Brewsflash: Dog arses and make-believe citrus

Bottling time!

I've been too busy brewing and not busy enough bottling lately, leading to a production bottleneck (see what I did there?) in the shape of too few carboys.

Nothing makes my day like a confusing Google Image Search.

As I reported recently, I brewed a medlar saison a couple of months ago, and it was about time I got it bottled bottle lest it never get druk. Drank. Consumed. Whatever.

Medlars are a fascinating fruit. Related to the hawthorn, medlar trees grow golf-ball sized fruits, which are hard, tannic, and not very pleasant unless they're bletted.

That means rotten, only more poshly so.

I am endlessly fascinated by weird and slightly(*) yucky foods, and the medlar is a favourite of mine pricesely because (°) it is a rare example of a fruit which effectively has to spoil in order to be edible.

*) or very. Or very very. Or will you fuckin' stop already!

°) also because it gets charmingly nicknamed things like "open arse" and "dog butt". Good thing the Internet wasn't around when the medlar got its nick, or else I'd be gargling goatse(^) beer soon. 

^) Oh and for the love of god don't google goatse if your don't know what it is already. The internet should come with a warning sticker that says "Don't google goatse". The medlar's nick should be ample warning, but apparently it isn't.

Using about two dozen properly bletted medlars (courtesy of the amazing Marloes & Martijn), I made a syrup which I froze until I was ready to use it in a brew.

Early February, I brewed a basic(*) saison, and in a spontaneous act of generosity, I'm sharing the recipe with you, Constant Reader.

Or just because.

*) I promise to one day lay out my understanding of what a saison was, what it now is and what it should be, but for now, let's assume there actually exists such a thing as a basic saison.

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Technical stuff below; skip unless you like technical stuff, numbers and beergeekery

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Made a 5 gallon batch, comprising 36% Pilsner, 36% pale and 28% wheat malt. 
Mashed on the low end at 150°F, where it gradually petered down to about 140 (my mash tun needs an insulation coat). 
70' boil. 
0.5 ounces of Citra @ 70'         (26 IBU)
1.0 ounces of Citra @ 10'         (6 IBU)
1.5 ounces of Citra @ flameout (0 IBU)

5g of black pepper corns and zest of 1 lemon @10'.

Cooled to 68°F and pitched with French Saison (second generation 3711, kindly donated by Frankenbuddy). 
Fermented at 71°F, ramping to 77 over the course of a week; dropped from 1.063 to 1.002.

Racked to secondary and split in three batches. 

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Technical stuff all done now, resuming normalcy

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Three batches then, from a single brew. Not only did I not have enough medlar syrup to flavour an entire 5 gallon batch, I also wanted to be able to define the specifics of the medlars' contribution. 

It will end in tears one day.

1. basic version. Just the above recipe, no further shennanigans applied.
2. Cul de Chien: added syrup I made from about 2 dozen bletted medlars, half a lemon, and sugar.
3. basic + Orval dregs for Brett funk and rustic saison character.

Then I moved all three to the cellar and tried to forget about them for a few months.

Until yesterday.

Batch 1 and 2 were bottled by yours truly yesterday, which means I'll be able to taste them properly in a couple weeks' time. So far, the prognosis looks good. Solid saison profile, with Citra really doing its utmost to bring refeshing hoppy citrus notes and the yeast tying it all together. The Cul de Chien version had a bit of extra lemony zing to it (I may have overdone things lemon-wise when I made that syrup) and a certain je-ne-sais-quoi which probably the medlars. Even if the beer tatstes nothing like medlars at all, it's still going to be a great brew. 

Yeastie Boy is buzzing with anticipation.

Batch 3 will be bottled sometime soon. My understanding is that the Bretts will take a long time before they become noticeable, but will impart a bit of that rustic Old Orval vibe, which I think will add more complexity and authenticity.

Because all authentic saisons were brewed with citra and Dog's Arse.

More news when the brews are sampled.

Until then, I part with a fitting Chaucer quote:

We olde men, I drede, so fare we:

Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype;

May our bletting be long in the waiting.

Greetz

Jo

Lawnmower Brew ongoing

Eight days after brew day, the Lawnmower Citra Inferno has got me stumped.

Dramatic lighting will save any beer.

Right from the start, the WLP300(*) yeast I'd pitched it with kicked off with gusto, creating a dense, 6 inch head of frothy yeasty yumminess on top of the fermenting wort. Airlock went bubblybubble and all was well and brewsy.

