some basic questions that many books skip over (like how much will it cost).

The book then goes into equipment and technique. I wish the author had been a bit more opinionated about the daunting variety of options available to the modern American homebrewer. I read a book to hear what the author suggests rather than just a list of all the possibilities. For example I would have been interested to hear about which of the gear and product Drew actually uses and why, and how he put his system together (in addition to why he didn't go with the other options).

In some places Everything tends to be a bit too anecdotal for me. For example the section on autolysis says "Conventional wisdom set a week's deadline, but award winning brewers leave beer in primary for a month with no ill effects when using healthy yeast." If you want to talk autolysis I think you need to get into different styles, yeasts, temperatures, and techniques etc... Just saying some good brewers don't worry about it doesn't give enough information to make an educated decision about your own particular situation. Similar logic is used for keg priming as well as several other "controversial" topics.

The book goes into great depth in a couple areas that are not always covered well by other books. The kegging section is especially useful with lots of tips on cleaning and carbonating. In general though I felt like several of the sections didn't bring anything new to the table (probably because, lets face it, there is much that hasn't been said about something like malt extract).

My biggest complaint about the content is the complete lack of pictures, drawings, graphs, or beer related graphics of any sort (although there are plenty of dopey little drawings to alert the reader to boxes that contain information that is either "Essential" or a "Fact"). I like the written word as much as anyone, but for a new brewer in particular the pictures and drawings can be the difference between understanding a point and missing it completely. The book I am reading now, Randy Mosher's Tasting Beer, puts this one to shame with beautiful design/pictures/graphs on nearly every page (even the paper feels much higher quality). I realize the lack of flair was probably part of the deal with the publishing company to keep printing costs down, but it is still a shame.

Recipes: The book is packed with recipes of all sorts (more than 100 all told). Some of the recipes are internet classics like Denny Conn's Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter, Jamil's Evil Twin, fellow Maltose Falcons member Jonny Lieberman's Blackwine IV, and many of Drew's own recipes from his website. The rest, either from the author or a variety of other homebrewers, run the gamut from simple style based beers through beers that push into areas that are too crazy even for me to attempt (like the Maltose Falcons' Methode Champenoise series of beers). However as you can see a good chunk of these recipes are available for free online, where in many cases they contain additional information/pictures not found in the book.

Most of the recipes are all-grain with an extract substitution listed. It is unclear which beers are turned into partial-mash recipes by the extract and which become extract with steeping grain. In general it seems to leave some basemalt in for a partial-mash, but this could lead to confusion in my opinion. It would also be nice to have the efficiency listed for the recipes since it seems to vary dramatically.

I like the general layout of the recipes with the details all laid out for easy perusal. Most of them contain little asides and tips for the particular idiosyncrasies of the recipe, and overall they appear to be solidly designed and tested. I will register my standard complaint that the book doesn't do enough to describe the specific flavors of the recipes, not even giving a short description of what generally to expect (this is really a shame considering that most of the recipes have half an empty page below them).

Accuracy: For the most part Everything was very well edited compared to many of the other brewing books out there. There are a few minor issues, things like wrong AA% listed for hops (5.25% AA Warriors in the Steve French recipe), which could throw someone off, but isn't a big deal. My biggest complaints has nothing to do with what is in the book and everything to do with what is not. Often the book gives a brief overview/mention of something without getting into enough detail to let someone get into it without doing additional research somewhere else.

Readability: Drew's writing may not have the same literary pop (inspirational power?) that some other homebrew books have, but it does crams a lot of concise info into its pages. I liked the way that some of the recipes were sprinkled in with each section to provide an example of the concepts being covered, with the rest tacked on at the end organized chapters by origin (Recipes from Belgium, Experiments: Recipes from the Laboratory etc...).

The use of abbreviations and symbols bothered me a little bit. For example the hops are labeled in the form "10.6 percent AA" and the malts all have "pounds" after them instead of lbs. It is a little thing, but it bothers me.

There are also some minor organizational issues. For example the last recipe in the book is for a Russian River Temptation clone which is alone in a section titled "Bacteria: The Friendly Germs", but several pages earlier there is a section on Belgian Sour Ales which does not say much about the microbes. It just seems like if you only have three recipes with non-sacch microbes you might as well lump them all together. In a similar way the sections can seem a bit out of order, I feel like the chapter on sanitation should come before the first extract brew chapter for example.

Overall: The Everything Homebrewing Book is a pretty solid first effort from one of the staples of the online homebrewing community. With its wide scope this might be the homebrewing book you would get if you had to pick just one, but if you own (or plan to own) more than a couple it becomes much less essential. While it does cover several topics very well, for the most part it just gives you a taste of topics that are covered in greater detail in other books. I don't think the introductory parts are comprehensive enough to recommend it over How to Brew for a beginner, but it might be a worthwhile addition to your brewing library if you are the sort of person who wants a hard copy of some bits from the ephemeral homebrewing internet.

Homegrown Hop Harvest 2009

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:05:00 +0000

My parents came down from Massachusetts to stay with me for a few days in DC. Along with a six-pack of my Wheat Triplebock (I had accidentally left the entire batch at their house without reserving any for my short term use) they brought along the yield from my 4th year Cascade hop plant (despite growing taller than it did last year the Willamette did not produce any cones again this year).

