Brown Rye (starter beer)

As I wrote about recently, I brewed a lot of beer with my dad this summer on his beautiful new all-electric setup.  He's been trying out a number of recipes in different styles he's found online--a frequent starting point for me as well--as well as working on scaled-up AG versions of beers I designed when he was doing small extract batches in my folks' former home.  Over the summer we'd trade off between us on the brew planning.  Having sought to finally brew a kölsch for some time--most recently this spring--that was my first choice.  Brewing such large volumes (11-12 gallons) and not having a stirplate on hand at the time (my dad built a nice one soon after this) meant that before the main brew must come a starter beer.

As it happened, my dad had a big Belgian/Trappist-style beer planned and needed to propagate yeast for that as well, so we brewed six and a half gallons of low-gravity wort to split between the two yeasts.  In some sense it was also a cleanup beer, finishing up some odds-and-ends grains in the brewery.  However the main malts, Munich and rye, I chose very intentionally, aiming to get a lot of richness out of this smaller beer.  Coincidentally this ended up encompassing long-term plans I've had to brew a Belgian rye table beer.  My original aim was for a red colour, but it ended up solidly brown.  Out of the two beers produced, I prefer the Belgian iteration, the kölsch yeast characteristics not really meshing well with the strong malt flavours.  In the end, though, we had large yeast pitches for both big brews and a couple interesting experimental beers to try.

Brown Rye - Kölsch/Trappist starter
Batch size: 6.5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.042
Projected SRM: 13.7
Projected IBU: 18.0
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 77%

Grains

64.2% - 6.5 lb Weyermann Munich Type 2
24.7% - 2.5 lb Briess Rye
4.8% - 8 oz Crystal 120
4.8% - 8 oz Dingemans Biscuit
2.5% - 4 oz Briess Victory
1.2% - 2 oz Dingemans Chocolate

Hops
1 oz Hallertau (4.3%) (60 min)
1 oz Hersbrucker (4.3%) (15 min)

Yeast
3.5 gal - 2 vials WLP029 German Ale/Kölsch
3 gal - 2 vials WLP500 Trappist Ale

Extras
1.5 tsp Irish moss (10 min)

Brewday: 7 June 2013
Mash: 154F for 60 minutes
Mash pH: 5.2
Mashout @ 168F
Fly sparge
Pre-boil volume: 9.5 gallons

WLP029 fermented at 60F ambient.
WLP500 fermented at 68F ambient.
Following fermentation, both crash cooled at 41F.

Bottling: 23 June 2013
WLP029 FG: 1.019 @ 50F - 1.018
ABV: 3.1%
WLP500 FG: 1.0??

Both bottled cold with sugar and rehydrated US-05 added.
Each bottled with 2.5 oz table sugar and rehydrated US-05.

Brett Love I

While it probably won't replace hops as the signature ingredient of American craft beer, Brettanomyces funk has come into its own as a popular brewing component in the last couple years.  This is the first in a planned series of all-Brett beers.  The inspiration for this one was Russian River's Consecration; a big, dark beer that will get fruit and oak made for a good choice to spend the summer maturing on a pitch of Brettanomyces.

My first choice for the yeast strain was Wyeast's Brett Lambicus, known for its pie cherry qualities.  Unable to get it in time for the brewday, I decided to mess with the tropical fruit character of White Labs' Brett Brux Trois.  As in the past, I included a short period of sour worting before the boil to lower the pH and thus encourage the yeast to move toward the funky side during fermentation (though I'm getting to the point with the process that I may try acid malt or adding lactic acid instead in the future; they'd be a lot less labour intensive ways and could get close to the same result).  Also to push for more funk, this batch saw no temperature control; ambient temp was pretty reasonable when we left town, and as the summer progresses, the higher temps may coax more interesting (or possibly terrible) compounds out of the fermentation process.  We'll find out what magic took place in about a month.

