Landlord and Session Bitter updates

I now have both the Landlord and Session bitter on tap. I guess it's time to report on them. Let's start with the session bitter.

First off, let me say that this is exactly what it's supposed to be - a session beer. It can be drunk in quantity without tiring the palate or becoming overpowering. There is a subtle malt backbone, which I think come's more from the maris otter backbone than the victory malt. The hop aroma is quite subdued too, and I may need to look at how I dry hop as it seems to have made little difference to the beer based on earlier fermenter samples. Certainly there is a detectable late hop aroma from my 'method argonoise' experiment, and this was present too in fermenter samples. This is a recipe I will return to, though I will modify it and play with it to see what else I can tease from it. A negative is the yeast character. I'm not crazy about what the wy1275 brings to the beer. On it's own, the beer is quite pleasing, but when I've had it with certain types of food (spicy in particular), there's a sort of mineral character I don't care for.

session bitter

The Landlord is a triumph - there's no other word for it. My housemates remarked on brew day just how good the mash smelled. Very early fermenter samples were sublime - and indeed fermenter samples were taken quite frequently I was enjoying them so much. Luckily I still had enough beer left to fill the corny. The final product is just wonderful. I have to admit that I have never before used Golden Promise, thinking that any difference between it and Maris Otter wouldn't be worth mentioning, but I was wrong. The malt flavour in this is just spot on for Landlord, and must be derived from the malt, with Golden Promise forming 97% of the grain bill. It's the interplay between that malty backbone and the beautiful hop character that sets this apart. If you have ever eaten pure heather honey, the delicate floral character of this beer is quite similar. I'm also impressed with how much other people have liked this beer. It's a beer with serious flavour, and I don't think the lager boys would be too impressed with it. I can only assume that most of my friends are now firmly on the craft beer bandwagon here in Melbourne, and can take strong flavours and aromas. There will be tears when this keg runs dry.

landlord (with stephen fry in the background!)

Epic Pale Ale

I decided to do another "Can you brew it" recipe, this time the cloned "Epic Pale Ale" from New Zealand. The recipe is quite interesting, using Golden Promise in an American pale ale style beer. After the success of the Landlord clone I did with Golden Promise I'm quite keen to use it again to try and get used to it. I have had Epic quite a few times, and it's a really pleasant beer with a big up front hoppiness.

Here's the recipe:

Epic Pale Ale

A ProMash Recipe Report

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

Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50
Total Grain (kg):         5.16
Anticipated OG:          1.052    Plato:             12.93
Anticipated SRM:           6.0
Anticipated IBU:          22.2
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 79.8     4.12 kg.  Pale Malt (Golden Promise)    UK             1.037      2
 10.2     0.53 kg.  Carahell Malt                 Germany        1.034     11
  3.3     0.17 kg.  CaraPils                      Germany        1.033      2
  6.7     0.34 kg.  CaraRed                       Germany        1.035     20

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 12.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.50   7.6  60 min.
 18.40 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.50   7.5  30 min.
 45.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.50   7.2  10 min.
 50.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.50   0.0  0 min.
 50.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.50   0.0  0 min. (after 10 min whirlpool)
 65.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.50   0.0  Dry Hop (at ferment temp)
 65.00 g.     Cascade                           Pellet   5.50   0.0  Dry Hop (cold)


Yeast
-----
 Wyeast 1272 American Ale II

As you can see, this beer takes a bucketload of hops, all cascade. Fortunately I had half a kilo which needed a home. Today also marked my first go at recirculating the mash. I hooked up my new control panel to an electric kettle with a small stainless steel coil in it through which the mash was recirculated. For now let's just say it went well and I was pretty happy with the system. A full report with pics etc, will follow when I get things dialled in a bit more.

I estimated an efficiency of 75%, but ended up with only 72%, so I'm two points off my intended original gravity. Hopefully this won't hurt the beer too much. Brew in a bag is essentially a 'no-sparge' technique, so it's difficult to break through the 75% mark, and that gets more difficult the higher the OG (or grain to water ratio). I expect to get a more consistent and higher efficiency once I start sparging.

Here's a picture of the organised chaos. The laptop was monitoring temperature readings as I don't have any displays on the control panel yet.

Forgot two things today, I should have done a mashout step, as I was keen to see how my little heat exchanger would handle it, and also I forgot to add koppafloc in the last 10 minutes. BIAB does result in pretty cloudy wort, so kettle finings are important, but I think extended cold conditioning helps with clearing, and I need to do that with this beer anyway for the dry hopping schedule.

