Brew Day - Anniversary Day Porter

It was Anniversary Day here in Auckland today so I got a day off which I decided to use to lay down a Robust Porter. One of my aims for this brewing year is to master 3 or 4 basic recipes which I can then tweak to create variations on a them. One of those styles is Porter - I want to master a basic porter so that I can then do variations such as Honey Porter, Chocolate Hazelnut Porter, Bourbon Porter etc.

Today's recipe was based on a recipe from the Brewing Network's Jamil Show. Jamil Zainasheff, John Plise and their guests have created some superb podcasts over the last couple of years - a great blend of goofball humour and reliable brewing knowledge. Anyway, this recipe is similar to Jamil's Black Widow Porter, but obviously I had to substitute the hops with varieties I could get locally.

The recipe is:
4kg Pale Ale malt (I used up the last of my Maris Otter, plus a bit of Golden Promise)
550g Medium Crystal (60L) malt
550g Munich Malt
350g Chocolate Malt
200g Black Patent Malt

40g NZ Fuggles @ 60 mins
40g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 15 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ flameout

This was the first time I'd done an all-grain brew of a dark beer and the mash looked amazing - see the photo below:

Sparging and lautering went fairly smoothly - the runoff was fairly slow but not too bad, and I didn't get near to a stuck sparge. The picture below shows the first jugfull of runoff - absolutely amazing colour! I could have drunk it right then and there.

My calculations (using BeerSmith software) must have been slightly off, however, as I ended up with more wort than I expect (30 litres as opposed to 28 litres) and the specific gravity was a bit lower than my target. I made an on-the-spot decision to increase my boil time to 75 minutes from 60 minutes in the hope that the extra evaporation would bring the volume down and the SG up. So into the pots it went (I'm still using the two-pot stovetop boil method as I haven't got round to converting my old keg into a kettle):

The boil went smoothly (no boilovers again) but the volume didn't reduce down as much as I'd hoped, so I ended up with 22 litres of wort going into the fermenter (after chilling), rather than the 20 I'd aimed for. The original gravity was 1.053 instead of the target 1.061. Not a disaster, just a little annoying. I'll have to tweak my calculations next time.

I then rehydrated a sachet of Safale S-04 dried yeast as I didn't have a suitable liquid yeast to hand. That was pitched and the fermenter is now sat in the temperature-controlled fridge at 19 degrees. I'll inspect it in the morning for signs of activity.

All in all a good day's brewing, and if the look (and taste!) of the unfermented wort are anything to go by, this will be a good beer!

Yeast Washing

For a while now I've been using liquid yeasts from Wyeast. These yeasts are imported from the USA and therefore they are fairly expensive. One way of reducing the impact of these costs is to re-use the yeast from one brew in one or more other brews. For my recent barley wine (Grandad Joe's Gold Label) I re-used the entire yeast cake from my brew of Palliser Pride. However, in most cases I would not want to use so much yeast for one brew, so I've investigated harvesting and washing the yeast at the end of the brew (in order to separate the good yeast from the proteins, hop bits and other gunge, known as 'trub'), and splitting it into several smaller amounts.

Today was my first shot at this. I followed the basic process from a very useful forum post but modified it slightly (I used sanitiser solution instead of boiling stuff as I didn't have enough glass jars). It went fairly smoothly although I'm concerned that I poured away too much real yeast along with the gunge at the bottom. All in all I ended up with the three jars shown above. Next time I come to brew a suitable beer (probably an English bitter of some sort) I'll make a starter using one of those jars and see how we go.

Brew Day - Electric Landlord

An exciting brew day for me yesterday, and one that went fairly smoothly. The beer I brewed takes its name from this blog, but its heritage comes from one of the greatest English beers.

One of my favourite English beers of all time is Landlord, from Timothy Taylor's brewery in Keighley, West Yorkshire. It's a perfect example of an English Pale Ale - golden in colour with a strong smooth backbone of bitterness. I always used to detect a creaminess in there plus a hint of bitter orange marmalade. Overall the keyword would be 'balance' - the malt, the hops and the yeast character all coming together well.

The beer I brewed yesterday was not an attempt to clone Landlord, although that beer was certainly my inspiration. The exact recipe for Landlord is not public knowledge, but Roger Protz's Real Ale Almanac indicates that it uses 100% Golden Promise malt, plus Fuggles and 3 varieties of Goldings hops. Of these, the Styrian Goldings lend it that bitter orange character.

