Winning Beer - Black Hefewiesse

I brewed my first winning beer. It was a Black Hefeweisse that I made for the London Amateur Brewers "Black Friday" competition. It scored 40/50 on the BJCP scoring system which classifies the beer as excellent.

The winning black rosette

A black hefeweisse, well if that sounds a bit odd, it is. Its not really a style, but the aim of the Black Friday competition is to make any type of beer you like as long as it is black. One of the best beers i tried at the 2015 competition was a black hefe so i thought I'd have a go at making my own.

My approach was to make a standard hefewiesse bier but with some roasted wheat malt (which has a very mild roasted malt flavour) to add the requisite blackness.

The beer didn't win the whole competition. But it did win it's flight. The flights are the subcatagories in the competition (eg Stout, Porter, Mild). My beer was put in the experimental beer flight, which was fair enough as the beer doesn't really fit in any of the existing styles.

When they announced the results I was completely surprised. But the judges loved the beer. They said it had a lovely big banana and clove aroma - BOOM that's the classic hefeweisse aroma! I think the key thing I did was to carry out a  feurlic acid rest during the mash, which is supposed to really accentuate the clove/banana aroma. Worked a treat!

Black Hefeweisse 4.1% 
11L Brew in a bag mash
Feurlic Acid rest at 45C for 20 mins
Mash at 67C for 60mins

Grain:
2.67kg Pale wheat malt
0.23kg

Hops:
4.5g Pheonix @FWH 60minutes (used this because it has a bit of a chocolate taste)
9g Pheonix @30 mins
4.5g Pheonix @FO

OG1051
FG1020

Totally missing the target

Last night I brewed a beer and it all went wrong. I made a Belgian Blonde - target OG was 1049. Instead the OG came out at 1031 - disaster! What went wrong? I think it was the mash. I used my cool box mash tun, and put the grains into a BIAB mesh bag to help with cleanliness. However, last time i did this was with much more grain, whereas this time the sparge water bypassed a lot of the grain, or didn't extract as much as it could. And I was in a hurry..

So how can i rectify this? I've put the wort outside in the cold, and i'm going to attempt to boil off quite a bit of the wort to get it somewhere near to 1040 - 1045 and then i'll be adding some candi sugar to get it up to the right strength. Wish me luck!

UPDATE -

I did an extra boil of 2 hours, which got the wort to 1039. My savior was Wilkinson's which sells packets of dried malt. I added some DME to the wort to bring me up to 1045, which with the candi sugar later on is just enough for the style.

Homegrown (hops)

This year I've had my first decent crop of hops from my garden 300g of Cascade and First Gold. I’m really excited about turning these into a very fresh beer.

I've been growing hops in my garden for a few years now. Hops are perennial plants and take a year or so to establish which means the good crops don't come straight away. My First Gold plant is 3 years old, the Cascade is 2 years old.

Hops like the warmer end of the English climate, and lots of sun. I live in London and have a tiny garden, the hops grow on west and east facing fences. As much as possible I encourage the bines to trail up along trellising and other plants, which isn't optimal and they’s prefer full sun, but looks really good (which is half the point of growing them).

Knowing when to pick the hops is a bit tricky. When the hop flowers are ready depends on the type of plant and the location they are growing in. Commercially September is the peak hop picking time. But my hops weren’t ready that early, in fact mine were only really ready at the end of September.

How do you know when the hops are ready to pick? When they are too young they are wet feeling, perfectly green and when you press them in your fingers they stay compressed for a bit. When they are ready to pick there are some good signs:

• They feel dry and papery
• The tips of some of the leaves go brown
• When compressed the hops spring back to shape quickly
• When you rub the hops in your fingers you get a big hop aroma and the cone disintegrates quickly
• The hops come away easily from the bine

My First Gold hops were ready earlier than the Cascade by 2 weeks, which meant I left the Cascade crop on the bines for a bit longer and picked the First Gold first.

Last year I used the hops straight away. This year I didn't have time to brew straight away and use the hops to make a green hop beer. So i looked into ways of drying the hops at home. Many people opt for a net or screen set up by a sunny window, but by early October the sun isn't reliable like it is in early September so in order to keep the the hops from oxidising too much (which destroys the aromatics) I tried drying them in my oven. The temperature needs to be as low as possible to avoid oxidisation.

For me this was about 40C. I arranged half a kilo on three baking trays for 2-3 hours, stirring the hops every now and then to get an even result. After this time the hops were excellently dried. This removed 80 - 85% of the water (about right) and final weight was between 100g and 80g depending on the batch. I stuffed these into freezer bags, squeezed as much air out as possible and used a food seal clip to attempt to make airtight. Ideally i’d use a vacuum seal, but i don't have one and this would do if i use the hops quickly.

I made a beer with the Cascade hops that I’ll detail in the next post.

English IPA #1

Why don't you see more IPAs that use English hops? Is it because the taste of the hops is different to American hops? Is it that they don't really suit the style? Certainly you do see more old fashioned English pale ales and traditional IPAs with English hops, but not so often in the American style IPAs. 

I love hoppy beers, so I was inspired by BrewDog's recipe book DIY dog to have a go at an American style IPA using English hops just like they had done.  

