Visit From A Friend

Friend Owen is back in the United States for a time and stopped by for a visit. Any of you who have been following his blog are familiar with his brewing adventures. His escapades are enough to make any beer knurd jealous.

His time here was short, but I enjoyed what he was able to share. We discussed a bit about about brewing techniques and some ideas for the brewery and just shot the bull.

While visiting, he sampled the New England Cream Lager and Hemlock Ale. He declared both of them excellent, which shows that he posses either excellent taste or excellent diplomatic skills. I prefer to believe the former.

As a gift, Owen left behind a bottle of Pannepot Grand Reserva, vintage 2006. This is a 10% alcohol powerhouse that is aged for 14 months on French oak and then 8 months on Calvados wood. It gives me a few ideas for my own brew. I will file a report when I drink rare gem. In return, I sent him off with a bottle of the German Pale.

It was great to see Owen again. He has been a great supporter of our brewery idea since the beginning. We look forward to reading of his further adventures on his blog.

This upcoming Sunday, we will be meeting with some people who are starting a hop farm. The farm is in Massachusetts and sounds like great idea. I will keep you posted on what we find out.

German Pale Ale

My experimental German Pale Ale has now had time to condition in the bottle. I have tasted a few samples and have had others taste samples too. The verdict is a consensus: it is good!

German Pale Ale

To refresh my readers’ memories, I will give a rundown of the origins of the “German Pale Ale”. It arose from my continuing desire to do something different. In this case I came up with the idea of using proven dark beer yeast to brew a proven pale beer grain bill. So this experiment was a bit of a criss-cross of past successes. I always advocate such mix-ups of ingredients as a way to grow and explore. I am continually frustrated by brewers who live in a world of hard categories. To them, the world is made up of ale yeasts, lager yeasts, IPA’s Double IPA’s, blah, blah, and blah. Is it not the height of ignorance and irony for some alleged expert to declare, “A good beer, but not to style”? May God, or whoever may be in charge, never allow that I should live in such a pathologically defined world. Good beer is good beer; style is in the eye of the beholder.

So it is I found myself brewing “German Pale Ale”. I made a starter of Wyeast German Ale yeast. For grain, I used 6 lb Pale Pearl malt, 4 oz 40L crystal malt, and 4 oz Cara Munich malt. For hops, I used 1 oz of my own hops, which will be the subject of an upcoming blog. For a mash, I did a single temperature infusion. All in all, this was a fairly simple recipe.

The only difficulty encountered during the creation of this beer was that the yeast, like so many Wyeast products, was a slow starter. Even mixing up a starter in advance was not enough, this yeast was a dog. After 48 hours, it had shown little, if any, activity. In an effort to get things going, I racked the whole mess into another fermenter. That did the trick and within a few hours a vigorous fermentation was progressing.

When it came time to bottle, I added 1 ½ cups of dark dry malt extract. I have always preferred using dry malt extract to using sugar for priming. It seems to me that sugar does not give as thick and smooth a head to the beer as does dry malt extract. Further, when I sugar primed my beers it seemed that I often got a cidery taste.

So now three weeks have passed since bottling the “German Pale Ale”. As the photograph shows, it is a nice golden colored brew (Note the reflection of the alien in the mug. Word of this beer spread fast). The flavor is a smooth malty sweetness overlain by a surprisingly strong hop flavor. This is not the harsh hop bitterness of modern India pale ales or other hop bombs. Rather it is true hop flavor.

I do not know quite how to describe the hop flavor of this beer. I know of no commercial beer with a similar hop flavor, though it is probably closest to a traditional Kolsch. The best I can do is to describe the taste as reminiscent of the aroma of a bucket of freshly picked hops. Indeed, I suspect that those who have never picked hops for themselves may well not recognize the flavor for what it is. For me, as the grower and harvester of the hops used in this beer, it is a real treat to have them make such a significant contribution to the overall flavor of such a fine beer.

