Monthly Archives: September 2013

A Few Bottles from Sussex

Beer, , , ,

Wind went back to England on business, and picked up a few bottles (all from Sussex) to bring back:

We’d heard of Harveys — their brewery is in Lewes, which we visited many times when we lived in Brighton.  In fact, the last time we visited England (in 2008), we walked right past their brewery.  There was quite a bit of controversy back then when Greene King bought a local pub that is half a mile from the brewery and stopped serving Harveys beers.  But neither of us had ever had any of Harveys beers before.  Neither of us was very impressed by the Golden Sussex Ale, though.  It reminded us both of a very clean lager, with just a touch of honey sweetness.  It did have more hop bitterness in the finish, at least — though not much hop flavor or aroma to go with it.

I liked the Goodwood Sussex Ale better.  It was still a pretty light, clean beer with a touch of honey.  But it seemed much richer, with a little bit of twang.  I hadn’t heard of them before, but Goodwood Farm seems like an all-around organic farm producing meat, dairy, and (more importantly here) their own barley.  It looks like the beer is actually brewed by Hepworth in Horsham.

Which brings us to the last beer — Hepworth’s Curious IPA.  Like the Goodwood beers, this looks like a collaboration (this time with Chapel Down winery from Kent).  I liked this much better than the bitters, with a much more pronounced hop character, tending towards dry herbal reediness.  This reminded me of Het Ij’s Zatte tripel.

These three beers, taken together, remind me that the English beer scene is really focused on different issues than us Americans.  There is much more emphasis on cask-conditioned beer, brewed in traditional styles and served in the traditional way.  Which is to say, mostly lower-gravity beers, without strong hop character, with a lot less carbonation than I’m used to.  Even the most hop-forward beer, the Curious IPA, has very restrained hoppiness compared to the typical American IPA.

Sour Experiment

Beer, , , ,

Fresh off bottling our latest batch of cyser, we brewed another batch of saison on Labor Day.  This is happily burbling away in the pantry right now — burbling a little too happily, in fact.  It gunked up the airlock, so I replaced it with a blowout tube feeding into a gallon growler.  But then that blew out and got yeast gunk all over the floor and our shopping bags…

Anyway, we’re using the same grain bill we’ve used for saison in the past (Pilsner base, Munich/Vienna for a little color, and some candi sugar), an ounce of leftover low-alpha hops from our IPA, and our go-to Belgian yeast (WLP 530, supposedly from Westmalle just like Achel and Westvleteren use).

The boil was pretty much the same, except for omitting flavor and aroma hops entirely.  I did try one change on wort chilling (having ready several forum posts saying you could just rack to a plastic fermenting bucket and wait a day for it to drop to yeast pitching temp): I skipped the usual wort chiller and tried just racking through an ice bath:

Alas, it only cooled the wort by 5° or so, so hardly worth it.  Maybe if I had a coil…

The plan is to split the batch into five 1-gallon growlers and try a few different souring agents.  We’ve tried a few of these before — the first time we brewed saison, did three different Bretts (Bruxellensis, Lambicus and Claussenii), plus White Labs’ sour mix (which includes Brett, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus).  We definitely got different kinds of funkiness, but nothing like sour.  Turns out, we just need to wait longer.  Years longer.  So the plan is to try more aggressive souring agents (like Lactobacillus culture) and add some honeycombed oak planks to help the bugs grow.  Then we’ll just park the gallon growlers somewhere out of the way and wait for something sour to happen.  We’ve bottled almost all of our batches this year, and we’re tired of it.  So I think we’re going to be happy to leave those growlers souring for a year or two, and get back to making full batches and kegging them.

Speaking of waiting a while, our next batch will be our 18th, and our 18th anniversary is coming up next April, so we were thinking about brewing something we could leave fermenting until then.  We know lots of beers that benefit from years of aging, but we’re still thinking about what would like 6 months.  We thought about brewing a stout, but couldn’t agree on a recipe (she likes dry stout, I like sweet).  Maybe a Tripel?

Bottling Cyser

Mead, , ,

The cyser has finished fermenting and cleared up, so we bottled it today.  We wound up with nine 12 oz. bottles from each batch.  We saved a small glass from each batch and tasted them after bottling.  We’ve found with past batches that cider/mead/etc. change quite a bit after bottling, and can take 6 months or more to work through some of the sweaty/cheesy off flavors.  But still it’s nice to get a preview of what the different batches will taste like:

The first batch was made with Tupelo honey, and it was bone dry (my refractometer reading may have been off, but I think it was somewhat south of water).  The honey character shone through, though it was a little reedy.  It seemed the like the most prototypical “mead” flavor we’ve produced.

The second batch was made with dark, molasses-like Everglades honey.  The dark, almost smoky flavor was definitely there, as was some sharp green apple flavor.

The third batch was made with wildflower honey from our Uncle John.  This seemed lighter than the others (despite having more residual sugar), and had a velvety complexity that gives me hope it will mature well.

The last batch was made with a lighter honey we got from Uncle John last year (clover?).  Since we had a larger jar of it, we used more and the resulting cyser has the highest ABV of anything we’ve brewed (12.8%).  It had a higher final gravity, with a rich mouthfeel to go with that.  It also had the strongest floral honey flavor, and was definitely the sweetest.

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We were at the homebrew shop to get some priming sugar and some extra bottles (cleaning the labels off of bottles is my least favorite part of brewing — we keg some full batches, but small batches and especially mead/cyser need too long to mature, so bottles it is).  So we also picked up the grain and other supplies for making a sour saison.  We’ve tried various Brett yeasts before, and quite liked the funkiness.  But we never got anything like sourness.  After doing some reading, it looks like we just need to wait longer for the bacteria to do their thing, and add some wood to the fermentor to give them a good platform to live on.  So that’s our plan for the next batch: a single primary fermentation with 5 batches in 1-gallon growlers that we can just leave for a year or however long it takes.

It was also nice to see our local homebrew shop move into a new, larger location.  They even have a nice self-serve grain room now where you can pick and measure out your own grain.  They’ll still do it for you if you want, but I really enjoyed getting to paw through the gain myself.