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.

Tasting Notes - Back Mamba the Third

Last month I brewed my traditional beer to use up my home-grown cascade hops. Black Mamba (the third) is a black rye imperial IPA that I have formulated (and reformulated) to emphasize my home grown hops in a beer that also fulfills my winter desire for something a little more meaty. Past attempts at this beer have not quite lived upto expectations - the first version was an unsuccessful brew day that was lacking in the imperial department. The second version had the imperial down pat, but had too many roast notes and too much body, hiding much of the hop character. A few additional tweaks gives us this years batch - Black Mamba the III - reduced the dark malts and used sugar to dry out the beer...and it worked!

Appearance: Black as a politicians soul with an off-brown head. Shades of garnet can be seen on the edges if caught in the right light. Head is corse, and falls quickly into a layer of bubbles that persists for the rest of the pint.

Aroma: Mix of hop resin and hop herbalness. Hints of chocolate appear in the background and become more apparent as the pint warms.

Flavour: The malt note is a mild chocolate note with minimal roastiness. The rye adds a spice character is present but not overwhelming. The big flavour is a bold hop resin note, with herbal hop notes in the background. The citrus character cascade is known for is missing - but this seems to be a terroir "issue" as other local brewers have also mentioned their cascades skew towards resin and herbal, rather than citrus. After taste is a lingering hop bitterness and a resin note that sticks to the back of the mouth.

Mouthfeel: Pretty unique. The beer is dry, but the rye imparts its own thickness to the beer that counteracts this somewhat. Upfront the beer is whetting, but it leaves a modest dryness in the aftertaste.

Overall: I'm getting pretty close to my original vision for this beer. My home grown hops are in the fore, but are backed by a nice black IPA and rye character that is great in the winter months. The only thing I could see changing is adding a very slight touch of a mid-rage crystal malt to ad a touch of sweetness.

Not All Ideas Are Good Ideas...

I know a lot of us bloggers have a tendency to highlight our successes and minimize our failures. Looking at my own blog I see that my notable failures rarely make the roster, while my successes tend to get highlighted. So to even the scales somewhat, herein I present the results of my worst idea of 2015...

The recipe itself was merely a footnote in a previous post; a slight deviation of my normal cider recipe - in place of good o'l Nottingham yeast I used a Belgian yeast (safale T-58). The idea was simple, and its an idea I think remains sound. Simply put, I was hoping that the fruity character of the Belgian yeast would accent is apple flavors of the cider, while the phenolics would create a character like a spiced/mulled cider. On paper it was a winner; in practice is was a real loser.

Aroma: Smells like cider; apple plus a slight yeasty note.

Appearance: Golden, slight yeast haze

Flavor: A conflicting and poorly balanced mix of flavors. About the only thing that is right is that the finish is dry - which is how I like my ciders. After that, it all goes wrong. The most obvious 'flavor' is a clash between the apple notes of the cider must and the stone fruit character of the yeast. Yes, in hindsight it is pretty obvious that apple would clash with the raisin/date/dried fruit note of the yeast, but that didn't enter my thought process when planing out this recipe. But if that were not enough, the spice character of the yeast also conflicts - as in this beast is a Mexican standoff of three conflicting flavors. In place of the (hoped for) clove character I instead have a stale "5-year old cheap pumpkin spice" character. The sort of thing you would expect from jar of budget-bin mixed spices found in the back of your spice cabinet (or in any starbucks-branded scone). In other words, the flavor was that of apples fighting with dates, fighting with something akin to an unnamed brand of underarm deodorant. Either of the former two would be OK, but the three together are wrong, wrong and wrong.

Mouthfeel: Its a cider, so its dry and crisp. Even poor yeast selection couldn't screw that one up.

Overall: Disappointment in a glass. Sort of like liquefying every date you ever had in middle-school - not overly good, but hidden potential was there. I don't think the concept itself is flawed, but T-58 is not the yeast to make this work.

Its Lager Time!

40L in the pantry

This is going to be a long post...but I swear there is a recipe and brew day in here somewhere.

Many, many, many years ago I lived in a much colder part of the country, and I frequently brewed lagers. I now live in a warmer part of the country, and no longer brew lagers. The reason for that change in my brewing practices is entirely due to the weather...and how I used to lager. No fridge for me, all I had was months of below-freezing weather, a cheap bimetallic coil thermostat, a heat-lamp, and an insulated cardboard box. In other words, I had a basic fermentation chamber in which the beer sat in a carboy in an insulated box out in the yard, and a thermostat switched on one of those old-school 'red' heat lights to keep the temperature from dropping too low. The disadvantage to the cheap thermostat was a few batches that had a little ice on top, but even those batches turned out pretty good.

