As an experiment, I drew off a portion of pale ale wort last weekend and put it outside over night to see if I could get spontaneous fermentation.

It being the middle of summer and a little on the warm side I fully expect whatever I get to be undrinkable, but I might try mixing it. Spontaneous fermentation is normally started when it is 16° C outside because that favors yeast over other organisms enough to make the final product drinkable.

The normal way to start spontaneous fermentation is to cool the wort in a coolship, a large metal tray about a foot deep, in the open air and let the organisms naturally drop in.

Click the image for the ridiculously large sized version.

I used cooled wort because I was making another beer and couldn’t be bothered to measure hot wort. The side-effect is that maybe this little experiment will be drinkable despite it being in the 20°-26° range.

I left the wort out on a porch overnight until mid-day. Fermentation started about three days later. After about a week, the beer doesn’t look like a normal fermentation. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but if you know what forms large bubbles on top of the wort that seem to last for days at a time feel free to inform me.

The aroma is intriguing. It smells very much of red currant with a hint of green apple and the aroma is really strong for something still in the early stages of fermentation. I haven’t tasted it yet. I figure it will be fall before it is close to ready and spring before it is stable.

Post from: Life With Beer

Spontaneous Fermentation

1. Brewing beer is not something that will come to you on your own, it’s a long process and each time you’ll learn something new. But that does not go without saying that it is important to do some background research before you get to work. This means that you should read up online about the ingredients to be used and especially how to perfect the fermentation process. Reading some good books on brewing beer at home and keeping those at hand can help you a lot with your brewing!

2. You must already know how important it is for you to cool your beer quickly; this is because tannins and proteins can stay back in your beer which is bad for it. Cooling the beer quickly will also keep it clean and free from infection so purchase a wort chiller which will help to cool the beer quickly and will also improve its quality. It’s a small investment but it will definitely be worth it!

3. Knowing how long to boil the wort is important; the usual time is 60-90 minutes; 90 being more appropriate for lighter styles of beer. Boiling is extremely useful and apart from the reasons mentioned above, it can also vaporize undesirable compounds and can sterilize your wort which is good for your beer brewing environment.

4. Fermentation is the trickiest stage of brewing because you have to control the temperature of fermentation and while you can get a fermentation refrigerator for it, you can also do without one. One of the simplest yet most effective techniques of maintaining the temperature of fermentation is to wrap the fermentor in wet towels and place a fan in front of it and place the whole arrangement in a cool and dry place. Make sure the towels remain wet and you’ll get a constant temperature throughout fermentation.

5. If you want the fermentation process to be perfect, it is better to make a yeast starter first. You can do this by boiling a small amount of dried malt extract with a quart of water with ¼ oz. of yeast. When this gets cool, put your yeast into it, 2 or 3 days before you brew; then, place a foil over it and place it in a dark place. On the brewing day, pitching this starter will help to start quickly and will reduce chances of infection.
Author Bio

Richard Jacobs is a chief editor since early 2007, and he currently works for www.myduiattorney.org. A website that helps you to find the right DUI lawyer, you can search for a Atlanta dui attorney or a Cincinnati dui lawyers online, anytime!

Post from: Life With Beer

Brew beer at home with these top tips!

So what is Umami?

It’s sometimes called the 5th taste. It was first identified in 1908 by Ikeda Kikunae (don’t you just love Wikipedia). It wasn’t acknowledged by Western science until later and continues to be ignored by school science text-book writers, but, like salt, sweet, bitter, and sour, it has its own taste receptors on the tongue.

The sensation that is umami is triggered by glutamate. Glutamate is found in some types of fish, seaweed, and cheese and is also the active ingredient in MSG.

Don’t stop reading.

Some people claim to react badly to MSG, but studies testing MSG against a placebo don’t show any statistically significant effect. Furthermore, glutamate occurs naturally in a lot of foods.

Designing Umami Beer

The love for MSG stops here. My beer may be bent, but it’s natural.

For inspiration I looked to Japanese food. Umami in Japanese food usually comes from the ubiquitous dashi which translates roughly as bouillon.

Recipes for dashi vary. Actually restaurants can make their name by their dashi. But typically dashi consists of soy sauce, konbu (dried kelp), katsuo-boshi (dried flaked tuna), iriko (some tiny dried fish), niboshi (dried sardines), and shitake mushroom alone or in combination. All of these ingredients are sources of glutamate, but the largest concentration of glutamate is found in konbu.

