Monday 16 November 2015

A long long list of hops

http://www.morebeer.com/articles/homebrew_beer_hops

Sunday 15 November 2015

The brewing competition

The stout and porter table, and the long list of entries at the back
Back in April I entered my first serious brewing competition.Yes, I had entered the National Homebrewing Awards back in January, but I didn't get very good feedback from the judges, not just in the sense that my beer didn't do very well (the judges found this beer difficult to drink) but also because the feedback was so limited and unhelpful. Two sentences of feedback, for a very steep entry fee - unimpressed!
The results of best in show are read out from the stairwell in the brewery

Undeterred a colleague from work send me information about the London and South East craft brewing competition, which was organised by the London Amateur Brewers.

This was as much a celebration of home brewing as it was a competition. I had dropped the beer off a few days before on a sunny spring day, where some friendly staff at the brewery took my bottles in and had a chat about the beers we were entering.


A talk from the head brewer

So on the afternoon of the awards itself all of the beers that had been judged were laid out across tables set up around two rooms in the brewery. The judges had supped their way through 250 beers. I had entered 4. Each beer was poured into a plastic jug, and you could try any of the beers that had been entered. The best beers had yellow stickers, and commended beers had green stickers. Two of my beers gained green stickers - for my Willamette lager, and my Wai-ti wiezenbok. Totally surprised and chuffed with this. Later I would be emailed two score sheets for each beer with detailed feedback from qualified judges.

The Truman Brewery in Hackney Wick

Alongside the judging, there was a talk from the head brewer about a beer recreated from the records of the original Truman brewery. There were lots of great free give aways too. A huge bale of Dana hops which we all took big handfuls of. There was a tray of dried Mauribrew yeasts too.

I also go the chance to meet a whole lot of other homebrewers. Their message to me was pretty clear, the key to good beer is yeast, yeast yeast. And so this is the lesson I have taken away and have been putting into practice since the competition in April. The next one is a two weeks time, I've only entered one beer but I know it;s more than just the possibility of winning, it's the celebration of home brewing too.

Me with my two beers that got a coveted green lable

Tuesday 13 October 2015

Wai-ti weizen (100% wheat beer)

I brewed this beer to try something different. I wanted to see what an 100% wheat beer would taste like, and I wanted to match the banana clove yeast flavor with a fruity new world hop. Aiming for something like a boozy silky fruit salad effect. 

Yeast starter and hops measured out
I used New Zealand Wai-ti hops - these are lovely fruity hops. I'd never used them before, but they came with a great write up, and are quite subtle which is what i was looking for. 

Wort pouring into the fermenter

To make sure I got the effect i wanted, I split the batch into two parts and aggressively dry-hopped the second batch at twice the rate of the first. 
Healthy fermentation - this yeast was really quick to start and gave impressive head!
In the end I preferred the less dry hopped version, the overall impression allowed more of the yeast flavor to shine. This was a superb beer, at the time the best I had made. It scored 69 at the London Amateur Brewers annual competition, and came 4th in its class. One judge scored it 71 (of 80) which was really very good. 



It's a hazy brew - but we don't care! this did clear after a couple of months


Grain Bill
3.8kg Wheat Malt

Mash - BIAB 80mins @ 67C
15.5L batch

Hops 
Mash - 10g Dr Rudi
Mash - 21g Wai-ti
Boil 60min - 7g Dr Rudi

#1 Normal Hopped (10L) 
Whirlpool 20g Wai-ti @ 180F
Dry Hop 20g 

OG - 1063
FG - 1008

#2 Hopped up (5.5L)
Whirlpool 20g @ 180F Wai-ti 
Dry hop 23g Wai-ti

Yeast - Wyeast Bavarian Hefewiezen (#2 repitch)  

Thursday 8 October 2015

Chestnut farmhouse ale saison - brett experiment 2



A favourite beer style of mine is "saison." This is a pretty broad syle, more of a category - like "bitter",  saison can ultimately end up being a very different experience depending on the brewer, Its also quite hard to work out what you are getting. I've spent quite a bit of time in Brussels, which is close  enough to the spiritual home of saison in the French/Belgian borders to find a reasonable good selection of styles to try. 

