Hello, hello, it's good to be back (and I brought Glühapfelwein)

Happy New Year! I was never the most prolific blogger on the planet, but I was always really good about keeping track of my brew days . . . until this fall, that is. That's when I learned something: apparently blogging is a lot like exercising--the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to get back into the swing of things.

See, despite not having posted since September, I've been brewing just as regularly as I always have. I've brewed another Düsseldorf Altbier, a Doppelbock for the holidays (a portion of which had maple syrup added to the secondary) and, just last week, a Munich Helles. I also fermented a hard cider. The problem is, once I got behind on the blogging, I felt like my next post had to cover everything I had done in the meantime. So the task of getting back on the blogging horse seemed to grow larger and larger with each passing day.

But enough with the excuses... Rather than go back and cover everything over the past three months, I'm going to start quasi-fresh just to get going again. I hope to fill in the gaps here and there, but for now I'll get 2012 started by sharing a recipe I came up with that I think is pretty sweet: Glühapfelwein.

To explain what Glühapfelwein is, let's start with something you might be more familiar with: Glühwein. Similar to Gløgg, Glühwein is a German mulled wine that many Chicagoans know as the stuff you can get served in a little ceramic boot if you visit the Christkindlmarket (Chicago's German Christmas market). It translates roughly as "burning wine," and it's essentially wine that's simmered with various spices popular at the holidays. It's also generally sweetened with sugar.

Now, a few weeks ago the kids and I were watching the Claymation Christmas Special (the most underrated Christmas special in the history of television) and they had a running joke about wassailing. This led me to look up some wassail recipes, and I was surprised to find that many were cider-based. Well, by pure coincidence Leah and I made five gallons of cider earlier in the fall, so this gave me an idea: what if I made Glühwein, but instead of wine I used our cider as the base?

The end result is something I call Glühapfelwein (Apfelwein, literally "apple wine," being German for "cider"), and it came out awesome. I based it off of a fairly simple Glühwein recipe I found online which only uses two spices most people already have in their kitchen--cinnamon and clove--so it can make a good jumping-off point for those who want to experiment with other spices, but I found it to be pretty awesome as-is. It also would be lower in alcohol because our cider, at around 6.5% ABV, is significantly lower than a typical red wine, so I added enough brandy to boost it up to typical Glühwein levels. And without further ado, here's the recipe:

Pour 3/4 c. of hard cider into a sauce pan; throw in one cinnamon stick. Add 1/2 c. sugar and simmer until dissolved. At this point squeeze the juice of one orange into the pot. Spear ten cloves into the peel that's left and throw that into the pot too. Bring to a low simmer for 20 minutes to a half hour. After then, take out cinnamon stick and orange peel and add 750mL or 3 c. of cider. Heat for another ten minutes or until warm and carbonation is mostly gone. Just before serving, add 1/2 c. of brandy and stir well. Makes roughly 4 6-oz. servings.

One final note I should add... Our cider is fairly dry (I fermented 4 gallons of cider until completely dry and then back-sweetened with 1/2 gallon fresh cider) so if you use a commercial cider, or if your hard cider is sweeter, you may want to start with less sugar and then add to taste. Enjoy, and happy 2012!

Brew day: F3 Münster Altbier and Gust Front Leipzig-style Wheat

Before lagers dominated the German brewing landscape, everything was ale. Over time, most of these German ale styles disappeared as people gravitated towards Pilsner, Helles, Doppelbock and the like. However, ales survived in a couple areas: the south (especially Bavaria) and the north Rhine valley. In the south, the ale of choice is Weizenbier (a/k/a Weissbier), which with its high percentage of wheat malt and its distinct tangy yeast is easily distinguished from lager. In the Rhine valley, however, the ale beer that survived is best described as a hybrid: it's fermented at ale temperatures with a rather clean top-fermenting yeast and then cold-conditioned like a lager. Since these hybrid beers still use the "old" method of ale brewing, they're generally referred to as Altbier (literally "old beer").

Two styles of Altbier are prominent today: Düsseldorf Altbier (Uerige, Metropolitan Iron Works) and North German Altbier (Kutcher Alt, Alaskan Amber). There are plenty of resources out there for folks who want to brew either of these styles. But there are other regional Altbiers that are either dying or extinct (you can read about some of them here). The only other Altbier I've come across in the U.S. is Münster Alt--Pinkus Müller can be found in Chicago at Binny's--so I figured I'd brew one for this year's all-Altbier Novemberfest.

