One Solera, 2 Beers

Brewing a refill for
the LHBG solera.

Over the past 5 years I've maintained a series of solera's - two at home which, sadly, after 3 years of successful operation died to a bit of neglect on my part. The third belongs to my brew club, for whom I manage the solera. Starting this winter I am planning on a series of posts and videos about solera brewing, but as a bit of a prequel, I thought I'd share a brief post on by brew clubs solera (LHGB Solera) and two beers I prepared from the first pull out of it.

Firstly, for those of you who don't know, a solera is a method of continually producing sour beer. For a sour beer solera, a fermenter (often a large barrel) is filled with beer and allowed to ferment and age. At a set interval (usually between 6 months and 1 year) a portion of the solera is removed and bottled, and the solera topped off with fresh beer. Over time the effective age of the beer in the solera will approach a average age which will then be retained for the remainder of the solera's lifespan. For example, for the LHBG Solera, we remove half the beer every nine months, leading to a beer which will eventually converge on an effective age of 1.5 years. How effective ages are calculated, managing a solera, and other topics, will be the subject of some future posts.

The LHBG solera has been designed to be a middle-of-the-road sour beer; modest funk and restrained sourness. The beer is ~5% ABV, 50:50 mix of pilsner and wheat malt, and 10IBUs. This recipe was selected for a few reasons - the beer is aging in a white wine barrel, and this lighter tasting beer should allow for that character to shine through. Secondly, it allows members of the brew club a lot of flexibility in turning their share into something unique, through adding fruit, spices, or blending with other beers.

Refiling the LHGB solera.

The first time the solera was filled we brewed the beer on the personal brewing equipment of 10 volunteers, which was then pooled into the solera. The logistics of this wasn't trivial, leading our club to decide to build a large brew-rig to fill barrels (we have two at this time). Construction took a lot longer than expected (18 months), which was a happy mistake as it gave the beer a good bit of age on it, and got us to a point where we would have a solera with a stable effective age of 1.5 years. The first beer from the solera was a little more acidic than planned, and lacked brett character, so we tweaked the refill recipe to adjust. IBU's were increased to suppress sourness, performed a ferulic acid rest and fermented with a Belgian yeast to increase brett character, and finally, we added another sour culture to the mix to try and bring out a bit more complexity in the beer. These adjustments highlight the power of a solera - you can tweak a sour beer as it ages, to get a desired and consistent product.

Pellicle on the LHBG solera, as viewed during the refill.

A little over a month ago we "withdrew" the first beer from the LHGB solera, and shared the beer among interested club members. I am moving in the very near future, and has such had to do something quick with my share, as moving some carboys of sour beer are not really an option. Half of my share I bottled straight-up. The second half I put on some hibiscus for a week, whose fruit character should complement the sour beer nicely. The beer was bottled using sugar and champagne yeast, and left to carbonate for the past 6 weeks.

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Straight Sour

Appearance: The unmodified (straight) sour beer pours with a thin and short-lived head. Body is golden in colour with a slight haze and a nice effervescence.

Aroma: Aroma is lactic with a notable white-wine note. Missing from the aroma is any hint of funk - no mustiness, leather or barnyard to be found.

Flavour: Up-front is a strong lactic tartness and a modest white wine character. Behind this is a bit of a bready malt character and a touch of hop bitterness. The flavours are a little unbalanced - the acidity is too high given the lighter nature of the beer, and this acts to hide both the wine and malt character. There is no brett funk at all in the flavour. There is also a slight off-flavour on the after taste; a touch of diacetyl which leaves a bit of butteriness on the aftertaste.

Mouthfeel: Acidic, crisp and dry. Aftertaste is a lingering acidity in the back of the throat, and a bit of a buttery sweetness.

Overall: Not bad for the first pull from a solera, as there has been no chances to correct for flaws yet, but still in need of improvement. Good news is that all the flaws are correctable, and on the re-fill we modified the recipe to give more brett character (which should also clean up the diacetyl) and to suppress the lacto to make it less acidic. I'm stuck with my share as-is, but if I had the time I'd blend this beer with a saison to cut the acidity, add some funk, while still allowing the white wine character to shine though.

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Hibiscus Version

The choice to add hibiscus was based on a few factors. The first was speed - hibiscus was something I could add and bottle on time for our big move. The second was balance - hibiscus adds a sensation of sweetness (although not actual sugars) which can help to counteract the acidity of the beer. Finally, its floral/fruity flavour should complement the white wine character of the beer nicely.

Appearance: Strawberry-red, with a touch of haze. Unlike the straight solera beer, this one has some additional head retention, with a modest white head that lasts for a couple of minutes.

Aroma: Remarkable similar to the unmodified version; acidic with a touch of white wine. The aroma is perhaps a touch more fruity than the unmodified version, but only slightly so.

Flavour: This is where the big difference is. While still acidic, there is enough "sweetness" from the hibiscus to counter-act it somewhat. It is still a very sour beer, but is less harsh and better balanced than the unmodified version. This helps to bring out the white wine character, with the hibiscus acting to accentuate the berry character of the wine rather than acting as its own flavour. And while I know this is purely perceptive, I cannot detect the diacetyl note that is present in the unmodified version.

Mouthfeel: Dry, crisp and acidic. Despite the less acidic taste on the tongue, the beer still gives a lingering acidic burn in the throat. Aftertaste is an acidic berry character.

Overall: The hibiscus makes this a more balanced beer than the unmodified version, but as with the unmodified form, this one too has some flaws that will be corrected by adjustments to the solera's recipe.

