Brakspear Special Tasting

Final Update 10.08.12:

I finished this keg last night. Things I have learned:

1. I need to give my beers more time, 2 weeks from yeast pitch is not realistic for 4.5%abv beers. This beer got much better towards the end (finished keg after 30days from yeast pitch)
2. I need more than 113g of specialty malts when using highly attenuating yeast like WY1275, this beer ended up very dry with little 'maltiness'
3. Following from 2 above; underattenuation, something that's cursed my brewing since day one, is actually a lot easier to deal with than overattenuation, and underattenuated beer tastes a lot better than overattenuated. 
3. Attempts at fancy ways of capturing late hop character in no-chill beers have been largely unsuccessful. Better to stick to the obvious - a slightly increased dose of hops at flameout, whirlpool, then leave them behind in the kettle.
4. Invert no. 1 is highly fermentable, if you use it don't depend on it to impart much flavour.
5. Don't neglect gypsum. I had convinced myself it was having little impact on my beers, and didn't use it here. The result was quite a harsh hop character. Gypsum seems to help soften the hop bitterness.

So there you go. I learned a hell of a lot on this beer. It is far from the best beer I've ever made (in fact it may have been the worst), but it was well worth any effort and will make me a much better brewer I am sure.

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

Update 6.08.10:

I'm writing this another week on, so the beer is almost 4 weeks since yeast pitching old. The unpleasant yeast character I mentioned last week has completely disappeared, though there is still the faintest hint of acetaldehyde. This beer has really improved, and I think it will continue to improve if I can stop drinking it. One thing I would consider changing is the bittering level, it is quite unbalanced in my opinion, and I would drop the IBUs by at least 5 or maybe up to 10. I may be tempted to give the WY1275 another chance if something suitable comes up.

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

 Original post:

I've had this on tap for nearly a week, but a slight acetaldehyde issue prevented me from giving it a proper test until now.

It pours quite clear, with a straw gold colour. The first thing you notice here is the hop character, both the overall bitterness and the pleasant styrian goldings aroma. It is quite bitter at 42IBUs, much more so than any English style bitter I've made before.

Unfortunately this beer has what I call the 's-04 tang'. This is a kind of faint peppery yoghurt aftertaste which a lot of people notice when using Safale S-04 dry ale yeast. I had this issue with the session bitter I brewed a while back with this same yeast (WY1275 Thames Valley), so along with S-04, WY1098 and WY1099, I'll be adding WY1275 to the list of yeasts I will no longer use. I have read that certain fermentation regimes can increase or decrease this yeast characteristic, but I'm not prepared to look into it any further, as I can't see any characteristics that this yeast brings that is worth striving for. Here's a mention of it at perfectpint. Will seems to think it might be from underpitching or too warm a fermentation, but I don't think either of those were an issue for me this time around.

Aside from the 'S-04 tang', there is a distinct mineral character which interplays with the bitterness. As with the session bitter I find that this works quite well with food, but less well when drunk on it's own.

Overall this is a drinkable beer, but far from memorable.

Next up is my rebel red, currently at 1.016 and dropping. Fermenter samples are quite promising, though I think I may be well off the mark in terms of cloning rebel red. That wasn't really what I was aiming for this time, so it doesn't really matter. The reason for this is of course the yeast - WY1968. I'm quickly finding that the English yeasts I have used over the past year all seem to dominate the flavour profile of the beers they ferment.

I'm tempted to think that it is likely that two beers made from completely different worts, but fermented with the same English yeast, would in some ways have more in common than two beers from the same wort fermented with different English yeasts. Perhaps an experiment is due!

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!)

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.