Here's a beer a long time in the making. I brewed the base beer for this a year and a half ago as part of a split batch with a Belgian wit. While the wit was fermented with a yeast harvested from some La Trappe Witte, the half which became this was fermented with a wild culture. The grain bill is very pale, with a mix of pale ale malt, wheat malt and unmalted wheat and spelt flakes. Hopping was minimal, only 16 IBU from some Saaz.

I cultured the yeast and bacteria from a handful of uncrushed malt in a starter culture first, then pitched this after confirming that no obvious off-flavours were present. Starter cultures are my preferred method for doing spontaneous fermentations as they allow more control over the conditions and mean that if things go horribly wrong you'll only lose a couple of litres of starter rather than a full batch of beer.

Brewing spontaneously fermented sours is an enterprise that requires a fair bit of patience. Wild yeasts and bacteria are often slow to do their thing and over time the conditions in the beer will favour different species and strains. Most of the time the best thing to do it to stick the fermenter in some corner of the cellar and forget about it for a while. Thus this beer sat largely ignored for a bit over a year before I started thinking about what to do with it.

The beer that emerged was fairly sour, and quite funky, but somehow unremarkable. Because of this I decided to try to liven it up with a bit of fruit. I added 500g of frozen raspberries, defrosted first of course. I then promptly forgot about the beer again for another 5 months while I pursued other, more short-term, brewing projects.

Finally, in January this year, I decided it was about time to bottle.

Appearance

The raspberries have given the beer a fantastic, pink colour while during the long conditioning with bacteria has left it crystal clear. Theres a decent bit of carbonation and it pours with a bright white head. As is often the case with sour beers thoough, the head fades very fast.

Taste & Smell

There's something almost wine-like about this, it reminds me of a Sauvingon Blanc, or perhaps a dry sparkling wine. The flavour is pretty sour, probably through a combination of lactic acid bacteria and malic acid from the fruit. A Brett funk of earthy farmyard provides the base layer to the nose, but the raspberry comes through strongly too. The flavour starts full of raspberries, but this is a bone-dry beer without much sweetness at all. The finish is a bit disappointing, the flavour seems to fade somehow and the lack of body means it doesn't really linger on the palate.

Final Words

This beer is still a bit unexciting in all honesty, it certainly doesn't live up to its stunning looks. Although the raspberries did a lot to liven it up, in the end I'd have preferred it with a more interesting finish. Partly it's probably due to the vagaries of spontaneous fermentation, partly probably due to the grain bill. Perhaps the best solution for the beer would have been to wait to blend it with something else to get the best out of it, but unfortunately I don't have quite enough fermenters to wait for ever for the right candidate to come along.

Vital Details

Batch size: 10l
Expected OG: 1.049
Expected FG: 1.010
Expected ABV: 5.1%
Colour (SRM): 4.3
IBU: 16

Grist:
55.6% (1.25 kg) Pale Ale Malt
22.2% (0.50 kg) Wheat Malt
11.1% (0.25 kg) Flaked Wheat
11.1% (0.25 kg) Flaked Spelt

Hops:
Saaz (30g / 16 IBU) @ 20 min

Yeast:
Wild yeast cultured from malt

I like to set aside a few bottles of the beers I brew for keeping, particularly if I expect something interesting to happen to the beer as it ages. Sour and funky beers are some of the most interesting to hold onto as the slow-moving microbes will often change the beer quite a lot as it conditons. I've been rather slow to post a follow up to this Brett clausenii saison that i brewed last summer. I only have a few bottles left of this beer and I'm trying hard to hold onto a few to see how it changes as it ages. It turned out to be one of my favourite brews last year. A very enjoyable and (at 6.5% ABV) a dangerously drinkable saison, the Brett clausenii provides a fantastically complex funky character which is complemented by hints of spice and fruit.

Appearance

In the glass the beer is a not-quite-clear, pale orange colour. Sadly the off-white head dissipates rather fast and the carbonation is perhaps a bit lower than would be perfect for a saison.

Smell

The nose here is all about the Brett, I had expected Brett clausenii to provide a milder funk than what I've got previously from bruxellensis or lambicus but there is lots of earthy, funk to be had here.

