Andrew's Homebrew Log: November 2014

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Rye Pale Ale - Tasting

I've been drinking this Rye Pale Ale for the last few weeks. It's a very nice drinking beer - goes down very smooth. It has a really nice balance between hop and malt.

I have had quite a few commercial beers with rye and I've liked most of them. This beer has enough rye (20%) to get a good strong rye flavor into the beer but is also little enough to not be overwhelming (and also not enough to cause a stuck sparge).

I think I'll have to try another beer with rye not too far down the road.

Tasting Notes:

Aroma:

Mostly hops in the nose. It is a spicy and earthy hop aroma. The hops have gotten a bit more subdued over the last month I've been drinking the beer - this current level is very nice though. Not able to pick out anything that I'd characterize as malt in the smell but the spicy rye and hops could just be blending aroma.

Appearance:

Dark gold (picture doesn't do it justice) - very pretty. Good head with an average pour - lasts for a few minutes then falls down to a thin layer of foam. This is the first beer I've made that has left lacing on the glass - imagine this is due to the rye.

Flavor:

The flavor is a nice balance of the hop flavor and the spicy rye malt. The flavors meld together very nicely - I'm not sure I can say where the hops end and the malt begins really (I'd really have to try this hop bill without the rye to say for sure). The finish sports a pretty firm bitterness with the spicy character which is an interesting combo. No alcohol presence and no yeast character to speak of.

Mouth-feel:

Beer finishes very dry - really good gulper of a beer. It has decent body (also probably due to the rye).

Overall:

It's a really good beer. Very nice flavor, easy drinking, good appearance. I'm very pleasantly surprised by the level of balance in this beer after a month. At bottling it was drinking a bit more like an IPA but it has really mellowed out nicely. I think this one could continue to be good for several more months.

So, this is one of may favorite beers so far (second maybe to the Fortunate Islands Clone). It's also one of the few beers I've made so far that I'd be confident sharing with people as something that I think is basically without any flaws.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Russian Imperial Stout with Brettanomyces

I was inspired to brew this batch by The Mad Fermentationist's version of Courage Russian Imperial Stout which is a big Russian Imperial Stout with Brettanomyces yeast and oak in secondary. The original Courage Russian Imperial Stout, which was discontinued in the 1980s, was reputed to have a leather character from the brett which sounds very intriguing to me. Add to that the fact that I had the primary yeast strain lined up from the Brown Porter I was just about to bottle and the brett strain from my Berliner Weisse I decided to try it out.

From reading the tasting notes you get the impression that the Mad Fermentationist's version never really developed the leather of the original and that the brett contributed a lot more to the aroma than the flavor. I am going to try an alternate approach with this beer that will hopefully allow me to a get more brett character.

Brett has the potential to take the final gravity very low (my Berliner Weisse finished at 1.002). This could leave the beer with a watery/boozy/harsh/astringent flavor if I'm not careful. Ideally, I think this beer would finish around 1.025 but I'd be okay with it down to 1.018 or so. In the Mad Fermentationist's clone the brett managed to chew the beer down from 1.030 to 1.020 in about two months so he had to kill it with campden tablets to preserve that much residual sugar. It seems likely that this 2 months spent with the brett wasn't enough to allow the complex flavors to fully develop - I am thinking that a more extended aging period (10 months maybe) would go a long way towards allowing the brett flavors to come to fruition. The trick will be to let the brett work but also leave the beer with a reasonable final gravity. With that goal in mind I am going to attempt to control the brett behavior by doing the following:

Using a very high mash temperature - I am thinking 162 F will be a good one to help ensure that the primary yeast leaves the beer at a fairly high gravity. My hope is that it also creates some sugars that the Brett isn't able to handle (not holding my breath on this one). At the least it will give me some extra margin if the brett is able to crew through a lot of the sugar. I am thinking if primary fermentation stops in the mid 1.03 range then that's a fairly good sign.
Try to limit the oxygen content and exposure of the beer in secondary - the thought here is that less oxygen will mean that the brett has a harder time building up it's ranks and that it will be more likely to stall out earlier. To do this I will give the primary yeast 1 month to ferment out and then I will give the beer an additional month in a better bottle secondary prior to pitching the brett. I will fill the better bottle up to the neck to try to limit oxygen exposure.
Low pitch rate for the brett - I am going to build up a brett "starter" using 2 liters of my brown porter and some bottle dregs from my berliner weisse which contains brett C (as well as wine yeast and lacto which I'm assuming will not like their environment too much). I will let this grow for a couple months and add oak cubes to it at some point. Depending on the flavor and the gravity drop I may pitch the whole thing or I might just drop in the inoculated oak cubes

