Lilac Blonde

Last year we had an idea to make a lilac blonde ale using the lilac tree in Andy’s garden. It didn’t go as planned because just when the flowers were starting to come out we had a hot spell and the lack of water caused the flowers to be rather stunted. Instead we made Blackbeery Blonde (which incidentally, is drinking very nicely now it has had plenty of time in the bottle).

So here we are again – it’s lilac harvest time. We’ve had some nice weather over the last few days (although not a hot spell like last year) and so the tree was coming out nicely. We brewed yesterday, so of course it decided to absolutely tip it down just when we were cutting the blooms. But we ended up with a huge box full of (wet) lilac flower heads and a tree that looked no different, so many flowers were there on it.

The recipe is based on Jamil Zainasheff’s Belgian Blonde Ale recipe (called “Lefty Blond”, so you can draw your own conclusions as to which beer it is cloning). To that we added 846g of lilac flowers. Having read recipes for lilac wine, we were careful to ensure that there were no green bits left at all. It took us a couple of hours, during the mash and boil, to pull all the flowers off. Why 846g exactly? Because that’s where we just got completely sick of the task!

Then we agonised about when to add the flowers. The lilac wine recipes make a “lilac tea”, which involves pouring boiling water over the flowers and leaving them to steep for 24 hours. We, of course, have a vat of boiling wort which can extract the flavour and sterilise the flowers at the same time. We’d initially thought to add the flowers for the last two minutes, but having read the lilac wine recipes we decided to make it ten minutes. Hopefully that will have extracted enough flavour without killing the aroma too much. Interestingly, after pulling all the flower heads off my hands were a little resinous, kind of like after you have rubbed hops on your hands. Flavour oils?

The recipe, for those interested is below, followed by a bunch of photos.

Grain bill

Lager malt      5000g (81.4%)

Aromatic malt   230g (3.7%)

Wheat malt      230g (3.7%)

Cane sugar     680g (11.1%)

Hop Schedule

First Gold             (8.1% AA) 10g 60min  (6 IBU)

Saaz                     (3.4% AA) 36g 60min  (10 IBU)

Water treatment: None

Yeast: Safale T-58. Starter made the previous day.

Batch size: 23l

Mash temp: 64C

Mash time: 90 min

Boil time: 90 min

OG: 1.064

IBU: 16

Colour: 3.7 Lovibond, 4 SRM, 8 EBC

Target FG: 1.012

Target ABV: 6.4%

First attempt at cheese making

Last weekend I finally got around to trying out some cheese making at home, following the course that I attended in February. (Yes, sorry, this is not beer making but it is a similar food-related craft. And anyway, it’s my blog so I’ll write about what I like. So that’s my last apology for cheese-related posts!)

So, we made lemon cheese which is dead simple to make and comes out a bit like Boursin. It’s so simple in fact that you don’t need any special ingredients – just whole non-homogenised milk and lemon juice. It’s the acid in the lemon juice that splits the milk into curds and whey.

The milk must be non-homogenised, which these days is a little tricky to find. Homogenised milk has been treated to smash up all the fat particles, which means you don’t get the cream separating out on the top of the milk like you used to in the olden days. This is no good for cheese making so you have to find a source of non-homogenised milk. On the other hand you DO want it to be pasteurised. This doesn’t greatly affect the flavour of the final cheese and it makes it a lot safer. I’ve found a local butcher that sells non-homogenised milk from Cloudview Diary near Congleton in Cheshire.

You need to heat the milk gently to 38C and then add the lemon juice (about 6 table spoons) until the milk starts to split and the curds form. After leaving it ten minutes for the curds to become firmer they can then be strained through a straining bag. We then spread the curds on a piece of cling film, spread with basil and sun-dried tomatoes and rolled into a swiss roll.

The resulting cheese was a little prone to breaking up as you cut it, but it tasted nice on good bread or crackers.

I’ve got the ingredients to do some “proper” cheese making now, so I’ll write another post about that soon.