End of the Year Review

It's almost the end of 2014.  This marks my 4th year of homebrewing.  It has been a crazy ride up to this point.  The hombrewing I do determines the beers I try at bars and vice versa.  I have seen my tastes evolve and mature with each batch of homebrewed beer.  I no longer fear drinking an infected batch of beer - it might just be on its way to a perfect sour with the addition of a few more bugs.  How about a beer in the bottle just tastes to much like one flavor.  Degas the beer in the bottles and mix with another batch of beer and hope that you can balance it back out. 

Anyways – I want to put all of plans for 2015 on a piece of paper.  I somewhat did this last year with this post: http://vorpbrew.blogspot.com/2014/01/new-year-new-brews.html.

I hit most of the goals along with many more.  Here is 2014 in review:

1.  I learned the value of research.  Newly created beers all have their roots from something.  A little research on a style or an idea of a style created two memorable brews.  One was my wit.  I decided not to use any of the newer ideas of recipes and just stick to what was present back in the day.  I used the 50-50 split between malt and wheat.  Used a simple Belgian yeast and added some lacto that was most definitley present during the height of these beers.  It was not sweet.  It was light, bubbly and delicious.  My favorite beer this year.  Me and my friend also brewed a beer that would of been present in the 1600's - 1700's.  It was an Oat ale brewed with 75% oat, barley, English ale yeast and tansy.  The tansy was bought from a witch doctor online.  So we really felt like we went back in time. This beer sadly was infected to the point that it tasted like bandaids.  I'm sure the fact that the sterilizing benefits of hops were missing.
2. The Cab Sauv barrel is finally producing amazing beer.  The latest sour tasting I took from the barrel was amazing.  Complex, earthy, sour, tart, bready and even chocolate and vanilla notes are coming out of the Flanders inspired beers.  Now I just need to figure out how to carbonate them.  I have been failing miserably at this task.
3. The sour stout brewed in March of 2013 is also an amazing beer.  Again, I need to work on carbonation issues with this one.  I will also be starting to sour this in a barrel this year.  Most likely around March again.  A batch is being brewed on Friday of this week that will eventually be the first sour in the barrel.  Oh yeah, the barrel is a blackberry Pinot Noir.
4. My lambic style beer smells awesome.  But it seems during my first bottle test that I have the dreaded strain of bacteria that causes the beer to be sick.  We will see how that works since this beer is now aging in the Riesling barrel.
5. The more I brew with it the more I like Brett.  My favorite IPA I have made to date is the 100% Brett Trois IPA I brewed this year.  It was great.  I have plans for a rebrew this year.  More on that in the next section.
6. Finally - I brewed a pumpkin beer that made it out of the bottle.  This was a four year process.  I failed miserably each time prior.  This time. Success.  I probably wont brew it again and I have an update on what became of the Chocolate Pumpkin Stout.

Overall a great year.  Plenty of failures but plenty of success.  I learn so much more in those failures that I guess they really aren't failures. Hey, I know what not to do during the next batch.

So here are the plans for 2015:

1. Complete my barrel aging set up.  I have a Cab Sauv barrel for Red Sours, a Riesling barrel for my Lambic and soon will have my Blackberry Pinot Noir for my sour stouts.  This time next year I will hopefully be tasting beers from all three
2. Start my Gueze project.  One gallon from the Lambic barrel will be stored into a glass jar.  That one gallon will mix with this years version and I will go until I collect 3 gallons of lambic beer to make a traditional Gueze.  Look for the tasting notes in 2018 I guess!
3. Explore more wine and beer combos.  Yeah most of my wine beer combos are only with the use of the barrel but I intend to explore that some more.  I dont have room for more barrels so I will be stuck with oak chips.  Lame.  Here are those projects I have lined up.
4. A white wine/saison mixing.  This is not something new.  It's being done and it just sounds delicious and seems to be inline with my style.  So I am going to do it.
5. A wine/IPA combo.  I had 61 minute from Dogfish Head and was blown away by the combo.  Bitter wine notes don't seem to go together but when you can complement the flavor from each I imagine a great beer.  My initial thought is a Mango Australian Chardonnay with the 100% Brett IPA.  The mango juice flavor I got from the hops and the Brett should hopefully be amplified with this wine. 
6. Tripel.  Simple one here.  I just want to make a Tripel that is inspired by La Fin du Monde.
7. Bring back some dead beer styles:
1. Lichtenhainer - Think of a Berliner Weisse with smoked malt
2. Gose - This beer is already making a comeback.  The chapter in "Brewing with Wheat" that talks about Gose mentions that most commercial versions are not salty enough.  They provide a recipe and I plan to brew it like that.
3. Gratzer - A 100% smoked-wheat-hop-bomb of a beer.  A small beer at 1.028 OG that is made using 100% Smoked wheat for the grain bill.  It is then hopped up to 32 IBU's.  The quote from the "Brewing with Wheat" book states "The first time i opened one of these for some friends, the guys across the room smelled the smoke reek instantly."  I have to try it.
8. Figure out how to best bottle and carbonate my sours.  Once I figure this out I will be blending and mixing with fruits or bottling straight.  The fun then begins.