*) a German hefeweizen strain, chock full of estery aromas and whatnot

But after eight days at a steady 18-20°C, my ordinary Safale US-05 yeast should be done already.

Measurements indicate fermentation is still ongoing, or at the very least incomplete.

1012 SG, coming from 1049.
Blurry picture is in fact an opaque measuring glass.

More confounding still: that spanky Valentine refractometer the Missus so kindly donated to science (i.e. me) showed consistent readings at brew day: 1049 OG (13.9% Brix) but is way off at this stage, showing a measly 1025 SG (6.3% Brix) which should be around 1008 or lower (2.1% Brix) at fermentation's end. Whatever the state of my yeast at this time, both the refractometer and the densimeter should show consistent, nearly identical readings.

Whichever is more accurate, that yeast is still going on, but decidedly slower than I'd expected. Perhaps it's typical for the strain, something I plan to ask the lab.
This is my first time using White Labs, and this particular Hefeweizen strain in particular, and the Yinterwebzthingy tells me 14 days in primary is not unheard of. Since the airlock shows more activity is ongoing, I'll take my chances and keep things as they are.

Meantime, I got me a sample and oooh baby is this brew coming together or what?

Plush yeast is being bored by beer.

It's a weizen, so yes, it's cloudy to the point of looking like anisette. At this stage, it's flat with a mild tingle, but I don't expect I'll be carbonating this very strongly. The smell is Hefe all the way: a citrusy, estery fragrance, with hints of banana and clove, and juuuust enough hops to spark my interest. Odd, since I was aiming for about 45 IBU, which is about 3 times more than a typical weizen, but at this stage, this is floating my boat all the way to Beervana and back. The original plan was to dryhop the fermented beer with Citra, but as it is, I'm tempted to split the batch and leave half as it is: it really is that yummy.

Plus: be silly to call it Citra Inferno if it only contained a whiff of Citra, wouldn't it?

Not sure how the almost soapy fruity esters  of the yeast would combine with more hops, and I'm inclined to forego Citra, which can impart a pepperminty flavour sometimes, in favour of the more grapefruity tang of Amarillo, which I'd planned for a variant of this brew later on. Choice, the brewer's nighmarish muse...

Pretty stoked about this brew, which puts more forcus on yeast than I'm used to, but is pleasing me no end, even in this immature state. With or without extra Citra (Amarillo? Something else even?), I've a feeling this one's a keeper.

Greetz

Jo

Brewday!

HoppySlosh brews again!

What with spring being somewhat delayed, I had ample time to contemplate my next brewing endeavour. Looking foward to mowing the lawn and doing other potentially dehydrating chores around the house during the summer, I'm brewing a light, hoppy wheat beer this time; an American style hefe-weizen (or a Germanic Murkan wheat, if you will).

First things first: I need to learn how to control my brewing volumes so I'm applying science in the most advanced way possible to gauge the volumes in my kettle:

The Graded Spoon

Yes, that's a (rather oversized) plastic spoon, graded by yours truly to indicate how much liquid is in my kettle. Sometimes, all you need to improve the quality of life is a permanent marker. And an oversized spoon.

Onward onward as the day wanes: mashing was a breeze. I was prepared for all kinds of disaster (*) after reading that wheat tends to clog up the filter bed, but my grain behaved perfectly, and I got a good 22 liters of turbid wort out of the tun.

Steep steep.

*) speaking of disaster, the most important rule in brewing can be neatly summed up as this: Always check your valves. Nothing spoils the mood quite like having to start mopping when you're not even 5 minutes into the mash.

I applied a new technique (well, new for me at least) called first wort hopping.

Not hard to guess what that means.

I've been told the early addition will smoothe out the bitterness from the early hops, so here goes nothing.

Sparging. Note the state of alertness of the nearby mop.



Sparging went well, although I did forget to properly mash out (again). Forgot to take a pic of the pre-boil wort, but one thing I like about wheat is that it naturally clouds the wort, which means I could stop worrying about a super-clean sparge for a change.
No pic of the boil either, so you'll need to take my word for it: I added liberal doses of Centennial, Amarillo and Citra.

Post-boil tampering with the counterflow cooler.

