Brew Day: Pomegranate Cream Ale

I made a Watermelon Wheat Ale and that’s about the only fruit beer I’ve made.

So when I sat down with my last kilo of Pilsner malt before restocking, I had various ideas for a simple yet flavorful beer. I was thinking along the lines of a previously brewed Cream Ale and add a bit of fruit puree or fruit juice in the secondary. For a fruit beer a lightly hopped wheat beer seems to be the best base beer, but my plan was to re-brew a slightly different version of my Cream Ale and I will let you know if this forms a good base. My understanding is that it will, but I will wait till I taste the beer and confirm my findings.

The decision about which fruit to use for this beer was simple: the in-season pomegranate. It’s a bit tart and sometimes if they’re not ripe, they can be sour too and choosing the right pomegranates can make all the difference.

There was a bit of an apprehension about how long I should keep the beer in secondary. I had a bit of an issue with the Water Wheat Ale in that the watermelon puree was in the secondary for about 3 days but ended up with a very pronounced vegetal flavor. But if I went with one day in secondary, I fear I may have a high amount of unfermented fruit sugars that can over-carbonate the beers and even give me a few bottle bombs. This brewwiki link said pomegranates are very subtle tasting, and its best to use pomegranate juice sold in stores. That wasn’t much nor was there enough to answer the million questions I had and there wasn’t enough information anywhere else that I could rely on. So I decided to go it alone: add about a litre of fresh pomegranate juice for 2 days and see how things turned out.

Based on this experiment from the folks at brulosophy.com, I targeted a mash temperature of 63°C to extract as much fermentables as possible. I got my hands on a new hop, Horizon, with about 12.3% AA and clean bittering properties and that was chosen for the single hop addition. Before adding the hops to the boil, I smelled it and it had spicy, pungent notes to and I think it will be interesting to see how this hop works with something as simple as a Cream Ale.

From the recipe, it’s a low gravity, really pale yellow beer. But the pomegranate juice with its sugars will raise the alcohol levels slightly and turn the beer to a slightly orange shade from the pale yellow.

Pomegranate Cream Ale (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: All Grain, Fruit Beer

IBU: 25

SRM: 2.4, although this will change to a slight orange with the addition of pomegranate juice

OG: 1.036

Grains and Sugars

1.2 kg Pilsner

300 grams Flaked Rice

Hops

6 grams Horizon @ 45

Other Additions

Add 1 litre of fresh pomegranate juice to the beer in secondary for 2 days after a week of fermentation.

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 63°C for 60 minutes.

Batch sparged at 80°C.

Boiled for 45 minutes.

Brew Day: Simcoe SMaSH IPA

Honestly, its good to get back to brewing. No, it really feels good to sit down and review a recipe, go through my hops and malts and to check on my yeast starter from time to time. But I wish I did a better job of reviewing my recipes.

This beer was intended to be a riff of my Citra SMaSH Dark Ale with a few minute differences.

Truth be told, this beer was the result of a simple screw up. The original intent was to make a clone of the Citra SMaSH Dark Ale as is. No changes, none whatsoever. But the hop additions went wrong. I loaded the calculator at brewersfriend.com, entered the details and when it came to the hop additions, I added 15 grams of Simcoe (12.7% AA) to be boiled for 30 minutes to get about 24 IBUs which sounded fair enough, although it was slightly higher than the IBUs of the Citra SMaSH. So I was finally set.

It was only after I added the hops to the wort that I sat down to review my recipe and saw that when I converted from US to Metric units on the calculator, I forgot to change the batch size. The default batch size in the calculator is 5 gallons US, which when converted to Metric is 20.8 liters. And 15 grams of Simcoe will add 24 IBUs for 20.8 liters of beer over a 30 minute boil. Only, I wasn’t making 20.8 liters, it’s a much smaller 8 liter batch. I realized my mistake and changed the batch size to 8 liters to see that the calculated IBUs now stood at 62.

