Sandbach Grand Cru

Back in November 2014 we decided to move our homebrewing to the next level and make a sour beer. This has been quietly fermenting under our stairs since then. Yes, fermenting a sour beer can take a year or more. After an initial fermentation by yeast, which makes alcohol, the remaining sugars (generally the complex ones that the yeast cannot metabolise) are consumed by bacteria which produces the sour flavours – lactic acid, some acetic acid and other byproducts that give interesting flavours.

The recipe we used was based on Rodenbach Grand Cru, so naturally the Cheshire Peaks version will be Sandbach Grand Cru. (If you don’t know where Sandbach is, follow this link).

We tasted the beer a week or two back – sure enough we have a complex sour flavour reminiscent of Rodenbach and with not too much acetic acid (vinegar) flavour. Too much oxygen during fermentation leads to excess acetic acid production which spoils the beer. I’m very pleased we managed to avoid that on our first sour brew.

This Saturday we racked and bottled one third of the beer. We also racked another third into a fermenter and added 1kg of apricot puree. The last third remains in the carboy. When the apricot version is finished and bottled we’ll rack the last third and add cherries. Voilà! Three beers from one!

The cherry beer will hopefully be reminiscent of the discontinued Rodenbach Alexander and will of course be called Sandbach Alexander. (We’re open to suggestions for the name of the apricot version!)

We’re already planning how we can re-use our bacteria for a second sour beer: probably a sour porter.

Lilac Blond review

We raided Andy’s lilac tree back in May 2014 and brewed what we thought was a pretty unusual (nay, maybe ground-breaking) beer: a blond ale flavoured heavily with lilac flowers. This we gave the imaginative name “lilac blond”.

It’s been sitting in bottles since then. We’ve sampled one from time to time. Initially it was most odd – the “green” flavour of the lilac flower stalks came strongly through. (Despite the fact that we had been at pains to strip most of them out and only use the flowers).

However over the last six months it has settled down, the flavours have merged and the “green stalky” flavour has eased off. So recently I labelled the bottles and they were released for consumption.

I gave my mate Charlie at work a bottle and he sent me a very positive review. With his permission I am sharing it here.

Quick note on the Lilac Blonde - I shared it with my mum (she's a huge beer fan) and my girlfriend (again, massive beer lover). They both said it was the best beer they had over Easter. No mean feat, given that we also drunk multiple brews from Thornbridge, Ilkley, Oakham, AMA and St. Bernardus!

General consensus put it above Jaipur X, St. Bernardus 10, Karmeliet Tripel, St. Austell Big Job, AMA Blond and Kernel Mosiac.

Lovely floral notes and blackberries on the finish.

Overall, total belter.

Labelling Evening

Labelling beer bottles is boring. Making beer is far more fun (despite it being two thirds cleaning!).

But recently we’ve been getting low on bottled beer to give to interested friends to try, and I don’t like giving people unlabelled bottles. So tonight was labelling night.

I’ve been able to make it much less time-consuming by changing to a rectangular label(previously we had a lovely shaped label, but every one had to be cut out by hand). I’ve also found a better way to feed the labels through my printer which saved me a load of time as well.

So tonight sixty six bottles got labelled.

Just need to make some more now…

Cheshire India Porter

Andy and I both particularly like The Kernel Brewery’s Export India Porter. It’s a forthright little beer – deeply dark, with roasty coffee flavours but also hugely bitter with assertive hop flavours and aromas. You might think such strong hop flavour and aroma wouldn’t work with the dark malts, but it does. They complement rather than compete.
I bought a “bookazine” called The Complete Homebrew Handbook ages ago. Read it. Enjoyed it. Put it on the shelf. Only recently did I stumble upon the Export India Porter recipe in it. So we had to give it a try.
I have to admit I was astonished how much US hops were in the recipe. There’s 152g in there, if you include the dry hops. And they’re high alpha hops too (ie very bitter). Andy usually hates hops like that. But he’s a good sport and agreed to give it a go anyway since he likes the Kernel original.
We weren’t disappointed. I think this is a pretty good version of the original. Not a beer where you would drink more than one, but certainly a great one to have in store. Having said that, with all those hops flavours in there it probably should be drunk fairly soon before they fade.
I made one adjustment to the recipe because of what I had available, using amber malt rather than brown malt. I also note that the original Kernel beer states the hops as Columbus, Chinook and Motueka. The recipe used Magnum rather than Motueka and I went along with that.
One last point: the Columbus and Chinook hops we used were pellets rather than compressed whole hops. Usually I buy vacuum packed whole hops from either Morris Hanbury or The Malt Miller. But my local homebrew store is now stocking a range of pellets from Bulldog. I have to say I’ve been pretty impressed. They are easy to use (no hacking the cake of hops apart with a knife), pretty cheap and don’t fill your boil kettle with masses of vegetable matter which makes running off a bit easier. Hop pellets seem to be the only option in the USA. Looks like they are coming over here too.