So there you have it, the “German Pale Ale” is a success. Perhaps a new style? I will let the drinker decide.

Trying Something Different

Regular readers know by now that I like to experiment. So it is with my latest creation. I was trying to think of something different to do for a Christmas beer to go along with the traditional Hemlock Ale when I came up with this big idea.

The idea I finally settled upon was this: I would match a yeast I had used before with a grain bill I had used before, but had never used those two together in the past. Specifically, I decided to use a yeast I like for stouts and porters and a grain bill that I used for pale ales.

The yeast I chose was Wyeast German Ale, a fast working and powerful yeast, and one of the few Wyeast products I have received consistent results from. The grain bill was very basic: Pale Pearl malt, 40L crystal malt, Cara Munich malt. I also threw in 1oz of hops from my own yard.

Even though I made a starter, the yeast was very sluggish at the start. I racked it into another fermenter and made sure to aerate it thoroughly. After that, the yeast took off and worked vigorously.

A few days ago I bottled this creation. It came out very light with a surprisingly strong hop character. Unfortunately, I did not take an OG reading so I am not sure of the alcohol content. However, based on the amount of malt used, I would guess 4.5% alcohol would be about right.

Based on the sampling during bottling, it looks like I may have a winner on my hands. Only time will tell. Dear Reader, I shall keep you posted.

Mixed Yeast Update

The mixed yeast beer has now been in the bottle for nearly a month. While it tasted good going into the bottle, which usually means a beer will taste good coming out, so far the result is a bit disappointing.

On the first tasting, which was at two weeks in the bottle, the beer had a distinct vinous character. However, as it is fairly low in alcohol, I feared it may have somehow become infected during the bottling process. Now, at nearly a month in the bottle, that character has subsided somewhat. The flavor has become much more mild and earthy, perhaps even somewhat bland. A distinct alcohol-like sting is still is still apparent, but not so much of the wine/sherry character.

Considering the dramatic shift in flavor character that has occurred in the last two weeks, I suspect the flavor evolution of this beer in not over yet. So even though I am a bit disappointed, I shall reserve judgment. We may yet have a winner on our hands.

The Girls Are Back On-line

Not much on the brewing front this week. I have three beers in the cellar and a fourth in the fermenter. I should have enough for holiday gifts with a bit left over for me.

The best news is that our older hens have decided to start laying after a two month layoff. The new girls have started laying for the first time. We are getting a steady four eggs per day with as many as nine. Production is enough that I have started putting eggs out for sale. How long this will last, I do not know, but last year we got eggs through the winter.

The young Leghorns are laying the smallest, whitest eggs I have ever seen. The older Aracanas are laying giant, misshapen green monsters. Must be the weird weather.

Creating A New Style

I have never been one to accept sharp definitions of beer styles. When one views brewing as an art, as I do, the idea that a particular beer style is or can be a clearly defined target is anathema. All styles must be open to interpretation and innovation or they are dead. So perhaps it is both fitting and ironic that I would embark upon creating my own style.

I did not at first set out to create a new style. I simply wanted to do something that did not appear in any of my recipe books. Then it occurred to me that by avoiding all possible styles does one not effectively create a new style? Indeed, it treads into the realm of famous paradox: "The set of all things that are not the members of any set."

So what was the result of this desire for difference? I decided to create a "cream" lager. In defiance of the concept of lagers as clear, light, bitter beers, and ales as heavy fruity/malty beers, I would create a lager that was heavy and smooth, a little malty, and with a distinct, but not bitter, hop flavor.

I am only on the second batch, but I believe I am on to something. This second batch, after only 15 days in the bottle is among the best beers I have brewed. It is a bright gold, creamy, full bodied lager. The flavor leans toward the fruity (a bit like Steinlager) but with a strong malt presence. The hop character is distinct: I am reminded of the aroma of the hops on the day I picked them. It is not a harsh bitterness. It is more akin to tasting the whole flower of the hop.


