Oh Belgium man! Belgium!

Holy Zarquon singing fish, July is going to be a month of brewing Belgian ales at Cheshire Peaks.

It all started because Andy and I were discussing what to do next, and we decided branching out into some continental beers would be interesting. Our initial thought was a Belgian Pale Ale – a malty, fruity, somewhat spicy, easy-drinking, copper-coloured ale.

The important thing with most beers is getting the yeast right. It’s OK with British ales because we have found some very reliable dried yeasts (mainly Safale S-04). But for a Belgian Pale Ale we need a proper Belgian yeast. Enter Wyeast liquid yeasts. Our recipe calls for Wyeast 3655 Belgian Schelde, but this does not appear to exist anymore. So we decided Wyeast 3522 Belgian Ardennes should be a suitable alternative. I called the Brew Shop in Stockport – they don’t stock it but would see if they could get it.

Yesterday I popped in to see if the yeast had arrived. It hadn’t, so I whipped out my copy of Brewing Classic Styles and looked for an alternative beer to make. After much consideration I settled on a Belgian Dubbel – a deep reddish, moderately strong, malty, complex Belgian ale. The grain bill is much more complex - lager malt, munich malt, Belgian candi sugar, aromatic malt, caramunich and Special B. Phew! But as it happened the Brew Shop had every one. I settled on trying Safbrew T-33 dried yeast.

Sorted. About to leave the shop. Then for some reason Peter looked in a packet which had been recently delivered and was hanging around the shop – it was a bundle of Wyeast Activator packs (not in the fridge, eek!). And lo and behold one was the Belgian Ardennes I had asked him to get.

So I ended up buying the ingredients for BOTH beers. As I said, July is going to be a month of brewing Belgian ales at Cheshire Peaks. Belgium man!

Liberty Lightning

I realised as I was writing the last post about explosions that I haven’t written anything about our Liberty Lightning beer. I must have been busy with other things – there haven’t been any posts for a number of weeks. Sorry to all you readers. (Both of you!)

So, what is Liberty Lightning? Well we wanted to make a really light and easy drinking summer ale with a nice hop flavour along the lines of Hop Back’s Summer Lightning.

So we decided: keep the grain bill simple. And choose one interesting and light hop. What we ended up with was 100% maris otter pale ale malt, and 100% Liberty hops. I’ve heard some people refer to this as SMASH brewing: Single Malt And Single Hop.

Liberty is a US variety, although it’s very low acidity (compared to other US varieties). It seems to have Germanic roots, giving it a clean spiciness with a bit of fruitiness, apparently. We shall see! Apart from the loss of about a pint and a half (see the post about explosions), the rest is currently conditioning nicely.

STOP PRESS: It’s tried to escape again! Stop fermenting, you yeast! I made you; I am your lord and master!

Photo: Hop Back Brewery

Explosion!

Sorry for the sensational headline. Rumours of an explosion at Cheshire Peaks appear to have been exaggerated. But I did avert one this week. Bit of a long story.

I have been trying to work out how to serve our Bohemian Wrenbury – a Bohemian Pilsner (lager). I wanted to be sure that a King Keg (the barrels with the black tops in the photo below) would fit in the fridge. So I took the lager out (currently in a fermenting vessel) and briefly put the King Keg full of Liberty Lightning into the fridge (yes, it fitted fine, in case you were worried). I returned both vessels to their original positions and thought nothing more of it.

The following day I popped into the garage for something, and as I left the words “mmm, nice beer smell” went through my mind (probably in a Homer voice). Huh? I went back in to see beer gradually trickling across the garage floor. The Liberty Lightning was leaking! It was dripping off the bottom of the barrel, into a drip tray, which was now overflowing and the beer was running across the floor. On closer inspection I saw that the point where the black tap joins the barrel was fizzing (see photo).

I immediately opened the top of the barrel to release the pressure, then started the tedious process of mopping up.

I can only guess that in moving the barrel I stirred up the yeast and it started fermenting again. It’s summer, so the (reasonably) warm weather must have helped keep the little yeasties busy.

I just wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t caught it as soon as I did… Never mind the explosion, imagine all that wasted beer!

This was a few days ago, and it still smells rather nice in the garage.

Citra American Pale Ale

Citra hops are a very new variety: only commercially available since 2008. Since becoming widely available, these American hops have become almost “trendy”, if you can have such a thing in the beer world. There are a large number of craft breweries, in the UK, US and elsewhere, that delight in their citrus fruit flavour and aroma. They have been described as: peach, apricot, passion fruit, grapefruit, lime, melon, gooseberry, lychee fruit, pineapple, mango, papaya and other tropical fruit flavours and aromas.

I’ve had some lovely beers made with citra, and I wanted to give them a try. One problem: Andy’s had plenty of beers made with citra too, and he really doesn’t like them. It became a bit of a running joke, and so more as a wind-up than anything else I bought some a month or two back. (In fact the on line retailer actually sent me four packs by mistake, which made it look even more like a wind up!)

However, having bought them Andy relented and agreed that we’d make something with them. We decided to make an American Pale Ale – described as a “clean, fresh, hoppy beer with enough malt backbone to carry the moderate hop character and bitterness”.

I’ve seen some comments on the intertubes warning about using solely citra hops.(Suggestions of “cat’s pee” didn’t sound too appealing). So I decided we’d use 50% citra and 50% liberty – a softer, more Germanic style hop. Citra is also aggressively bitter (15% as opposed to Liberty’s 5%).