My fifth attempt at brewing and I finally figured out how to properly cool: let gravity do the work. As you can see in the pic, I pour my boiled (and still piping hot) wort in my mash tun again, which will now serve as a filter tun. What's not in the pic is how this time I placed the tun on a stool on top of the counter, raising it high enough to no longer be a pain during cooling. Higher altitude means more hydraulic pressure chasing my wort through the cooler, and less chance of flowback or halted cooling. 

Should have thought of that four sessions ago, but at least I'm improving.

After cooling, only one thing was missing. Well, two really.

Some yeast, and a lovely assistant to pitch it.

I'm using a bit of a character yeast this time: the German Hefe Weizen from White Labs (WLP300 in case you're interested) will impart spicy notes to the beer, which I hope will complement the hoppy aromas.

Fitted the airlock, forestalled any domestic disputes by cleaning up the kitchen, and a good six hours later, the yeast was going glugluglug like clockwork. Next morning, a good 5 inch of thick yeasty froth confirmed all was well with Brew#5. I'll give it about a week in primary (depending on airlock activity and density measurements), after which I'll rack it to secondary, with a generously added amout of Citra hops. From the whiffs I got off the airlock so far, this may prove to be quite drinkable. 

More news as the brew progresses!

Until then,

Greetz

Jo

Neuen Horizonten verdammt!

Way out of my comfort zone, on the murk side of Holland, and ever so discreetly bordering on Belgium proper, lies Germany.

Map not entirely up to date.

Remember what I said about Belgians and their low esteem of foreign beer? Well, all of that applies particularly to Germany, whom whe've still not forgiven for that string of military fisticuffs sometime ago.

German beer, to most Belgians, is perhaps even worse than Dutch beer for a single reason. In our opinion (and I must stress this is just me voicing the average Belgian's culturally dictated appraisal of foreign beer, and certainly not my very personal own) the Dutch  are merely incapable of brewing anything other than nauseating lager. Just order any commercial Dutch pilsner and you'll come to understand us backward Belgians a bit better
The Germans are worse because they choose to brew bland beers. Yes, the infamous reinheitsgebot puts certain (stringent) limitations on German breweries, and to the historically more liberal Belgian brewer, this equals bland, uninspired, dull beer.

But hark!

My buddy Frank (no, not that Frank, the other Frank again, the one...oh whatever, just Frank will do for now) made a generous contribution to my beer cellar recently, and among the acquired stash was this charming fellow:

Naturally opaque yeasty white-beer , in proper English.

My first real weissbier (I'm deliberately not counting any Belgian white beers or blanchekes, nor any of the more ubiquitous German weissbiers you might encounter the world over), this came highly recommended by just about anyone interested in beer, as it's something of a standard for the style.

Hefeweizen (weizen and weiss would appear to be synonymous) is a wheat beer (meaning it's mostly made from malted wheat, instead of malted barley), with a pronounced estery flavour coming from a particular strain of top-fermenting yeast.

The Paulaner pours spectacularly, with the densest, pillowiest head I've ever had the pleasure to encounter. True to style, the beer isn't clear but shows a typical wheat haze, which makes the warm orange colour really stand out. Beautiful pour, this one, and my Belgian roots are already withering.

That nose. Oh Saint Arnoldus blessed be, that nose is out of this world.
Coming back to Belgium, ever since beer got stuck in the elevator of trendy beverages, "Belgian" is now officially a flavour, rather than a denominator of nationality or origin.. A tripel can be whatever you want, but if you say it has a "Belgian" taste to it, even beer geeks in Singapore will know what you mean(*).
Why am I bordercrossing back to my home turf here? Because if Paulaner's nose is at all representative of the hefeweizen style, then "German" should be a flavour too.

*) especially of you throw in other buzz words like funk and barnyard.

Where Belgian yeasty beers tend to focus on fruits (banana, citrus, apple, pear, what have you), this hefeweizen displays a dazzling aray of spices, ranging from clove to nutmeg, and probably some others in between. Words fall short, but this beer smells amazing.
In the mouth, you get that same spicy, mulled impression. Combined with the naturaly crispy sourness which all wheat bears display, what you have here is an immensely drinkable, yet surprisingly complex beer. A beer which instantly makes me regret any diminutive comments I may have ever made regarding Prussian beer.

Frank's gift did not end there. Paulaner Hefeweizen is a benchmark in its own right, but so is this one:

Schneider Weisse Tap 5: Meine Hopfenweisse

Schneider has a range of these "weizens", numbered and somewhat quaintly named. To turn language barriers into true Iron Curtain-style obstacles, this Hopfenweisse is actually a weisse doppelbock.

