Maple Imperial Stout - Recipe & Tasting Notes

In retrospect, I guess it is a little weird how long I went without brewing any dark beers at Kent Falls. I do love stouts and porters quite a bit, and we had always intended to add them to the lineup. But winter snuck up fast, and with the many many many many things I'm juggling all at once, even just orchestrating the timing of releases to their appropriate weather patterns sort of slipped from my attention. There are many ideas I've been working on, and concepts I would like to try out in the future, and a lot of those fall into the neglected dark beer realm. You'll see more stout/porter-type stuff from us next winter, and especially whenever we're able to expand our barrel cellar. (So far, we haven't put a single clean beer into barrels). Different stouts, different porters, different flavors touching up those simple bases, and perhaps even different barrel-aging processes to create something new and #extreme. Like, has anyone even ever tried putting a stout in a barrel before? A barrel-aged stout? I can't say I've heard of it being done. It's probably just too crazy to work, but I'm at least willing to approach the concept on a purely theoretical level, before abandoning it as an absurd idea.

Eventually, maybe I'll even repeat something like this recipe: a 15% ABV maple imperial stout. Maybe. If you've encountered many Kent Falls beers in real life, you'll know that that's about triple the average ABV of the beers I brew here. The anarchist in me kind of wants to avoid brewing anything super boozy, but if there's one thing I'd buck my own conventions for, it'd be a beer like this.

One of my brewing white whales is perfecting this vague ideal I have of a maple imperial stout. It's weird: I generally haaaaaaaate sweetness in beers. In many cases, it can completely ruin a style I should otherwise appreciate. I've come to realize that I just... don't like imperial IPAs anymore. I could probably go the rest of my life without drinking another barrel-aged barleywine. Malt bombs just aren't for me, I guess. Basically every beer I brew is super dry, and rare is the beer that finishes above 3 plato that I would consider acceptable. Their grain bills are super stripped down and simple for a reason. Yet, oddly enough, imperial stouts very often slip through the cracks of my preferences. I think it may be that the roast and depth of flavors balance out the caramel raisin sweetness that I can't stand in other boozy malt-focused beers. Some additional adjuncts can still send these beers too over-the-top, and I'm getting a little burned out on the bourbon barrel-aged stout thing as well, but maple? Maple is one of my favorite flavors in the universe. Maple is a Trojan Horse into my heart and soul. God help me if maple becomes the next pumpkin, because I am helpless to resist it. Thus, I will always be chasing the perfect maple stout, a beer that balances a subtle sweetness with those earthy maple notes, roasty malts and coffee and vanilla undertones.

Having already written about the troubles of imparting maple flavor into beer (the TL:DR: it's just way too fermentable for the flavor to really stick), let me go on a bit of tangent. Let me talk briefly about the brewing-foibles along the way for my grandest Maple Beer attempt. I wanted this beer to be big, incorporate an absolutely ludicrous amount of maple syrup, have a bit of oak backing it up, and hold up as something I could age for years and years and decades to come. Born in the driveway of a homebrew shop, it was later carried home half a mile to my old apartment, where it was fermented and aged. It then endured one of the most miserable packaging experiences of my homebrewing career, thanks to the wonders of leaf hops.

Leaf hops are like this vegetative homing missile designed to find things that can be clogged, and clog them with supernatural vigor. And they follow no rhyme nor reason, either; sometimes they will decide to grant you mercy, and leave your things unclogged; other days, they will decide just to clog all your shit right to hell. Immediately before trying to keg this stout (the plan was to age further in the keg, then bottle off of the keg), I transferred a Brewer's Gold single-hop pale ale that had used leaf hops for every stage and had zero issues. All the beer went through fine, and the leaf hops stayed right where they were supposed to be.

Then I tried to transfer my imperial stout. There were considerably fewer hops in my imperial stout than in my Brewer's Gold pale ale; I'd used a mix of leaf and pellet hops for bittering and late additions. Not for any particular reason, but because it was what I'd had on hand, and I hadn't thought about it too much. But despite the small addition of just a few ounces, these leaf hops decided they were going to clog my auto siphon. Aggressively. I tried unclogging. I tried pumping harder. I remember the moment where the end of the hose popped out of the keg due to some kind of pressure build-up and sprayed syrupy imperial stout all across my room. The auto siphon I was using was so clogged I could not get any beer through it. I would pump and it would just shoot blanks. I separated the hose from the siphon and tried siphoning the old fashioned way, to no avail. I tried sucking the beer through the hose to start it; clogged. I tried a second auto siphon, and it immediately clogged. I tried one of those mesh straining bags around the end of the siphon: this did a great job of siphoning noisy angry air pockets through my hose. I tried creating a small wormhole in the bottom of the fermentor to draw the remaining beer through dimensions, summoning it into my keg with arcane magicks: clogged. These goddam things were so maliciously intent on clogging every piece of brewing equipment in my house, I'm fairly sure that they actually devised means to travel back in time and kill the parents of my auto-siphon. I'm sure that if I had just tried pouring the liquid from the bucket into the keg, these leaf hops would have found a way to clog the air itself. If they'd had these leaf hops available on the Titanic when its hull was ruptured by that iceberg, the ship would have never sank.

But I digress.

At some point I was standing there, half my apartment sprayed down with a thick mist of imperial stout, broken auto-siphons littered about me, and I was seething with rage. These mere five gallons of imperial stout contained, I'd guess, at least $100 worth of ingredients, and for whatever stupid reason or curse or personal incompetence, I could not move it from one vessel to another. Just physically... couldn't. The laws of gravity were broken that day. I gave up. Sealed up the keg, purged. Purged the carboy with CO2 and sealed that back up until I devised a better plan. Or had access to a better filter. Something that those leaf hops could not defeat. That turned out to be my patent-pending Bear Flavored Dry-Hop Keg device, and in the end, I did eventually successfully get to package this beer.

