Belgian Beer 1 - Atomium

This post is about how we made the Belgian beer that so nearly won the Belgian category at Beeroff#3. Infact, it was so good that I’m goint to re-enter the same beer for the next competition, give it a new name and hope that 4 months longer in the bottle has perfected it. I say “we” rather than “me” because though normally I brew solo, this time I had some help. My friends from the US who were staying in London came over to help and to see how it’s done. I’m no brewing guru, but I have made some drinkable beer, and my friends live in a dry county in Arkansas. In my opinion learning to brew their own is going to be essential skill!

This was only my second ever attempt at making a proper Belgian beer, and my first strong Belgian. The recipe was adapted from Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing’s “Three Nipple Triple”  (see the end of the post for full details). I adapted the recipe around the ingredients I had left in the store cupboard, trying to channel Randy’s advice,  be a radical brewer and trying not to worry about forgetting to buy a bitter orange for flavouring and improvising using the satsuma’s my children had ignored.

Here my friends are helping to measure out the grains below on my not very sensitive kitchen scales. For grains this doesn’t worry me too much.

Mashing

I use a 40L picnic cooler mash tun. I’d like to claim that I converted it myself, but I didn’t. I bought one pre-converted which is probably for the best as I’m not a very talented engineer. The strike water retained much more heat that expected when we added it keeping the temp at 70C, so we quickly added a few litres of cold water (i’m not sure how many - this was a bit of a panic) which brought the temp down to the mid 60s.

The picture shows us taking the strike water from the boiler into the mash tun and trying to evenly add the grain.

After 90 mins of mashing (where we sat down and drank tea). We sparged using my kettle. I own a sparge arm that fits into the top of my cooler box but I cannot get it to work despite repeated tries. I’ve found that it’s just as easy to use a temperature controlled kettle. Simply fill the kettle (1.5L) and set to 80C, and then sprinkle the hot water over. I keep a small tally chart to remind myself how many times we’ve done this so I don’t lose track. We added 9L in total which ends up being enough boils to get lost. 

Boil

The boil for this style of beer is really simple compared with an IPA or a highly hopped beer. In a 90 minute boil we added a bag of hops at the start, had some more tea and chat. Then 75 mins later we added a the second batch of hops, and with 2mins to go the peel and spices. Hops are not a major feature of this beer, and essentially I used up some noble hops I had in taking up space in the freezer.

Primary Ferment

I let the beer cool down slowly. We have a tiled floor that stays cold even in summer (this was the end of August in London) and cools a beer down slowly in about 12 hours. Although there are lots of warning of infection whilst beer is cooling I’ve been ok with small batches so far doing this, and I worry more about driving off hop aroma.  

I added the yeast at about midnight that night. I used a liquid yeast smack pack that I’d prepped the day before - Wyeast Belgian Abbey. I think it’s worth using liquid yeasts, the final beer is always much better.

The ferment itself was vigorous after a slow start - one of the less weird ferments as well, just looks like normal bubbles, and to the seasoned brewer like an exciting bubbling mass.

Secondary Ferment

A feature of many Belgian beers is the addition of sugar. Some recipes ask you to do this during the boil, but I wanted to try adding the sugar after racking off from the primary. To do this I boiled a couple of litres of water, mixed this in with the candy and demerara sugar and left to cool. This should have left the sugar solution in a sanitised condition, plus when adding to the secondary there would already be a high alcohol content which ought to restrict any unwanted micro-bacterial infection. No problems this time.

Tasting

I made this beer in August 2014, and I’m writing in December 2014, so there’s been a decent amount of time for the flavour to settle even for a strong beer. For my first attempt at a Belgian I am really pleased, especially as the longer i leave it the better is had got. Also this has had the best feedback of any of the beers that I have passed on to friends. If i was being critical, I think it sits somewhere between a duppel and a trippel without really being either. But for judging terms I’m calling it a trippel and entering it into the national home brewing awards Unfortunately tripels are in the same categories as IPAs (which in itself is bizarre) so I don’t expect to pull up any trees but it may just be the best thing I ever brewed so got to get it judged!