Well that's it.  A much more detailed list of what I did this year and what I plan to do next year.  Let's hope I can hit all of these goals.

Prost!

Brew Day: Rooster Red Sour

I have beer in my first barrel that is ready to be bottled.  It is a combo of two brews.  One of those brews which makes up over 60% of the beer in the barrel is now 25 months old. The other batch is roughly 13 months old. 

I use the solera method of mixing and souring beers.  I beleive that this is the first batch coming out of the barrel that will not need to be tweaked after leaving the barrel.  The first batch which was a "quick" sour that was made using the soured wort method and it came out with way too much oak flavor.  I think the barrel has finally stopped giving off the oak flavor and now the test bottles that have been coming out taste great.

The issue I am still having is how to properly carbonate these things.  On homebrewtalk.com you will read how some people always have carbonation problems.  Others say they never have problems.  I tried to bottle a few bottles of the red sour last month using two Brewers Best Carb drops. Nothing.  I then bought the new capsules from Northern Brewer that have a bit of yeast in the capsules to ensure carbonation.  After two weeks very light carbonation but I would still consider this unacceptable.  The review on those capsules is that it can take a bit longer than the two weeks they list on the bottle.  With how old this beer is the only live yeast are probably the small amount of wine yeast I added and whatever is in the capsule and of course the Brettanomyces.

I am have one bottle left in my test that I am going to age until the two month mark and see if that improves the carbonation some.  Maybe the Brett will eat up the sugars from the capsules and turn this into the beer I know it can be.

So–anyways–this post says "brew day" so why am I talking about this older beer.  Well, the goal is within three months, when I know how to properly bottle and carb the beer, I will take all but one or two gallons out of the barrel and then either bottle straight or mix with fruit before bottling.

Mockup of my labels.  I have three barrel that use
the solera method of mixing and creating beers.
This means I will have a steady stream of these
beers.  This is the Roosters Red label.  I saw my
cousins Grogtag lables and instantly knew
I needed them for my barrel beers.

To do this, I need to have another batch of beer ready to go into the barrel.  So I made another batch of my Roosters Red (see logo in masthead of the site).  It's a Flemish sour red ale.  Of course its mixed in my Cab Sauv barrel using the solera method.

The brew day started with a major hiccup.  I forgot to put hte false bottom in before mixing in my grains for the mash.  UGH.

I used a large grain mesh bag to line my hot liquor tank/cooler to dump the beer into. While I cleaned out the grain from my valve and tubing and then put in the false bottom and transferred everything over.

After that everything was great.  I was having issues hitting my target gravity lately so I was wondering if it was because I was not rinsing my grain as much as I used to when only using a false bottom.  When using the false bottom as my only straining/filter system I would mix the wort back through the grain many times over.  Once I started to use the false bottom with the large mesh bags inside my cooler I didn't mix it back through as much because the wort was running clear much much sooner.

I ignored the clear running wort and kept mixing it back through many times over.  I dont know if that cured what issues I was having but I hit my target OG right on the head.