My parents put the wet hops on screens (no microwave drying this year) for a few days to dry and I used my FoodSaver to vaccupack them for storage in the freezer. It is always a bit disappointing to see that huge fluffy mass reduced to such a compact form, but the space savings and reduced oxygen exposure makes it well worth it (I also vaccupack extra specialty grains for long-term storage).

Not sure exactly what I will do with the hops, but it should be enough for an aroma addition to a batch of American pale ale or something. The plants simply don't get as much light as they probably should, so I think this is about as much as they will ever produce. Now that I have a backyard with plenty of light in DC I might dig up the rhizomes, divide them, and replant them down here in the spring.

Anyone else harvest their hops yet? Any great hop harvest tips?

New Kegerator

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:34:00 +0000

I have long proclaimed myself a bottle guy, but it turns out the lure of the keg was too strong for me. So now that I have the room I decided to start kegging some of my beers. I am planning on just doing session beers and hoppy beers for the time being (since they need to be consumed the quickest). I like sour beer too much to have that sort of access to them (18 months in the fermenter... 18 days in the keg), and I still want to be able to squirrel big beers away for more sporadic tastings.

One of the things I am not is handy, but with a couple trips to Home Depot I was able to put together a new collar for my chest freezer (which I had been using for fermentation temp control). Nothing too fancy, just a sliced up 2x10, some L brackets, screws, and a can of black spray paint. Being a bit inexperienced with wood working (and not having all the right tools) it turned out a bit rough (the boards don't quite fit together like they should), so I won't go into the details of construction, but I am sure there are plenty of great sites out there on build a kegerator.

I got the actual guts of the kegging system from Keggle Brewing, their prices were pretty reasonable, but the big draw for me was that they assemble all of the gas/liquid lines for you (so I haven't had much of an opportunity to screw anything up... yet).

I went with a dual body regulator so I'll be able to serve my beers at two different carbonation levels at the same time. I also upgraded to Perlick forward seal faucets, since I may not be opening both taps every day I don't want them drying out and sticking.

I got my CO2 filled up at Bars By Bud Mepham (the only place in the greater DC area that seems to fill CO2 tanks on Saturdays). It will be another week or two before I am pouring beer (my hefeweizen is cold conditioning now), but I am really getting excited.

Anyone have any great kegging tips to share?

Extract Hefeweizen Recipe

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:25:00 +0000

After brewing pretty much nothing but all-grain beers for the last four years (with a few one gallon experimental extract and partial mash batches sprinkled in), I thought it was time for a full on extract batch. When I first started brewing in college I made two extract with steeping grains recipes before making the leap to all-grain. The first (a brown ale) was pretty tasty, and the second (a vanilla cream ale) was pretty blah. They followed the "classic" homebrew method (partial boil, low pitching rate, poor temp control, lackluster sanitation etc...) so I wanted to see how all the improvements to my general beer making technique/equipment might improve the results of an extract batch.

Another reason for brewing with malt extract was to test out my new 210k BTU Banjo Cooker. I wanted to see how it ran without having to worry about mashing/sparging. This was also my first batch at my new house, so I wanted to make sure all the connections worked for my chiller, and everything ran smoothly. This will also be my first kegged batch, so I wanted something that would be ready quickly to test it out.

There are a whole range of brewers out there, so if reading tips on extract brewing doesn't really interest you feel free to go back in the archives and read something a bit more Mad (like my Cuvee Tomme clone which I will be rebrewing later this fall), for the rest of you here are my thoughts on brewing with extract.

Dealing with water is very different for extract beers is very different than all-grain because when extract is condensed all of the minerals that were in the water used to make it get condensed along with the sugars/proteins. As a result when you add tap/spring water the beer is getting a double dose of minerals. This isn't a big deal, but it is something to think about if your water is hard already or if you are doing any water adjustments. For this batch I used distilled water from the supermarket to reconstitute the extract, this avoids getting the second dose of minerals. I gave the beer a healthy dose of yeast nutrient which is especially important for extract beers because they can be low in things yeast need like free amino nitrogen (due to the storage and processing of the extract).

A full boil is important because it reduces the formation of Maillard reaction byproducts (which darken the beer and add flavor). A full boil also improves hop utilization, not too important when brewing a 12 IBU hefeweizen, but critical for any beer that you want to have a good bitterness. iso-alpha acids saturate wort at around 100 IBUs, so if you have 2 gallons of wort at the end of the boil, even if it is saturated with bitterness after you dilute it to 5 gallons at most it will only have 40 IBUs.

The fermentation and yeast handling is just as important in extract beers as it is in all-grain. I made a starter with my vial of yeast and didn't pitch it until the temperature of the wort got down to my target fermentation temp of 60 degrees. Pitching warm (as many beginning brewers do) is a bad idea because fermentation will create heat, pushing the temperature even higher which creates excess esters and fusel alcohol.

I really enjoyed the batch of hefeweizen I brewed last fall and I had heard that wheat extract (which is a blend of wheat and barley) does a pretty good job without any steeping grains. Amazingly the 2009 Best of Show at the Spirit of Free Beer (my local homebrew club's annual contest) was an extract hefe brewed with an old kit, so it seemed worth a try (with a fresh kit).

The recipe for this one was pretty similar to the one I brewed last year. I kept the low starting gravity (1.042) and IBUs (12). The yeast strain I used this time was WLP300 instead of the Wyeast 3068 I used last year, but they are supposed to be from the same source. This grain bill is more wheat heavy due to the fact that the extract is 65/35 and I had gone 50/50 on the all-grain batch.

