Bengal Spice and the BIY

For the 7th annual Do-It-Yourself Brew-It-Yourself competition, I cooked up something unique but also very fast and easy.  I got the recipe from Homebrew Favorites and took a risk on something that was very straight  forward but unique. 10 bags of Bengal Spice tea, produced by Celestial Seasonings, was added at the cutoff boil to basically give all the character it could to an all-grain palest of ales and a single hop addition.  The aroma was dynamic and the body was flat.   It was served out of my kegerator at the event for a start out table beer.  It unofficially took 5th place in the competition, but due to having won a place already with my Dark Port Hawk chocolate porter, the award was passed down.

No images exist of the brewing of the Bengal, but it hit the mark for a simple beer that took one stage of fermentation and then straight to the keg in time for the event.  If event brewing turns out to be a regular affair for me, I will use this gem as a special seasonal ale.     

In total, the event had 15 entries and about 25 tasters in total.  Due to some smaller submissions, liter-age wise, had there been any more drinkers we would not have had enough to go around.  Kevin and I had some tense moments of tallying at the end of the evening. But the event on the whole went off without a hitch.

The Turn

Have you ever had an infection in your beer? An introduction of a living organism that was not supposed to be there? One so foul, so wretched, that it ate all your digestible sugars and gave no love other than its toxic gas? Expelling all across your upper lip when you lean in for a big draw? No?

The creation of a sour ale is about harvesting that wild beast which subverts the standard beer through guile and craft. In the fermenter today I have a homemade batch of Berliner Weisse which calls for this greasy intruder to be admitted, no, invited, into the young beer.

To begin, Berliner Weisse is a German style wheat ale that is generally low in alcohol-by-volume and is very light in color and sour in taste. The ingredients for this batch are as follows: 2 parts wheat malt, 3 parts 2-row domestic barley, 1oz of Liberty hops, homemade lacto-bacillus and a general ale yeast.

Historically, sour ales were naturally inoculated with wild yeast in open fermenters left outside, on rooftops, in barns, bakeries, abbeys and now my kitchen. These wild yeasts are all around us, at all times, and will gladly take a free lunch. However this is not going to produce a great beer all the time. If you have ever had an infected batch, that is the example of why wild yeast or bacteria is not always a welcomed helper. But beer styles are a funny thing, a brown ale with a hint of sour is totally uncalled for and would be rejected by a beer judge, however a Flander's red ale that tastes like sour gummy worms is applauded and marveled at.

Here's how it works: A week before brew day, I prepared a small jar with crushed 2row domestic and 130F degree water, placed tin foil over top and let it work with whatever happened to be trapped inside. Mold began to form within 2 days and a gray pellicule arrived by day 5. This recipe was a no-boil batch, meaning instead of sparging from the mash-tun into the brew kettle, the wort was run directly into the fermenter. Grains were doughed at 150F for 75 minutes with the introduction of boiled Liberty hop tea. Sparging up to the 5.5 gallon mark on the carboy and waiting to cool took much longer than it should have due to the difficulty of reducing temperature for pitching range without a wortchiller. Once cooled the moldy liquid from the lactobacillus starter was introduced. My kitchen smells awful.

Currently the brew is bubbling and expelling funk, in 2 days I will introduce an ale yeast that will help digest the bulk of the sugars that are undigestible for the lacto. This is intended to also impart estery flavors beyond the soured characters working right now. Many homebrew shops sell a cultured lacto strain in smackpack form. However, the great adventure of homebrewing is about utilizing the context in which you brew. This batch will taste kinda like my apartment, if you think thats gross then you're not invited.

Another option for making a style such as this and many other great sour ales is to get acidulated malt, or make your own. Instead of utilizing the yeast to make the souring quality, the malt itself is left to stand in warm temperatures for natural yeast to make it turn. Then it is added to the boil or mash-tun depending on your setup.






Similarly to my Gueuze, I will be waiting in sheer anticipation for when this brew can be tasted. For a closing image, I provide you with the following. One of the more pleasurable things to do, now that it's warm out, is two-maning the mash-tun over to the compost bin. We dribbled all the way there.