In the tourist shops and supermarkets choice is pretty limited to the big names (Saison du pont normally) and a few others amongst the usual array of Trappist and abbey offerings. But in the trendier beer bars (think craft ale UK style, except it feels like Belgium has been doing "craft" for a long time) and in the bottle shops you can find all types of exciting bottles jostling for your attention. In particular the Belgians go in for wrapping some in tissue paper, and whilst some come in familiar 330ml capped bottles, Others are packaged in the sturdier champagne style, which goes some way to indicating how unpredictable these beers are when fermenting.

About saison
Saisons are typically dry, the yeast tends to attenuate pretty well, chewing up most of the sugars. This makes the beers very refreshing, and tasty even at low alcohol. This is not always the case, as well as some excellent ones (Saison IV is just superb) I've had a more than a few duds as well.

Traditionally these were drinks made for farmworkers, apparently in the absence of cider or wine a beer would made instead. And because of this when making a saison one is at absolute liberty to basically chuck in any cereals you like, malted or not without worrying too much about authenticity. It also makes this an expedient beer to make if your stocks are running low. Only got a kg of pale malt? Don't worry! chuck in half a kilo of oats, use the rest of that wheat, chuck in the rye. I would normally add spelt to this but of course I've pretty much used all of my stock up already making IPA. However, what I did have is some chestnut.

Chestnuts
Chestnuts are a fairly common sight in the UK, and Ive always been a fan. I love chestnut stuffing, and roast chestnuts sold in packets from burning coals in the depth of winter. But mainly chestnuts are underused in general, and as their full name (horse chestnut) suggests they traditionally mostly got left for animal fodder. But you can make flour from chestnuts, and I figured you must be able to make a beer. And so you can - there are some Italian and French varieties from Corsica and Sardinia. But I've struggled to find anything closer to home. The obvious thing was to make one. I found some tins of pre-roasted chestnut, you would normally make some stuffing or ravioli filling from these.  decided that the simplest thing to do would be to use the methodology that I had followed in making pumpkin ale, do a brew in the bag batch and add the roast chestnut straight into the mash.

Unfortunately I don't know where my chestnuts were from, so I cant vouch that they are local. But I thought they would suit a saison because the dryness of the beer would allow the the chestnut to shine.

Fiddling with the funk
I decided to make two different versions of the beer from the same batch. In terms of style - I think there are 3 main thrusts:

1. Plain saison (dry crisp ale fermented with saison yeast)
2. Funky Saison (dry and crisp but with pleasing funk, either "barnyard" or "fruity" - both analogous in my palate to that "scrumpy" taste)
3. 1 or 2 plus hopped to within an inch of its life like a pale/IPA.


I wanted to see if I could successfully reproduce some of the lovely fruity funky flavors that Saison IV and others exhibit so well. In order to tell what was responsible for what, I split the finished batch into two, bottled the first as it was and poured the last gallon into a demijohn with a vial of "brussels" brett yeast (bretttanomyces). The Yeast Bay describes this as a classic lambic flavour, so i'm expecting lots of farmyard straw flavours. There hydrometer reading was 1006, leaving enough sugar in for the Brett to eat as a secondary, where it should enter a super-attenuating state, and produce all those funky flavors. I have checked and there is visibly a layer of small bubbles at the neck of the demijohn - exciting stuff!

Lastly - I am increasing of the opinion that life is too short for unhoppy beer. Sure there are some 
great examples that you can buy. But you can buy them, so I remain to be convinced that I need to be 
lumbered with 20 pints of the stuff myself, especially when I might end up there myself if I botch a 
batch of beer.  So I also added plenty of flavour (also a bit of whatever was left over) and dosed with Apollo and a heavy hand for some proper hoppiness.