The beer pretty much fermented out at an ambient temp of 58 degrees. I then bumped up the temperature to 64 to ensure that the yeast finish their job, then I will drop the temperature near freezing for about 10 days to help get some of the yeast out of suspension. Finally I'll rack it over to a keg, skipping secondary. Not sure if I will do forced or natural carbonation, but either way I will be aiming for ~3 volumes of CO2.

Next up I will be brewing an extract Belgian Single as a warm up for the next beer going into our red wine barrel in a month or so.

Extract Weizen

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 5.60
Total Extract (Lbs): 5.25
Anticipated OG: 1.042
Anticipated SRM: 5.9
Anticipated IBU: 11.4
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Extract
--------
5.25 lbs. Briess DME- Weizen

Hops
-----
2.00 oz. Spalter Spalt (Pellet 1.65% AA) First Wort

Extras
-------

0.40 Tsp Yeast Nutrient @15 Min.
0.50 Whirlfloc Tablet @ 15 Min.

Yeast
-----
White Labs WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale

Water Profile
-------------
Profile: Distilled Water

Notes
-----
Brewed 9/02/09

Took 6 oz of the DME and made a starter with .25 tsp of nutrient and 1.5 qrts of water. Placed into the freezer set to 60 degrees once it cooled.

Heated the rest of the 6 gallons of distilled water to a boil on my new burner. Added the DME when the water was ~160, added the hops once all of the DME was dissolved. AA% adjusted down from 2%.

Overshot the volume and undershot the gravity slightly despite only using 6 gallons of water total between the starter and the beer.

Only able to chill to ~80, Put into the freezer at 60 overnight to chill the rest of the way. 8 hours later pitched the now active starter.

Good fermentation after 24 hours. Sometime over the long weekend the krausen pushed off the aluminum foil top, it was in my chest freezer so I am not too worried about infection.

9/8/09 Turned ambient temp up to 64 degrees to help fermentation finish out.

9/13/09 Down to 1.010, fermentation is just about complete.

9/15/09 Put into a fridge to cold condition for a week before I keg it.

9/25/09 Racked to the keg, set to 14 PSI at 45 degrees.

10/14/09 1st tasting, doing well, could use a bit more yeast character.

Mega Gueuze Tasting

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:04:00 +0000

I don't usually post about commercial beers, but last week my friend Dyan picked up every gueuze he could find at State Line Liquors and brought them over to my place for a tasting. Nathan chipped in a few he had carried back from a trip to Belgium and Dan and Devin joined in.

The 3 Fonteinen Oude Gueuze stole the show for me (multi-layered funk, complexity, and balance), but the Oud Beersel (bright acidity), and Cantillon Lou Pepe (big oak character) were right up there. The biggest disappointment was the Cantillon Classic, it just didn't have the sour punch that I remembered from having drank it on its own. The Chapeau and the Timmermans were the only two I hadn't had before, both were better than I expected with the Chapeau being very cellar like and the Timmermans having not quite enough complexity to compete.

I was surprised at just how big the range of flavors was between these beers, it is something I didn't quite grasp having the beers on their own. After the first few beers our palates got used to the acidity so that may be why some of the beers (like the Cantillon) didn't taste as sour as I remembered them. The growler of Russian River Sanctification tasted mildly tart at first (not nearly as sour as as bottles from previous releases, apparently Vinnie backed down on the Pedio/Lacto this time because he thought he had too many sours on tap at the pub), but when we went to finish it off after the tasting it almost tasted like a pale ale (big citrus character and no sourness).

It is a shame I didn't have time to make up some starter wort to capture all the bugs from these beers, but as it is I don't have plans to brew another sour for a couple months anyway.

If you have a couple willing friends (and can get your hands on a few gueuzes) I would suggest doing something similar, it was probably the best $23 I have spent on an evening of drinking recently.

Has anyone else tried something similar? I'd be interested to hear how their results compared.

Which is the most important?

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:54:00 +0000

63% Technique
24% Ingredients
8% Recipe
3% Equipment

I was intentionally vague with this question. I think which factor is the most important depends on what you are making.

For example when making a simple salad the ingredients are probably the most important factor, great fresh produce will taste pretty good no matter how you chop them up or how you dress them. On the other hand I have found that making a sour beer is almost entirely technique (aging time, temp, blending etc...) with the quality of the ingredients being far less important.
over emphasize equipment. Sure a conical (or a $300 dollar knife) are cool, but how much do they really improve your results? Good equipment can save you time, effort, reduce costs in the long term, promote consistency etc... but it won't turn you from a bad brewer into a good brewer.

The value of a good recipe is also exaggerated in both cooking and beer. It has been amazing to taste how different the batches my friends have brewed for our barrel projects, the range is astonishing starting with the same ingredients (and considering we are all pretty good brewers). I think many people overlook how subtle changes in technique (pitching temperature or correct browning) can impact the final flavor of a beer or dish as much or more than major changes to a recipe.

Any simple techniques that people think have really improved their brewing (or cooking)?

