Rushton Imperial Stout–bottling

We bottled the Rushton Imperial Stout this evening. (Follow that link to read about when we brewed it.)

This is such a strong beer we only got 1 gallon of it, which when bottled made only 17 330ml bottles!
I was disappointed how high the final gravity was – 1.064. This is way above what I’d been aiming for, and has resulted in a very sweet, think beer with a strength of only (!) 8.8%. We’d been gunning for 12%! Why? Well we had a high mash temperature, which must have resulted in a LOT of complex non-fermentable sugars. Maybe another time we’ll dial down the mash temp a bit. You live and learn.

However (and this is the big however), we’re actually dead pleased with the final beer. It’s going to be a hugely rich and tasty beer which is what we were aiming for. Here’s a few tasting notes:

Appearance – jet black, with thick crude oil-like viscosity.

Aroma – camp coffee.

Taste – Dark bitter chocolate. Firm but not unpleasant bitterness that stays in the mouth for many minutes. Perhaps some slight acidity. Warmth from the alcohol, but not fumy.

Mouthfeel – thick and silky, coats the mouth.

These are going to stay in bottle for about a year before they are ready to drink.

Rushton Imperial Stout #2

Back in May we made a Russian Imperial Stout. Or at least we tried to. But it didn’t really turn out the way we planned due to over-sparging (that is, we put in too much extra water). This resulted in a much weaker brew that we’d planned – 6.5 % instead of 8.5%. (Although it was still delicious!)

So last week we tried again, this time with more careful planning and higher goals still.

A Russian Imperial Stout can be up to 10% ABV or more. If you want to achieve a beer as strong as this you can’t really add ANY water to the mash. The problem is this is rather wasteful of the remaining sugars in the grains – if you don’t add water (sparge) to wash these out then they are wasted.

Enter parti-gyle brewing. This is the name given to the technique of making more than one beer from a single mash. You make your strong beer from the first runnings from the mash tun, then add more water and make a second beer with the second runnings.

This turned out to be easier and less time-consuming than we expected. We did the mash, then ran all the wort out of the mash tun, leaving dry grains. We boiled this as our first beer. Meanwhile, we refilled the mash tun with hot water and after a few minutes ran this off (adding some additional water through normal sparging).

What did that leave us with? Well the first beer reduced down a long way during the boil and we were left with only about 1 gallon of wort. But what a wort – it had a gravity of 1.130! This is hopefully going to give us a beer of about 12% if we can get it to ferment out that far.

The second beer came out at about 1.061. That should give us a respectable 5.5% beer, which we flavoured with addition of a vanilla pod towards the end of the boil. (Mmmm, vanilla stout…)

We had the yeast cake from a recent brew of Audlem Unusual (our Old Peculier clone), so we split that into two which will have provided plenty of yeast for the fermentation. The first beer went absolutely crackers during the first 24 hours, but then calmed down just as fast. So a few days later I added some champagne yeast which has a greater tolerance for high levels of alcohol. Hopefully that will help ferment the beer out further.

This evening I have moved both beers onto our under floor heating to warm them up a bit and encourage them to finish off.

9kg of malt

 

Very full mash tun!

 

First runnings

 

Refilling the mash with hot water

 

Getting the big beer out of the hops after the boil required a bit of squeezing.

 

Proof – 1.130

 

The big beer is on the left – barely 1 gallon

Racking the damson porter

We racked the damson porter today, which was a hell of a mess. If you remember, we made a porter and added 2.5kg of damsons to the fermenter. These were a deep thick mush in the bottom of the fermenter, which made getting the beer down the pipe somewhat tricky. In the end we had to resort to using a sanitised stainless steel fork to jab the damsons out of the way.

The beer is now in a separate fermenter and we’ve added finings to get it clear. We’ll bottle it next week.

Damson Porter

Andy has a walk that he does at this time every year near Tarporley in Cheshire. He does it partly because of the abundance of damsons and sloes in the hedgerows in late September. This year he picked 3.5kg of damsons and we have used them to make a damson porter.