Adam's Pale Ale (an APA...get it?)

I've done a poor job of blogging recently, so here's my first attempt to getting back on track. Back in February I helped a friend (Adam) learn to brew on my system. This beer was designed with his tastes in mind - hoppy but not too bitter. A classical-ish American-style Pale Ale...an Adam's Pale Ale...an APA (get it, that's a beer "joke", or maybe a dad "joke"...regardless, its some sort of a joke, I swear).

Appearance: Golden with a modest white head. Sightly cloudy, although not as cloudy as it appears in the picture.

Aroma: Peaches. Lots and lots of ripe peaches...but there are no peaches in this beer.

Flavour: Overall I am happy with this flavour, although I would tweak the balance of flavours if I rebrew this beer. Upfront is a fruity hop character with a slight catty bite - courtesy of the large late addition and dry-hopping with Amarillo and Simcoe hops. Behind this was a slightly sweet, but otherwise fairly neutral, malt backbone. The hop bitterness was low - to my tastes a little too low to properly balance out the malty sweetness and hop fruitiness. Either a lower mash temp, or drawing back on the Munich malt, would give a more pleasant balance of flavours.

Mouthfeel: Modest body, accentuated by a lower level of carbonation, made for a creamy feel to the beer. Aftertaste was malt-sweetness and hop fruitiness. No lingering bitterness what-so-ever in the aftertaste.

Overall: A pretty good beer. The balance of sweet and bitter is a bit more towards the sweet than I would prefer, but its easy-drinking, hop-forward and delicious - just what Adam ordered.

Recipe below the fold.

The Power of Staged Fermentation - Sour Grapes

Progression of the beer from: Day of grape addition (left) to 4 months later in the glass (right)

I am a bit of an experimentalist at heart, and one area in which I do a lot of "experimental" brews is using the staged addition of pure cultures of wild or commercial yeasts & bugs, pitched at varying times, to produce unique sour beers that cannot be produced through conventional brewing techniques. I've made beers with similar complexity to classical sour beers using staged-addition of bugs, but that's not what this post is about. Rather, this post is about using these methods to make good beer from difficult ingredients. In this case, wild grapes.

Wild grapes are pretty common place across North America, and they come in two "flavours" - European wine grapes that have escaped the vineyard and native species of grapes. Wild European grapes are pretty similar to the grapes you buy in the grocery store, and can be used as would any other wine grape in sour beer brewing. Truly wild grapes are another beast. In fact, my first attempt to brew with these turned a rather lacklustre 2-year old golden sour into an unpalatable mess. Thankfully I only added grapes to one gallon of that beer, and rescued the rest with a more classical cherry addition! There have been attempts since, and none (until now) were worth writing about.

There are nearly 70 species of wild grapes native to North America, so I'm not sure how true the following statements will be for brewers in other regions of N. America (or elsewhere), but for people in Ontario and the north-eastern US, this should be relatively accurate. The three species of wild grape native to my area (Vitis riparia, V. aestivalis and V. labrusca) are quite different from their European cousins. These grapes are much more intense than their European cousins; while the juice of European varieties are generally used to make wine undiluted, our local wild grapes need to have their juice diluted between 1:2 and 1:5 to produce a wine with a tolerable taste. The grapes themselves are quite small (0.5 cm diameter or smaller), have a very thick and tannic skin, have a much higher malic acid content, and have a much larger seed portion (relative to the amount of fruit) compared to their European cousins. And it is those characteristics that make them hard to incorporate into sour beer - essentially, enough grapes to give a nice grape flavour also imparts a lot of tannins, malic acid and grape-seed character.

Tannins are astringent and drying, and while nice in small amounts, they can quickly become overwhelming and unpleasant. Indeed, tannins are often made by plants for the purpose of deterring animals from eating the plant - the term "tannin" comes from their ability to tan leather, so you can imagine how excess amounts make your mouth feel. Malic acid is also quite harsh - almost as harsh as acetic acid - and like tannins can be pleasant in small amounts but becomes harsh and overwhelming quite easily. The seeds of grapes are also problematic - they contain some earthy and woody flavours that are pleasant, but the high seed content of wild grapes means these characters can be somewhat strong, and in my experience, clash with brett phenolics.

My attempts at using these grapes in conventional sours failed because of these characteristics - the malic acid would make an already acidic beer far too acidic and harsh, the seed character would amp up the funk, which in turn clashed with the high levels of tannins. Even pressing the grapes for juice doesn't solve these issues (aside from the grape seed flavour) to any meaningful extent. But where traditional sour brewing methods failed, "experimental" methods succeeded.

More Below the Fold

Mike's Export - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Glass of export in the
winter sunset

As readers of my blog may know, I occasionally brew with 'Mike' - my wife's uncle. Mike is a BMC lager fan who also doesn't mind some forms of craft beer. Brewing with him has been an adventure on my end, as its forced me to explore some of the lighter ale and lager styles I normally wouldn't brew - and in doing so, I've become rather enamoured with some of the maltier German lagers.

While leads me to today's post/beer, a Dortmunder-style lager ('German Helles Exporbier' in the new style guidelines) that Mike and I brewed a little over a month ago. I brewed this beer using the fast-lager method I've developed (based on Brulosophy work) over the past year, using another vial of the W34/70 frozen down in my "Freezing Yeast" video. The "warm lager" method I've settled on works as follows:

1. Pitch a healthy dose of a warm-lager-comparable (e.g. W34/70) lager yeast into cellar-temperature wort (10-16C).
2. Ferment ~ 1 week at cellar temperature, then warm beer to 20C for another weeks fermentation.
3. Keg after 14 days fermentation, or transfer to secondary and age further at cellar temperatures .