Konbu also does well when boiled for extended periods of time. If you’ve had shabu-shabu, that brown leathery square in the boiling water is konbu. If you haven’t had shabu-shabu, go try some. Now.

So konbu does well in a long boil. One piece of the puzzle.

Now what kind of beer to use as a base for my umami beer? I’m so great at building suspense when I’ve given everything away in the title.

Stout. And for a couple of reasons.

First, stout goes well with oysters. And something about the smell of the sea joins oysters and kelp in my mind more than other sea foods.

Second, the bitter roast flavours of a stout are of about the same intensity as konbu-dashi. I would guess that the hops in an IPA would beat up on the kelp and leave it for dead in a pile of cast-aside dry hops while the kelp would strangle a milder pale ale.

Brewing the Umami Beer and the Control

On brew day I made an extra large mash and created a normal stout with the extra wort. I use two large pots to get full volume rather than a single large brew kettle, so I added kelp into one, distributed the hops evenly between the two, and then used wort from the kelp-free pot to top off the main fermenter.

Since I was making full batch with an experimental ingredient I decided to go easy on the kelp in the boil and add more at bottling if warranted. I ended up boiling 2 strips of kelp in the wort and boiled another three strips creating a kelp tea which was added at bottling.

Next time I make a beer with dry ingredients that need long boils I’m going make a tea and add them at bottling. Tasting as I blended allowed me to get a perfect flavour balance.

Head to Head Tasting: Umami vs Control

Appearance: Both beers have the same colour. The head on the Umami Stout is a little smaller than the regular stout, but I didn’t measure my priming sugar carefully enough to say this is significant.

Aroma: Roast and chocolate aromas dominate both beers. The control stout seems to have more aroma than the Umami Stout. This comes as a bit of a surprise since umami is known to enhance aromas. I guess just not the aroma of stout.

Flavour: This is where the kelp leaves its mark. The control stout has a very sweet, rich flavour punctuated by coffee notes. The Umami Stout has more bitterness and a wonderful balance across the tongue. A spritzy feeling similar to carbonation from soda pop dances before everything fades into an extended bitterness.

Questions and Notes for Future Umami Beers

Umami didn’t enhance the aroma from roast malt, but it is supposed to enhance some aromas. What will umami do for hop aroma?

The Umami Stout is definitely noticably more bitter than the control stout. Does the extra bitterness come from bitterness in the kelp? or is it the umami enhancing the bitterness already present from the hops?

I think these questions point to trying an Umami IPA next. I happen to have an IPA ready for bottling right now so it shouldn’t be too long before I can find out how that works out.

Umami Stout Recipe

Grains

Hops and Adjuncts

Yeast

Wyeast 1187: Ringwood harvested from lees

Brewing Schedule

Brewed: 03/07/2009

Racked: 03/14/2009

Bottled: 03/24/2009

Water

No water adjustments to local Pilsen-like water.

Brewing Stats

OG: 1.052

IBU: approx. 20

Ferment Temp: 72°F 22°C

FG: 1.014

ABV: 4.5%

Post from: Life With Beer

Umami Stout

There were few months where I was concerned about the lack of malt aroma in my beers. I started paying more attention to aroma in my beers and in commercial beers.

After sampling a number of commercial examples, I realised that malt aroma is the exception rather than the rule. But I’d still rather my beers be the exception when I choose.

I also noticed that I get accustomed to aromas very quickly and need to give myself some time between tastes to fully appreciate the aroma.

Roast Aroma in Stout

I don’t write about ordinary beers because there are plenty ordinary recipes on the web.

Last month, I brewed two stouts and a porter. On their own they are very ordinary, but plenty good. Comparing the aromas, however, is very interesting.

The two stouts are interesting because one has a pleasantly strong roast aroma, while the other is bland.

The first stout used 0.83% roast malt mashed in at °149 F (°65 C) and has a very strong roast malt aroma.

The second stout used 0.55% roast malt mashed-in at °150 F (°66 C) and doesn’t have nearly as much aroma.

I believe the Roast Malt I use is from Pauls Malt, but I have to check with the local retailer to be sure.

Honey Malt Aroma

The Porter was a platform for learning what Gambrinus Honey Malt brings to a beer. I used 0.82% Honey Malt in the porter mashed in at a high °156 F (°69 C) and had almost too much Honey Malt flavour, but not nearly enough aroma.

I was led to believe that Honey Malt was very aromatic, so maybe the problem was with my high mash temperature.

If you’ve used either Gambrinus Honey Malt or Pauls Roast Malt, I’d love to hear how the aroma turned out and what mash temperature you used.