I had a terrible fear that this stout would come out oxidized or infected after all the abuse that it endured, but it's now been in the bottle for a year, and it's holding up very well. It's sweet, certainly, and trending more towards the typical imperial stout sweetness as it ages. The maple is there, but considering the tremendous amount of maple syrup that I used — two thirds of a gallon Grade B syrup in 4.25 gallons of beer — the flavor is still not as prominent as I would have liked. Part of my hope in making this beer so high in alcohol was that the yeast would tire out and just stop fermenting the stuff while there was still a little maple character left, or that the fermentation would proceed slowly enough that all the delicate nuances wouldn't get scrubbed out. [Edit: the first comment on this post raised some questions that I really should have addressed to begin with, regarding the fermentation. Getting a big beer like this to attenuate is obviously a concern, and by adding the maple syrup in staggered additions, following primary fermentation, I figured the gentler fermentation would help maintain some maple character, but also ensure the yeast didn't get hammered too heavily, and would thus be able to finish this beer out to the degree I expected. Fermentation-wise, especially as a homebrewer, I think this always the best strategy for high-ABV beers]. This worked, to an extent, but if you really want a dynamic maple bomb, you'd have to go to even more extremes. Which is insane to suggest. Clearly there is a point at which just adding more and more maple syrup ceases to become practical, and I think with a touch of oak and maybe even vanilla beans, you would get some magnification of some of the maple characteristics. I did add an ounce of oak chips in the carboy as this aged, but they weren't enough to come through. In retrospect, I wish I'd done more along those lines — a more prominent oak backbone would be good here.

Then again, subtlety is a beautiful thing. The only downside of the beer tasting as balanced and restrained as this is, is the cost of maple syrup. It's... not cheap. So either you have access to a maple source yourself, and cost doesn't matter, or else you're going to be throwing down a lot of money for little reward. What's a little nuance and complexity worth to you?

And maybe that right there explains why something like the "pumpkin spice everything" craze became what it was, and hasn't happened yet with maple. At least in terms of beer, pumpkin and maple both come through extremely, teasingly subtle. In a market that really hasn't had a whole lot of interest in subtle, that's not gonna fly. But pumpkin has those spices to back it up, And man, those spices sure don't have to be subtle. You can load up on the spices. Maple has no such cohort. It is a natural and independent flavor. It is pure of heart. Noble. Humble. And that is why I'll keep chasing it.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 9.24.14
Bottled On: 3.14.15
Fermented at 66 F
OG: 1.093 (before maple addition)
FG: 1.028
ABV: 15%

Malt-
38.8% [#10] 2-Row malt
27.2% [#7] Grade B maple syrup

15.5% [#4] oak-smoked wheat

7.8% [#2] chocolate rye

7.8% [#2] flaked oats

2.9% [12 oz] Carafa III

Hop Schedule-
2 oz CTZ @FWH

Other-

1 oz medium toast American oak chips

Yeast-
British ale yeast

Buckwheat Sour Saison - Recipe, Brewing with Unmalted Adjuncts, & Cereal Mashing Techniques

Let's explore our memory banks for a moment. Even as hombrewers, making beer can get pretty stressful when lots of things start to go wrong. What's the worst brew-day you've ever had?

If I thought about it really hard, I could probably come up with a couple epically annoying brew days in my short career as a brewer. But the one that stands out foremost is the day I brewed this buckwheat sour saison and tried to package an imperial stout at the same time. I can remember it distinctly, because: that day sucked. Hey! Why don't I tell you about it?

I've been fascinated by buckwheat for a while, especially after trying eye-opening beers like Hill Farmstead Le Sarrasin, and reading some intriguing things about the chemical precursors it may set up for microbes to transform. I love stuff like this, the sympathetic magic of fermentation, able to take one simple input and really surprise you with its output. No one seems to completely understand how all of this alchemy works just yet, which makes it even more intriguing to those of us, like me, obsessed with obscurities and unknown horizons.

It's also really nice when things turn out in spite of bothersome complications. But that's like, half of all homebrewing.

For this brew, a 5 gallon batch that I made last fall, I picked up 3 lbs of buckwheat groats from a local health food store. It was probably not wise to brew this on Halloween, inviting some kind of curse down upon me, but whatever, I went for it. With so much unmalted buckwheat in the grain bill, I knew that I wanted to try a cereal mash. At 21%, it seemed like too much to use without trying to extract the sugars. Plus, I was simply curious to try out a cereal mash; I'd never used the technique before, but I knew the modifications we were getting on our brewing system at Kent Falls would make such elaborate mashing procedures at least somewhat easier for future brews. (We have rakes in our kettle that allow us to mash into the kettle, step mash or cereal mash, and transfer into the lauter tun).

Most homebrewers have little reason to ever cereal mash. The large majority of ingredients we use simply don't require it. When unmalted, many raw grains will not release their starches in our typical single infusion-style mashes. But on either the homebrew or the commercial scale, a cereal mash is a ton of effort, and most grains can be obtained in a malted form, or thrown into the recipe in smaller percentages without using a cereal mash simply to steal their flavor qualities, without much concern for their fermentables. If you do want to obtain those fermentables, you need to process the grain in a way that will unlock them. Within a certain temperature range, a cereal mash will gelatanize the starches in the kernel / seed / whatever, by destroying the structure, and thus allowing mash enzymes to later access these starches. It's sort of the "nuke the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure" of mashing techniques. The exact range of gelatinization varies from plant to plant, but a spread between 120 F to 140 F (50-60 C) will hit it for most grains used in home brewing. Like so:

Unmalted Barley: 140-150 F (60-65C)

Wheat: 136-147 F (58-64 C)

Rye: 135-158 F (57-70 C)

Oats: 127-138 F (53-59 C)

Corn (Maize): 143-165 F (62-74 C)

Rice: 154-172 F (68-78 C)

I haven't been able to find this info for buckwheat, just this generalized summary from a research paper: "The gelatinization temperature of buckwheat flour is higher than that of wheat flour, its gelatinization resistance is greater, the water absorption of its starch granules is stronger, the viscosity is higher and increases quickly during cooling." Looking back at the bullet-chart above, one can surmise (okay, guess) that the gelitinization range of buckwheat is probably similar to that of rice.

