A minor tragedy

The kolsch I recently brewed (see here), has been cold conditioning for a week, though I should really have just thrown it down the drain.

I have made this before, and I used White Labs WLP029 yeast which gave me a beautiful delicate kolsch. Unfortunately White Labs yeast is not available in Melbourne and so I had to order it from a New South Wales home brew shop. This had put me off brewing the kolsch again, but I recently found six bottles of last years version hidden away in my house. I decided to culture up the dregs from these bottles, and did so without undue difficulty. The first 200ml starter seemed to behave normally, as did the 500ml and 2L starters I then pitched to. The fun stopped when the main batch was innoculated. A very long lag time and a very slow fermentation got me worried. From my notes I could see that the fermentation was way behind schedule after a week, and so I took the dramatic step of making another starter and re-pitching to the main batch.

This helped things along a lot, but I think it may have been too little too late. From the first hydrometer samples I could detect phenolics, clove especially. This should always set alarm bells ringing, and it did, but I was hopeful that these volatiles might dissipate with time. When it came time to cold condition I could still taste and smell the phenolics, and a week in it's as bad as ever.

We know that some yeasts produce these compounds in a normal fermentation, particularly wheat beer yeasts, and wild yeast. I hadn't thought that WLP029 would produce them, and had put this problem down to a wild yeast infection. Now I'm not so sure. Firstly, the beer is completely clear, its appearance is actually picture perfect, exactly what I expected. Secondly it finished at exactly the same gravity as my first batch. Thirdly, there are several reports from home brew forums of this problem with this yeast. See here and here

Here's my theory:

The yeast I procured from the old bottles had very low viability. I tried to culture this up in a 200ml starter, and it did fire up, but it's possible that having started with such a small amount even a doubling of the cell count resulted in very little yeast. This problem then followed me through the other two starters, and I ended up underpitching this batch quite severely, a low fermentation temperature exacerbating the problem. The yeast, susceptible to these issues, in far from optimal conditions, was extremely stressed and secreted these unpleasant phenolics during replication/fermentation in the initial stages. After a sluggish start I pitched another starter and got things moving a bit, but the damage had been done.

The lesson:

Watch your pitching amounts, especially where you are using old yeast in cool conditions.

The plan:

I'll rebrew as soon as possible. I've already ordered a vial of WLP029 from another NSW homebrew shop, along with a vial of WLP006 Bedford Ale which constantly gets great reviews over at perfectpint.blogspot.com. I'll be making a big stirred starter and looking for a quick clean ferment.

The result:

About $18 of ingredients and 3-4 hours of my brewing time, plus minutes here and there to look after it, have been lost. I say lost and not wasted because once again I've learned more from this bad brew than I would from ten good ones. As long as I can explain problems I'm not overly worried about them.

Next Step:

A rebrew, I will have my Kolsch come hell or high water!

Bass

Irish people know Bass as a weak, tasteless red kegged/canned beer. This was certainly my experience of it. Our infamous taoiseach Bertie was a big fan, but was alone in his Bass preference from what I could see. When I first got interested in beer, around the time of that trip to Newcastle Upon Tyne (see the Landlord entry for more on that), I began to realise that Bass meant different things to the English than to us. The Bass available in Ireland was usually in a can and brewed in Belfast. When I ended up in a cosy roadside inn outside of Newcastle the day after my first cask ale (Landlord), it was Bass that mine host had put on the handpump.

 The difference was quite remarkable. This Bass had depth of flavour, many interweaving aromas and esters, with a dry finish. I'm still grateful to whatever hand was guiding me around my first 'Real Ales', as both the Landlord and the Bass were unforgettable brews, and my memory of the taste of each is as keen now as then.

I haven't before tried to brew it, and really this brew is more of a Bass inspired beer than a clone. I'm using Wyeast 1028, which is called 'London Ale', but is allegedly the Worthington White Shield yeast. This was pointed out to me by Will over at perfectpint.blogspot.com. I was going to try to get my hands on White Labs 'Burton Ale', but it may be the case that this is not from Burton at all, but rather Henley on Thames, and is in fact the same as WY1275, which I have had a patchy relationship with. Anyhow, if 1028 really is the white shield yeast, it should work really well for this beer.

For hops I'll be using Northern Brewer. I think they should give this beer a really unique hop presence, woody and earthy, and should be reminiscent of the Northdown/Challenger hops which I believe are the actual Bass hops. The third defining aspect of this beer will be the water profile. I'll be bumping up the sulphates quite a bit. The profile will be loosely based on Randy Mosher's Ideal Pale Ale profile, with the sulphates dialled back slightly from that. I'm aiming for about 110ppm of Ca, 280 SO4, and around 50 Cl.

