Summer Brew Sessions

Summer’s fast approaching, and with a big family reunion in December I need to start filling up the pipeline.  Most of the family like the typical shop-bought brands (Windhoek lager, Heineken, Grolsch, etc.) so I’m aiming for something quite simple in flavour, light in colour and served ice cold.

Here’s the potential list:

Beer	Recipe	Notes
Classic American Pilsner	Cream of 3 Crops Ale	Brewed this a year ago and it was absolutely fantastic! This is very drinkable even while it’s young.
English Pale Ale	Pride of Raubsville	Simple grain bill, just a pity I don’t have the hops.  I’m tempted to substitute with Fuggles and Styrian but we’ll see.
Light Hybrid Beer	Squeeze my Lemon Summer Blonde	Seems like a really clean recipe and the lemon zest sounds exciting.

I love simple recipes.  It seems that the more complicated a recipe the more difficult it is to get a good flavour profile from the recipe.  All 3 of the beers above have very basic recipes with very few twists.  About the furthest is the rice or lemon zest and those aren’t that bad anyway.

Each of the beers shares similar characteristics:

• Light in colour
• Light in alcohol
• Light in hops
• Not too much maltiness

Pretty much all simple, standard brews. I’ve seen the term “Lawnmower” beer used to describe them.  The one I’m most excited about is the CAP, but I’ll probably brew the Hybrid up first.  I’ve just added a braid manifold to my mash tun and don’t want to risk a stuck sparge just yet by using adjuncts.

Dry-hopping

Last night, I dry hopped the California Common I brewed.  Also took a hydrometer reading and threw some gelatin finings in for clarity.

The fermentation has been going well so far.  I started fermentation at 19 deg C then once the yeast had taken hold (around 12 hours) I dropped the temp to just over 10 and kept it there for 6 days.  Constant airlock activity throughout the entire period (I know, I know, airlock activity is by no means an indication of a healthy fermentation… but it’s just so fun to listen to it bubbling away!)  This is the first time I’ve been able to keep the fermentation temperature so constant (and low!!) I love winter for that reason alone.

The SG of the hydrometer sample was already down to 1.012 and I’m not expecting it to get much lower since we used almost 500g of crystal malt.  It’s already lower than I was expecting though, which means is going to come out quite dry.  Not too bad though considering the complete thermometer mess up that happened (planning a permanent fix for that).  Since it’s so close to ending I raised the temp a bit to 18 deg C and plan on keeping it there till Thursday night.  The increase in temp will allow the yeast to clean up after itself nice and quickly.

I want this batch in the keg on Saturday and after tasting the hydrometer sample (BEST sample I’ve ever tasted by the way) I’m getting more and more impatient!  The sample was very heavy with sediment and also hadn’t been dry-hopped yet so it can only get better.

The sample was probably so cloudy due to the fact that primary fermentation hadn’t actually finished yet.  Should clear up quite nicely when I cold-crash – the gelatin will help too.  Even if it isn’t too clear, I don’t mind. Clarity doesn’t impact flavour. I’m going to drop the temperature as far as I can on Thursday night in an attempt to get the floaties to settle out. I don’t have the patience for an extended cold crash so Thursday till Saturday is going to have to do.

Common brew day

As mentioned I planned to brew a California Common.

Here’s the recipe:

4.5Kgs Pale Malt (from SA Maltsters)
0.45Kgs Crystal 60L (from Weyermann)
28gm Northern Brewer 8.00% @ 40 minutes
14gm Northern Brewer 8.00% @ 10 minutes
14gm Northern Brewer 8.00% Dry hopped for 5 days
some Irish Moss for good measure
1 packet US-05

Pretty simple recipe. Here’s the goodies all laid out:

Step 1: Heat a bunch of water and clean everything with caustic soda.  No need to sanitize here since everything is still pre-boil.

Crush the grain.  Very handy grain mill provided by a friend from the local brew club (Worthog Brewers).  I need to make a hop feeder though, something that I can fill and it will pour the grain out at an adjustable rate.  I’ve got some ideas about that, just need to get around to it though.

Step 2: Mash

Dropped my thermometer in the water heating for the mash accidentally and broke it.  Had to swop out for a meat thermometer :/ Oh well.

I tea-bag mash at the moment, but that will change soon as well.  Until then though it means I can use equipment as is and only worry about cleaning one extra bucket (for lautering and recycling). Mashing at 67.8 C so this should be close enough.