Post from: Life With Beer

Get Your Roast On

I think of sanitation as being in two categories: pre-boil and post-boil.

Equipment that is used pre-boil (and during the boil) doesn’t need to be thoroughly sanitised; equipment that is used post-boil does.

If I need to stir my finishing hops and haven’t sanitised the big spoon that I use, I use it as is unless it’s obviously dirty. But that same spoon gets cleaned and thoroughly sanitised before I use it to aerate.

Sometimes I sanitise my pre-boil equipment, but mostly I try to make sure it stays clean and let the boil handle any small left-overs.

Post-boil is a different story. If you are like myself and like to minimise work, then focus on post-boil sanitation because that is where some flock of bacteria is going to mess up your hard work.

For more on sanitation, check out this month’s homebrew sanitation pracitices Fermentation Friday.

Post from: Life With Beer

Sanitation Practices

I wanted the spicing of a winter ale with the phenol of a tripel to serve as a base for the flavours of burnt orange.

Burnt orange gives beer a nice copper-orange colour so I made a very pale beer to let the colours from the oranges dominate.

Tasting the Tripel

The beer pours with a nice thick head that quickly dissipates. The colour is exactly what I expected, but it is one of the haziest beers I’ve ever made. I think haze might be a necessary sacrifice if you’re going to add burnt orange to the secondary.

The tame aroma is limited to burnt orange. Pleasant, but a little too weak.

The burnt orange flavour is a lot milder than in the previous small batch. It’s doesn’t assert itself as much in this stronger beer, but it is still evident. When I tasted it at bottling, mace really dominated. It seems to have mellowed now to the point where it’s evident but not out of balance.

There’s very little evidence of phenol. Normally, I don’t like phenolic beer so I’m a little surprised that even when I try to get it I can’t. I’m a little disappointed too because I thought it would replace the citrus sourness that is lost when burning the oranges.

While the head has already fallen, the high level of carbonation really brightens the beer making it seem refreshing in spite of the high alcohol.

Burnt Orange Tripel Recipe

Grains

Hops and Adjuncts

Yeast

Wyeast 1388: Belgian Strong Ale harvested from lees

Brewing Schedule

Brewed: 01/03/2009
Racked: 01/09/2009
Added 1st Half Fruit:  01/09/2009
Added 2nd Half Fruit:  01/16/2009
Bottled: 01/24/2009

Water

No water adjustments to local Pilsen-like water.

Brewing Stats

OG: 1.070
IBU: approx. 20
Ferment Temp: 79°F 26°C
FG: 1.014
ABV: 7.4%

Post from: Life With Beer

Burnt Orange Tripel

You can brew using fresh fruit or wild mushrooms, or you can brew beer that is so ridiculously strong that commercial brewers would have to charge wine prices to make it worthwhile.

Whoo-yaa, we home-brewers aren’t limited by paltry such concerns.

Strong Beer Brewing Tips

I can’t say that I’m an expert yet, but the Internet is sadly lacking in good advice for brewing strong beers and I’ve brewed enough to give useful advice to someone starting out.

Before You Brew

Pitch a lot of yeast

Screw the starter. Make a batch or two of weaker beers and harvest the yeast before trying a strong beer. Trust me, it’s a lot easier to pitch more yeast than your wort knows what to do with than to nurse a low volume of yeast through a strong wort.

Let me add a paragraph to emphasize: you will hate yourself for not pitching enough yeast. I’m sorry, hate is such a gentle word.

Think about your final gravity

Say you get 75% attenuation.

With a wort that begins at 1.040 you end up with 1.010. 1.080 ends up as 1.020. 1.120 ends up as 1.030. That is a cloyingly sweet beer.

Think about doing something to balance your beer:

Add a ridiculous amount of hops

Use a lot of fully fermentable sugar (dextrose for sugar without flavour, or unrefined sugar like demerara for sugar with flavour, or honey, or maple syrop, or…)

Use a mash schedule that that produces a highly fermentable wort, or

Combine these techniques to balance your beer.

Think about your mash capacity

You might need to add a little extract to get the gravity you desire. Max-out your mashing system and then don’t be embarrassed about adding a little extract. You’ll still have plenty of nutrients to nurture your yeast through the trying fermentation.

When You Brew

Mash Schedule

You can get by with a basic infusion mash, but I really like to do everything I can to dry out my big beers. Dry horse piss tastes like horse piss. But if you’re drying out big beer, then you’re doing well to make your beer average.

