Some of you who have checked in here for a while might remember my lager adventure last January. I had another brewing mishap this weekend. While the lager marathon went down in the cold, this time my friend Dave and I just did our Laurel and Hardy routine in the warmth of an October Sunday afternoon.
I hadn’t brewed since last Spring, and wanted to try something new, so I got out my brewer’s handbook and flipped through the recipes. My friend Dave, coming over to help me, likes brown ales so I looked a few of them over, including one they called an old strong ale, with a nice little write up about brewing before microbiology.
Brewers worked with yeast, of course, before Mr. van Leeuwenhoek “discovered” bacteria (his mother’s family were brewers, by the way) but they were kind of charmingly naive about it. They knew, of course, to reserve some of the foam for their next batch; Spanish brewers referred to it as “los almos” for the little souls, and the English gave thanks for the godesgood (or “God is good”) that gave life to their wort. But until they peered through microscopes and identified the little yeasties, they didn’t really know what caused fermentation. They just trusted and perhaps prayed: godesgood.
This recipe is mostly pale malted barley, with a little crystal and amber malt, a couple varieties of hops and a Scottish yeast. I got the ingredients and was setting up when Dave arrived (to the usual rousing greeting from the big dogs). Dave is a good brewing companion. We have fun hanging out, he gets the concept, and he’s very good at following directions. All he lacks is thorough direction, sometimes.
Ferrinstance, my mashtun is a metal barrel on stilts with a vertical spigot in its bottom. While I prep’d other equipment, I asked Dave to put the crystal malt in the bottom of the mashtun and the pale malt on top; I forgot to tell him to first put the screen filters in the bottom.
And we didn’t realize the filters weren’t down there until we had poured about eight gallons of 160 degree water (called liquor) on the milled malt.
Oops.
Still, as the grain has to sit in the liquor for an hour to make the sweet wort, we had some time to figure out plan B.
Unfortunately, extra time didn’t help. After it seeped for the required time, we really were ready for the next step: draining it out of the spigot at the bottom of the mashtun, and returning it to the brewkettle, then boiling and beginning to add hops according to the hop schedule.
But we needed to separate all that wort from the spent grain, first.
What a mess. First I sterilized some big, thick industrial gloves that reach up to my elbows and tried to work the filters down under the wort and grain in the bottom of the mashtun — but the little souls of my malted barely weren’t deterred, and when we tried to drain the wort the spigot clogged right away.
So we scratched our heads, looked at all of that grain and wort, and finally scooped it out.
Almost all of it.
We filled two buckets with about five gallons each of steaming hot grain and the wort, by now a murky brownish liquid, chock full of lovely little starches just brimming with promise for the yeasties I had ready for their little population explosion. I took a thin wood barbecue skewer, cleared the spigot, put in the two filters (one a screen the other a metal disk) and dumped the grain and wort back in.
And it clogged again.
Pouring the grain and wort in too quickly stirred up the filters, I guess, so more of the spent grain got under the filters and clogged the damn thing again.
So we cleared it again. We were getting good at it at this point. And only about 45 minutes late now, getting the wort to the brewkettle. But one thing was for sure — as you want the wort to dissolve as much of the starches from the malt as possible, we had sure facilitated that dissolving by scooping, stirring, and pouring it.
It went pretty much as planned the rest of the way, and we’re happy to report that the little yeastie population explosion has gone better than expected. While it’s best if it ferments at 60 to 68 degrees, it got up to 72 here in the house on Monday, so I came home to three very active four gallon carboys of merrily bubbling beer.
By Tuesday evening the fermenting beer had overwhelmed the carboys and forced its way up into and begun to clog the airlocks with a hardening foam, like putty.
Very promising, indeed.
I hope you resterilized the gloves after scratching your heads ; – ).
I love home brewed beer, by the way, except it’s always a wee stronger than my taste. I guess I’m a pale ale person and and not a brown beer one.
Yeah, umm, well, when it came to any idea what to do, our heads had been sterilized, first. =8D
The IPA I’ve made is one of the beers my friends like the most. Also a Belgian white ale; which has a little bit of a citrus finish.
I try to do a lager each winter, a stout or porter in the spring, and used to do a holiday beer in the fall. I don’t make many brown ales, either, but I know Dave likes ‘em, so I thought I’d give it a try.
