Garden Herb Saison

I've drunk some fantastic saisons in the last year - Ilkley/Melissa Cole's rhubarb-and-vanilla Siberia, Bristol Beer Factory's zingy Saison, Wild Beer's trifecta of Epic, Bliss and Ninkasi, homebrewer Andy Parker's Nelson Saison and its bastard son the Pomegranate Saison... It's a fashionable style at the moment, and lots of people are brewing great versions of it.

I had a largely unsuccessful attempt at a saison several months ago - my main problem was that I was worried about it drying out too much and put some cara-pils in the grain bill, completely missing the point of the style. The WLP565 yeast that I used took it down to 1.010, which is not too bad considering, and the final beer was still fairly drinkable - but it wasn't quite right. After trying yet another fantastic saison - Stone/Dogfish/Victory's sublime herb-flavoured Saison du BUFF - just before Christmas, I was inspired to have another go at brewing one, if only to stop me spending so much money on them outside the house.

First of all, I decided to use WLP566 instead of 565, which is a very similar strain but anecdotally is easier to attenuate without a lot of hassle. I made up a two-litre starter 48 hours ahead to make sure I had lots of nice, healthy yeast. Secondly, I wanted to keep the grain bill very simple - 5.5kg of grain, 90% pilsner malt, 10% wheat malt. In practice, I didn't have enough of either for that, so I topped up the pilsner with regular pale and subbed the wheat for 500g of spelt malt that I bought a while back on the grounds that it was a bit of a novelty. I've never used it before, but seeing as it's very similar to wheat, I thought I'd give it a try in this.

For hops, I went the all-Nelson approach that worked so well in Andy Parker's saison, but to give it a bit of a twist, I also wanted to steal the mixed garden herbs idea from Saison du BUFF, which uses parsley, white sage, rosemary and lemon thyme at the whirlpool stage for aroma. I took the proportions from Stone's blog (although as I don't have weighing scales that are accurate to fractions of a gram, there was a lot of guesswork involved), and replaced the white sage and lemon thyme with regular garden sage and thyme, as I didn't have those to hand.

Here was the recipe for my New Year's Eve Brew - Garden Herb Saison:

Mash
3kg Pilsner Malt
2kg Pale Malt (Crisp)
500g Spelt Malt

Single infusion mash at 67C for 90 mins

Boil - 90 minutes
12g Nelson Sauvin at 90 mins
10g Irish Moss at 15 mins
38g Nelson Sauvin at 0 mins
Herb bag containing 7g fresh parsley, 3g rosemary, 3g thyme and a few sage leaves at 0 mins

Yeast - WLP566 (2l starter, made 48 hours ahead)

Notes: I wasn't sure how to treat the spelt malt, so just used it as I would wheat malt in a simple single infusion mash, which I think had an impact on efficiency.  23 litres of very pale sweet wort collected - I've managed to lose the pre-boil gravity figure but I think it was 1.050.

This was the third brew I've done on my relatively new Brupaks boiler, which I bought to replace the leaky Electrim mashing bin in my all-electric setup (although I still use the mashing bin as an HLT). It's a picky bugger though, and it kept switching itself off just short of boiling point. I think there's an issue with the thermostat but I need to investigate further. After a frustrating 10 mins of watching the thermometer hover around the 91C mark, I gave up and transferred the wort carefully into the old Electrim boiler and used that instead.

I put the finishing hops and the herbs into a hop bag so that I could fish them out as soon as the wort was almost at pitching temperature. The last few degrees of cooling and the dead-slow run off from the Electrim bin can take over an hour sometimes, and I didn't want to overdo the herbs - by the time it was down to about 25C, the herb aroma was pretty pungent, so out they came. SG was measured at 1.058 - below the 1.064 BeerTools predicted, but acceptable. Fermentation started at ambient temperature - a fairly constant 16C in the utility room - and when it began to slow down after 7 days, I ramped it up to 22C gradually using a combination of a heatpad and towels. It took a while but after 20 days, it was down to 1.008 and ready to rack to secondary.

It's currently sitting in secondary with some more Nelson Sauvin as dry hops to try and balance off the strong herb aroma, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. It should be ready for bottling in a few days, and I'll blog about how the finished beer turns out once they've conditioned.