Now, while there's plenty of info on Düsseldorf and North German Alts, there's virtually nothing on Münster Alts. Hell, I've found far more information on Gose than I have Münster Alt. But there are a couple recipes floating around that suggest 50% Pilsner, 40% wheat and 10% Munich. It should also be lightly hopped, somewhere between 15 and 25 IBU's. The biggest key, though, is that it needs to have a slight lactic tang.

As I noted in my last blog post, I brewed a Leipziger Gose a few months ago but due to a combination of neglect and bad luck it got infected and I had to dump it. I wanted to brew another one ASAP, so I decided I could do a split batch with the Münster Alt. The Gose should be at least 50% wheat, so as a compromise I elected to go with 50% wheat, 40% Pils and 10% Munich for my grain bill for both beers. As for the lactic tang, I'll have two options: I can add food-grade lactic acid to taste, or I could blend in a little of the soured Gose. I'm still not sure which I'll go with.

Before I recap the brew day, I should note that I had a couple new toys to play with today. The first is my new Blichmann burner. I initially bristled at the high price tag, but several folks assured me it's worth the money. We'll see how much more efficient it is than my old jet burner, but I can tell you it's definitely more quiet, plus I like that it's low to the ground (less chance of my idiot dog setting his tail on fire--again). I also decided to split my hose that runs from the mash tun to my kettle so that there's a second line that I can runs to a pitcher (as you can see to the left). That way, when I'm done recirculating (or when I want the check the flow rate) I can throw a couple valves and switch from filling the kettle to filling a pitcher or vice versa. It's rather simple, but makes things WAY easier for me.

For the brew day, I went with a 20-minute rest at 125°F (I like to do this with wheat or rye) and then a 45-minute sacc rest at 151°F. I collected for about an hour and a half, brought to a boil for 20 minutes, and then collected 6 gallons at ~100°F for my Gose. I pitched lactobacillus into the carboy and it's currently sitting in a water bath which stays between 100°F and 115°F.

The remainder of the kettle was hopped and boiled for another hour. I went with two additions: Warrior hops at 60 minutes and Saaz at knockout. Then I chilled and racked onto the yeast cake from our Schwarze Alt (which is done fermenting--it dropped all the way to 1.011!). As seems to be a pattern, my gravity was high (1.057 instead of the target 1.050) but my volume was low (4.75 gallons instead of 5.25). I used a half gallon to make a yeast starter for my Gose, so I added a half gallon of water to the remaining 4.25 gallons to drop the gravity down to 1.051. It's currently fermenting away in the basement chest freezer at 60°F.

I'm really curious to see how this turns out. I'll also need to decide how I want to do the lactic thing. Adding food-grade lactic acid would be easiest and most repeatable (unless I want to brew a Gose every time I brew a Münster Alt) but at the same time, if I already have a soured wort, why not take advantage of it? Stay tuned to see what I decide.

Reflections on a Gose: a tragedy in two parts

So, in my last post, I alluded to my Gose going bad. Well, I'm giving it another shot this weekend but in the meantime I wanted to tell my sad story...

Now, the first thing that went wrong was manageable: it was way more sour than I intended. The last time I brewed a Gose with lacto I let it inoculate for roughly 40 hours, and it dropped down to around 3.9. This time I let it inoculate for five days. The result? A pH of 3.2, which might not sound that different but, considering that pH is logarithmic, is. It's the difference between refreshingly tart (think lemonade) and downright sour (like an Oud Bruin). Not only did I feel this was more sour than I wanted, but it also raised the concern that the yeast may not be able to survive.

Well, it turned out the yeast was indeed able to ferment the acidic wort, though it still tasted more sour than I want. The good news was I had five gallons of Hefeweizen as well and could blend to the appropriate level of sourness. EXCEPT...

...while the Gose was in secondary I never changed from crimped foil to an airlock and somehow the foil cap blew off of my carboy while in my chest freezer. The result two days later was a white powder on the top of the Gose and a stench that could best be described as nail polish cleaner. Yup, had to dump all five gallons. It was a sad day, to say the least.

Now the good news is now I have an idea of the range of pH I'm dealing with. 40 hours? pH around 4, not bad but not exactly where I want it. 110 hours? pH around 3.2, which is too sour. So this time I'm thinking of shooting for around 75 hours with a pH of 3.45 (if my use of semi-log paper is accurate, which is a big if).