For most of those grains listed above, much easier for the homebrewer is simply buying flaked or torrified versions. Commonly available through homebrew supply shops, these two options also gelatinize the grain by breaking down its cellular structure through heat and pressure. Buying grains processed like this is a whole lot easier than cereal mashing, and if you have that option, there aren't too many situations in which there's reason not to take it.

Buckwheat, being fairly obscure, is not easy to obtain malted, especially not at the homebrew scale. Unsurprisingly, flaked buckwheat and torrified buckwheat are not common features on homebrew shop shelves either, or even easy to obtain for commercial breweries (though there is one source). Speaking of obscure, here are some fun facts about buckwheat: it's not a grass or related to grain at all, and is actually related to rhubarb, except the seeds are the part consumed (rhubarb is a vegetable where the stalks are eaten — not a fruit, as you might think by its frequent placement in pies).

Procedurally, a cereal mash goes like this:

1). Mill the cereal adjuncts down to a fine grist, and supplement with about 15% of the overall total malted barley base malt. The malted barley will help to add the enzymes necessary for conversion, which many cereal adjuncts lack. 2). Add hot water at 3 quarts per pound. You want a thin mash here, because you'll be edging it through a boil later, and don't want an overly-gummy soup that'll scorch (as I would later find out). First, though, you're targeting a simple infusion-style mash, so 3). bring the temperature to within the gelitinization range and hold that for 20 minutes to allow the gelitinization to occur. 4). After the geli stage, you can raise your cereal mash up to a gentle boil. Here's where I ran into trouble: the mash will go from a soup of loose grains to a thick, porridge-like gruel. But my understanding of the procedure on brew-day was different: I had thought I was meant to hold the temperature of the boil for an additional 20 minutes. So upon reaching a gentle simmer, thinking this light boiling was that which would ultimately destroy the starches, complete gelatinization, and achieve great success, 5). I kept stirring feverishly. This was actually unnecessary — 6). upon hitting the boil, apparently I could have added the cereal mash right into my main mash — but I stood there and diligently blended the congealing porridge goo with a wooden mixing spoon for another 20 minutes, 7). like some kind of asshole.

Long story short: my cereal mash got a little bit scorched. Just a little though.

Coming out of a cereal mash — especially one that got cooked for longer than necessary, a mildly-toasted extra-thick porridge — buckwheat muck is super mucky. Added to my standard mash of pilsner malt, it got really extra muckity muck. And I got a stuck sparge. A stuck sparge like I've never seen before. I think this was a stuck sparge so stuck it actually went back in time to find my run-off and kill its parents, thus altering the time-space continuum so that my run-off never existed at all. 

I stirred in some rice hulls. The buckwheat muck went back in time again and killed the parents of rice hulls. Rice hulls no longer exist. When I write the words "rice hulls," you have no idea what those symbols on your screen are even meant to represent, because the concept of rice hulls no longer exists in our world. For a moment, or a minute, I just stood there fuming and perplexed. I momentarily considered just dumping the batch, thinking I would never manage to extract any liquid out of the quagmire.

Long story actually-not-that-short, I had to shovel my entire mash tun over into another vessel, add another like a truckload of rice hulls (what? rice huh?) to the bottom of the tun all over the screen until it had an impenetrable security blanket. I then scooped the mash back on top. From there, things finally actually went smoothly. With this beer. Also on that day, I was trying to keg an imperial stout. Have I mentioned how much I hate leaf hops and their tendency to clog things? Anyway, that's a story for another time.

I fermented this guy in my 6 gallon homebrew barrel that's home to one of my house cultures, which, upon taking residence in the barrel, has definitely grown more and more sour over time. Something else that I mean to write about another time: how mixed cultures can change in their performance after repeated repitchings. This was about the third use of this particular house culture, and the lactobacillus in the barrel clearly were ready to leap out ahead and get to work — over the four months I let this age, it's developed a nice strong acidity, but firmly in the lactic side of things. No acetic, and nothing harsh, fortunately. In fact, the very subtle smoke character imparted by scorching my mash a bit didn't hurt the beer at all, to my great surprise. You can taste it in the background, but it tastes just like a very subtle smokiness, to the point where I enjoy it as an incredible complexity, rather than a flaw. That, in addition to whatever nuances the buckwheat added (it grows harder and harder to determine what came from where), make this taste like a much older sour than it really is; I find it to be excitingly complex for a beer so young. It's far more multi-layered than other young sour saisons I've had.

Coincidentally, yesterday I brewed a buckwheat saison on the commercial scale. It'll be going into a 10 bbl stainless tank and getting a new construction of my mixed house cultures. Needless to say, I didn't try to emulate exactly the same mashing procedure — but writing about this new batch is an entry for another time.