Brewing the Megabeer Part 1

The 'megabeer' that I described in the last blog has been brewed and is fermenting away - I need to work on a better name for it than 'megabeer', but that can wait until later. As usual, there were a few hitches along the way that blew me off course on the day, so much so that I didn't actually pitch the yeast until nearly 5.30am on Christmas Eve.

The recipe was almost as described in the last blog - I cut the amber back a bit to less than 5% to make sure the final beer wouldn't be too dark:

8kg Pale Malt (Crisp)
400g Amber Malt
Mash at 64/65C for 90 mins with 24l Campden-treated water (I don't do water chemistry yet!)
This was quite a thick mash, but my mash tun couldn't take any more water.

Two very different amber malts

The first problem was that when we started to run the wort out of the tun, it was much darker than anticipated - much, much darker than expected, like strong tea, and not really what I was looking for, given that it was only going to get darker over the course of a two-hour boil. We'd put the wrong amber malt into the tun - instead of the EBC 48 bag, we picked the EBC 100 bag, hence the coffee-scented dark brown wort. (Incidentally, the EBC 100 Fawcett malt is what Dogfish Head use in their 60/90/120 Minute IPAs by many accounts, but although the beer is inspired in part by other people's clones of 120, I'm not trying to make an outright clone of that beer).

So, we made a snap decision to drain the tun without sparging, boil up anything we ran off along with some Fuggles hops that had been hanging around for ages, pitch the backup sachet of dried yeast I keep in case of emergencies, and start again. Using a Scotch Ale as a basic direction, we collected just over 20 litres of deep brown wort, gave it a short 45-minute boil with 50g Fuggles, then ran it off, took a gravity of 1.080 and pitched rehydrated Mauribrew 514 yeast. For an old sachet of dried yeast, it's done a good job - after 3 days, it was down to 1.028, and it's still going.

Hop soup - with the pellers now in sludgy suspension

While all that was boiling up, we reset the HLT and started mashing a second batch of malt. Mashing low for a highly fermentable wort, we collected as much as we could get into the boiler - 23.5 litres - knowing that we would lose a lot to the boil... and to the hops. I mixed together 250g of high-AA hop pellets (130g Amarillo, 60g Columbus, 60g Galaxy) and 75g whole-leaf Simcoe, and divided them into five equal portions, to be added at 120, 90, 60, 30 and 0 minutes. As expected, I lost a hell of a lot between the start of the boil and the FV - a shade over 15 litres. Runoff took a long, long, long time - about 2 hours - as the pellets broke down into a thick sludge that covered the hop filter and, together with the Simcoe flowers, slowed the runoff to little more than a drip at times. I need to work on a better hop filter for my boiler. I could have thrown in some more late hops, but I'm going to save them for a bigger dry hop.

300g Dextrose Monohydrate

Gravity was measured at 1.108, which was a few points up on where I thought I'd be. I allowed the WLP007 5 litre starter to settle down to a big cake at the bottom, siphoned off the top 4.5 litres of it, then swirled the cake into suspension and pitched it. After that, I made a 3-litre starter for the WLP099 high-gravity yeast, and left it to grow for three days. I left the FV in the utility room where the temperature stays at a good, constant 19C (I'll use a heatpad if I need to raise the temperature later in the ferment), and it was fermenting wildly within hours.


On the 26th, 60 hours after pitching, I took the first gravity reading at 1.030 - incredible work from the WLP007 to chew through that much so quickly - and pitched the slurry from the WLP099 starter, along with 400g dextrose monohydrate. I've measured the remaining 3.6kg of the dextrose into 300g and 150g freezer bags, and the plan is to add all of this to the FV over the next few days to give me an adjusted OG of somewhere around the 1.200 mark.


The routine goes like this - I keep a bucket of sanitiser next to the FV containing two jugs, a silicone whisk, my hydrometer and my baster. Twice a day, I take the two jugs out, drain them both back into the bucket, put the whisk and the drained baster in one jug so that they're handy. I then take a sample for the hydrometer and record the gravity, then pour this into the other jug and continue to draw beer from the FV until I have about half a litre in the jug. I add in 300g of dextrose from one of the freezer bags, whisk it into the beer until foamy and in solution, then pour it into the FV and seal it up again. I then clean all the equipment and put it back into the sanitiser.

