RECIPE #71: WTWTA: The Carol 3.0 (Lambic)

Earlier this year I entered a local BJCP competition and happened to win the Best of Show with a wild fermented "Lambic" I had brewed 2.5 years earlier.  I had cultured yeast and bacteria for that batch from blackberries over growing the fence of the back yard at our old house we rented, as well as peaches from the local farmer's market.  This was the only yeast I used for fermentation.  Over the course of the year I added dregs from commercial and homebrewed sours.  After a year and a half in bottles it won BOS.  When this happened I of course wanted to re-brew it, so I started stepping up the dregs.  For winning BOS I got to brew the batch at Falling Sky, but they don't do sours, so we did a kettle soured version that mimicked the original.  

Just after the win I was chatting about the beer with Matt Van Wyk of Oakshire Brewing and that it wouldn't actually be re-brewed commercially.  Then, almost as if it wasn't a big deal, he stated that he would brew the beer with me.  Matt makes amazing sours and the thought of even being able to do my beer with him is a huge honor.  8 months later and we are there.  I brewed this current batch for myself, 10 gallons, to fill a 6 gallon wine barrel, and have some for aging and blending later, as well as the big reason, to begin growing the yeast up for the 10 barrel batch.  I had pitched my starter onto 6 gallons of the wort I got from my Falling Sky brew, then pitched that slurry onto this 10 gallon batch.  I gave the slurry from this batch to the Matt who stepped it up on a 1 barrel batch to have it ready to ferment 10 barrels.  A few days from typing this, I will be at Oakshire brewing this recipe on a large scale for aging in full size wine barrels.  Never thought I would see this day come.

DIY: Making Yeast Extract

As I continue to bug out on bacteria and wild yeast (pun intended), I find more and more information on ways to culture and grow them.  I am also beginning to get more technical than simply adding dregs to starter wort and letting it go for awhile, though that works well.  Part of this is coming from reading a lot of information over on BK Yeast's blog, and part from the fact that I have been hanging out with Stephen, a buddy from church, who has a lab in his garage and works in microbiology.  In my reading I came across a post on BK Yeast about making Yeast Extract.  In the yeast ranching world Yeast Extract (YE) is an important component.  It is one of the main ingredients in agar plates for growing yeast and brewing bacterias, along with a sugar source (usually malt and glucose), and hydrolized protein.  In the DIY spirit of homebrewing he set out to make his own YE for plates and for growing cultures.  I followed most of his instructions to make my own, including information in his follow up post, and both Stephen and I used it with great success when mixed into our yeast starters.

UPDATE: Failed Lacto Cultures

A few weeks ago I posted about stepping up my Brett cultures by reviving older pitches from previous ferments as well as culturing new ones and getting pitches of new stuff from my buddy, Stephen.  At the same time I was working on culturing up Lacto from 3 different sources as well.  Stephen and I had split a Cascade Apricot after dinner on April 7th; he took the bulk of the dregs and I kept a few ml of slurry from the bottle.  His was pitched directly into a small wort starter (1.020 @ 300ml) that he had brought with him, and was left at room temp.  I put mine into about 250ml of Lactose sugar starter the next night and kept it at around 95*F.  I ended up taking this starter and mixing in apple juice to bring it up to 750ml of liquid.  I also added some Zoi Greek Yogurt to a jar and hit it with 750ml of apple juice too.  The third source was some pale malt I had in the garage which I added to to the last 500ml of apple juice.  I placed all of these in the ferm fridge wrapped tight in my heating blanket and kept them at 105*F for a week.  I sampled once or twice to see if I was getting any activity.  On brewday I was going to pitch some of the starters into my Saison along with 2 Saison yeasts and the Bretts.  I went to taste them and nothing.  Not a trace of Lactic acid.  I am thinking that my pasteurized apple juice must have contained sulfites as opposed to heat pasteurization (I swore I checked that though), thus inhibiting the growth of the Lacto in all 3 starters.

Luckily my buddy still had his 2 week old Cascade starter which he said was quite tart, and offered 200ml to me for my pitch which I used 150ml of and kept the other 50ml to grow up for myself.  This new starter of mine spent a week in the ferm fridge with the fermenting Saisons on 250ml of last runnings from the brewday, and had gotten quite sour.  I pitched around 100ml of the starter into my Oud Bruin from this time last year to get it to sour up, and then added the remaining 50ml (after sampling and such) to a 500ml 1.020 DME based starter for further growth.  It is back in the ferm fridge with the Saisons in the mid 80*s souring up nicely.

