No Accounting for Taste: A Brewer's Record

Kolsch

2011-12-02T23:38:00.000-08:00

Last winter I went to a MABCAB (Milwaukee Area Brewers & Chicago Area Brewers) get together in Shorewood, WI. The guy who hosted it served a really good Kolsch. I've been wanting to brew one all year. Having not brewed any sort of lager or hybrid in awhile, the time finally arrived. I used his recipe, scaled up to 6 gallons so excuse the odd grain amounts, except that he used the same IBUs worth of Perle hops rather than Hallertauer. I've seen many recipes with Hallertauer though, and it's what I had on hand. (I need to start brewing some hoppier beers to get last year's hops used up!)

Kolsch

brewed on: 12/2/11
OG: 1.047
IBUs: 46.6 IBUs
SRM: 5
mash temp: 149F

6 gallon batch
90 minute boil
75% efficiency assumed

malt:
5.38 lbs red Kolsch malt
4 lbs Pilsner malt
0.67 lbs Wheat malt

hops:
18.5 gm Hallertauer @ 3.9% - first wort (90 minutes)
39.5 gm Hallertauer @ 3.9% - 60 minutes

yeast:
WY Kolsch strain - 2 liter starter

I overboiled by a bit and had to boil/top up with some water. Not a big deal. Back to 6 gallons. I'm hoping it didn't get too dark though.

primary: ~58F- raised to 62. Back down to 58-59.

Anglo-American Pale Ale

2011-11-28T23:48:00.000-08:00

My friend Jim pointed out to me the other day that I hadn't brewed a hoppy beer in over 2 years. I hadn't felt like that long, but in checking back, he was right. And that one was an attempt at an all-brett IPA. It was time to break open the package of Amarillo hops I've bought a month or 2 ago! I call this an "Anglo-American" Pale Ale because I'm using English yeast (Fuller's strain) and Burtonized the water with a 10 gm gypsum addition to the mash.

Anglo-American Pale Ale

brewed on: 11/28/11
OG: 1.058
IBUs: 46.6
SRM: 7
mash temp: 152F

6 gallon batch
60 minute boil
assumed 75% efficiency

mash:
11 lbs US 2-row
1 lb Munich malt
0.7 lbs Carastan

10 gm Gypsum - mash

Hops (all loose pellets):
22 gm Yakima Magnum @ 14.4% - 60 minutes
14 gm Cascade @ 5.5% - 10 minutes
14 gm Amarillo @ 8.5% - 10 minutes
14 gm Chinook (homegrown whole-cone) - 10 minutes
14 gm Cascade @ 5.5% - flameout
14 gm Amarillo @ 8.5% - flameout
14 gm Chinook (homegrown, whole-cone) - flameout

16.5 gm Amarillo - dry hop, 5 days
16.5 gm Cascade - dry hop, 5 days

Yeast:
WY 1968 - London ESB (Fuller's strain) - repitched slurry from Golden Ale)

Yeast:
ECY Scottish Heavy - 2L starter

primary: started at 64F. Raised to 68F slowly over 3 days, then lowered back to 64F.

12/5/11 - Added dry hops - 16.5g each of Cascade & Amarillo loose pellets.

Brandy Barrel Golden Ale

2011-11-25T23:25:00.000-08:00

We recently removed our Wheat Wine from the Apple Brandy Barrel it was aging in. It tastes amazing! I can't wait to bottle it. (This is definitely aging-worthy, and I'm hoping to bottle condition it toward that purpose.)

We brewed a Golden Ale recipe I came up with as an experiment for the second barrel beer. I don't mean a Belgian Golden Strong. This didn't really fit a style. I knew I wanted to try a mid-gravity, malt forward light colored ale in the barrel. We've done lots of sours, dark beers, and big beers so far. This is probably with good reason. I have a hunch that something like this lower gravity, lighter colored ale will not take to the oxidation in the barrel well. We'll see. I can imagine it going in a good direction though as well, picking up the apple-clove notes from the wood. We didn't rinse the barrel before immediately refilling, so there should be residual wheat wine notes to it as well. While I'm not expecting the wonderful beer that the Wheat Wine was, I'm hoping for the best!

We went with MO and some Vienna to get nice maltiness, and the Wyeast Fuller's strain to accentuate the malt as well. (I love the Fuller's strain, WY1968, for malty beers! It is a favorite of mine in general.)

Brandy Barrel Aged Golden Ale

brewed on: 11/11/11
OG: 1.059
IBUs: 28.5 IBUs
SRM: 7.5
mash temp: 152F

mash:
9 lbs Marris Otter
3 lbs Vienna
0.6 lbs Cara-Pils
0.6 Crystal 40L

Hops (all loose pellets):
22 gm Nugget @ 13% - 60 minutes
28.3 gm Challenger @ 7.5% - flameout

Yeast:
WY 1968 London ESB - 2 liter starter

11/25/11 - Barrel filled with Bob, Jim, Dan S., John, and myself.

Old Ale

2011-11-06T23:26:00.000-08:00

Old Ale is one of my favorite types of beer. There are so many good Old Ales and English Barleywines out there and I've enjoyed exploring them over the last few years. I only wish we could get more here in Wisconsin. I found a clone recipe for Fuller's 1845, one of my favorites, and did some slight tweaking. My changes were the addition of 1% chocolate malt, and using East Coast Yeast's Scottish Heavy yeast instead of the obvious WY1968 Fuller's strain, as much as I love that yeast.

I got the idea to brew an Old Ale with the ECY strain a year ago when they first started selling it. Their description sounded perfect. Unfortunately, due to a mislabeled shipping address, it arrived after I had brewed and I never got to use the starter I made. So, when it recently arrived again this year, I put it right to work (after building up a 2L starter, of course!)

Old Ale

brewed on: 11/7/11
OG: 1.064
IBUs: 40.5 IBUs
SRM: 17
mash temp: 156F

mash:
11.75 lbs Marris Otter
1.5 lbs Amber Malt
1.5 lbs Crystal 65L (Fawcett)
3 oz Pale Chocolate malt
1 tsp gypsum

Hops (all loose pellets):
60 gm Fuggles @ 5.1% - 60 minutes
50 gm Fuggles @ 5.1% - 15 minutes

Yeast:
ECY Scottish Heavy - 2L starter

I'm debating adding some oak chips I received from Aeppeltreow owner Charles McGonegal that he soaked in his Pommeaux fortified pear dessert wine.

Choco-Coffee Imperial Stout

2011-10-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

A few years back my friend Jim did a great Founders Breakfast Stout clone. I still remember it fondly and decided to brew one myself. I pretty much stuck to Jim's recipe. I brewed this last a week ago, but just got around to posting. It was racked to secondary this afternoon and is tasting great even before the additional coffee and chocolate additions were made!

Choco-Coffee Imperial Stout (Founder's Breakfast Stout clone)

brewed on: 10/30/11
OG: 1.080
IBUs: 34 IBUs
SRM: 47
mash temp: 155F

mash:
10 lbs US 2-row
7 lbs Marris Otter
1.5 lbs Flaked Oats (Quaker quick oats)
1 lb Chocolate Malt
12 oz Roasted Barley (300 SRM)
8 oz Special B
4 oz Black Patent
4 oz Carafa II

3 gm chalk

Hops (all loose pellets):
33 gm Nugget @ 13% AA - 60 minutes
14.17 gm Williamette @ 5.1% - 5 minutes
14.17 gm Williamette @ 5.1% - flameout

Adjuncts:
3 oz Bittersweet Chocolate - boil, 5 minutes
2 oz roughly ground coffee beans (medium roast) - flameout
2 oz Bitter baking chocolate - secondary (14 days)
1 oz roughly ground coffee beans (medium roast) - secondary (14 days)

Yeast:
2 packs US-05, rehydrated

Apple Brandy Barrel Aged Wheat Wine

2011-10-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

I recently acquired an apple brandy barrel from Aeppeltreow cidery & distillery. This is some of the best brandy I've tried, with beautiful spice and fruit notes to it! The barrel echoes these, with an even more intense savory spiced aroma than the brandy itself. The barrel is around 26 gallons, which is more than I want to brew myself, so I recruited some friends from the B.O.M.B. (Barrel of Monkeys Brewers) group I started last year for group barrel projects. My friend Bob has a delicious Wheat Wine he brewed, based mostly off of one of the recipes in Stan Hieronymous's Brewing With Wheat. We decided it would be a great beer to age in the barrel. Along with Bob, Jim, Dan, and John, I brewed a batch of the wheat wine and we filled the barrel a week ago, along with a hefty amount of sampling of homebrew & commercial beers! A good time was had by all.

Barrel Aged Wheat Wine

brewed on: 9/16/11
OG: 1.110
IBUs: 75 IBUs
SRM: 11
mash temp: 156F

mash:
17.25 lbs Marris Otter
7.42 lbs White Wheat malt
1.36 lbs Aromatic malt
0.7 lbs Carapils
0.7 lbs Flaked Wheat

Hops (all loose pellets):
83.7 gm Centennial @ 8.7% - 90 minutes
25.6 gm Amarillo @ 7.5% - 30 minutes
43.66 gm Cascade @ 5.4% - 10 minutes
41.45 gm Cascade @ 5.4% - flameout

Yeast:
US-05 - 1 pack, rehydrated
Munich dry yeast - 1 pack, rehydrated

11/4/11 - Sample is showing nice clove and apple notes from the brandy barrel. Oak complexity is at a great level. We're shooting to empty asap, which is still 3 weeks off since we're brewing this week. Hopefully it doesn't get over-oaked. I'm really looking forward to this beer!

Second Runnings Beer - Thomas Hardy barleywine

2011-08-28T21:04:00.000-07:00

For the second runnings beer from my Thomas Hardy inspired barleywine, I capped the mash with a bit more grain. Unfortunately, it ended up picking up an infection from the dry hops (I don't know why I bothered using a bag on this one when I usually don't for pellets.) I'm 100% sure it came from the nylon hop bag. It was a bland beer anyway, so no huge loss. I've got a Brett Blend #9 pitch from East Coast Yeast on its way, which I may pitch to see what happens, but I'm not expecting much. By the time the bugs are done I'll have a beer that had little malt character, old hops (by that time) and a bunch of brett. Doesn't soundvery good, or balanced, to me. Anyway, for the sake of recording recipes, I capped the mash with the following:

12 oz Crystal 60L
6 oz Crystal 120L
6 oz Pale Chocolate malt

hops:
0.9 oz Nugget @ 13% - 60 minutes
0.5 oz Challenger @ 5.3% - 15 minutes
0.5 oz Challenger @ 5.3% - flameout

yeast:
WY London ESB - half slurry from English Mild

Thomas Hardy inspired Barleywine

2011-08-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

Although I didn't brew much over the summer, as usual, I've brewed a few beers since my last post and really slacked about recording them! I've intended to do an all-base grain barleywine, inspired by the delicious Thomas Hardy's Ale. A few friends and I each picked up a sack of Marris Otter in preparation. I was considering using a Bavarian Lager yeast for awhile, after reading a report that that's what Eldridge Pope brewery used to use, but went with a combination of Wyeast London ESB yeast (the Fuller's strain) and Nottingham. I love the character of the Fuller's yeast, and added the Notty since I know it can handle high gravity well.

I made this brew using first-runnings only, and had a tough time hitting my mid-1.120s OG I was shooting for. In the end I topped it off with 3 lbs of DME. I used the yeast slurry from my English Mild, split it in 2, and used half for the second runnings beer. The pack of Notty was pitched into the primary along with the slurry.

Barleywine

brewed on: 8/28/11
OG: 1.127
IBUs: 64
SRM: 10
mash temp: 150F

mash:
35 lbs Marris Otter
Hops (all loose pellets):
2.5 oz Nugget @ 13% - 60 minutes
1 oz Fuggles - 10 minutes

Yeast:
WY 1968 London ESB- 1/2 yeast cake from English Mild
1 pack Nottingham

English Mild

2011-08-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

I haven't brewed very many English inspired beers, and the majority of those have been along the lines of an Old ale here and Barleywine there. There was a bretted brown porter awhile back that is coming along nicely, and there was a pretty bad attempt at an ESB-esque creation with whatever I had on hand at one point. With that in mind, I picked up a pack of WY 1968 ESB yeast. This is the Fuller's strain and I love Fuller's. I plan to use it along with a pitch of stronger yeast to do a strong barleywine along the lines of Thomas Hardy next week. To get a big enough pitch of yeast ready, I brewed a dark Mild today. Here is my recipe:

English Mild

brewed on: 8/21/11
OG: 1.036
IBUs: 21.8 IBUs
SRM: supposedly 16.7, but I think mine looks a little darker than that. We'll have to wait and see.
mash temp: 156F

mash:
6 lbs Marris Otter
1 lb Carastan (30-35L)
8 oz Pale Chocolate malt (200L)
6 oz Brown malt
4 oz Crystal 120L

Hops (all loose pellets):
0.9 oz Fuggles @ 5.1% - 60 minutes
1 oz Fuggles @ 5.1% - 10 minutes

Yeast:
WY 1968 ESB - 1.6 liter starter, decanted.

Rum Barrel Aged Black Currant Melomel

2011-08-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

My first attempt at an oak aged mead turned out great when I put it in my peach brandy barrel this past spring. On the heels of that tasty batch, I decided to try another melomel in the 5 gallon rum barrel I recently acquired. I've been curious about black currants in mead since watching the Brew TV episode where Curt Stock is interviewed. Apparently that is a favorite fruit addition of his. Here is my recipe:

Rum Barrel Aged Black Currant Melomel

brewed on: 8/6/11
Batch size: 5 gallons

honey:
15 lbs Wildflower honey

Fruit:
96oz. black currant juice (Vintner's Harvest)

Yeast:
25g - 71B Narbonne dry yeast, rehydrated and fed using the Minnesota Speed Mead method.

11/28/11 - bottled

Lambic barrels!

2011-07-06T22:40:00.000-07:00

I've posted before about the group barrel projects I've been taking part in since last fall. It is finally time to drain our initial barrel of its contents, a sour Belgian Imperial Stout. We'll also be emptying our Rye Porter from the Zinfandel barrel it has been aging in.

In place of these beers the plan is to ferment a lambic-like beer in the barrels. Barrel #1 already has more than enough yeast and bugs from the 5 gallons of starter I inoculated it with last year. It was fermented half on Roselare and half on Bugfarm from East Coast Yeast. Barrel #2, which we've dubbed 'Rosie' probably doesn't have enough living in it to do the job of primary fermentation though. It has a mild brett strain living in it, but doesn't exhibit enough brett character (or any sourness) to make me think that there is enough population or variety of bugs for lambic fermentation. That being the case, I brewed a 10 gallon starter batch into which I pitched Wyeast Lambic Blend. I also mixed together dregs from bottles of Hansen's, Cantillon, and Boon Gueuze which some friends and I polished off while I was brewing.

For the starter batch I used the following recipe:

Lambic Solera Bug Starter

batch size: 10 gallons

brewed on: 7/3/11
OG: 1.047
IBUs: 0 IBUs (?)
mash temp: 158F
expected color: 3.6 SRM
90 minute mash
90 minute boil

mash:
10 lbs German pils malt
5 lbs German wheat malt
2 lbs flaked oats

Hops:
4 oz debittered Crystal & Willamette whole leaf

Yeast:
WY Lambic blend, dregs from Cantillon Gueuze, Boon Gueuze, Hansen's Gueuze, and Lindeman's Cuvee Rene

We'll be filling the barrels each half-way with wort brewed on 7-17-11. Six of us will provide wort that day. One week later, the rest of the group will be brewing the rest and topping the barrels up. We'll then rack off 5 gallons from each barrel to allow for headspace during primary fermentation. Once that has calmed down, the beer will be racked back to the barrels to top them up.

I've ordered debittered, aged hops for use in this project. Since they aren't here yet though, I experimented with quickly oven-aging them. I started at 170F, the lowest my oven will go, and slowly raised the temp up to around 190F over the course of 4 hours. The house smelled really cheesy and stale by the time I was done. It took a couple days to air out.

