Thor's Hammer - Norse Porter

Todays brew is a blast from the past - a recipe which I developed way back in 1998, and which was my most brewed beer (or, at least, base-recipe) for the better part of 10 years. This beer goes back even farther - in the early 90's there wasn't much of a craft beer scene in Western Canada, but this one beer store used to bring in the odd European beer. There was this porter, from Norway, they'd bring in a couple of times a year - the name was unpronounceable (and long since forgotten), but it was good. In fact, it was the beer that started my love-affair with the porter style. Through a lot of trial-and-error (this was before there were many good online brewing resources) a friend and I managed to make a fairly respectable clone of the beer...but could never get it just right. We knew it was a baltic-style porter, and we did everything we could to learn about the style to find our error. One day a chance encounter with a Norwegian brewer online solved our problem - unlike most baltics, this brewery used an ale yeast instead of a lager yeast. Vola - the next batch was spot-on.

From there this brew evolved a lot - substituting English for noble hops, removing the darker malts, brewing an all-Munich/Vienna base malt version and the addition of cherries were all tested at one point or another - and each produced a fantastic beer.

Todays brew goes back to the first "eureka - we got it" recipe; the closest to cloning that one great beer that brought light to an otherwise fairly dark beer-decade.

EDIT: forgot to add, this brew makes use of the Nøgne Ø yeast, kindly provided by Sam of Eureka brewing (also, yeast #113, my commercial yeast bank). Historically I used the old wyeast Scandinavian ale yeast - which apparently was just goold ol' ringwood...

Recipe below the fold.

Its Cider Time!

A third of this years cider haul

Its early October, the evenings are starting to get cool, and the leaves on a few ambitious trees are starting to change colour. That can mean only one thing - its cider season! This year my brew-club arranged a buy from a local farmer, receiving in total 729 litres of fresh-pressed cider! This years cider was a mix of 5 or so apple types, and had a S.G. of 1.047 - on the higher end for ciders!

This year I am brewing 15 gal of cider, using three different recipes. The first is the same cider I brewed last year - simple, quick and fantastic. The second batch is an apple wine, its constitution girded with frozen apple juice concentrate and table sugar. The last is a brew for my wife - a wine/cider mix which will be stabilized & back-sweetened once fermentation & aging is complete.

L->R: Apple wine, Cider-Grape Cooler, Imperium Brettania

Front: Classical cider

Recipes & details below the fold...

Announcing a New Yeast Bank! & A successful Yeast Hunt

As readers of my bank know, I have an interest in wild brews and purifying wild yeasts. I have gone through a series of wild yeast collection attempts, and finally have some success to report (more on that below the fold). In addition, over the past few years I've acquired wild yeasts harvested by other brewers - including the infamous/famous Brettanomyces strains from DCYeast.

I'm splitting off the wild yeasts from my yeast bank of commercial (e.g. Wyeast/White labs/bottle cultured) yeasts. I realize this is a somewhat artificial division, as within the commercial yeasts are yeasts that breweries harvested from the wild, but regardless, I figured this was the best division. The new bank of yeast is still rather small, but it should grow quickly as I purify strains from some successful wild brews I have recently conducted (again, more below the fold). For those of you who like my yeast-culturing videos, you'll be happy to know that I'm using this year's wild-yeast hunt to prepare a video covering the process of isolating pure strains of wild-yeast from beginning-to-end, so watch out for that - it should be up soon.

My "vision" for the wild yeast bank is akin to that of Bootleg Biology, namely a terroir-style project, but in my case the goal is to gather these largely from Canada (although I'm happy to bank wild yeasts from any terroir).

A Post Worth Reading

I don't often promote other bloggers posts - which is something I need to fix - so to get that ball rolling I'd like to link everyone to this blog post over at Ben's Beer Blog: Labatt is planning an expensive, intentionally misleading ad campaign for Shock Top.

