Research and Recipe Build: 1670 Tansy/Mugwort Oat Ale

Close of of the Tansy flower used to bitter this recipe.

So this is something new for my blog.  I wanted to capture the research process that goes into some of these beers since they take weeks to complete and finalize. Everything from researching similar homebrew recipes to reading pages and pages on wiki.

This particular beer has a great back story.  Typically my recipe builds go something like this:

1. Taste a beer.
2. Say "Wow this is good. Wonder if I could brew something similiar
3. Look for similar styled recipes online and then recreate based on my preference.

This Tansy/Mugwort Oat ale is a completely different path.  It looks something more like this:

1. Friend traces his roots back to Walsall, England in 1671. That's in the West Midlands.
2. Friend reaches out to local homebrew club in Walsall, England and asks them if they would know of a "house beer" recipe that would of been brewed in Walsall during the 1670's.
3. The homebrew club then reaches out to a beer historian who then contacts my friend and provides an oat ale recipe brewed with tansy - also known as mugwort.
4. Friend brings the recipe and idea into work and we start the process of building our version of the recipe.

Here is where I enter the picture.  My friend Mike is an extract brewer and this particular beer can not be made with extract.  That is because it has a very high proportion of oats.  Since I have been doing all grain brewing I was able to help build and finalize the recipe based on my set up and equipment.

Grain Bill:
At first glance the recipe seems near impossible.  Its a simple recipe.  75% oats and 25% pilsner malt brewed with Tansy instead of hops.  I initially thought there is no way to brew a 75% oat beer and not have it take all day due to a stuck sparge. In my mind I am thinking that the oats would all be flaked oats. This is because I did not know about malted oats.  I never knew these existed.  This is where the door opened and I was able to find some similar homebrew recipes that used malted oat in higher concentrations that you would typically use - for say a stout.

After some reading it seemed that you can use malted oats just as you would pilsner malt.  Some even said, since the husks are bigger on the malted oats it provides a good filtration for the mash and sparge.

After getting comfortable with the idea of malted oats we decided on the following recipe:

70% malted oats
5% flaked oats
25% marris otter pilsner malt

Illustration of Tansy plant.

Herb/Hops:
We knew our beer was going to have the tansy flower used in place of hops in at least a portion of our beer.  We also knew we were going to split the batch and test some different yeast strains and herb vs hops.  So the biggest question was how much tansy do we add in our batch.  This required a lot of reading on the internet to determine what is a safe level to use.  Tansy can be toxic in higher concentration.  Just check out the wiki page and all of the uses or home remedies it has been associated with:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tansy

Two of my favorites are - it "has has been prescribed by herbalists to expel worms" from the digestive system and during the "middle ages and later, high doses were used to induce abortions."

Nothing to mess around with so we needed to make sure we were not using it in high enough concentration to cause any issues.  We found with doctor websites that had tansy tea and herb shops that sold tansy teas for its "medicinal" benefits.  After some back and forth Mike landed on 0.5 ounces per 5 gallons.  This is where Mike had some back and forth with the folks from England and we got the amount "approved" by Dr. Ray.

Now we just had to source it.  Strangely enough we bought it from an online witch doctor type of site.

Yeast:
Our final step was to determine the yeast. This was one of the more simple steps.  We decided on three different yeast combinations.  Here is a break down with the reason why we selected it.

1. Burton Ale Yeast - Simple.  Burton Ale is from Burton upon Trent England.  Google maps tells us its a 40 minute car ride from Burton to Wassail.  After doing this same task for all of hte English yeast strains we found this to be the closets.  This is of course using very basic information provided and Google maps alone.
2. Brettanomyces Bruxellensis - This was another easy one for me.  I love using Brett.  I remember reading in the Wild Brews book that they first "discovered" this strain of Brett on the inside of barrels in England.  This is a yeast strain that lives in the wood of the barrels.  We are guessing that barrels were used in 1660 to store beer.  It made sense to us to try one of our batches with Brett and hope to get an authentic oat ale from the 1660's.  It will also have a small amount of Burton to help fermentation along quicker.
3. American Farmhouse - Oats.  Lots of oats.  This says farm to us.  I also read on another blog that the flavor of a high oat beer is very grassy or barn-yard like.  To me this screams farmhouse/saison.  We both wanted to try this yeast on other projects but never got around to it so this was our chance.

So that's it.  This is how we got to our recipe and why we selected what we selected.  This is by no means scientific.  We are making decisions based solely on the information we could find online and with the help of our new friends across the pond. The beauty of this beer is that we have never tasted a commercial version of an oat ale with tansy.  So in reality, there were no rules. When you don't have rules or expectations it can be a very exciting journey.  - OK so there was one rule.  We needed to keep the tansy levels safe.

 Special Thanks:

This beer could not of happened without the help from our friends from across the pond:

The organization we reached out to is the Midlands Craft Brewers
Dr. Ray Carson and Alan Gayton were the contacts at this organization.

Clive La Pesee is the name of the author and historian who Dr. Ray Carson and Alan Gayton directed us to.  He helped us put together the historical recipe. His website  has historical brewing books to buy and also free to download.  Really interesting stuff.  Go check it out.

Finally, the tansy came from The Iron Cauldron on Etsy. . Maintained by a nice lady named "Raven".

A brew day posting will be put up shortly... Until then - cheers.

Brew Update - Peach Berliener Weiss

After two weeks of primary fermentation with Brett Trois and Belgian Golden Yeast my Berliener Weiss has move over to the secondary.  I added 4 bags of peaches (12oz) to the 3 gallons of brew.  I hope to get a nice 2-2.5 gallons of a great summer weiss beer. 