I went for a simple recipe with the focus intended to be on hop flavor and aroma. I used the most traditional English hops, Fuggles for flavour, and East Kent Goldings for aroma. My friend made a lovely fruity pale using East Kent Goldings, 

Recipe (19 litres) 

6kgs Maris Otter 

45g Fuggles - 60mins

55g Fuggles - Whirlpool (80C) 

180g East Kent Goldings - dry hop for 4 days

OG 1065

FG 1010 (7%) 

Yeast: White Labs London Ale Yeast WLP013

Quite a nice beer - but not an IPA

So how did this work out? It's a decent beer. Without prompting my friends and family have liked the beer and thought it was a belgian beer. It has a nice Fuggles flavour, but its not got much aroma to speak of despite the huge dose of hops. 

I took the beer to my local beer club for tasting - and they gave me some really useful feedback on the beer: 

The good points

* decent beer - drinkable

* good colour and body

* good fuggles flavour

The bad 

* Some off flavours (fermented too high temperature? Some yeast autolysis?) 

* Very little aroma

* Not bitter enough

How could I have improved this beer? 

So the main message is that some english hops are just not very suited to hoppy styles. One suggestion was to use Bramling Cross hops as these a much more American flavour. 

The yeast off flavours were due to the temperature i fermented at. This is because i have no  way to keep my fermenter cold, and at the time (early July 2016) it was regularly 30C during the day and pretty high 20s during the night. So i could have used a more temperature tolerant yeast like Danstar Nottingham, or a Belgian Saison yeast.

Some of the brewers thought that the yeast flavours may have masked the hop aroma - although i'm pretty sure this was down to the East Kent Goldings, as they didn't have much aroma when they were opened in the packet. 

Holiday beers

 This year I holidayed in South West France and I though I'd try out some local (well - French) beers whilst i was there. Actually where i was my selection was pretty limited (I was pretty much limited to  the supermarket E Le Clerc). I could buy countless Belgian beers, cidre and of course the wine was plentiful and very good.

However I picked out 3 beers that were made in France that I sampled over the holiday.

1. De Goudale - grand cru with Fantasia hop.

This is a strong Belgian style beer, made in France. As a Belgian beer it's lovely Smooth, blonde, great yeast taste. Unfortunately i couldn't really taste much from the hops. Fantasia hops are supposed to have a unique flavour, turns out this is cream soda and caramel which would have been hard to tell apart from the flavours already in the beer.

2. Abbey du mont Saint Eloi - Bier du Garde

Bier du garde is a genuinely French style of beer, so i was interested in how this would taste. Really disappointed in this. It basically tasted like a poor high alcohol lager. Maybe it was a bad example but i didn't like it.

3. Pietra - Biera Corsa.

This is made with Chestnuts! It had a lovely robust malty taste and rusty colour. In fact colour taste and aroma were similar to a British extra special bitter. I could taste a similar slight metallic taste which was similar to the chestnut beer I made myself last year.. Very drinkable.

Windsor and Eton brewery tour

12 delicious beers on tap!

My third brewery visit this year was to the Windsor and Eton brewery - which unsurprisingly is in Windsor. 200 years ago Windsor was a major brewing center.

Our tour guide, Will

There were five breweries in the town in its hey day. The last of these closed in 1931, and there was no more brewing in the town until the new Windsor and Eton craft brewery opened 6 years ago. In that short time the brewery has expanded rapidly to an output of nearly 1.5 million pints of beer per year.

Lovely krausen on this beer

We were taken around the brewery by Will, a partner in the business and a lifelong brewer. In contrast to the wooden vats and ancient timbers of the Wychwood brewery I visited back in March, the Windsor brewery is a temple of glistening stainless steel. Nine large fermenting vats contain a huge amount of delicious beer.

9 large fermenters

While Will tells us about the brewery and how they got started, we get stuck into the beers. Eventually we will sample 8 of the beers, quaffing about a third of a pint of each brought freshly from the bar.

Big bags of malt on the left

Time for another beer Will says, and we tuck into some Guardsman, its a beautifully caramelly beer, with a big hop hit. Its like London Pride with the hops turned up to 11. Will explains that they designed the beer to be like London bride. It is a great example of what Windsor do - clean bright beers where the hops take centre stage With guardsman the centre stage hop is Fuggles, others feature American hops (Citra, Simcoe). In fact there's a big open bag of Simcoe that I'm sure we can smell all the way around the tour of the fermenters.

Mmmmm BIG bag of simcoe hops!

underneath the fermenters

Take a look under fermenter No6 says Will. The bucket under No6 looks like it is boiling, there is so much air passing though. They finish the main part of the fermenting in 4 day. This pretty much finishes the tour, two and a half hours in. 7 beers in we retire to the bar for the last beer. We have been too slow says Will, not enough time to drink the last beer on the tour. Oh, but we had so much fun, 2 1/2 half hours flew by.

Spent grain, salt free pizza base

I often feel quite guilty about how much spent grain is left over after a brew. I don't throw the grain away, I compost it, but even so I'm often left thinking I could have done much more with the grain.

So, I had a go at adding some spent grain to pizza, and it worked really well. In fact I could hardly tell the grain was there except when the odd husk got stuck in my teeth. Over all it added nicely to the whole meal crust. Here's the recipe, it makes 3 thin pizzas. Caution, as I don't like to add salt the dough wont keep unless you freeze it quickly.


272g White flour
204g Wholemeal flour (I prefer spelt, but any wholemeal will do)
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons oil
355g Warm water
12g (1 packet) dried bakers yeast
100g spent grains (maris otter in the picture)

Set to the dough setting in a bread maker (or kneed yourself) - allow to rise and then roll out as preferred. Blind bake for 5-10 mins until starts to rise, then add toppings and finish.

Serve with some homebrew :)