Tag Archives: homebrew

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?

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.

Another Year, Another Batch of Mead

Beer, Mead, , , ,

We’re back home after spending July up north.  And since we’ve got a few pounds of honey from Uncle John, why not make some mead?

Once it had enough time to mature, last year’s batch came out quite nicely.  Hardly even a faint hint of gym sock lingering.  So, this year we decided to change practically everything.  We did like the apple juice base, though, so it’s technically “cyser”.  And the results from last year gave us a pretty good idea of how much honey we wanted to use, but went with new juice (plain-jane Mott’s on sale) and yeast (Lalvin 71B).  We also varied the honey: one batch of Tupelo (which we’re calling Southern Cyser), one batch of molasses-like Everglades (Swamp Cyser), one batch with dark wildflower honey John gave us this year (Wild John Cyser), and one batch with a lighter honey John gave us last year (Old John Cyser).  We had a bigger jar of honey from last year, so we used more, pumping the gravity up to 25 Brix, so we hope it’ll finish dry and get to 12% ABV or so.

The Lalvin yeast is known for getting a quick start, and sure enough it was bubbling along first thing this morning less than 12 hours after pitching.  So with any luck, it won’t take too long to get there.

Florida Pale Ale, Part #2 – Brewing, Dry Hopping

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Brew day went smoothly.  We didn’t get quite the gravity we hoped for, but it was pretty close (1.067 instead of 1.070).  Thanks to some new hardware and the judicious application of thread seal tape, we got almost no leakage from the wort chiller this time around.  We had a little more than 5 gal., so we put 1 gal. in a growler like we often do.

Primary fermentation started quickly and got down to target gravity in about three days.  We just pulled them to secondary today, and added 1/4 oz. of leftover Nugget hops to the 1 gal side batch.  This is the first time we’ve dry-hopped, so we’re really looking forward to how much of an impact it will have.

I did some reading about dry-hopping, and in typical fashion there seems to be a pretty wide range of contradictory opinions.  The traditional view seems to be that you should dry-hop in secondary with low-alpha hops, and not leave them in more than a few days to avoid grassy off-flavors.  But other people seem happy to add hops in primary or directly to their kegs, and point out that many well-regarded IPAs are hopped with high-alpha hops like Simcoe.

Jai Alai, the beer that inspired us to make this batch, is dry-hopped with Simcoe, for example.  We didn’t like that very much, and the hops we liked the best were Nugget.  There is at least one well-liked IPA that’s dry-hopped with Nugget (Troegs Nugget Nectar).  So we decided to give that a try.

Florida Pale Ale, Part #1 – Hop Taste Test

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One of our favorite local IPAs has been in short supply recently (Cigar City’s Jai Alai). This had been my go-to beer ever since it started showing up at our local grocery store in cans (and the fact that it tasted even fresher in cans is a big part of my conversion to can/bottle agnosticism).

Hop Tea #1: Low-Alpha

So of course we decided it was time to complete our transformation to IPA-lovers and brew our own.  We have really grown to like hoppier beers, especially given the almost total lack of hoppy beers in the Netherlands.  And the ones we most like are Florida Pale Ale-style IPAs like Jai Alai and SwampHead’s Big Nose.  These are generally as hoppy as more traditional American IPAs, but with less resiny bitterness and more floral and herbal aroma.  I found a forum post with the Jai Alai hop schedule.  And since there were five different hops involved, I decided to order a bunch of American hops — Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Mt. Hood, Nugget, Willamette, etc. and taste-test them to decide what we really wanted to use.  Our usual supplier was sold-out of Amarillo, so we wound up with nine 1-ounce packages of American hops.

We made two batches of tea — one pellet of each hop in tiny espresso cups.  The first batch were the low-alpha varieties (Ahtanum, Cascade, Centennial, Mt. Hood and Willamette).  There were some clear losers (Cascade tasted very acrid and resiny, Ahtanum tested very oily), but no clear winners.

The second round had much clearer winners and losers — the high-alpha varieties (Chinook, Columbus, Nugget and Simcoe) had much more pronounced flavors.  We both liked Chinook and Nugget quite a bit, and hated Columbus (engine-fire) and Simcoe (astringent and resiny).

After a quick check of the handy Oxford Companion to Beer told us that Mt. Hood and Nugget were typically used for bittering, we arrived at a hop schedule: Mt. Hood and Nugget for bittering, and Centennial, Chinook and Willamette divided evenly between flavor and aroma.  Going back to the Jai Alai hop schedule showed that we’d basically picked all the hops they weren’t using, and gave us a little pause.  But we decided to plow ahead with what we liked, since we can always go back and copy Jai Alai if it doesn’t turn out.

Bottling Barleywine and Cider

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We bottled our barleywine and cider this weekend.  Since it was Obama’s second inauguration day, we used a couple of kitschy tea towels we picked up at his first inauguration to dry out bottle caps and equipment after sanitizing.

The gravity of the barleywine had not changed since I moved it to secondary, so we probably could have just bottled it after two weeks.  Many of the comments about the yeast mentioned how fast it ferments, and I guess they were right.  Barleywine is traditionally aged for ridiculous amounts of time, so we’ve tucked the bottles in the back of a closet, keeping only a handful of small bottles in the pantry to test whether it’s ready.

