Marathon Beer Bottling And Some Random Ramblings

The whole of the last weekend and this week has been crazy. I get up, dry hop some beer, prime and bottle some beers, head to work, come back and continue bottling. 

In between, I added mango puree to half the Foreign Extra Stout to make a mango stout and added 400 ml of freshly made grape juice to half the Palest Pale Ale and dry hopped the other half with Goldings. All this in between preparing for dinner.

Prior to bottling, I also have to prime the beers. This is a fairly simple task, and most of my time is spent when I have to wait for the priming solution to cool down.

It is also one of those times when I wonder if its worth the time and effort to brew your own beer. And after bottling my beers, I sit down and sip a beer I brewed earlier and the answer is obvious: it damn well is.

The end result of brewing beer and buying mas produced beer is the same: you get to drink beer. But the time and effort taken to do it is a lot more than driving down to a liquor store to buy beers off the cooling shelf. You have to have some equipment at home to brew, you have to plan for a brew day, have a recipe ready and perhaps half a day to brew as well. But the end result, oh the end result is so glorious all by itself that you wouldn't mind doing it again.

When I brewed the Palest Pale Ale, I woke up at 6 am on a Saturday. Saturdays are meant for sleeping in, the fist day of the weekend and a day when I would prefer (though not always) to start with lunch. The driving factor to get up at 6 am and brew was to see how well I could get a pale ale which would stand out in terms of the colour and taste. 

I started brewing with extract and with some tinkering, the lightest coloured beer I got was a deep orange or amber shade. Which is what drove me to make the Palest Pale Ale. Of course, this is just one reason why I brewed this beer and different brewers have different reasons to brew, but at the end of the day, if asked whether its worth the effort to brew your own beer, the answer is hell yeah!!

Brew Day: Foreign Extra Stout

Of all the stouts I have had in Bangalore's breweries, the Stout at Windmills Craftworks has impressed me the most. Its not a beer I order every now and then, but when I do it is one of the more consistent stouts.

It has a creamy tan head that settles well, drinks easy and isn’t overly roasty or burnt which makes you want to have more. The waiters there describe it as a roasty, coffee-ish tasting beer and some (very few) drinkers turn their noses at it and go for the pale ale or the IPA. Windmills' stout has a very slight sweetness and you could miss it completely during sips. All in all, they make one darn good stout.

The Mash Tun

I was working on a recipe for a Russian Imperial Stout and a regular stout but haven’t got to brewing either, at least till last Sunday. I had some grains and decided it was time to make that stout and keep it simple. I decided that it should have the typical roasted, burnt characteristic that all stouts have but I wanted some chocolate and coffee to come through, without any chocolate or coffee additions. I wanted a bit of sweetness and threw in some Crystal 80 and Crystal 120 as well. 

I also wanted a bit of gravity because I wanted to age it too for about 6 to 7 months. I had some jaggery from the Jaggery Pale Ale and threw it in too.

The spent grains. These would go great in a loaf of spent grain bread.

If all stouts have one thing in common other than the roasted malt aromas and the jet black colour, it’s the hop addition which is done primarily for bittering alone.

The BJCP Style Guidelines for Stouts have many different variations and this stout falls into the Foreign Extra Stout category.

Just before the boil. A lovely malt aroma filled the air and a deep breath brought in the roasted aromas.

Foreign Extra Stout (Tasting Notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 6 litres
Type: All Grain

IBU: 32

SRM: 41

OG: 1.072

Grains and Sugars

1.5 kg Pale Ale
65 grams Crystal 80
65 grams Crystal 120
65 grams Black Malt
65 grams Roasted Barley
65 grams Chocolate malt
100 grams shaved jaggery

Hops

4 grams Magnum @ 60 min.

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 66°C for 60 minutes

Sparged at 80°C for 15 minutes

Boiled for 60 minutes.

Brew Day: Palest Pale Ale

In my pursuit of brewing lighter coloured beers, the lightest I have brewed is a shade of yellow that was slightly darker than Kingfisher Premium. And I wanted to go even lighter.

The last weekend, on Saturday, I brewed a very simple pale ale but with one intention: to get a really light coloured beer. From what I see in the fermenter, I think I achieved it but I will have to wait for 2 weeks to confirm it.

The recipe isn’t complex: I used just pilsner, wheat and some flaked rice. The wort was the lightest I have ever seen and because I also want this to be easy drinking, I lowered the bitterness to under 20. 18 IBUs to be exact.

Palest Pale Ale
Split Batch #1 Tasting Notes here
Split Batch #2 Tasting Notes here

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: All Grain

IBU: 18

SRM: 3-4

OG: 1.053

Grains and Sugars

1.5 kg Pilsner
150 grams Wheat
200 grams Flaked Rice

Hops

5 grams Northern Brewer @ 45 min.

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 66°C for 60 minutes

Sparged at 80°C for 15 minutes

Boiled for 45 minutes.

Notes:
- This will be another split batch: one to try and make a clone of DogFish Head's Midas Touch, from their Ancient Ales series, and dry hop the other batch with Opal and Goldings for about 5 days.

- For the Midas Touch clone, I intend on adding half a kilo of red grape must to the beer after primary fermentation.