For the rest of the batches, we'll be using the following grist:

12 lbs pils
3 lbs wheat malt
2 lbs unmalted wheat
2 lbs flaked oats

Rather than doing a ridiculously long, but traditional turbid mash, we're mashing at 158F to provide some more complex sugars for the secondary fermentation, along with everything the unmalted wheat and oats will be adding. I amended the recipe after brewing my batch with 10 lbs of pils to help raise the gravity a bit. I realized it was a bit on the low side!

The plan is to use these 2 barrels 'solera' style, and draw off half every 8 or 12 months, replacing that with 5 gallons per brewer of fresh wort. This will keep the batch going and simulate the blending of older beer with younger in traditional gueuze. While not as refined as the traditional blending process, it seems like a fun starting place for our further exploration of sour barrel aged beers by the Barrel Of Monkeys Brewers!

Munich Dunkel

2011-05-11T00:10:00.000-07:00

I brewed my first lager a few months ago. It was a Munich Helles and it is delicious. I used to think I mainly had a taste for ales, but after trying some recent fresh lagers from both homebrewers and local commercial breweries, I did a 180 on that one. The key word in the last sentence is 'fresh'! The main reason I wasn't impressed by most supposedly world-class lagers in the past was that they are almost always stale by the time they reach the average drinker here.

Take Spaten as an example.They are an absolutely classic German brewery. In this case, they pretty much invented the Helles style when trying to imitate early Czech Pilsners in an attempt to capitalize on the growing light lager drinking trend that swept through Europe at the time. The average bottle of Spaten Premium Lager purchased here in the Midwest will have traveled for weeks or longer on a boat in a poorly temperature controlled environment, then waited months or more in a distributor's warehouse (again, sadly, often with complete lack of temperature control,) and finally waited on a store shelf or bar fridge, in some cases for weeks or months, before it reaches you. The beer you drink could easily be over 6 months old. For a light, delicate beer packaged in a green bottle, this means you will most likely find not-so-subtle notes of cardboard and skunk.

Enter homebrew and commercial craft beer. The first time I tried a Victory Prima Pils (a US brewed take on German Pilsner,) my initial thought was something like, "This is way too hoppy! It tastes like a pale ale!" Then it hit me. I'd never had an actual fresh German pilsner before. Aha! This is what these beers are supposed to taste like! I've had similar experiences with many homebrewed lagers in the last year or two as well.

The fact of the matter is most Americans will never taste a fresh lager in their entire lives, even if they are avid commercial beer drinkers. Now that I have, I want more! When I started homebrewing I never thought it would lead me to lagering. As a matter of fact, that was probably my area of least interest. Yesterday I brewed my second one and there will definitely be more to come. After my initial Munich Helles, I brewed a Dunkel this time. I've judged some great ones at local competitions, and this brown lager with it's toasted breadcrumb flavors gets high marks in my book. I stuck with a pretty simple recipe.

Munich Dunkel

brewed on: 5/9/11
OG: 1.053
IBUs: 24 IBUs
mash temp: 153F (I overshot a bit and then brought it down.)
expected color: 18.5 SRM

mash:
5 lbs Munich malt (10 L)
5 lbs Vienna malt
6 oz Carafa II

Hops (all loose pellets):
1.8 oz Hallertauer @ 3.9% - 60 minutes
0.25 oz Hallertauer @ 3.9% - 20 minutes

Yeast:
WY 2206 Bavarian Lager yeast. - 2 liter starter, decanted, followed by another 2.5 liter starter, decanted and pitched at 52F.

Flanders Red - ECY Flemish Blend

2011-05-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

There are few beers I've brewed repeatedly on a regular basis. One of the joys of homebrewing is the freedom of not being locked into producing the same few styles, as consistently as possible, over and over like a commercial brewery often does. That said, there are a few styles I've taken to re-brewing because I like them, and in some cases I find them very open to variations. Saison is a prime example. It is a very open ended style to begin with, and it's got examples all over the map with variants based on season, locally available ingredients, and pure creative brewing artistry.

On the other end of the spectrum, I find Flanders Reds to be something where I really appreciate a small percentage of the limited commercial examples out there. Rodenbach Grand Cru, Rodenbach's Vintage releases, and La Folie are my definite favorites and there are certain distinct similarities I find in them. They are 3 of the most sour, acidic beers I've tried, the fruity flavors of each fall into similar realms, and the oak aging brings out similar flavors and tannic mouthfeel.

In an attempt to get an eventual good Flanders sour ale brewed at home, I've done 3 batches in the past, all using various slurries of East Coast Yeast's Bugfarm releases. While meant for lambic fermentation, as well as general intense souring, they were my best option available since I find Roselare to be very lacking in the sour department until it is several generations old.

Recently, Al of ECY also released a Flemish blend. It contains a similar blend of yeast and bacteria, although not nearly as many and the balance of them is a bit different to hopefully get closer to a Flanders sour. I'm excited to try it! Since the vial of yeast/bugs sat around waiting patiently in the fridge for longer than I would have liked, I put half of the slurry through a stir-plated starter and saved half to pitch directly into the secondary. The logic behind this is that pediococcus, one of the players in this blend, is not a happy camper when introduced to large amounts of oxygen. I grew half on the stirplate to encourage the Saccharomyces strains in the blend to get healthy for a good initial fermentation. The pedio- is hardy enough to survive well enough in the vial, so I'll pitch the second half of the slurry later to encourage it to go to work once the fermented beer is transferred to a carboy to age and sour for a year or two.

Now that I've got 4 different batches of Flanders Red brewed, all with different yeast/bacteria blends, I'm looking forward to blending some into what I hope will be a passable, and quite acidic, batch of Flanders sour ale later this year! Here is the recipe I used, based on the information in Jeff Sparrows' Wild Brews. It is the same recipe, bug blend aside, that I've used in the past batches.

Flanders Red - #4

brewed on: 5/1/11
OG: 1.053
IBUs: 12 IBUs
mash temp: 150F
expected color: 13.1 SRM

mash:
5.5 lbs. Vienna malt
2.25 lbs. Flaked Corn
1 lb. German Carahell
1 lb. Belgian Caravienna
1 lb. Belgian Aromatic malt
6oz. Belgian Special B

Hops (all loose pellets):
0.6 oz Styrian Goldings @ 5.2% - 60 minutes

Yeast:
ECY Flemish Blend - 1/2 grown on stirplate & pitched into primary. 1/2 pitched directly from vial into secondary.

Brandy Barrel Imperial Stout

2011-05-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

As I posted awhile back, I recently acquired a 10 gallon Peach Brandy barrel from the owner of Aeppeltreow Winery & Distillery. While aging a Rhubarb-Berry Melomel, I wanted to plan ahead for the next batch to barrel age. Upon the suggestion of a few friends, and with their offers to help, I decided on an Imperial Stout.

Last year I helped start BOMB (Barrel of Monkeys Brewers), a group of friends, all wonderfully talented homebrewers/vintners on their own. We have 2 large barrels that we collectively brew for, with each person contributing 5 or 10 gallons. So far we have a 23 year old brandy barrel, and a Door County Zinfandel barrel from Stone's Throw Winery. The brandy barrel has a sour stout aging in it. The wine barrel had a batch of relatively low strength English Barleywine and now is holding a Rye Porter. Unfortunately, the barleywine, now kegged, is exhibiting signs of brettanomyces. The upside is that I find the flavors complementary so far, and if nothing else, it exhibits Old Ale-like qualities. My hope is that both barrels will soon be used for lambic fermentation. We're meeting this weekend, so ideas for what to do with them will be discussed.

The best thing to come out of the BOMB group is not the beer, but the friendship and camaraderie. It has been a blast getting together with the guys and sharing homebrew as well as great commercial beer. I'm amazed by the things some of the guys pull out of their cellars for our get-togethers. When we did the barleywine filling, we had flights of beer such as J.W. Lees barleywine, aged in Calvados, Sherry, and Port barrels going back to 2004, just as an example.

So, now with a smaller 10 gallon barrel of my own, I definitely want to get a few friends to brew batches with me here and there. With 5 gallons being my standard brew size, it'll be nice to share the brewing load and the results with friends.

For now, my friend Jim and I decided do use one of the Imperial Stout recipes from Zainasheff & Palmer's Brewing Classic Styles book. I intend to start brewing certain "beers to be aged" annually including an Imperial Stout, Old Ale, and barleywine. Thus, this recipe seemed like a good starting place with options to vary the recipe in years to come, whether or not it is oak aged. Here is what we ended up with:

Brandy Barrel Imperial Stout

brewed on: 4/25/2011
efficiency: 75%
expected OG: 1.100

Expected IBUs: 50.3 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
19 lbs Marris Otter
1.5 lbs Roasted Barley (300 SRM)
1 lb Special B
8 oz Caramunich
8 oz Chocolate malt
8 oz Pale Chocolate malt

Hops:
1.5 oz Magnum @ 14.1% - 60 minutes
2 oz Willamette @ 4.8% - 10 minutes
2 oz Willamette @ 4.8% - 1 minute

Yeast:
US-05 (2 packets)

5/17/11 FG 1.032. (Jim's batch @ 1.031) Filling barrel tonight.

Rhubarb-Berry Melomel

2011-04-30T19:26:00.000-07:00

I've yet to try an oaked mead, but it's something I've been curious about since I first read Ken Schramm's Compleat Meadmaker. He raves about the character oak can add to an already good mead. Now that I've got my 10-gallon Peach Brandy barrel this is my chance to find out!

I looked at some of the St. Paul homebrew club's info on staggered nutrient additions, pH adjustment, etc for meadmaking. Kristen England has a powerpoint online from a mead presentation he gave, and there is a good interview (w/ 2 recipes) from Curt Stock on Brew TV as well. With info in hand, I got some KOH from one of the guys in the Milwaukee Beer Barons club while taking my BJCP exam earlier this month and set out to make a big Stock-inspired melomel.

We have around 20 lbs of rhubarb in the chest freezer from my grandma's garden last year. I saved the really thick stalks for mead/beer since they are too big and stringy to work well in pies. (My grandma makes the best rhubarb pie ever, just for the record!) I also went out and bought a bunch of strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and 2 containers of Blueberry-Pomegranate juice concentrate. Along with 40 lbs of honey from 3 different sources, I split this all up into 2 buckets and did my thang. . .

Peach Brandy Barrel Aged Rhubarb-Berry Melomel

brewed on: 3/30/11
OG: 1.120
FG (bucket 1): 1.033
FG (bucket 2): 1.012

Honey:
18 lbs - Wildflower (Sean's dad's apiary, Fall '10 harvest)
6 lbs - Wildflower (DP. Wigley, funky/earthy smelling & crystallized)
16 lbs - Wildflower (Jim Payne, older honey, crystallized, but very clean tasting)

Fruit:
8 lbs - rhubarb
7.5 lbs - strawberries
5 lbs - blueberries
3.5 lbs - blackberries
2 cans - blueberry-pomegranate juice concentrate

Yeast:
25g Lalvin Narbonne 71B (split 12.5g/bucket)

Nutrients & pH adjustment schedule:
Day 1 (per 5 gallon bucket)
4.5g Wine yeast Nutrient
12.5g 71B yeast, rehydrated
28g GoFerm
2g DAP

Days 1, 3, 5, 7
stir to degas

Days 2, 4, 6 (per 5 gallon bucket)
stir to degas
4.5g Fermaid K
2g DAP
50ppm KOH (10 ml, 2M solution)

Fermented at 63F ambient temp

Added to Peach brandy barrel after 2 weeks. Average FG of 1.022.

5/17/11 - blended FG in barrel 1.017. Picked up just a hint of the oak & brandy barrel character. Also deepened the color to a deep orange. Cleared Nicely. Bottling tonight. Refilling barrel with RIS.

New 10 gallon Peach Brandy Barrel!

2011-03-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

I was happy to receive an email the other day from the owner of Aeppeltreow Winery where I occasionally help out with bottling. Charles turns out some very good ciders and recently started releasing brandies as a distillery as well.

I had asked awhile back about the availability of any barrels when Charles was done with them. He just got done using a 10 gallon Minnesota oak barrel that had been filled with his first, small batch of Peach Brandy. I was happy to give it a new home. Now my dilemma is what to fill it with! I'd really like to go with an oak aged mead of some sort, but I'd like to fill it sooner than it will take to turn out a mead from the primary. My preference would be to do a mead and/or cider prior to any beer, but it may have to be a beer. Eventually, I hope to turn it into a 10 gallon sour beer solera with a Flanders or something similar. Charles thought the first batch or 2 to go through the barrel would pick up some of the brandy character, and future batches would just pick up oak. Maybe a big beer is best to soak up the brandy character first anyway. Time will tell.

(Photos will be added soon!)

'Historic Influenced' Porter w/ Brett

2011-03-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

In an effort to use up the last few packs of yeast waiting for attention in the fridge, I was debating what to do with a smackpack of Wyeast Old Ale blend, a special release from last year. A few friends had been doing historic, or historic influenced porters of late, and I figured something along those lines would be fun with this brew. I was considering a Whitbread Porter recipe from Whitbread in 1811. However, the more I played around with the recipe, the more I was convinced that the brown malt I have is nowhere near the malt they referred to as "brown malt" in this article. Mine is too light, so I adapted and went with something closer to a modern porter recipe. I added some crystal (Carastan, in this case) and some pale chocolate malt. Both ramped up the color into the dark range, rather than mid-brownish 18SRMs I was getting before. They should add more complexity too.

Porter (w/ Brett)

brewed on: 3/20/2011
expected OG: 1.048

Expected IBUs: 27 IBUs
mash temp: 154F

mash:
6.5 lbs Marris Otter
2 lb Brown Malt
1 lb Carastan
12 oz Pale Chocolate

Hops:
1.2 oz Fuggle @ 5.1% - 60 minutes
0.5 oz Fuggle @ 5.1% - 10 minutes

Yeast:
Decanted 1 liter starter of Wyeast Old Ale blend

Added 0.3 oz House Toast French Oak cubes to primary.

3/28/11 - SG - 1.015. Chocolate notes, slightly roasted flavor. Body is on the thin side, but ok for a brown porter. Besides, the brett will chew the body up when it kicks in anyway.

Wine Barrel Rye Porter

2011-03-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

Awhile back, our local barrel group filled a Zinfandel barrel with English barleywine. At last tasting (which I could not attend) it was pronounced to be pretty oaky, so it's time to refill with our next beer, a Rye Porter recipe from fellow homebrewer Eric Wolf. He did a non-oaked 5 gallon batch of this, along with several other rye beers, that we all liked and thought would take on the oak well. This was my first time brewing with rye. I've heard it is very gummy and can lead to stuck mashes easily. I added 1+ lb of rice hulls to my mash and it was one of the easiest I've ever had to run off.

Wine Barrel Rye Porter

brewed on: 3/18/2011
expected OG: 1.065

Expected IBUs: 59.9 IBUs (I had to tweak my recipe a bit, so was a tad over the planned 58.4 for the group)
mash temp: 154F

mash:
4 lbs US 2-row
4 lbs Rye Malt
3.5 lbs Munich Malt
1.25 Caramunich
8 oz Chocolate Malt
8 oz Special Roast
0.4 lbs Pale Chocolate Malt

Hops:
1.25 oz Mt. Hood @ 5.5% - First Wort (calculated as 20 minute addition)
0.9 oz Columbus @ 14.4% - 60 minutes
1 oz Mt. Hood - flameout
1.5 oz Columbus - dry hops (we will each do this on our own after barrel aging)

Yeast:
US-05

Saison for Beer Fests

2011-03-06T22:29:00.000-08:00

I recently volunteered to brew up a keg of saison for the upcoming Kenosha Beer & Cheese Fest going on next month, as well as a keg for the Milwaukee Firkin a few months later. I figured I might as well get it all out of the way now and just brewed up a 10 gallon batch. I stuck with my base recipe for this one. With Spring in the near future, I'll be back to brewing more saison variations this year soon enough though! This was a good kick off. I've gotta say it's really nice having a few hundred lbs of grain on hand, and 9 lbs of hops! The only thing I had to pick up for this batch was yeast! I don't have a lot to say about this one. It went smoothly and I cooked some good Thai papaya salad while mashing & boiling. The only changes I made from past batches was that I ran out of Franco-Belgian pils malt after the first 4.5 lbs, so I made up the difference in MFB Pale malt. Also, I had a spare ounce of Crystal hop pellets in the freezer, so I added those at flameout. I was shooting for 11 gallons, but boiled down a tad too far and ended up with 10. Not a big deal. My normal OG for this recipe is below the minimum BJCP guideline, not that I follow those for everything. There was definitely room for higher gravity though. The IBUs were toward the low-middle range. They are still within the suggested range.

