Poetry of Beer

A haiku in honour of what turned out to be a really very excellent first attempt at lager brewing, a simple golden pilsner that is now sadly gone:

Is that CO2
Sputtering up the dip tube?
Farewell, my sweet beer.

The Bi-Annual Brog Update

As I inch towards six months of inactivity, I feel the bi-annual instinct to brog.

The draft system is up and running, as of last month! I've been enjoying my Oktoberfest, finally, after lagering it for many months. Slated to replace it is a low-strength pyment, made with Chablis grape must and honey, for a lighter mead champagne. After that, my first true lager will have finished a good long lagering phase. It was a very simple recipe...about 9 lbs of American pils malt, bittered to 10-20 IBUs, and finished with an ounce of Saaz at the end of the boil, and fermented right around 50 degrees F with a dry lager strain, Fermentis S-23. I'm not expecting brilliance, but it should be a nice drinkable beer, likely with some obvious defects that will show me where I need to shore up my technique and process. Mild beers like that are excellent for exposing flaws...no huge flavours to hide behind.

A pumpkin ale that I threw together a few months ago has proven to be somewhat ill-advised. It was fairly basic, the remainder of my British pale malt with mashed pumpkin, lightly hopped, spiced with the usual spices, and (here may be the big mistake) fermented with some extra weizen yeast I had on hand. The result is phenolic. Quite unpleasantly phenolic. Likewise, the malted/oaked cider might have pulled too many tannins out of the oak...its a bit less drinkable than I'd hoped. Oh well, win some, lose some.

The doppelsticke altbier is delicious though, a great example of a big, bold, and bitter German beer, although there are not many of them, admittedly.

At least I have learned some lessons; save the weizen yeast for weizenbier. Fair enough!

August Update

Last Saturday, I brewed a Doppelsticke Altbier, a big, heavily bittered dark German ale. Original gravity was 1.082, and it is fermenting at approximately 60 degrees.

The previous weekend I laboriously juiced a 5 gallon bucket full of small, underripe Granny Smith apples from my backyard tree, to make just under a gallon of juice. I sulfated this juice, and then later pitched a white wine yeast. This weekend, I decided to dilute these very tart apples with some plain sweet apple juice, and I did so with 3 gallons of juice. I may make up the final 1 gallon of volume with another gallon of acidic Neufeldian apples, but if I get lazy another gallon of storebought juice should do the trick, albeit make for a more insipid, bland cider. A 2 to 3 ratio of tart juice to sweet juice should make a great fermented cider.

Last night, I bottled my kirschweizen, which has a sort of cherry pie character now, between the tart acid cherry juice and the rich malty sweetness of the crystal and pale malts. It is somewhat on the strong side at 7% ABV thanks to a secondary refermentation caused by the addition of the cherry juice, but it is smooth and quite drinkable at this stage, even pre-carbonation.

I'm backing off the idea of the soured wort experiment, and I may try using the acidulated malt from Weyerman to approximate the sour character in a weizen, Belgian, or fruit beer, without actually developing funky bacterial cultures. One of my new ideas (actually an older idea, but rejuvenated) is to brew a Chocolate Coconut Porter. First I would brew a basic porter around 1.060, using lots of chocolate malt and maybe some extra crystal malt to ensure sweetness and full body. Then in secondary, I would add a bottle of coconut rum (an easy way to add coconut flavor without the oils) and a 1/2 pound of cacao nibs for extra chocolate flavor. German Chocolate Cake in a glass!

Words of Wisdom

Give a man a beer, and he'll waste an hour.
Teach a man to brew, and he'll waste a lifetime.
-Anonymous

Hopfen und Maltz, Gott erhalt's!

Loosely translated, the above saying means "God Save Hops and Malt". A good transition to discuss my next brewing ideas.

First off is a "mocktoberfest"; yes, an Oktoberfest or Märzen style beer fermented with ale yeast instead of lager yeast. I will be brewing it with a combination of Munich and Pilsner malt, for an orange-amber hue. Only hop additions will be modest bittering, and I will ferment it at a cool 60° F with the aid of a brewing refrigerator thermostat. I'll be using Fermentis K-97 yeast, which is derived from the German alt yeasts, known for a clean, crisp profile with few esters. I plan on lagering this post-fermentation until October, when hopefully I will have my draft system up and running, and can celebrate Oktoberfest thousands of miles away from Munich.

Secondly I plan to take the cake of alt yeast and ferment what is known as a "sticke altbier". These are special seasonal brews from alt breweries in Northern Germany, and they have a similar malty profile to altbier but with much higher gravity. 12lbs of Munich malt, 2lbs of wheat, some Caramunich, and some Carafa malt, and it should be a dark, malty, tasty beer, perfect for when weather cools down around here.