We brewed it last week, and the base porter recipe was as follows:

Grain Bill

• 4.31kg maris otter pale ale malt
• 450g brown malt
• 450g crystal malt (45L)
• 280g chocolate malt

Hops

• 32g progress, 60 mins (15 IBU)
• 20g bramling cross, 60 mins (10 IBU)
• 14g fuggles, 10 mins (1 IBU)

Mash 67C for 60 mins

OG 1.053

We used the yeast cake from the previous brew (Stock Old Horizontal clone), which was Safale US-05.

With such a rich yeast cake, fermentation was extremely vigorous for the first couple of days. I was glad of temperature control so I could cool it to 16C to keep it under control. Still had a bit of a mess though!

After 3 days we added the damsons. These had been initially prepared as follows:

• The best 2.5kg were selected – the softest, ripest and least damaged
• These were washed and frozen, the idea being that the freezing process would kill wild yeast
• On the day they were added, we defrosted them and placed them in a stainless steel bowl
• We poured boiling water over them and left it for five minutes, in an attempt to kill some of the bacteria on them
• The water was drained and the damsons mashed with a sanitised potato masher
• The mashed damsons were added directly to the FV and stirred in with a sanitised brew spoon

After the fruit was added, the FV was held at 16C for a few days then gradually ramped up to 19C. The vigorous initial fermentation again made a mess, this time with bits of damson skin getting stuck in the airlock. It’s a good job I caught this because the gas was not getting out at all and the lid was ballooning!

I plan to leave it for at least another week, then rack to another FV and fine it. Then it will be primed and bottled and matured for at least a few months.

Recreating Stocks Old Horizontal

When Andy was at university in the early 80s he used to drink a beer called Old Horizontal from the now defunct Stocks brewery in Doncaster. (This is not to be confused with a US beer with the same name from Victory Brewery, which is a very strong barley wine.)

Back when we first started making beer we had a go at recreating Stocks Old Horizontal based on the briefest of recipes from Roger Protz’s Real Ale Almanac. This was gyle (brew number) 7 in November 2010, so to be honest we didn’t really know what we were doing back then like we (think we) do now.

So we have decided to do it again. This post is about our decision making process on the recipe for tomorrow’s brew.

Let’s start with Andy’s “taste memory”. He dug the following up from the back of his mind:

• Looked like Guinness but not as black
• Relatively dry
• Not overly malty, not sweet malty
• Relatively bitter
• Not hoppy, no fragrance
• Not thin

OK, that’s a start. The Real Ale Almanac gives the following recipe:

• Original gravity 1054.7 (nice and accurate there!)
• 97% pale ale malt
• 3% chocolate malt
• Fuggles and goldings hops

There’s also a suggestion (here) that it was 5.3% ABV (although previously 5%).

This helps quite a lot, but doesn’t tell us anything about

• Bitterness
• Mash temperature (which affects final sweetness)
• Yeast (which has a big effect on flavour)
• Fermentation temperature (which also affects flavour, ie higher will result in more fruity beers because of the esters and the like produced as by-products)
• Hopping schedule – when they are added and how much (this affects bitterness but also hop flavour and aroma)

Back at gyle 7 we mashed at 64C – very low. We used 30g fuggles and 25g goldings for 80 minutes in the boil, followed by a further 10g fuggles in the last ten minutes. We used Safale S-04 yeast which would have given a fruity English flavour. It was November, so fermentation would have been at room temperature, 20C.

This time round we have made the following changes:

• Mash temp 66C – standard temperature for a dry beer
• 38 IBU – fairly bitter, but not aggressively so
• 25g fuggles and 25g goldings at 60 mins, and NO late hops, to reduce hop flavour and aroma
• Safale US-05 yeast – standard for beer where you do not want an English fruity flavour, such as American pale ales or Irish/Scottish ales
• No water treatment – Cheshire tap water

That’s it – we’ll brew it tomorrow and see if what we get is closer to Andy’s “taste memory”. I think the use of US-05 yeast and controlling the fermentation temperature to 19C will have the biggest effect – making it less fruity.

The full recipe is below, just in case that is of interest.