Yeah. Makes more sense in the glass.

Not just any doppelbock, but a hoppy one to boot. In a way, this makes the Schneider5 something between a weizen and an IPA.

Pour is remarkbly clear (wait for it): even though it's a lager (which no, is not synonymous with cheap ass pilsner you heathen), it's still a wheat-based beer, and hence I'd expected it to be hazy. But no, the first half (waaaaaaait for iiiiitttt) presented as a dark, lightly coppery lager, with a lanky head.

In the nose, there's a dazzling burst of hops going on: herbal, piney and resiny, undulating into flowery and back again. Not sure which hops are in this beer, but the nose made me think of some of  the UK ales I've sampled a year ago in London, with an almost soapy character to it. While it's not a hop bomb like so many (often US or NZ) hoppy IPAs, it's definitely a hoppy beer, make no mistake. But like UK hoppy ales, the hops take on a different identity from what we're used to over here. And while the result is a bit alienating, it is (if nothing else) intriguing.
Flavour-wise, weirdness abounds. The strong hop profile, combined with the fruitness of the wheat and the relatively high alcohol content (8.9% ABV) turn this in a perfumed beer, delicate but wafting at the same time. It's nothing like a modern era IPA, despite having a distinctly hoppy profile, and it's nothing like a weizen either, in that the wheat plays second (if not third) fiddle to the hops and (I'm on a limb here) the yeast.
Besides soapy hops (and this sounds less appealing than it really was), there's the fruity, almost lactic tartness of the wheat, and a gammut of spicy yeast: cloves again, mace and a hint of lemon peel, again teased by that ambiguous flowery note.

While very, very tasty, it's also a bit tiresome, as if it were a wheat beer with ADHD. Oh and that remarkably clear pour?

Guess what came with the second half?

Now I'm not fussy about the clairy of my beer. A live beer, a proper living beer, is allowed (nay, expected!) to be a bit hazy. But this is perhaps a bit much. Zoom in on that pic and you'll find bits of debris floating about, happily contributing to a lot of things, but not to aesthetics. The contrast with the clean, clear lager pour of the first half could not be greater if the beer had suddenly lit up a bright blue neon and started humming the theme to Allo Allo.
In other yeasty beers, adding the sediment will emphasise the yeast characteristics, but in this already very yeasty weizen, it added nothing but murk, so I advise pouring it carefully, in a large enough glass, and simply leaving the sediment in the bottle.

So.

Where, except waaaaaay out of my comfort zone, does that leave me?

I'm intrigued. I'd never imagined wheat beers to be this complex, and the fact that they're both German makes me all  boingboing with anticipation: a whole "new" country to explore. So many styles, now famous thanks to the booming craft- and home brew scene, which I know nothing about: alt, weizen, bock, what have you...

These were two fine specimens in their own right, and excellent ambassadors to German brewing. Just by themselves, they've established that there's more to German beer than gallon-sized jugs of watery Oktoberfestbier, and have made of me a man with a mission: to learn more about Germany and its beers and, if at all possible, spread the word across the border, that Prussia is still a force to be reckoned with.

I'll make sure not to mention Ze Var.

Until then,

Greetz

Jo

Brewsflash

Ah. Ah. Get it? Brewsflash? I do crack me up sometimes...

This weekend is Brew Weekend, with lots of things happening to quite a few brews.

Remember the RedCap and the BrueCap?  After more than three months, both are still utterly, well, still.


Like so, only less like so.

But fear not: science cures all. Remember how (and no I'm not deliberately doing that annoying "read my older posts" thing; consider it a necessity) the yeast in that particular brew was actually recuperated from a commercial bottle of Moinette? Since fermentation in the bottle wasn't happening, and the sugar I added during bottling wasn't being eaten by anyone, I decided to repeat the exercise and steal some more yeast.

This time from a particularly impressive Belgian IPA.




So I beheaded all my Brue'n'RedCaps, injected about 4ml of frothing, bubbly yeast slush into the bottles and recapped them (of course taking care to use appropriately coloured caps). This technique, for those interested in brewing-even-if-doesn't-directly-involve-inbibing, is called krausening and, if applied, is more typically a step in primary fermentation, but hey, I figured it would might work just fine during the bottling stage. The brew is banished to the hot room again, where, in a few days time, some carbonation should be happening.

