Home-brewed Tiger Beer – All Grain:

And a bit about mash pH.

Most visits to this blog come from people searching for tiger beer clones. I’ve referenced it a couple of times, including one previous attempt at the beer, which worked really well. It was mooched from the Dave Line ‘Brew beers like those you buy’ book, with a change here or there (not necessarily because I know what I’m doing, or anything). The first attempt worked quite well, I’m pleased to say: a little light for my palate, but it was for Ms Homebrew really, and it suited her nicely.

So for the second January in a row, I’m bottling a batch, which started life as follows:

3kg Pale Malt (Maris Otter, not lager malt)

700g flaked rice
300g Acid malt

Mashed at about 67oc for a ludicrously long time, in 10.8 litres of water.
Take a chill pill here, as the sparged goods are prone to sticking. You could add rice hulls here though, to make it easier.

Hops:

Hallertaur Helsbrucker (4.1%): Boil 40g, 15min 15g, 2min 15g

From that I got 22litres at 1038, which was fermented with Brewferm Lager yeast with a starter in our cold house while we were away over Christmas, and it’s very likely to have reached lagering temperatures.

Mash pH:

Most lagers benefit from a little acid malt to help with mash ph, and in spite of having soft water piped into the house I do have to use it in all my brews to help the ph level, and I’m quite happy to do this even alongside Burton water treatments in my pale ales. Alternatively, if you’re a prepared kind of person, stick an acid rest into your mash schedule. It’s at about 35oc (up to 40oc), and should last between 3 hours to overnight. The acid rest allows the lactobacillus bacteria that are all over your pale malt to flourish for a short period of time, which tends to acidify the liquor. The bacteria don’t make it into the finished beer, though.

Acid malt has already been through this step and then redried for you to use. Adding this to the grist decreases the mash pH (that is, acidifies) by 0.1 for every 1% of the grist. So if your tap water is fairly soft, like ours, at pH 6.5, to get it below 5.5 I’ve added it at 7.5% of the grist (not recommended over 10% apparently). It was VERY acidic! My litmus papers from thehomebrewcompany.ie only go down to 5.2, and I don’t think I’m using them right anyway. Acid malt is otherwise the same as your pale malt, so decrease the amount of pale malt used appropriately, which will keep your grist ratios in check.

I don’t think I’ll be entering this into the National Homebrew Club competition, even though it is probably going to be amazing; all I need for this beer is a thumb’s up from the missus.

Hobgoblin Plus

Note: this beer won Silver Medal in the Milds, Bitters and Ales category in the National Homebrew Club competition on 2nd March 2013.

This morning I’ve put on the biggest mash ever! I have a very limited mash and sparge capacity, and the 24l coolbox is something I’m looking into getting, as it can keep 20-odd litres of mash hot for hours, if necessary. For now I’m still working with 10l mayonnaise tubs with holes drilled through. Not particularly efficient, it’s got to be said; so all my recipes are currently worked up to account for only 60% efficiency. Which mean mashing a lot of grain. I mashed 6 kg, which needed nearly 20l of water. You don’t need to be a mathematician to see it won’t all fit in at once.

Then, by misreading the recipe (it is morning, after all) I added more amber malt than I’d called for. If you’re familiar with the Hobgoblin clone recipe that’s going around (I’m sort of following Orfy’s), then you’ll see that any amber malt is too much. But it was going out of date, and I hadn’t got a chance to use it properly (the only recipe I tried it in was undrinkable because of the obscene amount of DMS present). It’s going to be an interesting beer. It’s also going to be about 6% and barrelled (in an old youngs white thing) for the rest of the winter months, and for a final experiment, I’m going to add gelatine finings to it, to see if I can get it clear a little quicker. It’ll also make it technically illegal for vegetarians to drink, which is such a pity…

Apart from all that it’s a standard all-grain, all-hassle brew.

I’ve found a friendly neighbourhood farmer who’s willing to take the grain off my hands. Though they specialise in organic, and because I don’t use organic ingredients they have to give it to the cat, or something, but it means I don’t have it hanging around unnecessarily. Hops, though. What to do with them?

The beer finally landed in at 6.1%, and after a week it had plenty of condition and was MUCH clearer that it would have been had I not fined it. I’ll definitely use gelatine again for the keg, as it was cheap and easy to use, at one sachet per 4.5 gallons. Also, the 300g or so of amber malt, which did taste very obnoxious after one week, did mellow out nicely in the second.

Next time I’ll use more hops for aroma (still not sure what I’m doing wrong there), and until I get a bigger mash tun, I’ll be reverting to half extract and half mash, as it’s a lot more manageable.

