Munich Malt Experiment–Tasting

This week we finally had a proper taste of the Munich Malt Experiment beer. I have to confess we were a bit taken aback – not exactly what we expected.

Munich malt is used in many continental beers, and (hence the name) is common in beers from Munich such as Bock and Märzen.

Our brew was made with two thirds Munich malt and one third English pale ale malt. We fermented with a British ale yeast. So arguably it was a bit of an oddity, because we essentially used the grains of a German lager but fermented warm with a British ale yeast.

I was expecting a rich, sweet, malty beer. We got that. What I wasn’t expecting was a strong aroma and taste of orange! It’s like it has been aged in Southern Comfort barrels! I’ve scoured the Intertubes looking for any comments on the flavour of Munich malt, and they all talk about giving a deep, rich malty character. No mention of orange!

I suspect that given this un-seasonally warm spell we were drinking it much warmer than we should. I might pop the barrel in the fridge and we can try it again at lager temperature.

In other news, we put the Dunkelweizen into barrel this week. In Bavarian wheat beers you would expect a certain amount of fruity banana and cloves flavours – characteristic esters given off by the particular strain of yeast used. You have to use the right yeast, so we chose Wyeast 3056 Bavarian Wheat Blend. This should be used “when a subtle German style wheat beer is desired.” Compare this to Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan Weizen, which gives “banana esters and clove phenolics”.

We fermented the beer in the understairs cupboard (to keep the temperature a little lower), and towards the end of the fermentation every time I opened the cupboard I got this unmistakeable waft of banana. A quick taste when we put it in the barrel confirmed – no shortage of the banana flavours. High hopes for this one – should be interesting.

This has certainly been a very fruity week.

Brewing Dunkelweizen

Brewing the Dunkelweizen went well on Monday, although it did seem to take us quite a long time. We started at 4pm as we usually do, but it was after 10pm when we were finished and cleaned up. This was partly due to the 90 minute boil and partly, I think, due to the masses of different malts that each had to be weighed out.
When we brew an English ale we boil the wort for 60 minutes. This achieves the following:

• It extracts the bittering oils from the hops;
• It sterilises the wort – malt is covered in bacteria so if you didn’t sterilise it the yeast would have a hell of a fight on their hands;
• It develops some of the richer “cooked” flavours - the melanoidins from the Maillard reaction: same as when you cook food (imagine microwaving a steak rather than frying and you’ll get the idea).

So why a 90 minute boil for Dunkelweizen? Well the recipe uses some pilsner malt, which is very lightly kilned. These lightly kilned malts contain DMS (dimethyl sulfide), which can give the beer the taste and aroma of canned sweetcorn. You need a longer boil time to be sure to drive it all off, apparently.
And as for weighing out all those malts, well the photo speaks for itself:

Dunkelweizen needs to be fermented a little cooler than an English ale – ideally 17C. So it’s currently in the under stairs cupboard sputtering yeast all over the place!

Dunkelweizen

A few weeks ago Andy and I tried a Dunkelweizen – a Bavarian dark wheat beer. It was stunningly delicious! (Andy will disapprove of my hyperbole there: we were not actually stunned; maybe “maltily tasty” would be better?).

Anyway, exaggerations apart, it was a really good beer – a rich malty aroma and a warm toasty malt flavour with no bitterness. Really satisfying to drink. The sort of beer you could just accidentally drink the whole glass of before you realised it.

So… we’ve decided to set about making one on Monday. Obviously the malts are very different to British ales. It goes without saying that much of it is wheat malt (53%), followed by some munich and lager malt. There’s also some specialty malts to add a caramel sweetness: Special B, Crystal and Carafa I.

We’re not using our regular British Ale yeast for this brew; it requires a Bavarian Wheat yeast, WYeast 3056 to be precise. I made the starter for this last night:

What's in a name?

A couple of friends on Facebook said to me recently "Err, Cheshire Peaks? There aren't any peaks in Cheshire!".
My response was that Cheshire is not totally flat (they must have been thinking of Norfolk). There are a few notable peaks in Cheshire, although none of them are very high. But yes, we did decide to use the name Cheshire Peaks for a laugh. "Ah, right.," replied my friend Pete, "Irony."
There are some wonderful peaks in Cheshire, both out on the plain and in the foothills of the Peak District:

• Shutlingsloe
• Bosley Cloud
• Alderley Edge
• Beeston Castle
• White Nancy
• Shining Tor (highest point in Cheshire, 1834 ft)
• Beacon Hill (aka Frodsham Hill)
• Tegg's Nose
• Peckforton Hills
• Axe Edge
• Bosley Minn
• Sutton Common

Porter Tasting

After the outrageous cliff-hanger in my previous blog article, I’m going to discuss what the porter that we brewed in June tasted like.