The other thing I'm doing is switching up my grain bill yet again. In this case, I'm planning on doing a split batch with my Münster Alt, which usually calls for 50% pils, 40% wheat and 10% Munich grain bill. However, Gose should be at least 50% wheat and, well, it's hard to find accurate info on Münster Alt so I decided to go with a compromise grain bill of 50% wheat, 40% pils and 10% Munich. So anyway, that's the plan for this weekend. Can't wait to see how this Gose turns out (and this time I'll be using a stopper and fermentation lock!).

Brew day: Rain Wrapped Schwarze Altbier

So... I guess it's time for my quarterly "sorry I haven't blogged much lately" opening sentence. I could rattle off the usual excuses . . . summer is busy . . . work and three kids kept me occupied . . . I'm married to the sea . . . etc. However, the simple truth is I was brewing like crazy for a while and so I haven't brewed since early July. Sure, there's been plenty of news I should've mentioned in the meantime (like how my Gose went bad or how I ended up in the Elite Eight for the Pilsner Urquell competition before the judges came to their senses and picked other people to finish in the top three), but I just never got around to it. But then I brewed yesterday, so that means time to get back on the blogging horse.

The quick and dirty update is yesterday I brewed a Schwarze Altbier ("black Altbier" for the Germanically-challenged). But since that's not a real style, I feel like I need to do some explaining. Back in May Leah and I vacationed in Germany. Part of our vacation included the obligatory stop in Düsseldorf, home to one of my favorite beer styles: Altbier. Now the term Altbier means "old beer," which refers to the fact that Altbier is one of the few surviving German ale styles after the lager revolution hit the country in the late 1800s. If somebody just says Altbier they're probably referring to Düsseldorf-style Altbier, though North German Altbiers (Kutcher Alt, Alaskan Amber) are fairly prevalent as well. There are also lesser-known Altbiers such as Münster Alt, a slightly sour ale with a generous portion of malted wheat. So "Altbier" itself is a somewhat fluid term.

Now getting back to Düsseldorf, there are four historic Altbier pubs that have been around since the 1800s. Recently, however, a new pub opened up--Kürzer Alt. I was curious to see what they would brew, and sure enough it was a traditional, Düsseldorf-style Alt (though if you look closely at the picture to the right, their tap was anything but traditional). Anyway, I was thinking that if I opened up a pub in Düsseldorf, I don't think I could compete with the traditional pubs when it comes to making a traditional Alt. Instead, I would make variations on the style as well as the traditional Altbier. And the first variation I thought of was a Schwarze Altbier--basically the Altbier version of a Schwarzbier, one of my favorite styles.

When it came to the recipe, my thought was to start with my Schwarzbier recipe and tweak it to make it Alt-like. So I started with 75% Pils/25% Munich. I had a pound of malted rye sitting around that I thought would work well so I threw that in. Then I added a pound of Carafa III (5% of the final grain bill) to get it nice and black. I discovered on the brew day that I only had 0.7lb. of Carafa but figured if it's not dark enough I'll add some Sinamar. Finally, I decided to go with 30 IBU's of bittering hops--slightly lower than a Düsseldorf Alt but the high end of the Schwarzbier bitterness range--and a generous addition of Tettnang and Saaz hops at knockout for aroma.

Not too much to report from the brew day itself. Time was of the essence yesterday so I went with a single infusion mash at 151°F. Due to some sparge water delays I ended up with a mash of just over an hour, recirculated and collected for about an hour and twenty minutes, and boiled for 75 minutes. I chilled down to about 75°F and ended up with 10.5 gallons at 1052 (a couple points above my target). I then put everything in my chest freezer to get it down to 58°F and pitched a slurry courtesy of my good friends at Metropolitan Brewing (as you can see below, my kids enjoyed hanging out with their robots while Leah got the yeast--and don't ask why my daughter is wearing a witch outfit; it's a long story).

So that was yesterday. I'm excited to see how this variation turns out, and am thinking it would be fun to do some other Alt tweaks if this one's a winner (incidentally, I do plan on brewing a Münster Alt this fall). And if it's really good, maybe I'll sell my recipe to Kürzer.

Brew day: Step Leader Hefeweizen and Gust Front Leipzig-Style Wheat

While Leah liked it, I wasn't terribly happy with our last Leipzig-style wheat (a/k/a Leipziger Gose). For some reason it came out drier than last time, and though I kept the temperature hotter during the lacto phase it didn't come out any more sour. It also had terrible head retention.