Taste

Bone dry, with a great complex of fruit, spice and funk, the flavour could do with perhaps a hint more bitterness.

Final Words

The next time I brew this I'll probably dial back the alcohol by a percentage point or so, but otherwise this was a very successful brew indeed.

I find a lot of the commercially brewed imperial souts to be far too sweet and cloying. In designing this recipe I therefore wanted to balance the inevitable sweetness that comes with a really big beer with enough hops to ensure that it did not taste like drinking alcoholic treacle. My plan was to aid in this by using Brett to dry out the beer beyond what Saccharomyces would be able to handle, as well as hopping quite generously to ensure a good balance of bitterness.

I brewed this beer as a parti-gyle brew with approximately half the sugars going into a more conventional stout and half going into this imperial stout, with only half the water. Thus the volume is half the size of my usual batch. I have adjusted the grain quantities to this half size to account for this. In designing the grist I had two goals, first to use large amounts of caramel malts to build body and complexity, and second to use up the last bits of various specialty malts that I had accumulated.

I hopped with Magnum and Newport for a total IBU of 50, which should be enough to balance the inevitable sweetness of such a big beer without the bitterness clashing with the roast character from the dark malts.

I brewed the beer in February 2015 and pitched the M03 yeast. After a month the gravity had dropped to 1.030 and the yeast acitivity had pretty much stopped. At this point I added the Brett claussenii, with the expectation that it would be able to do what the Saccaromyces could not, and eat up some of those complex sugars produced by the high amounts of caramel malts and the high mash temperature. It still took the Brett another 3 months to drop the gravity down to 1.018 and for me to consider the beer ready to bottle.

Appearance

Pitch black and opaque even at the edges of the glass, the beer looks every part the imperial stout. The tan head is quite insubstantial and the low carbonation means you don't get much of it.

Smell

A mild, earthy funk of olives, farmyard and citrus combines with the sweet, coffee and smoky character of the roast malts. The funkiness of the beer has gradually increased as it has conditioned in the bottle, but even now, 6 months after bottling, it is not particularly strong.

Taste

The body is thick, with the slight carbonation providing only a tiny bit of lightness. There's alcohol here for sure, 9.7% ABV can't easily be hidden. But there's also lots of dried fruit and coffee. Above it all there are hints of spices and citrus and olives, perhaps from the Brett.

Final Words

I'm very happy with how this turned out. The funk of the Brett melds well with the other flavours in the beer and has produced a very tasty, heavy beer, perfect for a winter evening.

Vital Details

Batch size: 10l
Expected OG: 1.095
Expected FG: 1.020
Expected ABV: 9.7%
Colour (SRM): 41.9
IBU: 50

Grist:
50.7% (2.25 kg) Pale Ale Malt
11.3% (0.50 kg) Munich Malt
11.3% (0.50 kg) Flaked Spelt
5.6% (0.25 kg) Toasted Oats
5.6% (0.25 kg) Flaked Wheat
4.8% (0.22 kg) Roasted Barley
3.4% (0.15 kg) CaraPils
2.3% (0.10 kg) CaraAmber
2.3% (0.10 kg) CaraBelge
1.7% (0.08 kg) Black Malt
1.1% (0.05 kg) CaraAroma

Hops:
Magnum (9g / 20 IBU) @ 60 min
Newport (20g / 20 IBU) @ 15 min
Newport (25g / 10 IBU) @ 5 min

Yeast:
Mangrove Jack's M03 Newcastle Dark Ale
Wyeast 5151-PC Brettanomyces claussenii

It's been quite a while since I last wrote anything on here. I've been pretty busy, but I have also brewed some interesting beers. Perhaps then it's appropriate to write about a beer that I brewed in August last year and bottled in June this year. Death and Gravity is an old ale fermented with a red wine yeast and brett. After fermentation was mostly done I racked the beer into two 12l PET carboys and added some rum-barrel oak cubes. I then pretty much forgot about the beer for a while, occasionally thinking I should perhaps bottle it, but not getting round to it. The result was that the beer sat on the oak for 9 months before I finally got round to bottling.