Eggs Benedict: Bacon Grease and the Brunch of Champions

noreply@blogger.com (Fermentationette (Audrey)) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:13:00 +0000

We decided to mix things up a bit last week by doing a brunch instead of a lunch. Mike wanted to get things moving because he would spending the rest of the day with his father, ripping up the old damp floor boards in one room his new basement (which, he reports, he hopes to convert into a walk-in cooler once it is waterproofed). Indeed, it served as the final such Sunday farmer’s market meal in the old apartment. We hope to reorient ourselves to the Takoma Park farmer’s market and the bounty of fall fruits and vegetables in the next few weeks.

The idea this week was a riff on a brunch staple: Eggs Benedict. We opted to go all-American, though, replacing the traditional English muffin and Canadian bacon with a local whole wheat bread (a think loaf with a cross-hatched top whose label read: Multigrain Bruschetta) and some thick-sliced bacon. We also slipped in some homegrown tomatoes for a bit of bright contrast. And, just for Dan, we made a batch of creamy, heartstoppingly rich Hollandaise sauce.

Farmer's Market Booty
Multigrain Bruschetta (Bonaparte Breads)
Farm Fresh Eggs
Cantaloupe

Pantry Staples
Tomatoes
Butter
Bacon
Black Pepper
Salt
Sugar
Lemon
Distilled Vinegar

Bacon grease is your friend. And here’s why…
To get started, we fried the bacon, three thick slices from Niman Ranch (which Mike had left over from the previous week’s tarte flambée). Once the bacon was crispy, we used the drippings to fry two Texas-Toast-thick slices of the multigrain bruschetta (Is there anything that isn't improved by some bacon drippings? Mike says beer, but notes that Brooklyn Brewery is nonetheless putting out a bacon flavored barleywine shortly… I refuse to be the guinea pig for that one!). Once the bread got a little color we moved it to the toaster oven, on low heat, to get it out of the way.

With the pan vacant we cut thick slices of a couple tomatoes, freshly picked that morning from the planters on my back porch, and added them with a little olive oil to the pan (sadly, the bread soaked up a lot of the bacon grease while pan-toasting). The tomatoes are an heirloom variety that never gets past a reddish-pink, but they are very solid and sweet.

I bought the tomato plants as four seedlings at the beginning of the summer when I only had $2 to spend at the Adams Morgan farmer’s market. Sadly it took considerably more than that to purchase the necessary potters, soil, stakes, and such, though they have done a great job producing throughout the summer (and thankfully, the planters and dirt can be reused next summer).

Next, on to the poached eggs! I was particularly wary of this step never having poached an egg and worried that every effort would result in protein-clouded water and broken yolks. Hence, Fearless Mike led the way on this one. We filled a non-stick pan with several inches of water and brought it to a boil. We stirred in a tablespoon of distilled vinegar, which lowers the pH and encourages the proteins in the white to set quickly. Once the water was boiling, we turned off the heat, and gently poured the eggs into the pan (this is easiest if you crack them into cups or small bowls first). After 4 minutes with the cover on they were nice and oozy, but not too runny.

Before the poached eggs, we actually started the Hollandaise sauce, the recipe for which we took from Good Eats, which, though it sounded easy enough, caused quite a bit of panic as we worked to time the egg poaching and Hollandaise whisking so that neither was done too soon or late.

For the sauce, you whisk the three egg yolks with a bit of water for as long as it takes for your arm to feel as if it fall off (weakling that I am, this only took about three to four minutes). When the yolks will become light yellow and frothy, add a touch of sugar (the small amount helps to fight curdling by getting between the proteins… though we still ended up with a few tiny yellow dots in ours).

Heat the yolk mixture in a double boiler until it begins to thicken, then slowly add 1.5 sticks of butter whisking constantly. Once all the butter is incorporated into the emulsion, add salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste.

Finally Mike assisted in a quick assembly: layering a slice of the toast with bacon, tomato slices, a poached egg, and finally a “drizzle” of the Hollandaise (we really just spooned the stuff on, and it was wonderful).

The meal was delightful and rich, salty from the bacon, and tart form the tomatoes, crunchy bacon-y toast… once the stress over trying to cook five different things at once wore off. The ingredients all played very well together and the rich butter sauce really helped to bring all of the elements together. Our only mistake was starting the toast a bit too early, and placing it in the toaster oven to keep it warm, so it ended up a bit on the dry side (nothing a little dip of Hollandaise couldn't fix, though—shameless!).

In the absence of pie (and in lieu of nutritional content of our meal), we rounded out the hefty meal with a couple of sweet, simple slices of cantaloupe.

To compliment all these elements, we went with a bottle of the Lemon Pepper Single we brewed a few months back. It has really dried out since Mike reviewed it, and the carbonation has come around. The subtle lemon flavor matched well with the Hollandaise and the crispness fended off otherwise rich, fatty flavors.

Mo' Betta Bretta Batch #1 Final Tasting

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:29:00 +0000

After doing a tasting of my second attempt at cloning Mo' Betta Bretta, I thought it was time to do a tasting of my first attempt (the recipe was the first post on this blog). The first and second batches were very similar, the only major changes were the strain of Brett (Brett C for batch #1, and Brett A for batch #2), and the way the acid/sauer malt was added (to the main mash at the start of the sparge for batch #1, separately for batch #2).

After how oxidized the second batch tasting was I didn't have high hopes for this one, but it pulled through. One of the two recipe changes (or another uncontrolled process variable) was the flap of the butterfly's wings that sent these two batches in completely different directions over their two years in the bottle. There is always a bit of luck involved in brewing, particularly in 100% Brett beers, and this is just one of those times when things worked out.

