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.

Spent Grain Meatballs

I think I've found a recipe for the Homebrewers' Guild potluck this year.

Ingredients:

• ~600g lean ground pork
• 2-3 teaspoons of dry tarragon
• 1 1/2 cups spent grains
• salt & pepper to taste

Grains left from making a dark beer, like my own Sarcastic Doorman, are preferred.  (Recipe for the latest batch of Sarcastic Doorman this weekend sometime, maybe.)

1. Run half of your grains through the food processor for a while.  They don't have to be smooth, just mushed-up a bit.
2. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and mix thoroughly with your hands.
3. Roll into 4 - 6cm diameter balls.
4. Arrange balls evenly in a low baking dish which can be covered with foil.  Cover with foil.
5. Bake in a 190C oven for 15 minutes.
6. Remove foil, turn balls over carefully with tongs.
7. Bake 15 minutes longer, un-covered.

They're pretty great!  Somebody who prepares meat more often than me might improve on the cooking times, maybe, but I'm comfortable with them as is.

Oh, yeah...  And I did stand-up on Monday for the first time.  That was also pretty successful, so I'll probably be doing both these things more often.

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?

Ancient Sarcastic Doorman

Well, maybe not ancient.

The Sarcastic Brown (that one glass looked amber, but it's been pretty brown in all other lighting) has turned out to be a bit of a blessing, in that the Home Brewers' Guild meeting has a brown ale theme this month and I wouldn't have had one otherwise.

But, I have just discovered in the back of the brewing closet a few liters of the "failed" batch before this one, which has in fact been greatly mellowed and smoothed out by the extended secondary, so I'm going to bottle it sometime this week and see what people think.  I don't think I'll make it exactly the way I did that time again anyway, but certainly it looks like some of the mistakes of that batch were less severe than they at first appeared.

And it is definitely, definitely a porter.

COMPLETION: Sarcastic... Something Red?

Well, I checked a bottle today, and despite being in a rather cool corner for two weeks it's all carbed up and ready to move into the fridge.  It's a pretty pleasant drink, as well.  What it is not, in any respect, is a porter.

Even when I was bottling it, it was pretty red/brown, but it really seems to have lightened even further in the bottle somehow (though it hasn't cleared at all) - it's a cloudy amber, now.




It's not a beer I'd be embarrassed to have produced intentionally, but it's a pretty big defect in what was supposed to be a porter.  I'll have to get another batch on the go quite soon, and fix the grain bill - more chocolate ought to do the trick just fine, maybe a longer boil...  I've promised these to a number of people, so hopefully they can all be patient for another month.

Meanwhile, though, I have to figure out what I'm going to do about labeling these...

BOTTLING: Sarcastic Doorman

Whew...  I cleaned a LOT of bottles today for this.  In the end I only actually got 24 330mls and a couple of bombers, a little less than I expected out of the batch, and I'm not sure I have enough bottles left for the other batch I was thinking of packing up this weekend.  Still, it was overall pretty successful.

This batch came out differently than I was expecting.  The rye seems more prominent, though still pretty subtle, which is good, but the Cascade hops do not do the same job as the Amarillo did in terms of giving that little hint of citrus in the finish that balances it, so I'm worried people will find it more off-putting now.  Next time I can't get Amarillo, I'm going to have to really jack up my late hop additions during the boil, maybe double?

It's a little lighter in the alcohol and the body, which was intentional, but it's also a good deal less chocolatey.  That's definitely an overreaction on my part to the somewhat acrid results of my last attempt.  The Caramunich malt is working really nicely, though, adding a little toasty-ness.  I feel like I can't really judge it until it's carbonated, which will change the mouthfeel and give it a little bite from the carbonic acid...  I decided to shoot for 2.2 volumes of CO2, which I understand is pretty typical of an oatmeal stout and should work nicely here as well.  The colour's a bit lighter than I might have hoped, but again, that's probably the cut-back chocolate.

I think next time, some actual rye ale malt to supplement the pumpernickel, a little more chocolate, and a good deal more late hops (if it's Cascade at least), and I'm within a hair's breadth of absolutely nailing this thing.

And then I have to work on the juniper version.

Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I brew something a bit different!  What I'm going to bottle it in I have no idea...

Apple Cider

There's a certain amount of crazy stuff going on right now, some good, some just crazy, but it's awfully nice to be able to relax in the evening with a glass of homemade apple cider.

It's rather cloudy in part because the juice I used was cloudy to begin with, and in part because it's a bit yeasty - I just fermented it right in the bottle I'm pouring it from now, with a bit of Cooper's ale yeast and about a quarter cup of additional corn sugar.  I don't think it's terribly alcoholic at all (I didn't take any measurements) but it's pleasantly fizzy and not too dry.  Just the thing.  I may even try doing it properly sometime!