UPDATE: Prepping for Some Funky Stuff

In a couple weeks I will be brewing a big batch of Saison which will be split up a couple ways.  In preparation for this I have been busy culturing up and propagating different wild/sour/funky yeasts and bacterias.  I started by stepping up the dregs from an Allagash Confluence on the stir plate which had about 800ml of 1.020 starter wort in it.  After 24 hours it was rocking and by 48 was full bore.  I topped it off with another 800ml of about 1.040 wort to give it a bigger starter both in size and gravity.  A few days later it is still roaring.  This beer is a blend of Allagash's proprietary house Belgian strain that they use in the White and other Belgian beers (but not the Saison), and their proprietary Brett strain which was isolated from there coolship.  I am looking forward to how this blend will do with the 1.037 Saison in the works.

I also stepped up some older Brett strains from the slurries in my fridge like a Brett B I cultured from Elysian's Mortis, a Brett L from a local brewery that hooked me up with a pitch, and a new vial of WLP Brett Trios.  I also cultured the dregs from a fairly fresh bottle of Orval to get that funk it is known for.  I boiled up some ~1.020 wort and put it into mason jars and then cooled it down.  I pitched each strain separately to build them up and left the lid loose for CO2 escaping.  When I walk by I tighten the lid and give it a good shake then loosen it up again; by next morning a few were already giving off CO2 and foaming which is great.  My buddy Stephen from church plays with bugs too, and he gave me some Brett C from Wyeast and some Brett "F" which was cultured and isolated from plum skins by the brewer at Flat Tail in a neighboring city, Corvallis.  These will go into primary alongside some Lacto I cultured up from grains and I am hoping some Lacto from a bottle of Cascade that Stephen and I split the other night on my new deck.  He took the bulk of the dregs home to plate and isolate the Lacto, then grow it up, I took the last of the dregs and tossed them into a low gravity solution of Lactose sugar which I have sitting at 105*F right now to try to get some good growth before I brew.  All these strains will be pitched along with both WY PC strians of 3726 Farmhouse (Blauges) and 3725 Biere de Garde (Fantome).  The hope is that getting the Lacto and Brett cell counts stepped up in starters and raring to go, and pitching at the onset with the smaller pitches of the Saison blend will give a quick turn around for a young and complex beer.

Allagash Culture

I am also going to pitch 1/2 gallon of the same Saison wort with a Tej yeast strain to see how it fairs in an all malt environment.  There are 2 other brewers testing the Tej yeast as well and we will compare the final beers to get a feel of how it works.  If these trials go well, it may make its way into the collaboration beer I am doing with Falling Sky in June for winning Best of Show.

I also have 3 bottles worth of dregs from the Carol (BOS Lambic) stepping up for a future brew from just that yeast, that may eventually become a full batch at another local brewery...

Lots of exciting yeasties and beasties to play with, just wish I had more time and more wort...

2014: What to Do, What to Do?

I recently posted a last year in review post, and thought it would be good for me to get an expectations and goals for the coming year article up as well. Last year was a good year with lots of expansion to the brewery, learning and using new techniques, some really good recipes, buying a house, etc. This year I have a few things that I really want to either get into or refine. Unfortunately I am posting this one a few weeks later than I had hoped to, and so some of these goals are already achieved or at least parts of them are.

To start, this is the year of competitions. My aim is to enter my beers in competitions and place as many as possible. It is all fine and dandy when I like my beers and think that I did a good job, it is another thing to have unbiased judges give real feed back and to have medals to validate my own beliefs about my recipes, process, etc. We have 6 Club Only Competitions this year, 5 of which I am able to enter (one is for first time COC entrants only). I am hoping to beat out the reigning 3 time COC winner this year, high hopes for sure, but I think I have a chance. I have also entered 7 beers into the KLCC homebrew competition which is BJCP sanctioned, and was judged this past weekend. There were 221 entries total, and from my 7 entries I had 4 beers place. My Dopplebock, Procrastinator, took 2nd place, The Caleb, a recent Bourbon/Oak aged Imperial Stout took 1st, CUDL Buddy, a Winter Warmer entered as an American Brown, took 1st, and my first Lambic from September 2011, The Carol, took 1st place in sours as well as Best of Show for the comp. I will also be entering the Sasquatch homebrew comp, which is another locally hosted but nationally opened BJCP comp in June.