Recipe-
6.0 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 10.30.14
Bottled On: 1.17.15
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.065
FG: 1.004
ABV: 8%

Malt-
77.5% [#11] Pilsner malt
21.1% [#3] buckwheat
1.4% [3.2 oz] acid malt (pH adjustment)

Hop Schedule-
1 oz Brewer's Gold @flameout

Yeast-
White Labs Saison II
House Sour Saison Culture - White Mana

Strong Sour Ale with East Coast Yeast Bug Country - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour Ale
Brewed: 5.27.2013
Bottled On: 7.31.14
ABV: 9%

Introducing any type of wild microbes into a beer always means some big potential departures from the well known and easily controlled, at least the first few times around. Sure, you can learn the habits of semi-domesticated, once-wild microbes — at least, you can learn their habits in those specific contexts. But new cultures can always be expected to carve their own path, like water down a mountain. Sometimes the flow just can't be steered, and your well-worn trail gets washed out. Sometimes it's easy to find a source of nice clean water. Sometimes there's a dead squirrel floating down the stream, and you didn't see that coming, did you?

The two versions of White Manna — a pair of tarts saisons I did the other year with two mixed cultures — remain some of my favorite beers that I've made. The Fantome culture didn't develop the acidity early on of the other version, but more and more over time, a soft berry fruit tartness emerged, quite unique among other saisons I've had. I'm so happy I still have a few bottles of each, because watching them develop over time has been just real neat. Real neat.

When deciding to do this strong sour saison for my 50th batch (and my dad's 50th birthday; happy coincidence), I had to decide among my available cultures what might lend the nicest character to a 9ish percent ABV tart sour saison. The blend of Saison II and Fantome dregs that I had used before seemed as good of a choice as any. And so I let the beer do its thing for four or five months.

One thing about being a homebrewer with a decent pipeline of beers in production and a lot going on in life: that early rush to see your aged beers be ready to drink eventually dissolves into a sort of forgetful patience. Or maybe that's just me. Beers that need more tending-to get it, while beers that I know are fine to age for a while often sit quietly in the corner, going about their business as I remind myself that I should really check on them soon, but maybe not tonight, because all these kegs need cleaned and I'm already a few pints deep. Which is to say, I could have easily turned this batch around much, much faster, in retrospect. Still, the way I went about it returned a very interesting beer. If I had packaged it after four months, it would have been another, different, interesting beer. Just ready much sooner. That's often how it is with, especially, wild beers: whatever path down the mountain the fermentation tends to take, there are many possible outcomes that are all interesting. Just interesting in different ways.

After four months, I added honey and sugar to bring the calculated ABV of the batch up to about 9%. This is an easy trick employed by various Belgian styles to keep a beer dry and drinkable and clean and deceptive in its ABV — elementary stuff, but again, I could have added the sugar much earlier, even in the boil itself. Realistically it wasn't going to make a huge difference either way. Three weeks into fermentation versus four months into fermentation was somewhat arbitrary. However: knowing that I was already taking my sweet time with this batch led to another, more serious editing choice.

Right after adding the sugar to re-initiate fermentation, I decided to add another microbe culture. Having some newly-acquired secondhand dregs of East Coast Yeast Bug Country to play around with, I figured: why not?

With the new dregs added in, I figured this might become more of a full-on sour than just a lightly acidic saison, and so ultimately this batch got almost a year to age. Its lifespan offers up a few glimpses of lessons about, I dare say, the lives of sour beers in general.

Most full-on sours with mixed cultures aren't considered done for at least a year, and this is generally a good baseline if you know you're using lambic-like cultures. That is why my procrastination at bottling this until approximately a year after it was brewed didn't seem extreme. If I had meant it to be a full-sour from the start, this would be the normal timeline anyway. Why not have the patience to wait and see what, if anything, would change?

Flash forward to the beer being ready to drink. Yes, I've not really checked up on it for a few months, but I know it should definitely be done by now. There's no sign of a pellicle or anything. Definitely no activity. I could have bottled a while ago, I'm sure. Oh well. It's not as sour or lambic-like as I expected, but it's... interesting. There's a flavor note I can't quite pinpoint, at first. It certainly doesn't taste like the "strong sour saison" I originally intended this to be.

Rather than a brisk, pale saison, I find a profile I have not encountered in many beers previously: sherry.

It's hard to describe the flavor profile of sherry other than "sherry." At first, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Even the color of the beer was darker, though the recipe was essentially the same as other saisons I had done. But that unique sour note.... The flavor of sherry so particular, I might not have even been able to place it had I not randomly bought a bottle of sherry not too long before I brewed this beer, from my friend who runs the fancy schmancy wine store in town. Maybe it's just this particular region, but I can't say I find sherry to be a particularly oft-consumed beverage. (When was the last time you personally consumed sherry?) The flavor of it, though, is very distinct. It's a profile similar to what you might get with a minor acetic backbone, and both depend on the presence of oxygen, to some extent, to arise. Had I allowed this beer too much oxygen due to its overly-long aging process? And how had excess oxygen gotten into a glass carboy?

Now, as I finish this write-up, I can no longer find the description for East Coast Yeast Bug Country online (the results turn up hits for "Bug County", which I assume is a different, newer blend. Al is changing his offerings all the time). But when I was first trying to solve this riddle, I had pulled up the description for the Bug Country blend release, and noted that it contained sherry flor. Ah-ha. This previously mysterious flavor that I hadn't been able to place, clicked into place. I at least understood what I was tasting, now, if not exactly the path the beer had taken.

Perhaps I favored the flor cultures in the blend unintentionally, by feeding the beer in stages with additional sugars; by giving it so much extra time to age; by allowing it the headspace it had, for the months it had once fermentation was otherwise complete. I'm not entirely sure. This is a beer that I don't know that I could reproduce, if I wanted to brew it exactly like this a second time. Which is kind of a shame.

Ultimately, I'm glad this one came out the way it did. No, it's not lambic-like. It's not quite Flanders like either, though that's the style probably closest to it, with that oxidative, semi-acetic influence. Like I said: I've never had another beer that tasted much like this. And since this is an enjoyable, flavorful, surprisingly-drinkable strong sour beer, that's kind of a shame. A lot of things about this batch fascinate me.