How did I achieve this? I suppose I should not give away trade secrets, after all this may become one of the flagships of our brewery. Then again, in the spirit of brotherhood among brewers, I guess I can give out the basics so that others can interpret my new style. The ingredient list is actually quite simple: pale Pearl malt, 20L crystal malt, lactose, and my own hops. Oh, and a touch of molasses for priming prior to bottling.

So what name did I give this new style I created? After a bit of thought, I decided to honor both geography and content. I decided it should be known as New England Cream Lager. Let us hope that many will enjoy it and none feel compelled to define it!

A new style is born...

Dark Lager

After thinking a bit about which beer to brew I decided on a dark lager. I had tried to brew a dark lager a few years back. That effort ended with me being awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of bottles exploding. I had not tried again since then.

Why I decided on now as the time to once again tempt the dark side of lager beers, I cannot say. Perhaps it was simply the need to once again face that which had defeated me. Whatever the reason that compelled me, I, and my tasters, are glad that I did.

The recipe for this was a figment of my own imagination, flavored by my past experience. I started with a base of pale Pearl malt with some 20L crystal malt for a bit of flavor. Then I added a couple ounces of dark wheat malt for some sharpness in the flavor and a bit of color. The last ingredient was Kent Goldings hops.

For a yeast, I used one of my new favorites, Saflager dry lager yeast. This is a powerful, fast working yeast. When I bottled, only half the bottles were primed, with dry malt extract.

Unlike my previous effort, this time no bottles exploded. The result was a well carbonated (both primed and unprimed) dark lager. The flavor had a hint of hop bitterness with a very crisp sharpness from the wheat malt (and possibly the yeast) that was dominant and led to a dry finish. The unprimed bottles were slightly smoother, but very close to the primed bottles in flavor.

I gave this beer to several outside testers. I was a bit worried that it may be too sharp for some tastes. I need not have worried,it received universal approval. Ah, sweet success. I guess sometimes we need to revisit our failures to, quite literally, taste success.

To Prime or Not To Prime - Continued

Oh the pain of dial-up! I have not been able to get on the internet for over a week! This is too much. We hope to be getting a faster connection, sooner rather than later.

The to-prime or not-to-prime experiment continues. My latest test of the no-prime theory is with a stout. This is a very dark beer I brewed with a good bit of dark roasted barley and fermented with a Wyeast German Ale yeast culture. This yeast is an explosive worker. It creates a huge krausen and gets done quickly. I thought it might be an excellent candidate for bottling without priming so I bottled half with primer and half without.

The bottles that were primed came out as expected. They have a huge tan head that takes up about half the mug. They also have the strong chocolaty taste characteristic of the German Ale yeast. I forgot to put in the lactose during the boil, so they are somewhat light-bodied for a stout, but still a very satisfying full-flavored beer. Success!

Being just short of a month since bottling, I opened one of the unprimed bottles. As expected, the beer had much less carbonation, though it still managed about an inch of white foam at the top of the mug. The taste was excellent. Again, as expected it was noticeably, though subtly, different from that of the beer in the primed bottles.

The flavor of the beer from the unprimed bottle seemed to be a bit sharper. The chocolate flavor was definitely more pronounced. The flavor provided by the hops was also more noticeable, but still in the background, as it should be with a true stout. There was just enough carbonation to tickle the tongue as it slid smoothly by. Another success!

It seems that once again I have managed to get two distinct and excellent beers just by priming or not priming bottles from the same batch of wort. I am beginning to like this method. It has opened a new frontier of experimentation. Let us see what the unprimed beer tastes like in another month.