I have been reading quite a lot about SMaSH brewing, which stands for Single Malt and Single Hop i.e. brewing a beer using only a single malt variety and a single hop variety. I thought that this beer would be a good place to experiment with this. So the recipe brewed yesterday was:
3.9kg Golden Promise malt
25g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 60 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 30 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 15 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 0 mins

Original Gravity was 1.042 for 21.5 litres, bitterness should be 36 IBUs.

The yeast I used was a limited edition from Wyeast, which I bought from Craftbrewer in Australia. It's 1469PC West Yorkshire Ale, and the rumours are that it could actually be the Timothy Taylor's house yeast. So I've got a pretty good chance of getting very close to the characteristics of Landlord. But as long as I produce a flavoursome beer I'll be happy.

As I write this the fermenter is bubbling away nicely in my temperature-controlled fridge at 20 degrees Centigrade. I'll leave it there for about a week before transferring it to a secondary fermenter and dry-hopping with more Styrian Goldings. All being well it should be in a keg in a couple of weeks time.

I also had an excellent package arrive yesterday from The Brewing Network in the USA. It was a late Christmas present to myself - a signed copy of Brewing Classic Styles by homebrewing legends Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer, plus a Brew Strong t-shirt from their fascinating podcast. Loads more recipes to brew, and a cool t-shirt to wear while brewing them!

Kegs. That's right, kegs!

One of the few irritating parts of the homebrewing process for me has been bottling the end product. It takes ages to clean and sanitise the bottles, then there's the racking off of the beer and adding of the priming sugar, then the bottling itself. Then you have to wait at least 2 weeks for the bottles to carbonate, and probably another 4 weeks before the beer's tasting at its best. So for a long time I've been keen to build a setup that would allow me to put my beer into kegs and dispense from them.

It's not as complicated as it sounds, but I have to thank the guys on the Realbeer.co.nz forum for all their advice, as well as other local homebrewing mates and especially Barry (who let me look at his setup and answered all my dumb questions).

The basic components of a kegging setup are:

• a fridge (preferably with a temperature controller so it doesn't run too cold)
  
• one or more Cornelius kegs. There are loads of secondhand ones out there, mainly old Coca Cola kegs.
  
• a CO2 cylinder
• regulator, pipework and connectors

I picked up a cheap secondhand fridge from TradeMe. The kegs (I've got 3) came from Steve Plowman at Hallertau brewbar (and I borrowed one from Barry). The CO2 cylinder came from a place in Grey Lynn in Auckland who supplies reconditioned fire extinguishers. The regulator, pipework and connectors (I used the excellent John Guest push-fit connectors) came from CraftBrewer in Australia. There's a picture below of most of the bits and pieces, prior to assembly:


Assembling the whole thing was not hard at all, especially once I'd spotted the plastic seal for the regulator that stopped the one leak I had. I've drilled a hole in the side of the fridge for the gas-in line so I can put the CO2 cylinder in a safe place down behind my bar. I use a simple picnic tap for dispense (no fancy font heads for me!) and it works beautifully. There's nothing like being able to walk up to the beer fridge and pour yourself a pint. And the beauty of the whole thing is the reduction in time between brewing and drinking! I can throw a batch of beer into a keg in about 10 minutes, gas it up overnight and start drinking it the following night (with the obvious caveat that beers tend to take a few weeks to develop their full flavours).

SOBA National Homebrew Competition 2008

This year was the second annual running of the SOBA National Homebrew Competition, and my first chance to enter (I hadn't really got started on the brewing thing last year). I told myself I was only entering to get some feedback on my beers, not for the chance of winning anything, but that didn't stop me from being a little disappointed when the results came back.

I entered 4 beers, all malt extract-based (I hadn't got around to all-grain brewing in time). Entry involved shipping 2 bottles of each beer to Wellington, along with a completed entry form for each one (plus the entry fee of course). Judging took place in September, with the inital results coming out shortly after, followed by the judging notes and comments a bit later. I've lost the actual scores I received, but I can remember that the highest was a 31/50 and the others were in the 14-17 range.

The feedback came on full AHA/BJCP scoresheets. I would include an example because they're very interesting, but my scanner is currently out of commission. I've included a few of the key comments on each beer below:

• Extract of Daisy (American Pale Ale): Hops low on nose for style; cardboard (indicative of oxidation) in aroma and flavour; stylistic accuracy low; technical merit low.
• Storecupboard Larger (Vienna Lager): hop aroma seems inappropriate; more cardboard!; Stylistic Accuracy medium; Technical merit medium-high; "I would drink a pint of this beer"!
• 4BC Altbier (Dusseldorf Altbier): hard to detect aroma; appropriate hop; Lacking malt for style; bitterness too low for style; harsh; technical merit low; sour/acidic flavour.
• 4BeeCee Porter (Honey Porter): Chocolate, phenolic aroma - electrical fire; chocolate, vinegar flavour; medicinal aroma; Stylistic accuracy medium; technical merit low.