This batch is actually going to be mixed with the first batch that was too oaky.  I cracked all the bottles open and pour them into a carboy to degas them. The sweetness from this batch mixed with the strong oak flavors will hopefully balance out and make a good mix.

This will go in with the other old beer once the main stages of primary fermentation are complete.  I feel comfortable enough now to age these beers long term in the barrel.

So hopefully in a year we will see how batch #3 does.  More on batch #2 once the carbonation issue is figured out.

Brew Day - Blackberry Pinot Noir

Some of the concentration cans we used.

Wait. What?  This is a wine. Not a beer.  Why is it here.  Well the easy answer is that this is the base for my sour stouts.  This Blackberry Pinot Noir is going to be the base for my new barrel.  This is a 6 gallon barrel that is made of Hungarian Oak.  Not as harsh as American but not as mellow as French.  It's said to have great vanilla flavors.  This just seems to be the answer for a sour stout in my book.

The barrel will hold this Blackberry Pinot Noir for a few month and then hold a batch of my Pitchfork Black stout (not the batch I just brewed - a new batch) before the sour stout goes into the barrel.  It could be around 6 months before this happens.  This is just step one.

I am actually excited to try this wine when it is done.    Something about making a recipe on your own with guidance from the internet vs just following directions from a kit.  It's more on you and your idea of what can be created vs matching the expectations of the kit.

I took about 4-6 ounces of the juice prior to the chemicals and whatnot being added to the must so I can use on my curent batch of sour stout.  This will be a good idea to see what flavors I can potentially come up with.

The must of the blackberries and Pinot
prior to adding the water

Here is how I plan to break down the 5 gallons.  This of course can change based on how things go – but this is the plan:

1 gallon will be bottled straight.
2 gallons will be bottled with the blackberry pinot noir juice and some oak.
The remaining 1.5-2 gallons will be saved and used for the first batch of the barrel sours.  This will help get the barrel beer get to the appropriate flavor profile quicker. (which I will brew over Xmas break) .

If the wine goes into the barell in late January or early February and the the Pitchfork Black goes in next for a few months, we can be looking at June/July before the new batch of sour stout would need to be put into the barrel.  This gives us 6 months to get the new sour started.  That 1.5-2 gallons of already soured beer should help speed that up.

At this time I hope the barrel is not pushing out as much oak flavor and that I can then let the beer age another 4-6 month in the barrel before I being the solera mixing method.

Fun times await.

Coming up next are bottle tastings for my carbonation tests.  I am using the new capsules from Northern Brewer to carbonate my sours.  They have a small amount of yeast and the appropriate amount of sugar in each capsule.  We will be tasting the follonwing beers on Christmas:

1. Straight Lambic - I used plain sugar tabs.  I want to see what happens on this one.
2. Sour Red - Hopefully the beer will carbonate and the beer we tasted at Thanksgiving will be a completely different beer.
3. Sour Stout - This will be the straight version.  This is the first carbonation test for this batch which was brewed in March of 2013.

For those interested in the wine recipe here is what we used

1. 96oz can of Vintners Blackberries
2. 3lb can of Blackberry Puree
3. 1 Can of Alexanders Pinot Noir concentrate
4. 11lbs 6oz of Sugar
5. Typcial wine chemicals etc per usual kits
6. RC212 yeast

Many tastings will be posted in the next month or so.
Stay tuned.

____________________

Update 12-15-14
Yeast added.

 























Update 12-18-14
Fermentation well underway

Brew Day: Pitchfork Black

Last Sunday I brewed up a batch of my Imperial Stout.  This is really one of the first times I have tried to duplicate a recipe.  I have made multiple versions of the sour red base beer but that never tastes the same based on conditions, yeast, bugs etc.

The last time I brewed this beer it was pretty awesome. It was thick, roasty, bitter and sweet.  It was described as being chewy because of how thick it was.  In the cold winter months this beer is just what the doctor ordered.

The beer is essentially an American Imperial Stout.  High on bittering units with all of the usual stout players.  This versions is inspired by the local brewery East End Brewing.  They make one of the best stouts - Blackstrap Stout.