Lager & Thames Valley Yeast Update

Today I finally bottled the lager I brewed on January 19. Coming out of the fermenter it tasted very good. I would put the taste at about a Steinlager, one of the few commercial lagers I really like. Steinlager is a New Zealand brew that my college in River Falls, Wisconsin, used to serve. I also have fond memories of it from my time in New Zealand. I remember coming over a hill on Great Barrier Island, into Port Fitzroy, and seeing the little shop with the Steinlager sign. I bought two and Terry and I drank them on the front porch. That ice cold beer was such a relief.

This was my first brew with dry lager yeast (Saflager S-23). I have always been told that dry lager yeast is a bust. Not so. Going into the bottle, I am happy with the results. But I can’t leave well enough alone. I decided to prime it with a cup of maple syrup. We shall see how that goes.

As an update, the beer I brewed with Thames Valley yeast is now at almost exactly eight weeks in the fermenter and still very active. Suspecting an infection, I used a bottle filler as an improvised wine thief and sampled some. Surprisingly, it was quite good. I have never had ale go so long in the fermenter and anything good come of it. For now, it looks as though this will be a good beer.

I must admit I am pretty excited. I was beginning to fear that both these beers were going to be garden food.

Horse Blanket

A short time ago, I was reading some beer reviews in a national magazine. In one of the reviews, the statement was made that the subject beer had a "warm and pleasing horse blanket aroma and flavor". I have seem similar statements many times over the years. While this particular reviewer meant their statement as a compliment, it set me to thinking.

I have a long association with horses, currently I own three, and it has never crossed my mind to taste their blankets. In fact I cannot imagine it would be very pleasant at all. Ever see what the water looks like after washing one of those things? This leads me to believe that those who created and continue to propagate this description have never been particularly intimate with a real horse blanket.

Yet why does the description of beer as having horse blanket aroma/taste continue to be used? My best guess is that it was used once and became a catch phrase and, like most catch phrases, became so over used that it lost any association with its origin. No literal meaning remains.

These days the "horse blanket" description is most used in reference to Guinness, which to me tastes nothing like a what I would imagine a horse blanket to taste like. I wonder if the first beer so described really did taste like a horse blanket. If it did, I would bet that is why no one remembers it.

Would you really want to taste my blanket?

Existentialism and Beer Update

Over the past two weeks I have been listening to a series of lectures on existentialist philosophy. In the past I have had a bit of antipathy toward existentialism. This arose from my dealings from the few self-proclaimed existentialists I have met. Particularly, a Sartre toting and (mis)quoting fellow in Fairbanks, Alaska, whose constant refrain was "I don't care about my life." I could not brook such a philosophy.

I should have known better. As I wend my way through this series of 24 lectures I am finding a very different meaning of existentialism than that which I had heretofore believed. Freedom to choose and responsibility for oneself are the real character of the philosophy of Camus and Sartre, in its simplest form. They (and others) contend that no matter the situation we still have choices and are responsible for the outcome of those choices. We cannot simply let life happen to us. Thus the old excuse of "I had no choice ..." does not hold. Echos of Socrates here.

It is not hard to envision situations where such philosophy would lead to a very severe judgement upon one. We must not expect too much. After all we are only human. Or is that just an excuse? Based on this interpretation, one could opine that existentialism may well be just the philosophy for our current era.

The irony here was Sartre's support of Stalin and Castro et al. How could one argue for freedom of choice and individual responsibility while supporting a system that sought to eliminate individualism, and those who brutally enforced such a system? Camus couldn't figure that out and it ended his friendship with Sartre.

Beer Update

The honey beer is in its 20 day and still turning over the lock. It has slowed, but is still not quite ready for the bottle. The "Old British Ale" is chuggin' right along.

Yeast Failure!

Oh! The pain!

The yeast I pitched in my last recipe, a knock-off from the Old British Beers book, appears to have failed. It was a Wyeast "smack pack" liquid culture. I got on the company website and it stated that a culture could take up to 36 hours to get going. After about 40 nothing was happening, so I pitched a Nottingham dry yeast. Hopefully this will save things.