Wednesday 23 September 2015

English summer pale

For my family holiday I decided to make a keg of lowish alcohol sessiony beer which would be light and focused on English hops. I made enough to fit comfortably into my 10L mini keg with the rest bottled.

I largely used Phoenix hops, which lent the beer a fruity (with an accent from the Phoenix) and tobacco/leather aroma, nice and soft rather then harsh and piney like an American IPA.

To boost the mouth feel I also added quite a lot of oats, although this did add a haze to the beer, along with the wheat, this didn't really matter too much.

The beer tasted great, it was consumed in 5 days by my family (14 adults!) - and confirmed for me that it is possible to get a really good hop flavour and aroma even at fairly low gravity.


Single infusion, bath sparge - 15L
Abv 3.5%


Mash @67C for 120mins

Grain bill
0.5 kg Carapils
1.05kg Wheat malt
0.96kg Munich Malt
0.50kg Biscuit Malt
0.36 kg Flaked Oats

Hop Bill
30 mins- 20g Dana
5 Mins - 10 g Phoenix
WP 45 mins @ 75C descending - 12g Calypso, 45g Phoenix

Tuesday 22 September 2015

Breakfast (Spelt & Dana) IPA

I love trying out new ingredients. I found spelt malt from one of the brew supply stores I use fairly often, and because I love the taste of spelt bread I thought I'd probably love spelt beer. But I've never had a commercial spelt beer (although there is a German one - Dinkelbier) so this was a bit of an experiment, I was not really sure how it would turn out.

I thought I'd make an IPA so the spelt flavour would shine through. I had a ton of Dana hops so I used these for aroma and flavour - they gave the beer a nice marmalade touch (hence the name) and the Galaxy lent a nice spark over the top - without blocking out the malt.

Method wise, this was a straightforward BIAB beer (because spelt is like wheat and can get stuck), single infusion mash and simple fermentation.

Drinkable after 6 weeks, I think this is the best beer I have brewed yet. Clean, yet very flavoursome. The spelt produced a lovely background flavour and a wheat like silkiness to the mouth feel and finish. Someway towards lager whilst still deliciously pale ale. I took a dozen of these to the Glastonbury festival and they didn't last long amongst my friends.

I'm going to recreate this soon, using a bit more spelt and some Kiwi hops.



Batch 11l
Abv 5.3%

OG 1054 (post boil cooled)
FG 1014 (at bottling)

Yeast - Mauribrew dried

Mash @67C for 100mins

Grain Bill
1.68kg Vienna Malt
1.00 kg Spelt Malt
0.36 kg Pilsner Malt (needed using up)

Hop Bill
Mash 28g Dana
20mins 10g Dr Rudi
Whirlpool 20g Dana 20mins @75C
Dry hop 28g Dana & 12g Galaxy for 10 days

Monday 27 July 2015

Camping hop monster

At the end of August I'm taking the family on a camping trip to a lovely place by the sea in Dorset. There'll be a campfire, there will be singing, there will be ball games. There will be beer. Last year I made an underwhelming IPA with some stale Centennial hops - but I completely underpowered it and it just wasn't any good.

This year I've decided to make a proper monster IPA. I'm using Apollo hops, described by my brewing buddy as "a really big hop" and Ahtanum for a really nice mix of aromatic and full on piny American hop flavour.

The other change is that I'm making this as a wheat malt based IPA. This is mainly because I have a few kgs of wheat malt that need using up, and because I wanted a light bodied pale beer that would let the hops shine through but give some pleasing body. Well, it is a bit of an experiment.

 I made this as a brew in the bag (BIAB) beer - using my temperature controlled boiler as the mash tun. You can see the mash hops bobbing along the top as the mash reaches 65C. Its a bit counter intuitive, as BIAB feels like a bodge rather than rigorous method. Yes, using a converted picnic cooler somehow feels more professional. But now I'm practiced at BIAB it gives a bit more control than the cooler box method. 


