Brew Day: Tansy/Mugwort Oat Ale

Mike poses manning one of the two brew kettles

So the previous post was all about the research and how Mike and I decided on our recipe and how we were going to break the recipe into different batches to see how they taste.

Today is a quick recap of the brew day.

The biggest concern I had was how the malted oat was going to act.  I read that it could gum up the mash and I also read that it acts just like regular malt like 2-row and causes no issues.  So we really had no idea what to expect.

We mashed in and hit our target temp and let is sit for an hour.  During this time we made a tansy tea. We just took some of the sparge water and put it into a coffee much with a tea strainer filled with tansy.  To our surprise it was actually pretty sweet and not too bitter at all.  We knew it could change with the boiling temperatures it would be used at but we were still taken back by how sweet/herbal it really was.

After the hour, we batch sparged three times to get all of the wort that we would need for our two kettle system. One kettle would be mostly tansy, while the other would just get a small dose of tansy at the end.  We decided to add the small dose to the other batch once we smelled the brew during the boil.  It was an intoxicating smell.  It was somewhere between rosemary and thyme with a bit of a bitter smell.  Not strong though.  Smelling that, we had to add some tansy to the mostly hop forward beer we were creating with the oats.

After an hour boil we force chilled and then pitched the yeasts.  Here is the final batches and how the ended up.

1 gallon - Mostly fuggles hops with Tansy added with 15 minutes left. Fermenting with Burton Ale and Brett. Brux.

2 Gallons - Mostly fuggles hops with Tansy added with 15 minutes left.  Fermenting with American Farmhouse Ale yeast.

2 Gallons - Tansy with just a few pellets of fuggles.  Fermenting with Burton Ale yeast.

The Burton/Tansy combo was the slowest to start fermentation.  The American Farmhouse was the fastest and started within 24 hours.  The others started somewhere between 32 and 42 hours.

We will rack to secondary fermentation for another two weeks and then get them bottles once the gravity is stable.