Whisking in the dextrose

I'm hoping to keep the OG somewhere around or just under the 1.030 mark - if I take a gravity reading and the yeast hasn't chewed up all 300g of the dextrose from the previous addition, I'll switch to adding the 150g bags.

So far, it seems to be turning out very nicely! I reckon the ABV is up around the 13% mark by now, and the aroma from the FV is wonderful. My main concern is that during one of the dextrose additions, I'll introduce an infection of some kind, hence the sanitising routine each time I open it up. It's been hard work having to nurture it for as long as I have so far, but I hope it'll be worth it. I'll be back with an update once I've finished the primary fermentation and the beer is ready to enjoy a nice, mellowing rest in secondary for a few weeks.

All-Grain Brew #4 - 'Jessica Porter'

If you know someone whose surname is 'Porter' and you like to brew, then I imagine that it's fairly inevitable that you will end up brewing something dark for them at some stage. My friend Jessica recently gave up her beery name when she got married to my long-time drinking partner Adam, but before he could strip her of her birthright, I brewed them a chocolately imperial porter.

Back in March, when I wasn't sure what to brew for my 4th all-grain brew, I canvassed on Twitter and someone suggested brewing a baltic porter (I'd credit you but I can't search that far back - it may well have been David Bishop). Given that I'm not in a position to do a cold ferment with the equipment I have, I couldn't do a true BP, but I liked the idea of doing a stronger-the-average porter with a traditional ale yeast. Knowing that Jess isn't a huge fan of really robust, roasty flavours (which is kind of important in a porter), and after the relative success of flavouring my first brew by using coffee beans in the secondary, I started looking on homebrew forums for shared recipes for flavoured porters. For some reason, cherries are really popular with American homebrewers (I guess it must be sort of Black Foresty but I can't say it appeals that much to me), along with chillies, ginger and even cinnamon sticks. One of the most popular recipes of all was for a 'Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter', originally devised by Oregon homebrewer Denny Conn - and I used this as the basis for this brew. There's a cracking Q&A with Denny that mentions the formulation of this recipe here.

Denny's recipe - or at least the iteration I saw, as it's been passed around, Chinese-whisper style, quite a bit I think - is pretty decadent. It's heavy on the sweeter malts (approx 7.5% Crystal, 7.5% Brown Malt, just under 6.5% Chocolate Malt...) and specifies adding two whole vanilla beans when racking to secondary. As per the name, he also includes some bourbon at bottling, while some recipes I've seen add oak along with the vanilla beans, but I wanted to keep the number of variables down so omitted them from my version. I also tweaked the proportions of the malts ever so slightly as the original recipe was given in imperial and I didn't want to end up with lots of open bags of the malts I was buying specially for this recipe.

Malt bill:
6kg Maris Otter
1.25kg Munich
750g Brown Malt
500g 'Dark' Crystal Malt
500g Chocolate Malt
300g 'Regular' Crystal Malt


Mash profile was a simple single infusion (to keep it simple) at 68°C, with tap water treated with a couple of Campden tablets - with the amount of grain in the tun and with the way we mashed in by pouring water onto the grain, I found it very hard to avoid balls of dry dough, even after stirring relentlessly. I need to work on my efficiency! Sparged with more of the same to collect just over 23l of wort at 1.066 - a satisfyingly straightforward mash-and-sparge compared to a couple of the gummy nightmares I've had.

As per Denny's original recipe, I used Magnum to bitter (28g, first wort) and then 28g of East Kent Goldings when the IC and Irish Moss went in with 15 mins to go. (At this point I didn't have a hose connector sorted for the IC, so myself and my brother took it in turns to freeze our hands by trying to clamp the end of the hose over the cold tap for the hour it took to get down to pitching temperature - I don't recommend the experience.) As you can see, gravity at pitching was 1.074 - 5 points short of target, but better than I'd feared given the dry, doughy mess the tun had been.

Wyeast 1056 was pitched (with a 1.5l starter), and it was kept more-or-less at 22°C, using the ultra-high-tech towel-and-clothes-pegs temperature control method, for 10 days, by which time it was down to 1.022 - again, a few points short of the target, but the yeast had had enough, leaving it at 6.8% ABV (on the weaker side of imperial - perhaps dynasterial?). My theory on the lower attenuation is that there were some colder spots in the mash tun around the doughy clumps, hence a less fermentable wort - any suggestions welcome.

