Monday, March 26, 2012

Special Bitter

After the success of the Beamish clone, I decided to do another recipe from Will at http://perfectpint.blogspot.com . This time it's his "Session Bitter". I had to make some changes based on hops and yeast available to me, and my lack of a mill. Will recommends toasting some Maris Otter for this brew, but this needs to be done before crushing. My local homebrew shop puts together my malt bills for me and I pick them up freshly crushed at the shop. This time around I substituted Briess Victory for the toasted MO.

I stuck with East Kent Goldings for finishing hops, but substituted Northdown for the Challenger. For yeast I chose Wyeast 1275 "Thames Valley Ale". This is supposedly the Brakespear strain, and is a pretty strong attenuator for an English Ale yeast. To be honest this was chosen in a bit of a rush when another yeast I was thinking of using was out of stock. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

I still haven't quite figured out a 'house' yeast for English style bitters and lower alcohol 'session' beers. I use WY1469 (west yorkshire) and WY1968 (London ESB) quite a lot, and generally have vials or slurry on hand. While they both produce fantastic beer, the tend to not attenuate the beer as much as I would like. This is not a problem for me with bigger beers which I will only have one or two pints of in a night, but for 'session' beers I want a low FG, from about 1.008 to 1.010. I could get this with 1469 and 1968 if I was to add some simple sugars, but I'm keen to avoid this if I can - I would just prefer to stick to all malt beers.

I had a porter fermented with WY1469 recently which ended up at 1.016, and while it was a tasty drop at first, two pints in I had enough - which is unusual for me!

I've tried lowering the mash temperature, and this is something I will look at again when I get a proper recirculating mash system in operation, but have not had success. I want there to be a yeast character in my bitters, so american ale yeast is not an option, though it will generally give 75% or more apparent attenuation in my experience.  Hopefully the Thames Valley yeast may provide a solution, time will tell.

Anyway, here's the particulars for the session bitter as brewed by me:

Recipe Specifics
----------------

Batch Size (L):          22.60    Wort Size (L):     22.60
Total Grain (kg):         4.00
Anticipated OG:          1.042    Plato:             10.38
Anticipated EBC:          23.4
Anticipated IBU:          29.4
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes



Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential EBC
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  4.5     0.18 kg.  Victory Malt                  USA            1.034     73
 89.1     3.56 kg.  Pale Malt (Maris Otter)       UK             1.038      8
  3.8     0.15 kg.  Crystal 60L                   UK             1.035    158
  2.6     0.10 kg.  Crystal 120L                  UK             1.033    317



Hops

   Amount     Name                                    Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 20.00 g.     Northdown                             Pellet   9.60  26.0  45 min.
 16.00 g.     East Kent Goldings                Pellet   5.45   3.3  0 min.
 30.00 g.     East Kent Goldings                Pellet   4.75   0.0  Pre-ferment
 16.00 g.     East Kent Goldings                Pellet   4.75   0.0  Dry Hop


Yeast
-----
Wyeast 1275 (Thames Valley Ale)

Cubed Wort, 1L starter, 2.5L late hopping experiment
I've mentioned before that I 'no-chill' my beers. This involves transferring the still almost boiling wort into a clean sealed container (cube), and leaving this to cool in it's own time. It sounds barbaric, but has it's advantages. Firstly there's a big time saving, a good hour or two is knocked off the brew day. It separates out the brewing and fermenting stages of the day, which means that fermentation gets the attention it deserves, and is not just an afterthought at the end of a long session over the pot. You can draw off a litre or two and make a starter with the actual wort you are brewing with. There's no chiller to clean (or even buy), and no water used for chilling, which has been an issue here in Melbourne where water has been scarce in the recent past.

