Shortened Brewday Update

As I stated in my last post, I severely tweeked two brews to shorten my brew day and make it much easier and less stressful... thus funner, and it was.  My efficiency was slightly lower than I thought it would be but I still hit my numbers where I wanted to.  1.049 for my Wit, and 1.055 for the Gumballhead... then the curve ball.  I was racking the Gumballhead into the Better Bottle with my airstone going just fine while I emptied my mash tun.  After it finished I looked over to see a plume of foam exiting the top... wait a second... why is Starsan foam coming from the... top... of my... oh... !  Yes, after pouring a half gallon of Starsan into my fermenter, shaking to sanitize, putting the shirt over the top to keep the sun from skunking my beer, and putting the stopper in to keep debris and such out, I forgot to empty the Better Bottle before racking into it.  Luckily Starsan is drinkable, unlike Iodophor, and so it just diluted the beer from 5 gals @ 1.055 to 5.5 gals @ 1.050.  To adjust for this I added a pound of sugar to the fermenter to get the gravity back up to about 1.055 so that I will still hit the right ABV (maybe a little higher with how fermentable the sugar is).

As an added bonus I drew off 6 gallons of 1.011 gravity last runnings and soured them for 50 hours @ 95*F.  Smelled like yogurt, not too tart though.  Went to boil it with 2.5# DME and my burner caught on fire at the hose, so no boil.  I pulled 1 quart of wort and brought it to just under a boil and added 1oz Challenger and 1oz Cascade for a frutiy, spicy, floral, citrus hop nose to it and steeped for about 5 mins, then strained it into the other 6+ gallons of unboiled wort in the bucket.  I added some slurry from the 3/4 gallons of Soured Saison I just bottled, and after 2 days it smells of fruit, lactic, and CO2, and I can see the wort churning when I look inside.  Tossed in a couple of my French Oak cubes as well.  In a few months it should be nice and tart and funky.  My thoughts are to add fruit or maybe flowers to it, possibly dry hop.  We'll see how this one turns out for a last minute, last runnings, sour mash that didn't fully sour and never boiled, hopped nose but not boiled, oaked experiment, that I didn't take a gravity reading on.

Be on the look out for the recipes soon.

Already Slammed Enough... Shortened My Brewday

As I reflected on my schedule, and the two beers I was getting ready to brew, it dawned on me, I don’t have to make this so much work.  I was slated for 2 separate brews, 2 mashes, 2 boils.  1 American Wheat with all Amarillo - a Gumballhead clone with Wheat Malt, Pale Malt, and CaraVienne.  The other, a Belgian Wit with Flaked Wheat, Flaked Oats, and Pils, which would call for a 90 minute boil.  I have been slammed enough already that I didn’t need a 9+ hour brew day.  So I decided to make a switch.  


I swapped the Wheat Malt for Flaked Wheat, which works since Gumballhead uses Red Wheat (Flaked) not White (Malt).  I also swapped the Pils for Pale Malt since the flavor isn’t going to shift too far - if it was nearly 90% Pale opposed to Pils it would show, but at less than 50% it won’t matter too much.  This dropped the boil time for the Wit to less than 90.  It also allowed me to combine the base malts and do a large single mash and run it all off into one giant kettle.  After mashing for 60 minutes, I will run it off into 1 kettle, stir, test my gravity, then split, leaving slightly more in the American Wheat than the Wit to account for higher hop losses.  I also adjusted each recipe for a 45 minute boil to shorten the day by another ½ hour.  I will steep the Caravienne in the wort for Gumballhead, and I will toss the Oats into the boil for the last 10 minutes on the Wit (contributing the mouthfeel as well as starches that will help keep the haze around), a tip I picked up from Michael Tonsmeire, that he got from a The Alchemist.  Should make for a much shorter, easier brewday, and two great beers.

How Did That Happen?

Thought this was kinda interesting... I brewed 3 beers from one mash awhile back, and this is one of the first times that I had them poured side by side. The two beers in the picture are almost the same OG and FG, both had 90 minute boils. The only difference is hops, yeast, and fermentation. The one on the left is my Bavarian Hefe that was fermented open with Sierra Nevada's Kellerwiesse yeast. The one on the right has 7oz of Falconer's Flight hops, fermented w/ American Ale 1056, and has a pineapple in the secondary with the dry hops. It is quite astounding the difference in color on these two beers. Granted, the Hefe has yeast in the glass, and the Wheat has lots of hops (for the style at least) and pineapple (juice included). Hard to believe they both came from the same mash. I might have one Hefe left to do a 3 way comparison with the "Berliner Wiesse" that was made from the last runnings, which will inevitably be lighter seeing as it was a thinner wort to begin with and almost 1/2 the OG.

3 Beers, 1 Mash

Back at the very end of August I had a difficult brew day, difficult because of what I had planned. I originally had set out to brew 2 beers with wheat. I wanted to do a Bavarian Hefeweisse and an American Wheat w/ fruit for my wife. So I set out to brew them both from 1 mash. I had been tossing around the idea of how I was going to do the American Wheat: blackberry, strawberry, blueberry, all 3, something completely different. This was also the same time that Falconer's Flight proprietary hop blend came out. As I was doing some research on them I thought, "ooh, lots of tropical notes, pineapple, some pine and grapefruit, sounds like a 'fruity' beer to me!", so I approached my wife about doing a hoppy wheat beer that would taste tropical and she loved it (except for the hoppy part). So the plan was set, 1 Bavarian Hefe that I would culture the yeast from Sierra Nevada Kellerweisse to brew, and a hoppy American Wheat with 7oz of hops and a whole pineapple (as if the hops weren't enough). Then, about a week before brew day, I got a wild hair, literally: Berliner Weisse! Berliner Weisse is a very low gravity, low alcohol, super dry, sour German wheat beer with a slight Brett funk, and I could do it from the left over runnings from the other 2 beers. What began as 2 beers became 3!

