Bitters abound

I'd say I'm way overdue to visit England.  While I'd love to see the pastoral countryside that Ralph Vaughan Williams depicted in music during the first half of the past century, I definitely need to spend some time down the pub with a few hand-pulled pints of ordinary, best, and/or extra special bitter.  While I've enjoyed British-styled pale ales in the States, especially on cask, I've never had the opportunity to revel in the "real thing."  Until I manage to finagle myself into the British Isles, I'll have to make due by brewing my own, five gallons at a time.

I enjoy the challenge of brewing session beers (below 4.5% ABV, as defined by some) in general, and it's one that I still strive to perfect.  British pale ales, particular the lowest gravity ordinary bitters, have been source of immense brewing pleasure for me over the years; finding the balance between malt, hops, and characterful yeast in a low-alcohol package has put me to the test and has at times yielded phenomenal beers.  With cooler weather approaching (and now upon us) this seemed a perfect style to keep me (and others) off the streets and indoors sipping pint after pint of beautifully balanced easy-drinking beer.

The wort was relatively straight ahead, mimicking some of my early successes in the style: neutral American base malt with a fair measure of crystal for residual sweetness, followed up by a bit of brown sugar to up fermentability.  This was a split batch; one half received a pretty traditional hop schedule of Kent Goldings

and Fuggles, the other half built on Willamettes and Styrian Goldings that worked so well in my early attempts with bitters, specifically in one I named S.O.B. (for "Standard/Ordinary Bitter").  Two different English yeasts added a bit more interest.  And with that, we were off.

The batch with the Willamettes and Styrians ended up a little higher in gravity than I intended, moving into the special bitter range, but everything else went pretty well according to plan.  These beers sat a bit longer in the fermenters than I would've preferred; while bitters can turn around in as little as a week and are often best as fresh as possible, these had to wait for about a month before I managed to bottle them.  I was worried when I sampled a couple early bottles; one batch had me concerned that the yeast had flocced out enough to make carbonation difficult, and the other that it had sat long enough to pick up a bit of acetobacter.  After an additional week and a half of sitting, though, everything seems to have pretty much come out all right.  The more tradition bitter is smooth and has a nice malty finish, while the S.O.B. has a bit more initial bite from the Styrians.  This has the makings of a fine early autumn, to be sure.

Double Batch Ordinary Bitter - Trad Bitter & S.O.B.
Batch size: 10 gallons
Projected OG: 1.043
Projected SRM: 7.1
Projected IBU: 33.8/35.0
Boil time: 70 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 89%

Grains/Fermentables
9 lb Malteurop 2-row
2 lb C 40
1 lb Carapils
1 lb Light brown sugar (8 oz per batch; 60 min)

Hops (Trad)
.5 oz Phoenix (10.2%) (60 min)
1 oz EKG (5.8%) (10 min)
1 oz Fuggle (4.2%) (10 min)

Hops (S.O.B.)
1 oz Willamette (4.7%) (60 min)
.7 oz Willamette (20 min)
1 oz Styrian Goldings (3.2%) (15 min)
1 oz Styrian Goldings (5 min)

Yeast
Trad - WY1968 London ESB
S.O.B. - WY1469 West Yorkshire Ale

Extras (per batch)
1 tsp Irish moss (10 min)
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)

Water additions
9 qts RO water (mash)
1 g Gypsum (mash)
1 g Salt (mash)
4 g Gypsum (2 g each boil)

Brewday: 2 September 2012

Mash: 154F for 4 hours
1st sparge: 22 qts @ 200F
2nd sparge: 23 qts @ 190F
Pre-boil volume: 14 gallons
Pre-boil gravity (w/o sugar): 7.1P (1.028)

Trad fermenter volume: 5.1 gallons
OG: 10.0P (1.040)

S.O.B. fermenter volume: 4.8
OG: 11.6P (1.046) - now a special bitter, apparently

Fermented in swamp coolers @ 62F ambient

Bottled: 29 September 2012
Trad FG: 1.006
ABV: 4.4%

S.O.B. FG: 1.007
ABV: 5.1%

Each bottled with 2 oz light brown sugar.

Tasting: Both batches ended up on the watery side, with a decent malt presence.  They share an off-flavour, though, that I can't quite place; at first I thought it might be acetobacter, but that hasn't developed.  Possibly oxidation?

Home-pressed ciders

Following our travels this summer, DeAunn has really embraced both mead and cider (particularly perry), so when we discovered quite a bit of available fruit open for the picking on the mean streets of SLC's 9th & 9th neighbourhood, we got right down to it.  Collecting a five-gallon bucket of apples on our first tentative venture, we juiced the apples in our home juicer, yielding a little under a gallon of juice by the time it made it to secondary.  It was a fun, if time-consuming, experience, and goaded us on to further renegade picking adventures.

My LHBS rents apple grinders and presses by the day, so I reserved them for the following weekend and we headed out to harvest more fruit.  We ended up bringing in two buckets each of pears and apples; the pears we ground and pressed on their own for a bit under two gallons of perry, and the apples yielded right around two gallons of cider when combined with four pounds of frozen blueberries.  While fun, the grinding and pressing were a lot of work and took literally all night, leaving us exhausted by the end.  I've done some online research and am already ruminating on constructing a grinder and press for our future cider adventures.