Running off the mash liquid. It's a very nice pale straw colour, and it has a very subtle hop flavour from the mash hops. The sweetness of the malt disguises the hop flavour quite significantly. 



 One thing with BIAB is that its tempting to try and get as much of the wort from the grains as possible. This is just a small batch, so I popped the bag in a colander over a jug and managed to get about half a litre further wort out. It's worth it even if that just gets lost in the dry hopping phase.



And here's the wort a mere 12 hours after the yeast starter has been added. There's loads of activity and the bubble lock is bubbling away and looking very healthy. Also smells amazing!


In the mash
2.008 Kg Wheat Malt
0.204 Kg Rolled oats
0.104 Kg Caramel Malt (124 ECB)
10 g Apollo hops
10g Ahtanum hops

Mash in at 65C for 110 minutes, then raise temp to 75C for 10 mins (i figured a longer mash wouldn't hurt with all the oats)

Boil for 60 mins

Hop Schedule

10g Apollo @ 20 mins

15g Apollo @ Whirlpool for 60 minutes @ 70C falling
45g Ahtanum @ Whirlpool for 60 mins  @ 70C falling

Dry hop 15g Apollo and 45g Ahtanum for 10 days.

OG 1050 (higher than intended - i might weaken the wort a bit, I was aiming for 4% abv)

Yeast - Cry Havoc WLP - using yeast starter

Tuesday 21 July 2015

Lucky dip yeast



This was too good to turn down - 5 phials of liquid yeast for £10. These yeasts are usually over £6 each and so even though they are over their use by date its still a great way to try out a load of different yeasts in a very affordable way. Even though the yeasts are over the use by date, they are still perfectly viable if I make a yeast starter first, it just means forgoing the really easy pitch straight from the phial function of the easy yeast. At this price you've just got to experiment!

Because it's a lucky dip, I had no idea what I'd get in the  package. I was hoping for some interesting yeasts and I certainly got some. This also means over the next few months I have some interesting beers to make. As it turned out I was really pleased, you can see from the picture what I got. Here's an idea of what I might make with these yeasts

Vermont Ale Yeast - Kohatu IPA (I've already made this one - recipe coming soon)
Cry Havoc (WLP862) - this is Charlie Papazian's house yeast strain and said to be very versatile - I might also make an IPA with this
Dry Belgian Ale Yeast - This yeast is a monster - 85 - 100% attenuation!! I'll probably make a Leffe or La Chouffe clone with this, with added hoppiness
American Lager Yeast - I struggle with lagers because I don't have any way to control low temperatures. But lager yeasts can make very good stout or porter yeasts and have a nice silky texture so I'll probably use one for entering this competition - and above all I am tempted to make a Baltic porter.
Northeastern Abbey Yeast - another Belgian style yeast, this one much more subtle, and suitable for a wit beer so I might make a Belgian wheaty beer from this.

Sunday 5 July 2015

White House ale - a critique

Its not new news that President Obama has had some homebrew going on - that dates back all the way to 2012. But when a colleague sent me one of the recipes I couldn't resist taking a closer look. I'm fully in favour of the White House promoting home brew, but now I have some experience of my own I wanted to think about what I might do differently if I was making this, and what might improve the beer. There's no comment box on the site (which is understandable but a bit annoying in this instance.)

What I'd change:

1. Aroma hops - these are added at 60 mins and then the wort is left to stand, then cooled water is added to the liquid. This will add a lot more bittering to the wort - and much of the best of the aroma will be driven off at boiling temperature. Instead I'd add the aroma hops at the stage when the cold water is added (when the temperature is 70 - 80C) and let them stand for at least 30 minutes before removing the hops and chilling.

