Homebrew: Fresh Hop Ale

I collected this year’s hop harvest two weeks ago, and today we finally brewed a beer with them. This is the first time I’m using homegrown hops, so am really looking forward to tasting the final beer! Technically, this wasn’t actually a fresh hop ale, since I dried the hop cones before using them – but I’ll call this a fresh hop ale anyways. Since I’m not sure about the alpha acid content of these hops, we decided to use them only as flame-out hops, and instead use some Herkules at the beginning of the boil. This way we will hopefully extract the maximum aroma out of them as well. The homegrown hops weren’t very aromatic, so I’m expecting mostly grassy flavors and less of the typical citrus and pine resin. But hopefully I’ll be positively surprised! The post-boil wort had a slight perfume-like tone, which might have been hop-derived. For the malt bill, we went with a very simple 90% Maris Otter and 10% Carapils to an OG of around 1.050. This should let the hops shine (if they do). For the yeast, we used a really fruity ale strain that I’ve developed at work (more about that in a future post). I’m hoping it will compliment the hops, and make for a refreshing and crisp fresh hop ale! We will see in a couple of weeks!

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This was the first time we brewed at our ‘new’ basement brewery (we moved there 1.5 years ago – yes, we’ve been extremely slow with the renovation), and I’m happy to say that everything went really smoothly. We were done in 5 hours and 30 minutes, reached almost 70% brewhouse efficiency, and the ventilation system (a really powerful inline exhaust fan) worked amazingly well. Looking forward to brewing a bit more regularly from now on!

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Homebrew: Wedding Dunkel

Time for another wedding beer. This time not for my own wedding, but for two of my friends’ wedding. The groom requested one dark and malty beer (the wedding is in January, so that would fit with the cold weather) and one pale and fresh beer. I’ve noticed that the most popular beers during events, where the majority of the people are not ‘beer nerds’, are balanced and easy-to-drink beers. American Pale Ales with a relatively mild bitterness seem to be especially popular, so I thought I’d go with a remake of my own Wedding APA for the pale and fresh beer. For the dark and malty beer, I decided to go with a dark lager.

I haven’t brewed many dark lagers before, but decided to go for a malt base dominated by Maris Otter and Munich malt. To this I added hints of Chocolate and Dark Crystal malt to give some color and flavor. I kept it simple with the hops, and decided to go with Tettnang at moderate amounts to a fairly low IBU. For the yeast I chose to use W-34/70, which is my favorite homebrew lager yeast because of the ease-of-use (just sprinkled two packs on top of the 21 litres of wort) and the clean and crisp flavor profile. The brewday went extremely smoothly, and 21 liters of wort are now fermenting strongly at 12C. The aroma coming from the airlock is really nice, which is always a positive sign! The wedding is in about three months, which will mean I will have some time to lager the beer once it has finished fermenting.

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Homebrew: Bavarian Hefeweizen

I’ve again been lazy and haven’t updated the blog for a while. There hasn’t been that much interesting to post though. About three weeks ago I brewed a Bavarian Hefeweizen for a friend, and today I decided to pop the first bottle as quality control. The recipe was really simple, with the malt base being 60% wheat malt and 40% pale ale malt. I hopped with Tettnanger to a modest 16 IBU, and fermented the wort with WLP380, supposedly the Schneider Weisse yeast.

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The beer pours with a hazy golden-yellow, almost grey, color. A fluffy white head is formed, but it collapses a bit too quickly for a Hefeweizen. A typical wheat beer appearance. The haze is both yeast- and protein-derived as it was quite clear before I put it in the fridge.

The aroma is typical Hefeweizen, with tones of cloves and banana. The spicy 4-vinylguaiacol dominates the aroma profile, but there are lots of fruity esters present as well. The aroma is quite one-dimensional, but I guess it fits the style quite well.

As with the aroma, the flavour profile is dominated by spicy phenols and fruity esters. The amounts of esters and higher alcohols almost go a bit too far as I get hints of solvent as well. On the other hand, it has only been three weeks since pitching, so these will probably subdue a bit with some time in the bottle. There are some malty and doughy tones hidden in the background, but I can’t detect much hop presence at all. As it should be in a Hefeweizen. The carbonation level is high and the body quite light. Refreshing and quite easy to drink.

Overall this is an okay Hefeweizen. I’m not that big fan of the style, so I have a hard time judging how successful this beer is. It is still very young, so it will probably change a bit with more time in the bottle. There are definitely a lot of esters and phenols present, as it should be, but there might even be a bit too much of them at the moment. Perhaps this could have been fermented at a slightly lower temperature?

Hop Harvest

Today I harvested the cones off the hop plants in my yard. They might not have been perfectly ripe, but we have some cold nights coming up and I didn’t want to risk them getting destroyed by frost. They were smelling really good though! I collected 400 grams of hops in total, which after drying will probably fall to around 80 grams. To dry the cones, I spread them out in three layers on a steel mesh and put a fan underneath to recirculate the air. I’m hoping to brew a beer with them in a couple of weeks!