J to L

As mentioned in the previous post, I had prepared a chocolate porter for the first time in my brewing history. I was very pleased with the results and will definitely be using chocolate in future batches and in different combinations. After a success one tends to try and keep going on that path. The past two weeks have seen three different batches brewed using first time ingredients largely from the produce and herbal sections at Organic Planet.

As owner/brewmaster of Dogfishhead Brewery Sam Calagione would say, 'why brew normal beer?' Although he is both older and wiser in the craft, sometimes you also want to make sure you are brewing what people generally refer to as beer, so that you can be reminded that when it comes down to it, you can make a style as intended. So this latest activity in the brewery has produced one creative weizen, one daring schwarzbier and one good old fashion brown ale.

These homebrew concoctions were labeled in the J to L spectrum of the alphabet so in keeping with problematizing linear progression, lets start with L:

Lowbush Vice
- Creative
Made as a hopeful attempt at an untroubled segue from winter to spring; this weiss batch utilized a couple tubs of wheat malt that had been kicking around the brewery for far too long. Lowbush berries - referring to the height of the organic blueberry shrub - were added after a standard boil and allowed to steep for 30 minutes. The longer the steeping lasts the more aromatics the blueberries will produce. Weiss style guidelines call for slight fruity characters in the nose and estery notes in the aroma.

When using fruit such as this in your beer, it is important to prevent the skins from breaking and keeping all amounts of pectin out of the wort. Mind you, the inside of the blueberry is where the flavor is, but if making a mead or fruit wine you would then need to uncomplicate the yeast's job by chemically stabilizing the amount of acids present, and that is far too much chemistry work for this first shot at blueberry beer.

I'm not sure if the originator of this recipe (which I tweaked from homebrew favorites) threw out the blueberries after steeping or not, but it would be ridiculous if they did. These are freakin good blueberries still...having said that I now have a couple bags of frozen blueberries that smell like syrup and are covered in hops so choose wisely how you reuse these.

All in all, this Vice has received good reviews from those who have tried it in the tap room. The remaining 2 gallons are bottle conditioning till that beckoning sunny spring day.

Licorice Lager
-Daring
Unfortunately there are no pictures of this foray into schwarzbier other than one of the secret ingredient in question = Licorice Root.

This batch sums up the creative nature of homebrewing for me. I found a recipe for a dark lager, added licorice root shavings in the last 12 minutes of the boil and an additional can of expired pre-hopped malt extract for a pilsner (I got it in the discount bin at Brewers Direct - which I don't recommend doing unless you are experimenting). Before I go any further, I want to mention that licorice has many great medicinal qualities...it also is used as a laxative. Drink under advisement.

Schwarzbier is a German black lager, meaning it has an srm (standard reference method) count near the porter end of the spectrum but the body of a lager. With any lager, there are particular conditions the brewer has to pay attention to. The biggest problem for me was keeping the lagering temperatures constant. I placed the carboy out into the walkway of my fire-escape when it was still -10C outside. However, the days grew warmer and the nights grew shorter, and the lager was not conditioning as it likes. Anytime you end up with temperature fluctuation you will get your yeast to react poorly. Generally, they release diacetyl which has a buttery taste to it, this batch produced more like a septic tank smell. The flavor is fantastic and made for a very quaffable beer, but the aroma was ungodly. After about 20 minutes of sitting in the glass the odor dissipated. I'm hoping this secondary fermentation stage at room temp will help expel some of that nastiness.

Just a note, lager yeast will ferment at ale temperatures, but the proof of lager yeast is their ability to produce good clearing beer at the near 0 C temp range. Right now, it's a wait and see policy.

Jupiter
-Old Fashion
This all-grain brown ale was inspired by the awesomeness that is the greatest planet (besides our own) in the solar system. Its fantastic and perceptible trip in the night sky during the months of February and March (in conjunction with that of Venus) has been both thought provoking as well as a silent companion on night marches. As seen at left, the brew produced a violent storm as if evoking the gas giant within my kitchen.

My best beers have been variations on Papazian's all-grain recipes from his seminal text, The Joy of Homebrewing. This little gem is no different. Still an issue with all-grain brewing in the apartment, but this time, it was slightly easier as my two brewpots are large enough to contain just over 5 gallons of wort, as opposed to three smaller pots just under.