After all the aging-pitfalls it's already handily dodged — and at 9% ABV too — this one is set up to age for quite some time. Good thing, as I donated most of the bottles to my dad for his birthday and told him to open them infrequently. Maybe a couple a year. Maybe, once they're down to a sixpack or so, once a year. A beer like this is meant to take the long, winding path of patience.

Wyeast De Bom Golden Sour - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Wyeast De Bom Golden Sour
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour Beer / Farmhouse Ale
Brewed: 8.21.14
Bottled On: 11.13.14
ABV: 5.7%

Appearance: pale straw yellow, orange hues, moderate head, low retention
Smell: apple cider, candied pear, Belgian esters, hormonal lactic funk, apricot
Taste: apple, citrus, candied pear, apricot, clean lactic, mild tangy funk, weird fruit
Mouthfeel: high carb, crisp, med-light body, low bitterness, slight fullness at finish

I'm going to try my hardest to keep this entry short, because holy crap I have a million things I should be working on right now. But before 2014 mercifully draws to an end, I wanted to write about a few experimental beers I brewed much earlier in the year. Plus, this batch doesn't require a lengthy introduction, as the premise is pretty no-duh: Wyeast put out a new sour blend as part of its "Summer Sours" Private Collection, and I was compelled to test it out. Pretty self explanatory.

The De Bom blend appealed to me a lot more than some of the other pre-mixed blends yeast companies release, simply because it was playing to a realm of beer that I've been dabbling with a lot in the last few years: deconstructed, quick-fermenting sours. Full-on sour blends are obviously great fun, but I only really have the space to keep a few of them going at a time — testing out every new re-arranged mix of microbes simply isn't an option. But I'm particularly fond of sour saisons / sour farmhouse ales and the way their simple stacking of flavors can create totally different impressions of balance simply by shifting one corner of the balance pyramid slightly. Lactic punch here instead of there? Different beer. Soft versus sharp? Different beer. Funk-crusted versus bright lemon tartness? Different beer.

I had suspected that De Bom was Wyeast attempting to recreate the character of Cascade's highly regarded sours, which, unlikely as it may sound, are not pitched with Brettanomyces and sour only through the action of lactobacillus. So in addition to simply being another random blend, it promised a possible glimpse into one of America's more interesting sour beer producers. 

Wyeast doesn't give the exact composition of this blend, but they do say that De Bom is intended to create "sour ale profiles but in a fraction of the time required by previous, less manly cultures." A new quick sour blend with some unknown microbial agents: awesome. For best results, they recommend: "no O2/aeration at beginning of fermentation; periodic dosing with O2 during fermentation to stimulate ethyl acetate production; frequent sampling to monitor development and complexity. Under optimum conditions, beers can be ready for consumption in 1-2 months."

The ability to sour quickly with an aggressive strain of bacteria is a nice tool to have. Now, Wyeast also happened to release the lactobacillus Brevis strain as part of its Summer Sours collection, and it is rumored that Brevis is, indeed, the Cascade strain (caveat: this speculation is based on my vague memories of some internet conjecture, and may be entirely false). This could be entirely a coincidence, or, as I took it with some liberal reading between the lines, a clue that Brevis was simply paired with a Saccharomyces strain to make a fast-fermenting De Bom culture. So there you go: with enough conjecture and assumption, it might appear to be the case that De Bom = Cascade culture. Or inspired by it. Maybe.

Then again, now that I'm drinking the results, I might want to rescind that hypothesis. Cascade's sours are notoriously acidic and hard-hitting in the pH department, and this homebrewed trial really doesn't carry much of those traits. The taste is somewhere closer to a mild Berliner Weisse on the spectrum of sour things, with an estery yeast profile that dominates the beer more than the mark from its bacteria. It's fruity and weird, like a Belgian pale with tart undertones. There's just no way to pretend this successfully delivered on the potential of a quick-fermenting but fully complex sour ale, though to be fair, there could be various process reasons for that.

For one, I brewed this at a friend's house and we left it in his basement for three months, which is longer than the time Wyeast says this culture should require. After three months, it was very clearly stable in gravity. But we didn't follow the hand-holding procedure that Wyeast suggests for this, the unorthodox method of "periodic dosing with O2 during fermentation to stimulate ethyl acetate production." I kind of overlooked that advice at the time, but in retrospect, I'm simply confused as to what it's meant to achieve. Ethyl acetate is responsible for solvent and nail polish remover characteristics, which are not desirable qualities so far as I know. Am I having a brain fart, or missing something here? I feel like I must be — frankly, with only two weeks left in 2014, and 2014 being absolutely the most stressful and silly and anxiety-inducing year of my life, this wouldn't be surprising. I'm absolutely fried! And I have read that ethyl acetate can also come across as fruity or pear-like, so maybe there's some chemistry here that I just don't understand. I'm not very good at chemistry even when I'm not fried! If you can educate me on what my cheese-addled mind is failing to grasp here, please do let me know.

Secondly, mixed cultures work very well in aged sours, but I think I prefer to keep cultures separate in the case of beers like this (quick sours). Deconstructed, one could pitch the lactobacillus alone, initially, giving it a head start by a day or two, and with the right equipment, ferment at an elevated temperature favoring the bacteria, before pitching any yeast. Here, with the culture mixed, fermenting at 110 F for 24 hours probably wouldn't be an option.

