Category: Misha’s Brewing

Today was the final Brew Day for 2019; I took another stab a a Kolsch, and got a friend started in brewing. I also worked a bit on setting goals for next year.

Kolsch

The brew from today was another stab at the Kolsch kit from Morebeer (available here). I was amused to see that my December Brew Day in 2018 was from the same kit–this was not intentional.

Looking back at my records, last year’s version came out much stronger than intended–basically, I boiled it down to a 4-gallon batch or so, which concentrated things down a bit far. I also felt that it was a little “flabby”–not as dry as it should have been, and it lacked the minerally “pop” that many beers of the style exhibit.

To combat those flaws this time around, I started by being much more careful with the water measurements, resulting in nailing all of my pre- and post-boil volumes. My Original Gravity was 1.052 for a hair over 5.5 gallons of wort–pretty good, when the software predicted 1.054 at 5 gallons. (Compare 1.063 last year, for 4 gallons.)

I also gave the water a little treatment, adding some gypsum, calcium chloride, and citric acid to the mash (2 tsp, 1/2 tsp, and 1 tsp, respectively). The gypsum, chemically Calcium Sulfate, bumps the hardness way up, and makes the hops “pop” a bit. Calcium Chloride does a similar thing, also helping decrease (acidify) the mash. The citric acid also acidifies things; I would have preferred to use lactic acid, which is naturally produced in the malt, but I’m out, at the moment, and didn’t want to make a store run. All of this water chemistry should give the missing “mineral” taste to the Kolsch.

(Also, to clarify, this is a “Kolsch-style German Ale.” “Kolsch” proper is a territorial designation, and only 20 or so breweries from immediately in and around Koln, Germany, can use it properly.)

Anyway, as mentioned, I hit all the numbers, or near enough for Government work. Things looked and smelled lovely, right where they should have been. Once the wort has cooled enough, I’ll pitch the yeast, and about the time I’m kegging the lager from last month, this will go into secondary–and in two months, give or take, it’ll be delightful.

A Friend Indeed

One of my typical brew buddies will be moving away–like, to a different continent away–in five or six months. He’s watched me brew several dozen batches, and finally decided to take the plunge and do one himself. So he hit the Local Homebrew Store on his way home, and has been pelting me with questions via text message.

I’ve been having a good time fleshing out the little details that he hasn’t caught, or hasn’t been around to see (he normally heads home before wort chilling and yeast pitching, to say nothing of racking, secondaries, or kegging). But it has put me in mind of working a better way to teach folks how to brew–hands-on is much better than just watching. Especially with something like brewing, where some of the more critical points happen much later in the process. Things like racking, and secondaries, and kegging…

Goals for Next Year

I’ve got a couple of goals set for next year, both for brewing and for the homestead generally.

I’d like to switch from brewing with propane over to an electric setup. At such time as I can tear down and rebuild the garage, I want a nice, all-stainless, 3-vessel electric HERMS system. But in the meantime, I’m eyeing the Robobrew Brewzilla 65l. It’s a single-vessel system, which isn’t my absolute favorite, but I’m sure I can make it work. In addition to being electric, it’s one of the least expensive 10-gallon capable systems available. (It is, in fact, one of the only 10-gallon systems out there.) While I’ll still be able to do 5-gallon batches, being able to crank up to a 10-gallon batch means I’ll be able to do side-by-side yeast experiments. I’ll also be able to crank out big batches to simplify stocking up for Pennsic. And in a 10-gallon system, I’ll be able to do the really really big beers in 5-gallon batches, which’ll be nice.

Speaking of the big beers, one of the ones I’d like to do would be a Samichlaus clone. I’d wait until December–the traditional time for Samichlaus–so that I’d have enough batches under my belt on the new system to be confident with something that big. (The grain bill for a 5-gallon batch runs to 29 pounds, which is more than my current system can handle by a bit.) Samichlaus runs to 14% abv, and generally is lagered for almost a year before being served–so it would be very much a seasonal thing.

I’d also like to set up a tasting, oriented at folks who don’t know beer that well, and would like to learn more. I got the idea from a post on the HomeBrewTalk forum, and I think arranging it more or less exactly as described there would be fine. I find that teaching this sort of thing to others helps me learn, as well, and can often recharge my interest in the subject.

There are, as I mentioned, household/homestead goals, as well, but they’ll wait for the next post. Until then, cheers!

We should file this under “from every life, a little brew must be dumped.”

I’ve got a cellar. I store things down there. Completed/bottled brews; conditioning kegs; empties of all sorts. Also things undergoing long fermentations, or bulk-aging.

It’s those latter that are… well, persnickety. They tend to have airlocks. The thing about airlocks is that they require maintenance. Periodic top-offs of water, to keep the bad things from getting in.