Export India Porter

Grain bill
Maris Otter  4111g  72.7%
Amber Malt  500g  8.8%
Chocolate Malt  373g  6.6%
Munich Malt  373g  6.6%
Black Malt  150g  2.7%
Crystal 70  150g  2.7%

Hop schedule
Magnum  17.3%AA  14g  60min  23IBU
Chinook  13%AA  4g  15min  2.5IBU
Columbus  13%AA  4g  15min  2.5IBU
Chinook  13%AA  16g  10min  7.2IBU
Columbus  13%AA  8g  10min  3.6IBU
Chinook  13%AA  39g  5min  9.6IBU
Columbus  13%AA  17g  5min  4.2IBU
Chinook  30g  dry hop  5 days
Columbus  20g  dry hop  5 days

Water treatment: None
Yeast: 1 sachet Safale US-05, 1/2 sachet Safale S-04.
Batch size: 23l
Mash temp: 67C
Mash time: 60 min
Boil time: 60 min
OG: 1.061
IBU: 52.6 (Rager)
Colour: 30 Lovibond, 40 SRM, 79 EBC
Target FG: 1.013



Target ABV: 6.5%

Six Month Catch Up (Part 2)

Last time I posted I was trying to catch up with the brews we’ve made since my last blog posts. Without further ado…

Gyle 83 Vanilla Oak Unusual

We have a recipe that we call Audlem Unusual, which is very similar to Old Peculier – a particularly favourite beer. We usually brew this beer to be ready for Christmas. So we did this brew on 12th October and it fact we still have a little left in the barrel and it is drinking very well.
But this year we wanted to put a little twist on it, so we added oak chips and two vanilla pods. It was a subtle addition, but I think it was very nice for a change.
We used 30g of medium toast french oak chips, which were added to 200ml of boiling water (to give them a little sanitation). This was then cooled and added to the beer 4 days into fermentation. The vanilla pods were split and the seeds removed, then the seeds and pods were added to the fermenter at the same time.

Gyle 84 Milk Stout

Milk Stout is an unusual beer style because it is sweetened with milk sugar (lactose). This gives it a sweet flavour to complement the dark, rich full-roasted flavours of the stout. Lovely!
So why is milk sugar added, rather than ordinary sugar? Well ordinary sugar is fermentable by yeast, so will just give you a stronger dry beer. Lactose is not fermentable so you can rely on it staying in the beer to give sweetness.
As with many of our beers, I used the recipe from Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. I have had such success with the recipes in this book. There’s only one recipe per style, but that still gives you 80 recipes to try and every one I have done has come out extremely well. The recipes are formulated for brewing with malt extract, but for every one there’s an all-grain option with is easy enough to use to convert the recipe. If you make all-grain beer (or extract) you should have a copy of this book.
Oh, and of course the milk stout came out great too. It was another one we brewed for Christmas, so that and the Vanilla Oak Unusual gave plenty of dark ale variety.

Gyle 85 Export India Porter

This was such a great brew I think it warrants a post all of its own (and probably the recipe too). Watch this space…

Six Month Catch Up

Oh my goodness, has it been six months since I last wrote a beery blog post? Looks like it. Why? Well, no particular reason to be honest. Andy and I have still been making beer but for some reason I’ve just not had the time and/or inclination to blog about it.

