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.

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.