AG #11 - Wailing Bike

With a number of important points learned from the last two brews (namely watch your carbonation, and late hopping is great), I sat down to plan out this years Winter beer.....it was supposed to be Christmas, but I kind of got around to this a little late.

I decided to roll with what I had, a load of pale malt, a vial of White Labs WLP500 Trappist yeast, and a pile of New Zealand Motueka hops from the dark saison I had brewed a while back (which has now been fully road tested, and no one has died). I supplemented this list with a bit of crystal, liking the colouring it gave to the Bluebird clone I had brewed, some light Belgian Candy sugar, and a smidgen of torrified wheat for a bit of head retention. The recipe is here.

As you can see, if all goes to plan, this is a it of a mighty beer. One to very much sup and savour. The tropical notes of the hops should work well in a Belgian beer, according to their blurb, so here goes.

Brew day went without much of a hitch. I also decided to forego my recent ritual of boiling my water and instead opted for using Carbonate Reduction Solution (CRS) to get my alkalinity down. Whatever is in this stuff really works, according to my test kits. A few millilitres in 20 litres of water, and the alkalinity has dropped by an order of magnitude. I look forward to easier brew days from now on.

I forgot to make a yeast starter too. Don't usually bother with White Labs stuff, but this is such a strong beer that more beasties would have helped. I thought I had killed the blighters, and, eventually, took to putting the beer in the airing cupboard after 24 hours. After about 72 hours, I spotted the first hint of krausen, which developed through the day. Once this subsided, the whole beer became alive.....and I am now a bit worried.

Belgian yeast goes mad from Paul Wright on Vimeo.

I'm a tad concerned now that this is TOO active, the temperature too high. I know that fermenting high gives really fruity esters, especially with these yeasts, but too much can really kill the beer. Certainly, when I removed the lid, the smell was AMAZING....fruity hops and bananas from the yeast. It is now back in the kitchen, and it is still fizzing away. Hope this beer doesn't turn into solvent!

My other worry is the masses of crud that I have generated, presumably from cold break material. I hope this stuff settles out somehow, otherwise this will not drink well! In the relative cool of the kitchen, it now seems to have crashed a little, and I will take a week-on gravity reading soon. I can see some of this stuff settling out....if it doesn't compact well, I may only have 5 litres of this to drink.

Mind you, at that strength, this may be a bonus. Please send all small bottles direct to me.....don't reckon a pint of this will a good idea!

Oh, and a free bottle if you can guess from the above why this beer is so named...

 

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The Session #70 – Don’t Believe The Hype

Hype?

Well, I’ll probably get hammered for this, and there is an element of me being contentious for its own sake (because I DO like much of the stuff I taste!), but can I suggest the most over-hyped beery thing is the term ‘craft’ and the stuff that sits around it!

It’s a meaningless term. It is generally defined as something you do with skill and by hand. So, can someone tell me how the ‘craft’ of brewing a pint of Banks’ Mild is less than that of making a beer with ‘bucketloads’ of hops before ageing it in the stomachs of Bactrian Camels? How can a brewery so aggressive in its defence of the term ‘craft’, defined in the US as ‘small, independent and traditional’, pump out around 2.5 million litres of product, ripping up everything we know about ‘style’? (a hateful word, anyway)? It isn’t that, to quote Brewdog, ‘real ale no longer means anything’, it is that the term ‘craft’ has been misrepresented, incorrectly used, and been foisted on drinkers as a marketing ploy, in a cynical attempt by brewers to entice the weak willed into buying their product.