We made it last Monday and it has been fermenting frantically since then – nearly done now and ready for racking.

The question now is what on earth to do with the remaining three and a half packs of citra! Actually I gave a pack to my brewing friend Andy Bowers – he was talking about making a brown ale hopped with citra. Sounds bizarre, but hey, you have to try these things!

Diageo screw Brewdog

This is slightly off-topic, but I thought you might find this interesting. You can’t make this sort of stuff up.

http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/diageo-v-brewdog

Frankly, I don’t think craft breweries like Brewdog are a threat to the monstrous super-tankers that are the drinks giants. I just can’t see craft beer taking any appreciable slice of the “fizzy crap” end of the market any time soon. And let’s face it, that must be 95% of the market. But it’s very interesting that Diageo see Brewdog as a threat. Something of an own-goal methinks…

The importance of maturation

When we first started making beer I was obviously extremely keen to start drinking our beers as soon as possible. Andy, on the other hand, was always the voice of restraint. He argued that every beer needs plenty of time to mature before it is consumed.

He’s absolutely right of course, and if you read my previous post about the American Amber Ale tasting you’ll see what I mean. When we first tried it (after a couple of weeks in the barrel) the flavours just had not blended. It was like drinking two different beers in one glass.

I have a suspicion that some of the “green” taste that many people associate with home-brew beers is largely down to lack of maturation too.

So what happens to the flavours during maturation? It’s a little hard to express, but once you start tasting beers through their lifecycle you start to pick up on how the flavours mellow out and blend over time. It’s a bit like eating a chilli that has not had a couple of hours of slow simmering: the flavours are all there, but are separate and distinct. Time is needed for them to blend into a new thing.

Initially the bitterness of a beer is much more pronounced. This eases off after 4-6 weeks, and so is something that needs to be compensated for in the recipe if you want a very bitter beer. Also, unfortunately, the hop flavours and (especially) aromas ease off too. This is perhaps the one downside to a long maturation – you can loose those crisp young fresh hop aromas. I certainly noticed that with the First Gold Experiment (again, see previous posting).

So how long should beer be matured for? Well I’d say 2-3 weeks as an absolute minimum. (Andy would say 4-6 weeks minimum!). For a light hoppy beer the minimum is probably OK; for a dark ale like a porter it should be more. For lagers, maturing them for a long time very cold is all part of the process – it is not a lager if this isn’t done. In fact “lager” is the German word for “store”.

As far as we are concerned, this extended maturation phase means a couple of things:

1. We need more barrels! Currently we have three. That is just about enough, but having four would allow us to leave beers alone for longer.
2. We should aim to brew some of our darker winter beers earlier and lay them down in bottles for a long maturation phase. We plan to do this soon – we have a winter porter on the list for the brew after next.

Mini Beer Festival

I had some ex-work friends over on Thursday night. We usually go into Wilmslow for beer, curry and a chat once a month, but since I have three barrels of beer ready to drink in the garage, I suggested they come to me first for a sampling session.

So the poor guys ended up trapped in my garage whilst I babbled on about step infusion mashes and alpha acid isomerisation. They nodded with polite interest, but I am pleased to say that the beer was consumed with some enthusiasm. It’s fortunate that the by-product of my hobby is something most of my friends seem very happy to drink!

I have previously blogged about the making of all three of the beers we drank that night, but what I haven’t done is write some tasting notes now the beers are being drunk. So here we go.

First Gold Experiment

Many of our beers at the moment use just a single hop variety. We’re doing this because there is such a huge range of hops available these days, and we want to understand what they are like. I first heard about the First Gold variety through the Badger beer of the same name. It’s an English dwarf hop with huge versatility both for bittering and also for flavour and aroma.

We made a simple, pale ale and used plenty of First Gold hops. Initially it had a wonderful sweet, spicy and slightly citrus (for an English hop) aroma and good robust bitterness. Over the weeks this has eased off a lot, leaving a rich and balanced English ale. We’re very pleased with this variety and I’d certainly choose to use it again.

American Amber Ale

The recipe for this was based on a recipe in Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. It has a fairly complex grain bill: pale ale malt, munich malt, two types of crystal malt and also biscuit malt. You can certainly get the orangey flavour of the munich malt in this rich and sweet amber ale. The hops are two US varieties: Centennial and Amarillo.

When we first tried this beer it was a strange beast. The aroma of the hops was very strident – quite a distinct flowery and citrus aroma. But the taste of the beer just didn’t match it. It was like drinking two different beers in the same glass. I worried that we’d cocked it up, but it is surprising what a number of weeks maturation can do. Gradually the strong hop aroma eased off enough for the beer to blend itself into a satisfyingly sweet ale. The colour of the head is curiously orange (probably that munich malt).

I think if we did it again I would try to make it a little less sweet, but other than that I’m very pleased with it.

The Guildford Ginger

This is probably the most experimental of the three. We devised the recipe by looking on a few internet forums, and then sticking a finger in the air.

The amount of ginger to use was our major concern – some people reported a few hundred grams; others over a kilogram! In the end we used 800g of very fresh grated ginger in the boil, and it was perfect. The beer has a robust ginger aroma and flavour without being too overpowering. There is also a slight kick at the back of the throat that stays with you for quite a while. You know you are drinking ginger, without it going too far. We’d happily brew this one again without any changes to the recipe.