Step mashing method was used for the bulk 2-row pale malt, black patent malt, chocolate malt, and 120-lovibond crystal malt as the specialty grains. Fuggles for boil and Goldings for aroma make this classic brown ale as good as I have tasted. One new addition to this style which I seem to make better than any others - not saying a whole hell of a lot - was the 1tsp of gypsum to the mash. When making regional styles of beer, the brewer must account for contextual flavors that go beyond the flare notes, in this case its replicating the waters of Burton upon Trent, a historic brewing
region of England. The traditional brewing waters of England have a lower ph level than my tap water or even the Red River can produce. An addition such as this seems to emphasize the desire to meet a standard because not living in England or back in the early 1800s before brewing water was treated is to recognize that this type of beer is historical, and must adhere to historical factors.

And this fun picture is what was left over after the primary transfer. Mmmm...

Sláinte!

A cautionary tale.

So, I'm going to begin from the end with this batch description. As the picture describes and reads, this Silver Dollar Porter was a bit of a nightmare. My first All-Grain batch of the Apartment Ber series. As I knew, dealing with 10+ pounds of grain was always going to be a problem in my tiny kitchen, with no wiggle room for error and no compost within 10 feet of me.

As described here, All-Grain requires a much more intensive process of both temperature and liquid utilization. In order to get the most out of your malts, you want to boil as much of the sweet wort runnings from the mash-tun as you can. Because I don't have a turkey fryer or a 7 gallon pot...I decided to boil three different pots getting as close to 4-5 gallons as possible. This allows for better hop utilization and longer breakdowns of the sugars produced from the starchy malt. The voluminous boil makes the better beer. This method however made the process stressful, humid and fevered. I hope everyone can taste a little bit of me in each bottle! (Ah the magic of not being bound by state sanitation regulations) The top picture is the primary chilling in an ice bath in the sink using the 'wet t-shirt' method. Because I boiled so much more liquid, the longer it will take to reduce the temp for pitching the yeast. By resting the primary in a cold bath and wrapping a soaked shirt around the top and keeping the waist end in the water, heat is wicked away as the water will always remain colder than the source it is covering.

To operate this process successfully, divide your hops by eye into the number of pots you will be using. You don't want to over-hop one pot versus the other where the malts will be stronger than the hops and weaker in the other. In addition to this, because of the metallic content of the pots used and the surface area of each, they will come to a boil at different times. In my case, i used two timers, one for the smaller pots and the other for the larger. Maintaining your hop schedule is key.

The batch here is a porter, dark in color and slightly lighter in body than a stout but still very dark with higher IBU's. The brewing process itself went off without a hitch despite the increase of scalding hot liquid around me. The original gravity was nailed, the temperatures for mashing were consistent, and the runnings produced just enough to get what should be a 5.5% abv.

The biggest struggle was dealing with the spent grains. Rather than carrying the awkward mash-tun with soaked grains - making it about 50lbs - down the block to the nearest compost bin, I decided to empty it into bags and buckets. I will Never use bags again. Even double bagging didn't stop the wort from leaking all over the place. After thinking the grains were contained, i would turn my back for a second and the runnings would be trailing the baseboards. If i had a resident cow in the spare room, things would be easy. Despite all this, the batch is fermenting away. Increased sediment in the primary is expected due to the husks and grain pieces coming along the way as well as the increased yeast I have been pitching with. If this becomes an issue, most brewers lower the temperature of their fermentation space which knocks down a lot of the yeast so that it doesn't carry over to the secondary or the bottle. Also Irish moss is effective for this, the method I prefer.

I don't believe I will be All-Grain brewing in the Apartment Ber series again, atleast not until I find that cow. A cautionary tale.

*UPDATE* Despite all the tedious work involved in making this beer in such a small space, it took 2nd place at the Brew-It-Yourself competition in June of 2011.

Lager Town

After much hiatus (and helping a few friends with their first batches), Ive decided to post a bit about my lager adventure. Several batches were made since I last posted - mostly ales - some filled the toilet tank and some got passed around to jolly faces. However, since winter brings about both cold temperatures, ideal for lagering, and the end of a comfortable brewing season, I'm going to post the following photos and synopsis.
Bohemian Pilsner / Bock / Kölsch


All three of these "beers" are German styles, which is where lagering historically originated as a trade practice and has corroborated the reputation that country has with beer connoisseurs. Budweiser, Miller, Coors, etc. are German lagers, as bastardly hard as that is to say.

