Failing coconut stout

Metallic, not enough coconut and smoky...

It's my 3rd batch of coconut porter. I call it coconut stout, because I add coconut to my dry stout. However, this time the beer was not cool. The beer had metallic flavour and also smoky character. I know why. That is why I'm so disappointed to my self. 

The smoky flavour was obviously coming from burnt coconut. I usually toast coconut to nice brown to sterilize and get rid of the oil in the dried coconut meat. When I did this I was in hurry and I burnt some of coconut to black. I dumped in the beer anyway, because I had to run to my work. I assumed, since the base beer is stout burnt flavour from toasted (burnt) coconut wouldn't be a trouble. Yeah, BIG MISTAKE. The most important ingredients in good beer making is CARING and PATIENT!

Metallic flavour usually comes from 

- rusty brewing gear

- aluminium

- poorly stored malt

- low fermenting temp

- iodophor (maybe not)

The most likely brew fault is fermentation temp. The second is rusty brewing gear. I am guessing the tap attached to boiling kettle is rusty, because I don't use the tap and don't clean it that often. I must, now!

It's cool learning from mistake. Screwed, but will never forget!

Brewing in Bangkok!! - bottling -

It's been a week after I came back to Wellington.

I ran a workshop and brewed Amber Ale while I was in Bangkok. I think it was quite a challenging experience I did in Thailand as well as eating ants egg and baby buffalo's eye ball.

I had fun on brew day meeting new people who's interested in getting into beer brewing or craft beers and cooking with Sam. The beer was fermenting in the room with the air-con on 24 7 to keep the room 20℃.
Before I head up to Chang Mai around 7th March, a homebrewer I met, Brian kindly offered me to store the fermenter in his new temperature controlled fridge.
The beer was fermenting nicely while I was eating exotic food in Chang Mai and up until 17th. On 12th March, just before I went to Singapore I dropped by Brian's and dry hopped the beer with 50gram Galaxy hops. The beer was smelling good, already by then.

After drinking good beers in Singapore, there was the last part of brew workshop, bottling session on Saturday, 17th March.

I was thinking about bottling the beers in the glass bottles and cap them using the bottling tool, but it will make the brewing difficulty higher for them. They cannot get the bottling tool in Bangkok unless they order from overseas. We used Coke bottle after all.

Collecting the empty bottles we can use

The beer smelt like pineapple as I expected from Galaxy hop

Sterilizing the bottles using iodophor

The final gravity was 1.011 and the beer was 5.4%

Managed to get some priming sugar

Stirred the priming sugar in the bottling bucket using a ruler......   a part of EPIC brewing BKK!

Thanks to the nothingness and improvisational brewing because of it

Bottling in Coke bottle

Wrapped these bottles with news paper afterwards to avoid the beer getting light strike

It was just brutal after all. I thank to NZ having many homebrew suppliers. I wish the people who came to the workshop good luck with their beer brewing. 

Brewing in Bangkok!!

It was a very hot day for sure. The sun was burning the asphalt and the heat was killing us even though we were brewing in the shade. Probably from the boiling the wort as well.

I ran beer brewing workshop for my friends here in my parents' house in Bangkok on 3rd March. I had no gears shipped from my house in Wellington except a refractometer and ordered every thing else from online shops in Australia and Singapore. Also bought bucket and few from the supermarket.

Talking about malt extract. I could not get malt for the workshop, so I had to use Cooper's Amber Malt Extract.

 Explained about the reasons for boiling the wort.

 From the top: 10g Aurora Hop - 60min, 20g Aurora Hop - 20min, 60g Aurora Hop - 10 min, 50g Galaxy Hop - 5min

Adding the 60min hop.

The original gravity was 1.055

Cooked the mussel from Sriracha. Few people asked Sam if we brought them from NZ. They were fresh and delicious.

Belgian Mussel with Hoegaarden Wheat and Beer Brats with Pilsner.

Chilling the wort in the ice water. Actually it took about 30-40min to chill the wort to 19℃.

Syphoning the wort into the fermenter I built 2 hours before the workshop.

Pitched Saf-yeast US-05 and the room is chilled to 20℃. 

The hard part of the brewing was building the fermenter. It was very hard to find the best one, but I probably could find better one than this ice cooler box from supermarket. I didn't have time as I landed here on 1st and ran this workshop on 3rd. I hope the beer is going to be good anyway. The bottling is on 17th. Need to through 40g of Galaxy for 3days dry hopping. Brewing in rush is quite stressful and probably there will be diacetyl in the beer as the temperature may be too high (I needed the thermometer sticker for the fermenter), but hopefully bottle conditioning longer will make it better.

