Clarity Problems

This is not a marketing blog. That’s because we don’t have anything to sell (did you hear that, Mr Duty Man??). And it means that this blog is not all about “we made this lovely beer” and “we made that lovely beer”. Sometimes things go wrong. Happy to admit it – that’s how you learn.

The previous blog post is a case in point – we’re currently drinking pretty much flat lager.

So here goes with another. What the hell happened to our ability to make clear beer??

This problem has afflicted the last couple of brews: East Kent Goldings Single Hop and Liberty Lightning.

The funny thing is that the beer seems fairly clear when it is racked out of the fermenter. Then it sits in the keg to mature for 4-6 weeks (a period of time soon to be designated a “Burrows”). When served we end up with the haziest beer you’ve ever seen (see the photo below). It’s a bit embarrassing giving it to friends to be honest.

I can only think of a couple of possible reasons:

1. Dry hopping. Maybe adding dry hops after fermentation has somehow affected the clarity.
2. Yeast activity during conditioning. Maybe the yeast’s secondary fermentation is so vigorous (especially given the warmer days of “summer”) that it’s kicking up a load of yeast into suspension and not settling out.

Certainly the vigorous secondary fermentation of the Liberty Lightning points towards the latter possibility. But I’m really not sure. Here’s hoping the Citra American Pale doesn't suffer the same fate.

Making lager fizzy

It’s funny how sometimes what would on the face of it appear a fairly simple thing turns out to be much much more complicated…

If you are our regular reader, you will remember that way back in April we made a Czech-style lager, named Bohemian Wrenbury. This has been lagering (cold storage) for many weeks, but now summer is here (ho ho!) we want to drink it. But obviously being lager it needs to be fizzy.

As everyone knows, the bubbles in fizzy drinks are carbon dioxide. How do you make beer fizzy? Well there are two ways: first is to provoke a secondary fermentation. Fermentation gives off carbon dioxide, so if you keep the beer sealed it will dissolve in the beer. This is how we carbonate our ales. The second way is force carbonation, i.e. seal the beer and use bottled carbon dioxide.

As I said, for our ales we use a secondary fermentation. So why not just do this for the lager? Well, mainly because of the lack of yeast. After many weeks of lagering, I think most of the yeast will have dropped out of the beer. Plus the lager is in the fridge, so any secondary fermentation would take a long time. And finally, it’s a bit uncontrollable. You add sugar to power the secondary fermentation… if it didn’t ferment we’d end up with somewhat sweet lager.

So we decided to try force carbonation. First problem: how do you know what pressure you have in your keg? After much research, I bought a keg pressure gauge on eBay:

After a bit of drilling, tightening and testing it was fitted and seems to work OK.

Next problem – how much pressure do you need? The first thing to say is that the amount of carbonation in beer is measured in “volumes”. That is, carbonation to one “volume” means you have dissolved the same volume of carbon dioxide in your beer as you have beer. Two “volumes” means twice the volume of carbon dioxide has been dissolved as you have beer.

Generally lagers are served at between 2 and 2.5 volumes. So far so good. Now the amount of carbon dioxide you can dissolve depends on the pressure of the gas above the beer and also the temperature. A quick look on Google reveals some handy charts for the pressure (in PSI) required to attain a certain level of carbonation versus temperature. Yes, temperature plays a part: the colder the beer the more gas you can dissolve in it. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s right. For dissolving salt in water, you need it to be warmer to get more to dissolve. Not so for dissolving a gas – for that you can dissolve more gas at lower temperatures, because a higher temperature means more energy in the liquid, which can drive the gas out of solution and into the space above.

All fine, except that you need quite a lot of pressure, even at about 5C, to dissolve 2.5 volumes or carbon dioxide. More pressure, unfortunately, than the King Keg is supposed to tolerate (10-12 PSI max). Bugger. But given that I’d got this far I didn’t see that there was much else I could do but go for it, and see how much carbon dioxide I could get to dissolve. So far it turns out that the answer is “not enough”. When served, the lager comes out at quite a gush (because of the pressure above), but it doesn’t hold any bubbles. Just the very slightest hint of carbonation, like mostly flat mineral water. Arse.

On the plus side, the beer itself tastes and smells wonderful – just like Budvar. And it’s nice and clear.

So what was the “right” solution? To invest in a “cornelius keg”, which can hold much much more pressure. But I don’t think one would fit in my fridge. So this is going to take a lot more thought and experimentation for future lagers.

New boiler

On Tuesday we made the second of our Belgian beers – a Belgian Dubbel. The brewday was enhanced by the arrival of a shiny new boiler for my birthday (thank you Gill!).

“Hang on!!”, I hear you say, “you’ve got a lovely vintage Burco boiler, what do you want to replace that for?”

A couple of reasons really. Firstly, the new boiler is slightly bigger (29 litres versus 22 litres), which means we can boil the whole batch (previously we’ve always boiled a little under the full volume, then topped up with a bit of water at the end). Bigger also means the liquid isn’t anywhere as near to the top. Much safer!

The second reason is speed. We have been able to shave some time off our brewday by using both boilers. The old Burco is now just a Hot Liquor Tank (HLT). Previously it had to do both jobs, which meant that we had to collect the runnings from our mash tun somewhere else until we had completely finished sparging and no longer needed hot water. Then we transferred it all across to the Burco to start boiling it. Of course the wort was cooling down during all this time, so with the new boiler we can start heating the wort much sooner, saving time.

Oh, and I’ve just thought of a third reason. The new boiler has a nice filter at the bottom, which holds back hops and trub (precipitated proteins) as we are running off. I suppose in theory that should mean clearer beer, although there is some debate about that in brewing circles.

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!