Tasting Day: Cascade Pale Ale

Recipe and Brewday here.

Three weeks into bottling the Cascade Pale Ale, I opened a bottled and tasted it.

On a warm Sunday afternoon, the cold Cascade Pale Ale poured with a hazy orange shade into the glass and a thick white head formed that quickly settled into a quarter inch thick foam in a few minutes.

On the nose, it had a burst of pine and citrus notes. I think I could have got more aroma if I had continuously hopped it every 15 minutes or so. But beyond pine and citrus, I couldnt detect much else.

On a warm afternoon, this is the beer to come home to. It is a very easy drinking pale ale with bitterness late on the palate and mostly dry with barely any sweetness. 

I have a recipe for a continuously hopped Citra Pale Ale too and these two beers might have to fight it out for a place as my house beer.

DIY: Belgian Candi

At some point during home brewing, a home brewer would like to do something special, like brew a big beer, or make a sour beer or even age some beers. And I wanted to do the first of them, which is to brew a big beer.

To make big beers, your yeast should have a higher-than-normal amount of sugars to chew through. These levels of sugars in the wort can come from the base malt itself or you can add sugars like dextrose, maltose, cane sugar or even jiggery as I have done so in the past. One other option is to add Belgian Candi to your wort. The use of Belgians using Belgian Candi is debated: some say they do, some say they don’t.

While I wont take sides on whether Belgians use Belgian Candi or not, I could not find a single place in Bangalore where Belgian Candi could be purchased. Some browsing around on the internet told me that you can make Belgian Candi at home.

Why make Belgian Candi for big beers when you can add any sugars since Belgian Candi is a sugar too?

Belgian Candi is inverted sugar. When you heat cane sugar, you invert the sugar (sucrose, which is made up of simpler sugars - fructose and glucose attached together), which means that the heat breaks down sucrose into individual molecules of fructose and glucose. This makes it easier for the yeast to process these simple sugars and increase the gravity of the beer.

And so with an eye brewing big beers in future, I decided to make Belgian Candi at home. All you need is cane sugar, which is easily available, water, a heat source and some citric acid. You can purchase citric acid from the bakery section of a supermarket or like me you can add the juice of one lemon to 300 grams of sugar.

Usually, 300 grams of sugar will yield around the same amount of Belgian Candi. Add enough water to the sugar to make it syrupy, add the juice of one lemon and bring the mixture to a boil. It is important to maintain the temperature between 126°C and 135°C. With time, water will boil off and you need to add water to maintain temperature in this range. As you hold this temperature range, you will start to see the sugar going from a pale, pale yellow to orange to red to deep ruby and then darker shades.

You can decide on what color your Candi should be and raise the temperature to 149°C when you hit that color. Immediately take it off the heat and pour it in a pan. I used aluminium foil to line the pan and then I left the pan to cool. 

And voila: you have Belgian Candi.

On the boil, 300 grams of sugar, enough water to make it syrupy and the juice of one lemon.

The mixture has started to boil and will change color as the water boils off.

There is a faint yellow shade, but you may not be able to figure that from the camera shot.

The Candi has reached the color I wanted and I'm just about to take it off the boil.

I poured the Candi syrup on a sheet of aluminium foil and left it to cool.

Once cooled, I cracked the Candi and dusted it with powdered sugar and put it in the refrigerator.

I had some extra time to play around with the process so I decided to have another go at making Belgian Candi, but this time vary the results with the boil time and here are my results:

Various shades of Belgian Candi

Brew Day: Cascade Pale Ale

I did another all grain pale ale over the weekend but this time I wanted an easy drinking ale with a lower ABV and a crisp, refreshing flavour.

The grain bill was fairly simple: just pale ale malt and a bit of Crystal 20. The wort would have been lighter had it not been for the Crystal malt, but I didnt want to work with just base malt. I used only Cascade at 3 times during the boil, including 2 additions to the end of the boil, so I expect a lot of flavour and aroma in the final product.

Cascade Pale Ale (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 4 litres
Type: All Grain

IBU: 17

SRM: 9

OG: 1.045

Grains and Sugars
700 grams Pale Malt
50 grams Crystal 20

Hops
2 grams Cascade @ 45 min
2 grams Cascade @ 5 min
2 grams Cascade @ 1 min

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules
Mash grains at 68°C for 60 minutes.
Batch sparge at 80°C for 15 minutes.
Boiled for 45 minutes.

Notes:
- The grain crush didnt go as well as expected; so I think the efficiency suffered a bit.
- I plan to prime with 40 grams honey at bottling after 2 weeks in the fermenter.

Dry Hopping the Extract Batch

Brewing an extract batch of beer is simple but it is mundane all by itself. Which is why I prefer to add fruits to it in secondary or dry hop it. I had some hops in the freezer and a quick check confirmed two of my favourite hops: Citra and Cascade.

I dumped the entire pack of Citra which wasn't much and about 5 to 6 grams of Cascade into the fermentation bucket.

And I checked it today morning and there was a thick layer of hops floating in the bucket and a strong scent of citrus fruits and pine. Dry hopping just elevates the beer to a different level altogether and will make this a very, very enjoyable beer.

Time to stock up on Citra and add some Simcoe and Amarillo to my hop collection.