We started refashioning an extra room in our house (built in the garage) into an entertainment room. We have painted, installed really nice shelves on which we arranged glassware and "show bottles" (Cantillon, Dissident, Abyss, etc.). We bought a couple comfortable but ugly chairs that we need to reupholster, and we want to use a dark leather to do so. I am hoping to border the room from the floor to about 3' up the wall with metal corrugated panels to add that garage feel, and also accent with some dark wood. I also want to buy a mini fridge for my yeast, and then put full taps in the beer fridge door with a drip tray. Eventually we want to get a new TV for the Family Room and move our smaller one into the entertainment room. We also need to take some good shots of my beers with nice backgrounds and frame them for the walls, and mount awards/ribbons as well.

I have plans to build an incubator in the coming months for culturing yeast. I want to couple this with actually culturing more yeasts. A buddy from church is a microbiologist and ranches yeast, and I have been getting into this with him. We are working on culturing Cascade's Lacto strain that I was stepping up. We are also trying to clean up some Conan I got second hand that was infected. I have petri dishes with medium on them and a few slants as well to start using.

Last year I got new kettles that have a larger boil off rate than my previous ones. I also recently bought a 70 quart cooler to convert over for mashing bigger batches and that will take some testing. I need to pin down this new system during the start of the year. I have also been getting much higher efficiency on my system with my water treatment and over night mashing, so I need to dial this into account when building recipes, especially when trying to replicate previous brews.

Last year I wanted to start a Solera project, but was not able to track down a barrel or legal keg to use. After doing some networking I found out that one of my buddies in the club has a used 14 gallon wine barrel he wants to do some sours in. He has agreed to splitting the barrel which will probably age in my garage, and we are going to start with a Flanders Red, a style I absolutely love but have yet to brew for some odd reason. After a year or so we plan to remove 5 gallons each of the beer from the barrel and replace with a new 10 gallons of beer to mix with the remaining 4 from the first batch. He is also trying to track down another 14 gallon barrel for me to get and brew on my own.

In previous years I have brewed 2 Wee Heavy beers, and both were failures. The first batch was infected with a gusher yeast and tasted too much like cherries. The second batch was a good base beer but I pitched a large jar of old yeast and ended up with autolysis which made the beer taste like pot roast. It is great for cooking beef and pork dishes with, but not much more. My desire for this year is to brew a really good Wee Heavy, and I brewed the beer a few weeks ago. So far it seems to be a good beer, but needs to get some age on it for melding the flavors. At 4 weeks it is sweet, chewy, malty, caramelly, and good, just needs to come together more, and I might need to add some acid to the keg just to drop the final pH a few points and brighten it up as the finish is a little flabby. It is bulk aging in a purged and sealed keg in the garage, and might get some oak at some point. 

For some odd reason, much like the Flander's Red, I have yet to brew a Barleywine. This year that is going to change. I was planning to max out my current mash tun, but with the new one on the way, I won't have to. This beer will be big; I am planning on a 13%+ ABV beer on this one, tons of hops, and over 120 IBUs. I also want to brew a Vienna Lager this year. 

As of yet, I have not actually grown hops. I have hops planted, but I have not grown enough to count. The first year I planted Chinook in a container and got maybe 12 cones. The second year I planted another 8 varieties, and got maybe a pound total from them, the transplanted Chinook giving the largest harvest. Last year we bought a house and moved the hops late in the season so I didn't have any plants to harvest. I was able to install a sprinkler system for them which will help a lot. i am hoping that this year I will have my first good crop, at least from the established plants. I am going to be removing the Brewer's Gold and planting Cascades, Centennials, and Columbus. Maybe even some Magnum to get a clean bittering hop. My eventual desire is to become self sustaining for hops (unless I need to buy some patented hops like Mosaic or something).

I want to rebrew a few beers this year, mostly with slight tweeks to the recipe. I have already rebrewed my IPA and Black IPA split ferment from this time last year. I change some of the hops up and one of the yeasts, but I also got super high efficiency leading to an OG of 1.074 instead of 1.065, and got full 5.25 gallons instead of the 5 and 3.75 from last year (another reason to pin down my system). I also want to rebrew my 1st place Dopplebock, stepped up to a 10 gallon batch as I have a family member that wants to have some cases of it and is paying for his batch. 

My buddy from church loves to work with metal, and has an itch to weld. He has offered to build me 2 burner brew stand, which would be awesome for brewday. I am hoping for one that I can set on its side out of the way when not in use, then drop down and roll around during the course of a brew. I hope to assist (watch) him on this project. 

