Cold conditioning

4BC Altbier has been successfully transferred to a clean fermenter for 4 weeks cold conditioning at 2 degrees centigrade. This will hopefully accomplish 2 things:

• clean up some of the byproducts of the primary fermentation, making the beer cleaner tasting
  
• cause some of the yeast and other particulates to precipitate out, making the beer less hazy

Will it work? Let's wait and see. My only concern is whether such a long period of conditioing will leave enough yeast in suspension to work with the priming sugar and generate CO2 when I come to bottle it. All part of the learning experience!

NZ Beer Festival

Yesterday I went along to the NZ Beer Festival at Ellerslie racecourse in Auckland. The weather gods had conspired against it, with driving rain and high winds meaning that everyone was crammed into the 2 halls where the bars were. As a result it was very difficult to find space to relax and chat.

I had an enjoyable afternoon, and it was good to see Greig again (and meet his missus) plus we got chatting to a few fellow lovers of good beer. Luke from Epic seemed to be having a good time too - there were certainly plenty of people round his stand.

However, I couldn't help feeling that the event missed the mark in several ways. The whole ethos of the festival seemed to be geared towards drinking and partying, rather than discovering interesting new beers. There were several stag/hen parties there and tons of people in fancy dress knocking back large quantities of Miller Genuine Draft. There were several small breweries present, but not as many as I would have expected, and the beers from some of them were distinctly average.

It's saying something that two of my favourite beers of the day were Epic Pale Ale (which I've had lots of before) and Hofbrauhaus Dunkel from Germany. The others that stick out in my mind are KEA Porter (from a now-defunct brewery) and Wigram APA (which is not one of their regular beers).

Quite a change from some of the beer festivals I've visited (and worked at) back in the UK.

Ticking along nicely

The fermentation for 4BC Altbier seems to be proceeding nicely. It took about 24 hours for it to kick off and it didn't get as frantic as I've sometimes seen fermentations, but the airlock has been bubbling away steadily. When I checked it this morning it appeared to be slowing down a bit so it looks like primary fermantation could be ramping down.

My plan is to check the gravity over the weekend to see if primary has indeed finished, then rack the beer to a clean fermenter for cold conditioning. In keeping with the style I plan to give it 4 weeks at close to freezing temperatures. Hopefully the wait will be worthwhile.

Batch #4 - 4BC Altbier

Brewday again. I'm getting quite comfortable and confident now, hopefully not over-confident. I still refer to The Bible - John Palmer's "How To Brew" a lot but it's all becoming a bit more instinctive now.

Today's beer is a Dusseldorf Altbier (or at least that's what I'm aiming for). The recipe is:

• 2 x 1.6kg cans John Bull Pale liquid malt extract (LME)
• 0.5kg crystal malt (120L - quite a dark one)
• 0.5kg Munich malt
• 0.5kg Vienna malt
• 50g NZ Hallertauer hops (boiled for 60 mins)
• 40g Motueka B-Saaz hops (boiled for 10 mins)
• 1 tsp Irish Moss
• 5 tsps yeast nutrient salts
• 1 packet Safale German Ale yeast (K-97)

The speciality malts were steeped in 8 litres of water at 70 degrees centigrade for half an hour. Here's a photo of yours truly dunking one of the grain bags (fashioned from my wife's nylons!) into the pot.


And here's a photo of the resulting wort after 30 minutes steeping. As you can see it's pretty dark, but that's spot on for the style I'm aiming for.


This time I was very careful to ensure that the malt extract was fully dissolved. The first can was added after the steeping as I brought the wort up to the boil. The second can was stirred in 15 minutes before the end of the 60 minute boil period. When I came to pour the wort into the fermenter, no malt extract was stuck to the bottom of the pot so I seem to have solved that problem.

Yeast was rehydrated in warm water prior to pitching. Thanks to Kieran for the tip on the K-97 yeast - hopefully this will give me something that tastes close to the intended style.


The fermenter was then transferred to my hi-tech temperature controlled fermentation chamber (i.e. a fridge with a temperature controller) and left to ferment at 20 degrees for a couple of weeks.


I drew off a sample to test the Original Gravity - spot on at 1.046. I also had a quick taste of the sample - yum!! This is the best tasting beer at that stage that I've done. Lots of maltiness, underscored with a bit of hop bitterness. I'm hopeful that this could be a cracker!

(Inevitable?) disappointment

When I was back in the UK, Young's Special London Ale was my favourite bottled beer of all time. A beautifully rich hoppy drop, perfectly balanced. I had it in bottles many times and was lucky enough to have it on draught at a couple of beer festivals, thanks to the friendly people at Young's brewery.