If you neglect that over a period–like, say, since about this time last year, maybe longer–you’ll find that your brews have, at best, oxidized. At worst, they’re developing pellicles. Nice if you’re souring a beer, but not so much if you’re not. (And when you’re developing a pellicle, it needs to be the right kind–not fuzzy, but spongy. More like mother-of-vinegar.) Regardless, they’ve become bad brews.

So, this weekend just past, while working on the underside of the kitchen (putting in insulation; this required passing repeatedly through the cellar), I took it upon myself to deal with several of the carboys. So far, I’ve dumped and cleaned four 5-gallon carboys of various liquids. One of them might have been saved, possibly–but really, at that point, the simplest route was just to dump it.

Remaining is one 5-gallon carboy, and four 2.5-gallon carboys. All full. All at various points of bad. I’ll work on the rest of them over the next few days, and I fully intend to develop a monitoring schedule, to keep on top of things, so this doesn’t happen again.

Other Not Bad Brews

Meantime, the beehives have done their thing, and reproduced like crazy this season. I went from two hives in the fall, to six hives right now. Of the four new ones, three are in regular Langstroth hives, and one is in a top-bar. The two “old” hives have produced some honey, and I’ll be harvesting (“collecting the rent”) this weekend–probably extracting the honey next week.

My theoretical maximum harvest this year is about 120 pounds. (I’ve got three medium honey boxes on the hives; they can store a maximum of about 40 pounds each.) I don’t think I’ll get nearly that much; 35-40 pounds is much more likely. It might reach to 50, depending on a number of factors (they’ve been bringing in stores from somewhere, I just don’t know how much), which would tickle me to no end. We’ll see just how it goes.

There have also been several other brews initiated, in the last few months. I’ve done a Blackberry Stout that I think will be quite nice. I started an IPA using the Voss Kveik strain; when it went into the keg, it was delicious. Waiting impatiently to see how it is, once it’s carbonated. And a variety of meads are in process, not least of which is an experimental braggot I did, using the lees from the kveik, the leftover beer from the IPA, and 3 pounds of honey.

I’m also looking at converting 2 gallons of one of the more “normal” meads into something that I can give to the King & Queen of Atlantia, either for personal use, or to gift others as largesse. It seems that adding a handful of Thai Butterfly Pea flowers will give a burst of color to the brew–said color depending on the pH of the liquid. Most meads run about 3.5 or so, which imparts a reddish-purple color. Adding a little potassium carbonate will bump the pH up to about 4.0, which should turn the mead to a delightful blue, without harming the flavor overly much. And blue is, after all, one of the Kingdom’s colors…

Most people aren’t familiar with the family tree of the various adult beverages we drink. They don’t always group together quite the way you’d think, and I think it’s worth a quick look.

The Three Main Families

By and large, fermented drinks break down into three basic families: Beers, Wines, and Meads. The separating factor is the source of the sugars for the yeast to ferment. It looks something like this:

Basically, if the sugars are broken out from starches–generally from grains–you’re looking at a beer.

If the sugars are from fruits, it’s wine.

If they’re from honey, it’s mead.

Bad Naming Practices

These classifications can lead to some confusion, mostly rooted in what I’ll call “alternative modern naming.”  Mead, for instance, is often called “honey wine.” While that gets the point across to someone who is unfamiliar, it’s less than completely accurate. Mead is mead; no more, no less.

Similarly, sake is commonly called “rice wine.” The base of sake is rice, which is to say, starch. This is broken down by aspergillium fungi into sugars; the sugars are then fermented by saccharomyces species. Being starch-based, it’s therefore not a wine, but a beer.

Then there are the issues of things that have developed their own names: cider, particularly, and its lesser-known cousin perry. Most people would separate them out as their own individual things–but they’re from pressed fruit, and thus wines. Yes, they’re particular types of wine–but they’re still wine.

Hybrids

As with the color wheel we all remember from grade-school art class, it is possible to take these “primary colors” of drinks and blend them into new “colors.” For example, if you make meads that include fruit sugars, you have what are known as “melomels.” And within the melomels, there are particular names depending on the fruit. Apples get you cyser; grapes get you pyment. Pears are perry, which is also the name for pear cider, which is confusing. There are dozens of others.

Conversely, a cross between beer and mead is called “braggot.” These are typically big, malty, strong drinks. They’re usually hopped, but it’s not absolutely necessary for the style. Brewer’s choice as to what the “base” beer style is, as well–although matching them with different honeys is a bit of an art form.

