Small Cherry Melomel

Looking ahead to summer weather and travel plans, I wanted to make something for DeAunn that a) would be ready relatively quickly and b) would be of an alcohol level that would allow her to have more than a few ounces in a sitting.  I combined a smaller amount of honey with the remainder of the bottle of cherry concentrate from the session sour, and voilà: a "sessionable" melomel that should be ready to clarify and bottle after a few weeks.

Having never even tried a mead of this gravity, I'm not sure what to expect.  I kept the ferm temp low, even with the wine yeast, to minimize fermentation byproducts (off-flavours) the yeast would have to spend a lot of time cleaning up or that would require a lot of aging to mellow.  This will get Bentonite in the next couple days; looking forward to trying the sample, hoping it's not overly watery.

Tomorrow will be my first beer brewday in quite some time, following the close of the school semester this week and appropriately on National Homebrew Day and (hip-dorkily) Star Wars Day.  Though my plans for a kölsch have been thwarted by a lack of lagering time before we head back east, I have a backup strategy.  More on that soon.

Small Cherry Melomel

OG: 13.8P (1.056)
Volume: 2 gallons

Fermentables
2.5 lb Cox Honeyland Honey
8 oz Stanton Orchards Montmorency Tart Cherry Concentrate

Yeast
1 pkg Lalvin 71B-1122

Extras (beginning of primary)
1 tsp Yeast Nutrient
1 tsp Yeast Energizer

Brewday: 13 April 2013
Fermented at 55F ambient.

SNA at 24 hours into active fermentation (1 tsp each yeast nutrient & energizer).

18 April 2013: Visible fermentation has ceased; krauesen has dropped.  Moved to 60F+ ambient to finish up.

Secondary: 3 May 2013
FG: 1.002
ABV: 7.0%
Bentonite added.

Bottled: 15 May 2013
Very thin and insipid, lacking in honey and fruit character.  Bottled still, backsweetened with 8 tbsp honey in solution.

Blast from the Past Tasting - Wheatwine

I was rooting around my collection of bombers set aside for long-term aging at some point last month, and decided to finally dump a couple that just hadn't turned out.  Among them was the wheatwine I brewed shortly after starting this blog; it had finished thick and never managed to carbonate, and I dumped the batch before we moved from Chicago.  Upon applying the opener to the cap, however, I was met with--miracle of miracles--a surprisingly forceful hiss.  This bomber, the final remnant of the batch nearly two years old at that point, had actually carbonated!  My best guess is that the Brett from the Wyeast Old Ale Blend I used hung around and did the work over time.  It gives me faint hope for my all-rye Scotch ale experiment disaster.  I was so pleasantly surprised that I poured a taster and recapped the bottle for a later tasting.

It's a good thing I took notes from that taster.  That small glass was exactly the right amount of this beer.  I finally reopened the bottle last week, finding it still adequately carbonated; however, a full glass turned out to be just too overwhelming, and since most of it had been poured, I ended up dumping it.  The body was just way too thick for consuming in quantity; because of this, I'd consider this batch a candidate for bottling in--no joke--mini 1-fl oz bottles.  Truly, a dab'll do ya; that first taster I had was just right.  Without further ado, here are my notes from that tasting.

Wheatwine

Appearance - Deep orange-amber with a mix of fine and coarse bubbles.  Interesting to watch rising bubbles really struggle through the viscosity of the beer.

Smell - Sweet, dark candy and caramel.  Deep maltiness.

Taste - Sweet from residual sugar (1.028 SG at bottling); not a lot of wheat and/or bread character.  Alcohol very present, but not hot or solventy.  Bittersweet finish.

Mouthfeel -Very thick; carbonation is low to medium.  I'm just glad it carbed at all!

Overall - More than many other beers I've brewed, this one is a real experience in a glass.  More than a taster is too much to deal with; just that much, though, gives you a window into something very out of the ordinary.  As intrigued as I am, I don't think it encourages me to run out to try a tall glass of a commercial example, let alone brew five more gallons of my own.

