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I’ve heard just about every lager brewery talk about clear wort = clear beer, so I think you’re onto something here. Two ideas that I plan to try:
– The method to mimic some of the pros that use holding tanks. Put your beer into a fermenter and pitch your yeast. About 12 hours later, transfer to a new fermenter, leaving about a cup or so of whatever has gathered on the bottom of the vessel. This should help not only get clearer wort but also remove some of the weaker/dead yeast from fermentation.
– Recirculating through a filter. Many systems I’ve brewed on including my robobrew, I often recirculate for the last 10 min or so of the boil. I’m thinking of doing it sooner and doing it through a filter, something similar to a hop screen. I’ve done it through a hop screen before, but since it wasn’t dedicated it spreads the hop material out and plugs up too easily. I think if I go through a 2nd screen that has no hops in it, it could potentially filter my wort clean.
I’ve heard just about every lager brewery talk about clear wort = clear beer, so I think you’re onto something here. Two ideas that I plan to try:
– The method to mimic some of the pros that use holding tanks. Put your beer into a fermenter and pitch your yeast. About 12 hours later, transfer to a new fermenter, leaving about a cup or so of whatever has gathered on the bottom of the vessel. This should help not only get clearer wort but also remove some of the weaker/dead yeast from fermentation.
– Recirculating through a filter. Many systems I’ve brewed on including my robobrew, I often recirculate for the last 10 min or so of the boil. I’m thinking of doing it sooner and doing it through a filter, something similar to a hop screen. I’ve done it through a hop screen before, but since it wasn’t dedicated it spreads the hop material out and plugs up too easily. I think if I go through a 2nd screen that has no hops in it, it could potentially filter my wort clean.
Cool recipe.
If you brewed it again, I’d make minor adjustments at first. As you say, you’re a better brewer today.
I’d drop the melanoidin malt. You can change the bittering hops to something like Columbus to get more clean bitterness, then up the Citra at the end/in the dry hop a little bit to add more flavor.
But honestly, it could’ve just been oxidized a bit or something if you didn’t take oxygen prevention into consideration when dry hopping back then. In which case, the original recipe may be plenty fine (I’d still drop the melanoidin though personally).
Can’t wait to try the remake sometime (this year?).
I’ve mostly used frozen fruit in beers. I also freeze local fruit when I make my port wines from scratch.
The extracts have gotten really good over the last few years now. I’d probably look towards one of the many name brands that commercial breweries use at this point, and not bother with frozen fruit, figuring out how much water is in them (they often reduce the ABV of your final beer bc the volume of water is greater than the fermentable sugars available) and dealing with potential wild yeast. And the biggest reason to use an extract is that it’s so much easier to adjust the dosage to taste. I was reminded of that the other week as I was dumping out 3+ year old raspberry porter. Too many raspberries on it and it just never faded enough to be drinkable.
Chuck, that sounds like a difficult beer to balance. With spice, hops and fruit flavor. Curious what the recipe looked like, if you don’t mind sharing/pasting here.
I’ll plan to drop off at 2pm today or so. And then I can come pick up tomorrow a bottle of each if that works @colter
That way everyone is guaranteed to get a bottle from me, from Colter (and maybe from Aaron?).
Jeff, I have your stout, so you don’t have to worry about a stout for me, but anything else I’m happy to take a bottle of!
My guess is that the brewer just doesn’t like IPAs. His tap list has none of them, despite it probably being the most popular craft style in the US, Canada and many major Euro cities. A single pale ale is the closest he comes – https://www.ebbandflowfermentations.com/current-beer-list
Neat and unique brewery he seems to have though, I’d definitely pay it a visit if I were in the area.
Voss and Hornindal are popular for IPAs.
I’ve used Hornindal, it gives some fun tropical flavors, especially if you get into the 90s. It’s otherwise quite clean and it’s a good fermenter.
Which BYO issue was it? I have an online sub, I’ll take a look, but I don’t see why that would be the case. Many breweries use kveik on IPAs now too. Resolute is a local one, but plenty others do locally as well.
I have a feature article that I wrote coming out in the next Zymurgy in like 7 weeks or so, it’s about using kveik for making clean beers.
The original kveik farmhouse beers are incredibly interesting. Historical Farmhouse Beers from Lars is the book that covers those and it’s easily worth the purchase, just very fascinating reading. I’ve tasted some of the non clean, historical yeasts, and they’re so fun. I’ve never tasted some of these flavors from yeast before. Everything from milky caramel to earthy black pepper to coffee, all coming from these farmhouse yeasts. Very cool stuff. A lot of the farmhouse beers are smoked beers too. I’ve always been interested in the farmhouse breweries of Belgium and France, like saison, lambic and bier de garde breweries, but this takes it to a whole new level.
But for the clean beers, I think temperature control is probably almost as important as with other beers. It’s such a fast ferment, and (oddly at low temps/with low abv beers) kveik can underattenuate a bit if you let the temp drop. So you can set the temp to 80F, and the beer can climb to 83-85F during high krausen, then fermentation slows and it can drop 5F or so and just go dormant without finishing up completely. The good news is that you don’t get diacetyl, fusels or fruity esters from these higher temps, it’s truly different from typical ale yeast. Some of these strains are also far cleaner than US05, allowing you to make lager-like beers in very little time. One trick for dealing with the temp is to pitch into wort a few degrees cooler than your temp control, so that when it gets to high krausen it gets to the temp of your chamber, then when krausen dies down it stays somewhat consistent and doesn’t go to sleep. Another is to just start low and raise it after 24-48 hrs so that it finishes fermenting strong.
