The Brew Room

It's either drought or floods - last week not much happened, this week it's all systems go. To start with the plain mead has been racked off it's sediment and is tasting quite good, this will probably happen every week to 10 days now till it's clear.

The Hoptastic has been bottled and is now spending it's week in the house while it bottle conditions.

The Pale Ale with Citra hops has been bottled and is now spending it's week in the house while it bottle conditions.

The Pale Ale with our home grown Cascade hops has been kegged and is now spending it's week in the house while it keg conditions - a first for us, we still need to sort out taps and cooling and stuff but we have time for that.

To top it all off we are gearing up to put down an All Grain Pumpkin Ale, should be quite interesting.

The Brew Room

It's been fairly quiet in the brew room this week.

The Wildberry Shiraz road test took it's next step, being racked off to another fermenter.

We are also gearing up to road test Joe's Ancient Orange Mead, a recipe I was put on to by a work mate.

In other news, I have just received some Saaz and Hallarteu hop rhizomes. So with the Cascade I already have we are starting to get a good variety going.

The Brew Room this Week

It seems once again we have a lot on the go, alongside the 3 Pale Ales and Blueberry Melomel we have started the, for wont of a better name "Road Test," on Island Mist's Wildberry Shiraz and a sweet Mead using orange blossom honey.

All 3 Pale Ales have been racked off the primary fermenter and have been dry hopped, one with more citra, one with our home grown cascades and the Hoptastic with it's ....it's a secret.

The Blueberry Melomel has been bottled and has started it's ageing, 6 months is a long time to wait but it will be worth it.

We opened a bottle of our first Mead this week, "Mr Dalliard's Great Distraction" a medium mead bottled at the end of January, coming in at 12.3% there was quite a harsh alcohol taste at bottling, which is almost completely gone leaving just the taste of the honey. I can't wait to try it after 6 months.

Each "Road Test" will be published after we have tasted the end result and will contain such things as length of time for each step, brewing times, how easy it is to brew, equipment needed, cost and the really important parts, the taste and is it worth it.

When things go POP in the night

You need to check out the photos for this one.

We started out with the best of intentions and ended up creating a monster. We wanted to produce a nice fruity Plum wine and in the end produced bottle bombs.

For those who haven't followed the Plum wine brew, here's a quick recap. We came across an old recipe we had used about 13 years ago, and decided to give it another go. The only thing missing was the total volume and we assumed it would be about the 20L mark so that's what we used. Upon tasting after a lengthy fermentation, the plum taste was washed out so we made the decision to bump it up with some juice. Plum juice not being available we went for second best; grape juice about 4L worth.

After another lengthy fermentation and to avoid making too dry a wine we decided to kill off the yeast with some camden tablets (about 7 or 8 I think it was ). That done after a couple of days we decided to bottle and all seemed well, the wine was tasting a bit grapey but not too bad.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
Fast forward a month and the kitchen gets sprayed with Plum wine. Oh no, what had we done? A second bottle quickly followed ( this time over the bath ) and sure enough we'd created a monster.

Funnily enough once it's "breathed" so to speak, it's not too bad a drink and is excellent for marinades and sauteing mushrooms.

         

In the Brew Room

Everything seems to be firing well this week, 2 Pale Ales were brewed and the Hoptastic is going well. The Blueberry Melomel is looking good for bottling next week and we've just recieved a shipment of Orange Blossom honey which will be made into a couple of different Meads.

This week also saw the first bottle of our Stout opened and we are impressed, served at about 8 - 10*c it has a wonderful bitter chocolate / coffee aroma and tastes of roasted barley with a bitterness that lingures. With a thinish body and 4% alc it leaves you wanting more.

This Week in the Brew Room

This last week has seen a flurry of activity, with the Ginger Beer and the Siberian Crude ( our Russian Imperial Stout ) both being sent through the bottling line, I say bottling line but in reality I'm filling them and the wife's capping them and productivity is up 50% so its all good.

We have been playing around with bulk priming ( previously we have just been using the sugar drops by Coopers, very easy 1 drop per stubby and 2 per long neck ) and have been using light dried malt added to boiling water, cooled and then poured into the fermenter. This requires a little more prep time but will be needed when we start to keg condition. There is a great online bulk priming calculator, you will find the link to it on our new "Handy Links" page.

We have also started another batch of Hoptastic, this one will be brewed on the bench rather than in the fridge as the temperatures are starting to become cooler and more stable.

Also I picked up some Citra hops to try, having tasted other brews that use them I am keen to see how they go.

In the Brew Room this Week

With the onset of colder weather the time had come to set the hop vines up for winter, not much to it really just cut off the vines above ground and untangle them from the frames. This done the beds got a healthy dose of cow manure and compost and a final layer of straw on top to help keep things from drying out to much. During winter I will be redesigning the climbing frames, getting rid of the wire that was holding the vines up and going with string instead. This will mean that come the end of next season it will just be a matter of cutting the vines and string with no need to untangle everything.