Session Sour II

After the success of the first session sour last year, a couple friends of ours commissioned a second batch.  Given how much I enjoyed this bracing sour cherry beer myself, I was happy to oblige.  The recipe is essentially the same, just scaled up to a six-gallon batch.  I'd considered adding a couple packs of organic frozen cherries to supplement the concentrate, but when the time came I just upped the concentrate amount.  More cherry flavour?  Oh darn.

There were a couple slight process changes.  After doing more research on Brett in primary, and considering the larger batch size this time, I made a starter for my Wyeast Brett L pack.  Due to our busy schedules, the mash unintentionally sat doing its thing for nearly a full day; while the aroma coming from the mashtun had started to take on a bit of "stank," the wort tasted fine and the smell dissipated with the sparge and cleaning afterward.  In addition, the sour worting

stretched out to a full day and a half for this pass.  Again, this wasn't the original plan, but just how it worked out.  The bottles will tell for sure, but I hope that the lacto sourness won't be too much for the beer.  On a positive note, the boil didn't have any of the overfoaming issues I've had on sour worted batches in the past.

As one of our friends is moving at the end of May, this will be bottled earlier than I'd prefer; as you can see in the photo below, it's just begun to grow a fine, cruddy pellicle.  No use crying over spilled beer, though; I'm currently thinking on what I'd like to put on top of the Brett cake to develop some cherry pie funk over the summer.

Session Sour II - rebrew for Gabe & Larry

Batch size: 6 gallons
Projected OG (w/o cherry): 1.041
Projected SRM: 12.3
Projected IBU: 4.7
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 91%

Grains
80.0% - 7 lb Malteurop 2-row
13.3% - 1 lb Aromatic
6.7% - 8 oz Special B

Hops
.3 oz Willamette (4.7%) (60 min)

Yeast

1 qt Lacto starter
3.5 l starter WY5526 Brettanomyces Lambicus (stirplate) (10 days ahead - 7 ferment/3 crash)
    -both started 3 Feb 2013

Extras
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)
16 24 fl oz Montmorency cherry concentrate (post primary fermentation)
1.25 lb Organic whole frozen cherries with pits (post primary fermentation) Not this time

Water additions (mash)
5 qts RO water

Brewday: 17 February 2013
Mash: 9 qts @ 156F for 20 hours! Top started to scum over and get stinky, but wort was still worty sweet.  Temp dropped to 83F over that time.
1st sparge: 10 qts @ 212F
2nd sparge: 10 qts @ 212F
3rd sparge: 4 qts @ 212F
Pre-boil volume: 7 gallons

Brett starter took several days to show activity, but it eventually got going.  Crash cooled for about a week before brewing.

Cooled runnings to 112F & pitched lacto starter.  Plastic wrap over the wort.  Kept warm for 37.5 hours, then boiled as usual.

Fermented at 63F ambient.

9 March 2013: 24 fl oz cherry concentrate added, fermenter agitated.  Considering 25 lbs fruit per bottle, recalculated OG is 1.058

9 April 2013: Has developed a nice thin pellicle over the last few days.

2 September 2013: Transferred to secondary (5-gal carboy & 1-gal jug, actually) before leaving for the summer. Respectable pellicle has formed in each. Looking to bottle within the month.

Bottled: 12 October 2013
FG: 1.010
ABV: 6.3%

Sample was excellent: tangy sourness, with big, juicy fruit unfolding in the finish.  Probably even better than the first batch.
Bottled with 5.1 oz table sugar and rehydrated champagne yeast.

Cherry Cyser

School has yet to let up--in fact, the pace is quickening with final projects and exams approaching in the next couple weeks--but it's beyond time to post about the current state of fermentation in the house.  DeAunn's running perilously low on mead and cider; she's finished everything we brought back from our time in Oregon and San Fran last month, about which I'll write soon over at the Nonic blog.  Fortunately, this little batch has been aging away in the corner for better than three months now, which, following my personal mead timeline to date, means it's about time to get it in a snifter (albeit a small, sampler sized one).  Down the road, I'd like to give my meads a year or more to mellow, especially in a barrel, but for now they've been turning out very nicely on a more compressed schedule following Curt Stock's SNA recommendations.

