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....

Dark Mild with Invert #3

I almost always use dry yeast, but one of my perennial problems is getting enough yeast character in native beers. I have tried using sugars in the brew and pitching less yeast to increase ester production, but ultimately I wanted to try some new strains, specifically the Fullers strain, wlp002. In Portsmouth, where I'm from, there are loads of Fullers pubs, and London Pride is probably what I first started drinking at pubs. I like low attenuating beers, and also clear beers, and since this strain flocculates extremely well and is a low attenuator I thought it was ideal.

My previous efforts with (wet?) yeast have been disastrous. One was infected and both were phenolic. These were both early brews and I thought I might venture out again, hoping my technique had improved.

I wanted a dark chocolaty mild.  This time I wanted to use no crystal malt, even though I think people are unnecessarily afraid of crystal malt, especially in a beer like a mild where you want it to be a bit smooth and caramely, but this I wanted to be a bit more authentic, and consulting Ron Pattinson's "Homebrewer's Guide to Vintage Beer" noticed that a lot of historic milds had no crystal at all. What they often did have was sugar syrup. Here I am using invert number three, home made, by heating demerara sugar in a pan with a little lemon juice at 115-120 deg c for 150 -210 minutes-ish. I used the oven so I didn't have to constantly monitor the temperature, but this probably means my temperatures were all over the place. Nonetheless a good dark syrup was obtained.

Because It was a dark beer, my water was probably fine, so I didn't fuss about water treatment for this one.

Recipe

The recipe was 20% invert syrup #3 (entered as sugar and adjusted for water weight), 5% chocolate malt and 75% pale (Crisp, flagon). I also added 10g of black malt in 10L just to darken a little more (not part of the percentages).

The hops were 12g of perle at 8.4 % aa at 60-mins for 23IBU-ish.  The beer was no chilled overnight and the yeast was pitched direct. Original gravity was 1.036.

Tasting

The beer (shown below) was bottle conditioned to 1.8 vols Co2. The fist flavour is dark malt, just a little acrid, and perhaps pushing towards (not quite) porter territory. Then there is a slight watery element with a hint of rummy-ness. Quite a complex malt character with roast, sweet at tip of tongue and dry and watery at the back. The low carbonation is nice. The beer is a few shades darker than coke, and is almost opaque but when held to the light it can bee seen to be clear.

The yeast was expressive, but had a slight twang that I associate with the slurry at the bottom of the fermenter. I might need to start oxygenating my wort a bit more  since this is unnecessary with dry yeast, but could be a problem with my no chill process, with limited shaking after transferring hot wort to the fermenter.

A nice but unremarkable beer. I have noticed however,that these slightly boring dark milds definitely get finished the fastest. The low abv, low carbonation and non challenging flavour all contribute to this. It just seems hard to get bored of something boring? Next time I might try and sacrifice some clarity for a little more body by adding oats or something.

Broad Bean Saison

On my one of the few things that will overwinter on an allotment in the UK is broad (fava) beans. A variety called "Sutton" was grown on mine, and I ended up with a couple of kg of the beans, which were blanched and then frozen. They then remained in the freezer for a year, taking up space.

They probably had been left on the plant a bit long and had got quite large and starchy. I remembered that one of the things a turbid mash is supposed to do is to contribute starches for microbes. The idea behind this being that sacc can't metabolize the starches but other bugs can.

 Someone has hypothesized that Brett doesn't really need much left behind because it can metabolise other stuff, so turbid mashing is really for other bugs, so what I'm doing doesn't make a huge amount of sense, but still.

I wanted to have another go at a saison with brett and thought the beans would be a rustic addition to a rustic beer.

I must say I was slightly inspired by CJJ Berry's excellent wine making book where the broad bean wine is celebrated as surprisingly good.  He suggests boiling the beans to extract whatever they contribute, but he suggests not letting the skins split to help the wine clear later. I'm not sure whether this is to stop protein or starch getting in the wine, but I decided I wanted both in my beer, so mashed the beans periodically with a potato masher. 

The 500g of beans started out a lovely green in 2 liters of water. At the end of an hour or so there was almost zero fresh bean aroma left and I had a grey looking sludge. This set in the fridge to a grey jelly, which hopefully means the beans had gelatinised. I froze it to preserve the goodness until I came to brew my saison.

The frozen block of beans was added to the inside of my BIAB bag, and swirled in the mash water while it heated. It surprised me how long it lasted in 70 degrees C water and actually it meant the mash water climbed all the way to 72 before it had melted the block. Adding a kilo of barley malt to the mash lowered the temperature to 68-9 degrees.

The recipe for this was 64% barley malt and 36% unmalted boiled frozen broad beans (by extract). I guessed that the extract potential of a broad bean was 1.038 which is the same as wheat as suggested in "designing great beers" by Ray Daniels. I use custom "software" to design my recipes in the form of a spreadsheet based on information from this excellent book. I wanted a very low gravity saison, I shot for 1.035 anticipating I might come a little short and 1.030 wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

For this one I wanted to adjust my water. Bristol water is generally good for medium dark beers (bitters?). For lighter recipes, I generally have to lower the PH using a bit of HCL, and, either gypsum or calcium chloride depending on the desired sulphate-chloride ratio. The use of HCL to lower the PH normally means it is  difficult to get chloride levels bellow 150ppm-ish. For this recipe it didn't really matter and I hoped to achieve the following profile (ppm).

 

Ca	Mg	Na	Cl	SO4	HCO3
98	4	25	147	144	0.6

I'd read on a forum thread, where a bloke reports on malting lentils, that he got an iridescent shine on the bubbles on his brew. I sort of noticed the soap bubble like effect in the mash, but once the boil began the bubbles became much tighter and more matt tan. The photo below is after transfer to the fermentation vessel.