Each year I ask for brewing gear for my birthday and Christmas that I can't really justify buying throughout the year. This year I really want to move from aeration to oxegenation, so I am asking for the oxygen regulator and stainless steel wand from William's Brewing. I wouldn't mind getting new quick connects for my equipment to replace the Aluminum cam locks with Stainless Steel ones as I use Bar Keeper's Friend and Oxiclean on my equipment and these are not good for Aluminum.

That is a lot of stuff to cram into one year, but I am well on the way to getting it done. We'll see at years end how I did. Until then, I'll keep brewing, and Let the Beer Speak.

Recipe: Carol "Lambic" 2.0 (Where the Wild Things Are)

As I sip on my “Lambic” from last year, which I am very pleased with, I am very anxious to brew another one.  This time I will use the same yeast culture from the last one as I saved the entire cake from the last brew in a gallon jar in the fridge.  This year I am going to go with a grist that is much more traditional, 65% Pils, 35% Raw Wheat, mashed @ 158*F.  Last year I had some character malts like Vienna and CaraVienne which are not traditional and I’m not sure they added any needed complexity other than color.  I also had a flavor hop addition which is pointless in a beer aged for a year, coriander was the same.  I added some cake flour last time for a little more dextrins to chew on since my mash temp was fairly low. 

I could always do a turbid mash, but why?  I could also do a cereal mash, but why?  These things are traditional, but do they add anything to the final product that won’t be there (or at least drastically noticed) in the final product?  My first Lambic is quite nice and it was mashed at 152*F, and hit 1.006 in 3 weeks.  The 158*F mash should leave a larger amount of dextrins in the wort for the bacteria and Brett to munch on, and the large pitch of yeast cake should ensure a healthy amount of bugs and Brett as well as autolized yeast for them to eat as well.  That combined with an overnight open cooling in the garage where all my wild stuff is going (which I already fermented a ½ gallon of left over Brown Ale spontaneously in there), and some more dregs from commercial and homebrewed sours should ensure a good, big, powerful, and characterful fermentation from the onset, avoiding some of the enteric bacteria that are not desired.  Add in a 3 hour boil, and aged hops, we are looking at a great start to a second Lambic for next year.

Stats:

5.5 gallons

1.050 OG

1.001 Est Fg

6.6% Est ABV

8 IBUs

3 SRM

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Fermentables:

7.5#  Weyermann Pils

4.0#  Flaked Wheat

0.50# Rice Hulls

10 Minutes @ 148*F

10 Minutes @ 152*F

45 Minutes @ 157*F

78% Extract Efficiency

72% Brewhouse Efficiency

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180 Minute Boil:

180 mins - 3.4 oz Aged Hops ~ 1.5AA%

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Fermentation:

Cooled overnight opened to air in garage

6 gallon glass carboy

Healthy pitch of cake from Carol 1 (cultured from blackberries plus dregs)

Dregs of 3 Fonteins Oude Gueuze

12 months at ambient in garage

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Additional:

Gypsum 1/2 t (mash), 5/8 t (boil)

Calcium Chloride 1/2 t (mash), 1/2 t (boil)

1 French Oak Cube in primary

Brew day started off difficult.  I overshot my strike temp and hit a mash temp of 165*F.  After adding cold water I ended up at 148*F.  Added boiling water to get up to 152*F, then added more boiling water to get it up to 157*F, and rested for 45 minutes.  Wasn’t planning on doing a step mash, but oh well.  After collecting 10 gallons of wort I drained the last of the runnings into a separate kettle and boiled it down to about 800ml of 1.080 wort.  I added this to the beer and drew off 1200ml of 1.040 wort from the boil and cooled it to make a starter to my dregs while the wort cooled over night.  I added the dregs from a Hannsens Oude Gueuze to the starter only for a fruit fly to get into it and render it useless.  After a 3 hour boil, I had to move the keggle into the garage for the overnight chilling, and of course, while carrying the 15.5 gallon beast of a brewpot with a scorching hot bottom, I hit my leg with it and burned it quite nicely, luckily I only did it once and got the wort to the garage without spilling any or hurting myself anymore.  I covered it in a large sheer curtain sack that I synched down on the sides, hoping that the Fruit Flies don’t get into there like the starter.  After about 28 hours at ambient temp I racked 5.25 gallons of the wort into the 6 gallon carboy with the yeast cake, oak, and dregs.