2. Honey - honey does two things - it adds sugar to boost the fermentation in the wort and it adds flavour. Honey can have some lovely delicate flavours and aromas, but if you add the honey at the boil stage these will be driven off. People add honey at the boil to make sure that the wort is sanitised, so that any bacteria or wild yeasts lurking in the honey are killed off. But this is at the expense of the delicate honey aromas. Instead I'd add the honey in at the end of the fermentation  (which will cause a secondary fermentation) because by this point the alcohol in the wort will limit the activity of any other yeasts or nasties lurking in the honey.

3. Yeast - Dried Nottingham yeast is fine - but it is a bit dull and has a distinctive finish. Personally if going with dried yeast I'd use Danstar Windsor (which is a bit more estery and would work well with this darker beer). If I was using liquid yeast, I'd go for a liquid english ale 

Here's the full recipe:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/09/01/ale-chief-white-house-beer-recipe




Ingredients
  • 2 (3.3 lb) cans light unhopped malt extract
  • 3/4 lb Munich Malt (cracked)
  • 1 lb crystal 20 malt (cracked)
  • 6 oz black malt (cracked)
  • 3 oz chocolate malt (cracked)
  • 1 lb White House Honey
  • 10 HBUs bittering hops
  • 1/2 oz Hallertaur Aroma hops
  • 1 pkg Nottingham dry yeast
  • 3/4 cup corn sugar for bottling
Directions
  1. In a 6 qt pot, add grains to 2.25 qts of 168˚ water. Mix well to bring temp down to 155˚. Steep on stovetop at 155˚ for 45 minutes. Meanwhile, bring 2 gallons of water to 165˚ in a 12 qt pot. Place strainer over, then pour and spoon all the grains and liquid in. Rinse with 2 gallons of 165˚ water. Let liquid drain through. Discard the grains and bring the liquid to a boil. Set aside.
  2. Add the 2 cans of malt extract and honey into the pot. Stir well.
  3. Boil for an hour. Add half of the bittering hops at the 15 minute mark, the other half at 30 minute mark, then the aroma hops at the 60 minute mark.
  4. Set aside and let stand for 15 minutes.
  5. Place 2 gallons of chilled water into the primary fermenter and add the hot wort into it. Top with more water to total 5 gallons if necessary. Place into an ice bath to cool down to 70-80˚.
  6. Activate dry yeast in 1 cup of sterilized water at 75-90˚ for fifteen minutes. Pitch yeast into the fermenter. Fill airlock halfway with water. Ferment at room temp (64-68˚) for 3-4 days.
  7. Siphon over to a secondary glass fermenter for another 4-7 days.
  8. To bottle, make a priming syrup on the stove with 1 cup sterile water and 3/4 cup priming sugar, bring to a boil for five minutes. Pour the mixture into an empty bottling bucket. Siphon the beer from the fermenter over it. Distribute priming sugar evenly. Siphon into bottles and cap. Let sit for 1-2 weeks at 75˚.

Saturday 20 June 2015

Kiwi IPA - 6%

For each "beer off" night my friends and I run we choose different beer styles, but we always include an IPA because they are so crowd pleasing, and above all else they really demonstrate the different characters that hops can offer. My last few efforts have underwhelmed me a bit, and I have realised that what I need to do is really push the boat out and "over do" the aroma and dry hops. Either this will get me where I want to be straight away, or if I over do it the hops will pull back over time and the flavour will settle down. My reasoning is that its much easier to over do it and correct with time than under do it and try to re-engineer. 

