Best Bitter, for cask.

Having brewed nothing at home for nearly a year, I’m making up for it now. The same can be said for this blog. Nothing new for years, and now I’ve a backlog of posts. Not because I’ve got more to say, necessarily, but I’ve finally got the hang of separating the content. So, to tease, the next couple of posts will include:

• Toys for a Tenner: All the best toys for really keen homebrewers
• Great Gruit: Brewing with Kviek and some not-hops
• In good nick: Real ale, and how to get beer on the floor and in your face
• Get pally at your local: Building an awesome bar from pallets

Onto the bitter. The recipe is similar to the last, because it was really very good. The changes include swapping out some crystal malt for Munich and Aromatic, simply because I wanted to try the Munich, and I was sent more Aromatic than I needed, and less crystal because I wasn’t. In they go.

This is a single hopped beer (not like that Double Hopped madness from Diageo, Hophouse 13), in that it is bittered, flavoured and aromad by Pilgrim. I’m nowhere near the end of the British hop list yet, so I’ve no interest in American or NZ hops when there are still so many varieties to try nearer to home. Pilgrim was described as "deeply fruity, lemon/grapefruit aroma with flavour characteristics including verdant, berries and pears. As a bittering hop it provides a refreshing, full-bodied and rounded bitterness" by The Homebrew Company, and they recommend its trial, so having enjoyed it in the first batch, I’ve stretched to another packet of pellets for bittering. I need to use some leaf hops to help filter out the trub etc, so the last additions will be leaf, totalling about 70 grams (This is a double batch, aiming for 44 litres in the fermenter). 70g won’t sound like much to many of you, I’m sure, but this is a session beer, remember. Drinky drinky, not sippy sippy.

The yeast is a reconditioned Fuller’s bottle, and it’s being stirred right up until pitching. This is its second run for me, and seems in good condition, so I’m happy to pitch later this evening. It’ll be a two litre starter, but I’ve no idea what that means in terms of yeast cell growth, as the starting quantity was one metric dollop, and it’s viability unknown.

I think the Fuller’s strain is WLP002, English Ale or something, should you want to pay €8 for it.

The recipe:

Minch pale (4-6srm) 5.8 kg

Munich malt (  ) 500g

Crystal 40 (80), 300g

Aromatic malt 200g

Torrefied wheat 500g

Water: down to 35ppm alkalinity, and added 10g CaSO4, 4g CaCl. 22.5l, should give roughly 3:1 litres:kg. God only knows what the Sulphate : Chloride ratio will end up, but going from experience it should be roughly 2:1, with about 200 – 300 ppm sulphate, and half of that in Chloride. That will leave plenty of Calcium for the yeast. Treated enough water to liquor back at the end.

Temperature settled at 65oC, so should get the FG down to 1010.

The grist yielded 44 litres of 1046, with plenty more sugars left to extract (sparge stopped at 1020).

Boil:

Pilgrim (pellet) 10.3%aa, 42g

Pilgrim (leaf) 10.4%aa, 35g (+ ¼ tablet protafloc)

Pilgrim (leaf) 10.4%aa, 25g

1 small handful added to cask. Book says so.

The wort is an excellent dark copper colour, which pleases me. This was acheived by using a little chocolate malt the last time, but I think I tasted it in the form of a little dryness, so to have this happen accidentally from the Munich etc is a pleasant, though not entirely unexpected surprise.

Why am I bothered by the colour? The beer is to be served at a wedding, alongside a locally brewed golden ale, and a locally brewed stout. It’s nice to brew a beer that’s a different colour, and nobody wants to drink a red ale all day: I speak from experience.

Result:

So, about all I can remember is that it was delicious, very popular, was lighter (colour) than I expected, and needed about another week for some of the hop roughness to smooth out. However, an excellent beer, of which many a pint was had. This was in contention with a locally brewed golden ale and a stout, and they all pretty much emptied at the same moment, so I’m pleased with the result.

Not so pleased, however, that I won’t be adding back some more crystal malt the next time!

Brewlab Education

And it's back to college for a few days!

I've been booked on the course since June, but I never thought it'd come around. But now I'm here, I can't believe I'm already halfway through! I've just finished the second day of the 3 day plus one Startup Brewery course at Brewlab Ltd, and it's basically sorted out all of my problems, from mash efficiency to those funny off-aromas, without even bothering to try one of my beers!

Firstly, the course took twenty of us (some home brewers, some not), through the brewing process from start to finish, and funny enough, they started with the brewing liquor, or water-what-you-make-beer-with, starting with the treatments in order to keep the beer in character and style with the original, and also in order to increase the mash efficiency, by adjusting the pH of the liquor. So that's the first thing I'll need, some litmus paper.