Stocks Old Horizontal

OG 1.054

FG 1.015

ABV 5.2%

Batch size: 26 litres

Malt

• 5000g maris otter pale ale malt
• 155g chocolate malt

Hops

• 25g fuggles (5.6% alpha acid) at 60 min (19 IBU)
• 25g goldings (5.2 alpha acid) at 60 min (19 IBU)

Water treatment: none

Mash schedule: 66C for 60 min

3g irish moss

Colour: 16 lovibond (21 SRM, 41 EBC)

Yeast: Safale US-05, 1 sachet

Fermentation: ~1 week at 19C

US Brewery Tours

I mentioned in a recent post that I’d talk a bit more about some of the beery things I got up to in my trip to the States last month. So here goes with a few words on two brewery tours.

Samuel Adams Brewery

Samuel Adams beer is made by the Boston Brewing Company. The easiest of their beers to find in the UK is Samuel Adams Boston Lager. The brewery opened in 1984 in Jamaica Plain, Boston, but there are now two other breweries (in Cincinnati and Breinigsville). Given the enormous output of the company, the original Jamaica Plain brewery seems extremely small – presumably it is only used for special and pilot brews, with the bulk of the beer being made in the other two breweries.This made the tour quite a quick affair – there’s basically only one large room which contains a mash kettle, mash tun, copper and six conical fermenters.

The tour was free, and very well attended considering we were on the first tour of the day. The tour guide gave us maybe ten minutes on how beer is made, with very little detail about the specifics of how Sam Adams beer differs from other beers. But that didn’t seem to bother the people on the tour – they lapped up the tour guide’s jokes and fooling around, and cheered frequently when there was mention of the free beer tasting to come. All a bit brash maybe for my reserved English sensibilities. :-)

The tasting part was actually a more detailed affair – he explained the importance of considering visual appearance and aroma when evaluating beer. And then he explained the flavours to look for.

As far as the beers are concerned, what I love about Sam Adams beer is the huge range of different styles from around the world that they have assimilated into their range. For example, every year they brew an Octoberfest, which is eagerly anticipated by beer fans and for good reason: it’s rich, malty and flavoursome but with a clean, crisp lager finish.

Rock Art Brewery, Vermont

We stayed in Stowe, which is in the middle of the skiing area of Vermont. Within 10 miles of Stowe there are seven craft breweries, so we had to visit one. Almost randomly, we chose the Rock Art brewery in Morrisville. I say “almost”, because we had tried a few beers and they were very good.

The brewery is probably similar in size to the Sam Adams brewery in Boston, but of course this is their only location. At the front of the brewery building is a tasting bar and gift shop. At the bar you can purchase a “flight” of four draught beers, chosen from the range of about 10. These range from hugely hoppy IPAs and double IPAs, through to a brown ale, a porter and a massively challenging barley wine called “The Vermonster”.

The tour was essentially a ten minute chat with one of the brewers in a room overlooking the brewery floor. He was knowledgeable and very willing to answer my damn stupid questions about yeast strains and barrel aging, which was good. The barrel aging (see photos) was particularly interesting to me – this is clearly something that they enjoy experimenting with. The results are (presumably) pretty variable, depending on the barrels used and the length of aging, which I suspect means fans of the brewery are treated to different beers every year. I like that: keep your customers coming back with constantly changing beers.

So that’s it. Thanks to my best mate Ian for taking me to these breweries. Next time he can keep his promise of taking me to Framingham Beer Works. :-)

Blackbeery Blonde label

My eight year old daughter insisted that SHE was going to choose the name and design the labels for our latest batch of beer, the fruit blonde ale. So a few days ago I let her loose on CorelDraw, and this is what she came up with.

The name came about because of a typo made by me whilst saving the image. Abi spotted the typo and shouted “keep that, that’s what we’re calling it”.

She spent a lot of time on thesaurus.com hunting down an alliterative synonym for “tasty”.

And the supermarket joke was again Abi’s, a reference to the mixed dark fruit we used to make the beer taste rather like Vimto. ;-)

So that’s another job done thanks to my enthusiastic helper, and forty bottles are sitting in the garage awaiting consumption. Thanks Abs!