Try a step or decoction mash that hits 140° (60°) and 158° (70°) degrees to get a highly fermentable wort. Or add fully fermentable sugars.

Bitterness and Gravity

The stronger your beer, the less you’ll perceive bitterness.

I don’t know the exact proportions, but you need to add a lot more hops to get the same perceived level of bitterness.

But it gets worse. The stronger your wort, the lower your extraction.

So take advantage of needing to add sugar or extract and get your hops in well before you add the gravity boosters.

I’m doing an Imperial Stout right now with 16.75 lb of malt. I’m adding 2.4oz (68g) of 16.4 AA Zeus/Centennial as bittering hop.

It may seem like a lot of hops, but I’ll be adding 4.5 lbs of extract and another 2lbs of sugar in the last 20 mins of my boil to hit my target gravity without wasting hop bitterness.

Long Boil Times

This one’s pretty obvious. If you’re mashing a lot more grain, then extract more wort and take your time boiling to get the same level of extraction.

Aerate Like It’s the Last Oxygen You’ll Taste in a Month

Yeah. Lots and lots and lots and, in case you haven’t got it yet, lots of oxygen is needed for your high-gravity wort.

After Brewing

This is where you wish you’d done everything above as I’d instructed. Big brews can be a huge pain in the beering muscles (I hope you’re exercising your beering muscles at the gym every day).

Help, My Fermentation Has Stopped

Big Beer = Long Fermentation.

Accept it, now deal with it.

To start with, pitch with the yeast that you want to be the dominant yeast flavour. Don’t worry if it can’t handle high levels of alcohol. All it needs to do is handle enough to assert itself.

Your Yeast Can’t Handle Your Wort

You’ve got a stuck fermentation.

If you’ve added sugar, remember that you should expect a lot higher attenuation than normal. So even if you’ve got average attenuation, you might have a stuck fermentation.

The first thing to do is to add yeast nutrients or yeast energizer. If you’re not even close to your final gravity think about re-aerating, but try to do it without adding oxygen outside the fermenter, or do it with the next step.

Plan to Add Champagne Yeast.

Champagne yeast is plain, resistant to high alcohol, and works at a wide range of temperature.

I add Champagne yeast to strong beers that seem fully attenuated before bottling to remove the last bit of sugar and make sure I have enough yeast to carbonate the beer.

I also add Champagne yeast and re-aerate stuck fermentations because it kicks unfermented sugars’ ass.

Give Your Beer Time

Strong beer takes time.

The first really strong beer I made, only using a starter, took 6 months to ferment. The less yeast you use, the longer you should be prepared for the process to take. As long as the beer is slowly fermenting, all is good.

If you want to give it some help, swish it around in your fermenter. All you want to do is replicate the process of rolling the barrel. Rolling the beer used to be a common practice with strong beers. Add a little oxygen, but not too much.

Only do this if your fermentation is truly stuck. Half a point a week is not unusual so don’t worry. Put your beer in a cool dark place and let the yeast do its thing.

Strong beer takes time. Relax and let the yeast do its work.

Post from: Life With Beer

Brewing Big Beer

That’s why I like this month’s Fermentation Friday topic about setting goals. It’s like a New Year’s resolution, without being on the New Year. Other bloggers can write about their New Year’s resolutions, and I can still write about my goals without compromising on my irrational distaste for New Year’s resolutions.

Here are a few things I’m working on now or would like to start working on.

Cook with Beer

I’ve started started this with my beer-glazed cheesecake, but I’d like to cook and post more if I can.

Cook with Barley

Again, I’ve started this as the beer-glazed cheesecake had a barley crust. I’m planning on using it for stuffing, in muffins, and in layered desserts. I’m sure I’ll come up with something

Start Cheese Making

I know it’s not beer, but they go well together so I think it counts. The tricky part seems to be getting my hands on Calcium Chloride that needs to be added back in to pasteurized milk to make cheese.

Get More Malt Aroma in my Beer

As far as I understand it, malt aroma is controlled by mash temperature, but following the advice from professional brewers has only made a small difference in the aroma of my beers.

The Canadian malt I get from the local is supposed to be of a quite high quality. I thought it was all Gambrinus, but if you look at their website you’ll see their only 2-row is organic and I didn’t think I was getting organic malt.

I’d like to try premium malts from other places, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort ordering and storing just yet.

Make Water Adjustments

I’ve tried this a few times before, but only recently bought a quality scale that I can use to properly measure water additions.

I planned on doing my calculations while getting my strike water up to full temperature, but I always forget doing things like bottling or writing here instead.

Time for some math and discipline.