And that’s that. Every brewer has a story to tell about their beers and this is mine. So now I’ve got a beer that has IPA level bitterness but is also a SMaSH because there’s just one malt and just one hop and Simcoe will be used again to dry hop. So this is a Simcoe SMaSH IPA. I hope it can be called that but I'm afraid it would never completely fit the description of either an IPA or a SMaSH.

Simcoe SMaSH IPA (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: Extract

IBU: 62

SRM: 25

OG: 1.060

Grains and Sugars
1.3 kg Dry Malt Extract
 - 600 grams added at the start of boil
 - 700 grams at flame out

Hops
15 grams Simcoe @ 30 min
10 grams Simcoe dry hopped for 5 days

Yeast

Fermentis S-04 Ale Yeast

Schedules
Boiled for 30 minutes.

Losing Beer and Getting Back

Its been quite a while since I posted anything here. This is a small post about what’s been happening so far.

I brewed two small batches of beer on a Friday and then I had to be hospitalized for 4 days about a week after I brewed. I couldn't get back to the beers quickly enough and when I finally did, I looked at spoilt beer in the fermenters, both of which I had to throw away with a heavy heart.

I’m in the pink of health now and I’m currently writing a few recipes to get back to brewing. These beers are simple, calculatedly flavoursome and easy drinking beers. Winter is approaching and usually this calls for some high gravity, body warming beers, but I’d like to get back to brewing with a few simple beers and then move onto the more complex ones.

I will start posting recipes shortly, so thank you for sticking around.

Tasting Day: Amber Wheat IPA

Recipe and Brewday here.

After about 3 weeks of carbonation, I opened a bottle of the Amber Wheat IPA just before a London derby in the EPL. The London derby was fiery but I will stick to reviewing the beer in this post.

This IPA pours a proper thick head, much like a head every brewer dreams of for all his beers. The head sticks around all the way to the end of the glass and then some. The pour is a beautiful dark amber and it is slightly darker than what I expected. It seemed to me like I took a bottle from one of my extract batches.

This is a medium bodied beer with pines and resins on the nose. Surprisingly, the aroma is less citrus even though there was a fair amount of Cascade and Simcoe in the dry hop. Although this was fermented with WB-06, there are no clove or banana notes on the nose and it wasn’t intended either. It was intentionally fermented at a slightly higher temperature to avoid the lighter aromas that WB-06 would have in a wheat ale.

This is not a perfect IPA because the aroma is not as intense as I would like it to be, but it does fit other characteristics of an IPA fairly well. I do not have a tolerance towards highly bitter brews and this beer was brewed with just 40 IBUs and the 40 IBUs definitely show: it is a clean bitterness and does not overpower the beer at all. 

The beer finishes crisp on the palate, it is slightly sweet but very drinkable with no overpowering characteristic. If I brew this beer again, and there are very good chances I will, I will tweak it to have a more hoppy nose and a less amber color, and that’s about all the changes I would want in it.

Tasting Day: Summer Wheat Ale

Recipe and Brewday here.

The first thing I understood from this beer was that I screwed up the carbonation. Even after an aggressive pour, it just had a plain jane 2-3 mm thick head. It stuck around for some time and then receded to give way to a clear headless beer.

Baring that one glitch, this beer has a lot going for it. Without much effort on my part, it is a much clearer beer than most of my other light beers. It was fermented with WB-06 and has light banana notes on the nose. The low bitterness makes this an easy drinking beer; it is easily a lawn mower beer and can be paired with a burger or pizza.

This is a no-fuss, session beer with no overpowering notes or complex layers. Its not a beer that will start off a conversation about how it was brewed or what its grain bill was or what techniques were used. Since this was brewed along with the Cream Ale, I intended the end result to be a beer that ends up being sessionable like the Cream Ale for loads of afternoon or evening drinking.

And it seems this wheat beer serves its purpose pretty well.