Brew#2, the Torakun-redubbed-Kohaku, is all gone(*) so I'm calling that a success, even if there were some flaws I'd like to correct when I decide to revisit the recipe.

*) "gone" means I might have a few stashed away at an undisclosed location, for future study

The yet-to-be-named Brew#3, of which I spoke only briefly, is nearing the end of secondary fermentation. I'll be bottling it later today so expect a tasting session in a week or two.

And Brew#4 is bubbling away happily in primary. Despite having taken the lessons from Brew#3 to heart, I had a bit of a setback when the filterbed collapsed, leaving me with 5 gallons (sounds so much more butch than 20 liters) of wort sitting on top of 12 pounds of mashed-out grains and not moving anywhere at all. Some emergency patching of my filter bucket, accompanied by the liberal usage of four letter words and curses towards St.Arnoldus saw the filter bed fixed and the beer (phew) rescued from becoming sewage. I daresay this is going to be an interesting brew. Posted I will keep you.

Until then!

Greetz,

Jo

How's the beer, you say?

A long overdue status update on my brews then.

Red&BruCap isn't doing very well. After some weeks in warm storage, followed by two more in cold, the beer still refuses to carbonate. And while I think it's tasty, I never intended it to be served flat.

Just so.

My guess is that the estimated 11% ABV is just too much for the Moinette yeast to handle. Graphically speaking, the yeast has pee-ed itself to death.

That picture in your mind should be graphic enough already.

I'm going to try and be patient with this one, emploing various tricks of the trade to get this secondary fermentation thing on a roll. If temperature control, turning the bottles upside down and playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik don't work, I'll need to manually reopen every bottle, add some sturdy yeast, and recap'em.

But I'm still filled with hope about this one.

No not that one.

Torakun, my little dojo tiger, is doing well. I siphoned the beer off the yeast sediment after a good week of lagering, and then put it back in the celler, with some added Pacific Jade hops for dry-hopping. Lab tests run during the first week of lagering were optimistic: the hop is robustly present, and the Munich malt gives the beer a certain toothiness which is fitting for a wee tiger. One carboy will become the KIAI version, with a secret ingredient added for extra punch.

Sometime this week, it'll be bottling time again, and Bob, you better make sure this tiger doesn't become another sick puppy.

Until then!

Greetz

Jo

Alchemy in action

It really is a bit of a miracle how brewing suddenly turns from chemistry to unadulterated alchemy. The simple introduction of a benevolent strain of micro-organisms is enough to trigger the magic, and turn a sugary bitter concoction into, well, beer.

For the past week, my beer has been fermenting in the boiler room. Every other day or so, I need to do that slosh slosh slosh thing to stir the yeast from its slumber and get it working again, but so far, it's been doing what it's supposed to do.




In layman's terms: booze & bubbles



For the last 24 hours or so, fermentation seems to have stopped altogether. Whether this is a good sign or not remains to be determined.
With science!

CO2 intoxication causes blurry Internets

What you're seeing here is a densimeter in action, which measures the specific gravity of the brew.
Dumbed-down a little, all it does is float in a liquid (like beer). The denser the liquid, the more it floats. The more sugar is left in the beer, the denser it will be. More sugar in the beer means the yeast hasn't finished its plate and needs to take seconds. Or thirdses.

In other word: a high SG reading means the yeast still has work to do. And 1020 is still quite high, even though the OG (original specific gravity, before fermentation was initiated) was 1085.

So I'm leaving the brew to stand for a few more days, protected by a cover of carbon dioxide and yeasty froth. Either it will wake up again with the munchies, or it won't. If it doesn't, then perhaps it's just "used up" (I seem to've cultivated a yeast which is renowned for its sluggishness), or perhaps it can't handle the booze.

Alcohol is, after all, a by product of yeast fermentation.
Refuse, if you will.
Saccharomyces sewage.

Yeast-pee.

Time will tell whether 't is one or t'other.

In the meantime, I discovered that an added advantage of the hydrometer is that you need a considerable sample size to measure the density. About 100 ml should do, and what oh what is a scientist to do with that when the measuring's all done and dealt with?

Right.

Because a good scientist is never wasteful. Although sometimes wasted.