The key thing is to try and avoid adding too much bitterness to the beer at the same time, so to do this I need to
a) use aroma hops at a fairly low temperature (the higher the temp stand, and the longer the more bitterness is added to the wort)
b) use lots of dry hops

I also really wanted to show off the qualities of the "fruit bowl " Kiwi hops. I had 100g of New Zealand Kohatu which is supposed to be beautiful.
Batch Size - aim 10-11 litre (depending on loss from dry hopping) but ended up with 9L

Hop Bill
Mash hops - 21g Kohatu
Bittering hops (60min) - 5g Dr Rudi
Hop stand (72C and dropping for 30 mins) - 30g Kohatu
Dryhops - 43g Kohatu, 10g Calypso

Grain Bill:
3kg Maris Otter

Method - mini BIAB
Mash in at 64C for 90 minutes
60 min boil
Ferment at room temperature in a cooler box
Vermont ale quite slow to start, may have been due to being a bit out of date even with 1/2 sized batch
OG 1058
FG 1010 (calculated gravity at 6% abv) 

Tasting notes
48 hours in the most amazing tropical fruit aroma, yes some sweaty pineapple pants, but also passion fruit and guava.

At bottling, very strong tropical fruit, some sweaty pineapple pants as expected, should round off nicely as it conditions. 

Monday 18 May 2015

The best of beers and the worst of beers

My wife tried one sip of this beer, screwed her face up and poured the rest away. Everyone else at the tasting table did the same. One of the beers I made for Beeroff4 was a clone of the very famous “pliny the elder” beer for a double/imperial IPA round. I followed a recipe from a forum, which had lots of continuous hopping with big C hops and tons of late editions, plus lots of dry hopping. In retrospect I didn’t chill the beer quickly enough, and I should have switched from late hopping to whirlpool hopping which I reckon avoids ,miscalculating the bittering of late hops by accident. I also tried out a new dryhopping method using 6cm tea eggs as hop containers.
In hindsight both of these issues prevented the beer from being as good as I would have liked. It scored the worst of any beer I have ever entered into anything. Every parent loves their own children, but I have to say I wasn’t feeling much love for this beer. I think because I didn’t manage to cool it quickly enough (this was the brew when I realised that the tubes connecting to my plate chiller were not heatproof) the flavour and the aroma additions contributed far more bittering that I’d intended. This beer scoured your mouth.
I ended up drainpouring quite a lot of this on Friday. I’d already given a bottle to some friends of mine who adore IPAs and wanted to try it. I warned them not to, I apologised when I realised how bad it was. So imagine my surprise when on Sunday I get an IM saying we loved your beer. The pumpkin one? No – the IPA! Didn’t you find it too bitter I asked? No – not for americans my friends said! They had another American friend visiting them. He wants to know if it’s a clone of Pliny the Elder, and can you send us any spare bottles. Wow – luckily I kept 4 bottles back just to see if it aged and got better with time. I’ll be posting those off to my friends now!

Thursday 14 May 2015

Re-engineering a disappointing IPA


Calypso dryhopping - hopefully an improvement.....

I few weeks back I wrote about two rye-IPAs I brewed, which were both ok but a little less hoppy than I had intended. The IPA that I dry hopped with Mosaic was the less impressive of the two, after a short time in the glass the hop pulled back significantly.

I wondered if I could re-engineer the beer? I had 4L of 5% beer, an empty 5L demijohn, 100g of calypso hops and a hankering for some hoppy beer. Calypso hops are described as having a pineapple flavour, with a bit of piney aroma, so a good contrast to the fruity bowl mosaic taste in the original brew. The hops were 2013 harvest, so even vacuum packed and kept cold (well as cold as my shed will keep them in the winter) they have probably lost a fair bit of potency. It’s worth explaining that I had a bag of calypso hops to experiment a bit with hops away from the IPA cannon, at current prices you can twice as many uncool hops as you would say simcoe or nelson sauvin.

Re-engineering the beer took two steps:

  1. A hop tea
  2. Dry hopping

The hop tea

The principle behind the hop tea is to steep some hops in some hot (but not boiling water) for a period of time to get lots of flavour, and not so much bitterness from the hops. Many of the hop oils are soluble at different temperatures, and some driven off at higher temperatures. In this instance I took 1l of boiled water and let it stand until it reached 90C  when I added 10g  of Calypso hops. I also added a small amount of DME so that there would be a little fermentation in the demijohn as the dry hopping process happened. The fermentation produces some flavours that are not extracted from the hops alone. Some people keep some heat on the tea to maintain a steady temperature, I didn’t in this case. I let the whole thing cool and then added it with the 4l of beer to the demijohn.

