Some tasting

Kolsch II

I tasted this just after a Flensburger Pilsner, so it's interesting to pull out some of the contrasting tastes between a very clean pilsner and a relatively clean tasting kolsch.

Pours with a generous creamy white head, which dissipates and leaves no lacing. Pale coloured, though not quite as pale as the pilsner. Good level of carbonation for the style. Some very slight green apple (possibly acetaldehyde but slightly different I think). Other noticable 'white wine' type flavours. Little to no hop aroma on this one. Bitterness is clean and at an appropriate level for the style. Dry finish.

A good beer, reasonably well brewed. I am very sensitive to acetaldehyde and I think I can possibly detect it here, but only a very tiny amount. I've gotten this with both Kolsch yeasts I've used (WLP029 and WY2568), but with other yeasts any acetaldehyde tends to disappear with time.

I would like to see a better head and lacing on this and some of my other beers. I wonder if no-chilling influences this. I think I've noticed a correlation here, but I need to keep track of things a little better to know for sure.

Kolsch II

Brunswick Pride

This beer is almost simultaneously a triumph and a disaster. With eyes closed it is a really fine example of a drinkable, sessionable english bitter ale. However with eyes open it's a mess. It has a serious haze problem, which cold conditioning has had no effect on.

If you can recall the brewing notes on this one, the grain had been sitting in my garage crushed for 9 months before I got around to using it. A taste test seemed to confirm it was in reasonable condition, but I think it's extremely likely that it's the cause of this haze. I have found a few examples on homebrew forums where brewers found the same haze problem with very old grain. I don't know how to explain this scientifically, but empirically there does appear to be a strong connection.

This is a shame, as usually any beers I ferment with WY1968 are extremely bright. Also I place a lot of importance on having my beer reasonably bright, and this haze is annoying me. Still, it's a really nice beer to drink, so not a total mess.

Got down to an FG of 1.012 on this, so I think the O2 injection at yeast pitching time is having the desired effect. Also this beer was ready to drink (tastewise) a little quicker than I would have expected. I think I'm sold on O2 for aeration.

Dead Guy Clone

This beer had me very confused for a while. Kegged after 3 weeks, I tasted it quite regularly over the following three weeks. It began with some harsh phenolic type notes, little to no hop character, poured with no head, and displayed a slight haze. This changed slowly at first and then rapidly to a beer with beautiful toasty, buiscuity notes and a spicy hop character. The rapid change seemed to coincide with the haze disappearing, so I think perhaps some of the particulate in suspension was causing the phenolic type tastes.

Dead Guy Clone

Dead Guy Clone

Unfortunately, the balance of this beer was off by a little, missing perhaps 10 IBUs of bitterness. Also it would have benefited from a little more late hop character. I can't blame the recipe for this, as the hops I used were lacking in AA% and my attempts to make up for this on the day with some high AA% hops I had stored were unsuccessful. This was probably due to the age of the high AA% hops.

Kolsch (again)

I saved the yeast from my last batch of Kolsch, and given the time of year I though I'd get another one on asap to deal with visitors. This is a beer I don't mind drinking, but not a favourite by any means. All the same, it requires a certain amount of skill to come up with a very pale, clean tasting beer, with no-where to hide in terms of fermentation issues etc.

An early tasting of the previous batch

I decided to change the recipe a little, based on a Jamil recipe from a Kolsch article of his in a 2009 issue of BYO magazine. This is just Pilsner malt and wheat malt in a 95/5 ratio. I had planned to go with Hallertau hops, but my brew shop was all out, so I went with Spalt. This is a hop which many people report as having quite an odd flavour profile. I'm interested to see what it's like in the finished beer.

Mashing was at 65 for 50 mins (recirculated through HEX), then mash out at 75 for 10. I no-chilled this beer. One unusual thing about my brewing setup is that I never measure volumes, just guess based on experience how much water/wort I've got at each point. This has never let me down before, but on this brew I ended up with 22.5L of 1.044 wort instead of 20L of 1.049 (after trub losses). This is actually quite a mess up, and is a bit of a wake up call for me, I need to sort out my volume measurements.

Anyhow, here's the recipe:

4.72KG Joe White Pilsner Malt
0.25KG Joe White Wheat Malt

30g 4.75%AA Spalt hops @50
10g 4.75%AA Spalt hops @10

whirlpooled for 20, then no-chilled.

This will stay in the no-chill cube until the London Pride clone is done fermenting, then I'll pitch some WY2565 slurry to this and ferment at 16 (one degree lower than the last batch). I'll also give it a blast of O2 and try to dry it out a little. The previous batch is not quite dry enough based on early tastings.

Kolsch

I have been brewing lately, but not blogging about it. I'll try to keep this a little more up to date.

Decided to brew something light and inoffensive for Christmas, as I have family visiting who are not especially in love with big hoppy brews. This is from Brewing Classic Styles and I've brewed it twice before, though I used the White Labs yeast both times, here I'm using WY2565. Wyeast is very easy for me to get, but white labs is a pain to get hold of. My former source in New South Wales is now out of business and I don't think I'll bother finding a new one.

The grain bill and hop schedule are both very simple. Unfortunately I only realised when I got home from the brew shop that my Hersbrucker hops were 1.8% AA. This was about half what I expected so I threw in a small amount of nugget to bump up the IBUs to something reasonable.

I recirculated this mash at 65C for 60 minutes, then did a rest at 72C for 20 minutes. I no-chilled this and took a 2L starter to which I pitched a full packet of WY2565. About 18 hours later I pitched this into the full batch at 17C. 12 hours later (this morning) I had noticeable activity.

Here's the recipe:


Grain/Extract/Sugar

   %     Amount     Name                          Origin        Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 95.4     4.67 kg.  Pilsener                        Germany        1.037      1
  4.6     0.23 kg.  Vienna Malt                   Germany        1.036      4

Potential represented as SG per pound per gallon.


Hops

   Amount     Name                              Form    Alpha  IBU  Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 40.00 g.    Hersbrucker                   Pellet   1.80  10.6  70 min.
  6.00 g.     Nugget                            Pellet  13.00  11.5  70 min.


WYeast WY2565 Kölsch