This has turned around 5 lager beers, most in 2-3 weeks, all of which tasted excellent and without significant flaws. This is now my go-to method of brewing lagers. This Dortmunder was no exception - a fantastic beer whose only notable flaw was a mis-balance in bitterness and maltiness, due to a higher-than-expected starting gravity.

Recipe, brew-day notes and tasting notes can be found below the fold...

Kveik - It's Advent Season!

The end of November is upon us, and for members of my homebrewing club this means one thing - our annual advent beer exchange. This year we had 25 brewers exchanging beers, which we will enjoy starting today and running through to December 24th. A much better advent calendar than those crummy chocolates!

My contribution to this years exchange is a Kveik, a Norweigian Farmhouse Ale, with a twist...my goal with this beer was to “reimagine” what the vikings who settled the north-east coast of Canada a millennium ago may have brewed. So in place of traditional Norweigian ingredients (juniper, European hops) I used instead spruce and wild hops native to Canada's far north.

Recipe and various notes & ramblings can be found below the fold - I'll post full tasting notes on the official day for my beer in the advent exchange.

Black Adder

This year marked the fourth year of my hop farming experiment. I added two centennial plants this year, to go with my cascades and goldings. Over the past few years I've brewed a variant of a black IPA, which I've called the black mamba (year 1, 2, 3). While I've enjoyed playing with that recipe, the new centennial hops plus a desire to try something new led me to develop a new beer for this years hop harvest.

Sticking with the snake theme, this years beer is the "Black Adder the 1st", although that should be taken more along the lines of Rowan Atkinson than of a scary big snake. This beer is still a black IPA, but with a lot of changes from the black mamba of yesteryear. Gone are the rye and wheat malts, with the beer brewed to be drier and more hop-forward. This beer contains 225g (a half-pound) of centennial and cascade hops, and even more oddly, was brewed using a Kveik yeast kindly sent to me by a Norwegian brewer. The vision of this beer was to emphasise the citrus notes of the hops with a yeast strain with a reputation for orange-like esters.

This didn't come out exactly as I had envisioned, and the hop character faded awfully fast, but I did learn two things while making this beer. 1) I am probably drying my hops incorrectly, which would account for their slightly different than excepted character and poor in-beer stability. Apparently I should dry them using a dehydrator or over at ~55C/130F (link). 2) Kveik yeast kicks ass in dark beers. The orange character blends nicely with roast malts, giving a character similar to orange-infused chocolate. A future stout will be brewed with this yeast!

Recipe and tasting notes can be found below the fold...

Helles a good radler

My wife is not a beer fan. This is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing as my beer lasts longer, but a curse as I cannot share the fruits of my hobby with her (although she does love the fruits of my cider and wine making).

But my wife (and I) does enjoy a radler. For those who haven't encountered these, they are a common beverage in Germany and Austria, usually served in cafes catering to cyclists, and are made of a 50:50 mix of a light beer (often a helles, although some are made with wheat beers or pilsner) and a ctirus soda (like 7-up, only a stronger citrus character).

While refreshing, radlers have two major issues (from my point of view): 1) Mixing the beer with the soda decreases the alcohol content too much, and 2) the balance is too sweet for my tastes.

So I tried to make a radler that my wife would like, but which would also fit my tastes better...I achieved the later, but the former goal was not quite achieved.

"Recipe"

Recipe in quotes as this barely counts as a recipe:

• ~17L of a light lager (I used the Helles blogged about in my previous post, but any light lager would work)
• 1/4 tsp of potassium metabisulfite
• 10 g of potassium sorbate
• 4 cans of frozen juice concentrate (enough to make up ~10L of juice; I used pink lemonade)

Transfer the beer into a carboy and mix in the metabisulfite/sorbate - this will stabilize the beer and prevent any residual yeast from consuming the sugar in the juice concentrate. Then add the concentrate, mix and carbonate. That's it!

Tasting Notes:

Appearance: Slightly darker, but much hazier than the Helles this beer was made from. Head retention is poor - likely due to fruit oils in the frozen juice concentrate.

Aroma: Pink lemon-aid, citrusy and fresh. The underlying malt-note is present, but plays second fiddle to the citrus.

Flavour: Here is where I succeeded...and failed. The citrus note is strong and upfront - as with most raddlers it is the focus of the beer. Beneath that is (as you would expect) the sweetness imparted from the juice. But where this recipe deviates from the normal raddler is that there is a strong beer note, including a detectable hop bitterness. To my palate this greatly improves this beer, making it more balanced and with less apparent sweetness than is normal. Likewise, the maltiness of the helles comes through, adding a nice counter-point to the citrus character of the lemonade. To my wife's palate, this is where I went wrong - its too "beery", which means that there is too much hop bittnerness. Aftertaste is a lingering sweetness/citrus, with a hint of hop bitterness.

Mouthfeel: Not as light bodied or dry as the helles base, and far heavier than a conventional raddler, but still light enough and fresh enough to be refreshing. You can tell this was made from juice instead of soda, as the beer's body has some of the "thickness" of juice, rather than the clean/crisp body of soda (if soda can be said to have body).

Overall: For my preferences, this is far better than any commercial raddler I've had. The balance provided by the higher hop bitterness is more pleasing to my palate, while the beer retains a refreshing character. To my wife's palate I've not been as successful as hoped - that bitterness I perceive as adding balance is, to her, a strong and unpleasant note.