And, as we (and I have been there too, comrades) get drawn into the seedy guerrilla marketing world of ‘craft’, we become involved in the beer-porn universe they want us to inhabit. For the analogy bears some testing. You start off, perhaps dissatisfied with the pint in your local, professing it to be brown and bland. You find, lurking in some recesses of the Beeriverse, an old bottle of some kind of IPA, packed with New World hops. You drink. You savour. No one need know. It’s your little secret; American beer isn’t that bad after all. However, soon, a beer spurting with Amarillo no longer thrills; you need to move on. Before you know it, you are drinking a Saison, flavoured with creosote, brewed on the auspicious day of the Great Farting, filtered through the gusset of a pair of tights worn by Betty Grable, and delivered by water cannon fired by homeless Ugandans. And we can tell our mates about it. And we can metaphorically say ‘Fuck You! I drank a PHENOMENAL beer that was only PHENOMENAL when I drank it…it is now shite, and you can’t have it!’

Why am I so exercised? Jealousy? That I cannot afford the £45 a bottle price tag? Hurt pride? That I can never brew beer like that? Not really. It’s more like the spicy hit of tedium, aged with chippings of concern.

Tedium. Tedium, because all of a sudden beer is starting to gain the caché of wine. Even CAMRA support that kind of thing. However, we now talk about beer pairings, artisan manufacture, and is someone going to say terroir soon? As a geographer, I really want to think about beer as a geographical entity; the hydrogeology of water supply, the transport of ingredients and product, the historical context, the environmental footprint, the way beer permeates parts of our social fabric and how that has changed over time. As a drinker, I just want a good, tasty pint, well kept! When I go to the pub I want to leave the academic stuff behind (that’s my day job!), and sup a beer and think ‘Mmm, I could have another of them….’ Don’t get me wrong, I am happy for people to taste and describe. I belong to the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society, and some of their tasting notes make Gilly Goolden blush. But, sometimes, over-analysis tells us nothing. You’ve just got to taste it yourself. And I don’t care what you think.

Concern. Well, because some proponents of the term ‘craft’, seem to have forgotten the roots of the drink they so love. And this has built a sort of ‘beer snob’ culture that I hate. I get accused of being a ‘beer snob’ because I turn my nose up at a pint of Worthy CreamFlow, but by ‘dissing’ lots of small, regional, truly traditional breweries who put out stuff many are now seeing as ‘bland and brown’, means that the real essence of the craft could be lost, at least to the many. Beer IS a simple product; the ingredients are few and common, and the process not that difficult – after all many households made their own in times gone by. But the present shift of the ‘craft’ movement towards chucking everything at it from coffee grinds to printer cartridges (‘ummm…yes…wait…I’m getting hints of the HP Magenta ink circa ‘95…’), means that they are actually making brewing a far more arcane activity, as if these brewers have some divine connection to Ninkasi, and marking the product up accordingly.

Beer, and brewing, is about democracy. Firstly, like any good democracy, you participate; not just in the process of selection but in the creation of product. There are aspects of the ‘craft’ industry where this is just as alien as the so called ‘regionals’ or ‘nationals’. Don’t get me wrong, there are both ‘craft’ and ‘non-craft’ areas that get this right, but neither can claim the moral high ground. Secondly, beer is democratic in that you choose to like it and choose what to like. At GBBF this year, a thoroughly decent ‘regional’ introduced us to a new range of beers laced with New World hops. They were, in my opinion, pretty rank. Or, at least, much worse than either the bitter or dark mild they had brewed for generations. Even they had been seduced by the ‘movement’! Even worse, could there be a time when I can no longer choose their ‘boring, brown and bland bitter’ over these new brews? All of a sudden, this lack of beery competition is sounding like taste autocracy!

I could go on. But you have probably nodded off into your exquisitely fluted glass of fermented yaks horn, barrel aged in the sewers of Paris, and fermented under strict conditions of 24 hour Popul Vuh records being played at barely audible volumes.

Cheers.

AG#10 - The Tasting

Well, here it is....in all its glory!

This is the late-hopped Bluebird clone, fresh out the barrel. First impressions, this is rather too carbonated...I'm going to have to move the barrel to the shed, as sitting inside, even in the coldest room, is playing hell with the fittings.

That aside, the look is great...compare that with a previous photo, and the colour is smack on. Dark golden in colour. That bit of crystal has given a nice hue, and just a hint of residual sweetness.

