Recipe modification and going back to least favorite beer

I have been taking off from brewing in July and concentration on drinking my own homebrews.




I had too many beers going on back then ...

It was hard for me to look after all 8 beers at the same time and I think I decreased the quality of the beer I brewed meantime as I couldn't be paying enough attention to each beer.


MASS PRODUCTION = LOWER QUALITY


It's kind of easy theory from economic course at university (ECON 101)




What I did was to tidy up my brewery  to

looks better now....




It's not only tidying up my brewery, I was up to in last few weeks.


I tried my Imperial Black IPA.


The conclusions to improve the IBIPA is:
- Imperial Black IPA isn't dark enough and needs more roasty flavour as well body. So, adding Black Barley or Roasted Barley is necessary.


This is the modified recipe

6.50 kg Pale Malt

0.60 kg Crystal Malt 40L

0.60 kg Crystal Malt 80L

0.20 kg Chocolate Malt

0.50 kg Roasted Barley

40 gram Pacific Gem  90min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  60min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  45min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  30min

30 gram NZ Cascade  10min

30 gram NZ Cascade  5min

50 gram NZ Cascade  1min

Increased the amount of dark malt and also more 1minute hop addition. I'm hoping the chocolate malt will help the roast flavour and the huge hop flavour get along with its sweet toffy malt character.

I also tried American Wheat Ale and Hoppy Wit.

I confess that Hoppy Wit was my least favourite beer I brewed this year so far. However, I tried from the  bottle today with a friend. He told me that his favourite was Hoppy Wit over American Wheat Ale saying that Wheat Ale was hoppy and good beer, but not interesting compare to Hoppy Wit. 

Actually Hoppy Wit was brewed because of accident that my 8 months old Hef yeast didn't start up after I pitched the yeast. Yeah, I was planning to brew Hopfen Weiss. 

As it's been popular to brew the beer with Belgian/French beer yeast, Saison yeast. 

There's Saison Sauvin from 8 Wired Brewing, which is IPA brewed with Saison yeast. The beer has Belgian yeast character and slightly sour.

My friend tasted similar sourness in my Hoppy Wit and suggested me that it may be possible to brew Wit IPA as well as Saison IPA. I agreed with his idea, but I have to change the hops around.

I thought it is very cool to go back to some beers you wouldn't pay attention to or wouldn't like (at least me) and seek out a new possibility. 

I'd say Imperial Black IPA and Hoppy Wit will be my next brews I must do. 

Whats brown and sticky.....?

.....my brown ale at the moment. That is to say I added oak chips to it.

Can't remember what commercial beer I had that had been aged on wood that made me go "man I wouldn't mind doing that myself" but I became fairly convinced that I would love it. I'm gonna say Firestone Walker DBA.

Rather than commit an entire batch to it though I split it in half. Half will be dry hopped with centennial, the other half untoasted american oak. Here is how I did it:

- I decided on 5gms of oak chips per litre of beer. Will this make it too oaky? Not oaky enough? I don't know. The packet (product was made with spirit making in mind) said 1 to 2gms per litre for a strong flavour. Reading over forums I came across people saying as much as 10gms per litre. I went with the medium and chose 5gms.

- I took the oak chips and boiled them in water for 10mins. Some forums said sanitising not necessary, others said boil them. So I boiled them.

- Once boiling had finished I put them in a stocking courtesy of my girlfriend (thanks Mel!) and also a decanter stopper for weight (couldn't find any marbles at home so Mum gave me a crystal decanter stopper/lid. um... okay. thanks mum). Reason for the weight was so the wood didn't just float on top and ultimately not give much flavour.

- Put the oak stocking in the secondary fermenter and added the beer on top. Will leave it on the oak chips for 2 weeks then bottle.

Will it be wonderfully oaky like I hope it would or too subtle to taste or so oaky its like gnawing on a log of wood? Time will tell.

Smoke Them if you've got 'Em

Intrigued by the history of London Porter - particularly brown malt (a traditional wood smoked malt) being a significant part of the grain bill, and after tasting our efforts having brewed a great session Porter, we decided to up the smoke!

Inspired by an Alasakan Smoked Porter http://www.alaskanbeer.com/smoked-porter.html and in the American tradition of making everything big, we upped the smoke, and everything else...

For a 40 litre batch...