Of course it isn't making any of those crazy things less crazy, but sometimes it's just about, as the poet says, "Whatever gets you through the night."

BOTTLING: "Poseur" Wheat-Date Ale

I don't have a lot of pictures this time.  Bottling this much beer solo, I find myself without enough hands to go around as it is, so I didn't really have an opportunity to take any until I was done.

The beer cleared up a lot in secondary.  It's still a little cloudy, I can't easily read text through a glass of it unless it's fairly large, but it's about as clear as my buckwheat beer was now, and actually more or less the same colour.  It'll be less carbonated - I meant to add a little more priming sugar but I forgot to measure it out - but hopefully because of the wheat the head will be comparable.  I'm not sure what the actual percentage of wheat is in the grain bill for the Brewhouse American Wheat kit, though.

The flavour's evolved a lot in the last two weeks.  The banana esters seem to have mellowed, although that may just be because the flavours from the oak have really covered it up.  The oak was certainly effective, lending all the flavours for which it is known (including, unmistakably, the leather). It's a bit of an odd duck, not to any particular style, but I like it.



Anyway, I've got two Tap-a-Draft bottles and about 21 bottles (mostly 12oz, but a few larger ones) in the closet now, carbing away.  The temperature is good, so if it doesn't cool off dramatically in the next two weeks it should be ready to drink in time for me to take some to the first Homebrewer's Guild meeting in September.

(The full label will be revealed after I've got around to printing them up and attaching them.)

Unbelievable...

I just broke my new hydrometer.  There has to be a way to make these things stronger...

Maybe I'll just break down and spring for a refractometer this time; I've been meaning to get one eventually anyway.  Long tubes of thin glass that have to be balanced precariously in my dish drainer may just be a bad idea, you know?

RACKING: Wheat Date Ale

Featuring: The Return of Pictures!  I have the pictures for the last couple of beer posts as well, I just haven't had time to rewrite them recently.

BREW DAY: Oaked Date-Wheat Ale

(Clever name TBD.)

Yet another disaster!  If I didn't drink so much I might start to get discouraged.

Actually, today wasn't so bad really, the usual spills and so on, but I did manage to break my hydrometer (this happens to every home brewer eventually), so I have:

1. No way to confirm the starting gravity of my beer, and:
2. Tiny pieces pieces of very thin broken glass in the bottom of my shower.

I also managed to cut my thumb, but I don't know if it was on the glass from the hydrometer or not.

Anyway, the beer itself!  I picked up a 450ml jar of pure concentrated date juice from the Italian Center little while ago, and I decided to combine it with a Brewhouse Prairie Wheat kit.  Based on some pretty much unfounded estimates of the extract value of the date juice, I calculated a starting gravity of about 1.052, not that much higher than the ~1.046 expected from the unaltered kit.  With the Safale US-05 yeast, I'm expecting to wind up with something around 5.2% which isn't bad for a nice drinkable summer beer, and I think the date flavour will be subtle but detectable.

Once it's fermented about a week or so, I'm planning to rack it on top of the very dark-roasted Hungarian oak chips I mentioned in a previous entry and give it a month or so on those.  So my nice summery beer should be ready just in time for fall.

I'll rewrite this post with pictures, once again, after I get the technology to get them off my camera.

RACKING: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper)

Wow.  That didn't work at all.

Juniper Berries

Technically, they're not berries. They're more closely related to pine cones -
if you look very, very closely at one you may be able to see the scales.

It's not easy to find good information about brewing with juniper berries. You'll find some vague, folklorish stories about sahti (a Finnish beer made with rye, juniper, and bread yeast), and quite a lot of people saying they've done it and either liked or hated it, but little in the way of hard and fast data about what they did.  Google the subject, and you'll find a lot of message board threads where people recommend googling it.

I based the juniper addition to Sarcastic Doorman on the most substantive Internet folklore and guesswork I could find, but I'm starting to think I was misled. Further research turned up... Well, very little, but I did find this recipe for a juniper porter that makes me think, after doing some hasty conversions and a bit more guesswork (it's just stupid that there are two totally different "gallons"), I could have used a little more.

I'm going to be splitting the batch in half for the secondary, just for reasons of capacity.  I'm thinking "dry hopping" with another couple of grams in each, at least, wouldn't be a bad idea.  It's not going into secondary for a couple of weeks, though, probably, so I'm writing this post as a reminder note to myself.