So far, it's beer alright. The malt has lost its saccharine stickiness (thank you, yeasties), and the hops are prominently present. Harshly resin-like, but already mellowing and blending a bit with the solid mouthfeel of the malt. Flat, of course, since the liquid cannot contain the produced carbon dioxide without some sort of pressure keeping it suspended.

A few more days (weeks?) and I'll be lagering. The observant reader may have noticed the utter lack of floating yucky bits in my beer sample. That's all thanks to gravity, and one of the reasons I'll be lagering in a clean vessel in a couple of days (week? please let it be days and not weeks).

Until then!

Greetz

Jo

 

 

Solitary isolation

For its own sake, I have banished my budding beer to warmer climes. For the past few days, fermentation repeatedly ceased, and I had to slosh the bucket to bring the sedimenting yeast back into suspension. Not only will this definitely do no good to clear up my murky brew, it will also lead to all kinds of off flavours I really could do without.
Turns out the Moinette yeast I'm using is a saison yeast, which are notorious for requiring rather high fermentation temperatures. Not that this makes a whole lot of sense to me since saison was a summer beer, and hence brewed in the coldest months of winter, but hey, that's brewers' logic for you.

As I was reluctantly championing the idea of a yeastbox to the Missus, she spoke thusly (more or less verbatim):

"Darling dearest, do you really want to be tinkering with old refrigerators, dangerous electronics, various bits of carpentry and isolation and no doubt highly dangerous equipment and tools, just to build a box to keep your beer warm when we have a perfectly suitable boiler room upstairs?"

Men of the world, take heed: without the collective aid of our Missuses (*), there would be no beer in the world. I'm sure of it.

Because the world would be a poorer place without either.

(*) Missus-es. Not Miss-uses. That's another blog you're searching for.

So up the stairs with the bucket, into the comfortably warm confines of the boiler room, the warmest (and most reliably warm) room in the house. Another slosh slosh slosh just to make sure the yeast knows I'm serious this time, and off to bed.

And yes, the Missus was right, as she so often is. This morning, my beer was steadily churning out CO2 at about one centi-bubblium (that's NuBru speak for "one bubbly fart per minute"), without the need to slosh it around anymore.

A keen eye shall be kept on the evolving brew, and frequent updates shall be posted. For great justice!

Greetz

Jo

Lazy yeast

Not even 48 hours into the main fermentation and the yeast has fallen asleep. Where the airlock was happily bubbling away at one bubble every 5 seconds (I'm not sure if there's a scientific unit of measurement for this, so I shall call it "the bubblium"), this morning I found the fermentation vessel to be sound asleep.
Hibernating.
Comatose.
Flatlined.

A cow of a mild anxiety mooed loudly in my ear all day, and after acquiring some valuable advice from the more expert brewers lurking all over the Interwebzthingy, I decided to shake the whole thing back to life. At 1052 SG, the beer (yes, I told you already it's called beer by now) contains far too much fermentable sugar to even contemplate lagering.

Let alone bottling.

Grabbed the bucket and slosh slosh slosh until all the yeast was back in suspension and now we're back to a yeast which is happily churning again at a rate of roughly 1 bubblium.

Hooray, rejoice, and go yeast, go!

Greetz

Jo

You're starving. Now go on a diet.

All right, you can all stop worrying now, the Yeast family are fine.


After transferring my captivated yeast colony to a larger container, it looked like all activity had ceased. Turns out they were starving: the SG(*) had dropped to about 1014, which is way below the comfort zone of my budding buddies.

(*) The specific gravity of a liquid describes how much more dense than water it is. In the case of wort, it is indicative of how much sugar is still available for the yeast to munch, and hence to grow, on.

So I topped up the broth with some extra wort, cleverly calculated to be of a sufficient SG to come up with a total of 1040 again, which should be enough (*) to get the yeast going again.

(*) But not too much. Yeast can pretty picky and delicate, especially at the cultivating stage. It wouldn't do to overcompensate by dousing my recuperating colony with wort of, say, SG 1080. Just like you don't save a starving child by forcefeeding it a double Whopper with extra cheese.

So, feed the hungry so the thirst shall have drink. Eventually. The Yeasts were happy with theirextra bento boxes, and after a few hours, a nice white head had reformed on top of the wort (no pic, you'll have to take my word for it).

With still about 4 days to go till brewing day, I heeded the advice of the learned and stopped feeding the yeast for a while. Fitted the bottle with an airlock and allowed them to come to rest for a bit.

Airlock. No seriously.