DeAunn's enjoyed getting to know the worlds of cider and mead, and in general her preferences land on the semi-dry side of both.  My first cyser finished a little drier than intended but was a big hit.  The present batch adds in another of her favourites, cherries.  While normally I aim for a larger volume of fruit, I'm counting on the (again, for me) extended contact time, especially with the pits, to add more character.  I'm hoping to bottle this soon--later today, if time and my pile of homework conspire to allow it--so I should have more information on how it's turned out in the near future.

Cherry Cyser
Projected OG: 1.113
Volume: 2 gallons

Fermentables
1 gallon Big B's Organic Cider
5 lb Cox Honeyland Honey
20 oz Organic frozen cherries

Yeast
WLP775 English Cider

Extras (boil)
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)
1 tsp Yeast energizer (10 min)

Brewday: 3 January 2013
Fermented at 60F ambient.
SNA added at 24 hours - 1 tsp each yeast nutrient and yeast energizer

State of the Brew 2013

With the end of March approaching, this post is nearly two months late; it's been busy 'round these parts.  As you can tell from my general posting output this year, I've been brewing less, due to scarcer time and funds available for the hobby.  School and a range of activities outside brewing have kept me more than a little preoccupied over the past twelve months.  I'm not planning to get out of it; this is just a period of zymurgical slowdown for me.  Fortunately, a spell of late-winter illness has given me some downtime to finally return to the blog.  Even at this late date, wrapping up the year still seemed like a good idea: it helps me reflect on what I've accomplished, what I'd like to improve, and how I'd like to plan my resources for what comes next.  Without further ado, then, here's a little statistical rundown for (mostly) 2012.

Total posts: 21
Total beers brewed: 16

Original Gravity
0.0% - 0 small beers (<1.040)
62.5% - 10 low gravity (1.040-1.055)
12.5% - 2 medium gravity (1.056-1.070)
25.0% - 4 high gravity (>1.070)

A solid trend here for sessionable (if not always textbook "session") beers, though nothing at the very bottom of the scale.  Given the small number of brewdays for the year, turning out just a few big beers ended up constituting a significant portion of my overall output.

Colour
12.5% - 2 pale (<7 SRM)
62.5% - 10 amber (7-17 SRM)
25.0% - 4 dark (>17 SRM)

Nothing surprising here; I find it pretty easy to brew right in the middle of the colour scale, from amber to brown.  I'm happy I managed to fit in a couple of pale beers; I have plans to work more at this end of things, trying a few more stripped-down, possibly historically-inspired beers in the coming year that may consist solely of pale malt.

National style
50.0% - 8 American
37.5% - 6 English
12.5% - 2 Belgian
0.0% - 0 German

Lots of pale ales and IPAs this year, often with pretty neutral American yeasts. It certainly didn't feel like I'd made so many of them, though that's probably directly related to my success rate below.  Still questing after a fine bitter recipe of my own, which contributes significantly to my English output.

Dominant character
37.5% - 6 hoppy
12.5% - 2 malty
12.5% - 2 roasty
12.5% - 2 balanced
12.5% - 2 yeast-derived
6.25% - 1 sour
6.25% - 1 fruit

Yup, lots of pale ales/IPAs.  But a good mix of other flavours running through the mix this year; I do like variety.

Brew support
100% solo brewed

While I had visitors stop in during brewdays from time to time, it's been lots of concentrated brew time for me.  While I really dig my LHBS here, I haven't met up with any local like-minded brewers with whom I've been inclined to share a wort production event yet.  Missing my Chicago brewing compatriots; brew strong, brothers.  I have one friend, though, who just moved to the area and is very interested in taking part, so I expect to have more company in the coming months.

