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!

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."

Munich Dark Lager

This brew (my second) was a kit beer in the most general sense: it was wort in a bag...All you had to do was pour the bladder into the primary, top with water to make 5 gallons and make the yeast starter and pitch. I tried a Munich dark lager because I knew that I didnt have the capability to lager anything more advanced without ample fridge space, and I also wanted to make sure I had something drinkable to show for my efforts in case the Rat's Tail didnt turn out (luckily they both did).

I do recommend this brand of beer-in-a-bag as it was very tasty and has gotten very good reviews from those i have passed it on to. If this type of homebrew is anything, its a lesson in cold side homebrewing. Fermenting in the primary, racking to the secondary, fermenting longer, then mixing the dextrose and bottling. Its easy enough to not come out completely disappointed, but at the same time it requires a chemical "activation" by adding a potassium bicarbonate pack to the wort prior to yeast pitching. This is not any more toxic than baking soda but the goal for me is to be as sustainable and basically pure in ingredients as possible. I recommend the kit as an example of what can be made in the home brewery.