Two big, fat Madagascan vanilla beans were halved and scraped into the secondary at racking, then the shells quartered and thrown in as well. In hindsight we should probably have sterilised them in vodka but no harm done. Another 10 days on and there was a good, strong vanilla aroma and flavour, which really helps to bring out the chocolate and smooths off the roastiness.

The big problem came when bottling - I hadn't really worked out how to prime correctly at this point, and rather than making a solution and mixing it in, I added approximately 4-5g of sugar to each 330ml bottle. Clearly this is far, far too much for a porter - perhaps as much as three times as much as needed - and the result is that while the first bottles that I tried after only a week had the right volume of gas in them, as time has gone on the carbonation has gotten a bit out of hand. I haven't had any bottle bombs yet, thankfully, but I have had to pour them out and let them settle.

Six months on from the brew day, at Adam and Jess's wedding, I cracked some open for our friends to try, and - once the fizz had subsided - I'm really happy with it. The vanilla has settled back to a background note (but hasn't disappeared altogether), and the main body of the body is rich and caramelly. More importantly, the woman herself seemed to like it, which was the whole point in the first place, so I'm happy. I'm planning to brew this again at some point... although clearly I'll need a new name now that she's married.

AG Brews #8 and #12 - Red Bee (An Irish Red Ale with Honey)

This beer started out as a name - 'Red Bee', as it's the place where I work and I wanted to brew something for my colleagues - and it was only after I started to look up recipes for an Irish Red that I realised that it wasn't so far fetched to brew a beer in that style with some honey to dry it out a bit in the finish (hence the 'bee' element!).

I have to give full credit for this to MysticMead, whose Raging Red Honey Ale was the basis for this. From reading his blog, his recipe has done him good service, including winning a few homebrew competitions, so it seemed like it would be worth a try. (His blog has some great stuff on it besides this recipe, including hop growing tips, so give it a look!)

I made a couple of changes to the hops to put my own spin on it. His recipe calls for Crystal and Cascade - I didn't have Crystal, so used Mt Hood instead. And to make a change from Cascade, which I've used in all the IPA batches I'd done so far, I swapped them for some juicier, fruitier Galaxy hops that I had in the freezer - I thought they'd suit the malty profile of the style.

Finally, I didn't have any WLP001, which he uses, but I did have Wyeast 1056, which is pretty much the same strain (I'd quite like to give this a try with a more English/Irish strain in future). No starter for this, as it's relatively low gravity.

Recipe - Red Bee (based on Mystic Home Brew's Raging Red)
Mash:
3kg Pale Malt
500g Cara Aroma Malt
250g Carapils
250g Melanoidin Malt

Mash at 66C for 60 mins using campden-treated tap water. Mashout for 5 mins at 72C, then sparged with water from the boiler at about 70-72C. Collected 23l (can't find my pre-boil gravity figure though, which is annoying)

Boil:
28g Mt Hood (5.7%) at 60 mins
28g Galaxy (15%) at 15 mins
10g Irish Moss at 15 mins
454g wildflower honey (made a bit more liquid with about 50ml boiling water) at flameout

Specific Gravity - 1.052
Approx volume - 20.5 litres (this translated into 39 500ml bottles)
ABV 5.78%

This was one of the easiest brewdays I've ever had - simple mash, simple boil, no starter to worry about - and one of the most satisfying. Eight days of fermentation at room temperature (19C) and it was down to 1.008 with no fuss. I was a bit concerned when the bottles took about 3 weeks to carb up, but they were worth the wait. It really looks the part - amazing, deep-red colour with a good white head - and with a deep malt flavour that finishes a little dry (from the honey). It's very sessionable, although I wouldn't recommend it given the strength.

As per the title, I've today brewed this for a second time due to demand from people I've given bottles to - the only change second time around was to first wort hop the Mt Hood, as in the original recipe. Just as before, it was a pleasure to brew - very straightforward, and I managed to hit my SG again (although thanks to some improvements in efficiency I managed to collect a bit more wort this time, so I've got a full 23l in the FV). If it turns out as well as the first batch, I'll be chuffed.