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Small Update

Just thought I’d write a short update on the recent beers I brewed for my upcoming wedding. They are all tasting really nice, which I’m happy about. Here are some short tasting notes:

Wedding Pils – Dry finish, grainy malts, and a floral hoppiness that ends with a nice bitterness.

Wedding Blond – Lots of spicy phenols and fruity esters from the yeast. Not my favorite style, but this is quite a nice Belgian-style ale.

Wedding Hybrid – Lots of hop aroma combined with fruity esters. A slight hint of spicy phenols in the flavor. APA meets Wit. I like!

Wedding APA – Citrus and floral hops mainly that end in a moderate bitterness. Some maltiness as well, and not a completely dry finish.

Wedding IPA – Lots of citrus and tropical fruits from the hops together with a huge bitterness. A really successful IPA!

Also, here is a progress picture of the ‘bar’ I’m building for the wedding. Five homebrews will be available on tap. I still need to paint it and build a drip tray, but it should be ready in a couple of days. Really looking forward to testing it!

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Homebrew: Wedding IPA – American IPA

Yesterday I brewed the fifth and final batch of beer for my wedding in August (see previous posts for the Wedding Pils, Wedding Blond, Wedding Hybrid, and Wedding APA): an American IPA loaded with hops and fermented with Conan. I’ve brewed a slightly similar recipe before (see here), and while it was a nice beer, it ended up a bit too sweet with WLP007. This time I’m changing up the hop bill slightly based on what I have in the freezer, and I’ll be fermenting the wort with Conan. I’m hoping for a hoppy and bitter IPA, with loads of fruity aromas from both the hops and the yeast.

The malt bill is similar to the APA I brewed last week, and it consists of Maris Otter, Munich, CaraPils and CaraAmber.  I mashed quite low (63C) in order to get a very fermentable wort. I’ve used Conan a couple of times before and I’ve ended up with around 78% attenuation. I aimed for an original gravity just below 1.070, in order to get a beer with around 7.5% ABV. For the hops, I chose to bitter with Herkules (using up the last from a 100g bag), added some Cascade and Centennial during the boil, and at flameout I added even more Cascade and Centennial together with some Amarillo. The bitterness levels should be around 70-80 IBU, depending on how much the whirlpool hops contribute. I pitched a 1.5L starter of Conan after I had cooled the wort down to around 20C. I placed the fermenter in my fermentation fridge and set the fermentation temperature to 19C. I checked the fermenter 24 hours later, and it was fermenting violently with krausen coming out of the airlock. After a quick clean-up things were looking good again. Man it was smelling good inside the fermentation fridge!

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Homebrew: Wedding APA – American Pale Ale

Today I brewed the fourth and penultimate batch of beer for my wedding in August (see previous posts for the Wedding Pils, Wedding Blond, and Wedding Hybrid): an American Pale Ale loaded with Cascade and Centennial. I’ve brewed variations of this recipe several times before (one, two and three), so I know exactly what to expect. The resulting beer should have a hop-dominated aroma, with tones of grapefruit, pine resin and floral perfume, while the taste should feature a lightly bready maltiness together with a citrusy and floral hoppiness that ends in moderate bitterness and semi-dry finish. All in all, it should be a really easy to drink, yet still flavorful beer. The beers have been crowd favorites in the past, so am predicting that this keg will be the first to run out during the wedding.

The malt bill is simple, consisting of Maris Otter, Munich and CaraPils.  These should, together with the relatively high mash temperature (67C) and low-attenuating yeast (WLP002), yield a solid backbone to the beer despite the low ABV%. I aimed for an original gravity just below 1.050, in order to get a beer with around 5% ABV. For the hops, I chose to bitter with Herkules (since I still have some left from a 100g bag), and at flameout I added a large dose of Cascade and Centennial. The bitterness levels should be around 40 IBU, depending on how much the whirlpool hops contribute. I pitched a 1.5L starter of WLP002 after I had cooled the wort down to around 20C. I placed the fermenter in my fermentation fridge and set the fermentation temperature to 18C. I like using ‘English Ale’ yeast in my APAs and IPAs, since I think the esters they contribute go well with fruity hops. The high flocculation is also a bonus. Hopefully this one turns out as tasty as my previous brews of this recipe.

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Physicochemical analysis of Sahti

Last summer, me and a couple of colleagues visited the 23rd National Championship in Sahti brewing, which was organized in northern Espoo. The purpose of our visit was not to compete or just drink Sahti, but rather we were there to collect samples for a research project: we had decided it was time that a thorough physical and chemical analysis on Sahti was to be performed.