The American Pale Ale we brewed has been tasted by several brewers and the conclusion is that it's more of an Amber Ale, with the crystal malt covering the hops so I will be tweaking this recipe to a lower grain bill and maybe some more hops. I will let you know.

In the Brew Room this Week

     This week has seen us bottling the first of our Sweet Meads, using 500gms more honey than the Medium Mead this Sweet  Mead is living up to its name with a finishing gravity of 1.040 there's plenty of body and sweetness, and  with 14.5% alcohol quite a kicker.
     The Blueberry Melomel has been racked off the berries and is tasting pretty good with a great purple colour, another month and it will be time to bottle.
     The two Stouts are now conditioning in the fridge for a couple of weeks prior to bottling.

We are now on the hunt for fresh apple juice and are waiting to hear back from a couple of orchards, we are looking to make a cider with no sulphides or sugar just juice and yeast. We will keep you posted.

Also we have just put down a ginger beer kit and it is bubbling away nicely. We made a starter yeast for this and were amazed to see it go so hard after just 4 hours.

In the Brew Room this Week

     Its been quite hectic these least 2 weeks, what with Easter, beer festivals and brewing up the Stouts, so now it's time to catch up. The two Stouts, Siberian Crude and the Oatmeal have both finished their primary fermentation and been moved into a pair of 19L kegs that have been partially modified to allow us to brew in them
      The Siberian Crude being an Imperial Stout is sitting at about 8.5% with some coffee notes in the background and a nice warmth to it ( this will need at least 4 - 6 months before even thinking about drinking it ) and the Oatmeal Stout is sitting at about 3.5% with big coffee and dark chocolate notes.
     The American Pale Ale has been bottled and we are looking forward to trying that in a week or so.

     Keg modifications - the up take tube inside has been cut down by about 4cm (doing this means you don't pick up as much sediment from the bottom) as we plan to keg condition (same as bottle conditioning, prime the beer with sugar transfer to the keg and seal it up the yeast will use up the sugar and the resultant pressure from the CO2 will carbonate the beer )our beers. This has the added benefit of not needing to force carbonate (connecting a CO2 bottle and ramping the pressure right up, then rolling the keg around to  get it mixed in) the beer. This is sort of what the CAMRA  ( Campaign for Real Ale ) guys in Brittan are doing, although they go further by using wooden casks and gravity (we will use CO2 to get the beer out of the kegs).
     The second modification is simply to use a short length of hose on the gas in line and add an air lock to it, this means the beer can ferment and vent the gas as normal. Then after the ferment prime and seal.

http://www.camra.org.uk/

In the Brew Room this Week

     It's been fairly quite this week, nothings needed moving or bottling so I have been concentrating on converting a 55L esky we no longer use into a mash tun. This involved changing out the drain plug for a tap, drilling a hole for the thermometer thermocouple and making up the drainage pipes.

    
     After sourcing copper pipe and fitting from the local hardware it was easy to measure up and cut to size, so we have 4 lengths running the full length of the esky. All the pipes have cuts in the base to allow the wort to drain through and keep the grain in place (they are upside down for the photo). The grain itself will act as the filter providing we don't crush it too fine.

     We have also picked up 2 19L kegs, we wil be using these to brew in in the fridge as it will allow us to have up to 4 batches either brewing or lagering. All of this work is leading up to being able to brew our Russian Imperial Stout "Siberian Crude" over the easter weekend.

Unnatural Selection part 2

4 Pines Hefeweizen - a great balance of hop bitterness, aroma and flavour as well as the wheat.
very drinkable.

Macs Hop Rocker Pilsner - using NZ Cascade and Nelson Sauvin hops you get a mild Cascade aroma with big bitterness once is enough for us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Cheers and Beers



In the Brew Room this Week

     This week has seen everything we have brewing either racked off or bottled. So quite a lot of washing up and sterilising, the less glamorous side of brewing but probably the most important. As we are encouraging the yeast to grow, giving them the ideal conditions to do so ie warmth, food and a medium we need to ensure that only those we want are there. Now ideally any work with the yeast or an open fermenter should be carried out in a clean dust / hair free environment to avoid contamination but that's just not possible outside a lab so we make sure that what we can control we do. All our tools are cleaned and sanitised before use, as are the fermenters and bottles to give our brews the best chance of being contamination free.

     First up this week the second batch of medium Mead has been acid balanced and bottled, a nice and easy job as it's only a 4.5L batch. This freed up the fermenter for the next step of the Blueberry Melomel, which involved 500gm of blueberries being soaked in 500ml of boiling water to sanitise them and adding a 1/4 teaspoon of pectinese. The Sweet Mead base was then racked off onto this.