Beer in the States

I’ve just returned from a fantastic trip to the north eastern United States: Boston, New York and Vermont. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the craft beer scene is in the States – it seems to be growing at an increasing rate over there. In some respects that makes me jealous: there is a massive range of beer styles available and you can get interesting beer pretty much anywhere in the north east. But in other respects it doesn’t: if I lived there I would really miss cask conditioned ale drawn through a proper beer engine. That concept doesn’t exist over there. All beer is kegged or bottled, highly carbonated and served cold. Whilst I like that too, I’d miss English real ale.

Anyway, I have a few specific thoughts and discoveries from my trip to share on this blog. Rather than writing one huge article, I’m going to split it over a bunch of posts, starting with:

Craft beer availability

There are loads of craft breweries across the States. We stayed in Stowe in Vermont, and there are SEVEN craft breweries within ten miles of Stowe! (There’s even one at the von Trapp Family Lodge, for you Sound of Music fans.)

But it’s not so much that there are an expanding number of craft breweries that amazed me. After all, there are 33 craft breweries here in Cheshire (not including Cheshire Peaks of course! :-). What amazed me (and made me jealous) was the availability of these beers in supermarkets and restaurants.

Here in the UK, the big supermarkets will sell plenty of bottled beer, but it is usually all beer from the larger breweries. There might occasionally be a few beers from smaller local breweries in better supermarkets like Waitrose. I went into a Wegmans supermarket near Boston, and they had three huge aisles of American craft beer. There were other aisles for imported beer and for “domestic” beer such as Bud and Coors. But there were THREE aisles of just craft beer. I was astounded and somewhat jealous.

Three long aisles too. Count them:

Now let’s look at restaurants. Here in the UK the best you can hope for is the most generic of kegged bitter or lager. Indian restaurants will sell draught kegged Cobra or Kingfisher. Italian restaurants will sell bottled Italian beer (Peroni etc.). There is never EVER any British craft ale available in a restaurant. That lives in pubs.

Over in the States, every restaurant seemed to have at least one or two craft beers on draught. Really, I can’t remember going to a single restaurant where they couldn’t offer at least Sam Adams on draught. More often it was five or six beers, even in a simple Vermont pizza house.

Now to be fair, British cask conditioned ales require considerable more skill to manage than kegged beers. And the shelf life (sorry, cellar life) is considerably less. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect British restaurants to start serving cask conditioned ales. And most of our kegged ales are pretty generic. But as a restaurant goer there’s certainly a great deal more choice of beers with your meal in the US than here in the UK. Which is a shame because I think beer goes really well with food, and there are so many beer styles to choose from you can choose a beer to fit whatever you are eating.

That’s it for this post. I’ve got more to share about brewery tours and bars, but that must wait for another post.

Back to brewing

We're pleased to be brewing again after quite a few weeks break. Summer is not an ideal time for making beer because it's a little warm for an ideal fermentation, so it's good that we have had a break during the unusually fine English summer. (Although today is still rather hot!)

Today we are making an American Pale Ale, which will probably be the last light and summery beer we make before we descend into autumn. American pales should be crisp and light and pretty easy drinking - we're not talking an IPA here, so bitterness is usually around 40 IBUs.

We have a lot of left-over hops in the freezer which I would really like to get used up. They only last a certain amount of time, even in the freezer, and we've had these well over a year. So the beer will be bittered with Nelson Sauvin and Centennial hops and the flavour and aroma will be from the more restrained Cascade and Liberty hops. Andy is being very tolerant because I love these sort of beers but American hops are not really his cup of tea. I have promised him we'll move to a darker autumn ale next! Perhaps something like a Scottish Red Ale Andy?

Cheshire Peaks Bottle Labels and Pump Clips

A tad self-indulgent, maybe, but I thought it would be fun to bring together all the bottles labels and pump clips we have created for our brews. These are by no means ALL the brews we have done, merely those that we have bottled or found time to create a pump clip for. In terms of total number of brews, we have done 54 now since we started in May 2010.

May 2011	May 2011
June 2011	June 2011
July 2011	October 2011
November 2011	December 2011
May 2012	July 2012
August 2012	January 2013
February 2013	April 2013
May 2013