Tuesday 23 September 2014

Should you rack your beer after initial fermentation?

Why is it that people seem to follow the ferment for four days, then rack into a secondary fermentor for another week, then bottle or keg dogma?

Unless additional fermentables (sugar from fruit for instance) are added then racking your beer from one fermentor into another won't result in a secondary fermentation, it won't, maybe you'll unstick a stuck fermentation (but rousing the yeast is probably as effective), more likely you'll just oxidise your beer and it will stale quicker.

There is even some evidence that the yeast absorb off flavours if the beer is left on the yeast for a day or two, there have been studies showing that leaving your beer on the yeast for a week or four won't ruin your beer (from the oft mentioned rubberery autolysis), certainly rushing to rack your beer into another fermentor for a few days before bottling or kegging is it seems, a waste of effort.

Ok, so if you are planning on ageing a beer for extended periods then you don't want it sitting on a yeast cake that is slowly dying (unless you're doing a lambic and then the brett likes to munch on the yeast) but what I'm arguing against is the accepted wisdom that racking to a secondary is de rigueur in all cases, my view is that buggering about with your beer as little as possible on the way to packaging it is of far more importance.

Sunday 21 September 2014

The easiest way to aerate wort (or how to do less work and get better beer).

Yeast like oxygen, everyone knows this, but if you don't (and even if you do it's worth revisiting) John Palmer has a whole section on Yeast and Oxygen in How to Brew so there's no excuse.

I like many other brewers have spent 10 to 15 minutes each brew day thrashing the hell out of my cooled wort with a big spoon in order to get some oxygen dissolved and a the yeast a good start in life, Mr Palmer lists shaking, pouring and finally pumping air or O2 through the wort.

Always on the lookout for a way to improve my process (i.e. do less work and get better tasting beer) I had considered investing £20+ in a pump system, or maybe even a bottle of pure oxygen.

However, I stumbled across a couple of forum posts about the Venturi effect. Basically manipulating the flow of an liquid or gas so that the pressure drops and causes a vacuum, and using this vacuum to either drag in a liquid like an airbrush does or drag in a gas, which is what we want to do.

You can create this effect by constricting the flow and then expanding it again, at the point of expansion the pressure is lessened and if you place a strategically placed hole suction will occur.

While this image is using air, the same effect works with a fluid.
 
This approach means you have to make something, then put a small hole in it etc, it all seemed time consuming and as it would be on the cold-side, sanitation was a worry.


I happened to have some nylon 1/4 (6mm) hose connectors, I'd bought them to make a pumped corny keg cleaning system (which I still need to do). I thought I'd have a play around with a three-way connector.




The result is, as you can see, a constant stream of bubbles of air mixed with the liquid as it falls into the fermentor, by the time I had 23ltrs in the fermentor the foam was touching the lid. At least as good as ten minutes thrashing with a spoon, and I'm not having to stand over it wasting energy.

It really is that simple, leaving one of the connector ends unconnected means that as the wort flows through it sucks air in the open end, and bingo, effortless, free (nearly) wort aeration!

Saturday 20 September 2014

About as unfunky as it gets - Broughcliffe Best Bitter

So having just fairly recently got back into All Grain brewing I thought I'd better make up a batch of my "house beer", this is a recipe of my own devising that has been tweaked a few time after I threw some ingredients together four years ago.

The aim then as it is now was to create a tasty, medium strength balanced beer, not sweet and and not IPA hoppy, but with nice body and drinkability that English Beers are famous for.

Some of the colour and mouthfeel comes from adding a mixture of malts to the base of Maris Otter pale malt, some Crystal of course, but also a good measure of Wheat Malt and a small amount of roasted malts. Originally I used Chocolate Malt, but this time rather than buy a kilo of grains that I'll never use, I decided to use Black Malt instead (that I bought for the Dogbolter brew I made a few weeks ago), only time (and my memory) will tell if there is a significant impact on flavour.