Success rate
56.25% - 9 good
31.25% - 5 poor
12.5% - 2 undecided

I'm not sure if it's due to me getting out of practice with more time between brewdays or if I'm just getting sloppy, but my success rate has not been fantastic over the past year.  Fortunately my beers brewed in the last few months have all been pretty solid, so hopefully I've turned a corner.  The undecided samples include a Burton ale, which I won't even touch for another couple months, maybe not even until a half year from now; and my second Flanders red attempt, which I'm just letting sit for a good long while, though the samples have been very unflattering.

Meads/ciders brewed: 6
60% - 3 melomels
20% - 2 straight cider/perry
20% - 1 fruit cider

With DeAunn going off gluten last year, meads and ciders have become a new area of interest and excitement for me.  The melomels, including my first cyser, have been pretty terrific; the straight cider I made with apples we harvested ourselves was very dry (as expected) but with a great floral apple aroma (big ups to WLP775).  Looking forward to messing with honey, fruit, and spices even more coming up.

Non-brewing posts: 5
40% - 2 on hop growing
40% - 2 tastings
20% - 1 on home toasting grain

My "resolution" last year was to do more tastings; I haven't really made the inroads I'd planned there, but I'm going to redouble my efforts.  The home-toasted grain posts from the past couple years seem to see a lot of traffic; I hope they help other homebrewers experience the same success with them that I've had.

I have a couple more fermenters full of fermented (or fermenting) goodness on which to report, including a cyser with whole cherries and a rebrew of last year's popular (in these parts) session sour.  Stay tuned.

Winter IPAs

Blogging my brewing has been a great experience these past nearly two years, for a multitude of reasons.  For one, it's revealed some of my own preferences on the seasonality of imbibing.  As much as I like to experiment, I fall into a cyclical pattern with such stunning regularity that you could set your pagan solstice virgin sacrifices by it.  Namely, it's light, bright, hoppy beers during the warm months and dark, roasty beers (of varying heft) in the cold months.  Saisons and sours cut in from time to time, and meads have been mixing it up in the last half year, but there it is: the hardcore basics of my brewing calendar.  I'm not alone in this, I know, but it does make it all feel a little...simplistic.

Fortunately, one other feature of my normal winter brewing helps to break up the monotony.  After a few months of stygian, contemplative pints, I experience a hop deficiency freakout and brew something way out of the porter/stout category (such as last year's IIPA attempt, which has evolved into a pretty decent, fruity "American old ale," if you will).  This season I got more of a jump on this curve-wrecking endeavour, making my last brewday of 2012 an IPA partigyle.  The first (strong) portion became an all-Summit-hopped American

IPA; the latter runnings of this mash formed a "micro" IPA of low gravity and heavy "new school" late hopping.

This NB blog post on Summit inspired the big beer.  Having never used much of the variety, and only to bitter, I was intrigued by their aromatic and flavour descriptors.  This beer went without a traditional 60-minute charge, as I hoped to avoid the onion/garlic character this hop can reputedly bring in larger quantities when bittering.  Fortunately, having such a ridiculously high level of alpha acids, the first wort- and late hopping added plenty of IBUs.  I still had a cache of Vienna in my stores, which seemed like it would make for a very characterful base; just a sprinkling of Caramunich came along for added complexity (originally there was some simple sugar in the plan, but the first runnings were so rich it wasn't required to hit the OG).  Had I actually considered it and realized how close I was to doing a SMaSH beer beforehand, I would've gone all Vienna for the grist and had done with it.  My oatmeal stout's WLP007 yeast cake had been hanging out in the fridge for a few weeks since bottling, just waiting for an opportunity to get back to work.  It actually took a few days to get going (including sending up kind of scary large, floating chunks of yeast/trub in the carboy) but eventually got properly fired up, requiring a blowoff tube.