Bohemian Pilsner
Pilsner, originating from the Pilsen region of the Czech Republic, has more pilsner barley which is very light in both taste and color than the recipe I used which utilized carapils, a browner caramely color and flavor. Thus its darker color making it a brown German pilsner with lager yeast. This batch was all-grain, 9lbs of organic pilsner barley and 1lb of aromatic with hallertauer and tettnanger hopes (traditional German variety). For the first time with a lager yeast (which requires much colder temperatures than ales, and is top fermenting yeast) I did a primary fermentation at 15 degrees Celsius then carried the thing out to the barn to sit for about 2 months. Not only is lagering about cold temperatures (as you can imagine, leaving it from early October to early December it ranged between plus 10 and -25c) it's also about 'lagering,' the process of leaving the young beer in fermentation for prolonged periods of time. However this beer was gravitating to 5% alcohol at best, so...it froze solid. Really solid. After thawing, it was terrible. I felt there was an off chance that it could be recovered based on the fact that making ice beer is essentially scooping out layers of ice in slowly freezing beer, so the water content would be seperated leaving the alcohol to be racked out. This was not the case, the liquids had completely separated but even the obviously thicker solution towards the bottom was complete swamp water. tough shit, that's what I get for assuming a barn is insulation enough against old man winter.

Bock
Bock is a German lager of high alcohol content. Historically, this beer was reserved for royalty and the upper class. The peasant brewer would make this style and have to transport it over great distances to pay tithing or royalties to the landlord, requiring a higher alcohol content to prevent spoiling on the trip. Similarly to the pilsner, I had to lug this thing quite a distance and I feel the utmost respect for both the pre-capitalist indentured poor but also for their ability to lug this stuff for miles. Hence, I named this batch Back-Break Bock. As you can tell from the top image of the bock, its very rich and brown but also having a lot of texture. This is predominantly because of the increased starch and sugar present in the style, which leads to higher alcohol content. To vigorously boil that much thick substance to a point of concentration, it would have taken me at least a day. So, I decided to let the yeast do the rest of the work breaking the concentrations down. In order to get this thickness I did a combination of all-grain and extract brewing. Added 10lbs of aromatic and carapils to the mashtun and 7lbs of malt extract to the brewpot. In addition I added about 2 cups of brown sugar, a very noticeable flavor after all said and done. This batch sat for 1 month instead of 2 in the barn and it miraculously survived! Both length of time for lagering as well as higher alcohol content made it harder to freeze solid, so what i discovered when i moved it to thaw was how much it resembled a slushy. Lo and behold, it thawed just fine and has been one of my best beers yet. 10% folks.

Kölsch
This style is a special German ale which is suited for lagering and lager temperatures. So, im adding it to my lager portfolio. However, it was a disaster. After reading up on this beer, it seems to be one of the more proprietary rights/regionally protected styles out there. Originally brewed from the waters of the Rhine in Cologne, it has been secured as a heritage trademark which cannot be brewed beyond or without the traits of its origin. So, no other commercial brewery can attempt this beer unless they are on that river or own a piece of Gaffel or other breweries. The softness of the water plays a large role in its flavoring, but it also widely known for its lightness in color. I bought an all grain kit at Midwest brewing supply in Minnesota on my last foray and gave it a shot. I knew that i would be leaving my brewery for the winter months so I took the poorly chosen route of single stage fermentation for this batch. Tasting it all the way through was a little odd. It had a very yellow color and never seemed to be lacking in carbonation. But there was also something very...lemony about it. My assumption is that because I did not do a two stage fermentation and directly went to the cold storage lagering for two weeks in a 0 Celsius garage, both the yeast was not as active to consume and die off and grew too sluggish and just hung in the wort. After months in the bottle, this beer is far too carbonated and far too thick. Even when stored in the fridge and opened, it immediately fizzes up to the top and causes an overflow, not to mention the mass amount of sediment at the bottom. I typically hate light beers, but this one received very little chance to be dismissed as a style. I was very excited about trying to make it for the very fact that as a homebrewer I could subvert this German monopoly on what i would surely coin a sub-par beer, but I didn't even make it that far. Someday Kölsch. For more on Kölsch and possibly investing in Kölsch 15 years ago, heres a funny PR video."A 700-year old."