HIGH KRAUSEN: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper)

It's a nice, big, healthy looking krausen (the biggest I've yet had in fact), so despite any irregularities yesterday, the yeast appears to have taken off.  You can see some bits of juniper berry that have been lifted up on top of the krausen there; as I do not skim my krausen off, these will fall back into the fermenting beer eventually and hopefully a little further flavour or aroma may be extracted once there's a bit of ethanol present.

It's a good sign!

EDIT 2011/07/12: If you expand that picture, you can see the 20 liter mark on the scale on the bucket.  The top of the krausen is about four lines below that (it's actually higher in the middle, but hard to measure how much), putting it around the 16 liter mark, while the top of the wort only came up to the 12 liter mark.  That means something over 4 liters of krausen on a 12 liter batch.  Like I said, the biggest I've had yet.

FINAL RESULTS: Buckwheat Cuivrée

Well, it's not the most exciting thing I've ever brewed, but it's a lot better than I expected when we bottled it.  It's clean, the hops are pleasant, and when I took it to a party, it was actually probably the best beer there.  It never fully cleared but it's definitely less cloudy than I expected, as well, and the head is actually very good.  It's a little overcarbed, but it's really only an issue drinking from the bottle (you have to keep drinking pretty steadily or it will foam up out of the neck).  In a glass it's actually really nice; you have to pour it cold and carefully to avoid a big glass of head, but it's still nice as it warms up.  I should think about making a dressed-up batch to have during the summer.

I have a few pictures from when I drank one yesterday:

Not very clear at all, but it looks good in the glass.

It's quite fizzy, and it stays that way for quite a while.

The head is actually really nice.  I attribute it to the buckwheat.

I just wish I'd been more aware of the date - I missed my chance to take it to the Homebrewer's Guild this month.  I'll try to save a bottle for the next meeting.

Next time I make this, I think it needs more buckwheat and crystal both, maybe a little ginger toward the end of the boil...

In other beer-related news, there are some big upgrades in progress to the Smashton & Parris brewery.  Pictures (and maybe even video!) when it's all ready.

Feedback on Sarcastic Doorman

I took some of my homebrew, the last of the Sarcastic Doorman, to the Homebrewers' Guild meeting last night, and passed it around.  Feedback was actually very positive!  Some of the more experienced hands advised that I should be toning down the rye a bit - I can see what they mean.  After getting quite a bit of advice I'm going to try a batch with half the rye to give myself another reference point, and go from there.

I'm also going to recreate the recipe with light extract rather than dark.  The trouble with dark extract, of course, is that you have no control over the grain bill - it's made from whatever combination of grains the maltster thought was desirable and even if it's the colour you want it may not give you the properties you're looking for.  By going with a very pale extract, you know better what you're getting (pale base malt), and that way all the specialty grains are your own.

I've got a lot on my to-do list after last night, actually, but one thing at a time.

The label got VERY good reviews, though.

RACK: Buckwheat... Cuivrée?

Well, it's certainly not an amber anyway.

I transfered my buckwheat beer to a secondary fermenter tonight, after what seemed like hours of very, very thorough cleaning and sanitizing and rinsing (with small batches like this, I don't think there's any such thing as a no-rinse sanitizer, even a tiny bit of iodine will affect the end product). It's going to need some time to clear, certainly, but I'd say it was fully fermented; it had dropped to the specific gravity I expected (1.025 - taking into account I thought my original gravity was going to be 1.04ish and it turned out to be 1.065), and wasn't showing any signs of activity. It's probably going to end up cloudy anyway, but it'll get better than it is now.

Unless my Tap-a-Draft bottles are bigger than advertised (that's what I'm using as a secondary, my small-batch airlock fits it), I've got about five and a half liters of beer there, so that's not too bad in terms of racking losses and so on. Procedure-wise this has been pretty successful.

I tasted the hydrometer sample, and it's not bad... I knew it wasn't likely but was hoping in my heart for something akin to Coup de Grisou, a buckwheat beer I enjoyed in Montréal, but what I'm ending up with is, I would say... Well, it's beer. It tastes kind of beery. It'll probably go fast enough, but I'm probably going to chalk this one up to experience. I think buckwheat, even unmalted, requires a mash, next time, and it has to be a much larger percentage of the grain bill. In an effort to make this one more interesting, I've thrown four grams of Amarillo pellets into the secondary to dry-hop it; we'll see how that works out.

BREW DAY: Buckwheat Amber?

Not much to it, really.

Sanitation is very important.

This was a fairly simple beer, just some extra-light DME, a little crystal malt, the buckwheat I roasted yesterday, Amarillo hops left from my porter and a packet of dry yeast.  The day was never-the-less not without its complications, which started when I realized I didn't have any cheese cloth to strain the water from my steeping grains and had to go out to buy some on the sheets of ice Edmonton is currently experimenting with as replacement sidewalks.  Fortunately, I've been trained to fall without getting hurt.