I’ve had experience with lutra, oslo, skare, opshaug and hornindal. I personally like oslo the best for psuedo lagers I think. It can get into the low 80s for attenuation % and give you that little extra crisp finish in an otherwise very clean beer. Lutra is nice too, but usually finishes around 75% attenuation for a pilsner, a little less dry than I want, though it can still be very good.
I have an oslo “northern german pils” and lutra “dunkel” on tap right now if you’d like to try sometime. Shoot me a msg, we can pick a warm day and sit outside distanced.
My take on these is that I sort of identify with two of the breweries that I talked with for that Zymurgy article: Peculier and Bottle Logic. They both love the kveik yeasts for psuedo lagers, but they’re not going to stop making traditional lagers either. It’s basically a new ingredient to play with, just like the new hops from the US, NZ or Germany, or the new malts from malsters. The turnaround time is also great, while you could make something drinkable in as little as 5 days, I think for something blonde/lager-like, 12-14 days is a good timeframe for grain to glass. IPAs can be done faster and are probably the easiest things to brew a quality beer with using this yeast. I’ve done IPAs where I throw a good bit of hops in the last 5 min/at flameout, then toss a massive dry hop in the primary along with the yeast. Within 3-4 days it’s fully fermented out, I transfer under pressure to another keg with biofine, crash to 31F for 3-4 more days, then it’s ready to drink and the most delicious hop flavor you can imagine without the issues you can get with fast turnaround time with english or american ale yeast on IPAs (21 days is the minimum time for most very good IPA breweries, they literally crash/condition for 4+ days, new england style or not).
Hey Aaron, yes we do!
We met in person outdoors a couple of times over the summer/September, but otherwise we’ve been online each month. The third Wednesday is usually the date. Are you on our email list? A January email should go out in the next ten days.
Our in-person meetings have a loose organization, we start with the lightest beer generally and pass it around and discuss and just repeat until we’ve tasted all of the homebrews brought to the meeting. Recipe, technique, ingredient discussions usually come up pretty organically and everyone is free to really ask any question they might have about a beer (or if you want specific feedback on your own beer, you’re encouraged to bring that up when it’s your turn to share).
It’s a fun group and a good mix between serious brewing and a good time with friends.
The online meetings have touched on homebrewing for sure, but are a little less organized since we’re not drinking the same thing/even necessarily drinking homebrew all of the time.
What kind of beers are you into? What do you like to brew? What has been most challenging for you as a brewer?
Hey Chuck, do you have any of the Gordon Strong books? He has a couple really good holiday recipes in there. If you don’t, I can paste a couple of the ones I’ve done on here.
Otherwise, you can take a base style that you enjoy and add a little spice to it.
Taking something like a belgian dark strong or quadruple or dubbel and adding something like an ounce of ginger and a few fresh cinnamon sticks would be a great way to “Christmas” the beer up.
Also the AHA has some good recipes on their website, especially if you separate by commercial clones and award winners. The samiclaus recipe on the website looks fun, I love that beer. And the many, many excellent homebrew books are good recipe resources.
I’d avoid places like brewtoad, and even homebrewtalk. They’re good for inspiration, but there is way too much inaccurate/poorly vetted material in there.
Good stuff. It’s just general enough to where anyone can make it about what they want I think. Like, a person who dislikes hazy IPAs but likes classic bitter, piney american IPAs can say “yea, what Jim G Said!” while someone who just likes to drink Coors Light and hates IPAs can say “yea, good simple lager, FU IPA people, what Jim G said!”
Except those chocolate avacado orange kids, damn all the thousands of breweries in the US making chocolate avacado orange beer!
If you’re doing a quicker lager, this method works well – http://brulosophy.com/methods/lager-method/
There are other methods that work well too, but I’ve done the above method multiple times and it works well.
I now do the way Jim mentions, the more traditional German way, for the reasons he cites. I think it produces a cleaner beer in general. And it’s the method my favorite lager brewery here uses (Bierstadt) and their crisp clean characterization is what really sets them apart in my mind.
One main reason I don’t quick lager anymore is because I found that in order to get the same type of clean, crisp flavor as the low and slow method, I’d end up deep lagering in the 30s for almost just as long, so the “quick” lager method wasn’t really all that quick for me, it was just fermenting the beer faster, I still had to condition it lengthily to get the same type of quality for my tastes.
An example of the quick lager method was that coffee vienna lager that Dean and I made on his system and canned on SPE’s canner a couple years back. We brought a few to the club, it was a nice beer, but by the time we canned it it was probably 2-2.5 months old. It was done in 10-14 days bc we fast lagered it, and while it was pretty damn nice at 14 days, it was clearly better after 2 months of cold lagering. In that case, if we wanted a “pretty darn good but not great” vienna in 14 days, we could’ve started carbing then. But we were patient and rewarded with what was in my opinion a fantastic beer.
Your mileage may vary, and different tastes/perceptions/biases can all come into play. I’d encourage people to try both low and slow and quick/hot lager methods and see what they think.
Same with mashes, decoctions, step or infusion. There are good lager breweries in both the US and Germany that use any of those 3 methods. I personally would advise on doing what your equipment can easily handle.
Great find, looks like a hell of a deal.
Same deal with me, I mostly do 5 gallon batches.
I wonder if the seller is the brewery that moved into Beryls old place on Blake. Would make sense since they likely inherited a lot of equipment, some of which they might not need.
I love my 2.5-3 gallon kegs for so many reasons.
Keep us posted on how the book ends up for you. I reference it all the time. The beer examples they go into depth about towards the end of the book are really spot on in my experience. I have experience aging/drinking about half the examples he uses. Rochefort and Bigfoot are two of my favorites in there, and the comments about Brooklyn’s Chocolate Stout are just dead on for when it falls off and how it changes up until then.