Finally though, to some positives:

1: Don’t be afraid to substitute a half pound of acid malt for a half pound of pale malt (or add an acid rest to your mash schedule), as it vastly improves efficiency if your mash ph as so far been a bit high (that’s alkaliny).

2: Gelatine finings are dead easy to use (better for a homebrewer than the fish finings, as it’s so easy to store and prepare).

3: If you have a cheapo Young’s white beer/cider barrel, put a short length of tube over/in the tap, as it makes dispensing a breeze. Today’s hangover was entirely due to enjoying pouring the beer so much that I repeated the experience ad nausem, so to speak.

 

Pictures to follow, once Blogger behaves itself.

Next up – Dave Line’s Tiger Beer 1038!

Post Brewlab Beer

It's been a month since I set off for windswept Sunderland to learn how to make my beer a little bit better. A whole month! Seems like only yesterday. Having said that, it's lucky they sent us home with the notes, as there was too much information for 20 drinkers to completely absorb.

If you have a wort chiller, the next bit doesn't apply!

The main issue for me is DMS (Dimethylsulphide), which is a taste/aroma compound which makes the beer taste and smell of cabbage, or overcooked sweetcorn. It can be present in small amounts and affect people's drinking pleasure differently. For me, though, not nice. So, after brewlab, have I got rid of it?

Well, in short, so far, yes! And thank God too, because it was ruining my beer. It was all about the cooling. The precursor to DMS compounds can be found in malted barley, and aggravated into existence during mashing, but then evaporated during a long rolling boil, to below noticeable amounts. Which is great. No problems then.

The DMS compounds continue to form, however, as the wort cools down, and longer cooling periods, as used by myself with no way of chilling the wort, can bring the levels of DMS back up to really  noticeable levels! So, although I don't have a cooling coil yet, it's on the list. I did, though, manage to maneuver the hot copper into a sink with cold water, which made short work of bringing the temperature down to about 60oc. Now we'll have to see after fermentation is complete if that was enough!

The recipe was for my usual Golden ale, which means that in spite of all the hops, there's no room to hide any unruly smells.

No pictures with this one, as I couldn't take a picture of the smell. Maybe in another couple of years.

Brewlab Education

And it's back to college for a few days!

I've been booked on the course since June, but I never thought it'd come around. But now I'm here, I can't believe I'm already halfway through! I've just finished the second day of the 3 day plus one Startup Brewery course at Brewlab Ltd, and it's basically sorted out all of my problems, from mash efficiency to those funny off-aromas, without even bothering to try one of my beers!

Firstly, the course took twenty of us (some home brewers, some not), through the brewing process from start to finish, and funny enough, they started with the brewing liquor, or water-what-you-make-beer-with, starting with the treatments in order to keep the beer in character and style with the original, and also in order to increase the mash efficiency, by adjusting the pH of the liquor. So that's the first thing I'll need, some litmus paper.

Then Arthur took us through the recipe compilation, using the ^ol scale, which measure's the malts potential extract, and will more than likely lead to much more accurate predictions of O.G., or the amount of fermentable sugar I can expect in my wort (pronounced wert, apparently, even in a thick Geordie accent). Out with Imperial, in with Metric. Sigh.

Arthur also casually pointed out that my DMS problem (smells like teen bedroom) comes from not chilling the wort quickly enough (or at all, in my case, as I usually let it cool down over a period of hours). Unpicking my brewing experience with one casual casual question: how do you cool down your wort?

The rest, all equally important, but numerous, will all be addressed soon. Some will be addressed at relatively little expense, some will likely cost more. Dr Thomas advocated getting a little more familiar, if not downright voyerstic, with yeast. Buy a microscope. I think Santa will be busy picking through 400x magnification Haemotologists microscopes in the Argos catalogue this month!

So, two more days to go, so much to learn, and so little time. You can see some gaps in your knowledge fill up, while watching others burst open, as you realise how much there is yet to learn! Early to bed tonight then... well, I'll just 'sample' this one more pint!

Harvest Ale #1

Fresh hopped Harvest Pale ale:

5oz, on the button.

It feels like ages ago that I got excited about the first hop shoots nuzzling at the surface of the soil. Now they’re drawing the attention of the council’s planning department! So, after nearly 5 months, I can finally reap the rewards of months of doing nothing; it’s basically looked after itself. Well, ok, I did rig up a zig-zag of Poundland plant wire, but that’s about it. The regular watering thing that plants seem to like wasn’t labour intensive this year, thank you Gulf Stream, and although I did manage to throw on some tomato feed once or twice, it was only because I was feeling guilty about having done, frankly, nothing. But now I’ve a brew day to plan. Some sort of pale ale should prove a hearty canvas for the piney Nugget hops I’ll be harvesting from the one bull-bine. Only one bine flowered, so I’ll probably only have quarter of a pound of wet hops at best, but lesson learned for next year: cut back all bull shoots, not just some. Success favours the brave.