This time around, I wanted to get it a little maltier, and one obvious option was a decoction. That's when it occurred to me that I could do a split batch with a Hefeweizen, taking half at the beginning of the boil to sour with lactobacillus and then boiling the remaining half and pitching a Hefeweizen yeast. With that in mind, I decided to go with my latest Hefeweizen grain bill (65% wheat, 30% Pilsner and 5% dark Munich) instead of the 50% wheat/50% Pilsner bill I've used for previous Goses.

Since I had the day off of work today (thank you, Founding Fathers) I figured I could brew today, incubate the Gose with the lacto, and give it five full days to sour before finishing it on Saturday. It also gave me plenty of time to brew what was one of my most complicated mash schedules to date (though, with friends coming and going throughout the day, it didn't seem that long... at least not until cleanup time!).

Using a schedule from Eric Warner's German Wheat Beer book, I did a double decoction. (To the right, you can see Jonas and I debating whether to do a single or double decoction; he was concerned about sufficient Maillard reactions.) I started with an acid rest at 108°F (supposed to be 99°F; not sure how I overshot it so badly) (while many think acid rests are unnecessary with modern malts, it is supposed to create ferulic acid which produces the clove esters during fermentation). After a 20-minute rest I did an infusion with boiling water to raise it to 147°F. After a 40-minute rest, I pulled a 9-qt. decoction. I held the decoction at between 158 and 162°F for fifteen minutes and then brought it to a boil for a half hour.

When I returned the decoction to the boil it only came up to 153°F instead of the 160 I was shooting for. I added 6 qts. of sparge water to get it up to 156°F and let it rest for fifteen minutes. I then pulled a 16-qt. decoction which I boiled for fifteen minutes before returning it to the mash for a mash-out of 167°F.

After recirculating for ten minutes, I sparged for an hour (quicker than usual; guess I wasn't paying close attention) and collected 12.5 gallons. I boiled for ten minutes and then began to collect six gallons at 110°F for the Gose. It was at 1.044, which should end up around 1053 after the boil.

For the remaining 6.5 gallons, I added bittering hops and boiled for another 75 minutes. Like last week, I had an unusual boil-off rate so I ended up with 4.6 gallons at 1059 instead of 5.25 at 1050. I decided to top it off with .75 gallons of bottled spring water to dilute it to 1051. I chilled to around 68°F and racked on top of a yeast cake from the Dampfbier I brewed last week and racked last night.

So now we have a little over 5.25 gallons of Hefeweizen in the chest freezer and 6 gallons of Gose in a cooler in a 110°F bath. Our basement is going to be the place to be in about three weeks!

Brew day: Steam Fog Dampfbier

A couple months ago our good friend Tricia, who lives the next street over, asked us to brew a beer for her block party. We had a tight timeframe so I figured I'd do something quick like a Hefeweizen. However, one day it struck me: this is the perfect opportunity to brew a Dampfbier! For those unaware of the style, you can read more here, but the easiest way to describe it is it's like a Hefeweizen brewed entirely with barley. I decided to tweak my Oktoberfest recipe to get a grain bill that would be fairly malty and slightly copper in color. I settled on a 70% pilsner/30% dark Munich base and added 2 oz. of Carafa III for color and just a touch of nuttiness.

As you can see above, Dorrie was more than willing to help out (and I had to post the pic to show off the shirts that Leah bought us). Our good friend Marta joined us for the day, and fellow HOPS! members Scott and Paul stopped by for a bit as well.

Being the lazy guy that I am, I decided to go with a simple infusion for this beer. This made for a pretty straightforward brew day. I mashed in at 152, did a 45-minute rest, recirculated for ten minutes, and sparged for 50 minutes (that's quicker than I usually sparge, but for some reason the mash kept getting stuck at slow flows, which is odd for an all-barley mash). I boiled for 90 minutes with a single hop addition to bring it to around 15 IBU. For some reason I only collected 4.75 gallons rather than the 5.5 I had calculated, but I was also three gravity points above my target so I diluted with a quarter gallon of bottled water to bring it to 5 gallons at my target O.G. of 1051.

One odd thing is it appeared a bit darker than I had planned; Beersmith calculated a color of 12 SRM (think the color of an Oktoberfest beer) but it appears closer to that of a dark lager. Fortunately I'm guessing most people will be drinking out of plastic Solo cups so they probably won't see the color anyway.