Spraymalt - ready to add for a litte extra fermentation
Dryhopping

The tea and the beer mostly filled the demijohn. There was enough space to add 10g [check] further of calypso hops to the demijohn. I closed the container with a lid and turned it over to make sure the hops were nice and wet, and then switched the top to an airlock and left for 10 days turning over every few days to maximise the amount of exposure the hops go to the beer.

Monday 27 April 2015

Beeroff 4 – the good, the bad and the ugly

Beeroff 4 - all set up and ready to go
It never fails to amaze me how much you actually taste with your eyes and with your brain. There’s some experiments that show in blind taste testing people will struggle to tell the difference between red wine and white wine even though Blind taste testing is a very powerful way to assess how good your beer is. Most homebrew I make will taste different to pub beer. That’s because I’m aiming for bigger, or less common flavours, or using materials or techniques that you don’t find in beers in most pubs (and amongst these also the odd complete stinker of a beer…). That’s not because these are bad beers or bad brewers (far from it) but to be commercially viable you need to brew crowd pleasing beer.
But when you taste something on a regular basis you get used to it and it becomes a bit harder to critically assess how it stands up to the competition. Blind taste testing allows you to do this in spades.
The golden beers poured out and ready to taste
The beer off format is simple – for each category we source some commercial and homebrew beers. One person is master taster and pours these into colour coded jugs so that only one person knows which is which. After tasting each one – we comment, individually score – and then put these together to produce a winner.
Category 
My beer Position
British best bitter
Panic ale Last (horrible)
Pale/Golden ale
Golden pumpkin Winner
Stout/porter
Twisted stout Winner
Belgian abbey style
Atomium (ages +3months from beeroff3) Last
Double/Imperial IPA
Double IPA Last







Overall it was a good night for me. I won two of the five categories – which was lucky as these were my only two decent beers. It was a shame that I had to make a panic brew for the first round. There’s a competition coming up in April which I’m going to enter these beers into, that’s how pleased I am with them.
I didn’t really have time and despite trying make something viable in a very short space of time it just ended up being a poor beer. Some beers might improve with age, at the time of writing this (6 weeks ahead) it is still foul and is about to go in the drain. I had to panic brew because when I bottled the bitter I had made I thought it had got infected in the fermenter. It may have just been the yeast at the end, but it didn’t look right. I bottled it anyway and now and 4 weeks later this tastes like a very nice beer. So a lesson there not to judge something too harshly unless it is categorically a hopeless cause,.
The stouts ready to go
Very disappointed with how much the previously excellent Belgian beer had deteriorated with ageing. Although this tastes fine on its own, it’s very poor next to a better (commercial or homebrew) version.
Less surprised that my double IPA did so badly – in fact this was the worst judged beer that I’d ever put into one of these competitions. Even I thought it was too bitter. Strangely some friends I gave a bottle to loved it so much they asked if I could send them as much as possible. Goes to show that sometimes these issues are in the taste buds of the beer holder.


Bottle tops left over from the night



Sunday 12 April 2015

Homegrown hops sprouting in springtime


After the long winter nights have passed, and the sun has returned to London the sights of spring are all around us. Daffodils, crocuses and in my garden the first spears of my hop plants. This hop plant is into its third year in the garden. This year the early growth has been really vigorous as it is now well established - so many spears! Last year there were 4 spears. Although i harvested 60g of wet hops from this plant last year, this is the year when it should really come into its own and produce a decent crop.

Its a First Gold plant - an English hedge variety which means it should spread well across a fence - and in my case I want to trail it up and over the fence to soak up the sun on the other side.