Well, the only way is up! I'm hopeful that next year will be a different story - my beers have certainly improved since the ones I submitted. Going all-grain has certainly helped.

Mind you, I've never brewed a beer I couldn't drink, and that's the main thing. Winning competitions is not the main objective of my brewing.

Mostly, I have been brewing....

Since I last posted anything of significance I've brewed seven different all-grain batches of beer. Some of them have been merely OK, some have been good and a couple have been absolutely amazing!

As a quick catch-up, here are the batches I've brewed but not posted about:

• 4BC Altbier v3.1. An all-grain attempt at a Dusseldorf Altbier using liquid yeast (Wyeast 1007 German Ale). Just a few bottles of this beer remain. I was very happy with it. Slightly on the pale side for style but a nice clean malty taste. I'll brew this one again.
  
• Palliser Special. An English Best/Special bitter. Again, just a few bottles of this remaining in the beer fridge. Very pleased with this one also - nice level of bitterness and the dry-hopping (added hops into the secondary fermenter) with NZ-grown Styrian Goldings hops worked well. Lots of hop aroma.
  
• Saison Du Diable. Possibly the favourite beer I've brewed so far. Recipe was based on Jamil Zainasheff's award-winning recipe. Yeast used was a Wyeast special edition - 3711PC French Saison. I fermented it at ambient temperatures in my shed (which were around 20-22 degrees in a warm Auckland spring) then ramped it up to 28 degrees by bringing it into the conservatory and turning the heating on for the last few days. This resulted in it fermenting out very dry, which was the objective. It's a lovely pale golden beer with tons of funky aroma, lots of fruit but a clean dry finish. Very chuffed with this one.
  
• Oh Vienna! A Vienna lager. Had some problems with this one - the liquid yeast (Wyeast 2206 Bavarian Lager) failed to kick off. I left it for a few days and tried raising the temperature but no joy. So I pitched a rehydrated sachet of Saflager S-23 and this kicked fermentation into life. However, I have no ide4a what the interaction of the two yeasts would do. This was the first beer to go into my new kegging setup (of which more later) and was the first beer I inflicted on my fellow SOBA brewers when they came round to my place, but I wasn't all that happy with it. A distinct rubbery/sulphury aroma, persisting into the flavour. A lack of malt sweetness also. I'll give it a few weeks in the keg and see if it comes right.
  
• Pale Beauty. A beer which is difficult to pigenhole to a BJCP style. In theory it's an English IPA but it tastes unlike most IPAs I've ever drunk! Not that it's a bad thing - I think I've created a damn fine beer. It reminds me a lot of Daisy Cutter from Twickenham Fine Ales, one of my favourite UK beers. It shares a name with another Twickenham beer, although it doesn't taste like Twickenham's Pale Beauty. As it's name suggests it's a pale straw colour and has a big hit of hops on the nose. There's a pronounced passionfruit aroma from the Riwaka hops and a lovely creaminess. At 5.7% it's a little strong to quaff, but it's very tempting to do so!
  
• Palliser Pride. My attempt to get close to one of my favourite beers of all time, Fuller's London Pride. I used Wyeast 1968 London ESB yeast which is rumoured to be the same strain as the Fuller's house yeast. The beer has turned out very nice, though perhaps closer to Fuller's Chiswick Bitter than London Pride - lacking a litle richness and body, perhaps. It's a mighty fine beer for quaffing though, and is currently on tap in my beer fridge!
  
• Grandad Joe's Gold Label. This is my currently-fermenting brew. Named in honour of my grandfather who, in his last weeks, took a liking to Whitbread Gold Label. It's not an attempt to recreate that beer, just an attempt to brew a good English barley wine. There's a lot of Pale Ale malt in it, and not a lot else ( a hint of crystal malt and a bit of sugar to stop it being too cloying). If all comes out well it will be somewhere between 10%-11% and will be aged for at least 6 months.
  

If you want any more details of any of the beers (recipes etc.), drop me a line.

Back after a long absence

Well, if anyone reads this stuff you'll no doubt be wondering why the lack of updates. Well, life got a bit too busy. Brewing has still been going on but has been interspersed in between family visits, lots of work etc.

But it's a New Year so I'm resolving to catch up a bit. Hard to believe that I haven't written anything since September! Hopefully, postings over the next few days will cover:

• further forays into the world of all-grain homebrewing
• my less-than-stellar performance in the National Homebrewing Competition
• construction of my home keg system

More soon!