The name 

Atomium - I've named the beer after the big expo sculpture in Brussels, if only to avoid anything to do with the mannekin pis

The recipie

Grain bill

3kg Munich malt

1.5kg pilsner malt

1kg pale malt

0.3kg biscuit malt

Additions (End of boil - 2mins)

Pith of 2 satsumas

2 very crushed cardamon pods

Hop bill

60g Golding's @ 90mins

50g Saaz @ 15mins

Gravity measurements

OG 1050 (added 500g of Candy sugar, 350g cane sugar to secondary)

FG 1008

Batch size

25L actual batch size (20L expected using software) 

EDIT - 17 March 2015
I entered this beer into two competitions, one formal and one informal. It got terrible reviews at the formal contest (the National Homebrew Awards) scoring 27/100 and described as "hard to drink" and "chlorophenolonic." I was pretty dissapointed, because this beer had been so good earlier and so many people had liked it. Then I entered it into our friend's blind taste testing, and it really sucked there too! What had changed? well the yeast flavours had backed off, and the tangerine and clove flavours had really come forward. Also the beer tastes thinner than before too. So altogether really dissapointing. Im not sure why its done this, maybe its the yeast, or maybe its because i didn't really push the ABV for the style, so it didn't have enough alcohol or malt to sustain it as it aged.

The beeroff

How can you tell if your beer is any good? You might think it tastes ok. Your friends and family might say it tastes great. You might give some to your colleagues and they'd say it's good. But in my experience few people will turn down free beer, and so how can you really be sure that your beer is any good and your friends aren't just being kind (and making sure they get some more beer!)

And then consider that your senses may be lying to you. That's right. There's a lot of evidence that how food and drink looks plays a big role in how you perceive it to taste. So if it's your own brew then maybe it might taste a little better to you than it might do to a complete stranger after all the time and effort you put in.

Well one way to get a good idea is to blind taste test it against some other beers. That way you get a pretty decent idea of where it stands, because its a blind test. If you test against other beers of a similar style you might be unable to even pick yours out from the rest. You might be really surprised. I was!

Every once in a while my friends arrange a night where we put home brewed beers up against some beers made by pros. There's a few of us who homebrew so there's also a "who is the better brewer" dynamic going on. We pick some categories some time in advance. Then we brew some beers, and and others buy some "pro" beers to taste test against.

On the night itself we pile round one house with a bunch of snacks and a thirst, then the tasting begins. This latest contest was "Beeroff3", so by now we had got the method down to a fine art. We had 5 categories. We tasted in 1/3rds with pouring away totally acceptable. That way you can keep quaffing the ones you do like and politely defer from the ones you don't!

So how did I do?

Round 1: Belgian Abbey

My beer did really well here. It was the first tasted, and I didn't recognise it. Happily I thought it was excellent! More banana and  ester flavours than I remembered, and less clove. A good hit of farmyard for good measure. It went toe to toe with the proper Belgian Abbey beer, Duval. Equal on first preferences where it went to second preference only to love out by one vote. Still equal with the monks whose brewing pedigree goes back hundreds of years. I would cling to this in vain as the night went on.  

Round 2: British (made from entirely British ingredients)

I'd put in an experimental beer here, one finished with green First Gold hops grown in my own garden. Id heard about using green hops, so I decided to try using my own in a London Pride clone. This made for a pretty good beer - good malty base with a herbal grassy hop profile. Unfortunately although it came second, it narrowly lost to the commercial beer. Now I don't liek to complain, and I am a realist, but it's November 2014 and this beer is using 2015 hops - what else aren't they telling us???!!!!!

Round 3: Porter/Stout

Wow - the second beer was amazing. This was my beer again. Deep resonant chocolate and coffee flavours, boozy kick augmenting the whole taste - definitely a winner. Beer one, a boring down the middle porter. Beer 3, overly stale coffee flavoured, sour and weak. Beer two wins almost unanimously hoora…. what? What do you mean mine is beer 3?

Round 4: Single Hop IPA

I’d brewed an all Chinook hop IPA for this round. An American IPA, brewed with my friends who are from Arkansas. That’s right, an American IPA made with real Americans! Despite sneaking my pals onto the voting panel the IPA still tasted a bit of armpits and admirably made it to second, behind my friend’s bombastic Cascade IPA (described as being hit around the head with a hop brick!)

Round 5: Blended Hop IPA

Last chance saloon. Because of a drop out,  my beer was head to head with another homebrew. 50-50 chance of winning if they were both good beers. They were. Mine a blended Chinook and Citra beer (it’s the single hop beer finished with tons of Citra) up against.. well my memory is a bit sketchy at this point but here’s what happened. It’s gone down to the final vote. The last voter is one of my American collaborators. He changes his vote at the last minute because he tastes the Citra hop in the beer… except he picks the wrong one, and once more I’m edged out on a narrow vote.

So no prizes but 3 really good beers, only 2 duff and really pleased with the Belgian. For the next post I’m going to run through making the Belgian - my best beer so far.