The resulting beer is a fantastically clear, dark red with a strong oak character. It is perhaps fitting for a beer fermented with red wine yeast that it looks like an aged Pinot Noir. The oak was rather overwhelming at first but has mellowed in the 4 months since bottling. I aimed for a rather low level of carbonation at 2.1 vol of CO₂ and it works well here. The brett character is minimal though, with only the slightest hints of funk peeking round the edges here and there. With 8.4% alcohol it comes as no surprise that there is a noticeable alcohol warmth present too.

Overall I'm not entirely happy with how this beer turned out. There is simply something not quite right about it, the oak is perhaps a bit too strong, or the alcohol too pronounced or the brett not quite funky enough. Put simply it's all somehow off-balance. Must try harder next time, I guess.

Here's a beer that I finally got round to brewing after having the idea knocking around in my head for a fair few months. The basic premise is very simple and not hugely original, to augment the spicy flavours produced by a saison yeast (Wyeast 3711 in this case) with the earthy, fruity funk from some brettanomyces. The Brettanomyces clausenii I used should produce a slightly less aggressive funkiness than lambicus or bruxellensis and so hopefully will not overwhelm the spicy aromatics of the saison yeast. The superattenuative properties of the brett should also help dry out the beer nicely.

For hops I used Magnum for some clean bittering early in the boil, followed by a few late additions of Saaz for aroma. I don't really want this to be a very hoppy beer, rather the hops should provide a backdrop against which the aromatics from the yeasts are able to shine. The mild, herbal and spicy flavour of Saaz should work well for this.

The grist is a fairly straightforward thing, a pilsner base with some Munich, some caramel malt and finally a bit of flaked oats to improve the mouthfeel since the attenuation will be quite high.

I did a straightforward stepped mash, starting at 63°C for 1 hour followed by 30 minutes each at 65°C and 68°C before mashoing out and sparging. The long mash should have the effect of creating an extremely fermentable wort and as a result the beer should ferment our very dry. My plan is to start fermentation out at around 20-22°C for the first one to two weeks before moving it to the basement and (hopefully) cooler temperatures. This should allow the yeast to develop some of the great peppery flavours that I particularly like in saisons. This being a mixed fermentation with Brett, I will probably give it longer than usual in the primary, perhaps a couple of months, to ensure that the Brett has fermented out too before bottling.

Vital Details

Batch size: 22l
Expected OG: 1.058
Expected FG: 1.012
Expected ABV: 6.1%
Colour (SRM): 6.4
IBU: 34

Grist:
72.7% (4.00 kg) Pilsner Malt
9.1% (0.50 kg) Munich Malt
9.1% (0.50 kg) Flaked Oats
4.6% (0.25 kg) CaraBelge
4.6% (0.25 kg) CaraAmber

Hops:
Magnum (20g / 29 IBU) @ 60 min
Saaz (20g / 3 IBU) @ 10 min
Saaz (30g / 2 IBU) @ 5 min
Saaz (50g / 0 IBU) @ flame out

Yeast:
Wyeast 3711 French Saison
Wyeast 5151-PC Brettanomyces clausenii

It's been 5 months since I brewed this beer and almost a month since I bottled it. I finished off the beer with 55g of Newport a week before bottling. With the gravity finishing off at 1.009, the beer comes in a touch lighter than planned at 3.4% ABV. As such it's very much a light, fresh, summer beer; and with spring just warming up, I seem to have timed this quite well. I was a bit conservative when priming it for bottling, aiming at only 2.8 vol of CO₂, in retrospect I ought probably to have been a bit more aggressive in that regard. The carbonation is slightly lower than I would like it.

Appearance

The beer is a very pale straw colour and almost, but not quite, clear. I'm hoping that a bit more time conditioning in the bottle will allow the bugs to munch up a few more proteins and clear the body up a little bit more. The head is white, and fleeting. This is not hugely surprising as sour beers rarely have a head that sticks around.

Smell

The brett from the De Bom blend comes through well in the nose, with hints of olives, lemons and perhaps a touch of goat. The funk is not overwhelming, though, and gives a nice bit of interest to a beer that I fear might otherwise be a bit bland. The hops added at the end have all but disappeared, with only a hint of hoppy aroma in the nose. Perhaps Newport was just not assertive enough a variety for this.