I take gravity readings at the start of the boil and then calculate what volume to brew to to get required gravity. The wort was a normal looking colour, not too grey.

This one was at 1.024 for 11L of collected wort. I chose to boil down to 9L to get final gravity of about 1.030. The wort actually boiled down much faster than expected so I had to add water to the fermenter to top up. It also darkened quite a bit. (See photo above above). This suggests the actual extract potential of broad beans is almost zero.

I used 10g of northern brewer at 60m mins for 21 IBU and then 10g of my allotment hops (mainly fuggles with a little bit of EKG) at 30mins for a further 3 IBU. This was more a romantic gesture as the beans and hops would have grown side by side last season (or saison?). No late hops for this one. The BU to GU ratio was 0.8. Refreshing but not too mouth stripping.

The wort was transferred to a brew bucket and a half package of mangrove jacks Belgian ale was pitched after an overnight cool. The yeast had been hanging around for a while (open but pegged shut). The brett I got originally  from some bruxellensis dreggs  (or was it orval? Who knows. Oops.) was pitched after 1 or 2 days. After a week or so I pitched burning sky's "saison a la provision" dreggs. I wasn't sure if I'd get much lacto expression due to the hopping.

 The beer was excellent, It was a lovely hazy yellow, the brett was very subtle and the lacto was non-existent. It just had a very bright slightly winey pale bright light flavour. This was an excellent table beer. I'm not sure what the beans really added, but suspect some of the clean fresh flavour might be from them, as well as a possible contribution to the body, although I may be completely deceiving myself based on psedo-scientific predictions about what the beans should do. I think because this was so low gravity the saison yeast was not so phenolic as it would be in a higher gravity example, which I much preferred.

One criticism would be that the hop character was a bit dull and one dimensional, a sort of slow lump of dreary just-bitter. If I were to re-brew, I would probably do either a large late addition of some floral noble hops, or I think it would work to just go wild and stick in something daft like galaxy in a large dry hop.

Excellent low gravity beer.

Blended Brett Brux Belgian Beer Bisected Batch

A belgian pale ale. This one was split two ways, one with brett brux from orval, one with brett brux from brasserie de la senne's bruxellensis. One bottle was kept clean, just for comparison purposes.

It was 80% pale (flagon, crisp), 10% sugar syrup I made from beet sugar mixed with water in a pan, which was a light honey colour, and 10% torrefied wheat. I just entered the syrup in the recipe calculator as sugar and accounted for the weight of the water. Aimed for a gravity of 1.040. Hops were 15 g of mandarina bavaria at 45mins for 17 IBU and 10g of homegrown mixed goldings and fuggles at 5 mins for negligible IBU (<2 I imagine).  Yeast was mangrove jacks M47 Belgian abbey. I slightly under-pitched by using a quarter of a packet in a 10L batch in order to promote esters.

The beer was fermented in a 10L bucket, then after primary was racked into two 5L demijohns and one bottle. The bottle was primed with sugar and the two demijohns had one type of brett each and then was fitted with an airlock and left for a couple of months.

The beer was a bit darker than I was expecting. I don't know if this was from the torreffied wheat.

Tasting. I accidentally tried the clean portion separately to the others. It had a very pleasant fruity estery  flavour initially, then there was a quite firm bitterness, which was satisfying in itself but clashed a bit with the yeast and then developed to a slightly strange astringent soapy aftertaste as the hops and yest fought to control the slightly thin finish. I'd probably add some wheat and down the bitterness next time, or just use an english yeast and mash a bit hotter for a nice bitter.

To free up some space in the kitchen I decided to blend the two Brett versions with a pale sour blend I had on the worktop for about a year. The details of that beer are a little hazy, but I know it is a mix of sourdough starter fermented 100% pale malt and repitched lager yeast in a sort of mainly honey and a tiny bit 25%? pale malt wort. The taste is apricots and honey. Really amazingly nice and not really sour, about the same as a sourish apple. A few sourdough notes. I doubt I could ever recreate this exactly, but might try something similar. 

On the left is a pale sour, and the right is one Brett Belgian pale ale.

The blend ratio was 3:1 pale ale: sour. I chose to carbonate to 3 vols of CO2. This was because both beers were pretty flat after a few months of aging. If the Brett takes it up .6 vols I'm still probably ok for bottle strength, if actually it doesn't and there is no CO2 currently in the beer I'm still at a respectable 2.4 vols.

The three amigos post racking.

I must confess, I made a few blunders. One airlock ran dry on one carbouy causing a pellicle to form. I also forgot which batch was which. Finally in the second batch I got a load of the lees into the bottling bucket, causing it to be much cloudier than the other batch. At this poiny I don't think I can really make a fair comparison. 

But anyway, to the tasting!

Above is a photo of both beers. The one on the left had poorer head retention. The one on the right was much fruitier, and had the perception of being sourer. The one on the left, which I think I recognise as the orval Brett, had more of a minerally character. Both beers were very dry. Whilst I'll wait a bit longer for things to marry, as they only had a week or two in the bottle, the beers seemed a bit disjointed. A sort of microbial mess. I preferred the sourer one which had a sort of generic red soft fruit flavour, whilst the minerally one was more harshly Brett at first and then made a suggestion of pink grapefruit squash to my ever listening taste buds. If the bitterness fades and the bugs start to get along a little better these could be nice, but at the moment they are just so so. A final thing to note is I was surprised how light in colour each beer was. As each blend was mostly brownish beer it was a shock to get honey gold out.