Maltwise, I'm going for a 95% Maris Otter, 5% Medium Crystal bill. I'll add a little roasted barley for colour, as I want this to be a darkish orange heading for red. Why do I want this? I dunno, just do. This will be the second beer put on my new handpump, after the Beamish, so it's got about 3-4 weeks to mature if we go easy on the Beamish.

We won't go easy on the Beamish though.

The recipe is a mix of the Wheeler "Brew your own real ale at home" recipe, a "Brew your own" magazine recipe, and some adjustments by me based on experience.

Recipe:

3.91Kg     Simpsons Maris Otter
0.21Kg     Simpsons Crystal Medium
0.05Kg     Simpsons Roasted Barley

15g    Northern Brewer   9%AA     @60mins
30g    Northern Brewer   9%AA     @Flameout

yeast nutrient and koppafloc @ 10mins

No-Chill

Target OG 1.043

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I brewed this last night, having set the timer on my pot to have my water up to strike temp when I got home from work. Everything went quite smoothly until it was time to transfer to my cube - part of the no-chill process. I was using my oldest cube, and while sealing it up I felt a distinct warm sensation on my left foot. The cube had cracked about half way up one of the sides and wort was squirting out onto my shoe.

I've been brewing a lot lately and all of my other cubes were full. I made a snap decision to keg the Beamish I brewed last week and use its cube for the Bass. This made sense as the Beamish had finished fermenting within three days and is to be served as a 'real ale' on my handpump. I was aiming to turn the Beamish around quickly, though not as quickly as it ended up.

Having cleaned and sanitised the Beamish cube, I transferred the Bass clone from the leaking cube with the loss of about a litre or so of wort, not too bad and I should still be able to fill a keg with a little left over.

Fermentation for this one is:

0.5 packet of WY1028 London Ale into 500ml of wort
When finished transfer into 1.5L of wort
When at high krausen transfer to main batch.

I lost quite a bit of efficiency here, and my Ph was a bit low (5.3 at room temp). I suspect a relationship between those two things. I may need to adjust Ph up a bit when using so much sulphate in future. I still hit all of my numbers by judicious use of my refractometer.

Ah, Beamish!

I've got a significant birthday coming up soon, and it's tax back time in Australia, so I've gotten myself an early birthday present.

It's a beauty, an Angram CO, 1/2 pint jacketed beer engine. Something needs to be done about the Scrumpy jack clip, but otherwise it's in perfect working order and ready for action.

The first beer I'll be dispensing through this is a Beamish clone. I've brewed this before but there are some subtle changes this time round. First off I'm using Maris Otter as the base malt. I don't think Beamish is brewed using anything as fancy, so mine will be a sort of upmarket version. Also this time I'm using 'Pacman' yeast (Wyeast 1764). I wanted to use this last time but couldn't get my hands on it, so I'm looking forward to trying it out. The fermentation plan for this is: half pack of Pacman yeast in a 500ml starter (just to wake it up), followed by a 1.5L starter, then pitch to the main batch. I'll ferment at 17C, which is what a lot of homebrewers on homebrewtalk.com use for Pacman. I'm hoping to turn this around pretty quick, but that will depend on how it's tasting. Here's the recipe:

3.5kg Simpsons Ale - Maris Otter
0.25kg Simpsons Roast Barley
0.13kg Simpsons Chocolate
0.35kg Joe White/Maltcraft Malted Wheat


47g East Kent Goldings at 50mins

No chilled (poured into a water container and sealed, allowed to cool slowly)

In addition to my usual water treatment, I added a level teaspoon of baking soda to up the carbonate content a little (remember I'm on very soft water here). I did notice a certain harshness to the last batch of this I did, so I think this may help to soften it a bit.

I read a recent post on aussiehomebrewer.com where somebody reported better attenuation when using yeast nutrient. This would seem to be due to increased yeast health. I picked some up at the home brew shop and used it on this batch. The dose is a half teaspoon dissolved in hot water 10 minutes from the end of the boil. Apparently the Pacman is quite the attenuator, so I have to be careful not to over attenuate this one. I'll be keeping an eye on the mash temp (66C).

I found this beauty on youtube, "sound man Brendan!"

Next up is mounting the hand pump, should be fun!

Fullers ESB, and another element failure

I'm a regular listener to the brewing network's "Can you brew it" show with Jamil Zainasheff. I have a lot of time for Jamil, mostly because of his book "Brewing Classic Styles". Everything I've brewed from that book has been a complete success, and I've learned a hell of a lot just working through the recipes. "Can you brew it" provided the recipe for the Black Sheep Riggwelter I brewed quite a while back. This wasn't a complete success, mainly due to under-attenuating yeast which left me with a sickly sweet 1.018 FG. Still I could see that the recipe had the potential to be really good.

