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.

Rye Pale Ale

To use up a load of old hops, and to keep my WLP002 ticking along, I thought I'd brew a beer with a bit of rye.

I couldn't find how much sulphate was in my water on my water providers fancy new website, so I just added 1.5ml of HCl (66%) and guessed based on vague memory of previous water reports that this would get me a very  low sulphate to chloride ratio.

The recipe went over a few quick revisions, when I realised I didn't have enough rye, and when my invert sugar syrup crystalised, causing it to be impossible to get out of the jar.

Grains 

This means the recipe was 79% pale (Crisp, flagon), 7% medium brown sugar/invert #3 syrup (roughly half and half), and 19% rye (flaked). Mashed hot and aimed for 1.044 OG.

Hops

For a 10L batch: 10g of simcoe at 11.7AA for 15IBU at 20 mins, 10g of perle of 8.4AA for 5IBU at 10 mins, 40g of Casacde at 0mins for 0IBU. Because I "no-chill" these were actually at 5mins -5mins and -15 mins respectively.

Yeast

Cooled in the fermenter and pitched with WLP002.

Tasting

The beer was dreadful. Picked up a medicinal infection, caused gushing bottles, was way to bitter, the hop character wasn't fresh. I don't know why I even bothered writing this. The picture wasn't even this beer. It's just appropriately miserable.

Vintage IPA

I grow hop bines on my allotment. The Fuggles bine is extremely vigorous, the Goldings is pretty pathetic in comparison; It produces far fewer cones.

The hop harvest was early September, and I was blessed with a decent pile of fresh English hops. I have no facility to vacuum pack hops in nitrogen flushed bags protected by cyro leviathans armoured with the frozen tears of married women from within the walls of Carcassonne so timely use of the harvest was my strategy to prevent oxidative degradation of said hops.

A vintage IPA seemed to make sense. There are some good ones in "A Homebrewer's Guide to Vintage Beer" R. Pattinson. From that book I knew the idea behind this beer would be 100 percent pale malt, a ton of whole leaf hops early in the boil, sulphate rich water, and that the beer should be aged for a year  or so with Brettanomyces.

Recipe

100% Pale (Crisp, flagon). OG 1.055. In 15 l of beer it was 130 g of  Fuggles at 75 mins, 130 g at 60 mins and 130 g at 30 mins. The sulphate was around 350 ppm to 100 ish ppm chloride.

The whole hops absorbed a lot of beer, something to bear in mind if you are attempting a recreation. Almost the whole volume of the beer was saturating the enormous pile of hops, and even with a decent squeeze of the hops in a muslin bag, I still lost a fair bit of wort.

The beer was fermented with WLP002 cultured from a bottle of honey mild. I'm afraid a Brett strain may have been in that bottle, and now the beer is infected. Unfortunately I have noticed some slightly medicinal flavours, but since I don't really need the demijohns I'll just let it ride out.

Just a year to wait....