Tasting Day: Watermelon Wheat

Recipe and Brewday here.

Quite easily, this isn’t one of the better beers I’ve brewed and tasted thus far!! From the image below, it is easy to think I’m joking, but I’m not.

The beer pours with a beautiful blonde color and a quick thick head. That head sticks around for some time and if observed closely, the lacing on the glass is good too. In fact, unlike some of my other low gravity beers, the head does stick around longer and even when it looks like its gone, the head is still around the edges of the glass.

On the nose, there is a fairly fresh, pronounced watermelon aroma and that almost instantly changes to a certain dank aroma. This unwanted dank, vegetal aroma is completely overwhelming and changes your perception of the beer almost instantly. I have figured out why this happened: I worked quickly with the watermelon and may have gotten some of the white pith in the puree and I may have left it longer than I wanted in the secondary.

This is a fairly light bodied beer where the wheat stands out and (unfortunately) the watermelon dankness stands out even more. This is a perfect beer to drink on a warm day and if I were to chug it down quickly enough, I wouldn’t notice any of the aromas at all. But being a brewer, I have to take a whiff of it and describe the aromas and when that happens, the look on my face is good enough to tell others a bit about the beer if we had a group tasting.

Per se, the beer isn’t bad. I’ve had worse beer so this wouldn’t be bad enough to give one an upset tummy but the beer wouldn’t be classified as good either.

Will I brew this beer again? Now that I have identified the reasons why that dank, vegetal aroma and flavor exists in the beer, I will brew it again and perhaps add watermelon to some of my other low gravity beers too.

All said and done, I wouldn’t think of sharing this beer with anyone unless they really, really want it.

Brew Day: Wannabe Wit

CAVEAT: If you’re looking for a traditional Wit recipe, please look elsewhere.

I have wanted to make a Wit for some time now, but I hesitated on most occasions only because I didn’t have the right grains. Wheat is equally important to a Wit as is the Pilsner or Pale Ale malt but I ran out of Wheat malt with my 3 wheat beers: Wheat Stout, Amber Wheat IPA and the Watermelon Wheat.

I had everything else: Pilsner malt, the hops, the orange (or citrus) peel, fresh coriander and the yeast. Just not the Wheat malt. But the urge to brew a Wit only increased ever since I started liking the smaller, simple beers after I tasted the Cream Ale.

But then what the heck: this may not be a perfect, to-the-point Wit, but it will certainly have the other elements that make a Wit. And with that in mind, I decided to brew a Pilsner-only Wit.

There are two elements of the Wit I had an issue with: the orange peels and the coriander, or the amount of each thereof. Most recipes I went through had additions of about a gram of coriander and a gram of orange peel per litre. Some of the recipes pushed those amounts higher. To be on the safe side and indeed enjoy what I drink, I decided to stick to just a gram of each per litre. Of course, I will gauge both these elements when I taste the beer and that should give me an idea of how accurate or inaccurate I am with the orange peel and coriander additions.

There was quite a bit of washed WB-06 from all the wheat ales that I brewed earlier and that was enough for this low gravity Wit. Bitterness was calculated to under 20 IBUs for easy drinking.

The more I explore Wits, the more I realize about the potential this beer presents the brewer with and the extent I can push it to. I will have a proper Wit recipe sometime in future and then work on additions to that recipe and see how they go.

For now, this is a Wannabe Wit.

Wannabe Wit

Specifics

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

IBU: 17

SRM: 4

OG: 1.048

Grains and Sugars

1.66 kg Pilsner Malt

Hops
3 grams Aurora @ 45 min.

Other Additions
Added 8 grams orange peels @ 5 min.
Added 8 grams freshly crushed coriander @ 5 min.

Yeast

Fermentis WB-06 Wheat Beer Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 66°C for 60 minutes

Batch sparged at 80°C for 30 minutes

Boiled for 45 minutes.

