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.

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.