Three benefits from this resting period:

1. I won't have to keep feeding the yeast for 4 more days. It's a bit of a hassle, what with the risk of infection imposing a serious level of sanity from my part.
2. Extending from this, I will have a manageable volume of yeast starter by the time I need to pitch it, instead of 5 liters of the stuff
3. the yeast, which now somewhere its 100th generation since I started cultivating it, can have its first fling with anaerobic respiration and (yay) alcohol

Tomorrow evening, D-day-minus-one, I'll feed it again so it'll be all ready and gung-ho by the time I get to pitch it on D-day.

Till next time!

Greetz

Jo

Not quite settled after moving

The Yeast family have all moved out to a bigger place. Since I'll need to scale up the yeast starter in order to achieve a decent volume when the time comes to pitch, I've transferred them to a 5 liter jug.

This morning, they looked just fine.

After aeration

However, when left unattended, the head seems to subside somewhat, and turn a not-quite-so-pleasant off-beige color.

I'm not sure what's causing this, but it could just be that the yeast is slowing down for lack of oxygen. Carbonation has almost completely halted, so it looks like it's gone back to sleep.

Not sure how to take it from here, but it's clear that I need to do something.

Greetz

Jo


 

Go forth, and multiply

My yeast is doing good. Not great, if I'm to believe the words of more experienced brewers, but good enough to make my happy.

It's been five days since I kidnapped a few milliliters of yeast out of a Moinette bottle, and it looks like they're doing fine. Scaling up the volume of wort to allow the yeast to propagate has brought me to about 400ml of yeast primer now. With six more days to go till brewing day, I'm in good spirits alright.

Time to look for a bigger apartment

Some carbonation going on, with a steady stream of tiny bubbles rising from the slurry at the bottom to the white foam on top. In fact, so much carbonation that I've replaced the screw-top cap with a wad of cotton. I've had some messy experience with exploding bottles of ginger beer in the past and I'm not going there again.

So tonight, the Saccharomyces family are moving out, and into a bigger vessel.

Stay tuned!

Greetz

Jo

 

Life!

This were looking grim this morning. The first rays of the mid-september sun awoke the sound of dismayed groaning, a bit of wailing and the occasional gnashing of the teeth.

The surface of my slowly awakening yeast colony was dotted by little white islands of, for want of a better word, muck.

This can't be good, can it?

That, my fellow uninitiated yeast enthusiasts, looks like mould to me. A quick and cautious sniff, however, revealed no suspicious odours, so I left things as they were. But I admit: the spirit of the moment was lost and I was about ready to pour the contents of the flask, microbiological denizens and all, into the sink.

Read that last paragraph again. Notice the past tense? Notice how the tension builds up, and you're left wondering how things went from there?

Oh enough already, here's what things look like right now:

This must be good, mustn't it?

Now hold your horses, I know what you're thinking. "But that looks even muckier than before! Why don't you trash the whole thing for it starts to stink up the place?"

But no! See that foamy mess between the clots of the other white mess? That's the yeast head forming! We're in the clear! They live!

THEY!

LIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVEEE!

(A quick recap for the slow-witted or the unaware: the yeast I'm cultivating is a top-fermenting yeast. This means that as it gets more active, it'll form a white, dense head of yeasty froth on top of the wort. And what we're seeing here is the birth of that very head. Yes, you read that right: we're watching the birth of a head)

But wait! It gets even better!

There's a reason why the above is a movie clip and not another boring still picture: it moves! There's life in this muck, and the rising bubbles indicate that the yeast is busy producing carbon dioxide. Of course, I don't want it to be producing too much of that; I'd rather have it focus on producing more yeast, but hey, we're on a roll here!

All this notwithstanding, I'm still set to start a parallel batch of Westmalle yeast. Because pessimism isn't all about the glass being half empty, but also about being prepared for the worst. As long as the yeast isn't more active, it's still at risk of being infected by all sorts of nasties which consider wort to be the ideal breeding grounds. And I don't want moulds, bacteria or duck-billed platypi pissing in my wort, thank you very much.

Go little yeasties, go! You're doing great!

Greetz

Jo

 

No life?

Things aren't looking at all great for my yeast.

