Bottle Day: O.A.T. Ale

Another day - another batch of beer to bottle.  Today I bottled two batches of O.A.T.  This is the new name for the Oat And Tansy beer me and my friend Mike created.  There are two versions that were bottled.  One was with minimal hops (4 hop pellets) and a lot of tansy.  The other batch was regular hop dose with minimal tansy added during the aroma/flavor timing of the boil.

First up if the OAT with Burton ale yeast and minimal hops:
This is the beer that I have not been too fond of from the first tasting while transferring over to the secondary.  It had a weird taste then and it still does.  One would assume this is the tansy and the fact that it lacks the regular hop flavor/bitterness you expect in a beer.  To make things even more discouraging is there was a very small pellicle.  When brewing a clean beer like this, it is a bad sign to see one of these guys.  I tasted the beer and it still tasted similar to what I tasted two weeks ago so I decided to go for it.  There may have been a small leak in the seal on the lid that let air into the bucket or the lack of hops could have left the beer susceptible to unwanted microorganisms that hops can usually fight off.  If anything this beer is becoming more and more "authentic" because most brews back in the day were probably "contaminated".

Next up was the OAT with American Farmhouse yeast.  This was the most promising batch of the two when we racked the secondary two weeks ago and that still holds true.  This batch also had a pellicle but there is brett in the American Farmhouse yeast.  So after some aging I would expect to see this.  The flavor on this one is pretty unique.  Fruity up front, funky and weird on the back end with some support from the tansy.  This should be a fun beer to try out.

Both batches should be ready in two weeks.  Hopefully whatever is going on in the Burton Ale yeast batch is OK and those beers are still good to drink when its time to taste them. Fingers crossed until then.

Don't forget that we still have a batch aging on Brett Brux.  I will let this go in the primary for one more week and then transfer over to the secondary.  I plan to put a small amount of oak in it to replicate "barrel aging".  I will let it sit for about two months and start checking the gravity to see if the Brett has more work to do or not.
Check back for updates on that as things progress.

Bottle Day - Pliney the Elder IPA Clone

Today was bottle day for the Pliney the elder clone that I have brewed up.  I am interested in using carb tablets so today I tested the Brewers Best carb tablets.  I went with 4 tablets per bottle which should give me "medium" carbonation.  The photo you see on the left is the hop residue left over.  This was all from dry hoping and there is no yeast on the bottom.  That is one inch of hops sitting on the bottom with a good lacing on the carboy.  I strained the beer through a hop bag when going into the bucket to clear it out.

The smell is very nice right now.  As you can guess, its very hop forward but it has a sweetness in the smell.  Very fruity.

The taste matches the nose.  It's very fruity and sweet up front but it finished with a very bitter bite.  This should be an interesting beer.  Here's to hoping that the carb tablets work well and we have a great beer in two weeks.

Sour Stout: Quick Tasting Note

I am getting really bad at posting things on time.  Case in point - July 3rd my friend had a good ol' 'Merican picnic/party.  This was three weeks or so after I primed one 750mL bottle of sour stout.  This was a test for a few things.

1. I wanted to see how carbonation drops work with sour beers.  I have had issues with batch priming.  (After reading American Sour Beers I think I have some new things to try out)
2. I just wanted to taste the beer carbonated to see if it needed to age.  The reason I wanted to do this is because I am learning I am not too good at determining how a beer will taste once it is bottled.  I tasted a few sours before bottling and thought the sourness and funk where perfect. Only to find once they were bottled... they weren't nearly as good as I thought.

With these two things in mind I went ahead and brought the unknown (quality) of beer to the part to try out with a few friends who can tolerate soured beer.

It was dark so my tasting notes are pretty bad.  I couldn't see the beer.  Only smell, taste and mouthfeel.

Smell - It smells exactly like Tart of Darkness from the Bruery.  The beer I produced was based on the recipe they provided to MoreBeer.com.  So far so good.

Taste - Amazing.  FInally! I have been hard at work with my brewing time trying out "Quick-Sour" methods while my first batch of Red Sour and Dark Sour aged.  18 months later I am finally seeing some rewards!  This was a perfect beer.  It tasted very much like Tart of Darkness.  I can easily compare this beer to that great commercial example.  My one friend remarked after the party that he thought it was a commercial beer.  Impressed that I made something that good.  So much for friends having confidence in your brewing right!

Body - Perfect carbonation and body.  It looked like the bottle was going to be a gusher but it ended up being ok.  Couldnt be happier

Overall - By far - miles upon miles - the best sour beer I have made.  Now the only issue is to replicate this throughout a whole bottle day.  This quick process has inspired me to pull another 750 mL and bottle for a taster.  This time it is from the barrel that is currently holding 3 gallons of 18+month old Sour Red ale and 2 gallons of 4-month old Clean Red ale.  I will do a quick posting on that once its ready in about a week.

Follow Up: Tansy/Mugwort Oat Ale

I moved the Tansy/Mugwort ale to the secondary fermentor this week.  Not too much to report on other than the small tasting and aroma at this point.

The tansy heavy beer brewed with Burton yeast is pretty gnarly.  It has a super ripe fruit smell with this weird medicinal thing going on.  Not many hops were added (4-8 pellets) so this is mostly coming from the tansy.  There was no signs of infection or lacto/brett taking place so the tansy is really shining through on this one.  The taste was not super impressive but it left that weird sensation on the tongue that we experienced with while drinking the tea during the brew day.  At this point I feel the carbonation will provide some brightness that the beer is lacking and hopefully the flavors will meld together a bit more now that it is off the dead yeast from primary fermentation.

The other batch to move over to secondary fermentation was the American Farmhouse ale.

The American Farmhouse ale version is slightly funky with a bit of farmyard aromas going on.  It currently tastes like a summer saison with some extra grassy flavors along with that mysterious flavor that the tansy provides.  I have high hopes for this one.  It seems to be on a path that could provide a unique type of saison with that extra special herb providing some mystery as you drink it.

The color on all of the beers is a very pretty hay yellow.  Not nearly as cloudy as the mash was showing us.  It cleared up really nice for having 75% of the grains being some sort of oat.

The version we brewed with Brett Brux will sit for another week before getting a hydrometer reading.  If all seems well we will move that over to secondary and then just start testing for stability in the FG reading.

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.

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.