January Homebrew Tasting night ~ Russian Imperial Stout

Last Sunday night, I hosted Wellington Hombrew Tasting in the cozy lounge of Hashigo Zake. It's been over 1 year since the first one.
We had about 10 people confirmed on internet, but as the weather was pretty bad we had 6 people came along. However, it was a quiet, but interesting and little bit exciting homebrewed beer tasting.

We tasted, Berliner Weiss 2.8%, Just Ale 4%, NZ Pilsner 6%, 2 NZ IPAs 6% and my Russian Imperial Stout 12%.

Actually, Berliner Weiss was the beer of the night we thought. It was very sessionable beer and had a great tart flavour, which almost reminds me some kind of citrus fruits like lemon, but not too much. It would be a great beer to drink under the sun, Good times!

Just Ale was quite interesting beer, didn't have much character to it, but the following NZ Pilsner was fantastic. The brewer brought Imperial Pilsner in the past. It was 8% fruity Pilsner. It was easy to drink. Surely that guy know how to brew Pilsner!

Both NZ IPA were nice, one of two was actually his first 'Contract Hombrew'. And another was 'Contract Homebrewed' at my place.

We had my Russian Imperial Stout at the end. I mentioned them that it was very young. I just bottled a day before Christmas eve. As I expected it smelled alcoholic and some people didn't enjoy the aroma that much, but what saved me was that they liked the taste. Cool!

They agreed on me bringing the same beer in the next homebrew tasting to see how it will mature. I actually might save it for NHC 2012 in October. Stronger beer lasts long.

Here's the recipe of Russian Imperial Stout I brewed.

8.00 kg	Pale Malt, Maris Otter (5.9 EBC)	Grain	1	62.5 %
1.00 kg	Caramel/Crystal Malt - 80L (157.6 EBC)	Grain	2	7.8 %
1.00 kg	Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (236.4 EBC)	Grain	3	7.8 %
0.50 kg	Carafa II (811.6 EBC)	Grain	5	3.9 %
0.50 kg	Black Barley (Stout) (985.0 EBC)	Grain	4	3.9 %
0.10 kg	Peat Smoked Malt (5.5 EBC)	Grain	7	0.8 %
0.20 kg	Smoked Malt (17.7 EBC)	Grain	6	1.6 %
50.00 g	Pacific Gem [15.00 %] - Boil 100.0 min	Hop	9	66.6 IBUs
30.00 g	Pacific Gem [15.00 %] - Boil 10.0 min	Hop	12	13.4 IBUs
20.00 g	Pacific Gem [15.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min	Hop	10	24.7 IBUs
50.00 g	Target [11.00 %] - Boil 10.0 min	Hop	11	16.4 IBUs
40.00 g	Target [11.00 %] - Dry Hop 7.0 Days	Hop	13	0.0 IBUs
1.50 kg	Invert Sugar (0.0 EBC)	Sugar	8	11.7 %'

And this is the learning from the brew day.
It was almost twice the usual amount of grain I use for brewing and I was checking the gravity as I was sparging the mash. It was shocking. Even though I had so much grain, the pre-boil gravity was 1.054. I remembered a guy who's been homebrewing for long time and know us beer-guru in Wellington, Kieran from Regional Wines and Spirits talking about over night mash for his Barley-wine. I soon posted on Facebook bitching about my low gravity from 11.3kg grain and said I should have done the over night mashing. A minutes after Kieran, Joe Wood from Liberty Brewery and Chris Poel, head brewer of Baird Brewery in Japan started commenting on my post!! Seems like I have few friends in high places.
From their over 30 comments I found out the following.
- brew efficiency drops significantly if I use more grain than usual, because more grain in the same shape mash-tun means thicker filter
- adding sugar to boost up the ABV is fine as long as I get enough flavour from the malt

That is why there is 1.5kg sugar included in the recipe above.

I still find that brew day was interesting, exciting and funny me getting worried so much about the low-gravity wort and professional brewers started helping me through. Facebook nailed!

New thoughts

I had awesome time up in Tauranga, Kawerau and Auckland over Christmas time.

I caught up with friends in Tauranga and then drove down to Kawerau to visit Mata brewery, where I will be contract brewing at next year.

In Auckland I went to Galbraith brew pub as it is a part of my routine when I visit Auckland.

It was pretty cool to see few new beer bars around Auckland as well.

