Herb table beer

After lacto fermenting some carrots, I decided to use the brine to inoculate some unhopped wort made from spraymalt.

After a few weeks of sitting there I put a small amount of the Wilner Brett strain in the mix.

At my allotment my chamomile and lemon balm was taking over the herb patch, so great bunches were cut, leaves and flowers. I made more wort with spraymalt, and boiled the herbs in for about 5 minutes. I don't know the exact weight of herbs but the impression was about the same ratio of herb to water as I would normally use when boiling spaghetti. Enough water to cover plus a bit of space in the middle...

Medieval precision aside, the wort was allowed to cool and pitched on top of the lacto sour. After 12 hours a some dry Nottingham was sprinkled on top. The gravity was probably about 1.040.

Entirely separately I turbid mashed a 90 percent lager malt 10 percent rolled oats grist to give a 1.035 wort. Hopped with 20 IBU of Fuggles, and inoculated only with bottle dreggs from some saisons including Brett for a few days. Then the St Austell brewery strain was pitched. After a week it was dry hopped with 0.5 g per litre of Fuggles and spent three days on the hops.

The sour was very sour, and the turbid stock ale was slightly smokey. I blended a bit of each using a pipette and the result was much greater than the sum of the parts. After a bit of messing about I decided on 60 - 40 stock to sour. Each was racked in the right proportion to a new bucket. After three days of melding the mix was bottled to 3.0 vols in 750 ml champagne style bottles which were capped.

The finished beer is a good level of sour. The lemon balm gives a tea like flavour, rather than fresh lemon, which gives a more lemon-curdy taste. I think this beer might have been better as not a sour. The herb aromatics would add pungent floral flavour to a hoppy beer. As it is the sourness just cuts through the floral too early. If this was re-brewed, I'd stick to a clean saison yeast and load it up with Sazz. It is hard to tell with so much going on, but I think the turbid mash adds an interesting grainy flavour.

Stout with Amber Malt

I had used brown malt before in a mild. I loved the flavour of that in combination with a lot of crystal malt, so I decided to use some of its cousin, amber malt.

I wanted to brew a simple stout to test my beer engine. As such, I came up with a beer that was 70 % lager malt, 10 % amber (Crisp), 10 % flaked corn and 10 % roasted barley.

Having messed about with mixed fermentation beers for the last year, and realising that I only really enjoyed the low gravity saison type beers, I was glad to get back to clean beers for a bit.

I cultured some yeast from a bottle of proper job, a St Austell brewery beer. This was then top cropped from a previous batch of bitter. I love this yeast. All I read about it is that it's fairly clean with mineral notes, but I always get a deeply pleasing apricot hum at the start of a sip.

The beer was 1.040 OG to probably something like 1.012.

Hops were a combination of Bramilng X and Willamette. These were added at 45 mins and 15 respectively for 30 IBU total. I would have liked to have gone higher, but didn't have enough time or hops.

The beer was nice, very silky cocoa impression. Would have been improved by a bit more fruity bitterness. As it was, it came across a little gentle, too  chocolatey. Will just up the hops next time. An alternative would be some dark invert syrup. Clarity was good. Will use flaked corn more to combat haze.

Blended 25 percent Brett pale at serving time into the last bottle. This blend was superb. Knocked off the cocoa impression replacing it with dark chocolate. Good to know.

Chamomile Saison

I decided to enter a beer to a competition. What better category than herb vegetable or spice beer!

I had a bunch of chamomile from the allotment. Siobhan also brought me some chamomile flowers from work. I had already brewed this beer with broad beans. I thought it worked well, and decided to brew with beans again. This time I wanted to use dried beans because somebody on 'milk the funk' mentioned my poor extraction last time might have been because my beans were still hydrated, whilst most ingredients are dried when weighing them for a recipe. I used a ten bean mix. Initially I was going to malt them, but my malting experiment turned into a smelly mess, so I decided to just use dry packet.