Where the Wild Things Are: The Carol

About a year ago, actually, 52 weeks ago, I brewed up a Lambic that I fermented with the yeast I cultured off of blackberries from my backyard and a small starter of yeast from organic peaches grown locally.  After making the wort and adding the entire starter from each yeast to the carboy, I had a "funny" fermentation which consisted of small bubbles flowing up to the top quickly to feed a very small fluffy white head that looked like a single centimeter of soda foam.  Eventually the fermentation looked a little more like normal, but the krausen never really roared up like a normal yeast would.  There were chunks of peach flesh and blackberry, as well as oak chunks on top.  I also added some wild grapes after a month for a little extra yeast.  After only three weeks it was down from 1.053 to 1.006.  Nice and fruity, with a light tartness, mostly tropical and berries.

Over the course of fermentation, I have added dregs from commercial and homebrewed sours to try to get more complexity built up from other sources of Brett and bacteria.  I added some Russian River dregs, Cantillon Grand Cru, Jolly Pumpkin, Oude Beersel, Girardin Black, some infected Logen Berry mead a buddy made, and some dregs from a sour I did with Russian River dregs.  This will ensure a more complex beer, but it also kills much of the work I did culturing the yeast since the final product isn't a showcase of what that yeast can actually do (part of the reason I am going to brew a new one this year with fruit cultured yeast again and leave it alone).

After a few months I noticed a lot of oak character showing, and seeing that I used 5 oz of French Oak that had come from a wine barrel in Lodi, it wasn't any wonder why.  I needed to do something to stop the oaking, but I didn't want to lose all of the goodness in the trub and yeast that is needed for a Lambic to ferment properly.  I racked the beer out of the carboy into my sour bottling bucket and then dumped the trub, yeast, fruit, oak, etc., into a vessel while I cleaned the carboy and removed all the oak.  After this I added a few pieces of oak to the carboy, opened the valve on the bucket and refilled the carboy.  While this was going on I also racked the yeast, trub, and fruit back into the carboy as well.

I noticed an oxidative character beginning to creep in around January, so I brewed a little extra wort on my Saison and added a half gallon to the carboy to displace the head space.  The FG was still at 1.005.  Only took a few days for the fermentation to kick back up and take on the fresh wort.  After about a month or so, it was back down to 1.005.

Given another month, the FG had gotten down to 1.002, and there was a sheen atop the wort slightly resembling an oil slick, not like the pellicles I have seen before on my other sour beers.  By mid summer the taste was nice, funky, tart, clean, fruity, spicy, but lots of oak, so I racked it from the 6 gallon carboy into a 5 gallon, taking some of the yeast sediment at the bottom with it.  Given another month, the oakiness is starting to fade some.  I racked 1/2 gallon out of the carboy and added 1/2 gallon of my sour Blonde ale to try to cut down on the oak a little.  A few weeks later I am happy with the results, and am ready to bottle, and seeing that it is sitting at 1.001, not much more for it to do in the short term.

A beer that I have been watching, shaping, tasting, aging, and waiting on for a year is no simple brown bottle beer.  For this batch I needed to do something special, at least for a few bottles.  I started with 375ml Champagne bottles.  At this point I could go with cork and cage, or cork and cap (Cantillon style), but I opted for a cap and wax seeing as they look very nice, and it's super cheap as well as not requiring extra equipment.  Add to this full labels with art work and it is a very nice show piece, even if it is only 6 bottles worth.

I hope that the beer will carbonate quicker than my other sour which has been bottled for nearly 7 months and is still fairly flat.  Our club has a competition coming up and in late October that I would like to enter this batch into.  I will of course set the bulk of this beer aside to cellar for years to come and continue to develop.

This beer will be the first installment in my new series of beers, dubbed Where the Wild Things Are, named after characters from the children's book made movie.  The first is going to be called The Carol.  One of the main Wilds, he was impulsive, much like brewing a beer with blackberry yeast, adding dregs at random, and over oaking, only to move the beer twice.

NOTE: This beer took 1st place in Sour Beers and BEST OF SHOW in February 2014 at the KLCC BJCP comp.

DIY: Stir Plate Build

Yeast... it is the key factor to fermentation.  Without yeast, there is no beer.  Yeast is what turns the sugars in the wort into CO2, alcohol, fruity esters and spicy phenols (where appropriate), and all the wonderful flavors we look for in beer.  Yeast also can add flavors that we don't want, off flavors, higher alcohols, and other things that can cause a beer to no longer be wonderful.  The key to making a great beer is healthy yeast.  Yeast, like us, can only do so much work before fatigue sets in and they have to stop.  In order to keep the yeast from quitting before their work is done they need sufficient nutrients, oxygen, and numbers.  Many hands make for light work.  The more yeast you pitch, the faster they can work, and the less stress exerted on them to finish their job.  