In other news, my pomegranate mead got the thumbs up from Annie today and will be bottled soon!

Saaz Saison

brewed on: 3/6/2011
expected OG: 1.044

Expected IBUs: 32 IBUs
mash temp: 150F
10 gallon batch
90 minute boil

mash:
12 lbs Belgian Pils (subbed Belgian Pale malt for 7.5#)
3.5 lbs German wheat malt
8 oz acidulated malt

Hops:
2oz Saaz @ 5.5% - 60 minutes

2 oz Saaz @ 5.5% - 15 minutes
3 oz Saaz @ 5.5% - flameout
1 oz Crystal - flameout

Yeast:
3711 French Saison - 1 pack per 5 gallon bucket

3/28/11 - OG 1.002. Dry hopped each 5 gallon batch with 1 oz Crystal (3.2%) whole leaf.

American Stout 2

2011-02-28T12:40:00.000-08:00

With a lot of carboys of sours aging, 2 more planned in the near future (to make use of Bugfarm 5 and Flemish Ale blend from ECY,) I've been on a bit of a clean beer kick lately. I just brewed a Munich Helles awhile ago, and now it was time to revisit my American Stout recipe. Last time I brewed this the keg was tapped out faster than any other beer I've brewed. It turned out really well, and was quite delicious! So, it was time to revisit the recipe. I made a few basic changes, just due to what I had on hand. I was happy enough otherwise that I didn't want to make more changes than necessary. Awhile back I ordered some ECY Old Newark lager yeast strain, but received the ale strain instead. Ah well. I figured I'd use it for something anyway, so kept it. So I had some Old Newark Ale yeast on hand, so I pitched that along with one pack of US-05 yeast, vs just 2 US-05 packs last time. Although I listed Chocolate Malt in the last recipe, I've had this nagging feeling that I used half Pale Chocolate since I have a lot of that on hand. I split up the chocolate malt into 2 halves to do that (again?) this time. My LHBS was out of Yakima Magnum, so I subbed in Columbus at the same exact AA% for bittering. Also, I didn't have black barley on hand, but I had a bunch of Roasted Barley, so I swapped in the roasted stuff. 300L vs 500L wasn't a big deal for a few ounces since the recipe was already darker than BJCP guidelines for a stout (which I find funny because either way it's BLACK), but seeing as I don't really care what the BJCP tells me a stout needs to be anyway, that's not a big deal. The 2 grains definitely have different character to them, but I think it'll still be complimentary. Here's the recipe!:

American Stout

brewed on: 2/27/2011
expected OG: 1.069 (I ended up with 1.074. Still getting used to Beer Smith rather than Beer Alchemy, so I was a bit off on the efficiency.)

FG: 1.022
Expected IBUs: 54.1 IBUs
mash temp: 155F
6 gallon batch

mash:
15 lbs US 2-row
0.5 lb Black malt
0.5 lb Roasted barley
12 oz Crystal 40L
12 oz Coffee malt
6 oz Chocolate malt
6 oz Pale Chocolate malt

Hops:
1.5 oz Columbus @ 14.4% (60 minutes)
1 oz Centennial @ 9% (5 minutes)
~ 1 oz homegrown Cascade (flameout)

Yeast:
1 pack - Safale US-05 1 vial - ECY Old Newark Ale

3/6/11 - FG 1.022, kegged

Munich Helles

2011-02-13T20:24:00.000-08:00

In today's news: I finally went out and got my chest freezer for lagering! I've been procrastinating since this fall. Lagers are something I've wanted to brew for awhile though. Back when I bought my chest freezer for kegerator purposes I was going to get a really big one to hold four-ish kegs plus room for a carboy. It turned out that a medium and a small chest freezer together were maybe $10 more total than buying one big one. So, I got my wife to agree that I'd just get a medium (7 cu. ft.) for the kegs with the understanding that I'd be getting another small one (5 cu. ft.) in the future to use as a lagering chamber. Somehow I managed to keep putting that off until now.

A few weeks ago I went over to my friend Jim's house to hang out and brew while he did his first decocted lager. He recently racked it and was nice enough to save half of the yeast slurry for me. He even gave me 10 lbs of spare Best Pils malt on top of it. With both of these in hand today, I set out to brew my first lager. I've been wanting to try brewing a Helles. Jim gave me Czech lager yeast, but I went ahead with the Helles recipe anyway. I'm not sure if it's appropriate or not (I haven't read up on lager yeast nearly as much as ales/bugs) but I figured even if it wasn't a spot on Helles, it'd hopefully at least be a nice drinkable light lager of some sort and that's good enough for me for now! Here's the recipe:

Munich Helles
brewed on: 2/13/11
OG: 1.045
IBUs: 18.5 IBUs
mash temp: 150F
expected color: 3.8 SRM
7 gallons

grist:
10 lbs. German pils malt
1 lb Cara-pils
6 oz Vienna malt

Hops (loose pellets):
1 oz Hallertauer @ 3.9% - 60 minutes
0.5 oz Hallertauer @ 3.9% - 20 minutes
0.28 oz Hallertauer @ 3.8% - 20 minutes
0.5 oz Hallertauer @ 3.9% - 5 minutes* (see below)

Yeast:
Czech Lager slurry from Jim's German Pilsner

Ferment at 52F.

Mashed in at 1.1 qts / lb.
Protein rest 130F - 15 minutes
Decoction - 40% weight (15.8 lbs)
Sacch rest - 60 minutes
90 minute boil

I forgot to add he 5 minute hop addition. No huge loss in IBUs, but I do like Helles with a bit more floral hop nose than is probably traditional.

Also, I planned on a 6 gallon batch, but didn't realize until after the fact that I'd get better efficiency from decocting. Thus, I ended up at 1.052 and diluted the wort with a gallon of distilled water while chilling.

More little mistakes on this one than usual, but I expected some since I wasn't used to the step-mash, decoction process.

2/21/11 - SG: 1.010. Raising to diacetyl rest. Clean malty taste w/ very slight floral background.
2/23/11 - Lowering to lager temp.

Dark Strong Funky Belgian Ale with Spices

2011-01-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

I've been intrigued by the Dark Funky Saison recipes that Mike over at The Mad Fermentationist has posted annually over the past few years. With a couple sour beer buckets free, I decided spur of the moment to try making one of them on Sunday. My friend Jim just happened to be brewing a decocted German pils, so I headed over to his place with my brewing gear and set up shop to brew together.

Mike's post was for a 15 gallon batch done as a group brew, so I scaled everything down a bit. I also made a few other changes. I got rid of the light extract, but I added 1# of D2 dark candi syrup. I also didn't have a spare bottle of red wine handy, so after chopping up my dates and caramelizing them in a tiny bit of wort, I deglazed them with more wort, then added the entire mixture into the boil. Since the recipe used under an ounce of hops, I just transferred everything, dates and all, into the primary. I figure it'll just be a bit of extra food for the bugs. I did up the hops a bit, but not terribly much. Since Mike mentioned the black cardamom he used was a bit strong, I didn't lower the spice amount, but I did increase the hops to balance it a bit more. We'll see how that works out. It's only a few IBUs difference anyway.

I also used different yeast. Mike used WY 3711 French Saison (one of my favorite strains.) Our LHBS has a tendency to have some pretty old yeast sometimes, and the newest saison strain of any type that they had in was almost a year old, with several from '09 even. . . I don't like using old yeast like that even in a starter in most cases, but especially since I was brewing on short notice, I wasn't about to pitch an old pack. Nor did I have time to drive up to Northern Brewer for fresh yeast. Luckily, they had a pack of T-58 dry yeast left, so I picked that up in place of the 3711. While it isn't a saison yeast per se, I've been curious to try T-58 for awhile and this seemed like a good opportunity. With sour dregs and spices getting added, the base yeast should be less exposed anyway.

I also subbed a couple specialty malts for things I had on hand.

The recipe I used was as follows:

Dark Strong Funky Belgian with Spices
brewed on: 1/16/11
OG: 1.098
IBUs: 20 IBUs
mash temp: 154F
expected color: 31.5 SRM

mash:
13 lb Belgian Pils Malt
11 oz CaraMunich II
6.5 oz Carastan
6.5 oz Special B
5.5 oz Pale Chocolate
4.5 Coffee Malt
4.5 US Crystal 90L
2.25 oz Carapils
2.25 oz Carafa II
2.25 oz Flaked Wheat

Adjuncts:
1 lb D2 Dark Belgian Candi Syrup - 60 minutes
7oz chopped Dates, caramelized in a pan, deglazed with wort - 60 minutes
1g Black Cardamom seeds, ground - 2 minutes

Hops (loose pellets):
0.7 oz Amarillo @ 9.1% - 60 minutes

Yeast:
T-58

Dregs (in primary):
Drei Fonteinen Oude Gueuze
De Dolle Oerbier
Jolly Pumpkin Bam

I was expecting about 1.088 OG, but that was without taking the dates into account. They upped the gravity significantly! This is apparently a winter of strong beer brewing for me with a strong old ale, English barleywine, and this Dark Strong Belgian. I may even do one more barleywine yet this winter since the one I brewed is destined for our group red wine barrel.

2/21/11 - SG @ 1.022 Dark brown and very opaque. Not much sourness yet. Cardamom is present but not too overpowering. A bit boozy, but more warming than distracting. Very mild raisiny background. Should be interesting with age.

Flanders Red - New Years 2011

2011-01-02T23:17:00.001-08:00

My friend Bob decided to start a yearly tradition of brewing a barleywine every New Years Day. I like it! Not only is it sort of a cool way to ring in the New Year, but it's also starting the year off enjoying the day with friends. Our group brew sessions are always a lot of fun.

However, having brewed a Strong Old Ale *and* an English Barleywine for our barrel project already, I didn't brew a barleywine. I had some Bugfarm4 from East Coast Yeast in the fridge and it was getting past time to put it to use. I grew it up a bit in a 1 liter starter for a week to get it healthy again, and then brewed a Flanders Red. I brewed my first Flanders almost exactly a year ago, at another group brew with other friends, at the end of December 2009. So, in lieu of a third huge abv beer in the fermentor, I figured I can either stick with brewing a Flanders once a year, or just start doing the yearly barleywine next year. Either way, we had a great time.

We were also joined by other friends, Tony C and Tony B. Tony C was brewing his barrel barleywine and Tony B brewed an ESB (yeast starter beer for his barrel brew.) Our friend Jim and his son, a Marine in town for the holidays, stopped by as well. Jim's son recently brewed his first extract-kit IPA and was getting in some quality all-grain observation time while on leave at home.

Both Tonys also grilled venison from their recent deer hunting trip. I've gotta say the venison was some of the best meat I've had in a long, long time. Thanks guys!!!

After a string of 2 unseasonably warm days/nights, Mother Nature decided to lower the thermostat on us for New Years Day and we got to brew outside in 19F weather! We at least took shelter in a detached garage and there were 4 burners running much of the time which provided some "heat" although heat may be an overstatement! Still, it was much better than brewing in 90F+ humid summer weather! (Next time, I vote we at least do this in my attached garage where we can run out to check things from time to time. . .)

Aside from the grilling & brewing, we also had many delicious beers. I broke out a bottle of de Struise's Black Albert, one of my last 3 bottles of award winning all-brett C beer, as well as all-brett L w/ wine & cherries, a bottle of one of The Bruery's Christmas beers (we all agreed this one was way too sweet,) and one of my Archaic beers using cultured up Pannepot 2007 dregs. Others brought many of their homebrews and some interesting commercial beers as well.

To end the day, another friend, Jesse, stopped by my place just after we finished brewing and the two of us tried several Baltic Porters we'd been waiting to sample side-by-side. And then I went to bed at 6pm for several hours. . .

This year's Flanders Red recipe is almost the same as last year's, the recipe from Wild Brews, but last year I decided to add some raw sugar for whatever (dumb) reason. In retrospect, I think I just didn't have much sour brewing experience a year ago. Maybe I did it to combat the terrible efficiency I was getting still, prior to fixing my mash tun. Regardless, I got rid of the sugar addition and brewed it this year. Last year's batch used Bugfarm3 and is getting really good as of the last sample I took. This year's is the newer Bugfarm4. I'm anxious to try Al's Flemish Ale blend whenever he releases that via East Coast Yeast as well. Here's the Flanders recipe:

Flanders Red - #2

brewed on: 1/1/11
OG: 1.053
IBUs: 12 IBUs
mash temp: 150F
expected color:13.1 SRM

mash:
5.5 lbs. Vienna malt
2.25 lbs. Flaked Corn
1 lb. German Carahell
1 lb. Belgian Caravienna
1 lb. Belgian Aromatic malt
6oz. Belgian Special B

Hops (all loose pellets):
0.6 oz Styrian Goldings @ 5.2% - 60 minutes

Yeast:
slurry from 1 liter starter of ECY Bugfarm4

2/21/11 - SG @ 1.006. Nice tartness. Acidity reminiscent of green apple, but more intense. (Not green apple flavor though.) Moved to basement.

BOMB barrel #2

2011-01-02T23:03:00.000-08:00

Here are a few photos of our latest BOMB (Barrel of Monkeys Brewers) barrel. It is a French oak barrel that help California Zinfandel. This is the info about it, according to the barrel maker's website:

Your Barrel Description:

Buttery and fatty.

Tronçais

The Tronçais cask:

Made from oak from the forest of the same name, where some trees are over 300 years old, and the environment is rich with 85 natural springs.

The Tronçais cask will provide your wine with a generous and opulent character, and a natural buttery and fatty expression.

The natural slight potential of vanillin in the wood provides light vanilla notes.

Performance : Opulent and generous

This last photo features Kevin, whose basement will house this barrel, when the barrel arrived.

Old Stone Thrower English Barleywine

2011-01-02T22:46:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my last post, we're brewing an English Barleywine for our latest BOMB barrel brew. We went with the Timothy Taylor strain of yeast (although I'd have preferred something more attenuative personally.) This beer is destined for a French oak red Zinfandel barrel in a couple weeks and I can't wait. We got the barrel from Stone's Throw winery in Door COunty, WI, so we've dubbed the first beer to go into it Old Stone Thrower in honor of the winery.

Since I've neglected my posting duties a bit lately, this beer has already been in the primary for a week. This yeast strain is definitely an English top-cropping variety, as it crawls up the bucket almost every time I rouse it, and has come out/filled up the airlock twice this week already! Others in our group have had similar experiences with it. I don't know how this yeast strain will turn out with a barleywine, but it'll be fun regardless. I know it definitely isn't normally used for such big beers though. The Timothy Taylor website lists their strongest beers as clocking in at 4.3% abv. I should also mention that while the recipe was written for 65% efficiency, lower than mine even for big beers, I neglected to scale it down mostly on purpose since we had a few other batches come in on the low side for OG. Here is our barleywine recipe:

Old Stone Thrower English Barleywine

brewed on: 12/27/10
OG: 1.095
IBUs: 57 IBUs
mash temp: 150F
color:13.7 SRM

mash:
19 lbs Marris Otter
1 lb UK Dark Crystal (one of my favorite movies comes to mind whenever I use this grain!)

