Alt Bier

We’ve brewed our way through many of the beer styles in Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer over the years but one we have not tried until recently is Alt Bier. This is a bit strange because alt bier is an old German style (hence the name, “old beer”) which is a rich and malty ale with low hopping and fermented at ale temperatures (ie warm). You would think we’d have done that long ago – right up Andy’s street (apart from perhaps some of “those nasty continental malts”!). I think the reason is probably down to the effort involved in getting the correct yeast.

For our English ales at Cheshire Peaks we rarely use anything other than Safale S-04. It’s dried, so easy to use and store; it is easy to buy (in all the local homebrew stores); it “drops like a stone” (ie does not leave a very dusty sediment that kicks up into the beer very easily) and of course it tastes good too. Just the right level of English ale fruitiness and sweetness without overpowering anything.

But you can’t brew an alt bier using English ale yeast, or it will just be an English ale with some German malts in it. So I mail ordered some White Labs WLP036 Dusseldorf Alt Ale Yeast as required by the recipe and kicked it off with a starter.

What was the beer like?

Mr Zainasheff’s book describes alt bier as “a well-balanced, bitter and yet malty, clean, smooth, well-attenuated, copper coloured German ale”. This sums up what we got very well. The only thing I would add is that the final gravity was on the high end of what the book said (book said 1.010 to 1.015 and we got 1.015) and there was certainly a sweetness to it as well.

In general it has gone down very well with everyone that has tried it. Opinions are divided as to the serving temperature. Served from the fridge (6C - my preference) it is a cleaner flavour. Served at English ale temperatures (12C - Andy’s preference) gives a fuller flavour and greater mouth feel. I doubt if it is served through a beer engine in Germany, but we found that worked a treat.

Recipe

Grain bill
Pilsner malt        3630g  68.6%
Munich malt        900g   17%
Aromatic malt     450g    8.5%
Caramunich        227g   4.3%
Carafa Special I  85g     1.6%

Hop schedule
Magnum     17.3%AA  22g  60 min  43 IBU
Tetnang      5.1%AA   14g  15 min  3 IBU

Water treatment: None
Yeast: White Labs WLP036 Dusseldorf Alt
Batch size: 23l
Mash temp: 65C
Mash time: 90 min
Boil time: 90 min
OG: 1.058
IBU: 46 (Rager)
FG: 1.015
Fermentation Temp: Initially 16C, slowly ramped to 19C after 6 days
Fining: Kwik Clear on racking to keg
Lagering: At 6C for 4 weeks

With apologies to Jamil, because what we brewed is exactly what is in the book. (Buy a copy).

Salted Caramel Oatmeal Stout

Salted caramel is still hugely popular at the moment and we wondered whether it would work in a rich dark stout.

We hit a problem in that you can’t actually buy “caramel” in the shops. I thought you might be able to get it in a jar or something. All I found was Cadbury’s Caramel, which is caramelised condensed milk. We did have a discussion about whether this might work in our beer, but I was rather concerned about dumping that much milk fat into our beer.

No, a better approach was needed. So I researched how chefs make caramelised sugar for desserts and cake decorating. Naturally Delia came to our rescue. I followed these instructions to the letter and it worked like a dream – see my photos below.

http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/sauces-and-dressings/how-to-make-caramel 

Once made, we let the caramel down with some hot water (just to make sure none was left round the inside of the pan) and added it to the boil at the start.

As for the salt – well that was a bit of a stab in the dark. We didn’t want to overdo it, so went for something just over the amount of salts you might add to a regular beer for water profile treatment. We chose 22g of sea salt.

What did it taste like?

This was a hugely popular beer with our friends. It was soft, dark, rich and chocolatey. But there was also something else in there. I can’t say it tasted clearly of salted caramels. But there was definitely a subtle rich taste in there that would probably not have been there in a regular oatmeal stout.

When we do this again (for it was certainly good enough to re-brew next winter) I would probably increase both the caramel and salt by half – 450g caramel and 40g salt. I know now that this would not be over-doing it.

Recipe

Grain bill
Maris Otter       4260g  69.3%
Rolled Oats      450g    7.3%
Biscuit malt       340g   5.5%
Chocolate malt 340g   5.5%
Crystal 70         227g   3.7%
Roasted barley 227g   3.7%
Caramel            300g   4.9%

Hop schedule
WGV       5.5%AA  68g  60min  36 IBU

Water treatment: 22g sea salt
Yeast: Safale S-04
Batch size: 23l
Mash temp: 68C
Mash time: 60 min
Boil time: 60 min
OG: 1.056
IBU: 36 (Rager)
FG: 1.013
Fermentation Temp: Initially 16C, allowed to free rise to 19C after 3 days

King Keg Pressure Gauge

We’ve got three King Kegs in the Cheshire Peaks cellar (OK, garage). Back in 2012 I bought a pressure gauge for one of them off eBay. You can read the post about it and the quest to make lager fizzy.

But the other two kegs remained without gauges. This has proved to be a complete pain. Here’s why.

When we serve beer through the beer engine, it is necessary to put some gas into the top of the keg to prevent building up a vacuum that eventually stops the beer coming out, or worse sucks air back into the keg through the tap. In a British pub cellar the gas going into the top of a cask is air (in other words there is a hole in the top of the cask). This keeps the pressure in the cask at exactly ambient pressure but also means the beer stales in a few days.

The solution at home is to inject carbon dioxide to fill the head space rather than allow air in. This keeps the beer fresh for many weeks. But without a pressure gauge it is always guesswork as to whether the keg needs gas adding or not. If you get it wrong you build up a vacuum and end up sucking air back into the keg through the tap next time you try to draw some beer. Bad.

The other problem I have encountered is that especially during the summer there will still be a little yeast activity in the keg which gradually builds up pressure in the keg. This is OK as long as it does not get too high. But I have had one or two incidents where the pressure in the keg built up too high and I was not aware of it. Fortunately I never had a catastrophic failure like a split barrel. What King Kegs tend to do instead is seep round the hole where the tap screws into the keg. Eventually I was discovering a beery smell in the garage and the keg sat in a sticky pool of beer.

So more pressure gauges had to be procured. Last time I bought a ready made kit -  a pressure gauge and the necessary washer, nut and rubber seal all ready to fit to a King Keg. It took me several months to see a similar kit appear again on eBay, so when it did I grabbed two. (Sold by rocnsoc1969 if you want to see if they have any more on offer). They were £18 each.

Fitting is simply a case of carefully drilling a 10mm hole in the soft plastic of the keg lid. I started with a pilot hole, then expanded it to 9.5mm because that allowed me to screw the threaded shaft snugly into the plastic and it “self tapped” into the plastic.

I had to be accurate with the positioning of the hole so it was not too close to the S30 valve in the middle of the lid – it needs clearance for the CO2 bottle to be able screw down without hitting the pressure gauge (see second to last photo). But it must also not be so far out that the brass washer inside the lid hits the channel in which the rubber seal sits – see the photo above.