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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.