All-Grain Brew #2 - Charlie Brown (a big IPA)

As per previous posts, I love IPAs, especially if they're loaded with big, piney American hops. For my second all-grain brew, I wanted to try to do something in that vein - and to banish the memory of the extract brew ruined by over-sanitation. The starting point for this was the evocative IPAs being created by Evin O'Riordan and company at The Kernel, which I find fascinating for being both extreme in their hop flavour but also, perversely, quite malty and rich to provide the right balance. I'd also been reading a bit about decoction mashing, and how Bavarian brewers use multiple steps to create a malty flavour through the production of melanoidins. I had no idea how I'd accomplish multi-step mashing on my equipment, but I did come across melanoidin malt while looking for ingredients - a modified malt designed to produced those melanoidin flavours in a single infusion mash. Ideal for the lazy brewer (or one out of his depth).

So the recipe came together as follows - keep everything simple, with pale malt as the majority of the bill and a little melanoidin malt for flavour and colour. I wanted to use the melanoidin malt very generously - firstly, so I could taste its effect on the malt bill clearly, but also because I wanted to load up on hops and didn't want to be disappointed that I'd created an astringent monster that no-one else I knew would want to drink. I settled on 6kg of Pale Malt and a kilo of melanoidin - a huge percentage (a shade under 15%), and right on the maximum of what I'd seen recommended online. I knew it would make the beer quire brown, but it turned out slightly darker than expected - a, er, brown IPA.

The mash was very painless - I managed to retain 68 degrees throughout, and the lautering was much, much easier than with the breakfast stout I made for AG#1. My notes aren't great for this brew, but I recorded that I collected 14l from the first runnings, and sparged with 10l to collect 21l. In hindsight, I should have collected more - I didn't take hydrometer readings towards the end to make sure I wasn't oversparging, a habit I keep repeating - but I'll come back to this later.

For the hops, I definitely wanted to use Citra hops, the star of my favourite Kernel beer (the Citra IPA), but I only had 100g of these, and as I wanted to use most of them late, I used some Cascade both for bittering and to use the grapefruity flavour to complement the lighter, tropical character that I associate with the Citra. Given that it was very much trial and error at this point, I didn't want to introduce a lot of variables, and I'm glad I didn't. For the yeast, I used Wyeast's version of the California Ale yeast I've used before, Wyeast 1056, so the malt and hop flavour would be unencumbered by anything unusual from the yeast. As I don't have any brewing software, all this was worked out using Hopville, an online brewing calculator... it's not very sophisticated, but it helped give me an idea of what I was doing. This is my brewsheet...

Charlie Brown IPA

Mash:

6kg (86%) Pale Malt

1kg (14%) Melanoidin Malt

Single infusion - Mash at 68C for 60 mins

Hops:

50g Cascade (7%) @ 60mins

25g Citra (15%) @ 30mins

25g Citra (15%) @ 15mins

50g Citra (15%) @ 5mins

50g Cascase (7%) dry hop for 10 days

Other:

15g Irish Moss @ 15mins

OG came out at 1074 - which according to Hopville puts my efficiency at 67%, which I'm pretty happy with at this stage. You remember I only collected about 21 litres? That was a mistake - once I'd drained the wort through the 150g of hop flowers in the bottom of the boiler, I estimate that I'd lost about 3-4 litres to the hops and the boil. The yeast was pitched at 24C, and held at 22C (using a heatpad due to the cold of early February), and bottomed out at 1022 after 14 days, giving an ABV of 6.8%. I had been expecting this to go lower, but it didn't seem high enough to be properly 'stuck'... Any thoughts welcomed! To be honest, 6.8% seemed strong enough anyway.

The remaining 50g of Cascade from the 100g packet I'd broken into were used as dry hops for 10 days in a secondary - more losses there, as the hop flowers sucked up another couple of litres. In all, I only got 25 half-litre bottles out of the batch - not a great return on all that time and effort...! Something to bear in mind for next time.