Finally, my element blew just at the end of the boil. There has been some chatter on aussiehomebrewer.com about these elements, but mine looked in good condition so I was pretty surprised that it went. The insulation melted where the wire joins the body and the live and neutral touched. I was in the kitchen when it happened and the bang was pretty loud even from there. Scary. I'll have to figure out a replacement before the next brew day.

Keezer, control panel, new HLT

I've been keeping myself busy lately with my new brewery, and I finally finished off my keg freezer. I started this back in February, and up till now I had been using a beer gun to dispense. I finally got hold of some beautiful new perlick 525ss taps and shanks, and got these mounted at the weekend. Already I'm thinking about adding another tap, but that will have to wait a while. This has really changed my brewing, as getting rid of bottles has freed up about 50% of the time I dedicate to brewing, meaning I brew about twice as often as I used to.

My new taps!

 Also late last week I got hold of this keg from eBay. It's an old stainless steel keg, and quite a bit bigger than the standard 50L kegs you see most of the time around here. I'm trying to build in the capacity to get 2 19L kegs filled from one brew. I think this may work well as a Hot Liqour Tank for the new brewery. It will probably start out as a 2 vessel brewery, using my current BIAB pot to do both the mash and the boil.

Finally I should show some updates on my control panel. I've got most of it wired up now, and can control one element and one pump with it. I still don't have PID control of the element built in, for now it just switches off near the desired temp. I haven't wired up a display yet either. I'd like to use 7 segment displays for set temperature and mash temperature, but they are a bit of a pain to get mounted and wired. I may just go with an LCD of some sort. For now I'll just monitor from an old laptop.

Black Sheep Riggwelter

I managed to top crop quite a lot of yeast from the recent Landlord brew, so I thought I might put it to good use on a strong ale. I'm a pretty keen listener to the "Can You Brew It" show on the brewing network. In each episode show Jamil Zainasheff and his co-hosts attempt to clone a commercial beer. Despite my interest in the show, I haven't up to this point attempted any of the recipes they have come up with. I think this is probably because many of the recipes are for relatively strong beers with high original gravity. Unfortunately this doesn't agree very well with both my personal taste (I like to drink more than one a few pints at a time) and my equipment (Brew in a bag can become quite inefficient at higher OG). Because I'm just about to start upgrading the brewery quite a bit, introducing mash recirculation and other stuff, I thought I might push my current system to the limit and try to do a big beer.

Paul Theakston, Founder of The Black Sheep Brewery

Quite a while back I listened to the "Riggwelter" Can you brew it episode. For those who don't know, Black Sheep is quite a unique brewery. Though quite young, it occupies an interesting space between English microbrewers and larger brewers. The owner, Paul Theakston, is one of the famous Theakston brewing family. He decided to start his own brewery in Masham after the sale of Theakston's brewery in the late 80's by his family. This means that it is both a young innovative brewery, and yet is steeped in tradition. As an example, the brewery has several slate 'Yorkshire square' fermenting vessels, and exclusively uses top cropped multi-strain yeast from their own Yorkshire square system.

Modern 'Yorkshire Squares" at Black Sheep

Black Sheep Riggwelter is a strong ale, coming in at about 6% a.b.v. The
'Can you brew it" episode mentioned above features an interview with the head brewer in which he outlines most of the ingredients and techniques used in it's creation. The only slightly odd ingredient is a very tiny portion of roasted barley. I decided to leave this out as I didn't fancy asking my local home brew shop to add 1g of it to my grain bag order! The recipe which 'Tasty' McDole came up with on 'Can you brew it' is listed here on homebrewtalk.com. Mine is slightly adjusted for different efficiency and hop IBUs.

Black Sheep Riggwelter

A ProMash Recipe Report

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

Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50
Total Grain (kg):         5.57
Anticipated OG:          1.055    Plato:             13.67
Anticipated EBC:          47.8
Anticipated IBU:          36.0
Brewhouse Efficiency:       72 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential EBC
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 80.1     4.46 kg.  Pale Malt (Maris Otter)       UK             1.038      8
  8.9     0.50 kg.  Flaked Soft White Wheat       USA            1.034      4
  6.0     0.34 kg.  Crystal 80L                   USA            1.033    211
  5.0     0.28 kg.  Chocolate Pale Malt           UK             1.036    595

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 60.00 g.     East Kent Goldings                Pellet   4.30  36.7  60 min.
 25.00 g.     East Kent Goldings                Pellet   4.30   0.0  0 min.