Taste

The lacto sourness provides a lemony, vinous quality with hints of apple and some grainy character too. The body is rather thin, and higher carbonation would have been a good idea. For my taste it could certainly be more sour as the sourness is quite gentle, more reminiscent of a tart apple juice than a riesling.

Final Words

For a first attempt I'm not too unhappy with how this turned out, but next time I will need to try and get a bit more sourness into the beer. I might try giving the lacto more time to do its thing before adding the yeast, or perhaps I will try to aquire a more aggressive lacto strain through spontaneous fermentation.

I find beers like this particularly difficult to get right, perhaps because there are no big, bold flavours to hide any flaws. After 2 weeks in primary and another 3 weeks in secondary, with most of the time in secondary spent at around 4°C, I was hoping for a beer with a good clean malt flavour. The beer does not quite live up to those expectations.

Appearance

Dark reddish amber with a little bit of haze. The beer pours with a large tan head which dissipates fast, leaving just the barest bit of foam at the surface.

Smell

Fruity with red fruits and banana.

Taste

The high carbonation provides a spritzy lightness. The clean malt flavour I was hoping for is not really noticeable, rather the flavour is fruity with some banana and red fruits.

Final Words

This is not a bad beer as such, but just OK and as such it's something of a disappointment. It might improve with a couple more weeks in the bottle, there's just something about the flavour that leads me to think it's still a bit green. See: Halting State for the recipe

Now here is a beer I that makes me really happy! It has turned out better than I would have dared to hope, drinkable, hoppy, spicy and a real looker too. This is a beer brewed like a traditional weizen, but hopped with plenty of New Zealand hops. I brewed it at the end of last year and it had a full month in the fermenter before I got round to bottling it. It ended up a touch lower in ABV than I had expected, coming in at 4.5% instead of the predicted 4.8%. Apart from that the fermentation went about as well could be hoped.

Appearance

The first thing you notice about this beer is the fantastic head on it. Just as a weizen should be, the slightly off-white head is big, moussy and long lasting, hanging around the whole time you drink the beer. The body is golden-orange in colour and quite hazy.

Smell

The nose is all about the hops. Peaches, citrus, pine and woody notes.

Taste

Spices, then more spices. Here the yeast really shines through with peppery notes combining with cloves and oak. I'd like to think that the ferulic acid rest I did during the brew had something to contribute too... The four and a half percent make this incredibly drinkable and unlike more traditional weizen, the increased hopping means it doesn't start feeling too sweet after a while.

Final Words

Must brew again. That is all.

I get the ideas for my beers from a pretty wide range of sources; commercial beers, blogs, books, and of course from the mysterious depths of my mind. This particular beer is one of two that I decided to brew after having read Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski, the other will be a funky, sour Saison that I've yet to formulate in any great detail. Farmhouse Ales takes a pretty detailed look at two beer styles, the Saison and the Bière de Garde, and is full of interesting stuff on the two styles. Halting state then, is my take on a Bière de Garde.

I've never had much interest in copying beers, be they commercial ones or recipes formulated by other homebrewers. Thus my approach to recipes is to form a vague idea of what I'm aiming for and perhaps read up on how others approach brewing similar beers, before sitting down in front of my brewing app and writing up a recipe. I also mostly ignore style guidelines except when I'm brewing a style I feel unfamiliar with. I've brewed a few beers that go in a direction similar to this, so I felt quite happy to just go with my gut. Having said that, the recipe for this beer turned out fairly close to what one might expect from a French beer.

For this beer the key component of the Bière de Garde that I'm particulary interested in is the "garde" portion of the name. "Bière de Garde" translates from French as roughly "beer for keeping", as opposed, I guess, to beer to be drunk immediately. Thus "garde" is somewhat equivalent to the German "lager". My hope therefore is that the current cold(ish) weather will allow me to condition this beer at near-freezing temperatures for a few weeks. The result should be a clean flavoured beer with a clearly malt-forward profile. I used a range of flavourful, slightly darker malts to give me that malty backbone I want, as well as some D-45 candy syrup to lighten up the body a bit.

For hops I went with some pellets I had in the freezer, a bittering addition of Magnum, followed by a flavour addition of Saphir. I'll probably dry-hop with another bit of Saphir, just to provide a hint of hop aroma up-front. I just need to decide when to do the dry-hopping.