Since I haven't had any other beer made with De Bom, I don't know if the character could have turned out drastically different given other conditions and process variables, but my intuition is that this is a fairly accurate representation of its profile. Frankly, I can't really decide how much I like it; every sip I go back and forth, from "this is pretty good!" back to "this is kind of weird in a way I can't put my finger on!" Ultimately, the oddest thing about this for me may be that it tastes bizarrely sweet, despite finishing relatively dry and relatively tart. There's a lot of mouthfeel, almost too much slickness in the body, which I blame on my generic sour recipe that uses 30% wheat in the grist. And then the flavor itself is decidedly cidery, which is something I often get in a beer fermented with a fruity yeast (often Belgian yeast) that has just a bit of tartness to it. If the lactobacillus in this blend had pushed out a bit more acidity, or the yeast had dried the beer out more, I think it would come across as more balanced to me, but I can also see the general public really enjoying this one. It's extremely fruity in a unique way, sweet enough to appeal to the American palate, and yet tart enough to become refreshing and multi-dimensional. It works. I can't decide how I personally feel about it, but it works. And its weird in ways that I have a hard time describing, which is cool. Like I said: I find it fascinating that the same basic character elements can stack up in different ways to make a totally different beer. I don't know that this is the way I would prefer to stack them personally, for the type of balance I find most appealing, but whatever arrangement they're in here, it's a nice option to have.

I said before this would be a short entry. I'm really bad at that.


Recipe-
Brewed 8.21.14
Bottled On: 11.13.14
Batch: 5 Gal
Mashed at 148 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at basement temp, 74 - 76 F
OG: 1.054
FG: 1.010
ABV: 5.7%

Malt-
70% [#7] Pilsner malt
30% [#3] white wheat

Hop Schedule-
0.5 oz Nugget @0 min

Yeast-
Wyeast 3203 De Bom Sour Blend

Equinox Single Hop IPA - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: IPA
Brewed: 11.08.14
Kegged On: 11.21.14
ABV: 5.8%

Appearance: hazy orange/copper, thick foamy head, lacing for days
Smell: sweet berry fruits, melon, cantaloupe, candy fruit, tropical weirdness, the color green
Taste: candy fruit, berry, melon, floral, sweet cantaloupe, sweet green pepper, berrppers
Mouthfeel: light-to-medium body, high carbonation, clean finish, low-med bitterness

Let's be super duper clear about something: beer is and forever will be highly subjective. Gather a group of people in a room — especially a crowd that varies widely in both drinking experience and brewing experience — and ask them to write down tasting notes for a beer without conferring with each other or listening to each other's feedback, and you will receive a dictionary's worth of responses..

Not so with the wide world of hop flavors. Hop flavors — second to nothing but perhaps Brett character — can get real wacky. Watch when a new variety is released, how scatter-shot the tasting notes are. In most cases, this is because the adjectives describing the hop are a literal hodgepodge collected from whatever aroma / flavor notes were tossed out by a sniffing panel. It takes a while to form some sort of widespread consensus on what a hop more-or-less tastes like, and until we've all drank enough of the stuff to reach a consensus, you get flavor-note buckshot. Sometimes, it's a bit weird. Lots of new hops seem to be staking their reputation on being "The _____ Hop."

Alongside the typical tropical and fruity descriptors that normally accompany new hop releases like this, Equinox got a distinctive flavor note with which to mark its fame: green pepper. I was very curious how a flavor note such as green pepper might taste among a smorgasbord of exotic fruitiness, and frankly, figured it'd be another red herring, another weird note some guy picked up and they tossed into the description for the sheer weirdness of it. But lo and behold: my first pour, I could swear I got it. Green pepper...(?) Or something like vaguely like green pepper? Maybe green pepper, if green peppers were a sweet juicy fruit rather than a savory vegetable, if that makes sense. What the hell? This makes no sense. Clearly, the power of suggestion, right? In the past, I have concluded that this is how Mosaic got labeled the 'blueberry' hop, and probably an explanation for those mystical sounding "chocolate coconut" hops going around the other year (which I still haven't gotten to try). And now that I try more and more pours of this beer (all the pours, so good), the more confused I become. What does this goddam hop taste like? Is it green pepper? Papaya? Strawberry? Okay, none of those flavors are remotely similar. This shouldn't be this hard.

And yet every single person who tries this beer has had across-the-board scattered reactions. That's just how this works. We're going to have to spend a lot of time arguing about what these things taste like. Maybe enough people will reach a consensus that the rest of us will be tricked into finding that flavor too, because it's been incepted into us. Maybe we'll have to invent or apply nonsensical new vocabulary words to cover these flavors. Who knows.

One theme that I've managed to parse out, though: whatever kind of fruit or weird vegetable-but-if-it-was-a-fruit this Equinox IPA of mine tastes like, the beer bears a candy-like aura, apparently. That's the most common description I've heard. Candy-like fruit. What the fruit is, of course, varies greatly, a mystery unsolvable as Serial (are you guys listening to Serial?). But okay, candy-like at least gives us a smaller pool of suspects. (What the hell is the deal with Jay, right?) Candy-like-one-of-four-things. We're getting closer: if green pepper was in the berry family of fruits but then someone made a candy to taste like that and then this is a natural recreation of that candy as a hop. Mystery solved.

Underneath the candy-like-green-pepper-berry-fruitness, at other times I can glimpse some earthy sort of character in here. A few people gave variations on 'earthy' as their primary notes, though to me it's barely a minor undertone. Pine was tossed out. So, sure, why not. Maybe this tastes like chocolate coconut? I don't know. I can't tell if Adnan is guilty. He seems so genuine! Ugh. I can't tell what Equinox tastes like. Fuck it, I give up.

No, wait!

Hold up. I got this. I can tell you guys definitively what Equinox tastes like: hops.

Anyway! I really like this one. Right mouthfeel, low/balanced bitterness, all the focus on aromatic and exotic hop flavors. I've been very happy with how my IPAs are coming out this year, particularly with my new dry-hopping process. I realized after the fact that I only gave this batch 12 days from brew to keg, but this rushed timeline (I was trying to have the beer ready in time for a party) didn't seem to hurt it at all. Hell, in retrospect, you probably could make it to the Best Buy parking lot in under 21 minutes with a beer like this.

