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. 

Stout with Soured Portion

A dry stout was brewed. It was 70% pale (Crisp-Flagon), 10% homemade invert syrup number 4, 10% roasted barley, 10% unmalted wheat. Water was Bristol water untreated. 21IBU at 60mins using cascade pellets. 5g of cascade at 5mins (10L batch), 10g of styrian goldings at 20mins. (I use no chill so these were actually 5 mins before end of boil for the styrians and 10 mins after for the cascade). I get bored of comercial beers using american hops, (if I want tropical fruit juice, I can buy tropical fruit juice cheaper than beer), but I like a bit of cascade in bitters and dark beers. It can lift them without being dominant.

The invert syrup was treated as sugar when inputing to my software, knowing the weight of sugar that went into the syrup it was easy to work out the sugar-liquid ratio and adjust accordingly. It was 500/820, and it hasn't gone off a few months after, so theres something to aim for if you are wondering how to stave off unwanted microbes using osmotic pressure. I started with waitrose demmerara sugar. The finished syrup was black and had a liquorice/burnt sugar taste, a bit like a cross between a creme-brulee topping and treacle (for those who live in the UK).

I drew off about a pint of unhopped wort to sour, which I kept on top of a radiator for about five days adding a little bit of sourdough dough a few days in. It had developed a sourness and dirty bread aroma by day 5. I then boiled to sanitise and blended back with the main beer once it had cooled.


The beer looked like this,

And was terribly good. When sipping the frothy mousey head, the first flavour is sugar, mix of dark brown and burnt. Then bitterness wells up, both hop bitterness and burnt sugar/roast barley acrid bitterness, this seems to stimulate the whole tounge in a very firm but balanced way and then there is a brief pause of carbonic spritzyness and then just a lingering complex roasty sugary burnt slightly hoppy melange. I'm not sure the sourness is perceptible but might be accentuating the sugary flavours. I was told this is one of the best beers I have brewed.

Spelt Brett Saison

I have really been enjoying Amos Browne's blog. One of the articles talks about his spelt saison recipe. I thought I would give it a try.

I decided to use spelt flour. This was mainly because it was easy to get, and I was confident that by mixing the flour with the grain first, my BIAB system would handle the slightly stickier mash.

The plan was to pitch some brett bruxellensis from a bottle of orval after primary fermentation was underway to get a bit of brett character in the final beer.

I used 80% pale malt (Crisp, Flagon) and 20%  organic spelt flour from dove farms. I aimed for a SG of 1.045 meaning if it really attenuates to 1.002 it is 5.64% abv. I didn't want to go much lower due to concerns about lack of mouthfeel. Bittering was with fuggles at start of boil to 28 IBU. I later dry hopped with some (15g for 10L batch) mandarina bavaria. Water was adjusted with sodium chloride and gypsum to make something vaguely like one of the water profiles in farmhouse ales, although from memory I struggled to get chloride down to the right level. Mash was single infusion BIAB at 65 C.

Yeast was mangrove jacks M27 Belgian saison ale.

Yeast was pitched, and shortly after (1 day?), brett from a relatively fresh (< 6 months) bottle of orval was pitched. Beer was left for 4 weeks, signs of airlock activity finished after 3.

I made an absolute hash of bottling. Aiming for 2.6 vols of CO2 (just in case brett takes it up further)  I had to add a liter of water to make up enough liquid for how much sugar I added to the bottling bucket, then the sugar didn't all dissolve which I noticed post bottling, so I quickly dissolved the remainder in some hot water then used a pipette to dose each bottle proportionally (I was using some 500ml beer style bottles and some 750ml champagne style bottles). Plain table sugar was used. This would normally be completely fermented by brewers yeast so I wasn't worried about the brett over-carbing, since, it too, will simply use all of it. I also gave it longer than normal to complete fermentation so hopefully no bottle bombs. Orval reportedly leave it three weeks.