The blog post is essentially a break-down of Labatt's (a subsidiary of In-Bev, which also owns Budweiser) strategy to mislead customers into thinking some of Labatts products are craft beers. It highlights some of the underhanded methods used by "big beer" to squash their craft brewer competition (that's the bad news). The good news is that it also shows just how damaging craft brewing is becoming to the big guys.

Is this beer cursed?

One full mashtun!

The readers of my blog know I had a bit of trouble recently - I had to dump an all-Brett imperial stout due to a persistent infection issue that had ruined a couple of beers. Anyhow, my plan was to quietly re-brew this beer so I could hand it out at my brew clubs annual advent event.

But, as the title suggests, things have not gone well. This time the problem is something else - I usually condition my grain prior to milling. I find that this greatly reduces the risk of a stuck sparge without hurting my efficiency. Not so this time - my efficiency is down 10%, and I'm pretty sure its because I lost track of how much water I conditioned with and thus over-did it.

To help fix this I collected a few extra litres of run-off and am extending my boil time slightly. But even so, I'm not getting the 9% beer I was hoping for, and instead it will be kicking around 7%.

I need a victory - I think my next beer needs to be something simple, something beyond even my ability to screw up. Malt-extract and hops, here I come

Tasting Notes: 50,002

Although I've been plagued with a series of infected brews lately, I have managed to prepare one brew during the infection-fest. My 50,002 was a partigyle'd beer brewed off of my (unfortunately infected) all-brett Russian Imperial Stout.

I wasn't too sure what I was going to get out of this beer - I was expecting something along the lines of a dark mild. Instead, I've got something more like the bastard child of a mild and a stout.

Appearance: Black, but if you hold it upto a lights its a deep ruby-red. The head is light-tan in colour, course, and lasts for a few minutes after pouring.

Aroma: A bit of roast and malt. Willamette aroma is present but subtle.

Flavour: The flavour of this beer is deceptively mild given the dark colour. The roast notes are present, but subdued. Even so, they are the dominant flavour. These roast notes are somewhat balanced by a slight maltiness and a bit of hop bitterness. The beer is a little watery and too thin in the body for my liking. Somehow the aftertaste manages to be a mix of sweetness and a subtle lingering hop bitterness - despite an absence of sweetness elsewhere.

Mouthfeel: Thin and watery; no astringency or drying sensation. For a mild this would have been spot-on, but there isn't quite enough to support the darker malts and flavours of this beer.

Overall: I've made far better beers, and far worse beers as well. Given this beer was made using leftover hops from a previous batch and by rinsing the grain bed of a bigger beer, I cannot complain too much. Its easy drinking, and has a pleasant flavour. I don't see myself making this exact beer again, but if I were I'd not change much other than using DME in place of the sugar I added to build the alcohol level.

It was a dark and raining morning...Redemption Harvest Ale

I brew a fair number of beers that I don't blog about - basic bitters, pale ales and the like which have nothing special, funky or unusual about them. Crowd-pleasers for BBQs, camping, etc. Today's beer is one of these, but I'm blogging it anyways for two reasons: 1) I feel the need for some redemption after my series of disastrous brews, and 2) I'm doing a harvest (wet-hop) ale, using the last of this years cascade harvest.

It was a bad year for the hops - too wet, too cold (the combination of which destroyed my Goldings), and one Cascade plant got decimated by mites. But, despite that I've got ~8oz of dried cascades in the freezer, and close to that sitting on my drying rack after a very wet morning spent picking hops. I'm planning on putting 250 g (over 8 oz) of wet hops into this beer, but even so, I should have about that much left over - after drying giving another 2.5 or so ounces of dried cascades for the freezer.

The one point I want to make before hitting the fold is how I guesstimated the alpha acids in the wet hops. Wet hops are about 6 parts water and 1 part dry-weight. So the 1% alpha acid number used in the recipe is equal to the average alpha acid content of dried Cascade hops (6%) divided by the wet:dry ratio (6X).

Recipe and notes below the fold.