My next "Can you brew it" recipe is Fuller's ESB. There were actually a series of shows on Fuller's beers, and one conclusion the guys came to was that you need to do a parti-gyle brew, and stick to a somewhat anarchic fermentation schedule in order to accurately nail this beer.  I'm not going to go quite that far, although the "Brew in a bag" system is essentially a no-sparge technique, meaning that my wort will be similar to the first runnings from a parti-gyle. I have adjusted the numbers from the show a little, as I wanted a slightly lower OG - though increased efficiency means I ended up two points higher than I was aiming anyway. I have subbed some of the hops too, magnum for target for the bittering addition I don't think will hurt much. Subbing extra EKGs for challenger for the final hop addition will undoubtedly change the character of the beer, though I think the dry hopping will probably dominate over any potential changes from this.

I brewed this yesterday, and about 5 minutes after mashing out I had more element woes. No harm done but I how have a plug in RCD which is completely shot. I won't go into detail about this, but it meant I had to rip the insulation from my pot and carry it inside to my cook top. Luckily for me the big burner on our cook top is well able to get a rolling boil going with 26ish litres of wort, so the beer should turn out ok. 

Here's the recipe:

Recipe Specifics

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Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50

Total Grain (kg):         5.70

Anticipated OG:          1.056    Plato:             13.77

Anticipated EBC:          29.5

Anticipated IBU:          37.1

Brewhouse Efficiency:       70 %

Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes

Pre-Boil Amounts

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Evaporation Rate:      15.00    Percent Per Hour

Pre-Boil Wort Size:   26.47    L

Pre-Boil Gravity:      1.047    SG          11.79  Plato

Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential EBC

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 95.0     5.41 kg.  Pale Malt (Maris Otter)       UK             1.038      8

  5.0     0.29 kg.  Crystal 120L                  UK             1.033    317

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.

Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time

----------------------------------------------------------------

 20.00 g.     Magnum                Pellet  11.00  31.2  60 min.

 15.00 g.     Wye Northdown         Pellet   9.60   3.0  3 min.

 25.00 g.     East Kent Goldings    Pellet   4.3    2.8  3 min.

 21.00 g.     East Kent Goldings    Pellet   4.3    0.0  Dry Hop

Yeast

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WY1968 London ESB

Chilled to 20 degrees and pitched with a generous quantity of washed yeast from the Rebel rising brew (WY1968 London ESB). As mentioned before this ended up at 1.058 OG, meaning efficiency was really more like 73%. As I have been doing for other high OG beers, I did a mash out for 15mins at 75C. Mash temp was 64C to get the desired attenuation from the WY1968 yeast.

It's now in the fermenting fridge at 18C. I'll step this up to 20 over the next day or two and send it back down to 18 later on in the fermentation, somewhat mimicking the Fullers fermentation schedule.

Yesterday was meant to be a double brew day, with a Beamish clone being the second brew. The element blowing meant that this didn't happen so if I can get it fixed soon I'll be brewing up some Beamish later this week.

Kolsch fermentation

I've had some trouble with the Kolsch fermentation. It looks like I dramatically underpitched the recultured WLP029 yeast, resulting in an extremely slow ferment. A week after pitching the gravity was at 1.034, compared to 1.020 for the same timepoint on my last Kolsch (same recipe).

To see what I'm dealing with here I took 200ml from the fermenter and put it on a stir plate for a fast ferment test. While this was running I cultured up some more of this yeast, this time a stirred 500ml starter and pitched this. The fast ferment ended up at 1.009 after about 2.5 days. The main fermentation has now speeded up quite a bit, dropping from 1.032 to 1.020 in 2 days. Hydrometer samples are not tasting very good at the moment. This beer will be lagered for a month after fermentation, so it may clean up a bit during that time. I'm hopeful about this beer, though not very confident.

Rebel Rising Tasting

Rebel Rising Red

Update: 31-Aug
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This is almost gone, only a pint or two remaining. Over the past two weeks those strong dark flavours have started to mellow, and are now allowing a little of the spicy hop aroma through. It's finished up a wonderful brew, and as usual I'll be very sad to see the end of the keg. The changes I suggested will probably still be implemented next time round, just to compare and contrast, but this was by no means a 'miss'. In fact it's one of the beers I'm proudest of, having come up with the recipe myself.



Original Post
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So we're nearly four weeks in with this beer, and once again I haven't been able to leave it alone. I kegged this about 10 days ago and have been tasting every day since. I always find it fascinating to taste the dramatic flavour changes in my beer as it transitions through the conditioning phase. This one was severely lacking in mouthfeel and maltiness at first, but now has bucketloads of both. It's almost fun to start worrying about what looks like a bad beer, only for it to turn the corner to malty heaven.