Hops (all loose pellets):
1.4 oz Nugget @ 11% - 60 minutes
2 oz. WIllamette @ 3.7% - 25 minutes
1 oz. Fuggle @ 5.1% - 25 minutes

Yeast:
Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire yeast cake from this sort-of ESB starter batch

90 minute boil

ESB

2011-01-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

Once again I've neglected my posting duties for longer than I'd prefer. We recently picked up our second barrel for the BOMB (Barrel of Monkeys Brewers) barrel group I helped start. The plan (hope) with this one is to do at least a couple clean beers before the barrel sours, intentionally or not. This barrel is a red wine barrel, Zin specifically. We bought it from Stone's Throw winery in Door County, WI and it is a thing of beauty. I will have to dig out some photos and post them after this as I don't have them immediately handy.

We decided on an English style barleywine for the first batch in this barrel using 1496 West Yorkshire yeast, a special limited release from Wyeast which is supposedly the Timothy Taylor strain. Several friends have used it for smaller beers with good results. I would have preferred something a bit more attenuative, but most of the guys wanted to try this strain so I don't mind.

As a starter beer to build up some yeast, I brewed an ESB. This is one of the first mid-gravity English style beers I've brewed since I was on a mostly belgian/wild ale kick for quite awhile. (I'm still mixing in plenty of sours and I have no doubt the saisons will flow again come Spring.) Since I've neglected posting for awhile, this beer is already on tap. I'm not super fond of it as an ESB, as it has a small amount of banana going on which really doesn't fit, but overall it is a fine everyday drinking beer for at home and I'm enjoying it well enough in that capacity. In the end, it was something I threw together with the malt & hops I had on hand, so I'd change a lot next time. For example, I didn't even use Marris Otter. I used Belgian Pale malt and some biscuit to add maltiness instead, since I have some of the Pale from a bulk order handy still. Anyway, here is the recipe:

Jay's sort-of ESB

brewed on: 12/20/10
OG: 1.054
IBUs: 40 IBUs
mash temp: 152F

mash:
9 lbs. Belgian Pale malt
1 lb. UK Carastan
1 lb. Biscuit malt
3 oz. Special B

Hops (all loose pellets):
1 oz Northern Brewer @ 9.4% - 60 minutes
1 oz UK Fuggle @ 4.2% - 10 minutes
1 oz US Willamette @ 3.7% - flameout

Yeast:
1 liter starter - Wyeast 1496 West Yorkshire strain

12/27/10 - kegged. FG - 1.012.

This yeast is a true top-cropping strain. After the main fermentation finished, it still had a huge mat of floating, krausen-like yeast on top of the beer. It may have knocked another point or 2 off the beer yet, but I needed the yeast for my barrel barleywine, so I kegged it since it was already on the low end of the ESB FG range.

Old Hardy - Old Ale

2010-11-21T18:32:00.000-08:00

As with so many recent recipes, this is another beer that I've had on my to-brew list for quite awhile now. While I've found that my preference has gravitated much more toward the low-alcohol session beer side of things over the last year, the foreshadowing of a quickly approaching winter has brought back cravings for both barleywine and old ale.

Arguably, they aren't even terribly separate "styles" unless you're really into the BJCP guideline thing. Historically, 'Barelywine' was the title given to a British brewery's strongest beer, even if it was not necessarily that strong. On the other hand, the strength of many of these sorts of brews have dropped considerably over the years as English tax law now works based on the strength of the beer brewed.

Before its distribution was stopped in our are, Old Peculiar was one of my favorite beers. The days of me drinking it regularly though, far preceded my discovery of Thomas Hardy ale after I began homebrewing. Now that both are tough to come by around here, I figured it was time to brew some sort of old ale.

Although I love Thomas Hardy ale, I didn't feel up to brewing a huge 1.124 OG beer this week. On the other hand, a beer in the mid 1.050s like Old Peculiar was weaker than I wanted to go. In the end, I looked at some of the Old Peculiar clone recipe already out there and used the specialty grains from some of those as a starting point, then bumped up the base grain to raise the OG to 1.095. In the end, this is very much like an English Barleywine, except a bit darker than most.

It is my intention, once I get in a couple brews with quick turnover, to brew a big American style Barleywine, and an old ale with Brett C. While I usually enjoy writing my own recipes, or at least adapting them from others, I'm also very intrigued by Northern Brewer's limited edition Northern No.1 ale kit.

Anyway, for the time being I've just got this one going. It'll get aged for quite awhile. Here's the recipe:

Old Hardy - Old Ale/Barleywine

brewed on: 11/19/10
OG: 1.095
IBUs: 63 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
16 lb 4oz Marris Otter
1 lb 3oz UK medium crystal malt
5 oz flaked wheat
4 oz chocolate malt
2 oz pale chocolate malt
2 oz cherrywood smoked malt

sugar (dissolved in 1/2 of boiling water & added to the kettle at beginning of boil):
6 oz brown sugar
6 oz mild molasses

Hops (all loose pellets):
2 oz German Northern Brewer @ 9.4% - 80 minutes
1 oz Fuggle @ 4.2% - 15 minutes
1 oz Golding @ 7.2% - 1 minute

Yeast:
3 packs - Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale Yeast

12/10/10 - Transferred to secondary. SG 1.021

B.O.M.B. Barrel Fill!

2010-11-16T23:43:00.000-08:00

I recently posted a recipe as part of a barrel project I started with ten other brewers. We all brewed similar imperial stouts and then filled a 23-year old, 52 gallon brandy barrel this past Saturday. Everything went pretty smoothly, although once it was full we went upstairs for a delicious dinner and returned to find beer leaking out the top!

It turns out that the staves swelled and pushed some beer back out. Not a big deal. We siphoned 1/3 gallon back out to make a little headspace and let the wood do its thing. Luckily, we ended up with an extra gallon or so of beer, so that is being stored in sanitized growlers (although he may have bottled it uncarbed by now to preserve it) and that will be used to top off the barrel shortly.

Aside from that, we had a great time! People brought lots of great beer to share including a BIG bottle of 2004 Stone Oaked Arrogant Bastard, Jolly Pumpkin Bam, Southern Tier's Cuvee series of oak aged beers, Lakefront Rosie Kreik
and others.

Unlike most of my posts, this one doesn't have a recipe to archive. Here are a few of the pictures from our night though. Hopefully the Barrel of Monkeys Brewers will procure another barrel or two in the future and keep exploring barrel-aging homebrewed beer!

Late Hopped Pale Ale

2010-11-16T23:35:00.000-08:00

I've been brewing a lot lately. Twice a week for several weeks straight, actually. There've been sour beers, stouts, chile beers, but it's been awhile since I did a nice hoppy beer. I've been curious for awhile to try brewing a pale ale in which all the hop additions are done within the last few minutes. Theoretically this, while requiring much more hops to get the same bitterness, would also provide a bigger burst of hop flavor & aroma. I brewed this recipe with all the hops added at the 10 minute mark. I will dry hop it as well.

Late Hopped Pale Ale

brewed on: 11/8/10
OG: 1.064
IBUs: 65 IBUs
mash temp: 152F

mash:
12.5 lbs Maris Otter
4 oz Carastan malt
4 oz Caraplis malt

Hops:
4.5 oz Amarillo @ 9.1% - 10 minutes
0.5 oz Simcoe @ 12.7% - 10 minutes
0.5 oz Citra @ 12.3% - 10 minutes
0.5 oz Centennial @ 9.0% - 10 minutes

Yeast:
Wyeast 1056 American Ale yeast

dry hopped 11/17/10
1.5 oz Amarillo
0.5 oz Centennial
0.5 oz Citra
0.5 oz Simcoe

11/30/10 - kegged and force carbed.

This beer turned out, probably obviously, *very* citrusy. However, the bitterness just isn't there. So much for that experiment. It'd be a great beer if it were more balanced, and I'm almost tempted to brew a second, very bitter IPA and blend some of the 2.

Deviant Cable Car - Bugfarm 4

2010-11-16T23:13:00.000-08:00

I've had some spare bottles of Bugfarm4 blend sitting in the fridge for a few weeks now, staring at me whenever I open the door. It was finally time to get some use out of them and since I've done some really good dark sours lately, I wanted to turn my attention back to a lighter sour beer. In looking over various websites for last minute ideas I came across a recipe on the Mad Fermentationist blog for Mike's 'Deviant Cable Car' recipe and thought I'd give it a try.

I'm excited to see how this turns out. This batch of Bugfarm seems to have a few various bug strains than the last batch, but they all sound great! The list of yeast & bacteria in this blend is as follows:

Brettanomyces custersianus
Brettanomyces Fantome Black Ghost
Brettanomyces Russian River Beatification
Brettanomyces Anomulus
Brettanomyces Boon Oude Gueuze
Brettanomyces Giardin Gueuze
Brettanomyces Rodenbach foederbier
Pedicoccus Cantillon St. Lamvinus
Saccharomyces fermentati Flor Sherry yeast
Saccharomyces cerevisae Saison - 5 strains
Lactobacilli sourdough
Lactobacillus delbrueckii

With a line up like that, how could a sour beer be bad?!

Now that fermentation slowed down a bit, this one is due for a long aging period and possibly some fruit for a portion of it down the road depending on how things are looking. In the meantime, I plan to reuse a portion of the bug blend for future sour brews and the rest will be used for a big starter to pitch into a bug barrel project I am part of! I did up the flaked oats in this recipe, but I kept everything else in line with Mike's recipe from his blog.

Deviant Cable Car

brewed on: 11/5/10
OG: 1.063
IBUs: 15 IBUs
mash temp: 154F

mash:
8.5 lbs Belgian Pils malt
2.5 lbs Munich malt
1 lb German wheat malt
1 lb flaked oats

Hops:
1.2 oz bagged whole Willamette 4.5%? (I used hops I picked from the plants at the local homebrew store, so I estimated the bitterness on this.)

Yeast:
East Coast Yeast - Bugfarm 4

1/10/11 - SG @ 1.006. Tart, lemony and on it's way to lambicness, but completely opaque in the hydrometer tube & glass. Very chunky! With a lot of time, this should be delicious! Photo below after 2 months:

Mo Betta Bretta #2

2010-10-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago I brewed my first all-grain batch on my own. It also happened to be my first all-brett beer! I used a recipe based on Tomme Arthur's Mo Betta Bretta from Pizza Port out in CA. The beer was initally very fruity and a bit tart. After about 6 months in the bottle it bloomed into an amazing beer with all sorts of pie cherry and pineapple flavors, enough tartness to make your mouth water without being overly sour, and a brett complexity behind it all to support it and add wonderful depth.

I entered this beer in the Schooner homebrew competition here in Racine, WI in September and it ended up taking the gold for the Specialty Beer category out of 35 entries! While I didn't expect this, I have been happy to use the opportunity to promote all-brett brewing! Now I find myself donw to my last 5 bottles. I'd been running short for quite awhile and rationing these for several months to make them last. Alas, there comes a time to finish off the last bottle of every batch and that time is near. With that in mind, I set out to re-brew this beer. I can only hope that with a year's experience since then in both all-grain and brett beers I can manage to get a similar result! Who knows what silly beginner mistakes I may have made that turned out wonderful! Anyway, here's the recipe:

Mo Betta Bretta clone #2 - (All-brett C)

brewed on: 10/25/10
OG: 1.062
IBUs: 12 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
9 lbs 7 oz Pale malt
1 lb German Munich
1 lb Carapils
1 lb Flaked Oats

Hops:
.27 oz US Magnum @ 14.4% - 60 minutes

Yeast:
starter - WLP 645 Brettanomyces Claussenii

WLP 645 also contains lactobacillus bacteria. Because of this, I don't want to hinder the bacteria growth with too much oxygen, so when I make this starter I simply grow it in a growler in the closet, swirling it once or twice a day for several days to introduce small amounts of oxygen each time.

Barrel of Monkeys Brewers (B.O.M.B!)

2010-10-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sometime last year, the availability of used bourbon barrels from Sprecher Brewery's beers was brought up at one of our local homebrew club meetings. It was suggested that we put together a recipe and do a group brew to age in the barrel. Then we went on to the next order of business.

A month later, it was mentioned that there were barrels available if anyone was interested in doing a barrel brew still. A few people thought it was a good idea. Then we went on to the next order of business.

A month later. . . you get the idea. Eventually the idea just died.

However, it was in the back of my head and I decided to eventually do something about it. So, I went to people individually who I thought might be interested in brewing a sour beer to put into a barrel. We got a nice group of good brewers together.

We were hoping for a wine barrel, but couldn't find one available in our area. We settled on an easier to obtain bourbon barrel since that's what we could get. That being the case, I suggested we do a strong, dark beer to stand up to the still relatively fresh oak character and any residual bourbon alcohol. Last winter I brewed an Imperial Stout recipe using the Bugfarm3 blend I had gotten via AlB from the babblebelt.com web forum. It is still aging, but is shaping up to be among my best beers. We eventually decided on that recipe, although we scaled the OG down a bit from my 1.105. We've all been shooting for 1.085, although a few people overshot that. No big deal in this case.

Over the last few months of planning we've added a few people, including one or 2 guys I hadn't met before that some of the other guys knew. We also found out that one of the main suppliers of used barrels to micros all over the US is within 2 hours of us here in Wisconsin! He has wine barrels, brandy barrels, and all sorts of good stuff available! Since we'd settled on a recipe already, we stuck with that and went with a brandy barrel. Apparently it is a 23 year old barrel. It shouldn't have much oak character left at this point, but we're really using it more as a vessel to inoculate with bugs for future brews.

My hope is that we'll put a couple long term batches through it, and then start using it solera style, where we draw off a portion of the beer every 6-12 months and replace it with new beer. After awhile it settles into an average age of a couple years or so, depending on the frequency and amount of beer pulled out & replaced.

One of the guys supposedly picked up the barrel yesterday and our fill date is coming up soon! Things are shaping up with this fun project and I'm happy I could get some people together to share ideas, homebrew, and have a good time playing mad scientists!

It is my hope that we can get a wine barrel this spring to house in my basement (or elsewhere if someone really wants to.) That way we could have a couple projects going at once. One with darker beers, and one with farmhouse type stuff and maybe eventually a lambic-inspired beer or sour ale like a Flanders.

Our recipe was based off of the Jolly Pumpkin Dark Dawn clone done on the BN awhile back. We raised our gravity to around 1.085, as mentioned above.

B.O.M.B. Sour Imperial Stout

brewed on: 10/11/10
OG: 1.086
IBUs: 34 IBUs
mash temp: 152F

mash:
7 lb 4 oz Belgian Pils malt
1 lb 10 oz Roasted Barley
1 lb 10 oz US 2-row
1 lb 3 oz German Munich
1 lb Wheat malt
8 oz Crystal 80L
4 oz Black malt

boil:
10 oz Turbinado sugar
8 oz Table Sugar
6 oz Honey

Hops:
.5 oz US Nugget @ 13.7% - 60 minutes
1 oz Fuggle @ 5% - 30 minutes

Yeast/bugs:
Split batch -
1) 3rd generation Roselare cake
2) Dirty Dozen bug blend

The rest of the guys brewing for this fermented their batches with the Wyeast Ardennes strain. I'll be adding my 5 gallons shortly thereafter to provide the bugs to inoculate this batch and the barrel.

For sugar, we decided that, rather than getting super picky, we would go with 3 different additions. One would be corn sugar or table sugar, one would be an unrefined sugar, whether it be turbinado, jaggery, piloncillo, etc. The third would be honey. While most of the guys went with table sugar, I think there was a bit of variation in the unrefined sugar used. I know several batches were done with jaggery, but I also saw bags of turbinado and piloncillo around at various brew sessions as well.

Kegerator!

2010-10-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy few weeks, both brewing and otherwise. Top on my list of brewing news is my new kegerator! I kegged the American Stout and the Habanero APA I brewed recently and both are now on tap and delicious. The body can hold 5 kegs, or 3-4 and a carboy. I plan to install a total of 4 taps, but started with just 2 for now. Perlicks are a bit pricey!