Cracking the first one after a couple of weeks conditioning, the hop aroma and flavour came through beautifully. The maltiness was a lot bigger than I expected, almost like honeycomb, but with the fresh hop flavour it seemed to just about balance out. That was back in February - more than two months on, I've just cracked open the last of them that I'd been saving, and the difference seems really clear already. The hops have died back a lot, leaving an oddly sweet centre that remind me a bit like a slice of malt loaf spread with Oxford marmalade. I can understand now why everything I'd read about melanoidin malt suggested that it should be used sparingly. It's still quite drinkable, but it's nowhere near the Kernel IPAs I was aiming at. I'm already planning my next attempt...

PS

Just as an addendum, I brewed this immediately for my third brew, I wanted to see if I could recreate this exactly, seeing as I was so disappointed with the volume and wanted some more bottles of the same beer. I followed the notes I had for this almost exactly, taking the same quantities from the lautering and into the boil, and using the same hop additions. However, during the cooling process - disaster. I left the room while the immersion chiller coil was running, and came back to find the boiler almost overflowing - a leaky crimp between the hose and the copper had caused an extra 3-4 litres of cold water to seep into the wort. I was tempted to pour the batch away, but pitched anyway - this batch ended up down at 1008, but with no idea of the OG, I can't really make any notes on what happened here. In this version, the melanoidin malt seems even more pronounced, sweet and caramelly and off-putting. The hops are distant, and it just doesn't work. Ironically, because of the leak into the wort, I have much, much more of this beer than I'd want... The home brewer will never have enough of the beers that they want to drink more of, but will always have a surfeit of those that are less successful.

All-Grain Brew #1 – Black Rain (A Botched Breakfast Stout)

Back in January, I bought a mash tun. I hadn’t actually managed to brew an extract beer I was truly happy with yet, so it was a mixture of naivety and excess ambition. Like a lot of home mash tuns, mine started life as a cool box and has been ‘enhanced’ with a stainless steel ‘false bottom’, which protects a small length of hose that leads to a ball-joint tap. I would love to say that I constructed this myself but, after reading lots of guides that made it sound really easy, I could see myself accidentally ruining the coolbox and having to buy another… The Home Brew Shop in Aldershot converts coolboxes in-house, and I’m pretty happy with the job they’ve done.

Going back to the naivety and excess ambition… the sensible thing to do when using new equipment for the first time would have been to brew something straightforward, with as few variables as possible. 3kg of pale malt, a single hop addition, no drama. However, it was the middle of winter and I wanted to brew the kind of thing I loved, so I decided to have a go at doing an oatmeal stout. I’d been having a bit of beer banter on Twitter with a musician friend who loves coffee (he travels with an espresso machine wherever he goes), so I decided to do a breakfast stout that was luscious and thick from the oats, but with a big coffee kick to it. I thought it would be a bit less disheartening to mess up a complicated first AG brew than if I ruined another really simple brew.

So, with that justification out of the way, I needed a recipe. I initially started looking for a clone of Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Breakfast – which I love – and stumbled on a recipe for Founder’s Breakfast Stout, which I’ve never tried. In addition to the coffee, they add unsweetened chocolate baking nibs and dark chocolate – the recipe is here on the BYO Magazine website. It sounded pretty good, so that was my starting point. I dutifully went out and bought what I thought were the right ingredients – as I couldn’t find ‘unsweetened chocolate baking nibs’ (which I assume are a US-only sort of thing), I replaced them with some grated 100% cacao that I found in Waitrose.

When it came to assembling the malt bill, I realized something wasn’t right – I only had 3kg of Maris Otter to the 6kg I needed. If it had been one of the speciality grains, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but suddenly this big stout was looking a lot more diminutive. In a bit of a panic, I threw together every bit of malt or fermentable that I could find that wouldn't affect the colour or roasted flavour too much:

-       1kg Golden Promise that I’d accidentally bought in place of Crystal Malt when doing Brew 3

-       300g Crystal Malt (the remnants of the bag that went into the initial bill)

-       500g light dried malt extract

-       400g flaked oats (again, the remnants of the bag that went into the initial grain bill)

The first mash-in for the new tun

I resisted the temptation to add any sugar as I didn’t want to thin the end beer out too much. I also realized later that the recipe required special, debittered black malt (e.g. Carafa Special III), whereas I used standard black malt through pure ignorance.