Next Time: Given this was supposed to be a treat for my wife I'm going to have to rebrew it more to her taste. I haven't finalized my plans yet, but next time I think I'm going to use a wheat beer for the beer base and use soda "reinforced" with frozen juice concentrate (to better mimic the soda normally used) in place of the pure juice concentrate I used in this recipe. And most importantly, I'm going to stick to the 50:50 soda/beer ratio that is normally used for raddlers - apparently that ratio wasn't decided on arbitrarily, and instead represents a good balance.

Helles is a good beer for summer

Good for camping, Canada day celebrations, and all
your favourite summer events

Time for another recipe/tasting notes thread. This is yet another beer in my series of "experiments" with warm-fermented lagers. The first and second brews worked out very well, and this third attempt was also a "Helles" of a success...and in case the corny post title and intro paragraph didn't give it away, this time around I brewed a helles.

For those unfamiliar with a helles, its a good summer beer - it has shades of a BMC beer, but has flavour and can legitimately be called a beer. The main focus in a helles is the pilsner malt; the bready malt note should be in the forefront. It is lightly hopped with a bittering charge - no flavour or aroma additions - with just enough bitterness added to balance out the malt-sweetness.

As the description suggests, this is a simple beer. My recipe is a little more complex than most, largely because I like a little extra maltiness than is normal, and because I replicate the effect of a decoction by adding a small amount of melanoidin and carafoam malts.

The recipe and tasting notes can be found below the fold, but the short version would be that this is a damned good beer

Don't be bitter - its just a bitter

A pint of bitter, frolicking with
some young hops

Bitters are one of my favourite styles of beer - I find the malt:hop balance more appealing than that of an IPA, they are sessionable, and the variety of malt, hop and yeast flavours which can be incorporated are nearly unlimited. Hop character can span from subtle to IPA-like; malt character from a touch more than an adjunct lager through to meaty and bold. And then there are the yeast - some are nutty, others fruity, and yet others bring out the malt or the hops, but picked correctly the yeast are what make the beer. In the past I always had at least one bitter available, on tap or in bottle, although recent insanity has prevented this frequent brewing of bitter. In fact, to squeeze this brewday in, I ended up brewing at night. I should have named this brew "1AM Bitter", as that is the time when the brewing of this beer was completed...

...or maybe "skunky standoff bitter", because my plan to sit on the deck and watch movies on my laptop while I brewed didn't come to fruition as I instead spent most of the evening trying to keep a skunk out of our yard - a successful attempt as evidenced by the aroma coming off my neighbours dog the next morning (Smelly dog bitter? Angry neighbour bitter? Blackstripe bitter? Damn, naming beers is hard).

Rather than posting separate brew-day and recipe posts, I've put everything together into a single post...we'll see if this becomes my preferred format for the blog.

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Recipe:

Stats:

Brewed late at night...

• OG: 1.046
• FG: 1.010
• ABV: 4.4%
• IBU: 26 IBU

Malts:

• 4.00 kg Marris Otter
• 0.23 kg Aromatic Malt
• 0.23 kg Caramel 120L
• 0.11 kg Special Roast

Hops:

• 34 g (20 IBU) EKG, 60 min
• 14g (5.1 IBU) EKG, 20 minb
• 14g EKG, Flameout

Yeast & Other

• 1 tsp Irish moss, 15 min
• Wyeast 1469 (West Yorkshire Ale)

Brewing

1. Single-infusion mash for 60 min at 66.1C, batch sparge to collect a total of 28L
2. Boil for 60 min, adding hops and Irish moss at the indicated time
3. Cool and oxygenate well, ferment at 18-21 C for 7-14 days
4. Keg & carb, add gelatin to clear

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Tasting Notes:

Appearance: Crystal clear, modestly carbonated, light-brown body with amber highlights. Head pours thick and creamy, and lasts for several minutes.

Aroma: Toasty malt note with some raisin/date-like fruit aroma. Subtle "spicy" note from the aroma hop addition.

Flavour: Strong malt character, mostly toast and stone-fruit, but with a touch of caramel malt sweetness. This is complemented by the yeast, which provides a nut-like ester quality that fits nicely with the toast of the Marris Otter and Special Roast malts. The strong malt note is nicely balanced by a decent hop bitterness, plus some raisin/date-like fruit notes provided by the C120 and yeast. The hop flavour addition is not overt; a subtle spice note is present, but not dominant. Finish is dry, with a lingering hop bitterness and touch of stone-fruit sweetness.

Mouthfeel: Medium-light body, whetting when you drink it but with a dry finish. Carbonation is on the high end for the style, but its the way I prefer it. No astringency or drying sensation.

Overall: A good pint of bitter; sessionable but with a ton of character. This is one of the only recipes I have that makes a frequent return to my brewhouse, and the reason for that is that this recipe makes - to my mind - the ideal bitter. The fact it goes from grain to bottle in 7-10 days doesn't hurt either.

Another Quick Lager

Tasty, but not as clear as it should be

A while ago I experimented with the new warm-fermentation temperature lager methods being promoted by various home brewers and bloggers. My first attempt at this was a home run - a great, Czech-style Pilsner...and as I was drinking this beer I remembered why I don't brew Pilsners - I'm not a huge fan of the style. So this time around I brewed a lager more to my preference, a continental style Vienna lager.