So here is a quick post to get me started again. I guess the best thing for me to do is re-cap the last six months of brewing as briefly as possible, then I can take up with more specific articles about what we’re doing now.

Gyle 80 Mosaic SMaSH beer (June)

This was our first true “Single Mash and Single Hop” (SMaSH) brew, used to provide a simple beer to allow us to try some Mosaic hops. The recipe was simply 5kg of Maris Otter malt, mashed at 66C. Mosaic hops were added to the boil at 60 min (15g), 20 min (20g), 10 min (20g) and flame out (20g). The remaining 25g of hops were used to dry hop the beer in the keg. Yeast was Safale S-04, fermented at around 19C (keep it cool to keep it clean!).

Any good? Depends who you ask. If you ask me, the answer is “oh my god yes!” I love American hops, and Mosaic is right there up with the best in my opinion. Forthright, aromatic and deeply flavourful, without being aggressive. However Andy didn’t touch a single pint of this beer. (“Nasty, horrible, pine fresh”).

Gyle 81 Gin Wit (July)

OK, this one was a bit experimental. We both love gin, so we wanted to try some gin botanicals in a beer. We decided to make a wit (lager malt, wheat malt, torrified wheat, munich malt and some porridge oats) and add juniper berries (20g, 10 min), lemon zest (15g, 5 min) and grains of paradise (5g, 2 min).

Any good? No, not especially. I mean it was drinkable, but the botanicals just didn’t “pop” out of the beer. Muddy and confused flavours. Back to the drawing board on that one I think.

Gyle 82 Flyer (September)

Another SMaSH beer, this time with Flyer hops. Same recipe as above.

Any good? Well Flyer is a much less assertive hop than Mosaic. What we ended up making got branded “pub beer” by the drinking committee. It was light in colour and strength, and just a tasty quaffable beer.

Flyer is a brand new British hop (http://www.britishhops.org.uk/flyer/) described as “citrus, stoned fruits, liquorice, treacle-toffee and caramel”. I didn’t get a lot of any of those, but I did get a good standard British hop. Unremarkable you might say. “Pub beer” is what I say.

 

Oh dear, I’ve gone over a page already. I‘ve got a couple more beers to tell you about but I think I’ll leave those to another post.

The Grainfather – in photos

As I mentioned in my previous post, my mate Andy from the newly named Prince Albert Ales has splashed out on a Grainfather brewing system. You can read my initial description of the system in this post (to save me typing it again).

The brew day started with cleaning the system, especially because it was brand new so the recommendation was to run cleaner through it for a reasonable time to remove any factory grime (I’m sure they didn’t use those exact words in the manual).

Recipe and grains were prepared in advance (today it was a German wheat beer):

Once rinsed, the Grainfather was filled with strike water and set at the target temperature to heat up:

Once at temperature in go the grains:

Then on goes a mesh to prevent the top of the grain bed being disturbed by recirculated mash liquor and later sparge water:

Then the mash recirculation pipe is fitted and the pump turned on so the mash liquor at the bottom is pumped up and onto the top of the mash:

Wait an hour and have some lunch…

At the end of the mash, there’s a foam on top of the mash:

Here’s the clever bit – lift the inner cylinder up and lock it in place so the wort can drain out of the grains into the boiler below:

Commence sparging – simply pour the sparge water onto the top mesh above the grain bed:

Once finished, remove the mesh, and indeed the whole grains cylinder:

In go the hops and the boil commences:

At this point I left Andy to it. But at the end of the boil the counterflow wort chiller is used to recirculate the wort until chilled to the required temperature, whereupon it is pumped into the fermenting vessel.

That’s it! In all we were very impressed. There were a couple of learning points:

1. The handle for the inner grain cylinder can easily come away when you are tipping the grain out of the cylinder. As a result Andy managed to drop it as he was tipping into the compost bin. Minimal damage fortunately.
2. Pumping out into the FV took forever because of the hops clogging up the outlet. Looks like a hop bag is essential.

On the brighter side, the OG was 1.060 when the recipe had said 1.050, so it’s clear the system is very efficient. That’ll be the mash recirculation I guess.

Now, I just need to find £600…