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.

Tasting Day: Peeterman Wit

Very poor attempt at photographing this beer.
Pours with a nice head and has good lacing but
overall the carbonation is just not high enough
for the style of beer.  Great flavor though!

I tasted this about 2.5 weeks ago.  I let it go a bit more since the carbonation was not that great.  I'm not sure if its going to carb up too much more so here are the notes on the beer:

Appearance:  It's a more golden than white.  It's cloudy, but not in the traditional sense where the beer looks white.

Smell:  It has a great nose on it.  Funky basement smells with a bit of lacto or brett.  Tiny tiny bit of oak but not much. It has a big funky citrus smell.  It was very reminiscent of the Jolly Pumpkin Calabaza Blanca that served as our inspiration for this batch.  The dregs from two 750 mL bottles probably helped that out.

Taste:  Surprisingly the taste is not too funky or sour as the nose might suggest. Again, this is similar to the Jolly Pumpkin we were inspired by.  The Jolly Pumpkin is has more funk in the nose and in the taste though.  Ours is a mini version of it.  Stronger smell and stronger taste.  The biggest taste in our beer is the huge citrus hits we got from the coriander. It was brewed with a modest amount that you see in typical witbier recipes.  We added the same amount from the boil to a "dry hop" in the secondary.  The extra coriander and orange peel really shine in this beer.

Mouthfeel:  This was the most disappointing thing in the beer.  It seems me and carbonation are just not getting along these days.  I'm hoping its because it got pretty cold early this fall (down into the teens in early November) and that my beers just need to move up to the main floor of the house.  I have put the rest up by the heater on the first floor hoping to get more of that bursting carbonation mouthfeel.  This beer has the mouth feel of a very light stout.  Think of it like a Bodingtons.

Overall:  Overall I think its a pretty darn good beer.  If the carbonation was higher I would be raving about it.  Let's see where it ends up in a few weeks up in the warmer rooms in my house.  I kind of like that it ended up very sessionable while having a funky nose.  It was a pleasant surprise.  I am also going to age two of them until the spring to see if the 5 year old yeast we used wakes up even more in the bottle.

Tasting Day: Pocahontas Pumpkin Pie Ale

I feel like this day was 4 years in the making.  I have made 3 pumpkin beers in the past.  All of them way below "decent"  The first one was just a spiced amber ale.  Lame.  Second one even worse. Bottle bombs.  Third one.  Worse yet. Infected.  So what do you have this year?  A real pumpkin beer!

Every year trying to brew this beer I learned something new.  I was finally able to put it all together and make a good pumpkin beer.  This beer was my take on the Pocahontas Pumpkin Pie ale from last years Zymurgy issue.

It's a pumpkin beer I can drink.  I don't really like pumpkin beer so this is a strong compliment.  The spice levels are just right.  Not overly spiced or under spiced.  The malty sweetness is ok.  It could be a tad sweeter to push it more into the "pie" flavors.  The carbonation is a bit high.  It would be great if it was smoother and lighter levels.  It might bring out the sweetness a bit more.

After the past 4 years I'll consider this beer a big accomplishment.  Now I can finally start to change and update the recipe to work better for my tastes.  Lowering the carbonation, using a more flocculant yeast and mashing a bit higher to keep some more residual sugars for the final beer will be step one.

Let fall officially begin!

Brew Day: Peeterman Wit

Yeast starter a few days after creating it.

Yesterday I brewed up a wit beer with my buddy from work.  The thing was that this wasnt any normal wit.  We decided to make our creation of the old Peeterman style of beer. 

It started when my friend texted me and said that he found his old sour starter.  They started to dump it out figuring it was bad because it was 5 years old!  As they started to dump the starter down the drain they smelled how great it was and decided to save the rest. I came in and said I would take the starter and try to wake the yeast back up.

My plan was pretty simple - take a good portion of the sour starter and mix it a very small amount of fresh Belgian yeast (White Labs 550).  About two days after making the starter I saw activity that it was fermenting something so I let it go and then stepped it up to a larger starter in prep for the brew day.  Each day the starter smelled different.  One day it would smell rancid and then the next it would be this wonderful Rodenbach smelling wort.  After stepping up to the larger size it started to smell like a slightly sour saison.  There were no real warning signs after a few days so we decided to go for it.