The actual construction was pretty easy. The entire project so far took maybe 2 hours total, not including time spent running to stores for the tap hardware & wood.

As of yet I haven't sealed the wood onto the body, but I've got some clear silicone caulk to do the job when the time comes. Gravity is holding it in place fine and there seems to be no real loss of temperature as is anyway. I'm waiting until the other two taps get intalled so the collar is still easily removable when I do that job. Aside from that, I plan to mount the temp control on the side of the collar and then it'll be done!

For now, the most exciting part (besides being able to tap a glass of really good stout anytime I want) is the fact that every day I don't spent bottling is potentially another day spent brewing! And I've got plans for several brews in the works! A few high gravity batches (barley wine & old ale) should be particularly fun.

Gose

2010-10-11T22:13:00.001-07:00

Gose is one of those types of beer you don't come across much.Well, at least I don't. Once a popular drink in Germany, this beer originated in the town of Goslar and was a spontaneously fermented like a lambic. Unlike lambic, however, this beer is brewed with a large salt addition. Stan Hieronymus' book Brewing with Wheat says it should be like eating crusty bread next to the ocean because of the Munich malt and salt.

I've been curious to try this beer for awhile, but it's not something that's available commercially much so I finally got around to brewing it myself. Since it should be sour like a Berliner Weiss, I built up a decent sized lactobacillus starter and pitched that on brewday along with use of a heat belt. (Lacto- likes warmer temps than ale yeast.) That will provide some lactic fermentation for a couple days, then German Ale yeast will be added. I'm looking forward to trying this one when it's ready!

Gose

brewed on: 10/10/10
OG: 1.046
IBUs: 11 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
8 lbs. German wheat malt
1 lb 13 oz Munich malt
1 lb 13 oz Pils malt

Hops:
0.75 oz Hallertauer @ 3.8 - 60 minutes

Other additions:
0.65 oz coriander - 10 minutes
62 g kosher salt - knockout

Yeast/bugs:
1 liter Lactobacillus starter - pitched on brewday
German Ale yeast - pitched 2 days later

Apply heat belt during initial lactic fermentation. Remove and pitch yeast once temperature drops back down to 70.

Grand Cru w/ honey & Roselare

2010-10-04T23:38:00.001-07:00

As I get closer to brewing a 5 gallon bug starter for the barrel project I have planned with my Barrel of Monkey Brewers (or BOMB) friends, I brewed a medium strength Belgian today for the second generation of my Roselare slurry. The blend was originally pitched into a Grisette wort. Although Ive heard that Roselare blend takes a couple generations to get sour, I have to admit I was hoping for at least a little something. I tasted a hydrometer sample while racking the Grisette to secondary and it tasted mostly malty so far. I guess I got spoiled by AlB's (of the Burgundian Babble Belt) Bugfarm blend I used last winter. Luckily I have 2 vials of his Bugfarm4 belnd waiting to be used! Anyway, I'm hoping this latest batch gets a bit more character quicker from the bugs. We'll see!

Grand Cru

brewed on: 10/4/2010
OG: 1.061 (I was shooting for 1.064, but subbed in an equal amount of honey for table sugar, and didn't boil down quite as far as I expected.)
IBUs: 23 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
11 lbs. Belgian pale malt
5 oz. Carastan
3 oz. pale chocolate malt

other fermentables:
1 lb. honey (dissolved in 1 c. of boiling water on the stove, then added at 30 minutes.)

Hops:
2 oz Styrian Goldings @ 3.5% - 60 minutes
0.7 oz. UK Kent Goldings @ 5% - 2 minutes

Yeast:
2nd generation Roselare

This slurry was seriously ready to go. After pitching, the airlock was showing bubbles in under an hour and now, 5 hours later it is some of the most intense airlock activity I've seen!

10/19/10 - Racked to secondary. SG: 1.010

Berliner Weiss

2010-09-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Over the winter my friend Jesse brewed a Berliner Weiss that turned out delicious. He used a historically influenced no-boil method where he did a normal mash, boiled a tiny amount of hops in the sparge water, then sparged with that, and then did not boil the resultant wort at all after lautering. It had a butyric vomity character for several months, but it has faded significantly now into a tart, complex beer that is aging nicely. He happen to save the yeast/bug slurry from that batch and made a second BW with it as well that, as far as I know, hasn't been bottled yet.

I got him to share half of the resultant slurry from that batch with me and brewed one of my own following his original method yesterday. I was brewing a Habanero Pale Ale, and happen to have a bunch of Belgian Plis and German wheat malt I bought in bulk just sitting around, a thermos full of BW yeast slurry, and I bought the hops awhile back so I could brew it at my leisure without having to make a trip out for a tiny bag of hops. Here's the recipe:

Berliner Weiss

brewed on: 9/26/2010
expected OG: 1.028
Expected IBUs: 4 IBUs
mash temp: 150F

mash:
3 lbs. Belgian Pils
3 lbs. German Wheat

Hops:
0.5 oz Hallertauer - boiled in the sparge water for 20 minutes prior to sparging

Yeast:
Jesse's yeast/bug slurry

Boiled the hops in the sparge water, but otherwise this was completely a no-boil recipe. I collected the wort, let it cool naturally in the basement with a lid on it, then transfered it to a carboy and pitched the slurry while it was lukewarm (to encourage a bit of bacterial growth before the yeast kicked in.)

10/4/10 - SG ~0.999. Appley, malt w/ slight sourness developing.

Habanero Pale Ale

2010-09-27T10:39:00.001-07:00

This may sound a bit ridiculous, but I've been craving chile beer all year. When I first joined the local homebrewing club here in town a year and a half ago, someone brought in a habanero pale ale he brewed and I thought it was delicious! Keep in mind, I love spicy food. We got to talking and he apparently used 16 dried habaneros right in the boil. Not a lot of the chile flavor came through, but the heat did. When I'd take a sip the bite of the carbonation never went away, it seemed to just continue for many more seconds in the form of chile heat. This sensation of the carbonic bite carrying right through into the heat worked really well for me. I know others who've had the same beer and weren't fans, but they all say it was just too hot for them. I can understand that, but if you can handle spicy food (or drink, I guess) this one was a winner!

I've been wanting to brew a similar beer ever since, but never got around to it. Yesterday was my chance! Our habanero plants have tons of peppers ready to be picked, and I had spare US-05 in the fridge, homegrown hops in the freezer, and bulk grain & my new grain mill in the basement! A friend who lived nearby had extra Munich & Victory malt sitting around and donated that. This is the first time I didn't have to run to the store for to brew with. It was a nice feeling to have it all here ready to go.

This is also the second time in 1 month that I managed to brew 2 beers in one day. Whereas the former time was simply a 10 gallon batch that I split with different yeasts, yesterday I actually brewed two separate beers! The second was a Berliner Weiss that I'll post about separately.

Here is the Habanero Pale Ale recipe:

Habanero APA

brewed on: 9/26/2010
expected OG: 1.053
Expected IBUs: 32 IBUs (not sure on this one due to all homegrown hops)
mash temp: 152F

mash:
9 lbs. Belgian Pale Malt
1 lb. Munich Malt
8 oz. Victory malt
6 oz Carastan malt

Hops:
1.23 oz homegrown Cascade (60 minutes)
1 oz homegrown Willamette/Fuggles (60 minutes)
1 oz homegrown Cascade (15 minutes)
1 oz homegrown Cascade (flameout)

Misc:
12 habaneros (5 minutes)

Yeast:
Safale - US-05

-also added 1/2 tsp of Whirlfloc, Gypsum & Calcium Carbonate during last 10 minutes

10/11/10 - racked to secondary. FG 1.011.

Sour Grisette

2010-09-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

I recently got a group of guys together to start a barrel project. I'm pretty excited about it and they are all good brewers! What we decided on for our first batch is the Dark Dawn recipe I brewed over the winter, and since there isn't a Bugfarm blend available from AlB on BBB right now, we're using Roselare blend from Wyeast. I've heard from many sources that Roselare doesn't really get sour until the 2nd or 3rd generation, so I am building up one or two starter batches first.

The plan is that everyone is brewing the same Imperial Stout recipe and fermenting it clean with Ardennes yeast in their primaries. We'll then add it to our barrel. We'll fill the entire barrel with the clean version of the beer, then after a couple weeks, draw 5 gallons back out to see what the barrel added in a short amount of time, and I'll replace it with my buggy batch. We'll see how it's doing after about 6 months. At that point, the plan is to take it out and put another batch in, but we'll see how it is aging and decide from there.

We found a guy (Tom Griffin) who lives a couple hours away here in Wisconsin and supplies used spirit and wine barrels to many of the breweries around the country including Lost Abbey and Jolly Pumpkin! One of our guys gave him a call and he's apparently a really nice guy. He was happy to sell us a single barrel at the same price he sells in bulk to the breweries. Here's an article about him:

http://draftmag.com/magazine/articles/169

We decided on a brandy barrel for now. When we originally got together we wanted a wine barrel, but couldn't locate one at the time, so we were going to use a Jack Daniels bourbon barrel since they were easy to get a a hold of. By the time we got in touch with Tom we had already formulated a recipe that we thought could stand up to the bourbon character left in the barrel and bought yeast and bulk base grain. We decided, rather than scrapping the plan and starting over, to use the same recipe in a brandy barrel, then in a few months get a wine barrel as well. I'm hoping to do some farmhouse style ales in the wine barrel using just brett, rather than a huge bug slurry to start with.

As a starter for the bugs for this barrel though, I decided to brew a simple Grisette, but ferment it solely with Roselare blend to get it started. I'll probably do one more batch on this yeast cake soon, before the Dark Dawn batch. Here is the recipe:

Grisette d'Roselare

brewed on: 9/20/2010
expected OG: 1.046
Expected IBUs: 23 IBUs
mash temp: 152F

mash:
7 lbs Belgian Pils malt
2 lbs 4 oz German Wheat malt

Hops:
1.5 oz Hallertauer @ 3.5% (60 minutes)
0.7 oz Styrian Golding @ 3.4% (15 minutes)
0.5 oz Kent Golding @ 5% (1 minute)

Yeast
Wyeast 3763 - Roselare Blend

10/4/10 - SG @ 1.006. Racked to secondary. Flavor is malty with maybe a hint of diacetyl in the nose. Hopefully it's just the beginnings of some lactic fermentation that I interpreted as a hint of butter. No noticeable sourness or funk at this point.

American Stout

2010-09-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I decided spur of the moment to brew on Labor Day since we had no plans. I wanted to stick with something straight forward as I've done a ton of sour/brett beers that are aging in the basement. I have some bottles left of my saison and cherrywood smoked porter, but that's about it. There's already 10 gallons more of saison on the way in carboys, and the smoked porter is delicious, but a bit of an acquired taste for my less adventurous friends. I narrowed it down to an IPA to use up last year's leftover hops (I just harvested this year's hops last weekend,) or a stout. Since I have a lot of lighter beer in the saison, I went with the stout.

While buying my ingredients, I took the opportunity to pick up a grain mill from Northern Brewer. It's something I've wanted for awhile, but with an order of over 100 lbs of grain on the way it was time. Can't wait to get brewing some more Belgian inspired beers. I've got a bag each of Franco-Belge pils & pale malt on they way as well as splitting bags of German wheat, crystal 40, and pale chocolate!

Once the weather cools down a bit more I intend to brew a barley wine and a strong Old Ale. Rather than bother building up big starters, I've been considering using dry yeast. I've heard good things about Safale US-05 and -04. This American stout seemed like as good a time as any to try out the -05 dry yeast and see how I like it! Here's the recipe:

American Stout

brewed on: 9/6/2010
expected OG: 1.069
Expected IBUs: 55 IBUs
mash temp: 155F
6-7 gallon batch (I ended up with around 6 in the primary, but left a bit behind in the kettle with the sludge.)

mash:
15 lbs US 2-row
0.5 lb Black malt
0.5 lb Black roasted barley
0.75 Crystal 40L
0.75 Chocolate malt
0.75 Coffee malt

Hops:
1.5 oz Yakima Magnum @ 14.4% (60 minutes)
1 oz Centennial @ 9% (5 minutes)
~ 1 oz homegrown Cascade (flameout)

Yeast:
2 packs - Safale US-05

9/15/10 - Transferred to secondary. Roasted coffee & chocolate aroma. Flavor: intensely bitter dark chocolate & roasted coffee. Gravity: 1.023
10/11/10 - kegged. FG 1.023 Chocolate & coffee. bitterness has lowered to an appropriate level.

Pomegranate Melomel

2010-09-04T22:50:00.000-07:00

I recently found out that one of my friend's dads is a beekeeper. (Yay!) Of course, I immediately jumped on the opportunity and got 3.25 gallons of honey just after his final extraction for the year, at a good price I might add. Now the question has been what to do with it all!

In a separate discovery, I was browsing through the local Indian grocery store down the street and came across bottles of pomegranate juice containing just pomegranate & water. No preservatives. Of course, when these two things present themselves to you within a week of each other, what else can you do but make a pomegranate melomel!

Pomegranate Melomel

brewed on: 9/4/10

4.5 gallons. (Will top better bottle to 5 once primary fermentation slows a bit.)
OG 1.162

18 lbs (1.5 gallons) honey
2.5 gallons pomegranate juice
0.5 gallon water
aerated extremely well, added 1/2 tsp wine yeast nutrient & 1/4 tsp yeast energizer

yeast: D47

I'm a bit worried about the OG. It is higher than I was shooting for. I plan to add another 1/2 gallon of water once the bulk of primary fermentation has died down a bit to ensure the better bottle doesn't spew its contents all over the basement. If the gravity stays too high I may split a portion into a smaller carboy and dilute both with water down to a more reasonable gravity.

10/11/10 - Racked to secondary. SG 1.050. Still mild fermentation taking place. (abv ~ 15.5% and rising.)

Saison Revisited (again)

2010-08-24T02:46:00.001-07:00

This summer has been hot, humid, and busy! As such, I haven't had the urge to brew in quite awhile! It's been a good 2 months or so since my last brew. I think I ended up brewing 3-4 weeks in a row at one point, including a mead, and my subsequent break was a bit longer than expected!

Awhile back, when I started brewing a string saison experiments, I picked up several packs of WY3711 French Saison yeast. This has since become my favorite yeast! Anyway, the final smack pack has been sitting in the fridge for awhile now and when I decided it was time to brew again I knew I wanted to use it up.

The last saison I brewed turned out great! I like it better than any commercial saison and, to me, it is a perfect example of what I look for in a good saison. Low abv, crisp, and refreshing with spices, subtle floral notes and a slight earthiness coming through in both the nose and flavor. The head is about as close to the puffy clouds that float on a good glass of Dupont as I could hope for as well.

I wanted to re-brew the same recipe. Even the basement is a bit on the hot side for a lot of yeasts, but good starting temp for the saison yeast. Once I got to Northern Brewer to pick up my grain & hops, I decided spur of the moment to pick up another smackpack of 3711 and double the batch size! When I got my all-grain equipment I made sure the kettle I bought and mash tun I built were big enough to handle a 10 gallon batch (assuming it's not a high gravity beer, anyway.) It was finally time to try that out.

I left the recipe as it was, but I recently picked up a TON of bottles of various Jolly Pumpkin beers for the cellar. The majority are Bam & ES Bam. Certain aspects of Bam remind me a lot of this saison. They have similar spice notes. The brett character in the Bam beers balanced very well with the hops and spice character from the yeast. Since I was brewing 10 gallons, I decided to split the batch into 2 separate 5 gallon buckets. Half will be dry hopped the same as last time with Saaz. The other half will get dry hopped with Crystal hops, similar to Bam. (edit: I didn't ed up dry hopping either. See below.) I added the dregs, along with 1/2 a bottle or so, of Bam into the primary of this second bucket. Depending on how the beer is developing when it gets moved to secondary, I may add more dregs then.