The real fun with Equinox: what other hops do I want to blend these with?

Recipe-
5.25 Gal., All Grain
Single infusion mash at 148 F
Fermented at 68 F in temp control fridge
OG: 1.054
FG: 1.010
ABV: 5.8%

Malt-
78.3% [#9] Pilsner malt
8.7% [#1] wheat malt
4.3% [8 oz] Cara-Pils
4.3% [8 oz] corn sugar

Hop Schedule-
5 ml Hop Shot @60
2 oz. Equinox whirlpool @200 F
2 oz. Equinox whirlpool @180 F
4 oz. Equinox dry hop for five days

Yeast-
Safale US-05 American Ale

Brewing With Local Hops / Brewer's Gold Pale Ale - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Pale Ale
Brewed: 10.21.14
Kegged On: 7.31.14
ABV: 6.2%

Appearance: pale orange/gold, good clarity, moderate head
Smell: mild fruit medley, melon, berry, floral, mild earth, mild spice
Taste: sweet mild fruits, melon, berry medley, floral/citrus note in finish, low bitterness
Mouthfeel: medium body, low-med carbonation, clean finish

I still don't think anyone fully understands why hops became the unquestioned poster-child of the revitalized beer movement. Logically, I suppose, it had to be something; something to focus on, to differentiate these new beers from the mass-market old. Water wouldn't work; too mundane. Yeast (and bacteria) are finally getting their day in the sun, but brewers have always had a habit of minimizing their importance, or misunderstanding it altogether. So it had to be either grain or hops.

I've noticed, through working at Beacon Homebrew and leading brewing classes and workshops this year: people just gravitate toward hops. Growing them, brewing with them, making tea with them, making pillows out of them, filling bouncy castles with them, and so on. Grain, for whatever reason, doesn't inspire much fascination. (And in fact, a lot of people will look at a bucket of barley malt and ask: "Are those hops?") New York has a rich history of hop growing, and the hop bines are finally returning to the region. I've talked to dozens of people growing hops that don't even know how to brew beer; or who have come to a brewing class to learn how to brew, primarily because they just want to grow hops and need something to do with them. Hops catch and hold people's attention. And I guess, to be fair, hops are considerably more exciting and odd (and aromatic) up close than a barley kernel is.

So in the future, a lot of us are going to have local hops available to brew with. Many of you are probably growing them yourselves. I've made a few different beers with different local hops since this harvest, and have been trying to get a feel for this growing but immature category.

It's often difficult to explain why 'local', when it comes to hops, doesn't work quite the same way as 'local' when it comes to the quality of produce. Freshness is important with hops, obviously, but a few weeks discrepancy isn't going to be nearly so important as how they're packaged. The big growers in the Pacific Northwest aren't some agri-corp pressing hop pellets made from pure GMO gluten and MSG out of molds in a factory — they are farmers with a ton of experience who really know what they're doing, because they've been doing it for a while. Most home-growers and small farms with a couple plants are still gaining that expertise. It's important to make a distinction between hops grown for fun, to be maybe thrown in a wet-hop beer in the fall, and hops expected to be put to use on a regular basis throughout the brewing year. There's more to well-handled hops than simply throwing them in a vacuum sealer. Me and a few friends got Cascade hops from a local grower that didn't seem to have been properly dried; once in the wort and beer, they had a near-magical ability to clog everything they touched. I've never seen hops have such a clingy, magnetic, port-stuffing ability — I was half afraid they would stick to me and smother me in my sleep.

But the main concern when brewing with local hops, I think, is that hops take a number of years to mature, and so much of what's out there is still quite young, and therefore mild. This is simply the nature of a fledgling industry, and means that the next few years, and the next decade especially, will be very exciting. Young hop farms are finding what grows best, and experimenting with new breeds like Neomexicanus and Tahoma. We'll start to see more variation between the same hops grown and adapted to different regions. Even between Eastern and Western NY, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, something as classic as Cascade will no doubt taste subtly different from farm to farm.

But for now, local hops are still finding their footing, as would be expected. Those Cascade hops (the cloggers), they basically disappeared into everything brewed with them. I brewed a wet hop ale with a large basket full of fresh-off-the-vine hop cones — of another variety, from another farm — that tasted like a kolsch. Good flavors, nothing weird, but just super mild. Again, these are all hop plants that have a lot of maturation to do. Give them a couple years, and hopefully they'll bear their own uniquely local flavors.

The best beer I've brewed with local hops so far is one that, oddly enough, uses an old and under-appreciated variety. You rarely hear any talk of Brewer's Gold as a flavor/aroma hop, but doing a single hop with this variety has been on my docket for a couple years now. It wasn't as high priority as brewing with exciting new stuff like Azacca, but I suspected BG had potential. As juicy and dank hop flavors didn't become acceptable until a couple decades ago, I've always assumed some of those past-century hops utilized heavily in early American brewing had more going on than we modern Citra-lovers realize. How could so many people describe Ballantine India Pale Ale as tasting like a modern IPA, when it couldn't have used modern hops? Cascade didn't just pop up out of thin air; it was part of an evolution in American hop terroir.