This wasn't my first time trying to create a low-gravity beer that delivered a wallop of hoppiness (not even since starting this blog) and there are now even a couple commercial examples that have captured the hearts and minds of beer drinkers across the country.  I'd already had in my long-term docket to give this concept another shot; putting it together with the Summit IPA in partigyle form seemed kismet.  For hops, I cruised my LHBS for the hottest and sexiest varieties of today; I was kind of shooting for the homebrewer's Top 40 chart toppers.  And I found them: Citra, Simcoe, and Galaxy.  With a little old leftover Galena for nominal traditional bittering, the rest of the kettle hops went in together as an hour-long hopstand (starting with 5 minutes of active whirlpooling) to further accentuate their late-use qualities.  I also added my 2012 homegrown Centennial cones for extra fun.  Unfortunately the final mash runnings came in too low to use on their own, so I threw in some spare DME and table sugar at the start of the boil to compensate.  The amount of simple sugar ended up constituting more of the fermentables than I'd prefer, so time will tell if I'll experience some of those fabulous "cidery" off-flavours older homebrewing tomes mention in their cautions against using sugar.

In an attempt to have a brewday experience to rival my last one in terms of ease and simplicity, I went full bore in prepping the night before: filtered (nearly) all the water needed, parsed out all hop mineral additions, pulled out (nearly) all the equipment, organized and labeled everything, etc.  With little left to chance, things went damn near like clockwork, despite the snow and running out of propane early on.  Two batches into the fermenters with all the heavy cleaning complete within eight hours.  That's the efficiency I like to see.

Dry hops are in the fermenters currently, and I'm very much looking forward to having some fresh, hoppy bottles in the fridge to share before too long.  Here's to sticking to my trend of bucking my trend.

Also..."Blogging my brewing."  I should just rename the blog with that one.

Partigyle: Summit IPA - Micro IPA
Summit
Batch size: 5.5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.067
Projected SRM: 11.6
Projected IBU: 60.9
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 58%

Micro
Batch size: 5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.042
Projected SRM: 11.5
Projected IBU: ~40 (shot in the dark here)
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 26%

Grains
95.5% - 16 lb Weyermann Organic Vienna
4.5% - 12 oz Weyermann Caramunich II

Hops
 Summit
1 oz Summit (18.0%) (FWH)
1 oz Summit (18.0%) (10 min)
2 oz Summit (17.6%) (Dry hop - 5 days)

Micro
.3 oz Galena (13.2%) (60 min)
1 oz Citra (13.9%) (Whirlpool/hopstand - 60 min)
.5 oz Galaxy (14.0%) (Whirlpool/hopstand - 60 min)
.5 oz Simcoe (13.0%) (Whirlpool/hopstand - 60 min)
.6 oz Centennial (homegrown) (Whirlpool/hopstand - 60 min)
1 oz Citra (Dry hop - 5 days)
.5 oz Galaxy (Dry hop - 5 days)
.5 oz Simcoe (Dry hop - 5 days)

Yeast
Summit - WLP007 Dry English Ale - cake from Toasted Oatmeal Stout
Micro - 1 pkg US-05

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

Water additions
SLC profile

Summit
10 qts Distilled water (mash)
2 g Epsom salts (mash)
2 g Gypsum (boil)

Micro
10 qts Distilled water (mash)

Brewday: 29 December 2012
Summit
Mash: 151F for 90 minutes
SG @ 6 gallons collected: 16.1P (1.066) - cut with 1 gallon water
Pre-boil volume: 7 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 14.1P (1.058)

Micro
Pre-boil volume: 6.8 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 5.8P (1.023)
    Added 1 lb table sugar and 12 oz light DME to bring up SG

63F ambient to start fermentation.
Micro started within 24 hours, Summit within 36 hours; moved to 56F ambient to continue.

3 January 2013: fermentation very active; Summit required a blowoff tube.  Bumped up ambient temps to 60F once ferments settled down.

Micro Dry Hop: 8 January 2013

A few small clumps of yeast left floating, but should be plenty done with fermentation.