Crossing beer with fruit gets a fruit beer. There’s not really a better name for them, unfortunately… With the fruit beers, the mix tends to skew heavy on the “beer” side. I can’t recall ever seeing a “wine with malt added;” I should think that getting that right would be tricky. (Note to self: do some small-batch experimentation with this…)

Then there’s what you get when you mix all three “primary types,” the mysterious middle of the triangle. Colors tend to get muddy here, and if you just toss drinks together willy-nilly, they will too. But there are commercial beverages that go this direction. Midas Touch is one, as is Chateau Jiahu, both by Dogfish Head. Historically, we think that the Beor of the sagas and legends was likely also a three-way mix.

Extending Past the Ferment

Interestingly, we tend to carry the distinctions between beverages into their distillations, as well. Scotch, Whiskey, and Bourbon are all distilled from grains. Brandy is distilled from fruit. I don’t know of any large-scale mead distillation, but the term for its product would be “honeyshine.” Beyond that, unfortunately, my knowledge of distilled products is limited.

A Hole in the Taxonomy

There’s one area that my taxonomy doesn’t cover. What do you call it if the drink is fermented from plant sugars, other than the fruit? For instance, if maple syrup was your primary sugar source? Or (gods forbid) cane sugar? Molasses? Treacle?

I’m tempted to lump these in with meads, mostly as a placeholder for now. (This due to the relative similarity between honey, syrup, and molasses.) I don’t know of anybody fermenting them on a large scale. Moonshiners, perhaps, in the case of cane sugar. Rum is the distillation of fermented cane sugar and/or molasses (and other sugarcane byproducts); following the “beer-whiskey, wine-brandy, mead-honeyshine” pairing above, either rum is a subset of honeyshine, or the fermented plant juices are their own category. If the latter, they’re mostly separate from the “big three.”

My latest brew day was a bit of a departure for me in a number of ways. First, it’s first Irish Red Ale I’ve brewed in over a decade–April 2008 was my last one. Second, I went with a partial-mash kit, done as a brew-in-a-bag (BIAB), which I’ve never done before. Third, due to high winds, I had to brew inside, which I’ve done before, but generally dislike. And lastly, this is my first time using yeast from Omega Labs.

Irish Red Partial-Mash Kit

Keeping with the “start from the basics” progression I’ve been doing the last few brews, I went “intermediate” with this batch, and used a partial-mash kit from MoreBeer. If you’ll recall, the “beginner” process was using extract kits, which took the majority of their maltiness from cans (or, in this case, pouches) of liquid malt extract, getting stylistic accents from a small handful of grains to be steeped.

So-called “partial-mashing” is in between extract brewing and all-grain brewing, in that about half of the fermentables come from extract, while the other half come from grains that have to be “mashed”. The process is simpler than it sounds. In essence, it’s the same thing as steeping the grains in an extract batch, except there are more of them–instead of the 8 ounces or so, I used 5-1/4 pounds of grains. They need to steep for longer, too, and at a slightly more particular temperature: an hour, at about 152 degrees.

Since I moved inside, which complicates using my all-grain equipment (an igloo cooler to hold the steeping grains, mostly), I decided to try the “brew-in-a-bag” method. This is a variation on the partial mashing technique, and with the right setup can be used for all-grain. Like it sounds, I put the crushed grains for this batch in a bag; I then heated up my full volume of liquid in my pot to about 160 degrees, turned off the heat, and added the bag of grains. Then, they steeped.

Another complication with being inside on the stove is that full-volume boils are difficult; compared to my 150,000 BTU burner outside, I’ve got access to something shy of 90,000 BTUs across the three biggest burners of the stove. But I made it work.

Grain Tea

Had this been outside, I would have been more concerned with temperature loss through the kettle. As it was, the temp tried to drop quickly enough that I turned one burner on low, just to maintain things for the hour. Once that finished, I removed the bag, put a cooling rack across the top of the pot, and set the bag of grains on that to drain.

About twenty minutes later, I added the remaining malt (about 4 pounds of extract, in this case), stirred it up to mix it, and turned the burners up to full again. As before, coming up to temperature (a full boil, in this case) took some time, but we got there.  Well, let’s call it a “vigorous simmer,” at the least. Eight gallons of liquid is a lot of mass to heat.

Once boiling, the brew proceeded as typical, adding hops at various intervals, stirring things now and again, and keeping an eye out to watch for boilovers, which is particularly important when brewing inside. With the smaller burners of the stove and a full-volume boil, it’s not usually an issue–but in this case, an unwatched pot always boils over.

Finishing Things Up

Having completed the hour-long boil, I gave everything a thorough stir, to get any trub (the “gunk” that forms in the liquid, comprised mostly of coagulated proteins) to pile in the center of the pot, then drained the finished wort into a fermenting bucket. I managed to get 5 gallons of wort at a gravity of 1.059, which was a higher efficiency than I was expecting, but that’s fine.Here again, I was left with a digression from how I like to do things: being indoors, I don’t have access to hoses, which means no wort chillers. So, I did things the old-fashioned way, and put the lid (loosely) on the bucket, set it in the utility room, and left it overnight.