Notes
I took a whiff of the fermenter and the aroma of the orange peels stood out. The coriander, not so much but I'm hoping for everything to come together when I bottle it.

Tasting Day: Wheat Stout

Recipe and Brewday here.

The first time I had a stout was on a trip to Singapore in 2010. I didn’t know it was a stout; I referred to it as a black beer. And I did not like it at the time. It was a Guinness Stout with the roasty, malty, slight coffee-ish flavors and aromas. I didn’t like it because I was expecting it to be the same as very other lager with a change in the color. Of course, Arthur Guinness had other ideas when he brewed this stout. I only finished the beer because I paid 8 SGD for it and didn’t want to waste it. From those naïve days, I have moved over to craft beers and have come to appreciate stouts.

The reason I told you this story is because, to put it simply, this wheat stout largely reminds me of those very same roasted, malty, coffee-ish flavors and aromas that I hated but now love. The aromas and flavors are not exactly the same, but it reminds me more or less of the ‘black beer’. To most folks, it could sound a bit off since Guinness makes their stouts with barley and this stout has wheat in the grain bill, but each drinker has their own perspectives and conclusions of the beers they drink.

This stout pours with a black color but on closer inspection, the beer is really a very, very dark brown with hints of ruby close to the top of the glass. One thing this beer has is a lot of head. On the first pour, I slowed down and stopped pouring simply because the head formed too quickly. In time, I was able to pour a full glass of beer. The head is tan, thick and persistent. It takes a bit of time to settle into a half finger thick foam and then slowly form a bubbly rim around the glass.

On the nose, as I mentioned earlier, it does have a lot of those roasty, coffee aromas. The aromas are strong and continue to persist irrespective of the amount of beer in the glass. A sip of this beer brings all of those aromas and flavors in liquid form and it is good. This beer is strong but very drinkable.

One of things I set out to do when I brewed this stout was to have a lesser roasted characteristic than the Foreign Extra Stout and I seem to have achieved it. Black Malt wasn’t in the gain bill and it really shows in 2 ways: one, the less roasted characteristics help make this beer a more drinkable one; and two: the color of the beer, although it’s a stout, is actually a very, very dark brown. Maybe a bit of black malt may have helped the color but that’s a recipe for another day.

This stout is medium bodied and enjoyable. I will age a small batch of this stout for a few months till, say, winter when I expect the flavors to mellow down a bit and then I plan on having a parallel tasting with the Eis Stout.

Eis That Beer

Eis Beer: Pronounced as if it were ‘Ice Beer’.

Eis beer is a concentrated version of a regular beer and this concentration is carried out by freezing the beer for a few hours and then letting it thaw out. The beer is not allowed to thaw out completely as some of the ice crystals are discarded. On tasting various Eis beers, it has been noted that it has a much more smoother as compared to its non-Eis versions. Freezing the beer also removes some of the hops bitterness and tannins. Alcohol does not freeze but water does and the loss of water increases the alcohol concentration of the beer.

I intentionally brewed 10 liters of my Wheat Stout so I could Eis 2 liters of it. Once the fermentation was complete, I measured out 2 liters of the beer and put it in the freezer just before I went to bed. The next day I put the ice block on a strainer and allowed it to thaw for some time. The ice block almost immediately collapsed because the alcohol had not frozen and this left some smaller blocks of ice in the strainer that I left to continue thawing for some time. 

After about half an hour, the remaining ice blocks has lost most of its color and I got about 1.5 liters of beer. I primed with a much lesser amount of sugar than I usually prime with, bottled it and then pushed it to the back of my cupboard.

The reason I did that was because I have no intention of opening the beer in a month’s time. Instead I plan on opening it after ageing it for 6 months at the minimum. I prefer ageing bigger beers because the inherent alcohol note in an un-aged big beer is sharp, harsh and heady which ruins the drinking experience. Its like drinking a peaty, smoky scotch with a seafood platter and having that smoke and peat linger on throughout your meal thus overwhelming the delicate flavors of the seafood.