Then Arthur took us through the recipe compilation, using the ^ol scale, which measure's the malts potential extract, and will more than likely lead to much more accurate predictions of O.G., or the amount of fermentable sugar I can expect in my wort (pronounced wert, apparently, even in a thick Geordie accent). Out with Imperial, in with Metric. Sigh.

Arthur also casually pointed out that my DMS problem (smells like teen bedroom) comes from not chilling the wort quickly enough (or at all, in my case, as I usually let it cool down over a period of hours). Unpicking my brewing experience with one casual casual question: how do you cool down your wort?

The rest, all equally important, but numerous, will all be addressed soon. Some will be addressed at relatively little expense, some will likely cost more. Dr Thomas advocated getting a little more familiar, if not downright voyerstic, with yeast. Buy a microscope. I think Santa will be busy picking through 400x magnification Haemotologists microscopes in the Argos catalogue this month!

So, two more days to go, so much to learn, and so little time. You can see some gaps in your knowledge fill up, while watching others burst open, as you realise how much there is yet to learn! Early to bed tonight then... well, I'll just 'sample' this one more pint!

Harvest Ale #1

Fresh hopped Harvest Pale ale:

5oz, on the button.

It feels like ages ago that I got excited about the first hop shoots nuzzling at the surface of the soil. Now they’re drawing the attention of the council’s planning department! So, after nearly 5 months, I can finally reap the rewards of months of doing nothing; it’s basically looked after itself. Well, ok, I did rig up a zig-zag of Poundland plant wire, but that’s about it. The regular watering thing that plants seem to like wasn’t labour intensive this year, thank you Gulf Stream, and although I did manage to throw on some tomato feed once or twice, it was only because I was feeling guilty about having done, frankly, nothing. But now I’ve a brew day to plan. Some sort of pale ale should prove a hearty canvas for the piney Nugget hops I’ll be harvesting from the one bull-bine. Only one bine flowered, so I’ll probably only have quarter of a pound of wet hops at best, but lesson learned for next year: cut back all bull shoots, not just some. Success favours the brave.

They're all perfect.

The pale will be 2lbs maris otter, 1oz crystal & 1oz wheat, and ¼ oz Northdown (bitter) per 5 ounces of fresh hops. Thinking about it, it’s probably too much, as the equivalent is about 5oz aroma hops in a 5-gallon brew (fresh hops weigh between 4 and 6 times more wet than when dried). Though after consulting the forums where it seems that more is more, more might be enough. Besides, it will be easily spread over the last twenty minutes of the boil.


So on Harvest Ale eve, about three weeks later than the microbrewers who were at the Kent harvests, and nearly a week later than some Dublin homebrewers (I’m quite far north, have I said?), I finally set the alarm clock for an interesting brew day. I haven’t dreamt about homebrew yet, but if it’s going to happen, it’ll be tonight.

Harvest Day: 18-09-2012

Hot, hot, hop.

Woke up to a wet and windy day, and thanks to some sort of bizarre cold, absolutely no sense of smell - hardly conducive to a morning of brewing with fresh hops!

The first thing to do was to measure up the hops, so I knew how much of what to make. As it turned out, my estimate was spot on: 5 ounces of fresh hops. So I set half a gallon of water to heat up, and mashed in the malts. I left it, checking occasionally that it was at the upper end of the 60s (temperature, that is). Then, sparge, boil, and in with ¼ ounce of Northdown hops to bitter the pale ale. Once the wort had been boiling for 40 minutes I begun to add small handfuls of fresh hops and became frustrated at how little I could smell! Was it the lack of hop oils? Was it the small quantity of hops being added? Or was it, hopefully, the absence of my olfactory senses for the day?

The whole with went into a glass demijohn at 1045, which wasn’t far off estimate, and then in with some yeast from a couple of weeks ago. It’s not fermenting yet, but with any luck by this evening there should be a krauseny mess all over the living room floor.

There’s very little I can do now, for a couple of weeks, except the usual bottle palaver. However, in a couple of weeks there will be an honest appraisal of the beer, but in the meantime, there’s bound to be an update on the next beers up, namely:

#4, a hoppy golden ale, with a fantastic citrus aroma,

Chocolate and Passionfruit Porter, which may or may not be a stroke of genius,
WHT Tayleur’s dried Rowanberry brown ale, and finally,
CIDER! If I can get hold of some apples!

And maybe, by next September, I’ll have both more hops and a hopback to really force in the aroma, sense of smell or not!

What to do with a spare 8 hours.