     This then freed up the fermenter for the other Sweet Mead to be racked off, this will help it to clear more and probably be ready for bottling with in the next few weeks.

     The Hoptastic we had brewing in the fridge has been bottled, not without it's own dramas, with the end of the bottling wand deciding to come off in a bottle with the end result of sticky beer being squirted over half the brew room. ( the clean up for this took longer than the actual bottling ) This beer is back in the fridge for some more lagering.

     The Bilge Pump Saison has been tested and we are very happy with the results, very different to the last Saison this one has a reserved taste and even though the brewing temp got up to about 26 - 27*c it has a very reserved ester taste and packs an almighty punch, coming in at a sneaky 7% alcohol you don't notice it straight away, there's no nasty alcohol taste just a gentle warming of the mouth when your about half way through the bottle. This beer should just get better and better.

     We will also be brewing and APA ( American Pale Ale ) this week but it will get a post of it's own so watch out for it soon.

Cheers and Beers

In the Brew Room this Week

     Sad news in the brew room this as we have had to dump the full batch of Fuzzy Navel, an Orange peel infused Pale Ale brewed back in August last year. We had had reservations about this beer as it had finished gravity of 1.020, fairly high for a 5% beer and with some strange tastes which we hoped would mellow with time but unfortunatly have not.

     In other news the Bilge Pump Saison has been bottled, and has come out with a very interesting taste, not as spicy / yeasty / estery as the last one which was extract plus grains with the original Belgium Saison yeast compared to this all grain with the Belgium Saison II yeast. At the moment it's conditioning in the fridge next to the latest Hoptastic at 18.5*c, it will be interesting to try after a week or so as we were expecting some big ester tastes due to the high fermentation temperatures, up to 27*c.

     Check out The Brew Shops new website as they have completly reworked it and I believe that the ES Brewing site is an exact copy, something to check on later in the week.

Cheers and Beers

In the Brew Room this Week

    This week we have started a Blueberry Melomel which is basically a blueberry Mead, made the same way we start off by fermenting the honey with water, yeast and the yeast nutrient and after about 2 weeks we then rack it off and add the blueberries ( the full recipe will be on the recipe page), we have decided to make up a yeast starter for this batch, it's like a mini brew just to get the number of yeast cells that we pitch way up and help with the high alcohol content.

     You can see in the picture not only the different colours we get from the different honeys but also how they change as they clear, the middle bottle is the Mead we put down at the same time as the Plum wine it was a dark dirty brown but has changed to a tan / orange colour.

     The Plum / grape wine is coming along and has received a dose of campden tablets to stop fermentation prior to sweetening with 950gm of sugar as syrup and then bottling bottling.

     The Hoptastic brewing in the fridge is going nicely and has gotten it's next dose of Amarillo hops and is undergoing it's secondary ferment.

    We tasted our Boadicea hop trial and thought it tasted very cidery we were quite disappointed with it and will give it more time under the house, as for the Bramling Cross it has a nice citrus / berry taste different to other hops we have tried so we will probably use it again.

    The all grain Saison was tested this week as well and has reached it's terminal gravity of 1.004 which is good news as we were not sure if the higher mash temps were going to stop it short, so once bottled it will come in about 7%. This should be quite interesting as there was no overt alcohol taste of testing.

Cheers and Beers

In the Brew Room this Week

     This week we have transferred both the Meads over, with the medium Mead coming out almost as clear  as water and will only need another 2 weeks before bottling, while the sweet Mead although clearer still has a long way to go.

     The Plum wine has also been racked off again and on tasting we were most disappointed with the lack of plum taste and also quite a strong yeast taste. We decided to modify the brew with the addition of 4.8L of grape juice and we will probably look at sweetening the wine before bottling with some sugar syrup. We will also adjust the recipe and double the fruit and bring the total volume down to 15L

     Finally the long awaited correct fridge controller arrived, this unit plugs into the mains power and the fridge plugs into it. It has a temperature probe which you place inside the fridge ideally against the brew which tells the unit to switch the fridge on and off to suit your selected temperature. At the moment we have it at about 18.5*c and have put down a batch of Hoptastic to try.

     We also had to dump a batch of beer this week that we had brewed in august as it had a very unpleasant green apple taste that was just not going away with time, not an enjoyable thing to have to do but it was taking up room and milk crates.