Eis beers are not available as widely as the other commercial craft beers are because of the sheer cost of brewing it. Initially, things seem fine, but if you observe closely the beers do carry a higher cost. I lost half a liter when I Eis-ed the stout. So that’s half a liter of hop bitterness (irrespective of how small it is), half a liter of water, half a liter worth of base, specialty and roasted malts and half a liter worth of fermentation. Half a liter isn’t much, but imagine the costs when a commercial brewery loses the aforementioned items because they don’t brewing small batches. And that loss causes the per serving cost of the Eis beer to shoot up. Which is why this beer makes perfect sense for a home brewer. You tend not to lose a lot if you plan properly and the only thing you need to worry about is trying to keep your hands off of the beer for a while.

The ageing process brings out the beer’s flavors, the alcohol mellows out slightly (but trust me, its very much there), and some of the hop bitterness fades away, all of which makes for a smoother drinking experience. I have not found a source anywhere on the internet that says a beer will lose the flavor and aroma compounds, so Eis-ing an IPA would make for an interesting beer. Of course, I wouldn’t age an Eis IPA since the dry hop flavor and aroma would simply cease to exist after 6 months of ageing.

Lastly, a simple piece of advice for folks who Eis their beers: share it.

Brew Day: Amber Wheat IPA

I’ve only had one Wheat IPA so far. At Toit in Indiranagar. Referencing their website, Toit states that the grain bill contains Munich, Wheat and Caramel malts and it is dry hopped with Chinook and Citra. It was a fairly opaque, cloudy and dark brown colored beer. And it made for one good IPA too.

With quite a bit of wheat malt on my hands and inspired by Toit’s offering, I decided to brew a Wheat IPA too. I have had a few nice, worthy IPAs and I’ve brewed some too but never one with wheat in the grain bill. So this was a bit of a challenge. With the grains at home, I decided to stick to the basics since this is my first Wheat IPA. My grain bill was just Pale Ale and Wheat, with a bit of dark caramel malts to deepen the color. This was done because my plan was to brew an Amber Wheat IPA.

My initial recipe had Aromatic malt too. But on later introspection, I decided to chuck Aromatic malt from the grain bill since I feared this would give the beer a bit of a stronger malty backbone and hide the wheat. I had some yeast starter left over from my other Wheat beers, Wheat Stout and Watermelon Wheat and that is what I used.

Once I finalized the grain bill, my next challenge was to zero in on the hops. IPAs are probably the more expensive beers brewed around the world due to the hops used in them and I may not be wrong in stating that the West Coast IPAs and the Imperial IPAs would be among the more expensive IPAs brewed. With that in mind, I decided on two hop additions during the boil to bring the IBUs to around 40. Of course, setting IBUs and maintaining it is easy for most beers. For an IPA the challenge is choosing which hops to dry hop with.

And that brought around some confusion. A fellow brewer gave me some Simcoe which I decided to use straight away. But I preferred 2 hops as part of the dry hopping regimen. Browsing through my hops (which isn’t a lot), I found some Cascade that I could use. The reason I stuck to two hops during the dry hop regimen was to keep things simple and not over complicate flavors and aroma in the IPA. There are IPAs out there with a lot more hops added during dry hopping but I guess simplicity has its charm.

Amber Wheat IPA (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

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

IBU: 40

SRM: 15

OG: 1.056

Grains and Sugars

900 grams Pale Ale
900 grams Wheat Malt
50 grams Crystal 120
50 grams Crystal 80
10 grams Roasted Barley

Hops
5 grams Aurora @ 45 min.

4 grams Northern Brewer @ 30 min.
7 grams Cascade, Dry hop, 5 days.
7 grams Simcoe, Dry hop, 5 days.

Yeast

Fermentis WB-06 Wheat Beer Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 66°C for 60 minutes

Sparged at 80°C for 30 minutes

Boiled for 45 minutes.