The hops were also modified, I'd got some Target hops in for a brew I'm doing with some friends in a month or so, and rather than buy a bag of Fuggles for bittering I substituted the Target. The consequence of using the much higher alpha % Target (2x at least) is that I needed less hops, therefore I lost less wort. Plus the run off was a lot quicker.

Some of my brewdays are really smooth, the first two I have done since restarting have gone great, but I didn't hit my efficiency or volume targets, this time I was all over the place organisationally, but this time I hit almost all my numbers, apart from a slightly higher efficiency.

I also got to use my "acme" wort-aerator for the first time in anger, and that proved very successful.

All in all I got 23ltrs at 1.042 OG, up a little from the predicted 1.039, which meant my efficiency was 72% rather than the 66% I had assumed, I'm sure this is in part due to the Crisp Maris Otter that I was using for the first time, but also maybe the Target Hops helped here too.

So, the recipe:

Batch 28 Broughcliffe Best Bitter
Type: All Grain
Date: 20/09/2014
Batch Size: 23.00 L
Boil Time: 90 Mins

Amount Item Type % or IBU
3600.00 gm Pale Malt, Maris Otter (4.9 EBC) Grain 83.62 %
470.00 gm Wheat Malt, UK (3.5 EBC) Grain 10.92 %
200.00 gm Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (150.0 EBC) Grain 4.65 %
35.00 gm Black (Patent) Malt (1300 EBC) (1300.0 EBC) Grain 0.81 %
28.00 gm Target (Leaf) [9.70 %] (90 min) Hops 30.7 IBU
17.40 gm Goldings, East Kent 4.6 [4.60 %] (15 min) Hops 4.2 IBU
0.50 items Protofloc (Boil 15.0 min) Misc
7.00 gm Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash 60.0 min) Misc
1 Pkgs Windsor Yeast (Lallemand #-) Yeast-Ale

Est Original Gravity: 1.039 SG
Measured Original Gravity: 1.042 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.009 SG Measured Final Gravity: 1.012 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 3.82 % Actual Alcohol by Vol: 3.90 %
Bitterness: 34.8 IBU Calories: 392 cal/l
Est Color: 20.9 EBC Color:
Color
Mash was at 67C for 60 minutes, the temp in my mash tun was 65 after the hour.
I used Windsor because it doesn't strip out flavours like many more flocculant strains to, certainly seemed to work well last few times, but it does mean the beer takes a good while to clear.

Update 25/09/14: Gravity is down to 1.012, so this is a 3.9% beer as planned. Still very cloudy, but then again Windsor doesn't like flocculating so that is to be expected, taste wise its very good, lovely tangy bitterness that is then followed by a nice malt finish. Now, need to be patient for a couple more days just to make sure the yeast finishes off before chilling for a few days to encourage the yeast to drop out. I've never had to fine any of my beers so don't expect to with this one. 

Update 03/10/14: Gravity remains at 1.012, still very cloudy but that's Windsor for you. Tastes great, really clean and fresh. Dropped temperature down to 5 deg c, will keg most of this over the weekend, although as I have 23ltrs some will have to go into bottles.

Sunday 7 September 2014

Salopian Sentinel

Salopian make my favourite session beer, Shropshire Gold, it's a great beer both in the bottle and also on draft. They are also moving their brewer to within about 2 miles of where I live, so I am looking forwards to visiting the new place soon, scrounging some beer and maybe even some ingredients.



While they have been brewers of hop-forward beers for a fair few years now, these have still be very traditional English bitters and pale ales, however they have, like many English breweries, started a range of more aggressively hopped brews, clearly influenced by the trend to use US and New Zealand hops in more fruity, higher alcohol brews.

Today I picked up a few bottles of interesting beers from the Shrewsbury indoor market, Salopian's Sentinal was one of them. Packaged in a simple brown 330ml bottle, this is an 8.4% "double IPA" style beer, very much in the vein as Brewdog's Hardcore IPA and many many similarly styled beers from the US, however this is really a big British style traditional India Pale Ale.

