Colchester’s Bane

We had a very successful brewday yesterday – brewing a dark winter bitter that we plan to call Shutlingsloe.

What’s it made of? Well our usual maris otter pale ale malt, coupled with a decent helping of crystal malt (for sweetness and richness), chocolate malt and Carafa Special I (for that dark rich toasty malty flavour).

And the hops? Well we’re trying something new here: Boudicea hops. These are a less well-known English variety, said to have a light floral character. Andy quipped that we should therefore be calling the beer Colchester’s Bane.

In other news… we also labelled our Norton Priory Abbey Ale. This is a bit of a labour of love because every label has to be shaped by hand. I’ve tried to persuade Andy that we should have a rectangular label like everyone else, but he’s having none of it. Oh well, it gave us something to do whilst the wort chilled.

We’ve made Rodenbach

Credit where credit’s due – Andy’s got a good taste-memory. I said back in my post about infection that Andy had commented that our “Belgian Sour” (as we are now forced to call it) tasted like Rodenbach Classic (Red). Well last night Andy turned up with a bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru from the Bottle Stop in Bramhall so we could do a side-by-side tasting. (As an side: if you like beer and you live in south Manchester and you haven’t been to the Bottle Stop, then why not!? It has an amazing selection of British and foreign ales).

Anyway, back to the story: the Grand Cru is not exactly the same beer as the Rodenbach Classic, but b*gger me if Andy wasn’t right! Our Belgian Sour is really very similar in aroma and taste. The Grand Cru is understandably more malty and a little bit woody, but the basic elements of the sour flavour are exactly the same.

So I have no idea how we managed to make what we did, but there you go – justification that it isn’t a complete disaster. We both think it will be better served chilled, but we need to finish the Bohemian Wrenbury before there is fridge space.

As another aside (in true Ronnie Corbett style), we also tasted a tricky-to-get American beer called Stone’s Arrogant Bastard. I’ve never tasted such a full on, aggressive beer! It had everything in there – smoke, wood, peat, malt, bitterness, resinous. There were flavours in there I’d just never tasted in beer before. It’s not exactly what you’d call a session beer (in fact I was very happy to have shared a bottle rather than drink a whole one to myself) but interesting nonetheless. I’m not sure we’ll be trying to brew that one however!

Experiences of brewing with rye

We had a successful brew day yesterday, making our Rye Beer Experiment.

We used 30% rye malt and 70% barley malt – from what I’ve read this is a fairly high proportion, but we wanted to get a feel for what it tastes like so risked pushing it.

So what did we learn? Well the first thing I was warned about was getting a stuck mash. This is where the grain in the mash tun becomes to gloopy to allow the sparge water to pass through properly. Rye has much less husk than barley, which means it is prone to becoming a big sticky mess that won’t allow water through it (think porridge). However, despite the warnings our mash/sparge ran completely normally.

Then it comes to the boil. It seems that rye is much higher in protein than barley, and this really showed itself during the boil. Proteins precipitate out during the boil process: an effect known as the hot break. Last night’s hot break was huge -  we had great big clumps of stuff the size of cornflakes floating around in the boil, as you can see below.

Andy skimmed quite a lot of the scum off the boil too, as you can see below.

Finally, getting the wort out of the boiler into the fermenter was something of a challenge. My new boiler has a filter at the bottom, as shown below.

I don’t have a photo of it, but the filter mesh was utterly clogged up with break material (the precipitated proteins). I had to sanitise a little brush and scrub at the mesh to help the wort to get through. (Sorry, no photo of that – too busy with it!).

So all in all, it doesn’t bode well for a clear beer. Those proteins are bound to leave a lot of haze. But hopefully it will be an interesting (and tasty!) beer nonetheless.

Rye Beer Experiment

You can make beer out of all sorts of grains. Obviously the most common is barley. Wheat is also a common addition to beer. But many other grains can be used too: rye, spelt, oats, rice, sorghum, millet.

So I thought we’d better try some to see what they taste like. The most obvious one after wheat is rye. My interest in rye was piqued following a conversation with Toby at Red Willow on Twitter, where he said that he uses rye in his excellent Sleepless American Amber Ale.

So that’s the recipe for Monday’s brewday: a rye experiment. It will be a fairly standard bitter in most respects, except that 30% of the pale ale malt will be replace with rye malt. (This is fairly brave – most people seem to recommend about 20% maximum, but we want to really get a sense of what it tastes like).

So what are we expecting it to taste like? I understand that rye gives the beer an interesting grainy, slightly spicy flavour with a dry mouthfeel. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Infection

This is not a marketing blog. We aren’t trying to sell anything. (If we did, we’d have the Duty Man chasing us). So we’ve got no reason to keep all the articles all positive and “we made this lovely beer then we made that lovely beer”. So here goes – the truth is we seem to have a major problem with a recent beer.

Regular readers will remember that we made a series of Belgian style ales. The first was a Belgian Pale Ale, which fermented nicely and tasted very promising when we transferred it into the keg.

We followed Andy’s “six weeks maturation minimum” rule, but when we came to taste it something was badly wrong. The initial signs had been there – frantic secondary fermentation and a leaking keg (a bit like our earlier explosion). When we served it, the beer gushed out under such pressure we ended up with a whole pint of froth.

But it’s the smell and taste that tells us we have an infection – it’s sour. Not vinegar sour. It’s softer than that, which suggests to me that it is lactic acid, rather than acetic acid. But sour nonetheless. Bugger.

We’ve not had a lot of experience of infections, but given the softness of the sour taste, I am guessing it is a lactobacillus infection. Lactobacillus is present on all raw malt, of which there is plenty around the brewery (I mean house).

So disaster. Well, we’re not so sure. A number of people that have tasted it have been intrigued by the “funky” sourness. It’s not unpleasant, just not what we normally expect from our beer. Andy believes it tastes rather like Rodenbach Classic (Red).

So, since we don’t need the keg right now it hasn’t been dumped. We keep sampling the odd half pint, and we haven’t died yet (or indeed had any adverse symptoms). So we’ll just have to see.

(If you LIKE this sort of beer let me know, we have a LOT to spare! :-)

Photo: http://www.thebarleyblog.com/2011/rodenbach-classic/