My version uses 3oz's of blackstrap molasses, 3 oz or dark brown sugar and 12oz of heavy roast coffee.  The molasses and sugar are added with 5 minutes left in the boil and the coffee is added at flameout.  Centenial and Cascade hops add the bitterness (along with the molasses) and floral nose that can make it seem like its a black IPA.

Fermentation was slow to start.  The basement must be too cold.  (Time to look into a fermentation jacket that can warm up my beer as needed.  After one day in the basement I moved it up to the main floor of the house and it kicked into full gear.  It has been steadily bubbling away for the past 5 days.  I will rack to a secondary vessel for about a month and then bottle them up.

Fingers are crossed it turns out just as good as the last batch.

Notes:
12-7-14 - Brewed
12-8-14 - No signs of fermentation
12-9-14 - Moved to a warmer location
12-10-14 - Signs of fermentation
12-17-14 - Moved to secondary

Lambic-ish Update

Big day yesterday.  When I brewed the Peeterman Wit my friend stopped over to help brew.  He was the one how had the 5 year old sour yeast starter that we wanted to bring back to life.

The nasty but yet lovely pellicle on the lambic-ish

Anyways – while he was over I was showing him some of the sour projects I have going.  I pulled out my lambic-ish beer and cracked open the seal for the first time. This was probably right at the ten month mark.  OH BOY!

The smell was INTENSE. In a good way. The moment I smelled where it was I knew it was well on its way.  I made the decision then that it was time to move it to the barrel in the next month.  To do so I needed to do a few things:

1. Brew another lambic-ish beer to have it ready for mixing or to have it aged when it's time to pull this beer off the oak.
2. Get the wine out of the barrel and bottled

As for brewing another lambic-ish beer I decided to just brew the same recipe except  I pitched Roeselare yeast as the main yeast and then added a bit of the lambic trub yeast when moving to the barrel.  I'm looking for a variety of flavors and wasnt a good mix of bugs inoculated in the barrel.

I brewed this batch roughly 3 weeks prior to putting the old beer in the barrel.  I plan to age the lambic-ish for 3-4 months in the barrel before pulling it out.  I'm trying to control the oak flavor a bit more on this batch. I learned in the Flanders red that the oak flavor is super intense even after a wine has aged in the barrel.  This means that my new batch will be 4 months old at a minimum by the time my lambic-ish beer may need to come out of the barrel.  I will probably brew one more pale ale beer to use to blend out the oak in the first batch and just have that ready.

Getting the wine out of the barrel

My girlfiend and I actually wanted to drink this wine.  Riesling is her favorite wine.  That's why I used Riesling instead of Chardonay like Russian River and many other other American Breweries.  I also thought the flavor profile of the Riesling would go great with the lambic style beer. 

This was a very light wine.  It had very little flavor from the beginning.  Now after 3 months in the barrel it has picked up all the tannins and really dried out.  It left a "burny" taste as my girlfriend stated.  To get this wine back to a drinkable and more flavorful wine we had to mix.  I decided to mix it with an apple juice and sugar combo.  I took 3 cups of sugar and dissolved that into one frozen can of concentrate 100% apple juice.  We added the syrup little by little until we got to a "I-can-drink-that" flavor.  We ended up using the full mixture.  It must of been that dry.

Mixing the wine with apple syrup and taste testing

Once we had the mix I bottled the wine.

I then took one bottle worth and added directly back into the barrel and then the lambic-ish beer went on top of that.  A fresh does of Roeselare was added for more bug infection into the barrel and to help quickly eat through the new wine mixture with the added sugar.  I also wanted to note that now the lambic-ish beer smelled EXACTLY like commercial examples I have had.  Think Cantillion, Lindemans etc.

Finally, another bottle worth of wine was added to the new young lambic-ish.  Most of the sugar and wine flavor will probably get chewed up by the brett and other bugs but added complexity none the less.

The exciting part is that I bottled two 12 oz bottles of the lambic-ish beer straight.  I plan to crack these open at the holiday party at our house and at the family get together.  I just want to see what it taste like straight and then how it carbonates up.

Be sure to follow up after the holidays as I really really hope to have an awesome tasting day.