The beans provide starch and protein, and the point of them was to increase mouthfeel in a low gravity beer, as well as some longer chain sugar for Brettanomyces to metabolise. In my previous beer I felt they also contributed a nice fresh but barely detectable pea/bean aroma.

The beer was 5% acid malt, 25% beans (assuming same extract potential as wheat) and 70% pale malt. The beer was 1.035 OG. the beer was bittered with Fuggles (I think!?) to 27.5 IBU and finished off with 10g of my allotment hops (mix of Fuggles and Goldings) in a 10 L batch with 10 minutes left (or no chill equivalent).

The beer was then fermented with yeast cultured from my previous batch of spelt Saison. This was mangrove jacks Belgian ale + a Brett strain, which was either Brasserie de la Senne's Bruxellensis or Orval. This problem of misidentification which started with this batch will soon come to an end, as I think I'll start with new yeast for the next batch of Saison in the summer.

The beans were hydrated/boiled for an hour before adding to the mash. My gravity was again a little low, suggesting that beans just don't contribute many sugars regardless of if they are dried or not. The liquid from the beans was purple, which I was a bit worried about, but the finished beer was a nice pale yellow. The beans really do flesh out the body of the beer, you'd not guess it it was only 1.035.

As for the chamomile, most was added at flameout, according to the recommendations in Phil Makowskis's 'Farmhouse Ales'. At bottling time, a tea was made in a French press and added just to boost the flavour a bit. I suspect the flowers added some bitterness, as the impression of this beer is quite bitter.

I've not had many chamomile beers before. This had a definite witbier feel to it, which is nice. It also had a phenolic flowery flavour. None of the nice fresh bean aroma is there in this batch, unsurprisingly, since the beans were dried. At times I feel I've been able to detect a bean flavour, that is, kidney beans, but this isn't always detectable. Despite my criticisms this beer is nice, I like the bitter dry expression, and being honest I would happily brew this again. The fact that it is 1.035 and relatively satisfying to the mouth is also very pleasing, a great table beer with a salad and some nice funky cheese. Would probably reduce the bitterness slightly next time.

The judges had mixed views. I got a score of 31, but the criticism was almost equal and opposite. One thought flavour was very noticeble, one too weak, etc. I, in the end, lost to a chile chipotle porter.

Pretty happy with this beer. A bit rough but I feel there is genius waiting to sneak out. The head is fabulous, I wonder if wheat or other grains would give retention as good.

Beer Engine

Something that is difficult to recreate at home is the character of a pint from a beer engine.

The gentle carbonation helps the delicate yeast flavours of a good strain express themselves, especially on the back of the tongue, where normally, carbonic bite would be most vicious. A beer engine contributes to the barmyness of a good beer.

The remedy to this problem is just to get one. A stand was built out of scrap wood as no suitable countertop was available. A one way valve between engine and polypin (from now on referred to as 'pin' for brevity) attached to a quick disconnect means that the majority of the beer in the line - which is in the long section of line nearest the pump - stays in the line, and can be pumped into a glass after turning the tap of a pin off and disconnecting. The small stub between the pin and the quick disconnect is lost, but we can live with that.

A mini cellar was easily created for a 5 L pin by using a cool bag and swapping in frozen bottles of water to achieve a 10 - 14 degree temperature.

Pins were primed at 3 g of table sugar per L. The carbonation on my first effort, a stout was just slightly low, although it produced a highly acceptable head. Next time would up the sugar and not chill as quickly as I did. The 5 L pin was just perfect for having a couple of guests for a few days.

Low tech brewing, and sewing a bag

My interest in brewing started whilst living with a homebrewer during my year in Australia. Beer there is expensive, so that was also part of my motivation. I like the low tech approach I experienced there. Water saving, for them, is a priority, so no chill is common, as is BIAB brewing.