So, here’s the actual recipe:

Mash:

3kg Maris Otter

1kg Golden Promise

1kg Jumbo Oats

500g Crystal Malt 60L

450g Chocolate Malt

340g Roasted Barley

250g Black Malt (NOT Carafa Special III)

Boil:

500g Light Dried Malt Extract @ First wort

35g Nugget hops (12% AA) @ 60mins

13g Willamette hops (5.5% AA) @ 30mins

13g Willamette hops (5.5% AA) @ 0mins

1 dessertspoon Irish Moss @ 15mins

55g Sumatran Mandheling coffee beans (fine ground) @ 0mins

70g Green & Blacks Organic Dark Cook’s Chocolate @ 0mins

43g Willie’s Supreme Venezuelan Black 100% Cacao @ 0mins

1 vial California Labs WLP001 (California Ale)

50g Sumatran Mandheling coffee beans (coarse ground) – 7 days in secondary

The sparging set-up

The set-up was a classic three-tier – boiler at top acting as a hot liquor tun, mash tun in the middle, fermenter at the bottom to collect wort, which is then poured back into the (empty) boiler when full. 15 litres of strike water went into the grist at 75, giving a mash temp of 65, which held firm for an hour (I was prepared for a loss of a degree or two, so was pleasantly surprised). I had been aiming for 68, but didn’t think I’d lose a full 10 degrees to the grain – more naivety! In addition, the mash was probably a shade too thick - there were a couple of stuck sparges along the way (solved by blowing into the tap.

The hop additions were straight-forward – 35g Nugget on 60 mins, 13g of Willamette on 30 and 0 mins. The chocolate, cacao and coffee went in right on flameout as well, and turned the dark wort absolutely jet black – just the colour I wanted. The biggest downside to using the coffee like this was that it immediately clogged up the tap on the boiler – getting the wort from boiler to fermenter took a very, very long time, as the tap kept jamming with coffee grounds. (getting the coffee out of the tap afterwards was nigh-on impossible – tell-tale coffee grounds appeared from nowhere when I was heating the strike water for the next brew!)

Clockwise from top left, all my boil additions - a mix of cacao, chocolate and ground coffee; Irish Moss; a vial of WLP001; Willamette; Nugget; and more Willamette to finish!

The OG ended up at 1.068 – below where it should have been if the recipe had been followed (1.078 is specified in that recipe), but not disastrous – and as I didn’t make a yeast starter and simply pitched a vial of WLP001 into the wort, it’s probably just as well. I was a bit worried when the yeast gushed out of the vial on opening, but apparently this can be a good sign – and there were no ill effects in the finished beer. The primary ferment was at about 20-22 degrees – and that was with the help of a heat mat that my parents use for their wine fermenting, and was down to 1.028 within three days and finished up at 1.022. ABV a shade over 6% - less than I’d been hoping for, but not bad considering the farce with the grain.

Wort draining into the FV - fantastic colour!

I racked it onto 2 more ounces of coarsely ground Sumatran coffee beans and left it to picked up their flavour for 7 days. Then, as I fancied oak-ageing some of it, I split the batch into two, bottled half of it and racked the other half into carboys containing oak chips that had been soaking in Jack Daniels for a few days – I’ll blog about how the oaking worked out later.

It went into bottles before the SF trip in February and I resisted the temptation to open any until the start of March. The colour is perfect – dark black, with a tan head, although it doesn’t stick around for very long (due to the coffee oils?). The body is a bit disappointing – I was hoping it would be feel a bit thicker with all those oats in there, although I’ve since read about using glucan rests with oats, which I need to read up on. The coffee and chocolate flavour are spot on though, and getting better as it matures – it’s a shame that it doesn’t have a bit more booze to back them up, but that’s my own fault. A bit more sweetness might help too, which could be achieved either by changing the mash temperature or adding a little lactose to the boil. I'm very happy with it though, overall - a huge leap ahead of the extract brews, despite the numerous basic errors.

I’ve christened the beer Black Rain, after one of the aforementioned coffee-loving musician’s songs – I’ve given him, Mel and a few other friends some bottles, so am looking forward to getting some feedback. If anyone reading this would like to do a swap, please let me know! I’m hoping to brew another batch of this in the coming weeks that puts right some of the problems mentioned above - Item 1: Make sure you have the right grain bill before you start.