The yeast I used was the appropriately named '3726 PC Farmhouse' from Wyeast. I'm giving the beer about a week at room temperature to finish primary fermentation before I take it down to the cellar (now at 13°C) for a week or two to allow the yeast a bit of time to clean up. Then, hoping that the weather remains fairly cold, I will condition it for a further 2-4 weeks. I can only hope that the gods of weather like beer.

Vital Details

Batch size: 20l
Expected OG: 1.062
Expected FG: 1.015
Expected ABV: 6.2%
Colour (SRM): 15.3
IBU: 30

Grist:
81.1% (4.00 kg) Vienna Malt
10.1% (1.50 kg) Munich Malt
4.7% (0.23 kg) Special B
4.1% (0.20 kg) CaraBelge

Sugars:
D-45 Candi Syrup (460g)

Hops:
Magnum (15g / 23 IBU) @ 60 min
Saphir (30g / 7 IBU) @ 30 min
Saphir (20g / 0 IBU) dry-hop 3 days

Yeast:
Wyeast 3726 PC Farmhouse

A pale, sessionable, New Zealand hopped weizen in mid-winter? This might be better as summer beer, but I'm not organised enough to plan all my beers by season. I've wanted to brew a weizen for a while now, but had to wait until the temperatures in my basement fell low enough. I'm using Wyeast's 3068 Weihenstephan Weizen yeast here and the recommended temperature range is 18-24°C. I'm planning to ferment at the lower end of that scale to keep the banana flavours under control but, as I have no means of controlling temperature, I needed ambient temperatures below 18°C to make that possible. My basement is now down to 16°C, so it should mean that the fermentation temperature will end up nicely at the lower end of the recommended range. Living in Germany means that I can get hold of a huge range of weizens, so I didn't want to brew yet another one, so I'm pushing up the hop aromatics by using lots of late additions of New Zealand hops.

The grain bill is a pretty simple one, Pilsner malt, dark wheat malt and a bit of Weyermann CaraBelge for a hint of colour and caramel flavours. I went with a stepped infusion mash, staring with a 45°C, 20 minute, ferulic acid rest. Then a protein rest of 15 minutes at 50°C, followed by two saccarification rests, 30 minutes at 65°C and 15 minutes at 70°C. I finally mashed out at 77C.

I'm using two varieties of New Zealand hops, Motueka and Pacific Gem. Motueka is described as having lemon and lime flavours with hints of tropical fruit, while Pacific Gem has an oaky character with a disctinct blackberry aroma. I'm hoping that these will work well with the clove and banana aromas that I'm expecting from the yeast. The hop additons for the beer are heavily weighted toward the end of the brew. The only boil addition was a 10g bittering addition of Magnum for 60 minutes. After the boil I added 25g each of Motueka and Pacific Gem in a 40 minute hop stand. The rest of the hops (75g each of Motueka and Pacific Gem) will go in as dry hops.

I pitched a 1.2l starter of Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan Weizen and left the wort at room temperature (20°C) until the fermentation was going strong before taking the fermentor down to the basement to finish its thing while I go off to London to try some exciting craft beers.

Vital Details

Batch size: 21l
Expected OG: 1.049
Expected FG: 1.012
Expected ABV: 4.8%
Colour (SRM): 7.3
IBU: 34

Grist:
58.1% (2.50 kg) Pilsner Malt
34.9% (1.50 kg) Dark Wheat Malt
7.0% (0.30 kg) CaraBelge

Hops:
Magnum (10g / 17 IBU) @ 60 min
Pacific Gem (25g / 12 IBU) @ hop stand (40 min)
Motueka (25g / 5 IBU) @ hop stand (40 min)
Pacific Gem (75g / 0 IBU) @ dry hop (5 days)
Motueka (75g / 0 IBU) @ dry hop (5 days)

Yeast:
Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan Wheat

One of the unsolved issues I have with recipe design is how to take into account the fermentability of the wort during recipe design. How fermentable the wort is depends on, among other things, mash schedule, yeast choice, and grain bill.