I tasted the beer as i took the hydrometer reading and it had a slight acidic bite.  It was very mild and hopefully the sweetness from the peaches will meld wit lactic sour to give me something similar to Dog Fish Peche.

It already a very dry beer at 1.008.  Maybe the secondary fermentation with the fruit can pull it down another notch or two with the Brett Trois still lingering around in the secondary.  I plan to age on the peaches for one week and then bottle and serve ASAP.

Tasting Day: 100% Brett IPA

I am finally getting around to the tasting notes for my 100% Brett IPA that was essentially the recipe posted over at Mad Fermentationist.

I tasted this when it was very young - two weeks in the bottle.  At that time it was super cloudy/dirty.  The flavor was all over the place and it was not the beer I expected.  The beer got great reviews from Mike over at Mad Fermentationist and I was expecting a bunch more. 

So when a beer does not taste like you expect the best thing to do is wait.  I put two bottles in my fridge.  I wanted to lager them with the hop that the yeast would settle along with the massive amounts of hop particles still floating around.

Two weeks of being in the fridge have made a HUGE improvement.  This beer is now one of my favorite - if not the favorite- that I have ever brewed.  The nose, the depth of the flavor, the body - everything is where I wanted it.

Appearance:  Bright sunshine yellow.  Pretty beer.  pours with a two finger head that dissipates once you take a sip and break the seal of the foam.  This then leaves a sticky hop lacing after each pull.

Smell:  It smells like hops and juice.  Specifically mango, pineapple and citrus with a hit of pine-tree earthiness.  As the beer warms you start to realize something is different with it.  The dank basement aroma starts to show up just as you finish the glass to let you know this was brewed with Brett.  Its in there but it shows up late to the party and adds another level of the aroma.

Mouthfeel:  Very light and refreshing.  Dry. Very dry finish for an IPA.  The hops and yeast combo fool you and you dont notice how dry it is until the end.

Taste:  I find it to be perfectly balanced.  Not too hoppy but very assertive. Citrus, tropical fruits are everywhere.  There is a sweetness to help balance it all together.  Is it the malt?  I dont know.  I think it could be the tropical yeast flavors that the Brett Trois is providing.  The very first hit on the tounge is almost like mango juice that quickly gets taken over by the citurs and flower power of the hops.  It ends with a dry bite that I found unique.  Again - I think this is the Brett letting you know something is different

Overall: Fantastic use of 100% Brett fermentation.  I may never brew an IPA with out Brett Trois.  The combination is phenomenal.  Only thing I would change is how much I brew.  I only brewed a 2.5 gallon batch and that turned out to be a dumb idea.  After two weeks of bottle fermentation I would add all of hte beers to the fridge to let them clear and settle out.  After another two weeks you would be well rewarded.

Brew Day - Berliner Weiss

I decided this summer I was going to try a Berliner Weiss.  I was inspired by Dogfish Head Peche.  Fifty-fifty split on the wheat and the Belgian Pilsner with a bit of Golden candi syrup for extra depth.  I guess it is more of an Imperial Berliner Weiss since it should come in around 5.4%.

For this batch I used the sour wort procedure that I used in some of my other quick sour beers.  This process didnt work out for those beers because it lacked the depth those types of beers usually have.  For a Berliner Weiss you are just looking for a nice clean acidity from the lacto bacteria that should remind you of lemonade with no hop flavor.  I am hoping that the golden candi syrup will add a bit more flavor to make it a slightly more complex Berliner Weiss.  Flavors that can be associated with that syrup are fresh plums and raisins along with white wine grapes.  

Here is step by step of what I have done to this point:

1. Mashed in all of my malts which was a 50-50 split of Belgian Pilsner and German Wheat
2. Once the mash was completed and I completed the batch sparge I brought the wort to a boil to kill any bacteria present.
3. I chilled the wort down to 110 degrees
4. Once at the proper temperature I transferred it over to an insulated cooler.  The cooler will keep the wort warm for the next few days.
5. I added White Labs lacto culture to the wort and sealed the cooler
6. 60 hours later I moved the wort back into a boil kettle and boiled for 75 minutes.  I added a small amount of Hallertauer hops 15 minutes into the boil for a 60 minute hop addition.
7. The last half hour of the boil I added the 5 Golden Candi Syrup.
8. Once the beer was cooled to pitching temperature I added White Labs Belgian Golden yeast
9. Two days later I added Brett Brex Trois.
10. I will age the beer in the primary for about 2 weeks.  Rack to a secondary to clear it out some and then bottle.

As you can see in the outline its a Berliner Weiss with Belgian twist.  Again this is all to see if I can get a bit more depth while still being a nice clean, slightly sour summer beer.  We will see where it ends up in a few weeks.

More to come...

Sour Stout - Update

It has been about 14 months since I made my stout that I soured with the mixed culture from Wyeast.  It has been sitting in the plastic bucket this whole time.  I checked on it around the 11 month mark and it didn't even have a pellicle  yet.  I figured I would let it go a few more months.  What a difference those months made.

Large grainy looking pellicle along with a huge dank aroma.  To be honest, I was afraid it went too far at first.  The smell was pretty bad.  Once i punctured the pellicle to draw out a sample though I realized all was right.  The smell was perfect and the taste was mouth-puckering tart.

I took two carb tablets and put enough into a champagne bottle to see how it carbs up over the next three weeks.  If all goes well I plan to bottle by the end of June or early July.  The idea is to have these ready for consumption late August or early fall.

Super excited to see how this one turns.  I will also know if I need to brew a new batch and have it ready in another 16 months.

Check back later for the tasting day.