Sadly I don't have any of the first batch's dried cherry Pinot noir portion left to sample (most of it was sent out for the BBB 100% Brett swap).

Mo' Betta Bretta Clone Batch #1 - Tasting 8/21/09

Appearance - Brilliantly clear golden with a thin white head. The carbonation keeps the head inflated, but it is not as voluminous as it was in the beer's youth. It took some time to clear, but this is a beautiful beer now.

Aroma - Terrific stone fruit aroma (peaches and apricot in particular). This would make a great base for a fruit beer with one of those. Luckily no sign of the oxidation that plagued the considerably younger bottle of Batch #2 I had a few weeks back. There is some musty/barnyard funk that this batch has always had, but it is just a subtle complexity compared to what it was when the beer only had a couple months in the bottle.

Taste - The flavor is very nice, lightly tart and crisp. The apricot carries over from the nose and is joined by some cherry. The flavor is just a bit sweeter than I recall, by now basically all of the bitterness has faded. A well rounded flavor that gets funkier as it warms (but never unpleasantly so). No malt character and just a slight breadiness from the malt.

Mouthfeel - The carbonation gives it some lightness, but the beer still has a medium body (probably from the oats). I remember it feeling a bit lighter in the past, but it is fine as is.

Drinkability/Notes - It was no chore to down the entire bomber on a warm evening. The combination of complexity and drinkability makes this an excellent beer. Maybe a bit past its prime, but still in very good shape considering that it is a pale, moderate gravity beer that was brewed 30 months ago. I had forgotten how good these 100% Brett beers can be, I'll have to do another run of them sometime soon.

Chick-N-Brick

noreply@blogger.com (Fermentationette (Audrey)) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:57:00 +0000

On a schedule of alternating weeks, last Sunday was Mike's turn to decide what we would make for lunch. Chicken-Under-a-Brick is essentially butterflied chicken, pan roasted under something heavy so as to encourage a deep, crisp browning on the skin. A much quicker mode of cooking than, say, roasting a whole chicken, the butterfly cut levels out the flesh to cook evenly and quickly. Accompanied with a simple salad and some roasted roots, this Sunday's lunch was comforting and filling without being too heavy for the summer heat.

Farmer's Market Booty:
One Whole Chicken
Tomatoes (a rainbow of heirlooms)
Carrots
Potatoes
Arugula
Parsley
Fresh Garlic (distinct in intensity and flavor from the kind with dried outer layers)

From the Pantry/Refrigerator:
Black Pepper

Red Pepper Flakes

Kosher Salt
Turbinado Sugar
Olive Oil
Lemon

If you have some extra time you can brine the chicken for an hour (which we did). The chicken was submerged in a solution of 1/4 cup of kosher salt and 2 tablespoons of turbinado sugar dissolved into 2 quarts of water. This process both seasons the meat and allows it to retain more moisture over the course of cooking leading to juicer meat. If you want to flavor the meat you could certainly add some crushed garlic, herbs, or spices to the brine as well, but with such a high quality free range chicken it didn't seem worth it.

For Mike to prepare the chicken, Audrey had the pleasure of witnessing the sickening crunch of bones and spine removal a la Mortal Kombat (nerd alert: it was a Deadly Fatality!). Butterflying a chicken can be intimidating, but is actually a pretty simple procedure once you have done it a couple times. First cut out the backbone (this can be done either with a knife or kitchen sheers), then flip the bird over and apply pressure to the breast to flatten it (enter sickening crunch here). Finally flip it back over and make a shallow incision in the membrane that covers the keel bone that separates the breasts, and leaver it out with your finger. Such butterflying as this makes for much faster cooking as well as easy serving at the table.

Butterfly chicken can also be grilled outside, but in the heat of mid-August (and living in an apartment), we opted to stay indoors and make good use of the stove and oven. Dry the skin, then lay the entire chicken down in a lightly greased pan (we used cast-iron, but anything oven-proof would work) and set either two foil-wrapped bricks, or (as we did) a heavy cast-iron dutch oven, lightly greased, directly onto the exposed flesh. The pressure helps to keep the skin in contact with the pan, increasing browning and deliciousness.

After about 5 minutes, we began to smell the familiar waft of frying chicken skin, but we kept it there for a good 15 minutes total before performing an amazing feat of chicken-acrobatics. We moved the chicken onto a plate, drained out most of the grease from the pan, laid down the potatoes and carrots (any root vegetable could work here as well), and replaced the chicken, skin side up this time, on top of those (no need to replace the dutch oven/bricks this time as it goes into the oven which was preheated to 450 degrees).

Brush with a simple mixture of lemon/olive oil/garlic/red pepper flakes/black pepper. The brined bird will give up some salty liquid, so you may want to hold back on seasoning the vegetables until after they are cooked (in our case they needed a bit of salt).

Once the chicken hits ~150, go ahead and remove it from the oven and let it rest on a cutting board or plate. In our case, the chicken seemed to cook a little faster than the roots, so we poured off most of the liquid from the pan, and returned them to the oven until cooked through. To serve, we placed the carrots and potatoes in a bowl and topped the chicken with a good bit of chopped parsley.

While the chicken cooked we made a simple arugula salad, with a basic dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper (pretty similar to what was poured on the chicken). Being late summer, we of course could not leave the tomatoes off the menu, so we just chopped a couple of colorful ones to top of the dressed arugula.