Hopefully a combination of these three actions will give me a good chance of both having a reasonably strong contribution from the brett and a good level of residual sugar in the finished product. Ultimately I think I will lean more towards the brett flavor if I have to choose so I'll likely let it age all the way out even if it over attenuates.

I really like a big stout but I was also thinking that 10% alcohol (as was the case for the original) might be a bit on the high side for me if I plan on drinking an entire bottle. So, I've planned for it to come in around 8.5% at my normal efficiency. If it turns out to be a bit higher or lower that doesn't hurt my head much.

I am thinking of giving this beer about a year to finish out - should be bottling in winter 2015!

Recipe Details:

Grain/Adjuncts:

13 lbs Marris Otter
4 lbs Amber Malt
1 lb Brown Malt
8 oz Black Malt
2 lbs Dark Candi Sugar

Hops:

2 oz Target (Pellet, 9.5% AA) at 120 min

Yeast:

Wyeast 1028 London Ale

6 cups Slurry from Brown Porter (Target 8.5 cups)

White Labs 645 Brettanomyces Claussenii in Secondary

Harvested from Berliner Weisse Bottle Dregs

Red Star Premier Cuvee Wine Yeast (at bottling)

Water:

13 gal Spring Water
2 tsp Calcium Chloride
1 tsp Gypsum
1 tsp Irish Moss at 20 min

Extras:

1 oz Medium Toast Hungarian Oak Cubes

Process Details:

Batch Size:

6 gal

Mash:

162 F for 60 min

Boil:

120 min

Fermentation Temperature:

Start at 60 F allowed to raise to 64 F

Primary Duration:

5 weeks

Secondary Duration:

47 weeks

Brett added after 4 weeks in Secondary

Results:

1.100 (Target 1.090)

Efficiency:

79% (Target 70%)

1.022 (Target 1.025)

Apparent Attenuation:

77% (Target 71%)

ABV:

10.24% (Target 8.53%)

Brewing Notes:

11/16/14 Brew Day - 2:15 PM to 9:00 Including setup and a lengthy break for dinner

Saved off 2 liters of Brown Porter from my previous batch in a flask to try to culture some Brett. Poured in the dregs from two bottles of Berliner Weisse. Added 1 tsp of the Brown Porter yeast cake to the flask to give the Brett some additional food

Brought 10 gal of Spring Water up to 194 F - took 35 min
Added 23 qt to the mash tun (kept the kettle running after this)
Added Calcium Chloride and Gypsum to the mash tun
Let the temperature settle for 10 min - temp ended up at 181 F
Added the grain, stirring well to eliminate doughballs. Temperature ended up a bit high at 165 F. Stirred more until it got down to about 162 F
After 30 min I stirred the mash and measured the temperature as just about 162 F
Added 3 more gal of spring water to the kettle and brought it up to a boil
After 60 min the mash was about 160 F
Added 14 qt of near boiling mashout water to bring the mash up to 170 F
Saved 4 gal of hot water for the batch sparge in two small pots
Stirred the mash then vorlaufed and drained slowly into the kettle - took 40 min to collect 7 gal
Added 4 gal of sparge water - ended up at 150 F. Stirred, vorlaufed, and drained slowly - took 20 min

Brought the 7 gal of wort to a boil while doing the batch sparge - took 30 min
Ended up with 10 gal of wort
Had a pretty nasty hot break on this batch - a bit got over the edge of the pot
Added the hops after the hot break had cleared
Once the kettle had gotten down to 6.75 gal I added the irish moss
Once the kettle was down to 6.5 gal I added the candi sugar. Stirred vigorously to help it dissolve

Added the wort chiller at flameout to sanitize. Chilled down to ground water temps (mid 50s) in about 30 min
Transferred to the fermentor. Poured the beer back and fourth between the fermentor and bottling bucket to aerate
Put the fermentor in the chest freezer and ladled the yeast cake from the Brown porter into the RIS. Set it up with a blowoff tube as this will likely be a very vigorous fermentation. The beer was at 58 F at this point.
Collected about 6 gal of wort. Measured the original gravity as 1.100 at 64 F which is 10 points higher than planned. This is 79% efficiency - not sure what I did to get that.