After four days, the bottle is looking decidedly lifeless:

Cueue dramatic music in minor key

Could be that I collected bottle yeast instead of  primary yeast. After all, when fermenting the wort, we want the yeast to be super active, converting the wort into beer at the best rate achievable. Once bottled, the only thing we want to yeast to do is produce enough carbon dioxide to make it fizz.
Too little of this and the beer is flat and lifeless and not all appealing.
Too much and the bottle might go ballistic at some random point, or at best gush out of the bottle as soon as you apply an opener to it.

So it could be just that: I may have been cultivating a bottle of low-activity bottle yeast.

...or these could all be corpses...

 

Off to find some apple juice to set up a parallel batch of something else. From what I hear, the monks at Westmalle use a yeast strain which is quite responsive to the treatment I've been attempting, so I might as well give it a shot.










Eight days to go until brewing day. Getting just a bit worried now...

Greetz

Jo

Life?

Day three of the Yeast Thief experiment. So far, I'm not getting much response from mrs. Yeast

Here's the bottle yesterday evening, after giving it a bit of shaking aeration:

 

 

 And here's the bottom of the bottle today (before shaking):

Those floating bits and the white sludge on the bottom is yeast, and perhaps it's my childlike optimism, but it looks like there's now more than I poured in three days ago.
While that sounds good, I'm not sure it is. I wouldn't be to surprised if what we see here as dead yeast cells, and I think it's obvious why I don't want those.

Some advice-gathering revealed that

• my wort may be too heavy (SG 1065 is good for my brew, but may be too much for the weakened bottle yeast at the moment)
• I may have "drowned" the yeast in too much wort. A small initial volume, increased exponentially (doubled each day) is preferrable, although I don't really understand how that should make much difference.

Anyhoo, later today (or tomorrow), I'll try a similar experiment, using apple juice as starting "wort", in smaller volumes, upgrading to lighter wort if and when the yeast wakes up.
Alongside, I'll keep this bottle and see how it evolves.

Come on li'l yeasties! I'm rooting for you!

Greetz

Jo

 

The Yeast Thief

Brewing beer seems like a lot of work, but the hardest work will not be done by me but by this little mama:

Saccharomyces cerevisae or brewer's yeast is the magic ingredient that'll transfor this somewhat dubiously smelling liquid called wort into actual beer.







The yeast will ferment all the sugars in the wort (well, almost all but near enough for now), converting them into

• more yeast (good but not the real aim) 
• carbon dioxide (good because I want fizz and, all innuendo aside, a bit of head)
• alcohol (which sets beer aside from pop in the first place)

I could just buy yeast from specialised stores, like I did with most of my other ingredients, but those 6 years of academic toil and meddling with micro-organisms have instilled in me a willingness to do this the hard way: I'm going to cultivate my own yeast! **insert Cackling Laughter à la Mad Scientist about here somewhere**

Well..."my own" means "a succesful brewer's" in this case, and that brewer's not me. Not yet anyway.

Dupont brews an excellent beer called Moinette which has a basic flavour I find absolutely charming: fruity and full-bodied, reminiscent of UK ales and hence perfectly suited for my first attempts at brewing an IPA. Since Moinette has about 8.5% ABV, it should be capable of rousing my wort to acceptable levels of booziness, as I'm aiming for about 7% myself. 

My attempts to break into the Dupont brewery and liberate a couple billions of yeast cells from their labs were sadly unsuccessful (but that's another story) so I decided to take a more legally and morally acceptable approach at  pilfering by collecting the yeast sediment from a bottle of Moinette I happened to have lying (*) about in my cellar.

(*) standing, really. All beer snobs store their beer upright. Unless it's gueuze. Because we like to be picky about beer.

So:

1. made a small batch of wort by adding 16g of wort extract to 100ml of water
2. brought to the boil, which also sterilises the wort
3. disinfected a 1l yeast bottle with alcohol
4. poured the hot wort into the bottle and closed it
5. cooled the wort to hand temperature by swirling it under the cold tap
6. opened the Moinette
7. carefully decanted the beer into a glass, leaving about one centimeter of beer, along with the sediment
8. swirled the beer bottle to bring the sediment back into suspension
9. disinfected the mouth of the beer bottled with alcohol (you never know where that has been)
10. poured the sediment into the yeast bottle

Drum roll! Applause! Californian wave! Cheering and chanting and high fives aplenty! 6 years of grueling university tutelage prove themselves well spent.

Witness the star players as they line up for encores:

 

Now the hardest bit: waiting for my babies to multiply.

The tension is killing me.

Greetz

Jo