Wa-San Dark Saison

I brewed up an experimental saison a little while back - experimental both because I've never actually done a proper saison before (and with the notoriously finicky Wyeast 3724 Belgain Saison yeast, at that), and because I decided to add some Thai red rice (Alter Eco's Thai Ruby Red) and kaffir lime leaves.  This was my first batch with temperature control, too, since saison yeast likes it hot (30+ Celsius, which is pretty hot for yeast) - I had the whole fermenter in a water bath with an aquarium heater.  It was a learning experience.

Today, I bottled it, and despite all the ways the beer could have gone wrong, it seems to have gone more or less entirely right!  After a few weeks at high temps it settled dead-on at my calculated final gravity (1.010), so it should be around 5.1% ABV - a little high for a saison, but lower than my stuff usually comes out.  Bottling went really smoothly, apart from once again overestimating my volume; it'll be a bit over-carbed, but it's a Belgian so it should be fine and I used good bottles.  But most of all, it tastes great!  I could be happier - it could have more Belgian character, if I'd gotten the temperature up after the first day instead of the third - but I think the nuttiness of the rice comes through and the lime leaves don't overwhelm everything else, and there's nothing I'd call an off flavour, so hooray!  Not bad for my first try with a challenging style.

Recipe for ~8L (small batch brewing!) as follows:

• 1 Kg pale ale malt
• 454g Thai red rice
• 125g "Special B" (Really just a variant of Munich in this case)
• 125g dark crystal malt (120L)

Mash at around 148F for 60 minutes.

• 8g Amarillo hops boiled for 45 minutes
• ~8 Kaffir lime leaves boiled for 5 minutes

Ferment with Belgian saison yeast, starting around 70F and ramping up to 90F over the next few days.

In other news, the blood orange bacon is great!  I need to work more on my smoking technique, and maybe not leave the skin on next time, because the orange flavour and the smokiness are both a bit uneven, but it's really good.  I smoked it over oolong again, mixed with barley and a citrusy chai.  Bits of it are really intensely citrusy, and bits are really smokey, but mostly it's very nice.  I'm definitely going to keep working on using zest in my cure.

The mustard was a bit less of a success.  It turns out I underestimated the amount of liquid required, and had to add more beer.  The only bottle I had at the time I was willing to sacrifice was a Big Rock Barghest barleywine (drank a bit as well, review = shrug), so the De Ranke XX didn't come through like I hoped.  I'll have to try again.  It's still nice grainy mustard, though.

My cheese is coming along swimmingly, but I haven't tried any yet.  The rind looks lovely, just pure white.  It's in the stage where it gets really soft, almost like brie, which I was told to expect - apparently it will firm up and turn into a nice hard cheese if I give it another few weeks.  I'll have to eat at least some in the state it's in now, though, just so I can compare.

I choose to believe all this success is a good sign for my stand-up set on Monday.

Cynic Ale

Smashton & Parris started a beer series over the summer, themed around famous philosophers.  The first entry, the awkwardly-named "The Horror of Wit-Kenstein ('s Monster)" (no one has ever actually called it that, but it's on the label) was a dark buckwheat pseudo-witbier with American yeast and LOTS of citrus.  It was pretty successful, but too much work to do the same way again.  Maybe there'll be a Bride of Wit-Kenstein ('s Monster) someday, without quite so much mandarin orange zest in it.

There are plans in the works for a couple of other entries, but the first follow-up is a very small batch of "Riogenes the Cynic", an ESB of sorts brewed with flaked rye, oats, and Nugget hops.  It just went into bottles today, and unlike the last one, I think I actually will brew more of this one, because the pre-carbonation sample was pretty good and it doesn't involve grating all my fingers off.  It could be maltier, but it's easy enough to adjust that.

Anyway, I ran out of tape, but here's the one bottle that got labeled:

Not bad, eh?

Mikkeller

I have GOT to find an English translation of the ingredients on the label of this Mikkeller Imperial Stout.  There is something in it that absolutely must go into the next batch of Sarcastic Doorman.

Anyone know what "cassanade" is?  Apparently it can be dark...

Ol' Draj

In a 750ml glass bottle (if you finish off that Old Raj gin, say, the empty will do nicely), combine:

• 1-2 stalks worth of fresh mint (at least, you could add more)
• 5-6 cinnamon sticks
• 1 tsp. cayenne pepper
• As much cheap vodka as you can fit in there with the other ingredients

Let sit for a good 48 hours or so before sampling, giving it a shake or inverting it once or twice.  The end result is a lovely amber coloured liquor that both burns and cools quite pleasantly.  Most congenial on a sunny day toward the end of summer.

Sadly, quite impossible for me to photograph adequately with the equipment I possess, seemingly.

Bottling

Bockenale is bottled and carbonating now - I hope it's carbonating, anyway, time will tell.

The red colour has mellowed - you can really only see the red if you hold it up to the light, now - and the cidery acidity is gone, but it's still cloudy, and I think there's a hint of diacetyl.  That last is a little unexpected given the warm (for the yeast I used) fermentation temperatures and extra week in the secondary, but it's very subtle.  It could actually just be the vanilla.  You can't really taste the tarragon at all, I'd have to be doing a proper boil to make better use of it.  The end result is very smooth and pleasant, anyway (having a small uncarbonated glass before I wash up), and being more of an ale drinker I couldn't really give a toss about the clarity so I'm pretty pleased overall.  It is damn hard to make bad beer with one of these kits.

The more unexpected thing is that I seem to have gotten the gravity wrong in one of my earlier measurements, as it's now reading about 1.015 at 72F (before adding the priming sugar) which certainly doesn't correct to 1.01 at 60F.  Assuming my original gravity reading was correct, by no means a given, that brings the beer down to about 6.5% ABV, though if as I suspect my OG was also ~.005 low then the ABV is pretty much unchanged.

In other news, this is going to turn from a beer blog back into the writing blog I meant it to be over the next couple of weeks.  At least until carbonation is finished a week or so after that.

Bockenale

I love coming up with names - whenever I'm writing something, I've usually come up with a lot of the names, and certainly the title, in advance.  Sometimes they change as it goes along, but that's where I start.  It's not even that I find names particularly meaningful, inherently - I don't subscribe to the idea that the etymology of your name is important, studies about people named "Baker" becoming bakers aside - but I generally find that if I know a character's, place's, or story's name, I'm ready to use it, and if I'm still not sure, it's half-baked.

I also love stupid, stupid puns.

So naming beers is fun, because it combines those things.  It's also a little frustrating because all the good ones are already taken.  There are at least two Coal Porters, for example.  In trying to come up with a name for my latest brew I've been through a couple, and I finally settled on what I thought must be peculiar enough to be unique - Bock'N'Ale (a classic pun, if you'll forgive me, in reference to the combination of yeasts) - but sure enough, there's at least one out there already.  So I modified the spelling a little.  Alternately, I've been working on something to do with Winan's Steam Gun, playing on Steam Beer.

Unfortunately, the reason I'm working on that second one is, rather than that I genuinely need a unique name, the fact that our cold snap ended and it's been warm and lovely and entirely inappropriate for lager yeast, so my beer is probably going to turn out all fruity and cloudy after all.

Stout's in the secondary, and...

...  more importantly, all these beer-related posts might actually be writing related.

The history of booze is the history of the world.

All bottled up.

The beer is in bottles and carbonating now.