Grist
7kg Golden Promise
2.5kg Rauch Malt (German Smoked Malt)
.8kg Munich Malt
.8kg Pale Crystal
.8kg Caramalt
.6kg Chocolate Malt
.4kg Black Patent Malt

Hops
75g EKG 60mins
35g Willamette 30mins
40g Willamette 15mins
25g EKG 0mins
25g Willamette 0mins

Single infusion Mash @ 67 degrees C

Pitched Wyeast 1272 @ 18 degrees C, 3 weeks Primary, no Secondary

Key Stats....

90 min boil
1.067 SG @ 70% efficiency
1.014 FG
7% ABV
39.4 SRM
35.6 IBU

Early tastings indicate serious Awesomeness and Smoke...

Recipe making for Imperial Black Saison

I posted the recipe for Imperial Black IPA previously and I was thinking what will happen if I brewed the same beer, but with a different yeast.

In the past I have done American Wheat Ale and Hoppy Wit from the same wort.

They turned out like this -

American Wheat Ale: huge hop aroma (Simcoe!), peach, clean bitterness and pine fruits taste and thin body, and the flavour doesn't last long. very easy drinking hoppy wheat ale

Hoppy Wit: smells yeasty and Simcoe hop is not getting along with Belgian Wit yeast character. Tastes soapy. not the best beer it could be. I think I should've done Hoppen Weiss using Hefeweissen yeast.

I learned that there is some case that the yeast and hop don't get along together.

However, I'm thinking to brew another crazy stuff.


Imperial Black Saison by pitching Saison yeast into the Imperial Black IPA wort.


For 20L batch

6.50 kg Pale Malt

1.00 kg Munich Malt

0.25 kg Crystal Malt 30L

0.60 kg Crystal Malt 60L

0.25 kg Black Barley

40 gram Pacific Gem  90min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  60min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  45min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  30min

30 gram NZ Cascade  10min

30 gram NZ Cascade  5min

10 gram NZ Cascade  1min

100 gram NZ Cascade Dry Hop for 7days

And Saison yeast

Well. I didn't create a new recipe.

"JUST PITCH DIFFERENT"

From my experience of drinking Saison, Saison make the beer dry and shows coriander or other spices on nose.

The mistake I have done for brewing Hoppy Wit may be "wrong hop used" "dry hopping"

However, Saison tends to have less yeastyness compare to other Belgian yeasts and I'm guessing it won't be a big problem to dry hop it. 

It could be cool to check this forum from Homebrew.com

Imperial Black IPA

Yeahp. Imperial, it is.

I bottled Imperial Black IPA.

Black IPA has been quite popular and I brewed, but something more. (more of this stuff brewed commercially in America though. i.e Southerntier Iniquity and Unita Dubhe Imperial Black IPA )

It wasn't done yet, but from what I tasted before bottling, the beer will be pretty good.

I can't forget to mention that the idea was from my friend Alec.

He was one of my friend who liked my homebrewed IPA and STARTED to brew the beer himself.

Seems like I'm doing my job to make the taxation department get less money....   inspiring and increasing the homebrewing population. 

Alec made the label for our collaborative brew and here is the front part of it.

(But not for sale as it's illegal.)

And also this is the recipe we brewed

6.50 kg Pale Malt

1.00 kg Munich Malt

0.25 kg Crystal Malt 30L

0.60 kg Crystal Malt 60L

0.25 kg Black Barley

40 gram Pacific Gem  90min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  60min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  45min

10 gram Nelson Sauvin  30min

30 gram NZ Cascade  10min

30 gram NZ Cascade  5min

10 gram NZ Cascade  1min

100 gram NZ Cascade Dry Hop for 7days

Taking the day off to brew

I've been struggling to find the time to get round to brewing as of late so did the logical thing and took a day off work to brew. And what I will be brewing is Tasty McDole's "Janets Brown". Recipe below adjusted to what I had available:


Batch Size (Gal): 6.00 Wort Size (Gal): 6.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 16.00
Anticipated OG: 1.066 Plato: 16.20
Anticipated SRM: 19.3
Anticipated IBU: 63.2
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70 %
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Grain/Extract/Sugar

% Amount Name Origin Potential SRM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
75.0 12.00 lbs. Pale Malt(2-row) America 1.036 2
7.8 1.25 lbs. Cara-Pils Dextrine Malt 1.033 2
7.8 1.25 lbs. Crystal 40L America 1.034 40
6.3 1.00 lbs. Wheat Malt America 1.038 2
3.1 0.50 lbs. Chocolate Malt America 1.029 350

Hops

Amount Name Form Alpha IBU Boil Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.00 oz. Northern Brewer Pellet 6.50 19.0 Mash H
1.25 oz. Northern Brewer Pellet 6.50 30.8 60 min.
1.00 oz. Northern Brewer Pellet 6.50 6.6 15 min.
1.50 oz. Cascade Pellet 6.00 6.8 10 min.
1.50 oz. Cascade Pellet 6.00 0.0 0 min.
2.00 oz. Centennial Pellet 9.00 0.0 Dry Hop

Yeast
-----
Fermentis US-05

Mash Schedule
-------------
Mashed in at 154*F or 68*C if you will.