Yeast
-----

To up my efficiency a bit I did quite a bit of mash stirring and also did a mash out, neither of which I normally bother with. A dunk sparge or something of that type would have helped too, but I didn't get round to it. I'm starting to realise that chilling is not all it's cracked up to be. It might make better beer (in certain cases) but it sure lengthens the brew day. By the time I had mounted it, hooked it up, flushed it and then figured out what was causing a big blockage (it was air), I had wasted a good hour or two. I am still learning on the job when it comes to pumps and brewery plumbing, and I think my issues today were mostly caused by having the plate chiller mounted at the same level as the pump. Next time the pump will be at the lowest point in the brewery, and I will keep the system primed with starsan until I need it. I ended up with only around 18L in my fermenter this time round. I'm losing about 3L to trub and hoses/chiller. I don't have a pickup tube on my kettle outlet, so I may look into doing something with this. I did try to strain the trub yesterday just to see how thick it is, and I could barely get any liquid through a regular baking sieve, so I'm probably recovering as much liquid as I am going to. Whirlpooling is hampered by the electric element protruding from the side of the kettle, though I do get a reasonable cone in the center.

In a way I'm actually quite pleased with how things went, as I adjusted my recipe to a 72% mash efficiency based on previous experience. I hit it pretty much bang on. My only mistake was underestimating losses to trub. At this OG and with BIAB I'm right at the limit of what I can produce while still getting a full 19L of beer for my corny kegs. As I move to more vessels I should have more flexibility in this regard.

The "Barkly Union" system

Here's what I'm calling my "Barkly union system" (I live on barkly street - get it?). I put this together because I got sick of cleaning up when my krausen overflowed the fermenter in my fermenting fridge. In the shop bottle is sterile water. This is the second time I've used this, the first being on the Landlord (which is nearly ready, watch this space). As I had hoped, it produced about 250ml of very clean yeast which has now been pitched to this batch. I'm hoping I might get some yeast from this too, but there is far more headspace so it may not happen. I'll just wash the yeast cake if I don't get a top crop. I think I'll just keep brewing something with the WY1469 every month or so if I can. It has produced some wonderful beers for me in the past, and they keep getting better!

Two new (commercial) beers

For the first time in a while I had a new beer which I really really liked on Friday night last, and then another on Saturday! It's not unusual for me to try new beer, in fact there's hardly a week goes by without me trying something, but it is rare for me to find something that makes a big impression.

The first was Stone and Wood "Jasper". It's no secret to my friends that I absolutely detest Stone and Wood "Pacific Ale", which is consistently voted as one of the top Australian beers. To me it tastes of concentrated cat piss, and I can't stomach it at all. The fuss about this beer genuinely mystifies me, and actually kind of worries me as I know I'm completely in the minority with my view.
Interestingly I've recently noticed that one of my favourite beers, Hargreaves Hill ESB, has a very similar taste/aroma profile. The only difference is perhaps a little less intensity of hop character, and a lot more bitterness. Perhaps I'm just a little more sensitive than normal to one of the flavour compounds or something.

 Anyhow, enough about the Pacific Ale, onto the Jasper. It pours a deep ruby red to brown, and my first thought upon sipping it was "Hobgoblin!". It has that subtly caramel/candy flavour you get from Wychwood Hobgoblin, and a nice balance with the bitter. This caught me by surprise as I assumed it would be another hop monster, but it's actually a beautifully balanced brown ale type beer. I haven't heard a whole lot about it, so I don't know what it's supposed to be. In fact, I'm not really sure what Hobgoblin is supposed to be either, an English brown ale I suppose. Whatever it is it's a damn fine beer, and one I will be drinking again.

The second beer I discovered this weekend was actually another brown - Mornington Brown Ale. I had tried their Pale ale before, and while pleasant it wasn't particularly memorable. The Brown is a fine beer. Again if I might be allowed to compare to a commercial beer, it's reminiscent of Samuel Smith's Tadcaster. There's a hint of banana on the nose, and it's balanced to the sweet side, though without becoming cloying. It's a rich, satisfying and complex beer, and after three (schooners, as the pub pretentious drinking establishment I was in only does massively overpriced schooners), I had my fill. I'll be back for more though!

New brewstand

I have finally finished painting my new brew stand. It's a collapsible structure designed for easy storage. I've still got to figure out some way of mounting my new chiller to it. I got this built through a recommendation on http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com. I'm really happy with it as it gives me something to build around, and doesn't take up too much space to keep everyone else happy.