However, Young's sold out their heritage (in my opinion) and moved their brewing operations from Wandsworth to Charles Wells in Bedford. They inisted the beers would be unaffected - they were taking their yeast strain with them and the brewers at Bedford had been working hard to match the beers. Initial experiences were not encouraging. Young's Bitter (known as Ordinary) seemed to lose it's citrus bite. But at first, SLA seemed unaffected. Maybe because they were still selling Wandsworth-brewed stock.

Recently, Kieran (a Kiwi beer blogger, homebrewer and beer judge with an exceptional knowledge of English beers, who shares my love of Special London Ale) posted the distressing news that Bedford-brewed Special London Ale had lost its soul. Maybe I was in denial, but I had to taste for myself. So today I finally picked up a couple of bottles of SLA which said "Brewed in Bedford" on the back.

And I was devastated. They've ruined it. I could hardly drink it. I am nowhere near as skilled a judge of beer as Kieran, so forgive my dodgy tasting notes (not helped by the half bottle of red wine I've consumed since tasting the SLA). Unlike Kieran, I felt that the major change was a loss of balance. The hops seem to overwhelm the beer with a medicinal, almost soapy flavour. Previously the big hop hit was balanced by a rich malty depth, but that seems to have gone. In fact there appears to be a big gap between the malt and the hops, a gaping chasm which separates the two flavour elements. There is a cloying sweetness from the alcohol, but it seems thin. Maybe I've had a bad bottle but it certainly was NOT good and was a million miles away from the nectar of the gods I've had under this label before.

Very very sad.

Planning batch #4

No sooner is one batch in the bottle than I'm thinking about the next batch! After some thought and research (and some advice from you lot) I decided to go for an Altbier. There are loads of good recipe collections around the internet - the Recipator is a one I refer to quite a lot. I eventually found this recipe which I tweaked using the recipe function in BeerSmith. This is a very useful function as quite often you can't track down exactly the same hops as in the recipe, or exactly the same malt extract etc.

So then I went to place the order with my favourite local homebrew shop - Hauraki Home Brew. Unfortunately their website was down (I found out afterwards that their provider has had a major outage) so I had to phone it in. As it turned out this was a good idea as I got to discuss some aspects of the ingredients, For example, I usually use Muntons liquid malt extract as it is known to be very high quality. Tiffany at Hauraki said they were out of stock because their distributor was also out of stock. The first alternative was John Bull malt extract. This is not quite as high quality as Muntons, and the stock they had was quite old (and so would be slightly darker) but I decided it would do the job.

I had to compromise on the hops a bit too - typically an Altbier would use Spalt hops but Hauraki don't stock them so I'll be using Saaz hops as an alternative. The final compromise is on yeast - it is possible to get a proper Alt yeast from Wyeast but it has to be imported from the USA and is relatively pricey so I'll be using good old dried Safale-S04 yeast. I won't be bang on for style but the colour, maltiness and hoppiness (IBUs) should be correct.

Assuming the delivery arrives OK I'll be kicking this brew off at the weekend. I'll let you know how I get on.

Yankiwi Pale is bottled

Batch #3 of my homebrew has been bottled today. I'm calling it Yankiwi Pale because it's based on an American Pale Ale recipe but with some New Zealand hops.

The bottling process did not go entirely without incident, but hopefully it's all OK. First of all I racked the beer off from the fermenter into a second fermentation vessel containing a measured amount of sugar water (a priming solution used to generate CO2 in the bottles). There's a picture of the setup here:

Anyway, the beer started running down the siphon tube into the second fermnter (from where I would bottle it) but then stopped. At first I thought I'd got n airlock but I quickly realised that something was blocking the tap on the top fermenter. It turned out to be the hop "teabag" I'd used to add some extra hop aroma during fermentation. I had to quickly sanitise a stirring paddle and free the tap.

This was a bit annoying as it stirred up some of the sediment at the bottom of the fermnter. I'd just spent 2 weeks cold-conditioning the beer to settle the sediment out, so stirring it up again was very annoying.

Still, the beer does look fairly clear, as you should be able to see from this photo:

I also measured the final gravity using the hydrometer which you can also see in the photo. I used the calculation tool in the BeerSmith software I use to work out the alcohol content of my beer. Due to the problems I had with undissolved malt extract (see earlier posts) the strength was lower than I planned - 3.4% ABV.

After that I was left with 22 litres of primed clear beer which I put into a variety of bottles. It now needs to sit for at least a couple of weeks to condition and for the CO2 to be generated. Based on my experience to date, I'll be trying to leave it for at least 4 weeks before I drink it, but I'm not sure I'll hold out that long before I sneak a sample! When I tasted it straight off the fermenter it tasted pretty good, so I'm fairly hopeful that it will be better once it has had time to condition.