Been A Busy Few Weeks

Now that I have my chest freezer out of storage I have been gearing up brewing to try and get my inventory built for competitions. Here is a quick run down of the springs brewing activities.

On April 12^th I brewed an American Rye. The recipe was pretty straight forward with 2-row pale malt making up 47% of the grist, 29% rye malt, and the rest being pale wheat malt. I used a single rest mash at 154° F and batch sparged it. I used Wyeast American Wheat to ferment it. I was surprised how well it fermented without a starter. The beer is quite cloudy and after two months shows no inclination to clear anytime soon. The flavor is great, malty and wheaty with a light spicy character from the rye. It would be a perfect lawn mower beer, if I had a lawn that is. I am quite please with the way it came out and I think I will add it to the regular list.

Then on Big Brew I made what I had been calling my Tax Man Barleywine. I call it that because I use part of my tax refund money to buy the ingredients since it is a big beer. This was also the first recipe that I ever created on my own a few years back. The only problem is that once I looked at the recipe in detail with my more advanced knowledge, I realized it is actually a Russian Imperial Stout. The recipe is solid and I have won medals with it, but I have been calling it the wrong thing. I still have half a case of a 2009 batch that is showing all sorts of wonderful age related character.

The big weekend was on May 29^th where I did two brews in one day. I started with a run at a Munich Helles. It seems a bit dark for the style, so I think I will actually be calling it a Vienna. I could not find my grain bag for steeping grains so I made a tea with the melanoidan malt. I think that is where I ended up with too much color. Next time I will be sure to find the grain bag and do it right. The primary fermentation is now complete for that beer and I have racked it into a corny keg to lager.

The other beer that I did that day was a Gose (rhymes with Rosa), which is a historical style of sour beer and is seasoned with coriander and salt. I have only tasted one commercial example of this beer and it was quite tasty. My version smells quite a bit stronger in terms of coriander and I intend to let it sour as much as I can. I did add a bit of flaked wheat to the extract that I used for this. The idea was to provide the haze that wheat beers traditionally have. I also pitched it with a tube of White Labs Berliner Blend. The yeast seems to have run its course, now the laccto needs to do its work.

The most recent beer I made is a total crap-shoot. I am trying to recreate an obscure German beer called zoiglbier. There is not a ton of information about this beer on the Internet, and I only have a few notes about the one homebrew version that I have tasted. But I decided why not give it a try. If that was not enough I added a few new techniques to the process as well. The first thing that I added was a decoction mash. The guy that made the one I have had insisted that decoction was required to make it correctly. That part actually went pretty well. I did not scortch the decocted portion, it cleared up as it came to a boil so I know the starches had degraded. When I put that back into the main mash it hit the next rest temp perfectly. Overall I was very happy with that portion.

The other new technique was to do a fly sparge over my older batch sparge process. I had recently found an old Home Depot gift card with $32 and change on it and Home Depot sells 10 gallon water coolers for around $35. I had the hardware for the valves and fittings from my old mash tun and someone had given me a sparge arm before I left Kansas City. So I got a nice new hot liquor tank for less than $5. This process was a bit harder to gauge than the decoction. The reason for that is this is a small beer, so the actual amount of the sparge was small because this beer was only boiled for 10 minutes. My recipe notes say 2 minutes, but I just did not have the nerve to go that low. This is the way to go, but I will have to make sure I am doing it right.

The final new trick was to do first wort hopping. Basically instead of adding the hops to the kettle after the boil has started, you add them as soon as the wort starts draining into the kettle. I left them in for the boil, but I will have to check to make sure that was the right thing to do.

None of those reason are why I have my doubts about this batch though. The beer never had a proper hot break, nor did it seem to have much of a cold break. The wort is the color it should be, but the examples I have seen are clear and mine is quite cloudy. Of course it could clear up during the lagering phase. I drained it onto the yeast cake from the Munich Helles batch and it took off and it seems to have fermented out already. I am going to let it go though the diacetyl rest and rack it off, so it can lager while I am in San Diego.