Boiling 2.5 litres of wort with 30g of EKGs
Of course no-chilling also has it's disadvantages, and the only one that constantly disappoints me is the lack of late hop character. It's something I look for in all of my beers, and is the reason that I'm about to set up a chilling system of my own. I'm keen to try out extreme late-hopping (see Jamil Zainasheff's article on it here), and I know that no-chilling will not work for this. However for english style bitters and ales, the late hop character is far more subtle, and I'm hoping that a technique I read about on http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/ might work for me. The idea is to draw off a small portion of the wort after cooling but just before fermenting, bring it to the boil, add the late hops, and then add it back to the remaining wort. This will cause it to cool rapidly, and should lock in some of the more volatile hop character. I'm going to give it a try for this brew, and we'll see how it works. I decided to draw off 2.5L from the kettle into a large conical flask I have before filling the cube itself. This evening (1 day after brew day), I boiled this up for 5 mins, then threw in what would normally be the 0min hop addition. I allowed this to boil for 1min, then let it sit for 10 mins and then emptied it into the cube on top of the 17L or so of wort already in there. I added my 1L starter of yeast, aerated (shaking), and now it's up to the yeasties to do their thing. It's currently sitting at 19C in my fermenting fridge.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Paddy's Stout

The last beer Aidan (my brew buddy) and I brewed was a Beamish stout clone. I went to University in Cork, and lived there for about 10 years in total, so became intimately acquainted with this beautiful stout. One of my favourite pubs in the world (The Oval) is directly across from the old Beamish brewery, and there was a particular satisfaction in drinking beer brewed just across the road. Unfortunately the brewery ceased operations a few years back, just before I left Ireland. I guess it was another reason to leave!

I came across a post on homebrewtalk.com outlining what looked like a well researched Beamish recipe. It turns out that the poster maintains an excellent blog at perfectpint.blogspot.com and has been perfecting the recipe for a few years. After some communication between us I settled on the following recipe:

beamish clone

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
----------------

Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     19.00
Total Grain (kg):         4.22
Anticipated OG:          1.043    Plato:             10.70
Anticipated EBC:          77.9
Anticipated IBU:          29.1
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential EBC
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 82.8     3.50 kg.  Pale Ale Malt (2-row)         Great Britain      1.037      5
  5.9     0.25 kg.  Roasted Barley                Great Britain  1.029   1523
  3.0     0.13 kg.  Chocolate Malt                Great Britain  1.034   1258
  8.3     0.35 kg.  Wheat Malt                    Australia        1.038      4

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 50.00 g.     Willamette                        Pellet   4.00  29.1  60 min.


Yeast
-----
Safale US-05

I used Williamette hops just because that's what I had. The malts used were; Crisp Ale malt, Simpsons Roasted Barley, Simpsons chocolate, and Joe White wheat malt.

We made this on February 26th, and fermented at 18C. It reached FG (1.010) in four days, and was left at room temperature (~20C) for a further week. I then put it in my keezer at 6C for another week.

When I see a need for fining beer, my standard operating procedure is to clarify with gelatin (2tsp in 200ml sterile water) in the fermenting vessel, leave for a day or two, and then transfer to keg. Here it wasn't so obvious whether fining was needed or not, but I decided to do it anyway as I have found US-05 yeast to be a poor flocculator. Also, I was going to serve this at a Paddy's day party, so I wanted to make sure people saw this beer at it's best.

We tapped the keg the night before the party, and it was obvious that I had made some errors with the serving setup. I had over carbonated the beer, and it was too cold. Some vigorous shaking and venting, and raising the temperature to 10C improved it immensely.

I started serving the beer at 2pm last Saturday, and by 4:30pm it was gone. Luckily Aidan and I (and our other halves) had managed to sneak a few in on the Friday night too, so we got a good impression of the beer.

Taste wise, it's not easy to compare with the commercial product. I think the influence of the nitro pour is difficult to ignore. However I can say that it's pretty close to Beamish, or certainly the Beamish that I am used to. There's a particular mix of delicate chocolate/coffee with roasted barley which you don't get with other Irish dry stouts. This is in contrast to many of the new world stouts which slam your palate with dark heavy flavours. For me stout is an easy drinking session beer, a thirst quencher and conversational lubricant. I'm happy to say that I can now brew it.

First post

I've decided to start blogging here to try and document what's becoming an obsession, making beer, or in Irish "Ag déanamh leann".

I've been doing this for a long time now, about 7 years I think, but I only really got serious about it when I moved to Australia over 2 years ago. The easy availability of quality ingredients means that I can brew more or less anything I want with only a few hours notice. I've done about 20 all grain brews in the past year. Currently I use BIAB (brew in a bag) and 'no chill' techniques, though I am in the process of changing that for something more complex so that I have more control over the finished project - and just cos I like making stuff!