I have also put a cascade root into the garden on the opposite fence this year, so it has very slight growth so far but the prospect of having my own cascade hops to brew with was too good to turn down.

I made a beer with the green (ie fresh and un-dried) hops last year - it was okay, if a little overly herbal. I think that owed more to my poor brewing than the hops. I'll have another go in September, and by the looks of it with a bigger harvest to play with.

Tuesday 17 March 2015

Quinoa beer

Beer isn't just made from barley. People have been adding other ingredients for hundreds if not thousands of years. Some of these are quite familiar (wheat, rye) and others common but less well known (corn, rice) and some seldom used, like quinoa. Actually i had never come across a quinoa beer. I love quinoa and cook with it on a regular basis, I love its nutty flavour and grainy texture - how much of this would translate across into the beer?

Well, when I saw this in a bottle shop in Paris I had to try it. What did it taste like? Opening it I got a big whiff of normal lager aroma (i'm not a big lager fan, to me its the smell of dank armpit) but this settled out quickly. This was brewed pale/pilsner style with a few noble hops basically letting the gran shine through. It was hazy, with a good head (all that protein from the quinoa). It had a very clean malt and yeast profile too. The reason for the bland flavour was to allow the quinoa flavours to come through. And to my surprise they did. Nutty, creamy, a slightly thicker mouthfeel that you'd think just looking and smelling the beer. Really good. I'd go back for more of this, if only I lived in France.

Tuesday 17 February 2015

Tale of two Rye-PAs

Hop residue in a fermenting bucket

Stone brewery in the US made 120 beers last year, I made about 12. I'm a self confessed beer nerd, I read about beer, I listen to podcasts, i seek out new and interesting beers but try as i might I'm not a full time brewer (no where near) so I need to think a bit more carefully about what beers I want to brew.

The conventional advice to homebrewers is to not to try and make or try everything, focus on making a few things well. But it not easy to heed this advice. Its very tempting to want to try lots of ingredients and try lots of styles. In short there are so many things to try - I want to try them all! But I also don’t want to be lumbered with lots of beer no-one (including me) wants to drink.
But how it is possible to do this when you are only making 20l batches? This is exasperated when making stronger beers that take longer to condition and age - if you get it wrong you could be left with 40 pints of expensive mediocre beer.

One approach is to rely on recipes that others develop and share . These are a great starting point but they don't allow you to the experiment and understand how the different ingredients work with each other.

Another way is just  to make lots  more beer and be dammed. I've done this recently, and although i now have a few fully laden boxes around the house, it has also made me realise that there are limits to how much I can ferment at any one time, and also limits to how much I can store. Plus i need to find someone with a taste for my underwhelming pumpkin pie beer.

Instead,  this has led me to think about more and more ways to get more beers a single 20L batch or a single mash.

The first of these methods is where you finish with different dry hops. I was really quite surprised how much of a difference this makes to a beer which is essentially the same in all other respects.

I made 20l of cluster/mosaic rye-PA. Basically an IPA with 10% rye in the grain bill. Cluster hops were used for bittering, mosaic for aroma and flavour at the end of the boil. Then after primary fermentation i split the batches and dryhopped for 5 days differently:
Batch 1 - 20 g of Mosaic
Batch 2 - 20 g og Nelson Sauvin

After 6 weeks bottle conditioning (and during “dry January”) these were ready to try. Batch one has lots of tropical fruit flavour and aroma - but is a little underwhelming (i think i under did the late hops or didn’t let it cool fast enough and drove off too many of the hop oils). Batch 2 is quite different, the same under taste (bready rye and tropical mosaic) but really pleasing citrusy/melony nelson sauvin notes that cut through, like higher musical notes.

Key things learnt from this brew
  • Don’t under cook the late hops - but do cool them quickly
  • Splitting a batch for dry hopping is a really easy way to experiment with dry hop aromas
  • Nelson Sauvin is a lovely contrast hop