Benefits of a Low Tech Approach

In the wet South West of England water is not a problem, however the low tech approach has several benefits for someone like me. Firstly, I live in a flat, space is an issue. Second, I am brewing mainly very highly carbonated beer (saison say) or very low (bitter etc). This means bottling is preferable to kegs, saving me a CO2 set up. I'm not worried about flushing everything with C02 either, because I don't really ever brew super hop forward american style beers, which react badly to oxygen. and will often be adding oxygen scavenging microbes like Brettanomyces. Having no chilling equipment also saves space and cuts down the length of a brewing session, which for my small batches is about 2.5 hours at the moment. I also find BIAB convenient because I often like to use "gummy" ingredients, which are no problem for a BIAB process.

Obviously BIAB doesn't  scale well to industrial sizes due to the requirement of lifting a bag, which needs to be tear resistant, and needs to be lifted in the first place. At the homebrew scale you can probably do bigger batches easier with three vessels, and it seems to create clearer wort. I also saw an experiment that seemed to suggest it can affect the perception of hops as well.

Making a Bag

Anyway I though I'd just give a quick overview of me making a BIAB bag. I bought Voile this time, which is a fabric of 100% nylon. I think it could also be other plastics, mine was nylon. Previously I have used muslin (cotton) which I can compost, but thought I'd try the plastic stuff this time. Good thing too, because a chap in front of me in the fabric shop had the roll of muslin and wanted all of it (150-ish m), the world is a fascinating place.

I use the old singer. Not as simple in form as a needle, but more than a modern sewing machine. I'm a pragmatist  I suppose. This machine is lovely. You can trace these by serial number. Victorian Scottish manufacturing, still going.

Basically its not rocket science, you cut the stuff, my fabric was already twice the height of the pot width-wise, so in length I just needed half the circumference of my pot, so that when folded left to right the top edges make the full circumference. The folded edge is the bottom, the sides get stitched. Excess is trimmed, and I guess you would normally turn clothes inside out at this point to hide the floppy bits of the seam. In beer making you don't want this, as the flappy bits are a hiding place for grains, so you want the flappy bits outside.

I have read some crazy plans for toroidal BIAB bags, which are somehow optimal (for maximising extraction per unit area of material?) Personally I feel if you are bright enough to make a torus out of material, it almost certainly isn't worth your time, just make an oversize "pillow case" such that the grain isn't constrained in the bag.

I trimmed the flappy bits and gave the bag a boil to finish.

Edit, having used the bag for the first time it is way better than my previous muslin ones. The friction is so low the grains just slide off with a rinse in the sink, my previous muslin bags had to go in the wash to remove all the caught bits of grain. It also seems to stain less and dry faster. Not having to go in the wash is a big plus because now my clothes don't have malt on them.

Equipment Overhaul

Writing a successful blog about beer is probably contingent on the following two things. a) Having something to say. I'm not sure I'm there yet, recipes can be a bit dull so I'll try and find an angle as the blog progresses. b)  You actually know what you are talking about. Having had a few infections that have irritatingly coincided with the start of the blog, my ability to be convincing in this regard is diminished. I thought I'd get aggressive with my equipment sanitation. On the bright side it means I can show my equipment a bit, just in case I become internet famous and people care.

Essentially I do electric BIAB in a self built boiler/masher. It has a kettle type element, and a 1/4" bsp ball valve in the bottom. See lovely pic. I used a hole cutter to make the holes, which is a wonderful tool that did the job really well. Unfortunately first I had to make a small hole through which to insert the threaded part of the cutter. This took the best part of a week of evenings with a step drill bit. Not something I recommend.

To clean most parts I just fired (powered) up the boiler with plenty of water and boiled everything. Fermenter lids, bottling wand components, the only airlock not in use. At the moment I have two 10 l plastic bucket fermenters, one for bottling. and a 25 l wide neck plastic fermenter. The buckets aren't really airtight, so if I do a big batch or am paranoid about oxygen I use the big one. After some boiling, the small parts got a soak in vodka (esp things that didn't get long due to dubious heat resistance). Now I keep chemicals, bottle tops etc in sealed plastic containers. The water was then emptied (boiling) into the two bucket fermenters, one has a tap for bottling, so the boiling water was run through this. They were both left to stew for a bit. My thinking was the heat would get anything lurking in any scratches that chemicals would miss. The large fermenter (definitely infected last time) was sanitised with sanitiser, Rinsed with boiling water, filled with salt water, rinsed again and sprayed with vodka, which was then diluted with water with more sanitiser, before being rinsed again with more boiling water.

