What's Brewing? April 2017 Edition

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doobiegoobie

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Woot! It's been a while since I started one of these!

I brewed up a mixed ferment saison today with what I hope will become somewhat of a house culture. I harvested the dregs from 3 carboys that had beers I thought turned out well, blended them in a ratio I thought might be tasty, and pittched that along some fresh Omega Saisonstein. Ended up with a 1065ish beer, which is a bit higher than I wanted but so it goes.

90% Belgian pilsner, 10% oats.
20 IBUs of Fuggles at 40 minutes.
14 g Hungarian M oak in primary

I'm going to ferment at room temp for the first couple days, then ramp it up to 80ish or so. I imagine this will end up as part of a blend in the future, but I think I'll play around with this bug blend for the next 3 or 4 saisons to see what it does.
 
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OVcLCmp
Brewed a NE style pale on Sunday.

10 lbs Pale 2 Row
2 lbs flaked oats

Apollo (60 minutes)
Citra and Mosaic (whirlpool/dry hopping)
 
I need to pull a sample of my Imperial Cranberry to see if it's ready for bottling.
I ramped up my "house" tart beer to about 7% instead of its usual 5ish%, doubled the amount of fruit I typically use to about 4lbs/gal and aging it on said fruit for about twice the normal amount of time
 
I need to pull a sample of my Imperial Cranberry to see if it's ready for bottling.
I ramped up my "house" tart beer to about 7% instead of its usual 5ish%, doubled the amount of fruit I typically use to about 4lbs/gal and aging it on said fruit for about twice the normal amount of time

That's a LOT of cranberry. Have you used that much before? I'd be afraid that it'd get overly tannic and heavy on the citric acid. FWIW, I like to use juice when using cranberries. It's just neater and gives dynamite flavor and aroma.
 
That's a LOT of cranberry. Have you used that much before? I'd be afraid that it'd get overly tannic and heavy on the citric acid. FWIW, I like to use juice when using cranberries. It's just neater and gives dynamite flavor and aroma.
my previous beers with cranberry were at 2-2.5lbs/gal. while nice, me and others often thought it could use more. I've only used whole fruit - I freeze them when I get them in season then when I want to use them I thaw and crush about half of them. I like the tannins...
 
I have so much **** to bottle RN. I also need to brew again. Dandelions are popping up like a mother ****er on the farm and I want to do a saison with them.

Need to bottle:
- 8% sour beer on Moscato
- Experiment where I "biotransform" hops in a brett beer and age for a bit (3 months). Then re-dryhop. Pale malt and **** tons of oats, Belle Saison primary, Lacto Plantarum/drie/c2/trois/brett from Bearded Iris secondary. Dry hopped while an active 2nd fermentation is going. I've always like the way heavy dry hopped brett beers age. They seem hoppy as **** even 6-12 months later. So I want to pair that aged beer with the fresh hops right before package. Ooooooooooooor I just wasted $15 worth of galaxy and nelson. IDK. Champagne yeast and tons of carb for bottles.
 
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I have so much **** to bottle RN. I also need to brew again. Dandelions are popping up like a mother ****er on the farm and I want to do a saison with them.

Have you used them before? Gathering and processing them is a royal PITA, but the resultant beer tends to be very interesting.

No brewing for me this month. Early next month is a mixed microbe saison, probably with Comet hops. Never used them. Anyone have input?
 
Have you used them before? Gathering and processing them is a royal PITA, but the resultant beer tends to be very interesting.

No brewing for me this month. Early next month is a mixed microbe saison, probably with Comet hops. Never used them. Anyone have input?

I've helped someone else do it before. I collected and processed a bunch one year and froze them. But by the time I got to it, I wasn't so sure about using them. Aged Pissenlit is one of my favorite beers of all time.
 
I've helped someone else do it before. I collected and processed a bunch one year and froze them. But by the time I got to it, I wasn't so sure about using them. Aged Pissenlit is one of my favorite beers of all time.

You might be surprised by the amount of good info on MTF.
 