Here is the grain bill:
7# Pilsner Malt (37%)
10# Wheat Malt (53%)
1# German Dark Wheat Malt (5%)
1# Flaked Wheat (5%)

This was my first attempt at a lot of things, seeing as it was my 6th batch of homebrew, and 3rd all-grain, this was a feat in itself. It was the first attempt at culturing yeast from a bottle. First attempt at doing a double sized mash. First time using wheat (and 63% at that). First attempt at step mashing. First sour mash. First sour. First open fermentation. First time using fruit.

The mash started off difficult, I had to fit 19# of malt into my mash tun, and do a step mash (which requires infusing extra water to take the temperature up to the next level). I started out by doing an acid rest @ 113 to create the precursors for 4 vinyl guaiacol (the clove flavor in Hefe). Then I scrambled to get enough boiling water ready to get it up to 120 for a protien rest. After that I scrambled again to get enough boiling water to get it up to the sacc rest @ 152. Got it to 148... NO! Had to add some more boiling water (wasn't ready) which put it to the brim of my cooler mash tun, and barely hit 152. I thought I would have to do my first decoction mash to get it right, but it worked. Mashed for an hour, then started to vorlauf. I took the first runnings into the kettle to measure, then hit the MLT (mash-lauter tun) with the sparge water. I drained this into a 15 gallon rubbermaid storage container (I had to have all 13 gallons in 1 master volume and then split it for the beers to be equal gravity), as I siphoned the 6.5 gallon from the kettle into it as well and stirred. Mean while I hit the grain bed with more water and added some more pils and some acid malt, and let it rest for a couple hours.

I syphoned 6.5 gallons into the kettle, added .25oz of Simcoe hops, and brought it to a boil for 90 minutes, cooled, topped off with water because I was short on volume, and then syphoned it into my 6.5 gallon fermenting bucket. I added the yeast I had cultured from the SN Kellerweisse, and put one of my large mesh sacks over top and taped it off... that's right, no lid, open fermentation. As you can see in the picture, the krausen got huge, no restraint or stress on those yeasties!

I then added the remaining 6.5 gallons of wort to the kettle and comenced the boiling sequence for it, adding quite a lot of hops as the boil came to a close. I cooled it, syphoned into the Better Bottle, and attached the blow off tube after adding a slurry of 1056 from Oakshire Brewing and aeration.

Now back to the MLT. I added enough cool water to drop the temp to 118 F and fill the MLT to the brim. I didn't put saran wrap or foil on top (to protect from oxygen which feeds the wrong bacteria) like I should have, but it turned out good in the end. I placed it inside an old sleeping bag and put it inside over night. 22 hours later I took it out and popped the top to the most horrid smell ever; like death climbed into my MLT and used it as a jacuzzi. I got it outside and ran off 6.5 gallons, and started the boil with aged hops that made it smell worse. I topped it off as it boiled with more runnings as it boiled for 2.25 hours. Finally I cooled it and racked it into my glass carboy. I added a smack pack of WY 1007 German Ale, and a 2L starter of built up dregs from RR Supplication (Lacto, Pedio, Brett). Sour mash, and souring bugs in primary... what did I get myself into! That thing continued to reek through fermentation.

After a few days I scooped off the krausen from the Hefe and put a lid on it just to ensure that nothing got into it (especially since I had a wild 4 feet away). Then after 2 weeks I racked the hoppy wheat into a 5 gallon bucket and added an entire pineapple that I had cored and chopped up. The next day I added 2 oz of dry hops. After another week, we bottled both "Cavendish and Cloves Collide" and "Harmonious Convergence" (named such as it was a harmonious convergence of my wife's desire for a fruity wheat, and my desire for a hoppy one). "Left Out Left Overs", the Berliner Weisse stayed in primary another 4 weeks. At a total of 7 weeks we bottled "Left Out Left Overs" and let it carb for 2 weeks in the warm garage inside rubbermaid storage containers with lids just in case of bottle bombs (when an over carbonated bottle explodes due to pressure), but none hit. I put one case into the fridge after the 2 weeks, and left another out for 6. They went into the fridge @ 1.007, but after the 6th week bottled, I degassed 2 beers (one of the 2 week crew, and one of the 6 week) to compare gravities. Both clocked in @ 1.004! They dropped another 3 points after bottling; that is amazing they didn't blow.

They all taste great. The Hefe has a lot of over-ripe banana, vanilla, and a clove kick on the back end, very smooth and creamy, superb head and lacing, but they have gone almost crystal clear in just over a month. The hoppy wheat is nice and tropical, lots of pineapple, grapefruit, a little pine, tart wheat, smooth, dry finish, lots of haze, great head retention, and a nice bitter bite. The Berliner is quite sour, smells of ripe fruit, greek yogurt, and funk, with a dry, fizzy, sour punch in the throat; lots of white bubbly head that quickly disipates. Very impressed with all three, but will probably never do the entire thing over again.