Higher mash temperatures will result in more complex sugars which are not as easy for most yeasts to utilise. The use of crystal malts has a similar effect. In addition, some yeasts such as Brettanomyces are able to utilise sugars that ordinary brewers yeasts cannot, while many wine yeasts cannot metabolise maltotriose. The combination of these factors makes it quite difficult to calculate the attenuation that one might expect for a beer which deviates from the average.

This porter is a good example of just such a beer. The use of crystal malts, unmalted adjuncts and high mash temperatures means that my estimated of attenuation were off by quite a lot.

I brewed John Frum as a fairly straightforward porter, with the aim of achieving the sort of full mouthfeel that I like in my dark, wintery beers. Thanks to those efforts I expected to have produced a relatively unfermentable wort and consequently, to get quite low attenuation. I bottled after 3 weeks in the fermenter, cold crashing the beer on the balcony now that the temperatures are finally cold enough for that to be possible. At the final count I ended up with an OG of 1.018, which is an attenuation of 70% and a fair bit less than one would normally expect from Nottingham, but not unexpected considering the unfermentable wort.

Appearance

Dark, but almost completely clear, the reddish copper hues just about show through at the narrower parts of the glass. It pours with a dense tan head that hangs about quite a while and leaves a nice bit of lacing on the glass.

Smell

There is are hints of dark fruits, spice and roasty malt with an almost smoky character in the nose, but it's pretty subtle. As the beer warms up the spice becomes more noticable.

Taste

The flavour leads with sweet, caramelly malt which is followed by dried fruits and finally a palate-cleansing bitterness that just about prevents the beer tasting too sweet. The mouthfeel is slick and oily, coating the palate pleasantly and never tasting too thin. I think this is likely to be due to the rye and oats in the grain bill. Both rye and oats have a tendency to add a somewhat thick, oily character to beer thanks to the large amounts of beta-glucans they contribute to the wort. The medium carbonation is just about right here, lending some brightness to what might otherwise be a slightly heavy feeling beer.

Final Words

This has proved to be a rather popular beer with my friends, and two weeks after bottling, most of it is already gone. I will have to hoard the remaining bottles if I'm to have any chance of finding out how it ages over the next few months.

This is my first attempt at brewing a Berliner Weisse. Usually when I brew a style for the first time, I try to stick quite close to the style description. This is especially true of a style like Berliner Weisse, which has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to get right. Thus my plan for this brew was to brew a fairly faithful version. My initial recipe plans were slightly altered when instead of pale wheat malt, I accidentally ordered dark wheat malt. This makes for a slightly darker beer (around 5 SRM instead of 3 SRM) than I had intended, though it will still be quite pale. Thus I ended up with a beer made up of 57% dark wheat malt and 43% pilsner malt. The malt bill was a rather small 3.5 kg in total as Berliners are generally very light beers. The plan was for an OG of 1.035.

The mash was rather more complicated than my usual single-infusion affairs. I went for a single-decoction mash, as I expected that the wheat malt would benefit from it. The mash schedule went as follows:

1. Mash in at a lowly 63°C, giving initial mash temperature of 59°C.
2. Remove a third of the mash into a smaller pot, heat that to 65°C.
3. Rest decoction for 15 minutes.
4. Increase temperature of decoction to 73°C
5. Rest decoction for 15 minutes.
6. Bring decoction to the boil, simmer for 10 minutes
7. Return boiling decoction to the main mash, bringing temperature of mash to 64°C
8. Rest the mash for 40 minutes.
9. Mash out at 77°C

As is typical of Berliner Weisse, the hopping was extremely minimal with 40g of Saphir (2.9% AA) thrown into the mash for 30 minutes. This will provide the beer with some hop aroma as well as the micro-biological protection offered by hops but impart minimal bitterness, only about 2 IBU by my calculations. This is a no-boil beer, so I did not bring the wort to the boil at all, but just raised the wort to 82°C for 10 minutes to pasteurise it. Thanks to the lack of evaporation during the boil I ended up with a generous 26 litres of wort at the expected original gravity of 1.035

I went for a combination of three types of microbes, lactobacillus, brettanomyces and Brewer's yeast. Berliner Weisse does not necessarily contain brett, but I've read in various places that brett tends to add extra dimensions to a beer that otherwise can be a bit over-simple and one dimensional. As I wanted to give the slow-moving lacto a bit of a head start, I first pitched a 3-day old starter of Wyeast 5223-PC Lactobacillus Brevis. After about 48 hours, and with the Lacto showing good acivity, I then pitched one some US-05 and Wyeast 3203-PC De Dom. Wyeast's De Dom is a blend of lactobacillus, brettanomyces and brewer's yeast, which I chose primarily because it was half the price of the pure brett cultures that I could get from my brew shop.