There are multiple ways to get an adequate amount of healthy yeast to pitch.  One way is to buy lots of yeast packs and pitch them all in.  Another way is to get a pitch of yeast from a brewery.  The standard way that a homebrewer has sufficient yeast of the strain they want for the best fermentation is to make a yeast starter.  Basically, you make a small amount of wort 1-2L of 1.040 wort with yeast nutrient, cool it, and pitch the yeast into it.  This will grow the amount of yeast and get them awake and active, ready for fermentation.  You can grow more yeast by adding oxygen as you pitch the yeast.  You can grow even more by shaking the starter whenever you pass it which sends oxygen into the wort while expelling the CO2 lowering the pressure in the vessel and allowing for more growth.  The best way to make a starter to optimize growth is to place it on a Stir Plate.  A Stir Plate uses magnets to create a constant vortex in the starter releasing CO2 and infusing with oxygen continually.  Commercial Stir Plates can easily cost $100, even on eBay.  But we're homebrewers, we don't pay absurd prices for beer we can make 5 gallons of for less than 3 6 packs (sometimes less than a bottle), so why would we pay that much for a piece of equipment that you can make for around $25?

Do you have access to a hard drive?  What about a computer fan?  What about a cigar box?  What about an extra 12V power supply (maybe to the old Sega)?  Grab a couple screws, nuts, washers, rubber washers, and some basic tools and you're good to go.  If you want more information on how to build a Stir Plate beyond how I did it, you can always read the article I used to build mine from Brew Your Own. 

What you’ll need:
Wooden cigar box
80mm 12-volt DC fan
12-volt AC/DC wall adapter
Rare earth magnet (from hard drive)
4 - #6-32 x 2” machine screws
4 - #6-32 machine screw nuts
#6 metal washers
4 - 1⁄4” flat neoprene wash
Plastic wire connectors

Tools:

Wire cutters

Drill

13/64 Drillbit

Countersink
Electrical Tape

Extra Needed Materials to Use:

2000ml Erlenmeyer flask

Magnetic Stir Bar

Start by opening up the hard drive and removing the rare earth magnet.  Once you have it, place it on the main hub of the fan and give it a spin to make sure the weight is distributed.  Mark it off with a pen, the superglue it in place.  Next measure the top of the cigar box to find the center and figure out where to drill your holes to attach the fan on the inside lid.  Once you have the holes marked out (use an inked q-tip), drill the holes so that they can sufficiently take the screw.  I did a countersink on mine that will allow not only for the head of the screw to fall below the level of the lid, but to have room for covering the head of the screws with wood putty (just sand it down and paint over for a clean look).  Open the lid and slide the screws through the top to the inside.  Slide the neoprene washer onto the screw, rubber side towards the box, then a couple washers; next slide the fan onto the screws, magnet towards the lid.  Add a washer to the screw next, then place the machine nut onto the screw and tighten it until the fan no longer moves (do this on all four screws).  If there is not enough clearance between the lid and fan for it to spin freely, add some more washers between the neoprene washer and the fan.  Once it is set you can wire it up.  Drill a hole through the back to slide the wire from the 12V power supply through.  Cut the wire of the 12V as close as possible to the part that attached to the device it was used for (typically the little circular plug).  Splice the ends of the fan wires to the 12V wires using plastic wire connectors and tape on tight.  (I just put the ground wire into a plastic wire connector and taped it off).  Check to see if you wired it up correctly and to see if it is stable; it might shake some, place a partially filled flask on top to see if it stops the rattling.  I filled in the hole around the wiring, and sanded it down as well to make a complete housing.  After a paint job it was ready for use.

Once it is ready, make your starter: go here to figure out what size starter to make for your specific batch of beer.  Once you know how big your starter needs to be, you take your flask, measure your water, and dump some of it out into a bowl where you will mix in the DME (1000ml of water to 100g DME makes 1.040 starter wort).  Add it back to the flask with some nutrient, and boil in the flask.  Add a couple drops of foam control to keep it from boiling over and to keep any krausen from blowing off during growth.  Drop in the magnetic stir bar during the boil to sanitize it.  After boiling, cover with foil and chill to pitching temps (below 80*F) in an ice bath (placing a cooling rack under the flask helps cool quicker).  Sanitize your yeast pack, open, pitch, and recover with the foil.  Tilt the flask so that the stir bar is at the outer edge, and place it on over the center of the plate.  You will see the bar magnetize to the magnet on the fan.  Slide it until the flask is centered.  Plug it in, and you will see the vortex form.  Place out of direct sunlight, and let her roar for a couple days.  You will see it get foggy and creamy.  After it is done, place it in the fridge.  On brew day, remove the flask from the fridge, let it warm up, and when you are ready to pitch - remove the foil, decant most of the wort, swirl up the yeast, and pitch it in – be careful not to toss the stir bar in with it.