For the beer we went with Mike's Hoppy Brown. The hop character is a bit over the hill now at seven months old, but the lightly roasted malt did a good job matching the roasted flavors in the root vegetables and chicken.

And finally, what is such a hearty meal absent dessert? Well, still pretty good, we assume, but with a good amount of blueberry peach pie leftover from a pretty fantastic potluck the previous night, we helped ourselves to a couple of fat slices.

Cherry Doppelbock

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 04:07:00 +0000

I have been a bit lax with my brewing lately, so for this week here is a recipe from my pre-Mad Fermentationist vaults.

Long ago (well not that long ago, but more than a year before I started this blog) I brewed a batch of cherry doppelbock. The idea for the beer was inspired by a nip bottle of Kuhnhenn's Raspberry Eisbock that I got in a trade. It was a beautiful beer, rich, sweet, jammy, and complex.

The base beer for my attempt was based on a Mike McDole Eisbock, and the idea to use cherries was based on a note in Radical Brewing that cherries were popular in German Bocks before the Reinheitsgebot (which among many other things forbade the use of fruit in brewing) enveloped the country.

Since I was adding the cherries in the middle of winter using fresh was not an option. To try to get a balanced fruit character I went with four different forms of cherry: Oregon puree, sour cherry juice, dried cherries caramelized in port, and cherries packed in water (from Trader Joe's). Combined they did a pretty good job giving a balanced cherry character, and the bit of cooked flavor actually worked well with the dark malt.

I waxed the tops of the bottles, it really makes opening a bottle feel like a bigger event. The bottle wax that many homebrew stores sell is the best way to go (1 lb is about enough for 1,000 bottles, so pick a color you really like), don't try to use paraffin as it is very hard to remove if you want to reuse the bottles. Just melt the wax beads in the microwave (in an old coffee mug or something that you won't mind staining) and then just dip the bottle tops into the wax, repeat after it hardens (which should only take a few seconds) for a thicker coating.

Cherryator (Cherry Doppelbock) Tasting 8/16/09

Appearance – Nearly opaque, dark brown, with just a hint of amber when held to the light (surprising not to see much red). The light tan head isn't big, but the retention is great.

Smell – At first I get sweet cherries, but the deep brown-sugary malt quickly takes over. It used to be much more fruit forward in its youth. There is a hint of oxidized malt, but considering this beer is pushing four years old it is in pretty good shape (I really think the cherries' antioxidants helped).

Taste – The slightly tart cherry twang is present balancing the potent sweetness (not to say that it isn't still almost cloyingly sweet). The finish is lightly roasted coffee and caramel (the roast character is not common in German Doppelbocks, I was probably too heavy handed with the Carafa). There is a deep bready/malty character from the Munich malt and to a lesser extent the decoction mash. The alcohol is completely hidden behind the malt/fruit sweetness (FG was ~1.034).

Mouthfeel – Rich and thick, moderate-low carbonation works well with the malt sweetness.

Drinkability & Notes – A great dessert beer, disturbingly easy to drink (even on a hot August evening), it has held up well considering I brewed it in 2005. The only batch that I still have bottles of that is older than this is a double-saison that was brewed in September 2005, but it is not very good (too much dried ginger).

Cherryator

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 5.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 17.33
Anticipated OG: 1.100
Anticipated SRM: 21.8
Anticipated IBU: 23.7
Brewhouse Efficiency: 80 %
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Grain
------
12.00 lbs. Munich Malt
2.00 lbs. Vienna Malt
1.00 lbs. CaraPils
1.00 lbs. Flaked Soft White Wheat
1.00 lbs. Rye Malt
0.33 lbs. Carafa

Hops
-----
1.50 oz. Hallertauer Mittelfruh @ First Wort Hop
0.25 oz. Hallertauer Mittelfruh @ 85 min.
0.50 oz. Hallertauer Mittelfruh @ 10 min.

Extras
-------
8.00 Oz Cherries Caramelized in port
32.00 Oz Sour Cherry Juice
3.00 Lbs Oregon Cherry Puree
12 oz Cherries Packed in Water

Yeast
-----
WYeast 2206 Bavarian Lager

Mash Schedule
---------------
Dough In 20 min @ 95
Protein Rest 120 min @ 122 (Infusion)
Sacc Rest 75 min @ 152 (Decoction)
Mash Out 15 min @ 167 (Decoction)

Notes
-----
Brewed 11/5/05 OG 1.100, 1/2 lbs rice hulls stirred in at mashout. 8 oz dried sour cherries boiled with Port in a frying pan until almost dry then added at flameout. Wort cooled to 55 then pitched with a decanted 5 qrt starter.

12/2/05 Ramped up to room temp (~65) for a diacetyl rest.

12/6/05 1.040, transferred onto the rest of the cherries (1 can Oregon puree and 1 can TJ's cherries in water and the sour cherry juice).

1/2/06 1.039, racked off cherries to lager

Slow 2 week drop to 30 degrees

4/7/06 1.034, and pretty tasty

4/23/06 Bottled with a fresh pack of 2206 and 2 1/8 oz of corn sugar.

5/7/06 Minimal carbonation, moved to furnace room and agitated to get yeast moving.

5/22/06 Fully carbonated, cherries taste processed. Solid, but not much complexity apparent. Beer moved to fridge for further conditioning.

8/6/06 Cherry flavor has mellowed and improved, turned out to be a very tasty beer. Over time a mild sourness from the cherries emerged which is a nice counterpoint to the thick sweet malt.