They're all perfect.

The pale will be 2lbs maris otter, 1oz crystal & 1oz wheat, and ¼ oz Northdown (bitter) per 5 ounces of fresh hops. Thinking about it, it’s probably too much, as the equivalent is about 5oz aroma hops in a 5-gallon brew (fresh hops weigh between 4 and 6 times more wet than when dried). Though after consulting the forums where it seems that more is more, more might be enough. Besides, it will be easily spread over the last twenty minutes of the boil.


So on Harvest Ale eve, about three weeks later than the microbrewers who were at the Kent harvests, and nearly a week later than some Dublin homebrewers (I’m quite far north, have I said?), I finally set the alarm clock for an interesting brew day. I haven’t dreamt about homebrew yet, but if it’s going to happen, it’ll be tonight.

Harvest Day: 18-09-2012

Hot, hot, hop.

Woke up to a wet and windy day, and thanks to some sort of bizarre cold, absolutely no sense of smell - hardly conducive to a morning of brewing with fresh hops!

The first thing to do was to measure up the hops, so I knew how much of what to make. As it turned out, my estimate was spot on: 5 ounces of fresh hops. So I set half a gallon of water to heat up, and mashed in the malts. I left it, checking occasionally that it was at the upper end of the 60s (temperature, that is). Then, sparge, boil, and in with ¼ ounce of Northdown hops to bitter the pale ale. Once the wort had been boiling for 40 minutes I begun to add small handfuls of fresh hops and became frustrated at how little I could smell! Was it the lack of hop oils? Was it the small quantity of hops being added? Or was it, hopefully, the absence of my olfactory senses for the day?

The whole with went into a glass demijohn at 1045, which wasn’t far off estimate, and then in with some yeast from a couple of weeks ago. It’s not fermenting yet, but with any luck by this evening there should be a krauseny mess all over the living room floor.

There’s very little I can do now, for a couple of weeks, except the usual bottle palaver. However, in a couple of weeks there will be an honest appraisal of the beer, but in the meantime, there’s bound to be an update on the next beers up, namely:

#4, a hoppy golden ale, with a fantastic citrus aroma,

Chocolate and Passionfruit Porter, which may or may not be a stroke of genius,
WHT Tayleur’s dried Rowanberry brown ale, and finally,
CIDER! If I can get hold of some apples!

And maybe, by next September, I’ll have both more hops and a hopback to really force in the aroma, sense of smell or not!

Grow Your Own Hops

So much better than grapes, and loads easier to grow!

I did try to grow and malt my own barley, last year. This year I'm letting that go to the professionals. However, I am sucessfully growing my own hops. And to help anyone else trying to do the same, or wishing to, read this:

www.gyohops.blogspot.ie

 

Within this new, small site you'll find much of the information needed to buy, grow, harvest dry and brew. It's a great aside to the homebrew hobby (sorry, not hobby, um... art), and when I harvest later this week I'm sure it'll prove to be a worthwhile one too.

 

I hope the information proves useful or inspiring: and if I can grow hops way up where I'm living, then anybody can anywhere.

 

http://www.gyohops.blogspot.ie/



Wet hopping . . .

So, a malt order has been placed and the hops are so nearly ready to harvest. I've been following Paul Corbett from Charles Faram hop merchants on Twitter and they've had their first harvest down in south-east England somewhere, so I figure I can leave it a week or two yet, up here in a north-westerly part of Ireland, with emphasis on north.

The early stages of hop cone formation. We're a bit on from there.

The hops I'll be using will be Goldings for bitterness (bought), and the home-grown Nugget cones for my taste and aroma additions. The internet thinks I'll need to add 4 or five times more hops by weight than if I were using dry hops, so the batch size will largely depend on the crop, which while better than last year, is not a prizewinner!

So check back soon for a post about extra-hopping a kit beer (John Bull IPA), and then some time after that for the wet-hop experiment, which will go something like this:

7lbs pale, 1/2lb crystal, some goldings to the tune of 30-odd IBU, then nugget additions at 15, 10, 5 and 0 mins of the boil. I'll probably bottle the batch as I want to show it off (nobody ever visits the house for barrelled beer) so I won't be dryhopping. I'll ferment with whatever's spare in the fridge, really.

Hope that's the appetite whetted. And thanks be to the brew gods that 70% of the Irish grain harvest has been saved! Hurrah! - courtesy of Aertel at 2am.