In my new home the weeks and weeks of consistent below-freezing temperatures simply does not happen; hell, last week we ranged from a high of 15C (shorts weather for us Canuks) through to -15C (beer freezes solid, we leave the sandals in the closet). Not exactly lager-compatible, given you want to keep temps pretty consistent in the 4C to 12C range...and I'm still too damned cheap to buy a fridge for brewing.

So I've been watching some of the experiments and tests being conducted by the home brew community on altered lager fermentation profiles with great interest. My interest was first tweaked by a Brewing TV video on lager workarounds, which compared 3 different methods ways to "lager" without lagering (my post on this video) . Its a great video so its worth embedding again:


More recently, Brülosophy has done a series of fermentation temperature experiments in which they found that (some) lager yeasts can produce perfectly serviceable beers when fermented at ale temperatures. There are two split-batch experiments using lager yeasts in the series right now (1 and 2), both of which produced lagers (a pilsner and helles respectively) where the warm-fermented lagers could not be distinguished by experienced tasters from their properly (or near-properly) lagered split.

That. Is. Awesome.

The temperature in the
pantry should work.

Its also not a surprise, once you think about it. The whole point of lagering is to suppress ester formation, leading to a very clean tasting beer. And historically, before the advent of pure yeast cultures, lagering would also have limited bacterial spoilage, also aiding in the creation of clean tasting beers. But move forward to today, where we have good cultures of pure yeast, have access to good ingredients, and know other methods to reduce ester formation (namely, good pitch rates and good oxygenation), and its not too much of a surprise that we can now get clean lager-like fermentations without actually lagering.

So I'm talking a page out of Brülosophy's book (and stealing their recipe & yeast), and giving it a go myself. I've taken the pilsner recipe from the first lager temperature experiment at Brülosophy, but am using the Saflager Lager (W-34/70) used in the second lager temperature experiment; mostly because I didn't have enough time to build up a proper sized starter of yeast from my bank in the time between brew-inception to my planned brew-day. Today I am brewing with my wife's uncle/my occasional brew-and-fishing partner, Mike, and so this beer is named after him - Uncle Mike's Pilsner.

Recipe and brew-day notes below the fold.

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.

It was the worst (of beers) and the best (of beers)

December and January have been nuts, so I'm a little behind on my blogging. Way back in November I brewed what was both the best - and worst - beer of 2015. I very briefly blogged the recipe a few posts ago, but the quick version is that it was a classical American-style IPA, with a touch of bittering hops and then 170 g (6 oz) of hops (1:1 mix of centennial & citra) added in the hop-stand. Fermented with "Brett" trois for 12 days, and then kegged.

My biggest mistake was preparing this beer right-on-time for the keg to be tapped at the same time by brew club began its advent exchange. Having a 29-day series of largely high-alcohol, high-body winter beers does not lend itself well to IPA consumption - meaning that this IPA was consumed far more slowly than it should have been. It started off amazing - best beer of the year. By nearly two months later, when the keg finally kicked, it had faded into something far less desirable.

So how was it (sorry, no pictures)...

Appearance: Extremely cloudy, almost orange in colour. Looked a bit like orange juice. Poured with a course white head that faded pretty quickly into a ring of bubbles around the glass. As anyone whose worked with trois before knows, it simply doesn't flocculate, so clarity only improved slightly as the beer aged.

Aroma: Early on the aroma was 100% tropical fruit; papaya with a touch of mango. It was heavenly, and so intense that the room would fill with the aroma as you poured a glass. This faded fast; a month later it was merely a generic, modest fruitiness, with the clear tropical note completely lost.

Flavour: Early on the flavour matched the aroma - tropical fruit flavours dominated, with a slight malt backbone and modest hop bitterness to hold everything together. If it wasn't for the underlying hop bitterness, this would have been like drinking a glass of papaya & mango juice. Personally, I wish it was a little more bitter in order to balance the fruit "sweetness" from the hops a little better, but just a slight boost in bittering would be needed to achieve that. As with the aroma, the flavour did not age well; within a month the clear tropical flavour note had faded to something almost cider-like, with the added 'bonus' of also tasting "dead" (for lack of a better descriptor). Both the fresh and aged beer had a lingering hop bitterness.

Mouthfeel: Everything an IPA should be - crisp & effervescence, somewhat drying, and with a lingering hop bitterness. The mouthfeel was about the only thing not negatively affected as the beer aged.

Overall: When fresh, this was easily the best beer of the year and one of the better IPA's I've made in a while. After a month this was a piddling IPA at best. In the future this would be a beer to prepare for an event - to ensure it disappears quickly - but it is a beer I would love to re-brew.