I'm not going to post the recipe because its not my recipe - I stole this one, in its entirety, from Five Blades Brewing - specifically, his Geburstagsparty recipe. The only change I made (aside from fermentation profile) was that I re-pitched some 34/70 yeast I had kept from my Pilsner. Brew day went smoothly, with 22L of 1.047 wort transferred to the fermenter.

Fermentation profile was the same as with my Pilsner - 6 days at ~15C, followed by 9 days at room temperature. After fermentation I kegged the beer, force carbed, and began pouring 3 days later...and that was when I realized that I forgot to gelatin the beer. So even now, half way through the keg, its still cloudy. But it is otherwise excellent, so onto the tasting notes.

Appearance: Light brown with amber hues, pours with a fluffy white head that lasts and lasts and lasts. But its cloudy, thanks to the lack of gelatin.

Aroma: Malty with a touch of bread, with a clear overarching note of Hallertauer hops.

Flavour: Malt flavour is upfront; not the sweetness of caramel malt, but rather a slightly sweet, rich flavour. There is a subtle, almost nutty note in the background. A subtle hop bitterness balances out the sweetness, but the balance remains malt-forward. The balance is near-perfect; not as sweet as a bock, but not as dry as a Pilsner. It's easy to drink, highly digestable, but has enough flavour and body to be interesting. As with the warm-fermented Pilsner, the yeast character on this beer is lager-clean, despite the lack of long-term cold aging. Aftertaste is very mild, just a lingering malt sweetness and subtle bitterness.

Mouthfeel: Whetting, medium bodied and highly effervescent. There is no astringency or drying sensation what-so-ever.

Overall: A damned good beer. Easy to drink, great flavour and nice balance between malt and hops. Aside from the clarity issue, the beer is nearly perfect. A great session lager, but with enough body and character to keep things interesting. The only thing I would change is to remember to add gelatin next time!

Tasting notes & a recipe - Kitchen Sink Stout (for St. Paddies day)

I don't always blog all the beers I brew, but seeing as it is St. Paddies day I thought I'd do a quick post one one such batch - my "Kitchen Sink Stout". As the name suggests, this beer was brewed by taking all of my odd-and-end grains & hops and trying to formulate a recipe that used them all up. What I ended up with was 40L (~10 US gallons) of a dry-style "stout" (stout in quoted because this is too dark/roasty for porter but has no roast barley). While this beer was brewed back in mid-November, I've managed to hold onto a few bottles until now.

The recipe is complex, not because I wanted it to be but rather because of the large number of malts I was trying to rid myself of:

• 8kg marris otter
• 0.7kg Carafa Special II
• 0.67kg flaked oats
• 0.45kg victory malt
• 0.2kg black patent
• 0.18kg carawheat
• 0.1kg carafa special III
• mashed for 60 min at 68.3C

Hopping was also done kitchen-sink style:

• 100g (50 IBU) Northern Brewer, 60 min
• 30g EKG + 30g Fuggels, 15 min

Fermented with 2 packs of Safale S-04 (English ale).

So how did this beer turn out... tasting notes can be found below the fold.

Belgian Candi Sugar Part III

Yesterday, Brulosophy published a post where they compared "my" candi sugar recipe side-by-side with a commercial candi syrup. The much more rigorous testing conducted by Brulosophy mirrored my own less scientific experience - i.e. namely that in beer the differences between them are hard to detect, but there are differences. The ability to find these differences appears to vary between people, as in the Brulosophy the majority were not able to tell the differences, but the minority that could tell the difference could do so consistently.

Since my previous posts on the topic (1, 2 and "3", #2 is the primary resource) I've refined my method further. In the discussions following the Brulosophy post its become apparent that I should share these changes as a fair number of people are using my old posts as a starting point in their own sugar experiments (hello, Reddit homebrewers).

The changes I have made seem to address the issues others (and I) have noted - namely an occasional acrid/burnt character. An issue was also brought up by one commenter which I think is worth addressing here.

The changes I've made to my method:

1. I've greatly reduced the amount of DME used, as the amount of protein in previous batches was excessive. For 1 kg of sugar (2.2 lbs), I am currently using 5 ml (~1 tsp) of DME. Previously I was using 1 tbs (~15 ml)
2. I avoid mixing the sugar as much as possible - I mix to dissolve the sugar into water, and I mix when adding the lye, but I do not otherwise mix.
3. I am much more careful and slow with my temperature changes. Most of the mixing I did previously was to add cold water to cool the sugar if I overshot the desired temperature.
4. I now usually add corn sugar (fructose) at a rate of 1% volume/mass (i.e. 1 ml corn sugar per 100g sugar). This does not change the flavour of the final candi, but does reduce crystallization. It is easier to then blend the mix into a syrup or cast rocks with the non-crystallized sugar.

These changes have led to a candi which is much closer (to my palate) to commercial candis, one without the unpleasant flavours some of the previous batches had. Others on the thread have mentioned using pressure cookers and other methods with great success. Hopefully, as a collective we will be able to formulate a better method of producing a consistent and flavourful candi sugar for home brewing.