Landlord

I can remember quite vividly the first pint of Landlord I ever drank. I was in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne for the weekend with my girlfriend and another couple. Not knowing Joe all that well, the girls suggested we head for a pint while they went shopping. We found a dingy pub upstairs over a shop, and both ordered our first ever pints of cask ale. By some miracle it just happened to be Timothy Taylor Landlord. It was an extraordinarily fine pint of beer. As a stout drinker from Ireland, lightly carbonated cellar temperature beer wasn't the huge jump in beer drinking experience it might have been for some. I think we had one or two more before Joe rang the girls to ask for more time, which was duely granted. We ended up more than slightly tipsy on a Friday evening at about 5 O'Clock. Nice.

I was lucky enough to find it in one or two pubs in London a couple of years later, and again it made a huge impression on me. Cask Landlord is the kind of beer craft brewers should be aiming to make. First and foremost it's drinkable, as my mother would say "There's a taste of more off it". This drinkability comes from a perfect balance. You can taste everything that's gone into the making of Landlord, but nothing dominates. It has a gentle yeast character, beautiful styrian golding aroma, nutty maltiness.

Unfortunately I have not been able to source a decent bottle of Landlord anywhere here in Australia. Every example I have tried has been badly oxidised with zero hop character, as well as costing a small fortune. As a moderate alcohol, relatively moderately hopped beer (well compared to some hop monsters anyway), I suppose it was never going to travel very well. There's only one solution available to satisfy my thirst - brew it!

Luckily I'm not alone in my Landlord obsession. It's got to be one of the most talked about beers on UK and Aussie homebrew forums. In particular Dr Smurto's Landlord on Aussiehomebrewer is frequently mentioned as a particularly tasty clone. My only worry with these clones is what people are aiming to clone. In this case is it fresh Landlord on cask? Is it 4 month old multiple heat/cool cycled bottled examples such as the one I paid $14 for a couple of weeks ago in a Brunswick establishment which thinks it's god's gift to beer?

Fermenter samples of the session bitter are a bit inconclusive on the late hop character. Unfortunately the WY1275 has been pretty slow for an English ale yeast, it's now at 1.025 after 6 days. Not that slow, but slower than I expected. I'm not yet ready to say if the 'method argonoise' from aussiehomebrewer is a good option for me when looking for that late hop character with no-chill, we'll just have to wait and see.

Of course the obvious solution to capturing late hop character is chilling - and at last this is an option for me! I dislike half baked solutions, so I decided to wait until I had all the bits and pieces I needed to plumb in a plate chiller before buying one. It's not just about the chilling, you need to be able to clean the things properly too. Backflushing with a pump being the optimal solution. Anyhow, it's fitting that my first beer through the plate chiller should be one of my all time favourites.

Plate chiller ready for action. It may be plumbed in but it's not properly mounted - to do!

Here's the recipe.

Dr Smurtos Landlord

A ProMash Recipe Report

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

Batch Size (L):          22.50    Wort Size (L):     22.50
Total Grain (kg):         4.36
Anticipated OG:          1.045    Plato:             11.14
Anticipated EBC:          12.9
Anticipated IBU:          29.7
Brewhouse Efficiency:       75 %
Wort Boil Time:             60    Minutes


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential EBC
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 96.4     4.20 kg.  Pale Malt (Golden Promise)    UK             1.037      4
  3.6     0.16 kg.  Crystal 60L                   UK             1.035    158

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 42.00 g.     Fuggle                            Pellet   4.00  24.5  60 min.
 21.00 g.     Goldings - E.K.                   Pellet   5.00   5.2  20 min.
 31.50 g.     Styrian Goldings                  Pellet   5.25   0.0  0 min.


Yeast
-----

WYeast 1469 West Yorkshire


Yeast choice is pretty straightforward here. 1469 is the closest you're going to find to Timothy Taylor, and I had about 60ml thick slurry of washed yeast from a very recent brew.

Malts for this one are Simpsons Golden promise and Simpsons Crystal (medium). Both the mash and the wort smelled amazing this morning. Bodes well for the finished product.

Plate chilling went quite well. The only issue was cheap K-mart water hose female connectors, which didn't match well with the male connectors I bought with the chiller. That will be fixed for the next time.

Brewery Build Progress 1

I've been slowly gathering bits and pieces for my updated brewery. Most of this is just electronic gadgetry, though I have now started getting some plumbing gear too. A box of stainless goodies arrived on Friday, so I thought it was finally time to get myself the plate chiller I've been planning to get. Here's what I've gathered so far

I'll be using an arduino mega for the brains of the operation. That's still wrapped in plastic though, so I'm using an old uno to prototype the various bits and pieces.

First pass through with the chiller will be this weekend, watch this space.