Come the next morning, it had cooled sufficiently, and I was able to pitch the yeast. I’ve not used Omega Yeast Labs in the past; they have liquid yeast in large pouches similar to Wyeast, but without the “smack pack”. Given that the wort wasn’t really high gravity, and it’s “only” 5 gallons, I felt safe enough just using the one packet. If things stall out, or otherwise don’t go well, I’ve got a packet of dry Nottingham yeast to use as a backup.

In all, I’ll probably get about 4.5 gallons of beer, with between 5.75-6% ABV. That’s stronger than I was aiming for, but not by too much. It’s looking like about 47 IBUs, and if my nose is a guide, it’ll be a nicely dry, roasty brew. I think the color of this one is a bit darker than I’d maybe hope for. It’s shaping up to be a deep garnet red, verging towards brown. The grain bill had both black roasted barley and Special B, as well as 120L (dark) crystal malt. Were I building this from scratch, I’d maybe keep the crystal, or more likely use 90L. I’d also use either the black roast or the Special B, but not both. (Most likely, I’d go with the Special B; it gives a nice red color, and has just enough of the roasty coffee-like bitterness, without being overwhelming.) In all, I think it’ll be lovely when it’s done.

For those keeping track, the Irish Red Ale is Batch #171 in my Little Black Book of Brews.

Previous Brews

I keep sipping on the Best Bitter and the English Pale from last month. They’ve been steadily improving, both due to the simple time factor, and from getting a little bit of chill on. Three weeks was a little young to be serving them. Now that they’re going on six weeks, they’re really hitting their stride. And since the kegs have been living on my back patio, and it’s been getting into the 30’s at night, they’ve cold-crashed down to a much better clarity.

That said, I still much prefer the English Pale. The Best Bitter, while better than it was, is still a little too estery for my taste. The English Pale, on the other hand, has developed into something very reminiscent of some of the draughts I had while in England and Scotland. In fact, it puts me in mind of a Fuller’s I once had on cask, and is quite yummy and quaffable.

That’s about it for this time around. I hope to get to more charcuterie in the near future. I also have to wrap up my thoughts on what’s happened with the bees this year, but I’d like to address them soon. As always, if you have any questions, commentary, or suggestions, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

My English Pale Ale from the last brew day has been kegged up, carbed, and made its debut at a party we held last night, not quite two weeks after brewing. I’ve got the Special Bitter in a keg, as well, but we didn’t quite get to that one, so I can’t speak to it just yet.

In all, I’m really quite pleased with the Pale. It’s got the characteristic toasty, biscuity notes that I associate with brews from the British isles. There’s an assertive bitterness to it, but it’s neither over-the-top (as an IPA would be, even an English one), nor does it really come through in either aroma or flavor.

The color is a deep amber, and it throws a fine, off-white head. I’ve got the carbonation set pretty low; I was aiming for about 1.5 volumes of CO2. The bubbles you can see in the photo are due to a less-than-perfectly-clean glass; it’s certainly not aggressively fizzy.

There’s still a bit of a haze to it, but I’m sure that will drop out, if the keg survives long enough. The beer came in at about 4% ABV, which is about what I was hoping for. I adjusted my water a little, adding some gypsum (calcium sulfate), which helped give it a drier finish than it might otherwise have. It definitely leaves you wanting another!

I’ll have to see about doing this one up as an all-grain recipe, so that I can fully implement the single tweak I might make. As mentioned when I brewed it, I’m surprised by the (relative) darkness of the beer, and would like to back it up a few points to a lighter amber. I mean, it’s not a stout or porter, by any means, but it’s a good deal darker than I think of when I think “pale ale”.

I will be curious to compare this with the bitter. Not only was it lighter in color, it had a bigger hop profile. Not IPA big, but more than the pale. I’m also curious to see what differences I get from the yeast. The Pale used the London Ale strain, while the Bitter used the Burton strain (WLP-013 and WLP-023, respectively). It might be a worthwhile experiment to re-brew these beers, but swap the yeast strains out, just to see how they do.

The WLP-013 is, at least until I try the bitter, my new favorite English Ale strain. It definitely eclipses the WLP-002 strain, in my experience. The 013 seems a good deal cleaner, and really accentuates the malt, where the 002 has always given me a really fruity, ester-y beer.

For my next post, I’ll be going over the Special Bitter, and doing a closer comparison of the two beers. Also, since it’s fall, I’m beginning to think cider!

What have you been drinking lately?  Let us know in the comments section!