I late hopped this quite considerably, and I can report that it has really worked. The nose is really hoppy, when it is first poured. Afterwards, this dissipated a bit, possibly losing it in the head (?), but a gentle swirl gets the aroma back. Of course, this was hopped with Challanger, so the hop hit is all spicy green hops, rather than the New World tropical fruits.

On the palate, the beer is nice and bitter...not over the top at all, but good enough to keep coming back. So my concern that I would not get enough IBUs out of the late hopping are unfounded. It lacks a bit of body (this is almost 1% lighter in ABV than it should be, due to a lower attenuating yeast than must be used by Coniston). However, this means that this is a cleansing pint, which you can keep coming back to.

Quite chuffed with this. The technique of late hopping looks promising.

All Grain #10 - Bottling the Bluebird

Last time, I wrote that I had decided to try a Bluebird clone, but use a significant amount of very late hops.

Well, the brew went quite well. I seemed  to hit all the volumes and gravities, with perhaps the finishing gravity being a little high (1.014 rather than 1.013). Having said that, there was no way I was going to get 3.6% out of this wort and yeast. Either Coniston have a phenomenal control of fermentation, which I suppose goes hand in hand with a more professional brewery, or their yeast has one hell of an attenuation rate. Well, 3% ABV isn't that bad, is it?

So, it all get kegged today. Great colour, that lovely burnished gold that draft Bluebird has....here's a particularly fine example from it's home in Coniston - a well deserved pint after a day on the hills with 45 undergrads!:

And did that late hopping work? Indeed it did, and this is quite exciting - almost 60g of Challenger hops added with 5 minutes to go. This gave me half of my bitterness, and it is still there. It's crisp and really enjoyable, well balanced. However, most of all, the hoppiness is there in the nose, in a way I have not been able to get before. Challenger is not a big aroma hop, and it's %AA is relatively low compared to the New World hops.  The aroma is one of hops (yes, I know that sounds remarkable!) rather than citrus or any of the stuff you get with hops like Chinook and Amarillo. It's kind of a grassy, spicy smell, not unlike the 'hop store' aroma of the hops in their packed state. Rather nice, and reminds me that the 'hopheads' who keep piling New World lupilin into their beers need to touch base with home occasionally!

Clearly, for the pocket, late hopping is a bit of an issue, but the results have been good so far. With some of the bigger aroma hops, with higher %AA, I can probably cut down on use. However, as a first go, with some good British hops, the results are decent. What it also means, is that I have probably been a little conservative in the past with my late aroma hops. It is also a technique to keep in mind when I have hops that need to be used. The single varietal pale ale approach isn't a bad tactic every now and then - a session beer with interest, easy to make and using up hops before they tire.

I hope I don't get any kegging nightmares before I can start drinking in 2-3 weeks. For some unknown reason, I seem to have yielded more beer than usual - the pressure barrel is full, so I hope there are no explosions.

The first of the Saison

After two weeks in the bottle, I opened the first trial bottle of the saison this afternoon.

I think it is fair to say that it is a little young, and it will be interesting to see how this ages in the bottle. However, time for first impressions.

I cooled the bottle down, it having conditioned in the warm, then coolish kitchen. Removing it from the fridge for 30 minutes seemed the best way to get to a decent serving temperature. And cool it should be; this beer is well carbonated, and probably needs cooling to prevent serious foaming when you uncap the bottle.

It poured with a decent effervescence, but nothing that meant I lost the beer. It is a bark russet red/brown in colour, not black. Although there is wheat malt in the beer, I neither got a decent head (just a thin lacing of foam), nor, apparently, a cloudiness you might expect. As far as I can see, through the darkness, the beer is clearing well.


On the nose is that faint Belgian yeast smell, that I always find really inviting with Belgian beer. The dry hopping has added aroma, but if you are thinking North American hops; all citrus and tropical fruits, that's just not there.The hoppiness is more woody, more European/British, if it is there are at all.