Now my chest freezer is occupied with my Wizard of Saaz Czech Pilsner so after aerating and pitching a vial of WLP 300 Weizen yeast (yeah, no time to make a starter) I placed the carboy in a cooler filled with ~60°F water. The beer fluctuated between 59°F and 64°F over the first few days as a got a hang of how many ice packs it took to lower temps, but for the most part it was between 62°F and 64°F for the first three days of fermentation before I let it slowly warm up to the 68°F it's at today (a week later).

So that's the story of our Dampfbier. I'm curious to finally taste it, as I've never actually tried a Dampfbier before. Will it taste similar to a Dunkelweizen? Or will the lack of ferulic acid (the dominant phenolic acid in wheat, which contributes to the clove flavors present in Weizens) due to the use of only barley malt significantly change the flavor profile? I suppose if you want to travel to Chicago's South Side you can always stop by 100th and Artesian and find out for yourself!

Brew day: Wizard of Saaz Czech-style Pilsner

A couple months ago somebody in my homebrew club forwarded an email from the folks at Pilsner Urquell. They are having a homebrew competition where the winner gets a trip to the Czech Republic. It’s only being held in three cities, and is limited to 30 contestants per city, but Chicago happens to be one of the locations and I got my email in quickly enough that I made the cut.

Now it’s sort of an odd competition. It’s one style only—Bohemian Pilsner (duh)—and 70% of the score is meeting the style guidelines. But 15% of the score is for “artistic interpretation.” So how do you artistically interpret a style as rigid as a Bohemian/Czech Pils? Beats the hell out of me, but fate has helped me out… a little, at least. My original idea was to add a pound of malted rye to give it a little extra spiciness. Unfortunately, some time between brewing our Somethin’ Else India Black Ale and yesterday, the rest of our rye disappeared.

Also, as I sat down at the table at 9pm last night to come up with my recipe, I discovered that most Czech Pilsners have a small addition of crystal malt (usually a half pound of 20L per five gallons). I didn’t have any, and wouldn’t have time to run to the LHBS in the morning, so it was time to improvise.

Here’s what I came up with. First, instead of the rye, I decided I would add a little crushed peppercorn at knock-out to give it some spice. Just a little (3/4 tsp.) so it’s not obvious, but hopefully it’ll give it an unidentifiable kick that will make it stand out.

Second, instead of crystal, I decided to use 3/4 lb. dark Munich plus 1/4 lb. of turbinado sugar. I figured the Munich will give it some sweetness you’d expect from the crystal while the turbinado would give just a little thinness to cancel out the richness of the Munich. Will it work? Probably not, but there’s your artistic interpretation.

The actual brew-day went fairly smoothly. I mashed in at 131°F for a 30-minute protein rest (side note: mashing in at .75 qt/gal. sucks because it's REALLY hard to get a consistent temperature reading) and then did an infusion to get the mash temperature up to 153°F for a 45-minute saccharification rest. Didn't do a mash-out.

One quick note on malt and water, two distinct features of Bohemian Pilsners... The Czech Republic traditionally had under-modified malt (which wasn't a problem when doing decoctions) and Pilsen in particular has very, very soft water. I sort of half-assed both of these features. Since I didn't do a decoction but did do a protein rest, I decided to go with 50% Bohemian malt in my bill. And for the water, I didn't feel competent to build up a water profile from scratch so I used carbon-filtered city water for the mash but then used distilled water for sparging.

I sparged for a half-hour and boiled for 90 minutes with hop additions at 90 minutes, 60 minutes, 45 minutes, ten minutes, five minutes and knock-out (sextuple-hopped!). All were Czech Saaz--the traditional hop for Bohemian Pilsners--except for a little bit of Horizon hops I used in the first addition. I chilled down to 60°F and threw the carboy in my chest freezer to get it down to 45°F. Oh, and I added Irish moss and the turbinado sugar at 15 minutes but totally forgot about the peppercorn. I'm now thinking of adding it to the primary after a few days.

I collected 5.25 gallons and my final gravity was 1052, which is a point above my target. However, I forgot to calculate my starter in my calculations, so after I decant most of my starter and pitch the final quart, I should be at 1051. I'll aerate and pitch this morning and then rack off the trub in a couple days. Will it be Saaz-tastic? I guess we'll find out in August!