Honey Mild

Mild hasn't been generally available in pubs in my lifetime. Samuel Smith's do a dark one which I think is worth trying, and I have brewed a couple of dark ones recently.

Whilst many homebrew recipes call for dark malts, it is clear from "Shut up about Barkley Perkins" that many historical milds would have had limited, if any, dark malts. These were usually darkened with various sugar syrups or caramel.

I wanted to try a light mild, and instead of using a light sugar syrup, using honey to add a slight darkening and add aromatic complexity.

I brewed with some organic wild honey. The chestnut coloured honey was slightly crystallised, and had a dirty (English English - as in messy) slightly earthy (as in US dirt like) rich honey flavour.

Interestingly this use of sugar syrups provides a bit of a link to the Belgian world of beer. Famously various Trappist and abbey beers use Candi sugar. Recently I have been interested in the possible link between Orval and historical English IPA (including use of Brettanomyces). I can't help noticing this recipe is something like an anglicised Tripple. I think the use of sugar is something interesting to play around with.

Hops

I had some archer hops to try. Supposedly they have apricot notes which I thought might go well with the honey. I have been using WLP002 yeast recently, which tends to drop out well, but to ensure clear beer I find it's best to boil hops a little bit rather than just steep them. This means late additions are difficult for me, because I have to add on 15 mins to the addition timing to account for a no chill process. This means I can't really do < 15 mins additions without missing the boil all together and risking haze. I might have to find a solution to this in future, but this experiment seems to suggest boiling is not as flavour stripping as once thought. I elected to add 567 g 5 mins to the end of the boil (20 minutes equivalent).

Water

The water profile was adjusted to add a little crispness and try and coax some sharper citrus notes from the hops. Obviously British hops aren't as citrus as new world counterparts, but over dosing gypsum in an early homebrew-career light-bitter, that used first gold hops, produced an astringent grapefruit flavour, evidencing the presence of such flavours. Citrus, honey, apricot  and yeast was something I was looking for. The sulphate to chloride ratio was gently tipped in favour of sulphate.

Flaked barley

I wanted to have a decent head on this, and just sort of wanted to try flaked barley. My experiment with my bean saison suggested non traditional fermentables can make good beer. Reports of grainy notes from flaked barley sounded like it might meld with the rest of the beer well.

Fermentables

Final malt list was 50% pale malt (Crisp, flagon), one quarter flaked barley, and one quarter honey to OG 1.045.

Process

The mash was 1 hr with flaked barley and pale malt. The mash was fairly hot. The boil was 30 mins with hops added in last 5. The honey was added to the fermenter and hot wort poured on top. My understanding is that this drives off volatile aromatics to an extent, but I wanted to ensure the honey was well mixed, and thought with 33% of the fermentables being honey, a judicious volatilising of excess aroma might be worthwhile.

WLP002 from a starter made from bottle dreggs of my last dark mild was pitched the next morning.

Beer fermented for under one week before bottling to 1.9 vols Co2 using table sugar.

The beer was pretty interesting. I had definite haze problems and the beer was a bit too full bodied, read snotty, for me. Probably reduce flaked barley next time. The beer was in the main pretty good, slight honey character to go with the nice malty flavour. I didn't detect much fruit from the hops. All in all pleasant but uninspiring pale ale.

Interestingly, I used some bottles that previously housed some sours/Brett beers. This meant I got one sour bottle, which worked very nicely, but was a little too bitter. Another two had a medicinal note. I'm worried that propagating yeast from this batch has infected my vintage IPA.

Having had three infection problems recently, which is quite unusual for me, I need to have a bit of an overhaul of my equipment. I may also need to concede that I can't propagate yeast in a sufficiently sanitary way, which is a shame because I like WLP002 but can't justify £7 per 10 l batch. I will probably have one more go propagating from a bottle of my dark mild.