Summit Dry Hop: 12 January 2013

Bottled: 17 January 2013
Summit
FG: 1.013
ABV: 7.1%
Bottled with 4.4 oz table sugar.
Initial tasting suggests that a neutral American yeast might pair better than an English yeast, but time in the bottle will be more revealing. 

Micro
FG: 1.009
ABV: 4.42%
Bottled with 3.5 oz table sugar.
Left on dry hops longer than intended as I missed my bottling window earlier in the week.
Huge fruity nose; DeAunn particularly noted peach.

Toasted Oatmeal Stout & the Simplicity of the One-Beer Brewday

I finally had a chance to put the oats I toasted to use.  While stout is a favoured style this time of year for us, the oatmeal variety has usually left me wanting.  The main problem, of course, are my own expectations: what do I think oats are going to add to all that stouty goodness already present?  In my mind, it's probably more what you get from lactose: a bump in sweetness and body.  In reality, there's an added fullness, but a certain slickness on the palate as well.  Why not just throw in some lactose and call this a sweet stout then?  Cos I really want to wrap my head (and taste buds) around the concept of oatmeal stout in a new way.  That, and these oats smelled so damn good.

Simple American base malt balanced with equal parts roasted barley, chocolate malt, and caramel malt set the stage.  While I often like to go with the more heavily roasted British grains in dark beers, I wanted to make sure

that coffee and roast characters didn't steal the stage from the brother grain that gives this style its name, so I went with the American versions for colour and the normal stout personality.  The oats had plenty of time to mellow and let any harsh aromas and flavours that developed from their time in the oven to dissipate before use; when I opened the bag of toasted wonder on brewday, the first thing that came to mind was coconut.  In these cold days, there was something about that scent that will not get old for me.  A bit of Galena for bittering without trying to make too much of a hoppy impression, a small starter of White Labs Dry English yeast for a bit of character and a respectably low finishing gravity, and it was time to brew.

Nailed the mash-in temp; managed to put it right where it should have been, sometimes more of a struggle for me than it should be.  Mash efficiency came in a bit low; not sure if that came from the wild card contribution of the oats--uncertain what to really expect from them in terms of fermentable sugar--or the fact that it's just been a while since I've brewed.  The day went on, and the brew came to a happy end in the fermenter.  The best part of it all, honestly, was how well everything seemed to come together because I wasn't also working out the logistics of a second beer at the same time.  It's been quite a while since I've done a (relatively) simple one-beer brewday, and it went so smoothly it almost seemed untrustworthy.  You could get used to this kind of ease.  Thing is, I'm too greedy to make that a normal thing; I want to get the maximum return (= multiple full fermenters, of different styles if possible) out of a given brewday.  Oh, the incredible struggles of the homebrewer.

 Toasted Oatmeal Stout

Batch size: 5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.048
Projected SRM: 29.1
Projected IBU: 34.2
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 72%

Grains
74.0% - 7 lb Malteurop 2-row
10.1% - 15.3 oz Organic quick oats, toasted
5.3% - 8 oz Roasted barley (US)
5.3% - 8 oz Chocolate (US)
5.3% - 8 oz Briess C-80

Hops
.7 oz Galena (13.2%) (60 min)

Yeast
WLP007 Dry English Ale - 1L starter

Extras
1 tbsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)

Water Additions (mash)
5 qts Distilled water

Brewday: 17 November 2012
Mash: 153F for 75 minutes
Pre-boil volume: 6.3 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 11P (1.044)

The toasted oats have a great nutty aroma in the bag, even with a coconut overtone; continues into the brewkettle
5.3 gallons into the fermenter
Fermented in swamp cooler at 58F ambient

20 November 2012: Active primary fermentation complete; yeast has flocced out and krauesen has completely dropped.  Agitation of the yeast cake yields no renewed activity.  Pulled from swamp cooler and brought to room temp.

Bottled: 8 December 2012
FG: 1.016
ABV: 4.2%
Bottled with 3.5 oz table sugar.