My aim with this recipe was to have a go at creating a beer of my own, loosely based on the irish red ale style. I chose some of my favourite malts and hops, my favourite yeast, and put them together with some invert sugar to see what I could come up with. I gave the grist in weight in a previous post, but here it is in percentages:

Simpsons Maris Otter      83.1%
Simpsons Dark Crystal      7.1%
Simpsons Roast Barley      1.7%
Invert No. 2                        8.1%

I wish I had looked at this a bit more carefully before I started! Really I shouldn't have gone past 5% dark crystal. It's a malt I really love but it's flavours are quite intense (rum, raisin etc.), and it takes away from the sessionability of the beer. The invert no.2 is also adding flavours like this, and so some of the malt flavours become overpowering by pint number three.

Pints number one and two, however, are inspiring. This drinks really well, with a full mouthfeel and some interesting yeast derived flavours. The WY1968 has done a fantastic job here, and I will certainly stick with it for future versions. In the end it's the heavy dose of dark crystal which stops your session, which is a shame as making a really sessionable beer was one of the key aspirations for this brew. I'm relatively happy though, for a first go it's really good, and promising.

I think the following would make a good version 2:

Simpsons Maris Otter       84.7%
Simpsons Dark Crystal        3.5%
Simpsons Light Crystal        2.4%
Simpsons Roast Barley        1.2%
Invert No. 2                          8.2%

I have dialed back the roast barley a little. This is a colour consideration. Currently the colour is a deep ruby red, beautiful in it's own way but perhaps a tad darker than I was aiming for. Cutting back a little on the roast barley and dark crystal will cut about 10 EBCs and should result in a nice bright red.

On the hop front, I'm happy with the bitterness level, but I think I could aim a little higher with the aroma level (currently almost non-existent). I may consider trying cube hopping again with this one. Again I'm probably heading out of style, but who cares?

I'll be having another double brew day next Sunday, which will be a "Can you brew it" Fuller's ESB, and a Beamish. I've got a nice washed WY1968 yeastcake from this red ale for the ESB, and a recently procured packet of Pacman yeast for the Beamish.

The Path Is Clear

A few months back I mentioned that I was planning to start brewing lager. Even though I still haven't gotten around to doing it, the decision to start has actually been quite beneficial to my brewing knowledge. It has resulted in some experimentation which has greatly increased my knowledge of the finer points of the brewing process. The main aspects of brewing I have been studying up on recently are water chemistry and mash ph, which are of course very closely linked. My main sources of knowledge have been the braukeiser wiki and the "Key Concepts in Water Treatment" document by Tony Wheeler, available from here. I also purchased a Hanna pH meter, and have learned to calibrate it correctly (it helps that I work with lab people). Here are some key concepts i have come to terms with (all based on Melbourne water supply - largely lacking in all ions important to brewing, with addition of about 75ppm Calcium plus some other ions):

1. Mash pH varies quite considerably with grist composition - darker grists produce lower ph mashes
2.  Very light grists produce mashes with pH (far?) above the desirable range of 5.2-5.4 (My recent Kolsch)
3.  Average grists producing copper coloured mashes just about hit the pH 5.4 mark. (My recent APA)
4.  Not adding gypsum as part of calcuim addition negatively affects hop character in medium to highly hopped beers. (Harsh hop character in my Brakspear Special with no gypsum addition, did not seem to affect hop character of my Rebel Rising Red, which had moderate hop levels and also received no gypsum)

Extrapolating from 2&3 above, it's possible that very dark grists may cause the pH to drop below 5.2. Wheeler claims it's better to be too low than too high, so we'll have to wait and see if this is an issue or not. I've got a Beamish clone coming up soon that will test this out.

Based on these findings, this is what I aim to change from now on.

1.  Measure pH with well calibrated meter FOR ALL BREWS.
2.  Add lactic acid to mash water for lighter coloured grists to get pH level in desirable range.
3.  Add gypsum to bring SO4 ion level into the 100-150ppm range for all hoppy beers. I just did this with my American Pale Ale and I'm keen to see how it affects the hop character. I may push even higher for the sake of experiment later on.

I should explain that I have always treated my water with about 1.5tsp of Calcium Chloride and 1tsp gypsum, but never really tried to understand why I should do this. I had a vague (and correct) idea that I definitely needed to add Calcium to my water, but didn't know any more than that. In the end I convinced myself that gypsum probably wasn't that important, but the first hoppy beer of my production line where it wasn't used had a very noticeable harsh hop character. Perhaps from something else, but I will experiment to see if it is from lack of gypsum.