We tasted samples of the four batches of cider/cyser.  The first batch (plain juice) was nice and dry, lots of good apple character without being juicy at all.  The second batch (juice plus concentrate) was fine when I had a sip of the sample I used to check the gravity, but was decidedly off when we tasted a sample from the end of bottling.  So we’re not sure if it’s just a problem with the dregs or if the whole batch might be off.  The third batch (juice plus honey) was a very interesting cider/mead combination, with a lot of the cider character of the first batch, but also the floral and reedy/bready notes of mead.  But the last batch (juice plus twice as much honey) was the most promising — it was a little sweeter, much more pronounced mead flavor, with the cider tartness really fading to the background.

Cider Four Ways

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We’ve been drinking a lot of cider recently, and decided to make our own.  I had a hard time finding any decent cider recipes online (well, beyond “any old juice and any old yeast and it’ll be fine!” type recipes).  But got a good recommendation of a recipe that had worked for a co-worker of mine.  Though he switched the yeast and used Safeale US-05, so we went with that too.

Since this is our first cider, we decided to repeat our Saison experiement and make five different 1 gallon batches in growlers instead of a single large batch.  The plan was to make one gallon of plain juice, one gallon juice with apple juice concentrate, one gallon juice with candi sugar, one gallon juice with honey, and one gallon of water with honey.  But our small candi sugar batch was too shallow and wound up a caramelized, crystallized lump.  So we went with plain juice, juice with concentrate, juice with honey, and juice with even more honey.  We found unfiltered, no-preservative (not even Vitamin C) apple juice at our grocery store.  And we used a 1 lb. jar of Tupelo honey from Cross Creek Honey.

One thing that was surprising was the gravity of our apple juice.  I’d seen estimates online ranging from 1.035 up to 1.050.  But our juice was actually 1.059.  So we did some experimentation and found 12 oz. of apple juice concentrate added to a gallon of juice brought the gravity up to around 1.070.  We matched that with honey (about 5 Tbsp.) in one batch, and used the rest of our honey (about 10 Tbsp.) in the last batch.  We’re particularly interested in comparing the difference between honey and concentrate at the same gravity — how different will they be?

Another question was whether to heat or boil the honey.  In typical fashion, I saw opinions online ranging from “you have to boil honey or you’ll get botulism” to “probably good to heat to 170° to pasteurize” all the way to “don’t heat at all and don’t bother filtering out honeycomb and wings — they’ll settle out eventually”.  So we sterilized everything but didn’t heat our juice or honey at all.  Luckily there were no wings or honeycomb bits to filter out.

It’s Westy Day, But I’m Not Buying…

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So today is the big day: the first (and maybe only) official commercial release of Westvleteren beer in the United States.  When I heard about the release earlier this year, I expected to find myself at the head of the line today.  But that’s not the way it turned out.

As someone who has driven across two countries to buy Westvleteren beer, driving 90 minutes to the closest beer shop to get any Westy 12 didn’t seem like a big problem.  But a couple of factors conspired to make it just not worth it.  First of all, we’ve had Westy 12 before.  In fact, we’ve still have a couple bottles that we brought home with us from the Netherlands.  Second, it’s a great beer (and worth the $15/bottle you pay on the gray market), but that’s what they are selling it for retail, so I’m not sure why I should go to so much trouble to pay extortionate prices.  Third, Wind has this pesky thing called work that won’t let her drop everything and spend the day buying beer three counties away.  If I go by myself, I only get to buy one six-pack.  I did the math, and when I drove to Belgium to buy two cases, I was driving about 8 miles per bottle (which is totally reasonable, right? Right?).  But driving 85 miles (each way) to buy a six-pack comes out to more than 28 miles per bottle.  And that’s completely ridiculous…

So what am I doing instead?  Brewing my own, of course.  I’ll be stopping by the homebrew shop pick up some supplies for bottling the Westy 12 clone we’ve got in tertiary fermentation, and to make some cider and mead.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat…

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It was about a year ago that our first belgian brew was suffering from a stuck fermentation.  And now here we are again with a quad that’s made a lot of progress towards the final gravity target, but still has a little bit left to go and hasn’t made any progress in the last week.  So we’re trying the same trick again, and have moved the carboy (and growler for the Bruxellensis version) to the warmest room in our house (our home office) to try to get fermentation unstuck.

With any luck, this will get the fermentation completed and the results will turn out as good as that dubbel.

Improvised Blow Off Tube

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The quad is fermenting away nicely, and I was just thinking how smoothly everything’s going.  The brew went well and we hit our gravity right on the mark.  In fact, it went a little too well and we wound up with a little more than 5 gallons, but we figured there was enough head space in the fermenter, so why not keep it?

Now fermentation has started, and is going perhaps a bit too briskly — foaming up out the airlock and gumming it up.  I just cleaned out the airlock and two minutes later it was all gunky again.  So I rigged up a blow off tube.  Luckily, our normal tubing we use for siphoning is the same gauge as our airlock stem, so I just plugged it into the airlock hole and put the other end in a half-full gallon growler.  It’s bubbling very musically every minute or so.