We followed the Fuller’s London Porter recipe in Brew Your Own British Real Ale by Graham Wheeler. In this he describes the brew as a “rich and flavoursome dark ale based on an 1880s Fuller’s recipe…hints of coffee and chocolate…long complex finish…and liquorice maltiness”.

It tasted interested when it finished fermenting – certainly dark, complex and roasty. We then spent a whole evening bottling it in hopeful anticipation.

A week or so later we allowed ourselves to try a bottle – bitter disappointment. It had hardly any carbonation, and tasted flat and almost oily.

So I left the bottles on the shelf and forgot about them for a couple of months. Here we are in September and we opened a bottle this week to see if anything has changed. What a difference a couple of months maturing makes! Firstly, the beer had carbonated, so we got a 1cm or so of fizzy head. This didn’t last long, but at least it was there and the beer had a delicate carbonation that lifted the heavy flavours out of the glass.

The aroma smelt enticingly of cocoa.

As for the taste – as we expected, complex, malty, coffee and chocolate. And a deep long aftertaste. But also in there was a tartness which kind of helped cut through the chocolate and coffee flavours.

Bump, back down to earth: I wouldn’t call this the most amazing porter I’ve ever tasted, but given that we’d been so disappointed just after it had been bottled we were pretty pleased.

So, two learning points here:

1. Maturation is everything. Don’t write a beer off until it’s had plenty of time to mature.
2. Carbonation really lifts a beer. Without it (no matter how small) a beer is pretty unpalatable.

Porter

Back in June Andy and I made a porter which we planned to bottle and mature for the winter. We tasted a bottle yesterday to see how it is coming along.

Porter is an interesting beer style, most notable because it was the first beer style to be “designed” (rather than just sort of come about over time). Let me take you back to London in 1722. Back then it was very common for the beer drinking working masses to mix fresh and stale beer – I’m not sure whether this was because it was cheaper or because they preferred the taste. Perhaps the stale beer added a pleasing tart edge to the brew (but you wouldn’t choose to drink it neat).

Anyway, enter George Harwood of Shoreditch Brewery. He came up with the idea of engineering a beer for the London workers that tasted like the mixed beer but saved the publican the time by allowing him to only dispense from one cask. Porter was born, reputedly named after the London porters that drank it. It was a massive hit and very soon was being brewed on an industrial scale.

My favourite tale from the story of porter is of the 1814 disaster at Meux. Porter used to be aged in huge vats, some of the largest of which contained approaching a million gallons (yes, really). On 16th October 1814 a 22 foot high vat of porter ruptured. The jet of beer ruptured a further vat and beer flooded the surrounding five block neighbourhood. At least eight people were killed (including women and children) and dozens were injured – crushed by the crowds attempting the consume the fine beer before it soaked into the streets.

Anyway, enough of the history lesson. What’s modern porter like? Well there are actually various different styles of porter: brown porter, robust porter, Baltic porter. We decided to make a London Porter, which I think is in essence a brown porter.

What should it be like? Well obviously colour-wise it is deep deep brown or black, and you’d expect a cream coloured head. It will be fairly strong – 5% – 6% ABV. Taste-wise, you’d expect rich dark malty flavours, giving slightly roasty flavours as well as coffee and chocolate. This is not a session beer, it’s a complex, rich, bold brew with a long lasting aftertaste.

And what was our porter like? Well there’s a bit of a story there, and you’ll just have to wait until the next post, because this one is already long enough! :-)

Red Willow Meet the Brewer

I was lucky enough to catch the “Meet the Brewer” session at the Bollin Fee in Wilmslow last night (lucky because I happened to be in the Fee for some other reason as it happened). The session was with Toby from Red Willow Brewery in Macclesfield.
The Fee had a large number of Toby’s beers on: Wreckless, Mirthless, Ageless, Smokeless and Headless. In addition to trying the beers I was able to sit in on Toby’s informal presentation which was fascinating. He was passing round hops, handing out tastings and showing some of the other wacky things he puts in his beers, such as the chipotles (smoked Mexican chillies) that go in Smokeless (smoked porter).
I have to say I am hugely impressed with what Toby is doing – he only started brewing commercially last November and he has already won various awards (such as winning the beer competition at the Mark Addy in Manchester, for which Red Willow will now be the house beer for the next year). Not only does Toby produce top quality regular ales (try Wreckless or Mirthless and you’ll understand what I mean) but he’s also not afraid to try some pretty wild new things such as adding the chipotles, making stout with real oysters and making a Thai beer with no hops – just bittered with Thai spices such as tamarind and lemon grass.
One other thing that I got to try was Ageless (outrageously hoppy 7.2% Double IPA) from both the cask and bottle, side by side. This was fascinating, and not something you’d normally be able to do. Guess what? They were utterly different, like they weren’t the same beer. Not surprisingly the cask was far better – smoother, better aroma and much less gassy.
You can follow his blog here. Seek out his beers, you won’t be disappointed!