Brewing up another mixed culture saison today with my potential house blend. It's basically the same as last time but a little lower gravity and I cut the IBUs in half. I ended up keeping the other one at room temp (68-70ish), so I'm going to ramp the temp up this time to see what the bug blend does. I'm gonna try to brew this one more time this weekend to build up my stash to blend with in a few months.
 
Brewing up another mixed culture saison today with my potential house blend. It's basically the same as last time but a little lower gravity and I cut the IBUs in half. I ended up keeping the other one at room temp (68-70ish), so I'm going to ramp the temp up this time to see what the bug blend does. I'm gonna try to brew this one more time this weekend to build up my stash to blend with in a few months.
Every time I drink and brew I usually forget something. Sometimes it's big and sometime it doesn't matter, but it's always something. Well today I was drinking while brewing and didn't forget a damn thing. Everything went great actually.

Except when I broke my 5000 mL flask. Fuuuuuuuck me.
 
Every time I drink and brew I usually forget something. Sometimes it's big and sometime it doesn't matter, but it's always something. Well today I was drinking while brewing and didn't forget a damn thing. Everything went great actually.

Except when I broke my 5000 mL flask. Fuuuuuuuck me.

Ahahaha. I rarely ever drink during my brew days now. Learned my lessons over the years.
 
Brewing up another mixed culture saison today with my potential house blend. It's basically the same as last time but a little lower gravity and I cut the IBUs in half. I ended up keeping the other one at room temp (68-70ish), so I'm going to ramp the temp up this time to see what the bug blend does. I'm gonna try to brew this one more time this weekend to build up my stash to blend with in a few months.

Care to share a recipe? Love getting new perspectives when saison brewing season comes around.

How'd you come up with your house culture? Is it pretty hop-sensitive? If so, are you going to try to acclimate it to higher hopping levels? If you already did so, how'd you do it?
 
Care to share a recipe? Love getting new perspectives when saison brewing season comes around.

How'd you come up with your house culture? Is it pretty hop-sensitive? If so, are you going to try to acclimate it to higher hopping levels? If you already did so, how'd you do it?
Kinda interesting that for someone so keen on telling other people they have **** reading comprehension, all of your questions could have been answered by reading my first post...
Woot! It's been a while since I started one of these!

I brewed up a mixed ferment saison today with what I hope will become somewhat of a house culture. I harvested the dregs from 3 carboys that had beers I thought turned out well, blended them in a ratio I thought might be tasty, and pittched that along some fresh Omega Saisonstein. Ended up with a 1065ish beer, which is a bit higher than I wanted but so it goes.

90% Belgian pilsner, 10% oats.
20 IBUs of Fuggles at 40 minutes.
14 g Hungarian M oak in primary

I'm going to ferment at room temp for the first couple days, then ramp it up to 80ish or so. I imagine this will end up as part of a blend in the future, but I think I'll play around with this bug blend for the next 3 or 4 saisons to see what it does.
 
Kinda interesting that for someone so keen on telling other people they have **** reading comprehension, all of your questions could have been answered by reading my first post...

The recipe, sure, I could have guessed what you meant by "a little lower gravity" and "I cut the IBUs in half". No mention of the oak, though, or if your grist percentages remained the same, or if you used the same hops at the same time.

So, yeah, you really laid it out in magnificent detail, there.

The rest of the questions, not even close. You never said anything about what went into those three carboys and never mentioned anything about acidity/pH.

Next time I'll make sure to read more thoroughly the things that you never typed.
 
The recipe, sure, I could have guessed what you meant by "a little lower gravity" and "I cut the IBUs in half". No mention of the oak, though, or if your grist percentages remained the same, or if you used the same hops at the same time.

So, yeah, you really laid it out in magnificent detail, there.

The rest of the questions, not even close. You never said anything about what went into those three carboys and never mentioned anything about acidity/pH.

Next time I'll make sure to read more thoroughly the things that you never typed.
Man, you are a ****ing Debbie Downer. I'm sure that people love inviting you to their parties. JFC
 
Man, you are a ****ing Debbie Downer. I'm sure that people love inviting you to their parties. JFC

Yeah . . . I'm trying to be nice by asking questions about his beer(s) and he basically calls me a prick for not reading what he didn't write.