     Finally we received our order of Ham on Rye and Coffee Pants today from HopDog BeerWorks and we look forward to drinking them.
     Ham on Rye took out the poll for your favaourite HopDog Beer
Cheers and Beers

In the Brew Room this Week

     We had to upgrade the home fridge this week so this means that the brew room now has a brewing fridge and with the addition of a dual controller for heat and cold we can now start to experiment with temperature controlled brewing and seeing what results come from that.
     I was supposed to be showing you a picture of the new controller here but they online store decided to ship the wrong one, how can anyone make a profit when they make so basic a mistake.
     In other news the Brambling Cross and  Boadicea hop trails have been bottled and are serving their 1 week sentence in the house before moving under the house to lager.
     We also tried the Strongbow clone and decided it needs a lot more time  with very strong peach scnapps aroma a perculiar taste which we think is the lactose powder, so it gets another month under the house and we will check again.
     I received 2 new books this week, YEAST by Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff and BELGIAN ALE by Pierre Rajotte. I look forward to putting some of their ideas into practice
    Punch and Judy took out the title for your favourite Murrays Beer.

Cheers and Beers.

In the Brew Room this Week

      This week started off full bore with the all grain Saison being brewed on saturday, 5 hours brewing plus the clean up makes for a full day. I was glad to get it in the fermenter and be done for the day. I must say I think the bilge pump cooling system worked a treat and to drop the temperature from boiling to 24*c in 20 odd minutes is great, out of 4 bags of ice we had 1/2 a bag left in the esky so I think we got right to, next time though we will move the keg off the bricks we were boiling it on to cool as I think it added to the cooling time with the bricks radiating all of their heat back to the keg.

     The Plum wine also sees it's first racking this week, and what a load of sediment it's dropped. A few more weeks and it will be crystal clear and ready to bottle.

     The batch of Hoptastic and the Strongbow clone have both served their 1 week in the house and have been moved through the mud under the house waiting their turn to be drunk.

Cheers and Beers
HBB

In the Brew Room this Week

     This week in the Brew Room has been fairly busy, the medium Mead has been racked off the sediment and is clearing nicely, The hop trails received their second dose of Bramling Cross and Boadicea 35gm each and the Plum wine is progressing nicely in the bucket and is in the fermenter now.

     The Hoptastic and Strongbow clone brews have been bottled and are serving their 1 week in the house before being put under the house. ( the 1 week allows the priming sugar to do it's work and carbonate the
brew. )

     The first batch of sweet Mead has been started, using 2kg of honey instead of 1.5kg for the medium Mead and is and incredibly dark colour thanks to the Stringy Bark Honey from Summerland Honey. The sweet Mead recipe is now on the recipes page.

Cheers

hop trials

     Today we have 2 new to us hop varieties to try out, Bramling Cross and Boadicea. We will be using them in a kit and kilo brew that we call our standard. This is one that we started with and know it's tastes and characters well, it starts with a can of Morgans Blue Mountain Lager and 1kg  #20 ultra blend  (500gm light malt, 250gm maltodextrine and 250gm dextrose )

    As we are trialing 2 different hops we have made up and then split this batch into 2 15L fermenters with 11L in each, this means that we are not risking having a full batch with a taste we don't like.

     With 15gm of each hop in some cheese cloth boiling in separate pans on the stove for 15min the batch is made and ready for the hops, which are poured in along with the hop bag. This short boil will give us some bittering without going over the top ( we can easily boil for longer next time we use them ). A full sachet of Morgans Yeast was used for each brewer, this will give us a very fast initial fermentation and within a week we will be able to add the second round of hops for aroma. We add the aroma hops after most of the fermentation has occurred as the vigorous bubbling drives off the aroma from the first hop addition.

     Bramling Cross : This hop was first bred in 1927 by crossing Golden Hops with a Manitoban wild male Hop. It has a distinctive strong spicy blackcurrant flavour with it's origins in the U.K and an alpha acid content of  6%.

     Boadicea : This hop is quite new to the market and also has it's origins in the U.K it has a light floral characteristics with excellent bittering as it's alpha acids are at 9 - 11%

     Let us know if you have used either of these Hops or had a Beer that uses them, alternatively let us know your favourite Hop.

cheers

Cascade Hop Harvest

     Took a close look at the hops yesterday after being smacked in the head by a drooping vine, and realised it's time to harvest. So out with the scissors and bowl for the first harvest of our Cascade Hops. These rhizomes are only 1 year old so not a lot was expected of them, most hops peak at 2 - 3 years and are dug up and divided.

 
     Total weight for the first harvest was 165gm once cleaned with probably another 20gm on the vines still. This should be enough for 1 batch of Beer as the usage rate of fresh hops needs to be about 5 times that of dried or pelletised, so we are looking at about 53gm of pellets.

     What we are using with these hops is the yellow lupulin glands which contain the essential oils which give us our alpha acids which are isomerised during the boil giving us our bitterness. ( very simply the higher the alpha acid content and longer the boil the more bitter the Beer. Big Beer companies want and develop ultra high alpha acid hops 14 - 20% so they can use less hops making cheaper but not necessary better Beer.) We will also dry hop with these to give us a nice aroma as well