The beer poured a golden yellow with a weird sudsy head that lasted a few minutes. Carbonation was high with big bubbles and quite a carbonic bite. Since brewing this beer I have had a commercial lager beer with mandarina bavaria hops, and I have determined that I don't like the tangerine pithy taste. When this beer was first tasted, the thin mouthfeel from the brett combined with the (to me) slightly unpleasant fruity bitterness combined with slight brett funk made it a little bit like when one gets a little bit of sick in one's mouth after eating an orange and then running about. However, with time the hops faded and the brett became a little bit more assertive, which was better. The weather warmed up a bit too, which made the dryness of the beer more pleasant. If I was doing this beer again I would probably get rid of the later hops and maybe add some calcium chloride to try and round out the flavor a bit.

Orval Inspired Bitter and Home Roasting

I initially bought a bottle of Orval because I wanted to harvest the brett. When trying the beer I noticed the aromatics reminded me of occasions in my childhood where my parents and their friends were drinking beer. The smell, and indeed flavour, to me, was almost like the archetypal beer (indeed Michael Jackson called it a "quintessential beer"), and I wondered if I could create something a bit lower gravity with a similar aromatic profile which I suspected was mainly from the styrian golding hops and possibly a bit of crystal type malt.

I also fancied having a go at roasting some malt at home to generate some toasty notes. I am a big fan of brown malt and I've never tried amber, which is supposed to be similar, so was wondering if I could get something close. I now know, from ISBN: 9781938469121 (I think?), that the process might be subtly different, and what I created was probably more similar to biscuit malt.

There is no space in my flat for grain crushing so I buy 25Kg sacks of crushed malt which last me about a year. Most methods for home toasting suggest using uncrushed malt, one reason being that you get a more even toast. Because that option wasn't open to me I threw caution to the wind and just decided to toast the crushed malt in a cast iron pot, which I assumed would give a more even toast. I pre heated the pot in the oven and stirred the malt which was probably a few inches deep every ten minutes or so. I have heard people say they like the smell of malt. I personally find it mildly unpleasant and this process really creates a stench, think boiling wort times a thousand. It permeated my flat and the stairwell. The malt was roasted at 180 C (356 F) for 35 minutes. It was hard to see any change but comparing to some unroasted malt at the end it was definitely a darker beige.

The recipe was 65% pale (crisp, flagon variety), 10% home toasted pale, 10% caramalt (30 EBC approx), 15% syrup. Gravity  1.045. Mashed med to high.

The syrup was homemade, starting with Waitrose demerara sugar, based on some posts somewhere on  here suggesting that unrefined sugar is the best base for historical brewing syrups. A small amount of lemon juice was added (<5ml, worked out properly with some calculation but I don't think it matters much). About a cup of water was added to 250g of sugar and the whole lot was bought to the boil for a about a minute. I doubt this added any colour. The syrup slightly crystallized in the jar I was keeping it in. The sugar was added at the start of the mash along with the malt.

I didn't bother adjusting my Bristol tap water, which as it turns out, is Orval like anyway.

Hops were 24IBU of perle at 60mins. I do no chill, and adjust my hop additions by -15 minutes to account for this when calculating late hop additions, and this was a 9.3L batch in the end so 20g of bobek went in at 5mins to go for 9 IBU and 30g more were added after 5mins of cooling in the fermenter for 6 IBU. If you were chilling these would be 15 min and 5 min additions.

Yeast was "muntons premium gold" which was recommended to me by a fellow home-brewer when I complained that many of my English beers don't have enough yeast character. A slight under-pitch and use of sugar should have promoted ester production as explained by SJ.

The beer when poured was very hazy despite being crystal clear in the bottle (before the fridge). I attribute this to fairly lively carbonation stirring up the yeast and a clumsy pour. chill haze. I like bright beer, and generally enjoy hazy beer less, but I wasn't too upset here, it didn't taste yeasty and wasn't visually disgusting.

The aroma was a nice mixture of damp hops and toasted grain. The flavour was yeasty fruity (strawberry?) and toasty with a very subtle caramel sweetness. Pretty happy with how this one has worked out. I think the toasted malt and sugar definitely added some complexity, the syrup smelt like overripe tomatoes before adding to the mash and I wonder if some of the fruitiness is coming from the sugar. I think to get it more like the beer I was imagining it would be I'd need some Munich to provide richness.

This was also way less aromatic than Orval. I probably would do a dry hop next time and possibly try the other type of styrian golding. Might reduce the carbonation slightly as well. This one was nice, but I think it could also work well with less fizz.