I can see how you'd think I'd be a real *******.
 
Yeah . . . I'm trying to be nice by asking questions about his beer(s) and he basically calls me a prick for not reading what he didn't write.

I can see how you'd think I'd be a real *******.
Yeah, you've certainly come off as a real nice guy in your short time here. My bad. :rolleyes:
 
The recipe, sure, I could have guessed what you meant by "a little lower gravity" and "I cut the IBUs in half". No mention of the oak, though, or if your grist percentages remained the same, or if you used the same hops at the same time.

So, yeah, you really laid it out in magnificent detail, there.

The rest of the questions, not even close. You never said anything about what went into those three carboys and never mentioned anything about acidity/pH.

Next time I'll make sure to read more thoroughly the things that you never typed.
You know what.. my bad. Just bc you're a dick to everyone doesn't mean I should have been a dick to you. And I was, so that's my bad.

Anyway... tbh, all the answers really were in the previous post. I said the recipe was the same but a lower gravity and IBUs (i.e., everything else was the same). Also, I said how I developed the blend, but I should have elaborated and said carboy 1 was 3mo old saisonstein + built up casey dregs, carboy 2 was 3mo old saisonstein + sara built up dregs, carboy 3 was 8 mo old 3724 + built up casey&sara dregs. I used about 50% carboy 1, 25% carboy 2, and 25% carboy 3. I never mentioned ph/acidity bc you never did and bc I don't check as I just rely on sensory information for my blending. And since it was the first time using it I'm not sure how I could know the hop tolerance, but I should have said that the blends the dregs came from were only ~10 IBUs each so I can't be sure.

Like I said, I'm happy to talk about my process and I think most people here are about theirs, but it'll definitely help if you don't act like such a taint itch
 
House culture b3 going down today. Same as last couple of times (target 1055 OG for this one), but going to sort of hop burst it with citra and mosaic at 10 min for 25 IBUs. I want to see if I can pull out and accentuate the tropical/melon character I pick up from the starter wort. Probably going to heat this batch up over fermentation as it seems that's a good way to go with the blend. Just basing off previous couple of batches and how they're progressing, so who knows really but it's fun playing around with this bug blend.
 
Drained a barrel yesterday. Saison in 'faux lambic' barrel. Got about 53 gallons out. Split into various treatments, mostly to delay the inevitable drudgery of bottling and to clean out my deep freezer. Scuppernong (these tend to take over so I went light, maybe 1ppg), rhubarb, dry hops varieties - motueka, amarillo, bramling cross, and crystal, and lemon verbena. Had no idea how much to use on the verbena, so I used all I had which was about 2 grams per gallon.

I don't know if I'll bottle any of that straight, plan is to blend from those, the almost 20 gallons of 'plain' barrel beer, 5 gallons of 'acid' beer, and another 10-12 gallons of hoppy base beer.

I'm hoping to get all my bottles prepped over the next couple weeks and then get a crew together to bang out all the bottling in one afternoon, but knowing me I'll decide to do it all myself.

Still need to get the barrel cleaned up today. I think I'm going to drag it down to my local brewery and borrow their hot water hose.:D
 
DAMN it was nice out yesterday!!!
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I've been using wheat in pretty much all of my sour beers so I figured it was time for a change. Took a dominatly wheat beer recipe that I've brewed 4-5 times and switched out the wheat for rye just to see what happens. Going to be bottling the last batch of the wheat version in about a month so I'll transfer this onto that cake for souring/aging.

2-row, rye, flaked rye, munich I, dextrine, warrior, brett C primary, 1.054 OG
 
I've been using wheat in pretty much all of my sour beers so I figured it was time for a change. Took a dominatly wheat beer recipe that I've brewed 4-5 times and switched out the wheat for rye just to see what happens.

Rye is lower in ferulic acid than wheat, so there's a good chance that you get less brett character than you're used to.