A Sunday evening alone, the perfect opportunity for things I’m not allowed to do when Ms Homebrew’s in: listen to jazz, and brew beer. Ms Homebrew doesn’t mind me watching the rugby, even when it’s on at the same time as an Eastenders omnibus, but jazz? She’s no time for it. “It’s messy sounding”. And homebrewing’s just plain messy. I’m wearing slippers now, while I brew. Once upon a time my homebrew outfit included waders.

I’ve been a bit busy with non-homebrew related stuff, so I’ll condense the last two brews into a single paragraph, seeing as nothing particularly exciting happened. 5 gallons of tiger beer made, from Dave Line’s recipe, to which I was largely faithful; and Kindleweisse, a whatever’s-left-in-the-cupboard wheat beer. The first has been lagered in the shed (in the plastic bucket, at about 9 degrees, so not really lagering, I know), the second, Kindleweisse, an American Wheat beer, has been soaking up the heat from the stove, occasionally exciting the cat. It did take a little while to start fermenting, but once I’d put it where the cat usually sits, it sprung to life. Cats do know the warmest spots.

I’m making a batch of Golden Ale. I’m not really sure what makes Golden Ale. Everything else I’ve brewed has either been pretty dyed in the wool as a style, or written about enough for me to reproduce it with some confidence. Even Kindleweisse, which was only made because apparently in some countries you can ferment a wheat beer with a top fermenting (ale) yeast, and was the result of a read through Daniel’s book.

Even on the Internet there’s not much about ‘Golden Ale’. As far as I understand it’s a relatively new term, coined in 1994, which is enough time for the Internet to have an opinion on it. Nevertheless, I did find the following: It’s a golden sort of colour, between 3 and five percent alcohol, little in the way of a malt profile, but plenty from the hops, which should produce a crisp, dry beer, with a feeling of bitterness, and a powerful hop aroma.


To that end, I’ve used 7lbs 8oz pale malt, 4oz each of wheat malt and barley flakes, 1.5oz Fuggles (hops) and 1/3 oz of Styrian Goldings (also hops) to give an IBU of about 30 (which may or may not be typical of the style). I’ve mashed low and long to remove any trace of flavour from the beer, but I’ll put it back with late additions of whatever Styrian Goldings I have left, and plenty of Cascade. I’ve also used some Burton water salt treatment to help with the hoppiness. I was toying with the idea of using acid malt, to lift up the pH, which I gather the Pilsner producing countries do to create a crisp flavour, but I chickened out of that in favour of something that would, if all else failed, make a passable pale ale. I also tried this: put in your copper hops before the wort comes to the boil and the wort won’t kick and spill over the place – it works.

Ah, and now I’ve distracted myself with writing, and I can’t remember if the boil started at ten to ten, or ten past! D’oh.

Pride before fall (or by winter, at the very latest)

Tuesday night I set my alarm for 6 am. It was dark, quiet, and way before I’d usually get up unless there was some sort of emergency. In a way, there was. The homebrew supply is worryingly low (I’m drinking white wine as I write this, and if it weren’t for Mrs Homebrew’s birthday last week we wouldn’t have any of that)! As a result, I was forced up way before dawn in order to get a small all-grain brew going before the day’s choir commitments got in the way. Oh, and I borrowed a thermometer for the mash that very much needed to be back in someone else’s fridge by half 8, so six was as late as I could leave it.

I’m making a gallon to try a new recipe, and I’ve only enough stuff for one anyway. It is a trial of Dave Line’s Fuller’s London Pride, from his book ‘Brew Beers Like those you buy’. The beer bottle says ‘Target, Challenger and Northdown’ are the hops used, whereas the book opts for Fuggles and EKG. Naturally, I’ve gone for Fuggles and Styrian Goldings, as that’s all that was in the freezer.

My morning was spent mashing 1lb 6.5 oz of pale malt and 1.6 oz crystal, followed by a 90 min boil with the hops. The mash and sparge went well, though I’m still struggling to juggle jugs of hot water and the perforated chopped tomato tin I use to spray the grain bed gently. I’ll show you what I mean in a picture one day... actually, for that I’ll need a fourth hand.

Then an interesting weather phenomenon occurred halfway through the boil; a small Cumulo Nimbus formed at the kitchen ceiling. It was a beautiful sight, and at a certain angle a rainbow shone through from the striplight on the roof. I opened to doors and windows to let some of the steam out. Apparently condensation on the walls annoys Mrs Homebrew even more than burnt caramel on the stove, which ranks pretty high.

So, having set the alarm for 6, and by four in the afternoon the beer is frothing away very merrily, which isn’t bad at all. And neither is the state of the kitchen. The walls need a go over with a hair dryer, and I’ve a bag of wet grain I need to get rid of. I’m very happy to report that what went into the bucket will probably end up a lot like an English bitter, and we’ll see how much closer it gets in about 3 to four weeks!