First Steps in Brewing

Before I started writing about my all-grain brews, I wanted to write a bit about how I started out. At the time it seemed really easy to get started, but then none of the first few batches turned out exactly as I wanted them to, which says something. I started brewing beer towards the end of 2011 – it’s something I’d wanted to do for a long time but never had the impetus to start. I was lucky enough to have parents that have made beer, cider and wine intermittently throughout my childhood, so they had fermenters, airlocks and hydrometers knocking around. As a hugely impatient novice, I had the idea that I could flick through John Palmer’s How to Brew, buy some ingredients, and suddenly be turning out decent brews. As I said – an impatient, naïve novice. The hardest bit for me to get my head around was the cleanliness. Everything needs sterilizing – fermenters, equipment, surfaces… but not too much, as any trace of the chemicals you’ve used will do as much damage to the brew as if you’d not bothered at all. A thin sodium hypochlorite solution does not taste good – but more of that later.

The first brew was a beer kit called Citrus Blast, put together by Pop’s Home Brew in Cheltenham. It seemed a bit too easy – you got some dried yeast, two cans of Coopers LME and a couple of different hop additions, each in their own bags. Boil them up with as much water as you can fit in as big a pot as you can get your hands on, then after an hour tip it into the fermenter, top up with cold water (which helps bring the temperature down to 20C), then pitch some rehydrated Nottingham yeast. What we had after fermentation was recognizably beer – deep brown, bit of malt, a bit of classic English hops… it just wasn’t the sort of stuff I like to drink.

Brew Two was another kit, which should have come out as a 5% stout, and consisted of a single hop bag and two cans of Coopers Dark extract. I had the bright idea of cutting the overall volume to under 4 gallons instead of 5 in order to bump up the original gravity to 1.080 or something silly and therefore, in theory, the eventual ABV. No taking into account the yeast (it was the same dried Nottingham yeast) or the amount of unfermentables in the Dark Malt Extract or anything – I told you I was naive. It eventually bottomed out at something like 1.028, looked and smelled like Marmite and tasted like, well, diluted Dark Malt Extract. Thinking it was a write-off, we decided to play around with it a bit – splitting it into four one-gallon demi-johns and putting some coffee beans into one, bourbon-soaked oak chips into another, both oak and coffee into a third and leaving the fourth gallon untouched. I’d read online about using coffee and oak to flavour stouts in the secondary, and given that our extract beast seemed to be a bit of a mess, I thought it would be an opportunity to try it out. We gave them all a week, then bottled then. Incredibly, they turned out okay – they were clearly not going to win any brewing awards, but the coffee and oak came through in the various bottles to take the edge off the twang. I’m planning to leave a few bottles for six months and see if they’ve improved.

At Christmas time I was given a 5-gallon boiler, an immersion chiller and some other new equipment, and decided to make Brew Three a recipe of my own. I adapted a recipe online for an Imperial IPA, and,ordered three cans of light malt extract, some US hops (Apollo and Chinook) and a vial of White Labs WLP001 California Yeast. The boil seemed to have gone well, the OG was up at 1.070 where it should have been, and the hops smelled great. Seven days later, it was down to 1.018 - despite me not making a starter, firstly because I didn't know exactly how and secondly because I hoped the yeast would pull through). We racked it to the secondary for dry-hopping with more of the Chinook hops and left it to settle. However, when we came back to it in the following days, there was an odd smell to it – instead of the crisp hop aroma, there was a slight chlorine taint to it that got worse when I tasted a sample. My theory is that there must have been some undissolved crystals of the sodium hypochlorite in the bottom of the secondary that we hadn’t rinsed out properly. The whole batch was ruined (although having said that, my brother couldn’t really taste it, so drank every bottle over the course of a fortnight…)

The lessons I learned from the first few batches were:

1. -       Keep everything sanitised... but rinse everything before use to make sure there's no residue.
2. -       Don’t mess around too much unless you know what you’re doing. If you do have to start messing around, make copious notes. 
3. -       Record everything… starting temps, OGs, FGs, everything.
4. -       Don’t be too ambitious to start with.
5. -       Read and learn as much as possible - the Palmer book is highly recommended.
6. -       Until you know what you’re doing, expect to make fairly mediocre beer at best

      That's not to imply I'm any kind of expert now, but I'm definitely cringing a bit at remembering some of the stuff I've just written....