India Pale Ales

India Pale Ale, what can I say?
You are the best. Your light color yet bold aroma, your sharp yet comforting bitterness tells me you're beer, and your healthy alcohol content always sets you aside from the "other." As a practicing hophead, over two weekends, I brewed two batches of India Pale Ale. One was a simple bladder and pitch, the other my first all grain recipe:

1. In a time of need, I decided to splurge (35$) on another bladder of BrewHouse. There was company in town, including one small inquisitive earth child (literally named Gaia), which made me take the easy road by fermenting this no frill's kit. At the same time, I needed beer that I was just wanting to drink, and my favorite style being IPA led me to this easy option. My first IPA kit, the rat tail, was okay, but it was my first, and everyone has their first. This simple procedure, as explained here, was well worth it as the resulting beer only a month later was as good as any IPA i could get at my local LC. I brought a Rossi jug worth out to a friend's camp on the lake and it was a hit with all participating tasters.
At first glance (right), this could be mistaken for a scene from Alien, but upon further inspection, its the kreusening that reached the bottom of the bung in the secondary! These kits really have some strong activity, leading me to believe that it equates to the consistent finish.

2. My first all grain batch required some DIY equipment. Firstly, what I mean by all grain is simply this: all grain homebrews require no malt extract, a lot of grain (roughly 10lbs/5 gallons of beer) and the means to extract sugars from the starch so that the yeast can digest it into alcohol. Ever since running into a few snap-headaches during the Oatmeal Stout partial mash recipe, particularly regarding my smallish brew pot and no easy way to deal with sacks of scorching hot grain, I decided to invest in the process. Secondly, what I mean by DIY equipment can be seen (left) next to my brew pot ready to take on the strike water (160F water for steeping the grain in) before sparging (rinsing) into the brewpot. Inside this 5 gallon water cooler (food grade plastic good up to 140F) is a stainless steel braid (from plumbing parts) which holds back the milled barley and allows the sweet mash to pour out that copper pipe and plumbing hose. Effectively separating the sugary liquid from the raw product - resulting in bye bye extract (only saves me about 10 dollars per batch without the extract - but its more engaging this way).

This recipe was as simplistic as I could get (10lbs of 2-row malted barley from my neck of the north, and a heavy hopping schedule utilizing 2oz Palisade 2oz Cascade), my goal was to test the procedure of the all-grain and measure its results. My synthesis revealed a process that effectively beats extract brewing in my opinion. The hands on feel, the smells, the activities, the measurements really create a more precise beer. Its not easy, in fact it's hot as hell and precarious! But the result is something that speaks about imperfection and yet labor through craft in the same sip. In addition to this being my first all-grain batch, I also decided to double the pleasure by trying out "dry hopping" on this ol' boy (3oz of Palisade). Dry hopping is the process by which you apply hops to the secondary fermenter and let the young beer get even more aroma and bitterness through aging directly with the hops (in this case pellets, but whole hop flowers are recommended).

The result? The yellowest non-lemonade beverage I have ever seen. Taste? Its not the best IPA ive had (I brewed it on August 7th, and just now - September 20th- as of the two week bottle conditioning), doesnt come even close to the BrewHouse batch. But yet I didnt use potassium bicarbonate to activate it, didnt use a concentrated pre-packaged malt extract made of grains that i didnt actually run my hands through or smell as it got adjusted to the strike water. Will it get better with age? yes! Will I get better at all-grain brewing? "Its a definite maybe." Will I use something other than the one single type of bland malted barley? have done and will do!

The coup de grace, I named this hand crafted delight in the tradition of my nerdy logic: Isildur's Bane. It's Isildur's bane - the One Ring from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - because it is as yellow as gold; its the bane of my existence because I love IPA more than any of the beer styles; lastly, perhaps beer should be done away with entirely as it prevents real action by the masses on both a political, philosophical and economic level when consumed beyond composure (said without a hint of seriousness, but with all caution). As a slogan on a future label when I sell my first born to improve the brewery, it will read "Cast me into the Fire!"