11/17/14 - No bubbling in the airlock yet after 24 hrs. The beer is now up to 61 F. I think the lid on this fermentor may not seal perfectly either so I might not get any airlock bubbling.
11/18/14 - The fermentor was bubbling and blowing off at very good pace this afternoon and some beer had been pushed out the lid. Probably lost a quarter of a cup due to this.

11/19/14 - Added another bottle of BW dregs to the brett starter. The fermentor had stopped bubbling so I checked the lid and found that it had opened a bit where the beer was leaking out - re-seated the lid.
11/22/14 - Beer is still bubbling. The brett starter has started develop a thin pellicle - good sign as I wasn't sure there would be much viable brett or lacto in the bottle dregs. Now the question is whether the lacto will contribute anything in the ~25 IBU Brown Porter - I doubt it will. It didn't really produce any real sourness in the Berliner so I'm not too worried that it will add anything offensive in this beer. No aroma contributions from the brett or lacto yet as far as I can tell.

11/29/14 - Fermentor is no longer bubbling. The pellicle on the starter has thickened up a bit and there's a bit of a cheesy smell to it.
12/18/14 - It has been about a month since brewday. It was a very vigorous fermentation. Pulled a sample and measured the gravity as 1.036. The high mash temperature had the desired effect - I was hoping primary would stop in this neighborhood. The beer is a very dark red rather than black - probably due to all that amber malt. It has a really complex malty flavor with chocolate and coffee mixed in. Also has a very firm bitterness at this point. No fusel alcohol. Even with the high gravity it doesn't really taste overly sweet - I wont be upset if the Brett doesn't take the gravity too much further. Poured most of the sample into the brett starter to give it some more to munch on. I will transfer to secondary this weekend.

12/20/14 - Transferred to a better bottle for secondary. Had enough beer to fill up to the neck. Boiled 1 oz of oak cubes to extract some of the oak flavor and then transferred half the cubes to the secondary and half to the Brett Starter. Tasted a sample of the Brett starter - no real brett flavor has developed so far.
12/21/14 - Tasted a bit of the starter - no funk yet (which isn't unexpected given the short amount of time it's had). I added a couple more bottles of Berliner Weisse dregs.
1/5/15 - Added two more bottles of Berliner Weisse dregs to the starter
1/16/15 - It has been about a month since I added oak cubes and transferred to secondary - the brett starter has developed a bubbly pellicle in that time. I have decided to transfer to a different secondary (6 gal glass carboy) along with the entire brett starter for the remainder of the aging. The better bottle is filled up to the neck and I have a bit more than 2 liters of brett starter so I would have to throw away some beer to add the brett. Additionally, if the brett happens to kick off any strong fermentation I would end up with a pretty big mess with such little head space. The carboy will give me quite a bit more head space and I can use the entire starter without dumping any beer. Transferred the beer and oak over and then swirled the remaining cup the siphon didn't get to also transfer the small amount of yeast at the bottom of the better bottle. Did the same thing with the flask of brett starter. I pulled a sample prior to the transfer and measured the gravity as 1.036 which is what it was after primary. It's very rich with roast and chocolate. It doesn't taste overly sweet even at this high gravity. The oak doesn't have a major presence in the flavor which is a little surprising. The alcohol is well blended which is nice. I would be happy to bottle and drink it as is but I still like the plan with the brett. I will check on the gravity in a month to see how the brett is doing.

Brett Starter

1/25/15 - Checked the fermentor after a week and found small patches of bubbles on the surface. Looks like there's something doing a bit of work in there but not too vigorously.