UPDATE: This is an awesome tool to use as you step up your starters, but some times you have a small amount of yeast, like from a bottle or slant/plate, and need to do a 10ml starter, what then.  Build a Shaker Tray for the initial steps, then use your Stir Plate for the 100ml and 1000ml steps.

Infecting My Infection Experiment

A few weeks ago I brewed up a basic American Blonde recipe to test my fermenters to see if I had effectively killed off the infection that may have been housed in them from previous batches.  The conical version of the beer seemed to be infected from the start so I decided to sour up the whole lot of it.  After checking the final gravity on the Better Bottle version and tasting it, I decided that I didn't have to have 5 gallons of this one bottled and could go for a half batch or so.  It seems a little thin with a FG of 1.005.  The flavors are nice, but the body is a little off.  I shouldn't have expected much different since I pulled 10.5 gals (post boil) from 12.5# of grain, and with such a low OG (1.037) even taking up the mash temp to 153*F wasn't going to stop it from finishing low.  Thus the decision to purposely infect the infection experiment batch.

On the conical, I diverted 1 gallon to a jug that housed a Brett starter to funk up, and I hit the remainder with 1/4 cup starter from Russian River Consecration and 1/4 cup of my Lambic along with 8 pieces of French Oak.  After a few days it was tasting quite oxidized, so I moved it out of the conical into smaller containers.  I put all the oak into one jug so it will be over oaked and used to blend into the final mix.  The rest was put into 2L bottles with a small addition of sugar.

I bottled 18 bottles worth from the Better Bottle using carb tabs just so I can know exactly how the final batch actually turned out.  The rest I transferred into the conical where I added the entire 2.5 gallons of this wort fermented on all Brett, the gallon of Bretted conical beer, and added 1.25# Clover Honey for added sugars.  I put a piece of saran wrap over the top so that I can easily look inside at what is going on with out allowing oxygen in every time I take a peek.  The saran wrap is kind of fogging up from the honey fermenting, which started out as a ring of foam as is began to dissolve from the bottom of the conical and start to ferment and slowly developed into a full krausen by 2 days later.

The plan is to let the Better Bottle version now in the conical funk up with Brett for a few months while the original conical version sours in the 2L bottles.  After 3 months or so, I will drain off a couple gallons of the Bretted conical into 2L bottles and add a 1 gallon starter of Lacto and honey, as well as a couple of the 2L soured bottles to get the souring bugs going in the Brett only version.  After some time passes I will pull some more form the conical and add the remaining 2L bottles of soured Blonde as well as the oaked sour Blonde to the mix.  Come the end of summer, I will have 2 gallons of Blonde Ale on Brett, and about 8 gallons of soured, oaked, wild Blonde which I will split 3 gallons onto cherries, 3 gallons onto apricots, and keep 2 gallons straight giving me a total of about 10+ gallons.  We will see how time plays this one out. 

Yogurt... In My Beer?

So much cleaning, so much sanitizing, so much stressing about whether I would ever be able to brew a clean beer again, and then the inevitable happens... another infected batch. I had stripped apart my conical, soaked it in PBW and hot water for over a day, and then left it in bleach for nearly a week. After brewing up 8 gallons of Blonde Ale to split between the conical and my Better Bottle (that had housed the infection as well) as a test to see if I had rid myself of it, I let them both ferment for a week. I pulled samples of both of them to taste, smell, and check the gravity. What I found from that conical was so much different than the Better Bottle. Dull, lifeless, dirty fruit, watery, and 3 points lower, diagnosis: INFECTED! With that, I resigned my efforts to salvage the fermenter, after all I had done, it was to no avail, and thus, a new fermenter for brewing up sours was born. And with all my renewed passions towards sours, it happened at just the right time. I was already planning on souring half the batch anyways, this just made it easier.

I pulled a gallon of the beer from the ball valve that went straight into a glass jug that had housed my Brett starter before it went into the leftover wort from this brew session, and had yet to be cleaned. Given a few months, the Brett should build up a nice pellicle and funk it up quite a bit. In the conical, I added a 1/4 cup of a starter I had built up from the dregs of Russian River's Consecration last summer, as well as a 1/4 cup of the Lambic I brewed last September using yeast I cultured from blackberries growing wild in my neighbor's backyard. I tossed in about 8 cubes of French Oak that were previously used by a winery in Lodi, CA to revive an old barrel as well. I also have a starter from RR Supplication that I won't be adding, at least not right now, because there is a lot of head space in that vessel right now and that culture has some definite acetobacter from when I used it in a bucket on another brew.