The "Issue":

An issue brought up the commenter 'Chino' in the Brulosophy thread was that the 30 minute inversion time that I recommend is insufficient to completely invert the sugar, with individuals over a Reddit working on ways to get improved inversions. I partially agree with what Chino states - given the rate of the reaction and the fact that it is an equilibrium reaction, a 30 minute inversion period without the addition of something to accelerate the process (e.g. acid) will only invert 8-10% of the sugar. Where I disagree with Chino is that I don't think this matters. Mallard products comprise a pretty small portion of the final sugar - assuming 100% of the protein added via the DME is converted to Mallard products, the Mallard products would comprise about 0.07% of the final candi by weight. Although multi-step reactions, the formation of most Mallard products requires only one sugar molecule per amino acid, meaning that you need "only" 0.07% inverted sugar to be able to (in theory) produce the full array of Mallard products. The 8-10% inverted sugar is a huge excess compared to what is required - this does offer an advantage in terms of reaction rates, but its hard to imagine that increasing inversion to 25% (theoretical maximum using heat alone) or 50-75% (theoretical maximum using acid) would offer further improvements.

Black Mamba the Third

Changes from last year - hops & sugar

Ever since planting my own hops back in 2013 it has become a tradition to brew a black rye IPA, the Black Mamba (recipe: year 1, year 2), using all of the Cascade hops grown in my garden. This year was not as good a harvest a last year, but also nothing to turn your nose up at - 175g of Cascade - and its all going in. As with past years the recipe is being tweaked to try and feature the hop character better (tasting notes: year 1, year 2). The first batch was good, but I didn't have many hops (first year crop & all that), so it was a little lacking. The second year I had a good amount of hops, but the beer was heavier body and too roasty. So this year the recipe is changing quite a bit.

To reduce maltiness I've lowered the mash temperature further (63.5C), elongated the mash to 75 minutes, and replaced ~10% of the gravity with table sugar. To reduce roast I've replaced the debittered dark malt with chocolate wheat malt, which gives less roast character than debittered barley equivalents (midnight wheat would have been better, but was unavailable). The bittering charge has been increased to 48 IBU's of Northern Brewer (up from 34 last year); the remainder of the ~70IBUs are coming from the last-addition home-grown Cascades; 44g additions at 20, 10, 5 minutes, plus a 15 minute hop-stand.

Recipe and Brew-Day notes below the fold

Advent Beer 2015

Way back in September I posted a teaser post on the beer I brewed for my brew clubs annual advent beer exchange. The beer itself is a Bière de Garde based largely on a recipe found in the excellent book American Sour Beers; specifically the Dark Winder Saison I (pg 336). This seemed to be an ideal winter beer - dark & somewhat malty, with rosemary, orange and raisins providing a unique spice character quite different from the classical winter spiced beer. My version differed from the original mainly in that it wasn't soured; rather a house-blend of various Brett's was added for secondary fermentation.

This beer surprised me somewhat - despite 3 months on Brett and oak, there was little funky character in the beer and it remained quite sweet (even though the final gravity was ~1.005). I've held onto a few bottles to see if this would change, but the beer has not picked up much more Brett character, despite an extra 1.5 months in the bottle. Even so, its a good beer, although if I rebrewed it I'd either brew it as a sour, or as a straight Bière de Garde without Brett.

Recipe, Brewing Notes and Tasting Notes below the fold.

Triple-Recipe Update

I've somewhat fallen down on the blogger job - I'd done three brews in the past week and not one blog post about any of them.

In my defence, the first two batches barely qualify as either brew-days or recipes...enter this years ciders!

The recipe for both is dirt-simple:

Cider #1: This is the classical cider that I've brewed 3 times in a row now (last years recipe) - 20 L of fresh-pressed cider, 3 g potassium metabisulfate, 5 g of yeast nutrient, 3 tsp pectic enzyme and 1 packet Nottingham dry yeast. The process is dirt-simple:

1. Add metabisulfate, let sit ~4 hours
2. Add yeast nutrient and pectic enzyme, let sit overnight
3. Add yeast, let ferment ~3 weeks before transfering to secondary
4. Age until ready, typically 6 months.

Cider #2: Take the recipe for cider #1, drop the yeast and split everything else in half (its a half-batch). In place of Nottingham, pitch a Belgian yeast (Fermentas T-58, this time around). Everything else is the same. The hope here is to get an effect similar to mulled cider, but without the addition of spice.

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Learn-To-Brew IPA

The third brew, brewed this Saturday, was a hop-bursted IPA which I brewed at my brewing clubs annual learn-to-brew event held at Forked River Brewing. For some reason I decided to go whole-hog on this beer - water additions, sparge acidification, whole hops, and so forth. But because this was a learn-to-brew event most of that (except the hops) got missed during the brew-day, so it may not quite end up where I wanted it. Regardless, its a pretty simple (and good smelling) brew:

• 6 kg Canadain 2-row malt
• 450 g Caramunich II
• 230 g Victory malt
• 85 g (3 oz) Centennial whole-hops, 15 min whirlpool
• 85 g (3 oz) Citra whole-hops, 15 min whirlpool
• Enough of a bitterning hop (N. Brewer), 60 min in the boil, to get the beer to 65 IBU

20 L final volume at 1.064. Mash for light body, use burtonized water, adjust mash pH with lactic acid, irish moss @ 15 min to help clear.

Of course, to replicate this beer add the salts to the boil, rather than to the mash/sparge, forget the irish moss, and boil for ~68 minutes, all while forgetting to take photos of the brewing event because you're too busy teaching new people to brew yakking with anyone who drops by your mash tun.

Well, There Gose Christmas!

Nearly 2 months ago I blogged a teaser post on the brewing of my 2015 Christmas brew that would be entered into my home brew club's advent event, and given to my beer-loving family and friends.

This post is not about that beer.