For yeast, I used White Labs' English Cider for the first batch, then repitched it into the blueberry cider.  As DeAunn wanted to ensure a predictable fermentation for the perry, I went with the Lalvin Narbonne yeast, which I've used for both the meads we've made so far and should purportedly leave a fruitiness in the end product.  While I added no extras to the first small batch of cider, I did go ahead and add a bit of yeast nutrient and energizer to the perry and blueberry cider at the start to help along fermentation.

I've been pretty cavalier about taking gravity readings for these ciders; especially when it comes to adding fruit to the primary, it seems difficult to really get a handle on the OG when I'm going ahead and pitching yeast before the sugars are really evenly distributed.  If/when I move to more full-sized batches I'll take more care wth the measurements.  Unfortunately, I fear that I may have waited too long to move the latter two batches; while the first cider seems to be sitting pretty in a glass secondary, the perry and blueberry cider have been sitting in thin plastic fermenters for better than a month now.  Finally checking them just a little while ago, their odor indicates likely acetobacter infections in both.  All that work may have been for naught, just because I haven't had time to mess with these little batches.  I'll plan to give them closer consideration over the weekend, but I'm not hopeful.  At least we should have that first batch left for quaffing.

Local Cider

Batch size: 3 qts
OG: 1.038

Fermentables
~45 lb Found, hand-picked apples

Yeast
WLP775 English Cider

Brewday: 4 September 2012
Quartered & cored each apple, then put in water bath to keep from oxidizing immediately.  Juiced in home juicer.  Whole process took several hours; looking forward to using an actual cider press on larger batches of apples (and pears?) soon.

Secondary: 9 September 2012

Bottled: 27 October 2012
FG: 1.004
ABV: 4.4%

Bottled with .9 oz light brown sugar.
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9th & 9th Perry and Blueberry Cider - from fruit hand-harvested from neighbourhood trees

Perry
OG: 1.048
Volume: 1.7 gallons
Lalvin 71B-1122

Blueberry Cider
OG: unmeasured
Volume: 2 gallons
4 lb Blueberries, frozen
WLP775 English Cider - yeast cake from Local Cider

Extras (each batch)
1 tsp Pectic enzyme
1 tsp Yeast nutrient
1 tsp Yeast energizer

Brewday: 9 September 2012
Ground and crushed all fruit on equipment rented from LHBS; very labour- and time intensive

Fermentation started at ambient 70F, then after 9 hours moved to water bath at 65F ambient

Perry picked up an acetobacter infection; dumped.

Tasting: Local Cider finished very dry, but retained a very perfumey apple blossom nose (thanks, WLP 775!).  Flavour was of a dry white wine with the suggestion of apples.  As of today (3 March 2013) the blueberry cider is still sitting in primary.  The berries have formed a barrier that keeps any acetobacter growth in the fermenter (which is undoubtedly there, given the thin plastic and the number of times I've moved it) from directly contacting the liquid.  The only reason it hasn't been bottled is my incredible laziness.

Summer hop picking

Coming off 6 weeks on the road this summer and pretty much jumping right into the busiest semester of doctoral study we've had so far has left me very short on time for keeping up to date here.  I've finally carved out a little time and plan to do a bit of catching up, starting with covering this season's hop harvest.

A dutiful friend kept the hops watered in my absence, and we returned to see them in fine form.  Following the trauma it endured last winter, the Goldings plant produced no cones this year; it was hard to tell at first, though, as the Centennial bines had grown over to the adjacent plot and set up shop there, producing .6 ounces dry all told.  The Willamettes took top honors as they have in the past, producing a bounty of sizable cones that came in at 1.6 ounces dry.

Ideally, I'd like to use these homegrown hops for a wet-hopped beer, but the timing simply didn't work out this time; it was getting late in the season when I finally picked them as it was.  Maybe next year I'll be able to plan out a brewday for when the hops are at their peak.

Speaking of wet hopping, I took part in a little communal hop picking for local brewpub Desert Edge in the latter part of August.  The brewers went out the day before to an undisclosed area of Parley's Canyon outside Salt Lake and cut garbage bags full of wild hop bines to use in an annual golden ale named Radius, for which all the ingredients are sourced within one hundred miles of the city.  Over the course of the day, the assembled civilian hop pickers harvested nineteen buckets of wet hops that went into this year's brew; I stayed on for about five hours, enjoying complimentary pours of house beers as we went.  It's not my favourite local brewpub, but as one finds in many situations, the beer's quality improved greatly when it became free.  In addition, the brewers held a pickers appreciation party about a month later, pouring complimentary Radius (and other house beers) for the assembled helpers and sending each one home with a hand-labeled bottle.  Apparently this year's batch wasn't as hop forward as it's been in the past, but it's certainly not an offensive brew; I still have my bottle, and have plans to crack it before it's sat for too long.  For anyone in the SLC area, I highly recommend taking part in this event next year; it's good fun with good people.