2-row, rye, flaked rye, munich I, dextrine, warrior, brett C primary, 1.054 OG

What kind of attenuation are you getting with Brett C? B. anomala strains are notoriously poor attenuators by themselves.
 
attenuation
I can't find the numbers in my phone, maybe I didn't even measure it. Most (all) of my brett primary beers eventually get LAB so they all finish relatively dry. The last few batches got to 1.004-1.006 from 1.050-1.060 so ~90%, but like I said, that's not solely the brett.
 
Still need to get the barrel cleaned up today. I think I'm going to drag it down to my local brewery and borrow their hot water hose.:D

For anyone thinking about tackling full size barrels at home, making nice with someone with floor drains and as much really hot water as you want to use is a good idea.

Barrel was looking pretty rough on the outside and I assumed from having beer in it for several years without cleaning in between batches the inside would be a mess, too. I figured I'd end up making a planter or patio table or something, but it cleaned up great and I'm going to get it filled with storage solution today and plan to refill with faux lambic when brewing season starts this fall.
 
Also James from Black Project wrote up a pretty good article on how they steam their barrels with a $50 wallpaper steamer on MTF...

Here's my process for rinsing and steaming barrels shown here on a super sized scale
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:)

AKA "Double turbid mash brew day and James is bored during the 3hr boil"

1: Barrel had already been well-rinsed and sulfured before delivery. Yesterday we filled it to the brim with cold tap water and verified there were no leaks (there were none). This pic was taken after dumping the barrel, but shows how I use a tube to siphon the water out of the belly of the barrel.

2: So yeah, the other end of this hose is carefully places through the bottom valve (normally it would be placed through the cork hole on our barrel heads). I use a shop vac held up against the end of the TC fitting to get a strong siphon going. On a 225L barrel I'll actually just vacuum out all the water to save time. There was probably more water in the belly of this than my shop vac holds, though, so I just set the tube down and let it siphon. There was less than a pint of water after this, by my estimation.

3: Time for steaming. I use this Wagner 705 wallpaper steamer, modified with a TC fitting and a silicone hose. Here she is warming up. Takes maybe 15 minutes if you start with hot tap water.

4: Close up of the TC modification. Wagner is nice enough to use an NPT fitting to connect the plastic wallpaper steamer hose thingy... Boom, NPT->TC and we're in business.

5: Steamer is fired up and starting to produce steam. Note that if you're going to try this don't do it this way, put the hose on before the steam starts coming out. I'm pretty fast with TCs and used to them being really hot but even still it is sketchy to try to connect when steam is coming out... Just wanted to give y'all a glamor shot of the Wagner in action.

6: Steam coming out of the silicone tube. Silicone is important as it is not only rated to be food safe with boiling water, steam, and even much hotter than that... It is also quite insulative so you can hold the hose in your bare hand even after steam has been going through it for hours. I would not recommend trying this with a regular rubber or PVC hose of any kind.

7: Hose goes in the hole, steam goes in the barrel.

8: I sealed the top with a towel around the hose. The way it is set up right now the hose is dangling in the exact middle of the barrel. I am going to give it 1 tank which gives me about 90min (a gallon of water, which becomes... A lot of steam - 1600x or something?).

Last I will move the hose to the bottom port and have it in the center of the belly and run another tank through it for a total of 3+hrs of steam. Obviously for a small barrel it doesn't take this long and one location adequately saturates the whole barrel. One location would probably be fine for this too but as I'm doing two tanks I figured I would mix it up.

Then the foeder will rest overnight and cool down while the batch that will fill it is in the coolship. I humidify my barrel cellar to a minimum of 40% RH (not the norm in Colorado!) but it goes even higher when the coolship is full, so I'm not concerned about drying out over night.

Finally, in the AM I will siphon the belly out again and then fill with wort from the coolship.

Thanks for reading!

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0009XEL4O/?tag=talkbecom09-20

Get fittings from brewers hardware.

The forum keeps turning the link to a media message. Just add this /groups/MilkTheFunk/permalink/1638906016137606/

to facebook.com
 
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