Tag Archives: experiment

Micro Mashing

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Following the procedure in this excellent blog post, we did six micro mash test batches for a porter or double mild we’ve been thinking about brewing. We’ve been talking about brewing a porter for months now, but haven’t been able to agree on a recipe. Wind likes dry and roasty, Esme likes sweet and smooth. But there are also some outliers like Esme liking dark mild, but Wind doesn’t. When we have a porter or stout, it almost always turns out that one of us really likes it, the other doesn’t like it nearly as much.

We’ve experimented with multiple batches for trying different yeasts before, but didn’t have a process for trying different grain bills. So it was nice to find this process, which scales down a batch to quart size and then mashes and boils in mason jars. We made a few changes, with mixed results:

  • Instead of using malt extract, we did an all-grain mash because we wanted to test the difference between mild and pale ale base malts. We scaled our recipes down to 11.5 oz. of grain, which almost filled the mason jar, and were able to fit about 18 oz. of water. This worked reasonably well, but the mash efficiency was only about 45-50%, compared to the 70-80% we usually see with our usual mash process (Igloo cooler and fly sparging). So we would recommend doing a separate, larger scale mash to test different base grains (or accepting 50% efficiency and boiling down for higher gravity).
  • Because we were using more grain, a small strainer wouldn’t be big enough. So we used a pasta strainer lined with mesh bags (usually used as hop sacks). This worked very well, and gave us room to sparge the grains. We used the same setup post-boil to filter out the hop detritus.
  • We tried to do the boil in our usual kettle, using a canning rack to hold the mason jars. This seemed better than microwaving, since we’d be able to see them while boiling, easily add hops at the right times, etc. But the mason jars didn’t boil — an hour after the water bath started boiling, they were still slowly converging on 200°F. So we pulled them out and microwaved them, which worked fine.

This is a good process for trying out different grain bills, especially different specialty grains over a base malt you can get in powdered or syrup form. We’re looking forward to figuring out a grain bill we both like and brewing a full batch soon.

Speaking of Sours…

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We brewed a batch of saison in September and split it into five 1-gallon batches two months ago.  One batch was plain, one batch had Brett. Bruxellensis, one batch had Lactobacillus, one batch had both, and the fifth batch had White Labs’ sour mix.

I’m trying to be patient, and I’ve read that it often takes six months or more for the Brett. and Lacto. to work their magic.  But it has been two months, so we took some samples today to see how they’re going.  The first three batches were a little disappointing: they weren’t sour at all and had a definite sweet note, despite having attenuated pretty well (SG 1.014, 6.5%).  The fourth batch (Brett & Lacto) was lacking the sweet note and was just a tiny bit of tangy.  The fifth batch (White Labs’ mix) was decidedly sour.

So that’s promising.  We’ll park the growlers back in the pantry and check back in another few months, and try to be patient…

Sour Experiment

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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?