2/18/15 - It has been about a month since I pitched the brett into this beer. Measured the gravity as 1.030. So, it is down about 6 points. It is a very rich, flavorful, beer. Roast, chocolate, coffee, and alcohol are the dominant flavors I'm getting. I'm not tasting anything that I can pin-point as the oak but it could just be well integrated. Also not sure if I would say there are any brett flavors that stand out yet - maybe a slight mustiness on the nose. I am going to give this two more months to mature at this point before taking another sample. I'm happy that the brett is eating but not going hog wild on this beer. Will be interesting to see how low it can take it.
4/20/15 - It has been two months since the last gravity sample and three months since pitching brett into the beer. For this sample I'm measuring gravity as 1.032 - there's a bit of carbonation to the beer so this might be a bit higher than actual. In any event the brett has not made any dent on the gravity. The beer tastes pretty much like it did 2 months ago - good roast, coffee, and chocolate - still no brett flavor but maybe a bit of mustiness on the nose. May be getting a bit of vanilla from the oak on the nose as well. It's a really nice complex beer as is and it hides the 9% alcohol extremely well. I'm hoping the brett starts to contribute a bit more flavor over the next 6 months but even if it doesn't I'll still have a pretty great beer. I'll check on this beer again in 3 months.

7/30/15 - Pulled another sample which measured at 1.032 still. The main flavors are still roast/coffee/chocolate. Oak and maybe a small bit of brett character are in there but much less prominent. The finish is a bit sweet with a bit of alcohol burn - not much in the way of bittering hop flavor left. I'll give this beer 3 more months before bottling.
10/11/15 - I plan on bottling this next month so I've taken another sample. It is down to 1.022 somehow - it was holding steady at 1.032 for several months in secondary and I hadn't expected a further drop. I'm curious to see if it will drop any more in the next month - I may have to hold off on my bottling plans. It is still a very smooth beer at this gravity with nice refined roast flavors. It also seems to have mellowed and smoothed out over the last couple months. At this point I'm not really getting much in the way of flavor contribution from the brett - may be a slight earthiness to the beer from it but it could also just be age.
12/13/15 - Bottled with re-hydrated dry wine yeast and 2.5 oz of priming sugar. Collected about 5.75 gal of beer which got me 56 12 oz bottles. I left about a quart at the bottom of the carboy to help get RIS with Brett II started. The beer still measures at 1.022 SG so it is sitting at 10.24%. You would never guess that it's that high in alcohol.

3/19/16 - Tasting Notes - This beer had a great level of complexity after primary fermentation and it has gotten significantly more interesting with age. I really like the coffee/chocolate/roast flavors and aroma along with the dark fruit character. The Brett seems to be getting to be a more significant player in the flavor profile with some time in the bottle and it is creating some really nice aged beer sort of flavors. Hops have fallen off but they aren't missed. Will do another tasting of this beer next year around this time to see how further age treats it.

Lessons Learned:

I was reading about mash thickness while brewing. From what I read a thinner mash can help ensure that there are fewer fermentable sugars in the wort. I have been sticking with the 1.25 ratio of water to grain and raising the temperature to try to get some residual sugars left over (including for this batch). I may have to try playing around with this a bit
I'm really leaning strongly towards putting together a new brew stand with a RIMS setup here in the near future. I am getting very tired of only having one pot and having to lift stuff. Also don't like the guessing game with the mash temp
I had a significant efficiency bump on this batch that I don't understand. One theory is that the hot sparge water may have been more efficient about rinsing the sugar. Another reason for a second large pot.
The warm summer basement temps have had a pretty strong influence on this beer. It has somehow dropped 10 gravity points after having not moved at all for 5 months in a cold basement. Vary interesting. I'm wondering if it's wise to bottle this beer at 1.022 in the winter temps. Am I setting myself up for gushers and bottlebombs?

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Sour Blonde 1.1.1

There is no time like the present to start a long lead time project so I have decided to brew another sour beer that wont be ready to drink until some time in 2016. I would like to build up a pipeline of these beers building off the previous beer's yeast cake. I am thinking that I might brew a new one with slightly different techniques every 3 months or so. This will hopefully make a bad batch a bit less demotivating and will also give me some blending options.