First off, I needed to crush my steeping grains, the buckwheat I roasted yesterday (which weighs in at a little less after the roasting) and 50g of extra-dark crystal malt.

Although I'm making a larger batch than last time, you can see I'm steeping a lot less grains, since I'm trying for a lighter colour:

The colour I got from this steep wasn't as red as I would have liked - you'll see at the end it's more of a cuivrée than an amber - but I think that's down to my choice of grains.  Oh, well.  The steeping water is slightly cooler to start with this time, and I wrapped a towel around the cooler in the hopes that I would have a more consistent temperature over time.  It seemed to work.

Estimating that I got about four liters back from my ~4.5 liter steep (I probably got less, the buckwheat took up a lot) and that I would get something like one liter of boil-off in sixty minutes (based on my last batch), I topped up with about a liter and a half (okay, actually that number was as arbitrary as these parentheticals are becoming) for the boil and added my bittering hops.

I only used three grams, since this is meant to be a light
"session" beer.

I boiled for about 45 minutes before adding the extract; for some reason I wanted to add it before the aroma hops, which went in with ten minutes left (out of 60 minutes total boiling time).

Three grams this time as well.

Finally, while my wort was chilling in the sink like last time, I rehydrated my yeast.  Package directions call for rehydrating in water between 80-92 degrees Fahrenheit, and then adding a little wort at a time to bring the yeast gradually down to the wort's temperature (about 72 degrees).

Once again I underestimated my boil-off and/or over-estimated the yield from my steep; I was more than a liter short of where I expected to be.  I decided to top it right up to six liters - it's meant to be a session beer anyway, only three or four percent alcohol.

My original gravity (OG) reading doesn't line up with that at all, though!  It's something like 1.065, and temperature correction doesn't make much difference...  According to every brewing calculation I can find, this is way off, and my OG shouldn't be much over 1.040.  I'm guessing it's starches from the buckwheat, mostly, which is probably going to mean cloudy beer but isn't going to increase my ABV at all - it should still come out around 4%, maybe 4.5% if the yeast really goes to town (I've heard Nottingham gives high attenuations).



All's well that ends well, of course so...  In about a month, when this is ready, I'll let you know if it's well.  There's still one last complication with this batch, too...  I've decided it will be my first in glass bottles.  We'll see how that works out!

BOTTLING: Sarcastic Doorman

The great advantage of brewing a very small batch of beer is that it can only be a very small disaster.

I kid.  Somewhat.  Bottling is now finished, but it was a bit of a trial.  To begin with, the beer didn't attenuate quite as far as predicted - it's actually only 5.9% alcohol, I estimate, with a final gravity of about 1.028 or 1.029 - but that's fine.  It certainly tastes good.  Unfortunately, though, between the unavoidable losses, some spills resulting from my still far-from-perfect solo bottling technique, miscalculations, and so on, I've probably got less than three liters all together actually bottled.  This means both that I'm 25% short of my target batch size, and that I probably have too much headspace in my bottles which may affect carbonation.

Still, fingers crossed.  I'd like to crack at least one open in about ten days at the next Edmonton Homebrewer's Guild meeting (my first!), so hopefully it will be ready by then.

It's all worth it in the end, though:







(The label, based on that doodle in a previous post, was made in Inkscape, which is a very cool program I wish I could run the latest version of, and attached with tape, because the glue stick I bought turned out to be no good.)

Well, I've learned a lot of lessons for next time...

The Rack: Sarcastic Doorman

So I've finally gotten around to racking the Sarcastic Doorman tonight, after eleven days in the primary - a record for me, though nothing extraordinary really.  Lots of homebrewers leave things in the primary for a few weeks or more.

I appear, like my last batch, to have lost some volume - I'm down to an estimated three and a half liters, judging by how far it fills my little carboy.

I prefer to think of it as mostly full rather than a little bit empty.

If it were four liters exactly, it would be right up to the bottom of the neck, I think.  Which is where it should be - you don't want much headspace in the secondary fermenter.  I'll live with it this time, and I suppose in future I can beef up the batch size to account for possible losses?

As with my last batch, I'm not totally clear on where the missing volume went.  It obviously wasn't evaporation.  That dense, creamy krausen eventually turned espresso-brown and settled.  I certainly didn't leave that much liquid behind when I was racking (I favour disturbing my sediment a little over missing any of my beer).  I don't think I've been sleepwalking into the cupboard and drinking it with a straw.  I'm at a loss.

It smells excellent, anyway.  I didn't take a gravity reading or taste any, I'm trying to preserve as much of it for bottling as possible, but I have high hopes!