Brett Love I

Batch size: 5.5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.092
Projected SRM: 16.8
Projected IBU: 23.2
Boil time: 90 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 81%

Grains/Fermentables
41.2% - 7 lb Malteurop 2-row
29.4% - 5 lb Weyermann Pils
11.8% - 2 lb Weyermann Organic Vienna
8.8% - 1.5 lb Dingemans Aromatic
2.9% - 8 oz Weyermann Caramunich II
5.9% - 1 lb D-90 syrup (end of primary)

Hops
.6 oz Magnum (14.6%) (90 min)

Yeast
Lacto starter
WY5526 Brett Lambicus - yeast cake
WLP644 Brettanomyces Bruxellensis Trois - 2-qt starter

Extras
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)                   
1 lb Dried currants (end of primary)
8 fl oz Cherry concentrate (end of primary)
1 oz Bourbon-soaked 2nd-use oak cubes (end of primary)

Water additions (mash)
3 gal RO water
1 g Gypsum

Brewday: 22 May 2013
Mash: 156F for 60 minutes.
Pre-sour SG: 15P (1.061)

Sour worted for 7.5 hours.
Post-boil OG (w/o D-90 syrup): 20.6P (1.086)
Started at 63F ambient; left to ferment at summer ambient temps (probably 80F+) for 3 months.

End of primary: 19 August 2013
SG: 9.4P (measured) - corrected 1.007
Added D-90 syrup, currants (rinsed in Star San to remove oils), and oak.
Should’ve moved to a 5-gal secondary & racked on top to be able to reuse the big carboy and avoid oxidizing, but oh well.

2 September 2013: Restart of fermentation has been slow, but today there’s been a lot more airlock activity.  At this point the currants have swelled and are floating.

Bottled: 12 October 2013
FG: 1.013
ABV: 10.4%

Bottled with 5 oz table sugar and rehydrated champagne yeast.

Centennial Pils Pale

Kölsch is a style, as my good friend Ted has commented before, that can go by the wayside in the homebrewery.  For me, the lagering time required means that by the time I usually start thinking about having one around I'm already weeks or months behind the eight ball.  Add in a lack of a proper lagering setup that greatly increases the difficulty of doing right by this beer as the temperature rises in spring and summer, and pretty soon the whole plan is a wash.  This year, though, I made plans well in advance to finally brew one near the end of the school year for summer quaffing.  The grains and hops were collected, and I put together everything for a starter of Charlie P's Cry Havoc (on Ted's recommendation).

And then the last two months of the school year came on like a storm of hellfire.  It finally abated at the beginning of May, but summer travel plans loomed ever closer, leaving no time for lagering and scarcely time enough for fermentation.  How does the saying go about the best laid plans? So, like any good homebrewer or icebreaker captain, I altered course.  I reserved some of the Vienna I had for the next brewday and added in some Munich to up the maltiness and colour a bit, and swapped the Hallertaus for Centennials, shooting for a Two-Hearted Ale hop character.  So we have an American pale ale with a German malt bill.  An increase in the boil time should have removed the DMS precursors in the pils, keeping anything untoward from forming during the hop stand.  Leaving off dry hopping made it very feasible to have this beer in the bottle comfortably ahead of our trip.  I had my first of these just a few days ago; it's crisp, bready, bitter, and doesn't betray my original intentions for it to be an entirely different beer.

Centennial Pils Pale

Batch size: 5.1 gallons
Projected OG: 1.050
Projected SRM: 3.9
Projected IBU: 28.6
Boil time: 120 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 81%

Grains
58.8% - 5 lb Weyermann Pils
23.5% - 2 lb Weyermann Organic Munich Type 2
17.7% - 1.5 lb Weyermann Organic Vienna

Hops
.5 oz Centennial (8.7%) (120 min)
1.5 oz Centennial (10 min)
1 oz Centennial (0 min - 30-min whirlpool/hop stand)

Yeast
WLP862 Cry Havoc - 2.5 l starter (made 14 April 2013)

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

Water additions (mash)
11 qts RO water
1 g Gypsum
1 g Epsom salts
1 g CaCl

Brewday: 4 May 2013
Mash: 154F for 60 minutes
Pre-boil volume: 7.3 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 9.6P (1.038)

Bottled: 16 May 2013
FG: 1.010
ABV: 5.0%

Bottled with 4.4 oz table sugar.

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