Lastly, and this is just me considering some random brew ideas, I may have to try Charlie Papazian's method for sour mash brewing. My idea is as follows:

First, mash a simple pale beer, with about 6 pounds of pale malt, 3 pounds of wheat malt, and 1 pound of crystal or caramel malt. Mash for the standard period until conversion takes place, and then lauter into the kettle. Then I will take maybe 1/2 pound of extra uncrushed barley malt, and put it in a disposable muslin straining bag, tied off loosely at the end to keep the grain in the bag. This I will add to the wort when it has cooled to about 90° F. Then I cover it and leave it for a day or so, at room temperature, and allow the bugs on the unmashed malt to go wild. All kinds of nasties will start swimming around...lactic acid bacteria, particularly...and the wort will get funky and soured. Nothing you would ever want to drink. However, pinch your nose, pull the grain bag out and put the kettle on the stove. Now, open the windows, get the heat going, and boil the soured wort like it was any other brew, adding hops as needed. This will drive off a lot of the worst smells. What will remain in the brew is the sourness, which will give a refreshing tartness to the final beer. I think Fermentis T-58 would make a great estery Belgian yeast for this sort of beer. A sour Belgian style, without the post-fermentation wild yeast/bacteria still hanging around.

Bitter Bottled

Bottled a bitter last night. It was intended to be a "Special Bitter" or "Best Bitter"; that is, stronger than an Ordinary Bitter but not as strong as an ESB or Extra Special Bitter. My mash efficiency was a bit better than I expected, yielding a 1.050 original gravity, which is more in the ESB range, but I'm going to call it "St. Crispin's Best Bitter" regardless, as ESB in my opinion ought to have a little more oomph in bitterness and body.

So far this has been one of my most promising brews. I'll approximate the recipe from memory:

7 1/2 lbs British Optic 2-row
1/2 lb Belgian biscuit malt
1/2 lb British medium crystal malt, 60 deg Lovibond
3 ounces Belgian debittered black malt

The small quantity of debittered black malt darkened the beer up more than I had anticipated or intended, and instead of the orange amber I wanted, it was a deeper reddish amber, verging on brown. However, the roasted flavours associated with the darker malts is not there. Here is my hopping schedule:

60 min: 1/2 oz East Kent Goldings, 1/2 oz Willamette (both around 5% alpha acids)
30 min: 1/2 oz Willamette
10 min: 1/2 oz East Kent Goldings

The light hopping really allows the malt and hops to be in balance, something I've never quite allowed in my British bitters before (to their detriment). Willamette makes a great substitute for UK Fuggles, I think, and the aroma of it fresh is intoxicating. Very nice hop, one of my favourites.

I used the Fermentis S-04 strain (with a Whitbread origin) to ferment this batch. This is a very flocculant strain, which leaves a "bright" beer atop a concrete-like yeast cake.

In bottling it last night, the sample I had had a warm maltiness to it, with an unmistakeable biscuit-like flavour from the biscuit malt. Also a slight honey note. Very drinkable; has a sort of mild, rounded flavour that is never harsh or astringent. This is what brewing is about!

Weizen

Earlier this week I brewed a hefeweizen, my first wheat beer since last June. A delightfully simple and easy brewing session, using 4 pounds of British Optic 2-row malt and 5 pounds of domestic wheat malt. For yeast, I used a rehydrated packet of Danstar's Munich yeast. I hit the target OG dead on, at 1.049.

For hops, I was very generously given an interesting new product to try; Northern Brewer's HopShot. The details of the product are not all clear at this point, but it appears to be a non-isomerized hop extract. It comes in 5ml resealable syringes, with 1ml of extract having approximately the same bittering power as 1 ounce of 2.4% alpha acid hops; that is, 1ml will impart 10 IBUs to a 1.050 wort when boiled for 60 minutes. Very interesting, aromatic, and convenient. Hopefully this will help homebrewers get through the hop shortage a little bit better. I bittered with 1.5ml at 60min, and 0.5ml at 30min, which imparts an estimated 18 IBUs. A touch bitter for a true hefeweizen, but should still be nice.

Tonight I will be brewing a base beer for the kirschweizen (cherry wheat). This beer will need a touch more sweetness, so I will dial back the hop extract to a single 1ml addition at 60min, giving 10 IBUs. The grain bill will be similar, with 5lbs of American wheat, but an additional 1/2 pound of Optic and 1/2 pound of Crystal 60 for sweetness, for a total of 10lbs. Once this has finished fermenting in primary, I will rack this onto a quart of tart cherry juice concentrate.

As a status update on earlier beers, the bitter will be bottled in a week or two, having clarified nicely. The ginger beer is hot, spicy, dry, and strong, as expected. I sampled both the gruit and the espresso stout. The gruit was interesting and herbal, but the espresso stout is shaping up to be a royal failure, with a harsh astringency that I may not be able to force on anyone. Live and learn...coffee should be enjoyed freshly brewed, not bottle conditioned and aged.