The hop aroma is the first thing that you notice, Salopian have managed to capture more than more beers do in my experience, at a guess this is dry hopped with a traditional English hop variety like Goldings, it certainly doesn't smell or taste particularly citrussy which again would suggest UK or European hops.

It's also a bottle conditioned beer, which is in my opinion a massive plus, it will probably mean that the beer changes flavour over time slightly (although maybe not as much as I would like, more on that lately), again typical of traditional British IPAs rather than its US counterparts.

As you can see it's got a very nice hazy orange hue, it's almost impossible to guess the grain-bill but probably quite simple, at a guess just English Pale Malt.

Taste wise it is good, lots of resinous hop bitterness, some fruit and quite a lot of residual sweetness, it's not a sweet beer per se, but it's not fantastically dry or attenuated either. It's quite balanced but still a "big beer".

Personally I'm a little over this style, I don't know when to drink it really, I'm not really someone who sips beer and savours it, which this style really needs you to do, but there again I like complexity and good robust flavours, which it must be said this beer has in abundance. So it's hard to be critical, it does what it sets out to do perfectly.

I'd like to taste a beer like this, but one that has been aged with some brettanomyces to dry it out a bit more and thin it a little, changing the flavour over time, probably somewhat more like what an original IPA would have been like, particularly after a six month sea voyage to India.

Saturday 6 September 2014

Dogbolter - Strong English Ale

It would have been sometime in the late 80s that Simon and I began to frequent the Fitchet and Firkin pub in Northampton, this was part of the brewpub chain created by David Bruce in the early 80s, although had probably been sold to Midsummer Leisure by the time we went there.

The appeal was the frankly bizarre beer, at least to my young taste buds, weened on Foster Lager, namely Dogbolter (6%) and Earthstopper (8%).

Clearly it's going to be a short session on either of those beers, but we pretty much avoided the Earthstopper and normally managed three pints or so of Dogbolter before wobbling out of there.

The legend is that Dogbolter was a diluted Earthstopper, when David was distracted by a phone call while sparging the resulting wort ended up 15 gravity points lower, rather than pour it away David brewed up a batch and the result was many a happy hangover.

It's been over 20 years since I've tasted the beer, apparently the West Berkshire Brewery has relaunched it with David's blessing, I've not tried it yet, but I did find a recipe in Charlie Papazian's book, Microbrewed Adventures and have now managed to brew it.

Recipe: 27 Dogbolter
Style: Extra Special/Strong Bitter (English Pale Ale)
TYPE: All Grain

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 21.00 L      
Boil Size: 25.40 L
Estimated OG: 1.063 SG
Estimated Color: 23.2 EBC
Estimated IBU: 40.7 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75.00 %
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amount        Item                                      Type         % or IBU      
5000.00 gm    Pale Malt, Maris Otter (5.9 EBC)          Grain        88.46 %       
630.00 gm     Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (78.8 EBC)     Grain        11.15 %       
22.00 gm      Black (Patent) Malt (985.0 EBC)           Grain        0.39 %        
85.00 gm      Goldings, East Kent [4.10 %]  (60 min)    Hops         37.3 IBU      
15.50 gm      Goldings, East Kent [4.10 %]  (15 min)    Hops         3.4 IBU       
1.11 tsp      Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min)                Misc                       
6.00 gm       Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash 60.0 min)  Misc                       
1 Pkgs        Nottingham (Danstar #-)                   Yeast-Ale                  


Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Medium Body, Batch Sparge
Total Grain Weight: 5652.00 gm
----------------------------
Single Infusion, Medium Body, Batch Sparge
Step Time     Name               Description                         Step Temp     
90 min        Mash In            Add 14.13 L of water at 76.0 C      68.0 C        


Notes:
------
Used tap water treated with 16ml of CRS, added 6gm of gypsum to the boil, 
GW water calc suggests adding nearly twice that but that's all I Had.
Hops are getting on a bit so have used the calculator on 
http://brewerslog.appspot.com/HopAlphaCalc, which means adding a who 100g 
to the brew to get anywhere near the suggested IBUs of 48.