Due to the heat-loving nature of lacto, I started out fermentation next to a radiator at a temperature of around 25°C. I will probably move the fermentor somewhere cooler once primary fermentation slows down. I expect that this beer will need a good 2 months at least before I can consider doing anything more with it. Until then I can only listen to the plaintive cries of the air-lock...

Vital Details

Batch size: 26l
Expected OG: 1.035
Expected FG: 1.007
Expected ABV: 3.6%
Colour (SRM): 4.9
IBU: 2

Grist:
57.1% (2.00 kg) Wheat Malt, Dark
42.9% (1.50 kg) Pilsner Malt

Hops:
Saphir (40g / 2 IBU) @ 30 min in mash

Yeast:
Wyeast 5223-PC Lactobacillus Brevis
Wyeast 3203-PC De Dom
Fermentis US-05

I've spent the last week or so planning my last two beers of this year. One will be a Berliner Weisse (my first attempt at the style) and the other a New Zealand hopped weizen. One of the features I've been working to add to my Brew Designer application for some time now has been IBU calculation for hop stands and mash hopping. I'm planning to use both of the two methods in these last beers of 2014 (mash hopping in the no-boil Berliner and a hop stand in the weizen), so I thought I'd write a little of what I've learned about these techniques. Hop stands and mash hopping contribute some bitterness to beer, but the lower temperatures involved in both mean that the bittering effect is much lower than during the boil. The reason for using both techniques is to maximise the extraction of aromatic compounds from the hops. These compounds tend to be very volatile and so tend to be lost during a long boil.

Bitterness in beer is primarily the result of iso-alpha acids extracted from hops. Hops contain varying amounts of alpha acids, which are not significantly bitter, but which, when heated, are isomerised to iso-alpha acids, which are intensely bitter. The amount of alpha acid in hops ranges from a low of around 2% by weight in old-world varieties like Saaz, to over 15% in newer, high-alpha varieties such as Magnum or Summit. The rate of isomerisation increases with temperature and rapidly falls below significant levels at temperatures below boiling. I wanted to add logic to the application to allow me to determine the amount of bitterness contributed by mash hopping and hop stands.

In mash hopping hops are, as the name suggests, added to the mash, rather than to the boil. Due to the lower temperatures alpha acids in the hops are isomerised at significantly lower rates than during the boil, resulting in substantially lower bitterness. Interestingly, it appears that the aromatic compounds extracted from the hops during mash hopping survive the boil and into the final beer. Mash hopping is also a way of adding hops to beers such as Berliner Weisse which are not boiled.

For a hops stand, hops are added to the wort after the boil and the wort is allowed to stand without being cooled for anything from 10 minutes to overnight. The wort temperature is typically somewhere between 90°C and 70°C. These lower temperatures mean that many of the volatile aromatic compounds in the hops are retained in the wort and thus in the resulting beer.

Utilisation

Essentially what I wanted to find out was how alpha acid utilisation (the proportion of total alpha acids from the hops to make it into the final beer) varies with temperature. This turns out to be a fairly difficult question to get an exact answer to. There is some research into this (see for example this) but it's not entirely clear to me how to translate the results obtained in such, closed-system studies, to the real world. What most sources seem to agree on is that the utilisation at mash hopping temperatures (~ 60 - 70°C) is somewhere around 20% of what you would get during the boil and at the 70 - 80°C range perhaps 30% of boil utilisation. I use the Tinseth formula in Brew Designer, and so until I come up with more reliable numbers I simply adjust my utilisation figure to either 1⁄5 or 1⁄3 of that for the boil to account for the lower utilisation. This isn't a hugely reliable calculation, but as my IBU calculations are probably pretty imprecise and as most people would probably struggle to distinguish a difference of a few IBU one way or another, it should allow me to make some rough estimate of bitterness generated by these hopping methods.