I won't bother reposting the entire recipe. Here's a link to it: Summer Saaz Saison. Everything was pretty much exactly doubled. The hops were 4% AA this time rather than 3.9%, but seeing as that made a 1 IBU difference, I stuck with the same (doubled) amounts. As noted above, the only change will be JP Bam dregs ~~and Crystal dry hops for 5 gallons~~. The other 5 are exactly the same.

After the boil, I ended up with 8 gallons. (Oops. A few friends were brewing along with me and we got distracted sampling all the carboys of sours aging in the basement and let the boil go long. . .) I split it into 2 buckets of 4 gallons, then boiled another 2 gallons of water and topped both buckets up to 5 gallons. The OG of both ended up at 1.041. I was shooting for 1.040 so That was pretty good.

3711 (only) batch:
9/4/10 - Transferred to secondary. Added dry hops: 2 oz Saaz (1 @ 2.8%, 1 @ 4%). Trying 2 oz rather than 1 this time. Ropy infection on bottling day. Dumped the whole batch and threw out the plastic gear. This is the first time any beer has gotten unintentionally infected here. I find it a bit ironic that the only evidence of pedio sickness I've seen in any of my brews was a supposedly clean one!

3711 + JP dregs batch:
9/9/10 - Transferred to secondary. SG 1.003. Spices & brett in nose. Tastes slightly tart, spices (ginger?,) and fruity brett. Delicious!

10/4/10 SG ~1.001 Developed the same ropiness that the other half had. The taste seemed similar to earlier, but more sour. I wish I could've gotten a better taste, but I couldn't stomach keeping the mucus-like beer in my mouth any more and had to spit it out.

1/21/11 - Tasted this a few days ago while giving friends a tour of the sour beers. It is in a really good place right now and the sickness has gone away. I'm looking forward to getting this in bottles soon!

2/2/11 - Snowed in by a huge blizzard, so I had Annie help me bottle this half. It tastes amazing as is, so I opted not to dry hop after all. I'll have some fellow brewers try it after it carbs and give me opinions about possibly dry hopping next time. Unfortunately, I ended up with a bit over 4 gallons rather than the 5 I hoped for. The hydrometer sample tasted somewhere between a Bam Biere and a lambic. Very little brett character, but a nice crisp, tart acidity that offsets the extreme dryness of this beer. I'm expecting the carbonation to add another dimension to the crisp body, but honestly I'd drink the entire batch flat with no complaints!

Sour Cherry Melomel

2010-06-17T01:31:00.001-07:00

I've gotten in the habit of putting together a few batches of mead each year and this is the first for 2010. At one or two years age before they are really good in most cases, I feel like I should continue doing this so as to eventually have a nice turnaround. My first attempt was last July (2009) and I bottled it early. I did several things wrong with it including pitching a weak yeast just before leaving on vacation so I couldn't feed it during the first few days. We also moved over the winter and the carboy got shook up more than I'd like on the car ride even though I was extremely careful with it. I also didn't rack it enough times and the bottles have sediment. It ended up with a very yeasty flavor to it which I'm hoping will mellow out a little with more time. For now, it's not great, but it's not something I would dump either. It's just below average in my opinion for now.

My second batch was started in early September of 2009 using cranberry blossom honey delivered by a friend from a beekeeper in Tomah, WI. I haven't tasted it recently, but I have high hopes that although it also didn't get the best treatment while moving, it will hopefully turn out better.

Now that I've done this a couple times and have some experience under my belt, I set out to make what I hope will be a much better end product. I pciked up 2 gallons of sour Montmorency cherry juice from a local store, 12 lbs of Wildflower honey from Northern Brewer, augmented with 4 more lbs of Basswood honey from our local homebrewing store in Racine.

Sour Cherry Melomel

brewed on: 6/13/10

12 lbs (1 gallon) Wildflower honey (northern brewer)
3 gallons water
2 gallons sour cherry juice (SG 1.051)
4 lbs Basswood honey (added later once yeast krausened)
aerated extremely well, added 2 tsp wine yeast nutrient & 1 tsp yeast energizer

yeast: BM45

More yeast energizer & nutrient added once per day for the next 2 days.
Re-aerated around 1.5 days later with addition of Basswood honey.

I'm shooting for something on the sweet side to balance the sour cherries, thus adding more honey. I was originally planning on 5 gallons, but it ended up being 6 with the addition of the Basswood honey. Possibility of topping up down the road with more cherry juice after racking.

I need to sit down and figure out the approximate OG on this one due to the late honey addition and cherry juice.

I didn't get to take an OG reading since the fermentables were not added together. However, I've calculated the gravity roughly as follows:

expected OG - 1.098
FG - 1.020
ABV - ~10.5%

7/13 - Transferred to secondary. SG @ 1.020. Alcohol a bit harsh. Still very cloudy. (Need to add a handful of raisins soon.)

12/10/10 - bottled. FG 1.020

Wine Yeast Experiment

2010-06-17T00:47:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I listened to a Sunday Session podcast with Shea Comfort (from 11-23-08.)If anyone reading this hasn't listened to it I *highly* recommend it! They cover two different topics, both of which are quite helpful. The first deals with using wine yeast in beer.

Most wine yeast is incapable of digesting maltotriose which is one of the complex sugar chains present in malt. Since there's no malt in wine/mead/cider, this normally isn't an issue. Comfort talked about an enzyme called Convertase AG-300 which, when added to the fermenter in very small amounts, breaks up all the complex sugar chains into simple sugars that are easily fermentable. This will completely dry a beer out though unless a tiny, tiny, tiny amount were added.

Wine yeasts are interesting creatures to use in beer fermentation because they can impart some great fruit flavors and big mouthfeel (even in drier beers, since it isn't coming from residual sugar like most homebrewers are used to) to the final product. Ale and wine yeast strains are all members of Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, as opposed to Saccharomyces Pastorionus (lager yeast) and Brettanomyces strains. Some Sacch C. strains are killer, some are neutral, and some are susceptible. The way this breaks down is that killer strains secrete compounds which will completely kill off a susceptible strain within about 12 hours. However, they will not affect neutral strains. Neutral strains and susceptible strains will coexist fine. Pretty much all standard ale strains are susceptible.

The problem in using wine and ale strains in the same batch becomes that the wine yeast will kill off the ale strain, but won't be able to digest the maltotriose, thus the need for AG-300 enzyme to break down the maltotriose into simple sugars. Other approaches include adding the wine strain later in fermentation, after you've gotten what you want from the ale strain, or blending from a split batch using 2 or more different strains of yeast.

They discussed several different wine strains on which I took notes. White wine yeasts tend to impart either apple/pear, or tropical/citrus flavors. Red wine yeasts tend to impart cherry or berry flavors. I will outline some of the notes on specific strains here:

71-B
Susceptible, white, general fruit salad

1118
Killer, white, champagne yeast, relatively neutral flavor, general background winey (fruit/grape, not alcohol) Useful for Belgians, etc. Good for bottle conditioning a finished beer due to its strength.

K1b-1116
Killer, white, peach and stone fruit flavors

GRE
Killer, red, fresh berry. (Comfort suggested Stout, Porter, Kriek, Lambic as possible uses)

BM45
Killer, red, cherry, big mouthfeel (won't get broken down as it dries out). Comfort suggested 1/3 this yeast, 2/3 ale yeast in split batch. Cold crash a lot and re-yeast to bottle.

L22-26
Killer, red, berrylike flavor
-------
Convertase AG-300
suggested dosage of .08-.28ml/gallon
-------

I ordered some Convertase AG-300 to play around with and brewed a batch as an experiment. I decided to do a split batch and ferment part with WY3711 French Saison strain. (I had several packs of this in the fridge, and I really like it. I chose it for this simply because it was onhand and I was hoping the spiciness would complement the fruitiness of the wine yeast.) I opted for BM-45 for the rest to see how much cherry flavor and mouthfeel it produces.

I stuck with an extremely simple grist since this was an experimetn, adding only a small amount of Crystal malt to an otherwise all base malt bill.

Wine Yeast Experiment I

brewed on: 4/30/10
expected OG: 1.044
Expected IBUs: 31
mash temp: 152F

mash:
8 lb Maris Otter
1 lb Crystal 40L malt

Hops:
2 oz Willamette @ 4% - 60 minutes
0.6 oz Kent Golding @ 4.8% - 15 minutes

Yeasts:

1.5-2 gallons - BM45 Brunello
4 gallons - WY3711 French Saison yeast

The BM45 batch finished very early after just a couple days and I added .25ml of Convertase. Within 12 hours the fermentation picked back up again for several more days!

6/13 - The 3711 batch finished at 0.002, not unexpectedly as this yeast is a monster. The BM45 (w/ Convertase) batch completely dried out to 0.000! I have to admit I was disappointed in the lack of overwhelming cherry flavor I was hoping for from this batch. However, as I sipped the sample I did begin to pick it up. However, being bone dry obscures it a little. I blended the 2 batches together in a secondary. While I'm not expecting anything amazing from this blend, I do think the spice and fruit will complement each other well still. I need to decide if I want to augment this somehow to add some residual sugar, or possibly brett and something for it to nibble on. We'll see when I taste the blend soon, given some time to actually blend together completely.

Cherrywood Smoked Porter

2010-06-16T23:57:00.000-07:00

Brewing at my friend Dan's house is becoming a regular get-together every few months. We got together on 5-23 for our most recent brewday. (I'm obviously very behind on my posting here. . .) On past outings to our local Northern Brewer store in Milwaukee I've been tasting various grains that I wasn't familiar with. The Briess cherrywood smoked malt really stood out to me, and to my taste was definitely better than the normal beechwood smoked stuff. Tasting this grain inspired me to brew a smoked beer, although it took a few months to actually get around to it due to the large to-brew list I've had going lately!

When the weather is nice, as it was this time, we all brew out in the yard or on the deck. I tend to do my mash/sparge inside though due to ease of using the kitchen table. Apparently when I was doughing in the guys could smell the smokey aroma from this grist all the way outside and across Dan's relatively large yard! I have to admit, it did smell pretty damn good.

Cherrywood Smoked Porter

brewed on: 5/23/10
expected OG: 1.060
Expected IBUs: 37
mash temp: 154F

mash:
6.4 lbs American 2-row
4 lbs Munich malt
2 lbs Briess Cherrywood Smoked malt
12 oz Crystal 40L malt
11oz Chocolate malt
7 oz Debittered Black malt

Hops:
.75 oz - Columbus @ 14.2% - 60 minutes
.75 oz - Willamette @ 4.9% - 15 minutes

Yeast:
Wyeast 1968 - London ESB Ale

With the nice weather the temperature in our house really jumped curing the first 12 hours after I pitched the yeast and this thing took off, but the ambient temp was in the mid-70F range. I quickly moved it down into the basement which is in the low 60s instead. This is supposedly on the really low end for this yeast which has been known to floc out very easily, and sometimes too soon, so I made sure to give the pail a good swirl 2-3 times a day for the first few days. I mashed pretty high, at 154F, and my Beer Alchemy software was predicting a FG of 1.020, but when I racked this beer to the secondary it was at 1.015.

6/13 - racked to secondary. OG 1.015. This beer tastes delicious! The smoke flavor is very subdued in the nose, but present. Nice thick mouthfeel without being too sweet. The smoke flavor is perfectly balanced with other elements of this beer. It starts off tasting smokey with tiny hints of dark fruit that I like in small amounts in some porters, but transitions through notes of roasted coffee, and chocolate. This might very well be the most complex flavor profile I've gotten in a non-sour yet. Like a good wine, the flavors roll over the tongue one by one for several seconds. I can't wait to get this bottled and hope the level of smoke stays present until it is conditioned.

This is a funny picture one of the guys took. He did an extract batch with a small bag of grain to steep. Afterward he hung it from a tree for some reason. It was maybe four inches wide. I'm actually standing 9 or 10 feet behind the bag and the camera is extremely close to it. It's a funny optical illusion though!

7/3 - Bottled w/ 2.5oz corn sugar

Dark Belgian "Archaic Beer"

2010-05-16T00:54:00.000-07:00

On May 1st, some of the members of our local homebrew club, the Belle City Brewers and Vintners, got together at our local homebrewing store to brew together. It was a fun day with a few people doing their first all-grain batches (one of which was a RIS. What a way to start into all-grain!) Actually, last year when I went to my first big brew day, I was inspired to start doing all-grain as well after seeing how much easier it was than I'd imagined.

I recently got a chance to try the 2007 vintage of De Struise's Pannepot. This is officially one of my new favorite beers! It has tons of dark fruit flavors, a bit of coffee, and more. Between drinking Pannepot, De Dolle's Oerbier, and De Dolle's export stout recently, a beer in this vein has been something on mind mind to brew for quite awhile. (I had a bottle of Thomas Hardy recently as well, which I hadn't had in a year or two, and although it is coming from a different sort of place, I've gotta say those dark, complex Old Ales are very much along similar lines, at least to my taste.)

My friend, Jesse, and I polished off all 3 bottles of Pannepot I picked up and I pitched the dregs into a starter. Since it was a roughly 3 year old vintage, I built up the starter repeatedly, until it was just under 2 liters, to get the yeast going again. I plan to culture up more yeast from dregs in the future, as it is pretty easy. (I'm currently growing a starter from dregs of a Fantome Printemps. I haven't decided what to do with it yet.)

After taking a look at the Wild Brews recipe for Donkere Geneeskunde, and browsing various recipes on the web, I settled on a slight adaption of a collaboration recipe between De Struise and Sean Paxton.

Belgian Dark Archaic

brewed on: 5/1/10
expected OG: 1.080 (Since I got a late start and this ended up being a long boil I only boiled it down to a bit under 6 gallons, but the gravity was not too far shy of what I was shooting for. The OG was between 1.075 and 1.080.)

Expected IBUs: 26
mash temp: 153F

mash:
6 lb US 2-row
5 lb Belgian Pale malt
1 lb Maris Otter
1.5 lb flaked oats (the store was out, but I sent my brother to the grocery store and used Quaker oats instead.)
1 lb CaraMunich II
.75 lb flaked barley
.75 lb flaked wheat
.5 lb Crystal 20
6 oz debittered black malt
1.25 oz Crystal 120

1 lb Piloncillo sugar - start of boil

Hops:
2.5 oz E. Kent Golding @ 4.8

Yeasts:
Wyeast 3538 Leuven Pale Ale cake &
1.5 liter starter from dregs of 3 bottles of 2007 Pannepot

Fermented at 66-68F.

5/25/10 - Racked to secondary (62F). SG: 1.014
8/22/10 - SG: 1.011 aroma: alcohol & raisins. Flavor:raisins, sweet.
10/4/10 - SG: ~1.012 (temp change?) aroma: fruity & sour. flavor: chocolate, dried fruit, a hint of subtle sourness.
11/30/10 - Kegged and force carbed

Brett Pale

2010-05-16T00:34:00.000-07:00

It's been several weeks since I posted last. I've been brewing, but haven't posted the last two batches yet since I've been busy with the onset of Spring. Having moved to a new house, we just put in a garden. I also planted some hop rhizomes! 3 Cascade, and 1 Willamette. I put in a Chinook from a friend as well, but it was more of a sprout than a rhizome and died pretty quick.

A fellow brewer that lives nearby recently did an all-brett beer and saved some of the slurry for me. I wasn't sure what I was going to brew until the last minute, but settled on a pale wort with brett in the secondary. I decided to use the grain bill from the Flanders Pale in Jeff Sparrow's Wild Brews. However, since I wasn't going for a sour ale on this one, instead of pitching Roselare or a lambic mix as suggested in the recipe, I used the Wyeast special release Leuven Ale yeast. Once it was done fermenting and transferred to the secondary, I pitched the brett slurry, which was a mixture of Wyeast Bretts - Bruxellensis and Lambicus. It quickly formed a small dusty pellicle after a couple days in the seconday.

