Yeast washing

Fresh liquid yeast is great. I think it makes for better beer and certainly the beers i have made with liquid yeast have been better on the whole than those with dried yeasts. But there are some drawbacks. 

1) liquid yeast is much more expensive than dried - at nearly £8 for a phial or smack pack. 

2) the yeasts are imported from California - which means that they rack up a lot of air miles. This seems really disproportionate seeing as many of the yeasts I use are English, Belgian and Scottish - from about 250 miles of where I live. Brewlabs at Sunderland University has a limited number of UK yeasts available - but there is nothing in the EU that is anything like Whitelabs or Wyeast. 

So for both cost and environmental reasons it makes sense to re-culture yeast. It's also a useful back up to have a store of dormant yeast in the fridge ready to go if your planned yeast fails. 

I harvest yeast from the previous fermenter. there's always a layer at the end, a yeast "cake" that is left after the beer is racked off. I add some cooled boiled water to this and then pour off the sludge to some sanitised jam jars. Then once this has settled I pour the liquid from these into a smaller jar, leaving the solid trub. 

I seal the jars tight and keep these in the fridge. These can be woken up before using to make the next beer by adding them to a sugar solution, or a wort. 

In general I add 100g of sugar to 1000ml of water - then add the saved yeast. See the results below which are the two yeasts for my next brew. They were ready to go after 48hrs! 

  

Crabapple sour beer

Not pink as i had been led to believe it would be

Every autumn my neighbor has a crop of lovely orangey pink crab apples. They look beautiful on the tree. The blossom in the spring is a wondrous flood of pink.

But there are only a limited number of things you can do with them. You can't eat them - they are too sour. You can make them into a nice tart jam (it goes really well with roast chicken), i've made muffins with little chunks of apples in. Theses were ok. This year the harvest was amazing. Even after making a huge amount of jam.

This year there was a bumper harvest. I wondered if  you could make a crabapple beer - and turns out you can!  Even better it is supposed to come out a crazy pink colour! Mine didn't. The fermentation went fine, the secondary was as planned. But the colour wasn't pink.

The taste. Well, it's a bit sour. I used a fruity brett mix so it isn't too lambicky or challenging. It's a bit sour from the crab apples. But essentially it tastes like a mild cider. Crisp, refreshing, dry - but still very cidery!

11L BIAB
Yeast - Yeast Bay Dry Belgian Yeast
OG 1044 - est 3.8 abv before adding brettanomyces, 4% at finish of fermentation. 

Grain
2.26kg Wheat Malt

Hops
20 mins - 10g East Kent Goldings

Additional
1.4 kg frozen crab apples added to secondary for 2 months (quartered).
Added 1 vial of "amalgamation " Yeast Bay Brett yeast

Cherry sour

My first stab at cherry sour happened by accident. I was planning to a crabapple beer. I had made a 4% Belgian golden ale as the base which I was going to add the fruit and souring yeasts to.

But when i took the crabapples out of the freezer they had kept very badly, browned all over looking very unpleasant. I couldn't commit to using these, so i composted them and instead bought some frozen cherries from the supermarket.

I split the beer into two batches. One would be exposed to a Brett mix which would mature in 2 months. The other I'd expose to a lambic bacteria mix (with pediococcus and lacto bacillus as well as Brett) which would be ready in .... 12 months.

I let the cherries defrost. I liquidized these in the food blender and then poured the cherry mixture into the containers. An elementary mistake, but cherries contain a lot more sugar than crab apples, so very soon both containers had begun to froth and then overflow.

Ooops. I scooped off the excess cherries and poured away some of the work (wah!) to prevent any further blow over. At least when adding your own wild yeast you don't need to worry any more about your beer getting infected. It's already infected!

First cherry beer will be ready about easter time, i'll get the first look at it at the end of February!- the lambic one will have to wait for Christmas.