Next Time: Fresh cherries (mix of sweet and sour). Simpler grainbill, drop the carapils and rye. Decoction may not be necessary because the cherries prevent the malt from really being showcased. Drop the last hop addition (no hop aroma after long aging).

Salad Farm-oise

noreply@blogger.com (Fermentationette (Audrey)) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:24:00 +0000

For once, I had a solid idea in mind of the meal we would make before we arrived at the Dupont Farmer's Market last Sunday. I kept toying with the words "niçoise" and "salad," suggesting the outlandish twist of sausage in place of tuna (!), and "who has time for those fancy olives... and capers... and anchovies, anyway?" Mike insisted that this salad creation of mine, while perhaps loosely inspired by the original, was not in fact anything like a real Salade Niçoise.

In the end, we built a sound "niçoisienne" base of little gem lettuce (the diminutive bibb lettuce-wannabe of the Romaine fam), green beans, hard boiled eggs, potatoes, and a tangy, herby, slightly creamy vinaigrette. Atop we laid perfectly tender, juicy medallions of marinated, pan-seared pork tenderloin. And, though we don't by any means usually adhere to the schedule of a proper meal, the prospect of some bruschetta-type pre-salad course was too tempting to ignore. We "toasted" a few slices of French baguette (I use "toast" here because we may very well have used enough olive oil to technically be frying said slices) to act as spongy seats for our chopped tomatoes, garlic, and basil ("bruschetta" here loosely defined).

Now, les details. Below are two lists of food; the first containing those items we purchased at the market (not all, just those relevant to this meal), and the second, those items which we already owned and used at some point in the preparation of... LUNCH!

Farmer's Market Booty:
Potatoes - small, yellowy flesh, and with a reddish skin
Tomatoes - one pint of red-yellow mixed cherry tomatoes; two small black princes and two green zebras (at least I'm pretty sure that was the variety)
Green Beans - one pint of what seemed to be slightly more mature beans (or maybe some rogue variety, unfortunately I didn't get the name), which I didn't notice entirely until I got them home
French Baguette - from Bonaparte Breads, who thankfully make the trek to Dupont (and other markets) every week with the finest bread in all the land, pastries, and countless stacks of other buttery wonders. Seriously, for your own good, check these people out
Pork Tenderloin - About a half-pound strip of lean pork tenderloin, suggested by the nice man behind the table in lieu of my sausage idea (which would admittedly have overpowered the subtle flavors of the other ingredients)
Little Gem Lettuce - smooth, inoffensive, and buttery

Pantry/Fridge Staples and Such:
Olive Oil, Garlic, Shallot, Mayonnaise, Kosher Salt, Pepper, Dried Thyme, Basil (fresh and dried), Dried Tarragon, Sherry Vinegar, Coarse Brown Mustard, Eggs

While the ingredients for the bruschetta and the salad were prepared alongside each other until the very end (we ate the bruschetta while waiting for the tenderloin to cook and rest), for clarity's sake, I'll explain the basic procedure followed for each as a whole on its own, rather than what I did in chronological order (I was all over the place, but it worked!). For the bruschetta, I waited to cut the bread (on a hard bias, so as to increase the slice surface area) until I was ready to put it in the pan. Though it probably wouldn't reduce it to crouton staleness, you never know what might happen (meteor, dance party, tenderloin crisis, and so on) and before you know it, the bread's been sitting out for two hours. Given the quality of this baguette, though, it would probably take a lot more than an extra hour sitting out to come anywhere close to staling it out.

Now, the tomatoes = super easy. Everyone's definition of "bite size" is different, but I cut about half the pint of cherry tomatoes and my four other heirlooms into such approximate size into a colander resting on a plate (or bowl, or in the sink--just something to catch the liquid at the tomatoes drain). If you like the extra juice, no need to salt your tomatoes, but for our taste, mixing about a teaspoon of kosher salt into the cut tomatoes did a great job of pulling out the excess liquid and concentrating the sweet, rich flavor.

Once the tomatoes had rested with the salt about a half an hour, I got rid of the liquid (down the sink or down the hatch, whatever you please), and added 1-2 finely minced cloves of garlic, another small pinch of salt (you might want to taste a tomato first to determine the need), a couple grinds of the pepper mill (again, to taste, it's up to you), about a tablespoon of olive oil (not too much, since it's really best served as a toasting agent for the bread) and let it all sit and get happy in a bowl. I waited until just before serving the add the basil chiffonade so it wouldn't darken.

And of course, the bread. Some people might prefer to skip the liberal application of olive oil which aids so well in the pan-toasting process, but not us, not this time, being Sunday lunch and all. All it takes is a simple nonstick pan atop medium-heat, and a patient little wait of maybe 5 minutes on each side (no real timing magic here, we just constantly lifted the slices to check the progress until we were satisfied with the rich golden brown color).

As the toasts became ready, we placed them on a plate, and atop them, the garlicky-basiled tomatoes. It would nearly have sufficed as an entire lunch in itself...

...If it weren't for the amazing pork tenderloin that had been marinating for over an hour in olive oil, garlic (two crushed cloves), salt, pepper, dried basil, tarragon, and thyme. The photo may be a bit difficult to make out, but beneath the looming specter of olive oil, on the counter are the dried herbs and tenderloin.