Rather, this post is about another winter-holiday themed beer that is both a product of long planning (and fantasizing), plus a bit of last-minute brew-wizardry to make the brew-day happen. Sadly, I have no images of this last-minute brew, as I've recently taken a page from a fellow home-brewers book (hi, Devin!) and begun brewing late at night. Yep, 7 PM - midnight brew "days" do get you around all those irritating day-time things (jobs, family, friends, etc), but make for crappy photo-shooting conditions.

I wish I could claim this recipe as my own, and to some extent it is, but I received a lot of help on this one. The initial motivation for this beer is the table of Gose recipes by Cascade brewing in American Sour Beers; specifically, the all-to-brief mention of the winter gose featuring cinnamon, orange, hibiscus and cranberry. While a gose is a pretty straight-forward sour-ketteled beer, the balance of orange & hibiscus came from a very helpful set of  private messages and public posting of a similar gose recipe by BigPerm over at HomebrewTalk. The remaining balance of cinnamon, cranberry, hops and salt are from my previous brewing experiences with gose and those particular ingredients.

Despite that, there was (of course) a bump in the road. I had planned on souring using Lactobacillus isolated from a bottle of Hottenroth. Unfortunately, the lacto culture got "infected" with yeast (you know you're not a normal brewer when the yeast is the infection), so I was forced to preare a last-minute lacto starter using 1.040 wort @ pH 4.5, a handful of grain, and a "homebrewed" incubator to keep the cultures at 44C. The last-minute starter worked, so the brewday(s) was/were saved.

Additional details and recipe can be found below the fold.

Happiness is a Bubbling Carboy...Training Wheels CPA

Go yeast go!

Last weekend I had the opportunity to teach my SWIMBO's uncle how to brew. Because teaching a new brewer the ropes makes for a busier brew-day I didn't have time to blog the recipe...so here is is a week late.

This recipe is pretty straight forward - a Canadian Pale Ale, which much like history, is a blend of English and American influences. Namely, it incorporates the more interesting malt profile of an English ale, but hopped with "new" American-style hops at a modest (modest, how Canadian!) rate. Hopefully a beer I will enjoy, but not too crazy for a new brewer/light beer drinker.

The Recipe:
The recipe is dead-simple, for 40 L (10 US gallons):

• 8 kg Canadian pale ale malt (Maris Otter would be a good substitute)
• 0.45 kg Caramunich I
• 0.45 kg Caramunich II
• Enough bittering hops (14.8 g of Northern Brewer @ 8.5%) at 60 min to get to 36 IBU after late additions.
• 28 g of a 50:50 mix of Citra + Centennial whole hops at 15, 10, 5 minutes before the end of the boil + a final 15 min whirlpool addition (i.e. 112 g total)
• Irish moss, 15 min before the end of the boil
• Safale US-05 (2 packs)

Mash @ 66.7C (152F) for 60 min, then sparge & boil for 60 min. If everything goes right, the beer should come in at 36 IBU, SG of 1.049, ~9 SRM.

Ferment started in my pantry, which sits at ~16 C (~60 F) for 5 days, followed by moving it next to the furnace for the final 5 days at ~20 C (~68 F). As you can see above, even at 16 C the ferment was pretty active. The expected FG (1.010) was hit in 4 days, but there is still some bubbling going on, so it may drop a little lower.

The Brew Day:

Brew day was completely, totally and utterly uneventful. Which, given this was a brewday where I was teaching someone how to brew, was exactly what I was hoping for. We slightly exceeded our expected gravity (1.051), and hit our planned volume dead-on. The beer was chilled to 25 C, and then split between 2 x 23L (6 US gallon) carboys fitted with blow-off tubes which were transferred to my pantry where it cooled for 5 hours to 17 C, prior to adding the yeast. Five days later I fitted the carboy's with air locks and moved them next to the furnace to ensure diacetyl reduction and complete attenuation. As of today we're 6 days away from brew-day and 5 days prior to kegging. Hopefully, tasting notes will be posted in about 2 weeks!

Return of the Black Mamba

The hops for this beer.

I was digging through the deep-freeze a few weeks ago and came across the tightly vacuum wrapped remains of 2014's hop harvest - 270 g (~9.5 oz) of Cascade hops. Not to sure what to with my unexpected bounty, I looked back to see what I did with the home-grown Cascades last year. Turns out last years beer was an Black Imperial Rye IPA - The Black Mamba IPA. Tasting notes (and memory) revealed that this was one of last years better beer, so I thought "what the hell, lets do it again".

Last years beer ended up being under-gravity (more a BRIPA than a BIRIPA) as I  had begun experimenting with wet milling my grain and had over-whetted the grain. I've now optimized this method, so I hope to hit the desired gravity (1.071) instead of missing it like I did last year (1.059).

But what to do with all those hops? The answer - add them all to one beer! For accuracy, the 75 minute bittering addition will be 34 IBU's of Northern Brewer, but everything else is the home-grown cascade.

My (hopefully temporary) $10
3-tier mash system

How do you work in 270 g (over a half-pound) of home-grown hops? The answer is lots of additions - 57 g (~2 oz) at 20, 12 and 5 minutes, plus another 57 g in a 15 minute hop stand (half added at flame-out; half added 7.5 minutes after flame-out). But that leaves 34 g (~1.5 oz) unaccounted for - that would be the prime hops; the ones I put aside into their own little pack as they had the most resin and aroma of the harvest. Those are being held back for a 3-day dry-hop after primary fermentation is complete. Estimated IBU's are 67; maybe lower or higher depending on just how bitter the home-grown hops are.