Just for the fun of it, I also made a 1L starter with 750ml water and 250ml Apple Juice, and 100g DME, that I cooled to 115*F, and pitched in 1/3 a serving Zoe Non-Fat Plain Greek Yogurt, which I inserted my temp control probe into and set it to 115*F wrapped in the heating blanket I received from a friend. 3 days later, the temp is constant at about 39*C (~100*F). When I poured a sample it fizzed like Alkaseltzer, which is good, that means carbonation, which means that something is going on. A sniff gives hints of yogurt, clean, nothing off in the aroma. A taste gives off sour apples, and a light yogurt twang. I effectively cultured Lacto from Greek Yogurt! After a few more days, I added 3/4 gallons of water mixed with 1.25# Clover Honey to bring it up to 4L, and give it a week or so at 100*F. Once this gallon of Lacto fermented Mead is ready to go, I will add it to the main Blonde Ale in the conical, along with another 1.25# of Clover Honey in a gallon of water, and let her ride for a good 6-8 months. Then I will add back in the gallon of Brett only portion, and hit it with 2-3# of fresh Apricots this Summer. This will bring the total volume of beer up to 6 gallons, with a new OG of 1.041 (1.037 prior to honey), and a FG of near 1.002 (or less) for a 5% ABV oak aged, wild Honey Blonde Ale.

Here's to innovation and infections!

A Yeast Starter w/o Yeast?

I am preparing to make a beer in 3 weeks that will not have yeast added to it for fermentation... well, not directly; I will be adding fruit directly to the unfermented wort to do what is called a Spontaneous Fermentation. Spontaneous fermentation is used in Belgium to make Lambics; the hot wort is pumped into a cool ship (a flat, shallow steel container with no lid) that sits high in a pathway for good night time breezes and awaits the breeze to bring local microflora: wild yeasts, and beer souring bacteria. After a night of cooling and being innoculated with these wild strains, it is transfered into a wooden barrel that is home to wild yeasts and bacterias, and it ferments here for years.

I will be doing something like this, but not quite. The wild yeasts and bacteria that are in the air used by Lambic brewers are mostly from fruit. Fruit have all the organisms needed to make a wild ale: Saccharomyces, Lactobiccilus, Pediococcus, and Brettanomyces. My plan is to add the fruit with these microflora on them directly to the beer and allow the resident critters to do what they naturally do. The fruits contain sugars that will be eaten and increase the alcohol in the beer as well as helping to dry it out, and they contain acids that will help add another layer of sourness to the finished product. I am going to use blackberries and peaches, the blackberries will give a nice acidic and fruitiness, and the peaches will have a large amount of Brett living on the fuzzy skins. I also will be adding French Oak cubes to primary to add some more depth, as well as any microflora living in the wood.

One huge risk I run by doing this is if there is too much oxygen, acetobacterer can grow which can turn the beer to vinegar. So to avoid a slow start to fermentation, I am taking a precaution. I am making starters from the fruit, that I will pitch along with more fruit when it comes time to ferment. So far I have made the starter wort: 200ml Simply Apple Juice and 800ml of water, to 50 grams of light DME, boiled with yeast nutrients. To this I added 15-20 fresh blackberries from my neighbor's bush. It has been 4 days, and it has hit high krausen, has a substantial amount of yeast on the bottom, and is forming a pellicle. It tastes great. Lots of fruit, light alcohol, clean sourness that is more than straight tart blackberry. Here is a progression:

12 Hours - Some signs of growth as the slurry on the bottom is larger than before.


24 hours - the blackberries are starting to float around a bit, and there is quite a bit of yeast (I assume) on the berries on the cores.


36 hours - many of them floating on top and what appears to be fermentation signs on the top. Progressing nicely.


44 hours - definite signs of a good fermentation.


48 hours - krausen has formed, and smells of fermentation.

84 hours - fermentation seems about done, there is a substantial amount of yeast on the bottom, and I see signs of a pellicle forming on top.

I will be updating again soon as I do the starter for the peaches (the Farmer's Market was sold out the other day, hoping to get some tomorrow morning), and again as I step them up, and of course, brew day!

NOTE: This beer took 1st place in Sour Beers and BEST OF SHOW in February 2014 at the KLCC BJCP comp.

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.