First of all, what is Sahti? Well, Sahti is a traditional farmhouse beer that has been produced and consumed in Finland for centuries. The Sahti beers that I have tried have all been sweet and alcoholic, with strong yeast tones in the flavour. The aroma of isoamyl acetate (banana) has particularly stood out. If you are interested in a more thorough introduction, then you can head over to this blog. For instructions (in Finnish) on how to make your own Sahti at home, you can check out this blog.

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© Nesster / Flickr

We collected samples from 12 random Sahti at the Championships (all from different parts of the country). We then did some thorough analysis on these samples, including: ABV%, residual extract, IBU, colour, foam stability, sugar profile, organic acid profile, higher alcohol profile, ester profile, phenolic acid profile, 4-vinylguaiacol content, and finally we looked for juniper-derived components with GC/MS. We also analyzed seven commercial beers as references (one Sahti, two Pale Lagers, two Hefeweizen, and two Porters).

There was quite a lot of variation between the samples, but in general the Sahti had quite high ABV%, residual extract and ester concentrations, as was expected. The isoamyl acetate (banana aroma) concentration was really high in some of the Sahti (up to around 14.5 mg/L). Since Sahti is unhopped or lightly hopped, the bitterness values were low. Also, since Sahti is typically uncarbonated or lowly carbonated, the samples had really poor foam stability. All samples also had 4-vinylguaiacol (clove-like aroma, typically found in Hefeweizens and Belgian-style ales) concentrations above the flavour threshold. This is a presumably a result of the use of Finnish baker’s yeast. It can be concluded that Sahti indeed is a unique beer style, with some very interesting properties. I’m not that big of a fan myself, but I can understand the fascination behind the style.

You can download a pre-print version (i.e. it hasn’t been formatted yet) of the publication here.

Abstract:

Sahti, a strong, unhopped farmhouse beer flavoured with juniper is still actively brewed in rural areas in Finland. Presented here is the first comprehensive analysis of the physical and chemical properties of this unique beer style. Twelve sahti samples from the southwest of Finland were analysed and while properties varied, the beers generally had high levels of alcohol (mean = 7.9% ABV) and high residual extract (mean = 9.5 °P). Foam stability was negligible, as is typical for the style, and glycerol concentrations at 3.1 – 4.7 g/l were higher than in reference beers (commercial lager, wheat beer and porter). Both of these features may be attributed to the very high gravity conditions employed in brewing sahti beers. Bitterness levels were relatively low (3 – 13 IBU) due to the absence or moderate use of hops. All samples contained detectable levels of the clove-like compound 4-vinylguaiacol due to the use of baker’s rather than brewer’s yeast for brewing. Concentrations of higher alcohols and esters were high, with many individual aroma compounds being above the normal flavour thresholds. Results have highlighted the uniqueness of this style of beer in comparison to commercially available beers and have contributed to our understanding of the reasons for the particular sensorial properties of this traditional beer style.

Homebrew: Wedding Hybrid – American Pale ‘Lager’

Today it was time to brew the third batch of beer for my wedding in August (see my previous posts for the Wedding Pils and Wedding Blond): an American Pale Ale-like beer, fermented with one of my newly created A62×C902 lager yeast hybrids. I’m not really sure what to expect from the beer, but I’m hoping for a really fruity aroma and flavour. Apart from the large amount of experimental fermentations we’ve done with the yeast hybrids at work, we have also fermented a bigger batch of ‘typical’ lager wort with one of the hybrids, which we then kegged and taste-tested. That beer at least had a really fruity flavour, with plenty of ethyl esters and isoamyl acetate. That wort was relatively lightly hopped, so it will be really interesting to see how the yeast aromas go along with a more heavily hopped beer. I’m hoping for bold flavours, yet still an easy-to-drink beer.

The recipe might seem a bit complicated, as it features six different malts and five hop varieties. This is because I’m using up some opened malt and hop bags. I’m hoping that the ingredients come together nicely, and that the flavours aren’t too muddled in the final beer. The malt bill consists mainly of some Pilsner and Maris Otter malt as base, with a hefty portion of Munich malt to lend some more breadiness. The rest of the malt bill consists of some CaraPils, oat flakes and Crystal 6oL, in order to give the beer some increased mouthfeel and a hint of caramel. I aimed for an original gravity of around 1.050, in order to get a beer with around 5% ABV. For the hops, I chose to bitter with some leftover Styrian Goldings and Simcoe, and at flameout I added a mixture of Amarillo, Citra, Saphir and Simcoe. I aimed to keep the bitterness levels quite low and instead concentrate on a massive hop flavor and aroma. I pitched a 2.5L starter of one of my lager yeast hybrids after I had cooled the wort down to around 17C. I kegged the Pilsner yesterday (it was tasting awesome by the way!), so my fermentation fridge was free again. I set the fermentation temperature to 15C, and 6 hours after pitching there was already slight activity in the airlock. Fingers crossed that this turns into an awesome beer!

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