Wedding Commission–The Results

Regulars will remember that we recently took a commission to brew a barrel of beer for our neighbour’s son’s wedding. Well the big party was on Tuesday, and I can report that the beer went down extremely well. So well in fact, that it was all gone by 8.30pm! You can’t ask for better praise than that.

If you remember, we actually made two beers, and named them Vulcan and Buccaneer. Vulcan was a malty English bitter, whilst Buccaneer was a lighter bitter using American cascade hops.

To be brutally honest, the Buccaneer was a big disappointment. I think the hot weather affected the fermentation. It has a hot alcohol flavour, almost like pear drops. I was close to pouring it away, but it’s not quite that bad. But certainly for “office use only”.

So we were pinning our hopes on the Vulcan. I confess I was quite concerned about whether it would be OK, but as I have already said my fears were unfounded. It was a roaring success and everyone had a great evening.

I’ve actually taken another commission, for a friend’s 40th birthday party in September. I think maybe we should just re-brew the Vulcan!

Demand Valve

One of the best things I have ever bought is my beer engine. It allows me to serve home-made beer in my garage, but create a creamy rich head on the beer in a way that is usually only possible in pubs. My friend Andy sometimes comes round with a 2 litre pop bottle filled with his home-made beer, and we draw it through the beer engine and magically it turns into beer like you’d get from a pub.

The most popular post I have ever made on this blog was when I took my beer engine apart to clean it, and photographed the process.

However, all is not entirely well in the Cheshire Peaks beer serving arena, and it all comes down to how the beer is stored in our kegs. In a British pub, hand pulled ale comes from a cask. The publican will open the cask by knocking a peg through the hole in the top of the cask. This allows air to be drawn into the cask to replace the beer as it is served. The oxygen in the air eventually stales the beer, so a cask will generally need to be used in 3-4 days. Obviously at Cheshire Peaks we don’t drink quite that volume of beer. (“No???” I hear you ask…). So we need the beer to be replaced with carbon dioxide not air as the beer is drawn from the keg. I do this by injecting CO2 from time to time to keep a slight positive pressure over the beer.

The problem with a positive pressure is that it will force the beer from the keg when the tap is opened. If it’s quite a high positive pressure then we get the “self serving pint” – when you open the tap on the keg the beer forces itself through the beer engine without any pumping required. It’s not ideal and makes serving a pint a two man job: one to open the tap on the keg and the other to draw the pint.

There had to be a solution to this.

And there was. It turned out to be a “demand valve” (also called a “check valve”). This rather pricey gadget goes in the line between the keg and beer engine, and prevents the beer from forcing its way through the engine. Beer will only be allowed through the valve if there is a negative pressure (ie pumping) on the engine side.

So I got one, and it does work a treat. Now we can open the tap on the keg at the start of the evening and friends can pop down to the “cellar” (ok, garage) and draw their own pint whenever they wish.

There was one slight complication in the whole affair however. That was in the size of the connections on the valve. One side (the engine side) is 1/2 inch (which is the size of the keg tap and also the back of the beer engine). But the keg side of the valve is a 3/8 inch “push fit” connection. I have to thank my friend David for sorting this problem for me. In his brewery he had a box of dozens of different types of pipe connectors and converters and he soon found what I needed (the grey bit on top of the valve in the photo below). That saved me ordering things blind on eBay and hoping for the best!

Making Mozzarella

A few weeks ago we had a go at making some mozzarella cheese, following the procedure I learnt on my cheese making course.

The process is fairly simple, but it does require rennet and citric acid, so you can’t do it with just what you have in the kitchen at home like the lactic cheese.

What you do is heat the milk to 31C and add the citric acid and rennet. Then you gently heat (over a water bath) to 40.5C and leave the milk to separate.

Once separated, you scoop the curds out with a slotted spoon and allow them to drain in a sieve. That’s the standard bit. The bit that is different about mozzarella is that the curds are then briefly cooked in hot whey, which makes them stringy and stretchy. This gives the stringy cheese you use on pizzas.

What you do is heat the whey to 80C, then dip small blobs of curd into the whey for 30 seconds or so. The stretchy curds can then be shaped into mozzarella balls or pulled out into cheese strings. This is great fun for the kids!

The photos below show how we got on.

Wedding Commission

It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post, and I have made a list as long as my arm of things I want to tell you about. To maintain a certain air of suspense, I’m not going to tell you what they all are… but I am going to apologise that each will probably be written fairly briefly just so I can get through them. So here goes with the first one – our wedding party commission.

Our neighbours’ son is getting married in July. We were delighted to be asked if we would make a barrel of beer for a barbecue party to be held at their house the day after the wedding for all the guests still staying in the area.

The brief was fairly broad. “A nice malty English ale” was about it. So Andy and I got thinking, and we decided that to make sure we had the best chances of providing a great beer we’d make TWO and choose the best. Initially these were going to be two similar malt driven bitters. But in the end we decided to make one malt driven bitter and one lighter beer hopped with cascade hops for a nice summer ale.

I think in the end we’ll probably deliver both barrels to our neighbour’s house, and let them have some of one, then switch over mid-evening. Unless either of them turns out to be sub-standard. I do have a concern that some of our beers have been a bit “estery” recently, and I put this down to the warmer summer weather. Fermentation temperatures have been up at 21C or so, and this tends to result in a far from clean tasting beer. 19-20C would be more appropriate. With hindsight we should have used the temperature controlled fridge for all fermentations, but that was in use lagering the lilac blond and oktoberfest brews (oops, given hints on future posts there!).

Anyway, back to the wedding beers. The malt-driven beer will be called “Vulcan”, in celebration of XH558, the last flying Avro Vulcan. (If you haven’t seen her, GO AND SEE HER THIS YEAR!). The lighter cascade beer will be called “Buccaneer”. Let’s hope it doesn’t taste too much of bananas, given the nickname of the bomber it is named after!

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.

Refractometer revisited

I posted last month about our new refractometer, which we now use for measuring the density of our wort and beer instead of a hydrometer. The original blog post is here if you want to have a read.

This post is just an update, to explain our “doh!” moment when trying to use the refractometer to read the final gravity of one of our Boddingtons beers.

To cut a long story short, the final gravity was reading high. Really high. Like the fermentation had stopped halfway through. Our original gravity was 1.036 and the refractometer was telling us that the final gravity was 1.024. That’s only half fermented: we’d expect about 1.012.

After a bit of trawling the forums the penny dropped. A refractometer does not measure the sugar content, it measures the refractive index. The refractive index happens to be altered by the sugar content, but it is also altered by the amount of alcohol present. So you can’t use a refractometer to measure gravity once fermentation has started – any alcohol present will affect the reading. Doh.

Well actually, not doh, because maths comes to the rescue. This formula to be precise:

SG=1.001843-0.002318474(OB)-0.000007775(OB^2)-0.000000034(OB^3)+0.00574(AB) +0.00003344(AB^2)+0.000000086(AB^3)

SG = Specific Gravity, OB = Original Brix, AB = Actual Brix (Brix Readings During Fermentation)

This works out the correct gravity, given the actual reading and also the original gravity (which will determine how much alcohol is therefore present).

We’ve created some tables to do the correction now (see image below!) and I’ve also updated our recipe spreadsheet to calculate the correction. So you can sleep soundly, dear readers, without worrying about our half-fermented beers.