We couldn't figure out what type of beer to make.  I already have a sour red, stout and lambic going and didn't want to duplicate efforts.  We were looking for something unique to go with our new unique batch of yeast.

I recently saw the New Orleans episode of Brew Dogs where the brewed a beer they called a Peeterman.  The explanation was that the beer would be a dark soured wit.  Sounded awesome.  Only problem was the episode said the recipe was 50-50 mix of pilsner and wheat.  Where was the dark color coming from?

So naturally the next step was to search the internet.  I couldn't find too much on the internet other than Peeterman was one of the three original "white beers" of Belgium and that all three hada varying degree of sourness from the lactic acid that would of infected beer before modern sanitation practices.  I wanted to learn more so  I found that a brief section of the book "Brewing with Wheat" had some information.  There was no recipe but enough for me to determine that we should just brew a wit and add our soured WLP550 batch of yeast and see what we get.

The book did provide some insight into a modern day old-school wit.  That beer is Jolly Pumpkin Calabaza Blanca.  A funky and slightly tart wit.  We added the dregs of one of these beers to our final concoction of yeast for one last punch of funk.

Brew day went smooth and our blend of yeast are rapidly chewing through the sugars.  They were active within 12 hours which is pretty fast based on how most of my beers go.  We plan to drink it fresh because the book stated that these beers were typical consumed within two weeks before they went too far over to the sour side.

Depending on what flavors we get from the primary we may decide to add a bit more orange or coriander to freshen up the flavor while its in the secondary.  We will for sure be adding a bit of oak to replicate the old style of fermenting everything in barrels.  Updates will be posted as they happen.

Brew Day - Chocolate Milk Stout

Another day off from work and another brew day.

Today I brewed up the Chocolate Milk Stout that I will blend with the Pumpkin Ale I brewed this weekend.  In total I will have three beers.  This is the same idea I had last year but the hope is that this year all of the beers will turn out.  This was a relatively easy brew day.  45 minute mash in for a nice thick stout, simple 2 hop additions at 60 and 30 minutes and chilling the wort down to temp.

OG is coming in at 1.056 and hopefully this will ferment fast like the pumpkin is.  I will move this to the secondary when the primary fermentation seems complete and then add the cocoa nibs - the sterilized cocoa nibs.

Once this beer and the pumpkin are ready to bottle I will bottle 1 gallon of the chocolate straight, 3 gallons of the pumpkin straight and then blend the remaining.  I used the same yeast on both of these batches so that when I mix the two batches together there shouldnt be any more ramp up in fermentation.  I will let those mingle together for another week and then bottle that batch as the Chocolate Pumpkin Spiced Ale.

This idea was based around mixing a Younghs Chocolate Stout with Pumpking.  I'll check back in about 4-5 days to see how things are going.

9/3/14
Brewed.  Yeast pitched.

9/7/14 
Racked to secondary. Gravity reading 1.022.  Yeast still got some more work to do. Target is 1.016.

9/21/14
Bottled one gallon.  Remaining was mixed with Pumpkin Ale to create Chocolate Pumpkin Pie Ale. This batch will age for another 2 weeks and then be bottled.

Barrel Prep: Riesling Wine for Lambic Blends

Filling the barrel with Reisling wine at night

I finally got around to preparing and filling my second 20L wooden barrel.  This particular barrel is getting 20L worth of Riesling added.  This is going to sit in the barrel and hopefully saturate the staves and provide a nice fruity/vinous flavor to the Lambic-ish sours that I am making.

The wine is not a super complex one.  Its pretty smooth with some apple fruit flavors.  A bit drier than we expected but nothing a little sugar cant fix.

It has been 7 months since I brewed the Lambic-ish. 

Another 5 months and it should be ready for tasting and potentially move into its new home - this barrel.

Here's hoping all goes well.