Looking back over my brewing notes, I see that of the last four times I have used Wyeast cultures: Two have failed, one underperformed, and one (Scotch Ale) worked excellently. I am not sure what the problem could be. I had made a note that only the Scotch Ale pouch had inflated prior to pitching and that was the only one that I smacked the night before brewing. The others were all smacked the day of brewing but still had 6-8 hours before pitching. Maybe that is the key. However, the Wyeast website does say that the pouch need not be inflated prior to pitching.

I know many people swear by Wyeast products, so if anyone has an idea what went wrong, please pass it on.

Thanks and Cheers!

Old British Beer

Greetings and Happy New Year!

Some time ago I stumbled upon the website of the Durden Park Beer Circle. This group of lads and lasses have been pursuing the recovery of formulas for the great British beers of yesteryear. They have published an excellent book, Old British Beers and How To Make Them, of which I have obtained a copy. Part one of the book contains a brief but fascinating history of how the members went about researching and testing their recipes. The second part of the book discusses brewing such beers and includes 131 recipes.

The recipes are all designed for the production of one imperial gallon (4.54 liters). This is where it gets interesting. Some of these recipes call for up to 10 lbs. of pale malt for one imperial gallon! In most of the recipes, as much malt is used for one imperial gallon as I use for five US gallons. I am not quite ready yet to commit 40 or or more pounds of malt to one five gallon batch of beer, however I was inspired.

The most noteworthy feature of the recipes in this book is their simplicity. Most American recipes have a long list of malts, hops, and other additives, often added in very small amounts and at varying times in the mash or boil. The recipes in this book all follow one of two mash and boil schedules and have only two to four ingredients. That's it.

In this spirit of simplicity, and guided by the Durden Park Beer Circle's fine text, I created my own simple "Old British Beer". I used British pale malt in a ratio of 7/1 lbs. with 60L crystal malt. For hops I used the last three ounces from my own hopyard. The yeast of choice was Wyeast British Ale II.

What will become of this "Old British Beer"? Time will tell, and so will I....

Cheers!

Honey Beer & Brewery Update

Howdy!

The honey beer continues to chug along. Much of the yeast has dropped, but there is still quite a bit in suspension and the fermentation lock continues to turn over regularly. I am very interested how this will turn out.

The only downside is that if this does turn out to be a masterpiece, it can never be duplicated. Being that I did not have much time to brew, I essentially threw this together out of left over supplies. I used canned extract and pre-cracked crystal malt that I had been given by a former brewer over a year ago. One must confess that there is something romantic about a beer that can never be repeated....

Brewery Update:

We have had our preliminary mettings with the planning and zoning boards. All went very well. We were asked plenty of questions, many of which were helpful to us as they addressed items we had overlooked or not fully explored. Overall, the mood was supportive. We have also received the support of another local business. So far, so good.

In other news, we picked up some of the tanks we will be incorporating into the brewery. We had preordered these to avoid an anticipated increase in steel prices. Then the price actually went down! It is well that I am not a gambler.

Here is a photo of the tanks on arrival:

Howdy

Hi All,

It may sound a bit contrived, but, welcome to my first post. I am new to blogging so bear with me and, hopefully, we will have some fun. This blog is dedicated to my three favorite things in life: Beer, photography, and philosophy. My favorite beer is (was) Watney's Cream Stout, my photography is at http://www.belgianmare.com/ and my philosophy is decidedly Ancient Greek. Am I the only one amazed that those guys got it right 2500 years ago and since then all we have been trying to do is find a way to prove them wrong?

About the beer thing. I enjoy brewing my own. In fact my wife and I are starting our own brewery. We hope to have it fully functional in the Fall of 2010. It will be a lot of work but also a great adventure. So please stop by often to check on our progress.

And about anything else - have at it. Send me your thoughts and I will respond. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, on anything, and dispensing my suspect knowledge and wisdom upon all of you!

Until next time - Stay Metal!