As I am a BIAB brewer I've made some slight adjustments i.e took into account no sparging.

This is my first attempt on the electric water urn brew kettle my friends and I chipped in to buy and brew day is off to a bad start. With a beer this big you need a lot of grains and alot of water. This is probably one of the biggest problems with BIAB brewing. Let me explain.
The electric kettle I use is 40L and I want 23L in the fermenter. For this happen I need calculate how much water I need. So....
If i want 23L I need to add 23L to the kettle
The malt bill for is about 7.5kg. I assume for every kg of grain, I lose 1L of water + 7.5L
On the this kettle I can assume 2L lost to evaporation per hour. This is a 90min boil. +3L
So to start I need 23L + 7.5L + 3L which gives me 33.5L of water needed. Plenty of room in a 40L kettle for that.
Except i haven't eally taken into account the displacement of the 7.5kg og grains. Now 40L isn't quite big enough and I got a bit of an overflow.

Balls.

Still, rather be doing this than working.

Vanilla scotchale

Last night, I tasted the Scotch ale I brewed for my friend's birthday.

The beer had the final gravity of 1.020, and the original gravity was 1.070, which was 0.003 lower than the target gravity.

2 weeks after I pitched the yeast I put 2 pods of vanilla beans, and 1 cinnamon stick in the carboy. (yeah, actual vanilla beans and cinnamon stick)

The beer had a good colour, not very carbonated, big, but subtle vanilla aroma and tiny hint of cinnamon.

It was tasting good, but the body was kind of thin even though it finished at 1.020 (maybe I should have aimed higher for FG(Final Gravity) or just added more grain?) or the sweetness in the beer ganged up with vanilla and made me think it had thinner body in the beer. 

However, the peat flavour in this beer was definitely making the other think it was an interesting beer.

Here is the recipe for "Cole's Vanilla Scotch Ale"

5.50 kg Pale Malt

1.00 kg Wheat Malt

0.23 kg Crystal Malt 40L

0.23 kg Crystal Malt 60L

0.23 kg Crystal Malt 80L

0.23 kg Munich Malt

0.10 kg Chocolate Malt

0.10 kg Peat Smoked Malt

0.10 kg Mild Smoked Malt

0.10 kg Roasted Barley

30gram Fuggles hop 60min

30gram Fuggles hop 30min

30gram East Kent Goldings hop 10min

Extra ingredients:

2 Vanilla Pods

1 Cinnamon Stick

and Happy Birthday Cole!

Clarity

Left : hoppy wit

Right : hoppy wheat ale

I brewed hoppy wit and hoppy wheat ale last month using, 10kg grain 50% wheat malt 50% pilsner malt. I halved the batch into two and brewed twice that day.

After each brew I syphoned into 2 different fermenters to have exactly the same wort in them from 2 separate brews. As I pitched different yeast (saf-dry wit and us-05) they started fermenting, but what made me surprised was that, the each colour of the wort I could see from outside of the fermenting bucket were different. 

Usually colour difference of the beers are from how much/what kind of roasted malt you put into your brew and never heard that the yeast affect the colour.

Guess it was because the bucket wasn't clear container, I thought it was the colour difference I had in my mind. Each beer started from the same wort, hence the colour of the beers are the same and the difference in these beer was the clarity level. 

The hoppy wit in the fermenter looked darker in the fermenter as it didn't let the light go through as much as the another hoppy wheat ale, because ale yeast make the beer clearer than wit or hef yeast.

by the way this is the recipe for these wheat beer.

Amt	Name
2.5 kg	Pilsner Malt
2.5 kg	Wheat Malt
10.00 g	Centennial [10.00 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days
15.00 g	Simcoe [13.00 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days
20.00 g	Motueka [7.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min
15.00 g	Centennial [10.00 %] - Boil 45.0 min
10.00 g	Motueka [7.00 %] - Boil 30.0 min
10.00 g	Simcoe [13.00 %] - Boil 10.0 min
10.00 g	Simcoe [13.00 %] - Boil 5.0 min
10.00 g	Simcoe [13.00 %] - Boil 1.0 min