Check the temp 30 minutes in.  I lost a couple degrees since it’s winter. In summer I don’t seem to have this problem so in winter I tend to check and topup a little more often.

Step 3: Sparge.  Like I said, I tea-bag mash so once the mashing is done I take all the grain out and pour it into a bucket with a tap at the bottom.  I sparge with the grain still in the bag which means I don’t have to worry about stuck sparges or anything.  The wort does come out a bit more cloudy but it’s easier with my current setup.  Yes, it is ghetto, but it works… most of the time

Step 4: Sparge again. Same thing as before but with less water (just enough to get to our pre-boil volume)

While the second sparge is on the go I start slowly heating the previously mashed and sparged wort.  This just makes it a little quicker to get to the boil when it’s all done.

Step 5: Boil and hop additions. Nuff sed.  These Northern Brewer hops smell FANTASTIC!!

Step 6: Transfer to no-chill cubes and wait.

That’s it.  OG of 1.052, efficiency came in at 80%.  Projected FG of around 1.012.  Once the cubes have cooled down I’ll transfer them to the fermenter, pitch the yeast and let the real work begin.

Super-quick brews?

I just finish watching ITV’s Men Brewing Badly.  Men Brewing Badly is a 5-part mini-series based on the 2010 soccer world cup.  Neil Morrissey and Richard Fox are brewers who try and help the English team by bringing a batch of their own beer to Africa.  The plan is to drive 3000 miles from Dar Es Salaam to Rustenburg for the first English match, throwing a party for the England fans the evening before.

The brought a lot of beer with them but proceeded to either drink it or give it all away before they got to their final destination.  Eventually they managed to make it to South Africa, beerless, 5 days before the big party.  They manage to convince the South African Breweries to make a couple kegs of their english ale based on their recipes.

5 Days from grain to fully carbed up beer?  Surely that’s not enough time.

A quick google search yields typical quick-brews come in at 10 days from grain to glass, so 5 days to get going?  I suppose it’s possible: 4 days fermentation, 1 day force carbing with the shaking and rocking and crash cooling during this step.  It’d be interesting to try a speed-brew like this…

Steaming ahead with a new brew

Time to brew again!  It’s been almost 6 weeks since I’ve brewed, the keg is feeling really empty and I want to try do better than last time.  But what to brew?  There’s a brewery in SA called Shongweni Brewery which makes what it calls a “West Coast Ale” which as far as I can tell is modelled after the California Common (or Steam Beer).  I quite enjoyed it so I think it’s time to try brew one myself.  Not knowing the recipe that they use for their “West Coast Ale” I’m going to go ahead with the assumption that it is in fact a steam beer clone.

Steam beer was first produced somewhere in the 1800’s.  The beer was brewed using a lager yeast but was fermented at the cool end of the ale-temperature side.  This was probably out of necessity for them, but for me it means I don’t need a lager fridge yet :)  Steam beer is the name trademarked by Anchor Brewing Co so we need to refer to it as a California Common.

According to the BJCP styles (7B), the California Common’s signature style comes from the use of Northern Brewer hops.  The supposed profile is:

“Med body, moderately malty.  Clean lager flavour, but character of an ale.  Dry, with a hint of toasted/caramel flavour.  Med amber to light copper colour.  Low fruitiness, ester and diacytl. Clean.”

The recipe I’m going to use comes from HomeBrewTalk.  Nice, simple and I have almost all the ingredients.  The only item I’m missing is the lager yeast but I’ve made the decision that I’m going to use US-05 instead of the actual lager yeast.  It is going to change the flavour profile and it won’t follow the BJCP style anymore… and I can deal with that.  I like the profile of US-05 and I have on hand.

I’m very excited to see what the Northern Brewer hops are going to come through with.  It’s going to be my first time brewing with an American hop having previously opted for the European and African styles.

Anyway, since it’s no-chill I’m going to go ahead and change the hop additions like so:

Hops	Original	No-Chill Altered
28.35gm Northern Brewer 8.00%	60 minutes	40 minutes
14.17gm Northern Brewer 8.00%	30 minutes	10 minutes
14.17gm Northern Brewer 8.00%	0 minutes	Dry Hopped for 5 days

So there we have it.  The plan is to get this all going on Sunday, pitch yeast Monday evening and see what happens.

OG is projected for roughly 1.050 so not a big beer by any measure.  I’m still going to try bottle about 8 of these (keg the rest) and leave the bottles for 8-12 months and see what happens to the flavour.