Post from: Life With Beer

Brewing Plans for the Year

Unfortunately I can’t find the blog recommending burnt citrus fruit so no link, but basically they said burning citrus fruit causes a chemical reaction that radically changes some of the flavour compounds and and kills the oils.

Being the adventurous little brewer that I am, I instantly recognised the potential for new potential brewing ingredient. I had some Belgian Witbier on so when I went to bottle it, I siphoned off a portion and let it sit on some freshly burnt oranges for a couple of extra weeks.

Tasting Notes

It’s hard to describe the flavour of burnt orange. It retains some orange flavour without the tang, but it doesn’t taste burnt.

The colour is a rich, dark, brownish-orange with a nice beautiful head that unfortunately doesn’t last very long.

Orange and caramel aromas dominate the scent slipping between subtle and bold. Maybe it’s just me but sometimes I totally miss the aroma and other times it seems plain as the snow on my porch.

The burnt orange flavours dominate, but it still retains some beer characteristics. I think the coriander in the original recipe really support the burnt orange well. The mix of orange with the bright carbonation makes this beer seem almost a little spicy. The aftertaste is rich and changes from caramelly to bitter and citric before fading gracefully over a couple of minutes.

Brewing Notes for Future Recipes

This was an excellent first recipe. So good that I’ve already started my next burnt orange beer (or citrus I haven’t decided).

So what is it? a Belgian tripel.

Burnt orange is quite robust. So I’m upping the spice a little, upping the gravity and making the beer a lot more phenolic than I normally like. I think a hint more spice would be nice and the phenols will get balanced out by the burnt orange. If you’re not a regular visitor to Life With Beer, I’m not a lover of the rubbing alcohol-like flavours imparted by phenols.

Burning Orange Belgian Wheat Recipe

Grains

Hops and Adjuncts

Yeast

Wyeast 3944: Belgian Witbier harvested from lees

Brewing Schedule

Brewed: 10/07/2008
Racked: 10/30/2008
Racked Oranges:  11/14/2008
Bottled: 11/28/2008

Water

No water adjustments to local Pilsen-like water.

Brewing Stats

OG: 1.048
IBU: approx. 17
Ferment Temp: 71°F 22°C
FG: 1.007
ABV: 4.9%

Post from: Life With Beer

Burnt Orange Belgian Wheat Recipe

The base beer was taken from my excellent Belgian Wit. I removed and cooled half of the wort before adding the spices and other adjuncts for the witbier. I then filled a small 160 oz (4.7 L) carboy with the unadulterated wort and later added the rest to the spiced wort in the main fermenter.

The Chanterelle beer fermented with the same Wyeast 3944 Belgian Wit yeast as the Belgian Wit. I then added 0.4 lbs (180 g) of fresh Chanterelle mushrooms that had been washed, patted dry, and pulled apart to the secondary and let it sit for two weeks.

Tasting Notes

There is a lot of sediment in the beer including what I suspect are small chunks of mushroom. This is partly because smaller batches are harder to work with so the sediment gets agitated more than in larger batches. If the beer is left at room temperature, the beer is cloudy with yeast and mushrooms.

Apricot and fungal notes are evident in the nose, but overall the aroma is a little weak.

The beer has a little spiciness and sweetness to it along with a fruity blend of mushroom and yeast flavours. Like with my previous Winter Chanterelle beer that used a similar quantity of mushroom, on a rare sip the Chanterelles in this beer will really stand out and assert their flavour only to blend back in to the beer.

My main objection to this beer is the aftertaste which is long and somewhat reminiscent of pine detergent (an unintended adjunct?).

Brewing Notes for Future Recipes

I think the Chanterelles and Belgian Wit yeast ended up competing with each other rather than complementing each other. I thought their different fruit flavours would work well together, but I was wrong.

I think maybe mushrooms do better in stronger beers where unpleasant or unusual flavours are masked. When they work well, the mushroom flavours round out and complement the yeast flavours.

Chanterelle Belgian Wheat Recipe

Grains

Hops and Adjuncts

Yeast

Wyeast 3944: Belgian Witbier harvested from lees

Brewing Schedule

Brewed: 10/07/2008
Racked: 10/30/2008
Bottled:  11/14/2008

Water

No water adjustments to local Pilsen-like water.

Brewing Stats

OG: 1.048
IBU: approx. 17
Ferment Temp: 71°F 22°C
FG: 1.007
ABV: 4.9%

Post from: Life With Beer

Chanterelle Belgian Wheat Beer Recipe and Tasting Notes