Voodoo Child is the love child of an American IPA and a Saison. I bottled it after three weeks in the primary, having dry-hopped it for 5 days with 120g of hops, equal parts Mosaic, Newport and Amarillo. I primed the bottles with 120g of table sugar for an estimated 2.4 volumes of CO₂. With an FG of 1.011 giving it 5.4% ABV, this should make for a great session beer.

Appearance

The beer pours with a thin white head that dissipates pretty quickly. I had hoped for a longer-lasting head. But perhaps it needs a bit more time in the bottle for that, the carbonation is slightly lower than I would have liked. The colour is pale golden orange, with only a touch of haze.

Smell

Juicy and sweet with a wonderful combination of tropical fruit and citrus. There's a suggestion of spice in there too.

Taste

The juicy fruit flavours follow you from the nose, giving way to a gentle, spicy, bitterness that lingers on the palate. The Saison yeast has really done its work nicely here, producing a great, earthy spiciness in the finish.

Final Words

I'm really pretty happy with how this turned out. Apart from the slight under-carbonation, all the elements come together to make a very drinkable beer indeed.

This beer is the successor to a previous porter (called Cargo Cult) that I brewed a while back. That beer turned out fairly well, but because the mouthfeel was somewhat thinner than I would have wanted, I decided to make a few changes to the recipe before brewing it again. In tweaking the recipe I ended up making enough changes that just about the only thing this beer shares with Cargo Cult is the style.

I brewed this in my shiny new brew kettle, a Bielmeier electric kettle, that I bought to replace the stove-top pot I've been using until now. Compared to my old pot this new thing is a wonder of efficiency, cutting a good hour out of my brew day just by heating up the water and wort more quickly.

I wanted plenty of malty roastiness from this beer as well as a fuller mouthfeel than I'd had with Cargo Cult. With that in mind I went with a selection of dark(ish) caramel malts as well as some flaked oats on a Marris Otter and Vienna malt base. I also used some TUOPPI Kaljamallas, which is a rye crystal malt from Laihian Mallas. It's intended for use in kotikalja, a Finnish, low-alcohol, unhopped malt beer. I figured it ought to add a fair bit of unfermentable dextrins and such, and thus contribute to a somewhat thicker tasting brew.

I mashed in high, aiming for a 67°C mash temperature. My new fancy brew kettle with its thermostat then held the temperature more or less there for 60 minutes at which point I began heating for a mash out temperature of 77C. In total I ended up with a mash time of just shy of 90 minutes. After sparging I was left with 26l of wort at 1.057.

The hopping was pretty conventional, with a bit of Magnum for a 60 minute bittering charge followed by two additions of East Kent Golding, a smaller one at 10 minutes and a larger one at flameout. I threw in 10g of Irish moss 15 minutes before the end of the boil along with the immersion chiller. I cooled the wort and siphoned it into the fermenter, giving me 21l of dark copper-coloured wort at exactly the planned OG of 1.060.

I'm fermenting this with Lallemand Nottingham which I rehydrated and pitched after aerating the wort for 20 minutes with an aquarium pump. I've never brewed with this yeast before so I'm looking forward to seeing what it will do. The fermenter went straight into the basement, which, at 18.5°C, is nice and cool compared to the flat.

Tasting Notes

Vital Details

Batch size: 21l
Expected OG: 1.060
Expected FG: 1.012
Expected ABV: 6.3%
Colour (SRM): 23.1
IBU: 30

Grist:
53.1% (3.00 kg) Marris Otter
25.6% (1.50 kg) Vienna
5.3% (0.30 kg) CaraBelge
4.4% (0.25 kg) Flaked Oats
4.4% (0.25 kg) Kaljamallas (Rye Crystal Malt)
3.5% (0.20 kg) Special B
2.7% (0.15 kg) Black Malt

Hops:
Magnum (15g / 23 IBU) @ 60 min
East Kent Golding (30g / 7 IBU) @ 10 min
East Kent Golding (70g / 0 IBU) @ flame out

Yeast:
Lallemand Nottingham