For this batch I decided to try my hands at something similar to a lambic. The lambic brewing process is pretty involved and I didn't feel quite up to the challenge of duplicating it so I have tried to match the results using shortcuts. For future batches I might try to be a bit truer to style.

Lambic wort is created using Pilsner malt and unmalted wheat. To get a starchy wort and to deal with the unmalted wheat the Lambic brewers have developed a mashing technique called Turbid mashing which involves stepping the mash temperature up and pulling off starchy wort at the various steps and heating it to stop the enzymes from converting. The Mad Fermentationist created a great walk through of the process which can be found here. The theory with this process is that it creates a wort with a lot of fermentables that brewers yeast can't touch but that Brett and Lactic Bacteria will be able to break down and eat over the 2-3 year brewing process. I did some research and decided to use flaked wheat, which is unmalted wheat that has been treated in a way that allows it's starch to be more readily accessible, and perform a high temperature single infusion mash (was planning on 160 F but missed my mash temps and had to improvise a bit). This will hopefully create a similarly starchy wort.

Flaked Wheat

With my Flanders Red I tried to mash high and control the pH of the mash using chemical additions to optimize for Alpha Amylase enzymes which resulted in great frustration. It turned out that I left starch in the wort due to my failure to optimize for the enzymes which is probably preferable to my original plan. I have been thinking about that experience and have decided that with the unknown variable of yeast/bugs quality/health it makes it so that obsessing too much about the fermentability of the wort might be a bit futile at this point. With that in mind I wont bother with attempting to optimize pH (just adding CaCl and my normal amount of acid malt) and wont check for starch conversion or gravity after sparging. If this batch doesn't get sour enough due to not producing wort with enough food for the bacteria and brett then maybe I'll have better luck with the next batch pitched on to the yeast cake and will be able to blend them to get a more acceptable beer. So, it's all on the bugs which is really what this style of beer is all about - hopefully I'll figure out how to make them happy over time rather than just having it be a crap-shoot but I'm not holding my breath for that.

Another shortcut I used was to hop this using ~16 IBU of normal (Fresh) German Hallertau hops. Real lambic uses a huge amount of aged hops which have lost much of their bitterness but still have their normal preservative properties. This high hopping rate keeps spoilage microbes and lactobacillus from taking over the beer when they capture microbes out of the air for their spontaneous fermentation. I will need to look into this step a bit more in the future because I would really like to try a purely spontaneous fermentation at some point.

This spontaneous fermentation is probably the most critical aspect of Lambic as far as how the finished product turns out. The Belgian Lambic brewers take the wort after the boil, put it into a large shallow troth called a coolship, open the windows, and then let nature take its course as organisms blow into the wort. That's the theory anyway but in practice things are actually a bit more controlled. It turns out that the old buildings these breweries are housed in are infested with the organisms that create the lambic beer so a lot of these organisms are likely falling into the beer from the rafters rather than from outside. Additionally, lambic brewers reuse their oak barrels (ones that have produced good results for the previous batches) to ferment their beer so they're essentially pitching their spontaneously inoculated wort onto a known good culture of yeast/bugs living in the wood.

I don't have the benefit of either of these sources of lambic organisms so I'm using Wyeast 3278 Belgian Lambic Blend. I am brewing in the evening so I have decided to let the wort chill naturally overnight rather than completing the beer in one shot. It is scheduled to be a cool (low 40s high 30s) night with quite a bit of wind. I will leave the beer on the covered front porch partially covered by the lid and hope that something interesting blows in. Pitching onto an established yeast will probably prevent the spontaneous organisms from doing anything too dramatic - we'll just have to wait and see.

Recipe Details:

Grain:

8 lbs Pilsner Malt
4 lbs Flaked Wheat
4 oz Acid Malt

Hops:

1 oz Hallertau (Pellet, 4.1% AA) at 120 min

Yeast:

Wyeast 3278 Belgian Lambic Blend

Water:

13 gal of Spring water
1 tsp Calcium Chloride
1 tsp Irish Moss at 20 min