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.