Belgian Pale w/ Brett

brewed on: 4/23/10
expected OG: 1.059
Expected IBUs: 27
mash temp: 151F

mash:
10 lb Belgian Pils
1lb 14oz German Carahell

Hops:
2 oz Czech Saaz @ 2.8% - 60 minutes
1 oz German Hallertauer @ 2.8% - 60 minutes

Primary Yeast:
Wyeast 3538 - Leuven Pale Ale

Secondary Yeast:
slurry of WY Brett Brux & WY Brett Lamb.

Fermented at 68F.

5/4/10 - moved to secondary @ 62F. Added Brett slurry (WY Brett B & WY Brett L)
7/19/10 - added dregs of JP Oro de Calabaza
8/22/10 - SG 1.002 leathery nose w/ hints of pear. Thin body, astringent. ~~Consider adding a bit of oak for vanillins.~~
10/5/10 - SG @ 1.002 - Sour fruit, brett. Dry, astringent mouthfeel.
1/21/11 - Tasted this while giving some friends a tour of the sour beer carboys the other night. Astringency has backed off some and it is turning out like a nice, somewhat aged Orval. Nice cherry and leather brett character has developed.
2/21/11 - Kegged and force carbing!

Summer Saaz Saison

2010-04-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

I absolutely love the Wyeast 3711 French Saison yeast. I've brewed 2 beers with it now. Although both were takes on saisons, they were very different. The French Saison yeast worked great in both! The first was my Red Wheat Saison. (I'm convincing myself little by little that the local homebrew store gave me something other than red wheat, because the color was much darker than expected and the flavor was different too. Regardless, it turned out to be a nice "export strength" strong brown beer with nice spice character from the yeast.) After giving 3711 a try with great results, I ordered 3 more packs of it to try varying the recipe in various ways. (I really should get better at saving & re-using yeast, but that's a project for another day. By the end of summer I hope to be ready to start culturing yeasts from bottles more regularly and saving them. These will go hand in hand at that point.)

On 4/9 I brewed my second beer with this yeast. Although the Red Wheat Saison has been a big hit, I wanted to scale back the gravity significantly, lighten up the color, and brew a nice refreshing session beer. While weighting out my grain at Northern Brewer, I made a last minute decision to include a few ounces of acidulated malt to crisp the beer up a little more, give it an even more refreshing edge, and really make the spiciness of the wheat pop. The recipe turned out as follows:

Summer Saaz Saison

brewed on: 4/9/10
OG: 1.041 (I was quite happy with this, as I was shooting for 1.040. This makes a few brews in a rom mow where I've just about hit the OG right on the money. That means I've finally gotten my all-grain system dialed in.
Expected IBUs: 29
mash temp: 149F (I undershot this by a bit and ended up pulling off a pan full of the mash, bringing it to a boil and adding it back. This hit the target temp right on.)

mash:
6 lbs. Belgian Pilsen Malt
1 lbs 12oz. US White Wheat
4 oz. Acidulated Malt
(mashed for 2 hours, stirring every 15 minutes)

Hops:
1.5 oz. Saaz @ 3.9% - 60 minutes
1 oz. Saaz @ 3.9% - 15 minutes
1.5 oz. Saaz @ 3.9% - Flameout
.5 oz. Hallertauer Hersbrucker @ 3.5% - Flameout
(I intended this to be an all Saaz beer, but the .5 oz of Hallertauer was sitting in the freezer from a recent brew, so I added that in as well.)

Dry Hops:
1 oz. Saaz @ 3.9%

Yeast:
Wyeast 3711 French Saison

Fermented at 66-68F.

4/17 SG @ 1.003. Racked to secondary, added dry hops, and moved to basement (62F).

I'm tempted to try a similar recipe, but with significantly more acid malt to bring the tartness level up to a more "forward" level, perhaps slightly milder than a Berliner Weiss. We'll see. I've got a whole list of saison variations to try in my brewing notebook now!

All-Brett IPA

2010-03-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

My standard IPA recipe is a carry-over from my pre-all grain days because it has always turned out so delicious that I see no reason in fixing what isn't broken. The one thing I do vary is hops. Every time I've made the recipe I try either a different single- or blend of hops for the dry hopping. Among the best were 50/50 Amarillo & Cascade, a 3-Cs blend of Cascade/Colombus/Centennial, a similar blend that included Chinook, and a batch that used mostly whole homegrown hops (both wet and dry.)

I've been meaning to brew an all-brettanomyces IPA for awhile now. Almost since I first started brewing all-brett beers, actually. Victory Wild Devil has been distributed in our part of Wisconsin for a few months now and is one of my favorite American beers. My normal recipe is very similar to Hop Devil, so that has been another recent reason it's been on my mind.

Every few months we get together at my friend Dan's house for a group brew day. These are always a blast. It's a good thing I live relatively close though because I've never managed to make it there with my gear in the morning without forgetting something important. This time I had to go home for the yeast. Normally I'd just wait until I got home to pitch it in a case like this, but I picked up yeast for Dan's tripel as well during my trip up to our shiny new Northern Brewer store in Milwaukee recently. (Here are a few of us pictured along with Dan's tripel.)

Now that I'm down to one or two bottles of my last batch of IPA, I started narrowing in on another standard IPA batch as my project for the brew day. In looking at my to-brew list I keep, the idea of the all-brett IPA popped back up though, coupled with the fact that I've been hording a few smack-packs of various brett strains in the fridge, ya know, in case of emergency. . .

As my older all-brett bottles age, the brett character has really started to come through, especially in the last few months. I wasn't sure what the long-term brett influence would be on these beers for awhile since the yeast tends to behave closer to an ale yeast during primary fermentation. It is not the super-attenuative beast we see in lambics and the like, at least initially. In putting together the ingredients for this recipe, I decided it was time to do an all-grain IPA so as to hopefully provide a bit more food for the yeast during the long-haul. Of course, IPA is usually tastiest at a young, hoppy age, but I'm thinking I'll most likely give this one a longer than usual (for IPA, anyway) aging time of a few months in the carboy before dry-hopping and bottling.

Although I've had great luck with the White Labs brett C strain in all-brett brews, and my White Labs all-brett L is coming along well, I decided to go with a mixed strain pitch of Wyeast Brett bruxellensis & lambicus for this one. (This is what I had in the fridge already, plus I've been curious how they would turn out.)

Normally I make around a 3/4 to 1 liter starter when brewing an all-brett beer. This time, I tried pitching the two packs directly into the wort. I'm actually hoping the yeast stressed a bit. As expected, the lag time was much greater this way, and after a few days I put a heat belt on the bucket to help it along. Fermentation picked up well at that point. (I've always had better luck fermenting all-brett beers of any specific strain above 70F anyway.)

The recipe is as follows:

All-brett I.P.A.

brewed on: 3/20/10
expected OG: 1.064 (In the midst of post-brew frisbee, I spaced on taking a reading, but I've gotten familiar enough with my setup now to have a feel for it, and I'm pretty sure it came out very close to this. This is the main downside of group brew day at someone else's house. It throws off my routine.)
IBUs: 67 - (In the end, I added a couple packs of my dried, whole, homegrown Cascade cones at the last 15 minutes, and last 2 minutes of the boil. Since the beer will be conditioning longer than usual in the secondary to give the brett time to due its thing, I wanted to up the hops to last a bit longer.)
mash temp: 153F

mash:
11.5 lbs German pilsener malt
8 oz German Munich
8 oz Crystal 60
8 oz German CaraMunich I
(mashed for 2 hours, stirring every 15 minutes)

also in the boil:
6 oz Maltodextrin - added partway through the boil

Hops:
2 oz Centennial @ 9.5% - 60 minutes
.5 oz Kent Golding @ 5.5% - 15 minutes
.5 oz Cascade @ 4.5% - 15 minutes
1 oz Cascade @ 4.5% - 2 minutes

(Also added 2 bags of whole-cone homegrown Cascade. One bag each at 15 & 2 minutes.)

Dry Hops:
2 oz Amarillo

Yeast:
Wyeast 5112 Brettanomyces bruxellensis
Wyeast 5526 Brettanomyces lambicus

I started the temp around 66F, raised it to 68F after a couple days, then put a heat belt on after about 5 days. Signs of fermentation kicked in stronger at this point, although the airlock bubbles were pretty weak, even at the height (that I noticed, anyway.) A day or 2 after the airlock activity ceased, I removed the heat belt and brought the temp back down to 68F.

As mentioned above, I'm going to hold off awhile on dry-hopping this one to give the 2 brett strains a little more time with the beer in the secondary first.

Jesse & Del pose here with Dave & Del's brews. My kettle is to the right. Jesse brewed a Berliner Weiss with an interesting mostly-no-boil method, aside from a small decoction at one point. I'm hoping he posts a description of his at some point (hint, hint!) , as it sounded different from most methods I've read and is apparently turning out well so far. (Also, a Berliner was the only failed brew I've made so far. I used my standard extract method at the time and pitched lacto & yeast at the same time. The result was a very mild, light beer with no sourness at all. The style is something I'd like another crack at in the future.)

4/5 SG @ 1.010 Moved to basement (62 degrees F.)
4/17 Dry Hopped w/ 2 oz. Amarillo pellets. SG @ 1.008 Tastes much better than the sample 2 weeks ago.
5/18 SG @ 1.006
5/25 SG @ 1.005 - Racked off Amarillo dry hops.
8/22/10 SG 1.001 - aroma: brett & mild hops flavor/aroma
9/4/10 Added 2 oz Cascade dry hops.

Dark Night

2010-02-14T21:32:00.000-08:00

I set out this morning to brew my third (and most likely final) batch of beer to be fermented on my Bugfarm III yeast cake from Al B of the Burgundian Babblebelt forums. After doing a Flanders Red inspired brew and a Sour English Brown, I wanted to do something REALLY DARK, and REALLY STRONG. Having had crappy luck with the efficiency on my mash tun since I built it, I generally haven't set out to do anything over about 1.060. Even a couple of the 1.060 beers had to have a shot of dry extract to up the gravity a bit before I got a handle on just how poor my efficiency had been. Well, that's all changed now. I fixed my mash tun before my last brew day (under a week ago!) Nonetheless, I didn't set out to do anything super crazy like a barleywine or anything.

If I had to pick a favorite brewery out of everything I've tried from the US, it'd have to be Jolly Pumpkin, hands down. (For the record, we don't get Russian River distributed here. Nor have I gotten my hands on any Lost Abbey yet, among others. This, of course, needs to change, but that's for another day and another post. . .) I started with a recipe based off of JP's Madrugada Obscura, which is a Belgian inspired stout w/ brett clocking in at just over 8% abv. From there, I upped things a bit, shooting for closer to 10%. With all my recent mash tun issues, I wasn't holding my breath on actually hitting anywhere near the mid-1.080s.

After giving my mash a good 90 minutes, I had sparge water heating up and got ready to drain the mash tun, I opened the ball valve and. . . nothing. The grist was ground a little finer than usual, and something gummy had gotten through the false bottom and actually plugged up the ball valve. In the end it wasn't as big a deal as I was worried it'd be. With my wife's help we poured the entire mash into the kettle, unstuck and rinsed out the tun/valve, and dumped everything back in. A bit of vorlauf and everything went fine. I *did* have to heat up new sparge water since we dumped it to free up the big kettle, but it wasn't a problem. That said, I'm going to see if I can fine some appropriate screen at the hardware store to cut to match the false bottom to give it a finer mesh in the future.

Everything went smoothly from there out, although the boil was longer than usual since I used a higher water/grain ratio than usual (1.4qts/lb.) In the end, my final gravity reading really surprised me! I ended up with a 1.105 batch of beer!

I racked my Sour English Brown into a secondary carboy and pitched this new (and taste, I might add) wort onto the Bugfarm yeastcake. I've gotta admit though, I'm still debating boiling a bit more water to dilute it a bit. Between the 20+ sacch, brett, lacto, pedios, and even kombucha, I don't doubt that it has the capability to take this one down relatively low, but I'm still just floored it ended up this much higher than I expected! Jolly Pumpkin's Madrugada Obscura is 8.1% abv, I was shooting for around 10% and now my expected abv is in the 11.5-12% range! I'm going to sleep on this decision. I don't think it'll hurt it too much, should I decide to boil/add more water if I wait until tomorrow at this point. In the meantime, here's the recipe:

Dark Night

brewed on: 2/14/10
expected OG: 1.085
actual OG: 1.105
IBUs: 34
mash temp: 150F

mash:
9 lbs Belgian pilsener malt
2 lbs UK roasted barley
2 lbs US 2-row malt
1.5 lbs german Munich malt
1.25 lbs Belgian pale wheat malt
9 oz US Crystal 80L malt
5 oz debittered black malt
2oz German melanoidin malt

in boil (diluted in a bit of boiling water on stove, then added to boil):
12 oz turbinado sugar
7 oz honey
5 oz table sugar
5 oz brown sugar

Hops:
0.6oz US Nugget @ 13.5%
1.5oz UK Fuggles @ 4%

Yeast:
Al B's Bugfarm III

Ferment at ambient temp (mid-60s F)

2/16 - Craziest primary ferment I've had. The airlock is going crazy, even in a bucket that I'm pretty sure normally has little leaks in the lid seal. The temp is 6-8F higher than the ambient room temperature in our living room as well, whereas most buckets I have going out there get maybe a couple degrees higher tops! The difference is great enough that the bucket actually feels warm to the touch.

2/17 - Temp up to 74F. Moved to basement (Ambient temp 62F.)
2/22 - SG @ 1.040. Sample has a slight sourness bordering on fruity that is offset by the flavor & mouthfeel of chocolate syrup.
3/23 - SG @ 1.32. Sample is *very* sour, but the thick body and sweetness balances it. There is an intense chocolate taste that feels completely separate from the sourness to me, but I think the added oak (later) and time will bring these competing elements together while it ages.
5/1 Topped off with a little under a gallon of wort for the 'Archaic' dark strong I brewed.
5/18 1.033 aroma: chocolate, sour, hints of roasted coffee; taste: dark fruit, tart, chocolate, roasted coffee
8/22/10 - SG: 1.017 aroma: roasted coffee. flavor: roast, tart, chocolate, coffee

add French & Hungarian oak?

Red Saison

2010-02-09T23:09:00.000-08:00

After having to do a few extract batches, I finally fixed my mash tun yesterday. The stainless steel braid I was using was way too long and, when stirred, the mash grain would get underneath it and prop it way up on an angle so I'd get terrible efficiency. I got to go check out the new Northern Brewer store nearby in Milwaukee recently and picked up a false bottom. After being non-functional for the last week due to my eye injury I finally felt up to brewing. Although I was really hoping to do a strong dark batch to use with the 3rd generation of my Al B's Bugfarm3 yeast cake, I decided on something simpler (and cheaper) as a test run for the mash tun repairs.

What I decided on in the end was a pretty straightforward saison based on the "classic version" recipe in Farmhouse Ales. I did make a few tweaks though. For this one I used red wheat rather than a pale wheat malt for a darker color, they were out of Saaz at the local homebrew store so I replaced it with Spalt for a portion of the finishing hops, and I added 8oz of flaked barley to up the head retention. Once signs of primary fermentation are starting to die down I'll add 10oz of table sugar to help dry it out. Also, I've really been wanting to try the Wyeast French Saison yeast, so this was a great opportunity.

I started this ferment out at ambient temperature (high 60s F) in our house, but after I add the sugar I'll use the new heat belt I picked up to boost it up towards about 80F. Here's the recipe:

Red Saison

brewed on: 2/8/10
expected OG: 1.065 (actual was a few points lower)
IBUs: 24
mash temp: 152F

10 lbs Pilsener Malt
1.5 lbs Red Wheat Malt
8oz Flaked Barley

Hops:
1.2 Kent Golding @ 5% - 60 minutes
.6 Kent Golding @ 5% - 15 minutes
.4 Kent Golding - 2 minutes
.4 Styrian Golding - 2 minutes
.4 Spalt - 2 minutes

Yeast:
Wyeast French Saison

Sugar Addition:
10oz white table sugar - after primary fermentation dies down

Ferment at ambient temp (mid-60s F)
Raise temp to 80F with heat belt and add sugar

I used a bit of rice hulls in the mash due to the wheat and flaked barley, but still got a bit of a stuck sparge. It wasn't a big deal and was easily remedied. I was a bit lower than I'd hoped on my mash temp, so I boiled up another gallon of water and added it until I brought it up to 152. My biggest gripe with the new false bottom is that it allows more crap to get through from the grain bed. I'll have to try and do a better vorlauf next time and see how it goes.The efficiency was still a few points lower than I'd hoped, but was much better than the ss braid I was using before. I actually took my OG reading while the wort was still pretty hot then adjusted for the temperature, so for all I know I actually hit my OG right on and just didn't adjust right. Note to self: Next time cool it off then check again to see how close the math on the temp correction is.