It’s pretty much finished fermenting, and the carboys have finally settled down (thank god).
This was fascinating. My only experience with home-brewing was the little U-Brew store that I paid. My only job, as per the law, was arriving and adding a certain ingredient at a certain time.
If I had a large dwelling and access to all the equipment I’d be tempted to give this a go.
It’s a nice way to spend a weekend afternoon, in part because it is so different from the job, but also for the craft itself.
I tend to write about the things that go awry, as I think that’s what’s more interesting, but mostly it’s hangin’ out, following the recipe for this batch as we taste and comment on prior batches.
You can’t get sloppy. There are points that require real care — the right temperature fo the mash, being very clean, etc. — but nothing that gets in the way of enjoying the day with some tunes or a ballgame on the radio, a tasty cold one in the glass, and playing with the brewing toys like a chemistry set for big boys.
I made a batch of mead once with some honey from a friend’s bees. Not quite as complex, but there was a carboy and some bubbling involved.
While visiting a burial mounds in Uppsala, Sweden once they had a little tourist center that served mead. So I tried it. I wasn’t impressed.
I mean, if I were alive a millenium ago and it was what we had, sure, I’d drink it. but I kind of like the advances we’ve made in brewing since then.
What did you think of your batch?
A fellow homebrewer!
I’ve been homebrewing for years, although I’m a little out of practice. I plan to get started again soon, now that the husband and I are back at home and I have all my equipment at hand (as well as the space to do it). My specialties are spruce beer and a luscious oatmeal stout. When I start up again, I’d like to do IPA’s for a while (because I’m such a hop head).
I did a mead last spring which we’ll be tasting soon. I like a dry mead, not as sweet as most, and it’s not really a true mead since I added some lemongrass and ginger to it. I used a champagne yeast. It worked out well the last time I made it that way. It was a very pretty straw color, and nice and bubbly. (I only mentioned all of this because I’m horning in on your conversation with Stevo.)
That’s sounds like quite an adventure, or misadventure as the case may be. I’ll be interested to hear how it all turns out.
Spruce beer! Really?
Using malted barley? Can you give me a sense of the ingredients?
I love stouts. I’ve got an imperial stout recipe I’ve used a couple times now. Haven’t tried oatmeal yet. Did a milk chocolate stout that was ok, but the imperial is my favorite.
Do you do full or partial mash?
I’ve done full mash, but I’m lazy and usually do partial mash. Nobody seems to notice the difference (not even the judges when I used to enter competitions, who were often surprised when I mentioned the beer was either all-extract or a partial mash).
Oatmeal stout is a messy beer to make (so is the spruce beer), but well worth the effort. I swear you could almost make a meal out of a good oatmeal stout, it’s that hearty.
One of the crucial ingredients in spruce beer is the new green growth of spruce needles so this beer has to be made in the spring. I’ve found that the type of spruce trees makes a HUGE difference in the flavor. The best so far comes from a Norway spruce. Whatever you do, stay away from the blue spruce. Yuk! You could also use spruce essence (usually available at home brew shops), but I don’t think it tastes as good.
The recipe I have is from The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian. It’s called Kumdis Island Spruce Beer (“originally brewed with the fresh spring growth of tall Sitka spruce trees in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, Canada”). It’s an all extract recipe, but you can fiddle with it if you’d rather do a full or partial mash.
Here are the ingredients:
3-1/2 lbs. Edme S.F.X. dark malt extract syrup
2 lbs. plan dried dark malt extract
4 oz. new green growth of spruce trees
2 oz. Hallertauer hops (boiling): 10 HBU
1-2 pkgs. ale yeast
Robin, I’ve had good luck with the stouts so will have to try oatmeal. Spruce beer sounds interesting; may check into this.
I racked the old strong ale we made a couple weekends ago. Reserved some of the beer with the trub after pouring it into new carboys and let it settle out, then tasted it. (Just to get a sense of what it wil be like, before carbonation.) I think it’s kind of a bland recipe; my book described it as an older style, and it seems rather neutral in flavor to me. Ah, well, worth checking out.
I may not brew again until I do this winter’s lager — which every year I mean to do in December and then don’t get to until January, what with the holidays.
But this year, I hope, will be different!
[...] it went well. My friend Dave came over and as we bottled this “old strong ale” (as my recipe book called it) we sampled some prior brews and I riffed off the old [...]