Craft beer scene is getting bigger, but not only in Wellington and all over in New Zealand.
I hope this will encourage more people to start home brewing.




Recently, I received the prize from NHC.

This is 30kg sack of Pilsner Malt.

My gold medal winning wheat ale was chosen as runner up prize in Hybrid Beer section.

30kg malt is actually a lot. What shall I brew? I guess brew wheat beer?
However I was not keen for buying more malt as I got quite much now.

I came up with an idea while I was at Mata brewery thinking how I can brew good beer cheaper. Yes. It sounds like cheating, but imagine you can brew a great pale ale by spending $10 less for your 20L batch. Wouldn't that be great?
The counter argument for brewing good pale ale with pilsner malt is that, the malt won't give good body to the beer. It is true, but what if we can avoid this issue with pilsner malt?
When homebrewers want to achieve more flavour and body in their beer, they often raise the mash temperture to around 69℃ and put in more caramel malt.
I wanted to achieve this by having 70℃ mash temp and using only pilsner malt with out caramel malt.

When I was brewing Imperial Stout last time I got advice from few brewers saying that I had too much caramel malt in the grain recipe. Their point was that if you boil the beer for 90 minutes there will be enough caramelisation in the wort instead of using that much caramel malt.

Using this idea I thought I can brew good pale ale with pilsner malt only, high mash temperture and long boil. (could be even more than 90min)

I will come back to this after I brewed this beer.

Coconut Rough Stout

I've been enjoying adding extra ingredients to my homebrew.

I have used, coffee, strawberry, cacao nib, vanilla, cinnamon and crisps. (!?)

I brewed a stout with one of my favourite Misc ingredient, coconut.

I'm not actually the first one to try coconut in the beer. There are some commercial example out there.
Maui Brewing Coconut Porter from Hawaii is a popular one and 2009 NZ national homebrew competirion (NHC) winning beer was coconut porter, too.

I tried the NHC 09' winning homebrew - brewed commercially at Hallertau in Auckland and fell in love with the beer for couple weeks. (Yes, only few weeks. I like mine better now)

My opinion was that the beer was too sweet and I applied to dry stout for the first time last year. It worked quite well. I modified the recipe and brewed again couple months ago and gave some of them to my friends.

Coconut Rough Stout tasting 1


Coconut Rough Stout tasting 2



The beer was getting some good compliments, but Greig picked up "green apple" in the beer, which is a fault and it is due to the stressed yeast. I remember that I pitched the dry yeast straight into the fermenter without hydrating them nor making the starter. Greig said that using the dry yeast without hydrating them kills the half of the yeast I pitch.

The failure of the brew apart from the one Greig picked is that the beer was 'wet' and 'sweet'. I was supposed to make it dry, but the beer came out as coconut caramel cream beer. Right. It is not what I aimed and it is far way from what I brewed last year. The reason I can think of is that I left the coconut in the fermenter too long.
I was supposed to bottle after a week I threw the toasted coconut in, but I was way too busy with my work and other stuff. (excuse? yes it is.)

Here is the recipe for the beer (20L batch)





 3.00 kg Pale Malt, Maris Otter  
 1.00 kg Barley, Flaked 
 0.45 kg Black Barley 
 0.25 kg Oats, Flaked 


 20.00 g Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] - Boil 10.0 min
 20.00 g Target [11.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min 


 50.00 g cacao nibs (Boil 10.0 mins) Flavor 7 - 
200.00g dry coconut meat (Boil 10.0min)


200.00g dry coconut meat (dry hop 7 days)


Add oat to the recipe this time to give the some texture, but I think it wasn't a good idea
Probably roasted barley could be added to gain the 'dry' impression when its consumed.
I should have kept the grain recipe more simple.

Forgetting to measure the final gravity

Getting the statistic about the beer that you brewed is important for the serious homebrewing, but it may be forgotten by some destruction sometimes.

I bottled my hoppy wheat ale and hoppy wit today.

I forgot to measure the final gravity, but it was too late as I already put the priming sugar into the beer in the bottling bucket.

However, I needed to find the gravity of the beer after fermentation to find out the ABV.

Here is the answer I came up with by going back to the high school chemistry experiment.

The difference of the boiling point between different types of fluid.

Boiling point of Ethanol is 78℃, hence the Ethanol contained beverage, Beer has lower boiling point than the pure water.

Here is the graph I referred to find out the ratio of the ethanol in the beer after it boiled at 95℃.

This is really helpful, but not as accurate as using the gravity before and after fermentation.