2/16 - Boiled 10 oz white table sugar in 2.5 c. water. Added to primary bucket & applied heat belt.

2/21 - SG @ 1.001! The sugar character/dryness & wheat both come through nicely, but not overdone. Yeast character is great! I'm super impressed with the Wyeast French Saison strain! Bitterness seems a little high, but this is a hydrometer sample, so that should mellow a bit with some bottle conditioning.
- Moving to basement (60-62F) for a few days until ready to bottle.
-2/27 - FG 1.001. Bottled w/ 5 oz corn sugar. Bitterness still seems a tad high, but not unpleasantly so.
-3/11 - Bottles are *super* carbed at room temp. Tossed the entire 2 cases in the fridge to help bring the foaming down and hopefully avoid bottle bombs!

English Brown and A Visit to the Emergency Room

2010-02-06T19:40:00.000-08:00

It started out as a normal enough brew day. My friend Jesse came over to the new house to brew together. He put together a Belgian Golden Strong AG recipe with a twist. We've both been excited about trying wine yeast for a few ales, either solo or blended with an ale yeast. Jesse did a very straightforward base malt grain bill and tossed in an ale yeast to get the fermentation started. As his beer ferments, he's going to add the wine yeast (which should take over the ale yeast) along with some sugar additions. I'm excited to try it when it's done, but will leave the details to him in case he decides to blog about it elsewhere.

I'm in the middle of fixing my mash tun. I just picked up a new false bottom from our awesome new Milwaukee area Northern Brewer store! (I'm all about supporting local business, and we have some wonderful people running a nice homebrew store, Hop To It, here in Racine as well. Hop To It hosts our local club meetings in the basement as well, which is cool.) Anyway, as a result of the mash tun repairs in progress, I did another batch of the extract Northern English Brown recipe I put together in the meantime. In my previous post I used the same recipe, but with my Bugfarm III yeast cake. This time, I used the White Labs Irish Ale Yeast I had originally intended for the recipe.

As a side note, I picked up some Victory Wild Devil that we enjoyed along with some of Jesse's recent Bitter he brewed. Both were tasty and I'm looking forward to the rest of the Wild Devil bottles currently in our cellar. While brewing I also baked my first batch of sourdough bread with a starter I made a week beforehand. In the end it wasn't very sour, but I didn't give the dough more than 2-3 hours to rise. Next time I'll let it rise overnight to give the bugs more time to do their dance. All in all it was still yummy bread though.

I'd love to say the brew day was otherwise uneventful, but that was not to be! I did manage to break our nice glass mixing bowl while baking and cut my finger on the resulting glass shards. Jesse also cut a finger on his brewing equipment. Here's where things started getting messy. Jesse's wort was chilling in the basement with my immersion chiller, and my batch was in its last few minutes of the boil (I started brewing significantly later than he did since he was doing all-grain. That worked out fine though with time to bake and cook up some thai yellow curry with pork for lunch.) I took my spent grain to the backyard to dump it for the critters. February in Wisconsin isn't the easiest time of year for animals to find food I'm sure. As I turned to go back out front I managed to turn eye-first into a low hanging pine tree branch! I'm not talking a little poke either, this batch of needles got me full on in the eye. With one eye closed, we managed to haul my kettle downstairs to get it chilled. (Jesse burnt his hand on the steam on the way down.) We ended up sitting in the bathroom trying to rinse out my eye and rub aloe (luckily my wife keeps a couple plants of it growing in the house year round) on Jesse's burns while we each already had a bandaged finger! I couldn't help but laugh. . .

After waiting about an hour with no improvement, with both beers chilled and in their respective fermenters, I had Jesse drop me off at the local Emergency Room on his way home. In the end I was diagnosed with a decent sized corneal abrasion right in the center of my right eye. They sent me home with a big eye patch on. Now, here I am one week, 2 ER visits, and 3 ophthalmologist appointments later, finally able to see well enough to type this article. I'll spare the medical details, but it's been a royal p.i.t.a. All I wanted was a quick brown ale to restock the cellar a bit since I've been spending so many brew sessions lately on sours that won't be done for over a year, and in the end I have an extract batch that will (assuming I figured out the deductibles right for our health insurance) have cost around $400. I know extract batches tend to run a bit more expensive, but that's overkill!

I ended up having my wife pitch the yeast for me later that night since I was in bed on the verge of temporary blindness when she got home, but left it in our 60F basement for the first night. After longer than usual lag time I moved it upstairs where it is more like 66-67 right now.

The only other interesting thing to come out of this was that I really was pretty much non-functional for several days and couldn't even see well enough to get down the stairs. As a result, I left my big brewpot uncleaned witht he dregs of the wort in it sitting in the basement for about 4 nights. (I made sure to at least give everything that comes near the wort post-boil its usual cleaning/sanitization before heading out to the hospital.) When I went down to clean out the pot this week the little bit of wort sludge had, probably obviously by now, grown an interesting bacterial pellicle and started to spontaneously ferment. While dumping it down the drain, I got a good wiff of it and though it still smelled somewhat sweet it also had a really neat overall odor, nothing at all off-putting. I'm tempted now to try a spontaneous basement fermentation down the road with a straighforward recipe in an open bucket, at least to begin with.

I just posted the brown ale recipe in the previous post as part of the Sour English Brown, but here it is again with the few changes that apply to this batch:

Northern English Brown

brewed on: 1/31/10
OG: (I didn't take a reading on this one due to my eye injury, but I estimate it was around 1.044 due to the small change in amount of extract used.)

12 oz Special Roast Malt
8 oz Crystal 40L Malt
8 oz Victory Malt
4 oz Pale Chocolate Malt
6 lbs Extra Light liquid extract

Hops:
1.2 oz Kent Golding @ 5.1% - 60 minutes
.5 oz German Hallertauer Hersbrucker @ 3% - 5 minutes

Yeast:
WLP 004 Irish Ale Yeast

Steep grains in 1 gallon for 3 minutes at 154F.
Sparge with gallon or so.
Bring 6-7 gallons (enough to end up with just over 5 gallons) of water to boil, add extract & hops as scheduled.

Pitched at ~60F with little activity. Raised to 66F after 2 days & activity picked up.

2/14 - Moved to basement where temp is around 60-62F.
2/21 - SG @ 1.012. Delicious. Sample had a malty nuttiness w/ slight sweetness, (but not syrupy or showing "extract" twinges.) Can't wait to get this bottled and carbed.
2/27 - FG 1.012. Bottled w/ 3.25oz corn sugar.

Flanders Red

2010-01-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

I finally found my scrawled out notes for the Flanders Red influenced beer I brewed recently. As mentioned in an earlier post, Al B of the Burgundian Babble Belt forums sent me an awesome vial of his Bugfarm III concoction which I put to work on this one.This bug mix includes the following:

Brettanomyces Drie Fontenein Oude Gueuze
Brettanomyces Fantome Black Ghost
Brettanomyces Russian River Beatification
Brettanomyces Vinnie's Oak Chips (RR)
Brettanomyces Anomulus (WYeast)
Brettanomyces Allagash Confluence
Brettanomyces (2) Cantillon St. Lamvinus
Pediococcus Cantillon St. Lamvinus
Pediococcus Rodenbach Foederbier
Saccharomyces fermentati Flor Sherry Yeast
Saccaromyces cerevisae Saison Dupont
LF1 / LF2 New Belgium La Folie
Lactobacilli Sourdough / WL / WY
and. . .
Kombucha Yeast!

Needless to say, I'm very excited about fermenting a few batches with this Bugfarm mix! I hope to get a few generations out of it before it gets too acidic. The initial batch I pitched this into was inspired by the Flanders Red recipe in Wild Brews, but I added some raw Demerera sugar to it as well. Here's the recipe:

Flanders Red(ish)
brewed on: 12/27/09
8.1 lbs Vienna malt
1.5 lbs Carahell malt
1.5 lbs CaraVienna malt
1.5 Aromatic malt
8 oz Special "B"
3.24 lbs Maize
2 lbs raw sugar

12 IBUs Styrian Goldings (I think I went a little higher than this due to homebrew store error. That's ok though. Some of my favorite sour/funky beers have been hopped significantly heavier than the accepted style norms.)

mash at 154F w/ 170F mashout
OG 1.060 (Need to fix the mash tun. My efficiency is terrible for now.)
fermentation temp - ambient (66-68F)
yeast: AlB's Bugfarm III vial!

I've got some medium & medium-dark toast French and Hungarian Oak which I may add to this down the road. For now though, I'm just going to let it age away in the secondary and see if it needs anything towards Spring/Summer.

3/11/10 - Added Cuvee René dregs.
3/23 - SG @ 1.003. Sample was mildly sour. Not much funk yet, but this will be a good, if restrained sour beer. I took samples of my Dark Night, Sour Brown, and this back to back and made the mistake of going in reverse order of how they were brewed, from the third generation bugs to first, so my perception of mild sourness was certainly distorted by the stronger acidity of the beers I tried first. The bitterness is still very high, but not ridiculous. Nonetheless, this will be a good beer.
4/20 - Moved to basement. (62F)
5/18 SG @ 1.004(seems odd that it'd go up. . . Temp change?) - Mild acidity, background complexity comes through, but delicate; good aroma.
8/22/10 - SG 1.001 Light pit fruit & alcohol. slight butterscoth in nose? Astringent.

Sour English Brown

2010-01-17T15:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the first time in months that I brewed an extract batch. It was also the inaugural brew in our new house! When we bought the house in mid-November I was convinced that the first thing to get replaced was going to be the early-50s electric stovetop built into the counter. This thing has the old blender style rectangular buttons built into the counter to control each burner, and the elements are apparently not removable, so I can't use my nice high-wattage canning element that I got specifically for brewing. That said, our stove is apparently awesome. We found out right away that the thing goes hotter than any electric stove I've ever come across. Not only does it go hotter than my canning element, but I can fit my 15-gallon kettle across three of the burners and get a full 5+ gallon boil going in about 20 minutes! (I can't wait to see the electric bill on this one. . .)

Having brewed a few brett/sour batches lately I've been meaning to get a "normal" brew in lately before I run out of bottles of homebrew to share with my less adventurous friends. I put together a recipe for an English-style brown ale, picked up the ingredients along with a vial of Irish Ale yeast, and promptly got busy for the last couple weeks.

So, I found myself coming into this weekend with ingredients for an English brown, and a primary bucket full of Flanders Red(-ish) beer (recipe post to follow shortly if I can still come up with my scrawled out notes) that has been waiting patiently to get racked to a carboy for long term aging. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, except for the fact that this particular brew was using the vial of Bugfarm III bugs & yeasts that was generously shipped to me by Al B of the Burgundian Babblebelt forums. This being the case, I definitely want to reuse the bugs for a few generations if possible.

No problem! Why not go for a Sour English Brown? Maybe it's not the first recipe I'd think of to try with these bugs, but it certainly has potential. Plus, considering it came in at a modest 1.047 and was an extract (w/ additional grain) recipe, I'm not opposed to either blending in a small batch of something all-grain later or adding some sugar, depending on how it comes along and if the bugs/brett seem like they want something else to chew on.

So, sorry all you less-adventurous drinkers out there, but you'll have to wait another week or two until I get around to picking up another batch of extract & grain to do the English brown w/ the Irish ale yeast the way I originally intended. Here's the recipe:

Sour English Brown

brewed on: 1/16/10
OG: 1.047

12 oz Special Roast Malt
8 oz Crystal 40L Malt
8 oz Victory Malt
4 oz Pale Chocolate Malt
6.6 lbs Extra Light liquid extract

Hops:
1.2 oz Kent Golding @ 5.1% - 60 minutes
.5 oz German Tettnang @ 3% - 5 minutes

Yeast:
Al B's Bugfarm III yeast cake

Steep grains in 1 gallon for 3 minutes at 154F.
Sparge with gallon or so.
Bring 5.5-6 gallons (enough to end up with just over 5 gallons) of water to boil, add extract & hops as scheduled.

Ferment at ambient temp (mid-60s F)

12/14/10 - Racked to secondary. Current SG: 1.009. Tastes delicious! Already extremely sour (acidity has a zing similar to kombucha.) Earthy hop notes come through in the aftertaste.
2/23 - SG @ still at 1.009. Sourness didn't taste as extreme on this sample, but I tasted it right after my Jolly Pumpkin Madrugada Obscura-inspired crazy-sour sample, so that probably tempered my perception a bit. So far, this is the most delicious sour beer I have going and I can't wait to get some oak in it and taste it in a year!
2/18 - Moved to basement (62F)
8/22/10 - SG 1.007. nose: acid & alcohol. flavor: caramel, dried fruit. Blend w/ Leuven pale ale?

All Brett L w/ cherries

2010-01-17T14:58:00.000-08:00

After spending some time on the Burgundian Babblebelt homebrewing forums, I delved into the world of all-brett beers late this past year with a clone recipe from a magazine for Tomme Arthur (of Pizza Port/Lost Abbey)'s Mo' Betta Bretta. Considering the wide range of reported results people have been getting using Brettanomyces as a primary yeast, I didn't really expect the recipe to turn out the same as MBB, but it seemed as good a starting place as any. Seeing as I followed someone else's recipe for that one, I won't go into brewing details on it.

My second all-Brett beer followed closely on its heels. I started with a grain bill inspired by Jeff Sparrow's wonderful Wild Brews book. Having tried Brett C, I moved on to 2 vials of White labs 653 Brett Lambicus for this one.

Once it had finished it's initial fermentation, rather than bottle it, I added 4 pounds of slightly sweetened dried sour cherries. It was tougher than I expected to find decent unsweetened, preservative-free dried cherries. In the end, I settled for a batch from one of the local health food stores which was slightly sweetened with natural sugar. A little extra sugar in a beer like this never hurt anybody!

The cherries were rehydrated in a bottle of Pinot Noir before adding, followed shortly after by a vial of White Labs 650 Brett bruxellensis. When I brewed this, I intended it to be a straight single strain fermentation with no fruit or anything, but I tasted it while moving it to the secondary and it was almost begging for more something. This is not to say it was a bad beer at that point, but I saw potential for something with even more depth.

Anyway, here's the recipe:

All-brett #2 (until I come up with an appropriate name for this one, anyway)

9 lbs Pilsener malt
1 lb Wheat malt
8 oz Acidulated malt

25 IBUs Styrian Goldings @ 60 minutes

2 vials of WLP 653 Brett L.
fermented at 70-72 degrees F.

After primary fermentation:

4 lbs dried sour cherries, rehydrated in a bottle of Pinot Noir
1 vial WLP 650 Brett B.
age @ 66F

3/26/10 - added dregs of 'Saison Rue' from The Bruery
3/29/10 - SG @ 1.005. Racked off cherries & purged carboy w/ CO2. Acidity is quite pronouced, but not too strong. (Slightly less than La Folie, I think.)
4/20/10 - Moved to basement (62F)
5/18- SG @ 1.004 - Nice bold acidity, nose similar to a Flanders (acid & fruit?), fruit comes through, several layers to the flavor.
8/22/10 - SG 1.003 - nose: honey. Flavor: sour, cherries. Warming w/ full wine-like body

Since this was brewed in the midst of moving into a new house and Christmas travels, I didn't get an OG reading on this one. (Thus my need for a place to keep records like this page. . .)