The first taste was unusual. That slight saison sourness, with a hit of chocolate which develops more as the beer warms slightly. The finish is dry; pleasing bitterness, but almost flint dry so that the beer finishes really early leaving that roasted malt taste - more black coffee than mocha. Because of this, I wonder if this is a beer to pair with food rather than just drink as is, as it may cut through some foods.

Very interesting. I am starting to think bottling it by the pint may not have been wise, though. This feels like a half pint measure, but I suppose you can always share!

I was tasting this as I mashed for another brew. This time, I've gone for something pale. A bit of a pain as my water is all wrong for pale ale, so I had to boil it first and get rid of some alkalinity - note to self, buy some carbonate reduction solution! Anyway, I'm going for a clone of the rather lovely Coniston Bluebird, but following this trend, I am getting half the IBUs by throwing a load of hops for the last 5 minutes. The aim is to get a really great hop hit, but with the bittering added. I have a load of Challenger that need to be used, so, why not?

Closed saison

Well, bottled anyway!

Sunday saw me bottling the dark saison co-created with Steve at Beers I've Known. On removing the top of the FV, the first thing I got was a huge hit of hops from the Pacifica I had added as a dry hopping experiment. Gravity remained at 1013, suggesting a beer of around 5.5%.

Tasting it before bottling, there had definitely been a change over the week. The sourness was there but less pronounced, the roast notes there but much more subtle now - and providing more balance than main interest now. However, the dry hopping had made this beer taste much fresher - not exactly the hit I expected from the way the hops smelt and were described, but a nice crispy taste that came from these new hop oils. I wonder what bottling will do for it?

Next time, I think I will get some kind of small bad for dry hopping, as fishing all the arrant leaves out was a bit of a pain. I primed the bottling bucket with about 60g of sugar, and syphoned from SV to bottling bucket.

Managed to squeeze 13 pints and a couple of small tester bottles out, so Steve, you have your saison! Will let you know what it's like in a couple of weeks!

At the same time, I decided to do a bit of housekeeping. I decided to get rid of the remainder of the Veno's Porter....it was just getting too much for me! I also had to get rid of three remaining bottles of the winter Belgian I brewed. Not sure what happened here, but the yeast never settled, and opening at room temperature created lots of foam (so I suspect I over primed). However, one thing to note is that months and months down the line, the beer still tasted great, if not better than when I first brewed it - a definite plus side to the faff that is bottling

Saison Update

So, a week from pitching, and I thought I might take a peek at the Overseas Dictator....

First thing to note was just how ACTIVE the yeast was. I had my first ever overspill in two years of brewing....it just went nuts. Now this maybe because I fermented in the kitchen, rather than understairs, and the weather has been a bit warmer...but we returned home on the Monday to froth everywhere! Even after a week, there is still krausen sitting on the surface, which I had to skim off to take a gravity reading.

Secondly, this yeast attenuates very well, regardless of what I have heard some say about its general finickiness  Perhaps warm is best for this yeast! However, seven days on, gravity comes in at 1013, from 1055. That's over 75% attenuation, and 5.6% ABV. This was a little higher than I expected, so it looks as if the yeast has done most of its work. I shall let it sit for another week, just to allow it to condition a little before bottling.

Finally, the taste. I have to say that I think this is one for the enthusiast. Easy drinking this is not. The roast that was dominant before pitching has lessened, but there is clear dark, smoky hint. Bitterness wise, there is a decent balance, but it is not overpowering. I have to say I do not get the citrus notes from the hops, but this may improve with bottling. However, the beer is rather dry on the palate, with black pepper (for me), and then there is just a hint of sourness. This is not acetic sourness from contaminated beer, but something all the more subtle, similar to the sourness you expect from this and similar styles.

My suspicion, on first taste, is that this one will be better served a little cooler. This may also help me carbonate it a little more without explosion!