While the tenderloin marinated in the fridge, the rest of the salad preparation was quite simple (if not mildly sweltering with all the boiling and no AC, though it's amazing the discomfort your brain ignores when it's in the cooking zone... but maybe that's just me). In no particular order, we: boiled eggs; boiled (in salted water) and then quartered potatoes (for fear they might get waterlogged if we cut before boiling); steamed green beans; and washed and tore up the lettuce. It should be noted that to none of this did we add salt, except for about two teaspoons to the water in which we boiled the potatoes and green beans. Given the delicate and fresh flavors of the salad components, and the distinct zip of the dressing, we thought it best to let them shine as themselves while also acting as complimentary vehicles for the subtle, succulent tenderloin.

The tenderloin! Not much to it after the marinade, really. We fired up the cast iron skillet nice and hot to get a good sear on the outside, making sure to remove any big pieces of garlic or herbs beforehand, and let it cook on all four sides for maybe 5 minute each. As you can see in the photo, we settled on only cooking the meat to medium/medium-well (around 140 degrees F), and it was well worth the risk (so far...? anyone know how long trichinosis takes to show up?). Be sure to let the meat rest for about 5 minutes after removing it from the heat before cutting it, as well, as it gives the juices a chance to cool down and settle, magically keeping them from running out all over the place, and resulting in disappointingly dry meat.

For such a simple, lean piece of meat marinated in a really uncomplicated mixture (believe me, if I can make it up, it's not that difficult), the final product kind of knocked my socks off and was almost delicate enough to match the service tuna normally pays to a Salade Niçoise.

Next-to-last step was to mix up a vinaigrette containing sherry vinegar, a tiny amount of (real) mayonnaise for a little creaminess, coarse brown mustard, kosher salt, pepper, chopped basil, and olive oil. The trick, it seems, to a decent vinaigrette is saving the oil component to be whisked in, very slowly, until last. At that, if you've not added any real emulsifying components to the vinegar (mustard, egg yolk, etc.), making it essentially water, the oil droplets are going to quickly coalesce at the top. Additionally, though it may seem counterintuitive to add salt to such a strongly flavored component of the dish, believe me, it's one of those things that you'll miss if it's not there.

Finally, we placed all the ingredients together on our plates -- lettuce in the middle, green beans sprinkled on top, eggs and potatoes each lining one side, a drizzle of vinaigrette, and the tenderloin medallions down the middle.

Beer Pairing:
Mike chose Orchard White, a dainty wheat beer from the Bruery folks that has only recently become available in the DC area, and supposedly with smacks of lavender, though we only got a pleasantly faint waft here and there. Mike adds: The firm carbonation and light character did a good job keeping our palettes fresh between the different components of the salad. It was delicate enough not to trample on the greens or the eggs, but still had enough herbal complexity to match with the pork (although probably not as well as something a bit of darker malt would have). The Bruery is one of the most interesting breweries to open in the last couple years. Most of their beers are delicious Belgian inspired brews (I am particularly fond of the Saison De Lente). The only knock on them is that their quality control still has room for improvement; I had a badly infected bottle of Black Orchard a few weeks back.

I hope you all enjoyed my first actual post. This is very much a process in progress, so please don't hesitate to let me know what you think can be added or improved for future posts.

Fruited Sour Beers

madfermentationist@gmail.com (The Mad Fermentationist (Mike)) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:31:00 +0000

Despite not doing much actual summertime brewing, this time of year my thoughts always turn to adding fruit to aging sour beers. I love the way the acidity of the beer brings out the fruit character in a way that no other base beer can. Here is a brief update on a few of my fruited sours.

Today I added 5 lbs of (sliced and lightly mashed) white peaches from the farmer's market to about 2 gallons of my Honey-Wheat sour. Originally I was planning on adding some flowers to that batch before bottling, but after waiting 6 months I decided fresh peaches sounded like a much better idea (it is hard to say "no" to beautiful fresh fruit). I have always heard that peaches don't work great in beer, but having tried the delicious Festina Lente from Dogfish Head and the tasty Eric's Ale from New Belgium (and hearing my friend Dyan rave about Lost Abbey's Yellow Bus) I just had to give it a try for myself.

Half of my Lambic 2.0 from last summer has been sitting on a combo of dark cherries and raspberries for the last month or so. I racked the 2.5 gallons of beer onto 18 oz of raspberries and 2 lbs of cherries which had been frozen for about 24 hours. I am hoping that the fruit's acidity and the renewed fermentation from the sugar add a bit more tang since the base beer doesn't have quite enough sourness for my taste. I will be aiming to bottle that one in a couple months depending on how it is tasting and if the gravity drops back down close to 1.000.

Over the weekend I bottled my Cabernet spiked Berliner Weiss. Hopefully it carbonates soon because that is exactly what I should be drinking now that it finally feels like summer here in DC. The beer was a nice deep cranberry-red in the fermenter, but looks decidedly more pale in the sample tube.

I also have 5 lbs of sour cherries vaccu-packed in my freezer. Some of them will go into a portion of the Wine Barrel Flanders Red that should be ready to go in a couple months, and I am thinking about doing another version of my Cuvee Tomme clone in the fall.

I am about to buy a house, so my brewing/posting may not be on quite the pace after the closing later this month. That said, once I get settled in I finally have a yard (plus a basement and a garage), so I'll be brewing outside, and have more room for aging beers, cheese, charcuterie, and other fun projects.