Grain bill is pretty much unchanged from last year - good quality Canadian pale malt as a base malt, 25% rye for that refreshing rye crispness, some carafa special II & victory malt to round things out. Again, I am trying Conan, but will coax more ester flavour out of it by under-pitching (50% the recommended rate) and minimally oxygenating the wort. Fermentation will begin at 18 C (65 F, AKA my basements temperature) and ramp up to 22C (72 F) to finish. I'm going all-out, and even altering the water to up the sulphate and magnesium to make the hops pop.

Full Recipe & Brewday Notes Below The Fold

Ambrosio, The Fallen Monk

This post is the ultimate post (minus the inevitable tasting notes & updates which will follow over the upcoming months and years) in my Brewing Vintage Beers Series. Today's beer is  a Belgian Septuppel, which is the closest number I could come up with that matches the normal Belgian beer-naming scheme*. What is this oddity? It is a strong Belgian Dark Strong (aka a Quad) fermented to at least 20% ABV, and potentially 2-3% beyond that.

* An analysis of over 80 Belgian Enkels, Dubbels, Tripels and Quads reveals that commercial brew "names" follow the formula %_vol = [4.0296 * 1.3559^%vol]. I.E. a 20% beer would be:
20% = [4.0296 * 1.3559^Bel], where Bel = 1/2/3/etc (Enkel, Dubbl, Tripel, etc)

My new eHLT in action
(in my under-construction video
studio - AKA laundry room)

Why would anyone do such a thing? For me, there is two reasons. The minor reason being that while I've brewed mead's that pushed up close to 20%, I've never hit or exceeded this strength. Its a completely arbitrary, and yet almost mystical threshold. What lies beyond that I do not know - perhaps beer nirvana, more likely a really bad hangover, but either way I want to see what is one the other side.

The main reason is a bit different - December 9th, 2016 will mark the 20th anniversary of my first brewday. I though it would be nice to have a beer whose ABV was at least as large as the years leading up to the anniversary. To make sure this happens I have over-designed the beer; assuming it attenuates as I expect I should get a beer at 22-23%, but I suspect I may not get quite that much attenuation, and as such, I've hedged my bet. I'm brewing it now since I'm certain its going to emerge from the primary as a fusel, ester and phenolic mess, but with roughly 20 months of aging ahead of it, it should have turned into something really nice on time for 12/9/2016.

To get to that mystical 20% I'm using every trick in the fermenting high gravity beer playbook. Multiple yeast additions, holding back the ~20% of fermentables that are sugar until a day or two into primary ferment, multiple yeast additions, multiple oxygenations, and I'm pitching a shit-tonne of yeast (roughly 5 million/ml/^oP) thanks to my use of my last brews yeast cake. And the ace in my sleeve - a backup 2L starter of White Labs super high gravity yeast. I'm hoping to not need that bad-boy, but if I do he's ready to go.

41 L of wort boiling on the range.

Brew-day itself was a bit of a mix-up; I recently bought an electric HLT from one of the co-owners of Forked River Brewing (I guess you don't need to homebrew when you have a real brewery), so I was able to do my mash indoors, with the plan of venturing outside into the -25C weather for the boil. Turns out propane valves freeze at -25C - even if the propane itself is at room temperature, but my wonderful wife was kind enough to clear out the kitchen for the day so it was a full-volume boil on the electric range too get this beer down to gravity - adding an hour to what was already supposed to be a 3 hour boil. But in the end I exceeded my numbers slightly by 4 points), and everything looks like it went well, so now onto the ferment.

The recipe, brew-day notes and other details are included below the fold, but I thought I'd spare a word on what is now the second really odd name I gave to a beer in the past 2 weeks. These two beers are deeply connected - with "Matilda, The Seductress" functioning as a starter for "Ambrosio, The Fallen Monk". These names are not arbitrary - they are drawn from my favourite novel, "The Monk" by Matthew Gregory Lewis (legally available free from the Gutenberg Project). In this novel the young monk Ambrosio is seduced by Matilda - a familiar of the devil - leading Ambrosio down a road of murder, rape, insect, and eventually death at the hands of Satan himself. As with the novel, the beer "Matilda , The Temptress" gives Ambrosio his drive to darkness (namely, a lot of yeast) - and "Ambrosio, The Fallen Monk" somewhat follows the tradition of naming these beers after devils & other dark creatures...

Quick & Simple Invert Sugar

2 kg (~5 lbs) of invert sugar. The one on the right is slightly less
caramelized due to better temperature control during inversion

In some of my previous posts I've covered the making of Belgian Candi Sugar (Posts 1, 2), but this isn't the only hard-to-find brewing sugar out there. For my upcoming big beer I need a healthy dose (2 kg) of invert sugar - something which around here you cannot get in anything less than industrial amounts (a hundred kilos minimum order).

Invert sugar is used in a lot of English-style beers; it is simply table sugar (sucrose, a glucose chemically bonded to a fructose) broken down into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules. In theory it is easier for yeast to ferment this sugar, hence why it is popular in high-gravity brewing.

Several of my readers and youtube viewers (and myself) have reported issues with sugar crystallizing, which if you're lucky makes a hard-crack sugar ugly, but if it gets too bad can turn your sugar into an unmanageable - and insoluble (which is bad for brewing) mess. I've been working on this issue and have found a solution - the details are included in this post, and can be applied to both Belgian candi sugars as well as to invert sugar.

And as with candi sugar, don't forget that this can be quite dangerous - you are working with a sticky liquid well above the boiling point of water. Wear long-sleeved shirts and pants, cover your feet, and be as careful as you can be.

So how do we make it - its easy, but as always the details are found below the fold.