Well, Brewer's Gold is a worthy hop, if this batch is any indication. These particular hops (leaf, from the 2014 harvest) are from Camps Road Farm, the first modern commercial hop farm in Connecticut. In a super light and clean pale ale, yes, they are mild, but not in the sense of some of others I've used — not in the sense that they don't give off much flavor. It's just that the character is not exaggerated or aggressively bold in any particular direction; it seems like a summary of hop flavors, an encapsulation of a whole bunch of different things, none of which are turned up to 11. Which, it turns out, makes me for a very nice and very drinkable beer; I'm enjoying this far more than many IPAs on the market with a more intensely pungent character. It's just that I'm having an insanely difficult time pinning specific flavor descriptions upon it. Adjectives just slide off every note that I grasp at. I can barely get more specific than "fruit(?)". Maybe, uh.... floral? ... Hoppy? It might be one of the hardest-to-describe beers that I've made. But quite possibly, that intrigue is a big part of what's keeping me interested, too. It's complexities are on the subtle side, but there are certainly complexities.

In the right context, in the right base beer, there's a lot still to be said for the overlooked flavors of the past, and for the new farms in old regions newly growing old hops. One new hop farm a town up from me found a thriving, vigorous bine of (at least) 100 year-old hops growing on its property. Obviously, I demanded a sample to brew with. What will hops that have been left to nature for at least a century taste like? I have no idea, but I can't wait to find out.

Recipe-
5.25 Gal., All Grain
Single infusion mash at 148 F
Fermented at 68 F in temp control fridge
OG: 1.058
FG: 1.010
ABV: 6.2%

Malt-
85.7% [#9] Pilsner malt
9.5% [#1] wheat malt

4.8% [8 oz] Caramalt

Hop Schedule-
1 oz. Brewer's Gold @FWH

3 oz. Brewer's Gold @whirlpool

4 oz. Brewer's Gold dry hop for five days

Yeast-
Safale US-05 American Ale

Crown Maple Strong Ale - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Adirondack Cabin Breakfast
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Strong Ale
Brewed: 6.23.14
Kegged On: 7.31.14
ABV: 9%

Appearance: bright orange/copper, good clarity, moderate head
Smell: sweet malts, caramel, treacle, earth, maple
Taste: sweet rich malts, earthiness, treacle, maple in finish
Mouthfeel: medium body, rich, low bitterness, relatively clean finish

Earlier this year, I was going to try to pitch some kind of article about how maple is the next pumpkin. I never got around to it, but if you need evidence supporting my theory, look at the explosion of maple-infused bourbons that came out of nowhere and then mark down on a Post-It Note somewhere that Bear Flavored was the source of the first observation of this trend so that, in the future, you will remember where to attribute proper credit when everyone starts catching on. Pumpkin is under heavy fire as we mark another year of pumpkin spice-flavored everything jumping multiple sharks, and what's next? Pumpkin jumping fermented Icelandic shark? Clearly, the culinary world is going to need a new trend to shamelessly exploit, and soon. And it's going to be maple.

Whether or not this is a good thing, the fact is: maple tastes good. It is a good taste. The flavor of it is good. Who doesn't like maple syrup? What kind of nerve would it take to strike some kind of anti-maple stance? You would be rightly labeled a heretic.

As such, of all the flavors that craft brewers / homebrewers like to throw in a beer, maple syrup is one of the few that sounds, off the cuff, like it might actually be a pretty good idea. Here is where that gets tricky: maple syrup is pretty much concentrated sugar, and as such, when you add it to a beer, it ferments. And after all of it ferments, it's essentially... well, no longer there. The flavor of maple syrup is much more volatile than other stuff like molasses, despite its deceptively dark and rich appearance. When brewing beer with maple syrup, you'll commonly read that you should use Grade B maple syrup, which has a stronger, less refined flavor that's not as appealing for most straight applications of the stuff, but works well in cooking or brewing situations. Unfortunately, this only goes so far. The truth of brewing with maple syrup is this: you have to use ungodly amounts of the stuff for it to have any real impact.

I've been chasing this whale (whaleshark?) for a couple years now. My last attempt was hilariously disastrous and yet sort of intriguing thanks to the otherworldly potency of spruce extract (though after a while that beer started to taste like Dr. Pepper and I'm hoping I stumble across a bottle or two of it that got misplaced because I'd love to try it with like five years of age on it). Paradoxically, maybe, this is part of the reason why maple seems so innocent and inoffensive to me in this context. It's essentially impossible for it to become over-bearing and take over the profile of a beer, to a degree that it's actually really difficult to get a beer to taste strongly of maple at all without cheating.

The most obvious strategy therefore being to simply add Lots of Maple Syrup, and add it late in the process. Primary fermentation can scrub out more delicate flavors (this is why we dry-hop), so adding the maple syrup a week or two in helps retain a bit of nuance, theoretically. Following the same logic, you want to ferment on the cooler side. (It just this second occurs to me that it would be interesting to try this as a lager). But still, your main weapon for maple flavor is simply going to be the amount of syrup you add — I just don't see any way around this. This beer got about 3 lbs., or slightly less than a third of a gallon, of Grade B maple syrup. I then keg-primed the beer with 4 more ounces of syrup for carbonation. This strategy works reasonably well, though you're still unlikely to get a beer that tastes like straight-up maple syrup unless you use, well, even more, some ludicrous amount that essentially turns the beverage into a maplewine-beer blend kind of deal (don't think I won't try this). While a good chunk of the fermentable sugars (over 20%, in this case) were maple syrup, the maple flavor is quite subtle, a bit in the nose and a suggestion in the mid-palate of the beer, but never a note that's super, distinctly maple. Interestingly, in fact, I would say the fermented-out maple character here evokes a molasses flavor. Though I guess that makes sense: the sweetness gone, a much more earthy, rootsy (?), pungent character is all that's left.

The base beer underneath doesn't need much comment. I kept it simple and relatively light in color, wanting all the maple character I could summon to shine through. Flaked oats ensured there would be a good amount of body without cloying sweetness, and Munich malt provides a bit of clean malt character without, again, cloying sweetness. One pound of smoked wheat malt added a bit of body and, frankly, no detectable smoke character (so it could either be upped significantly, or dropped). No caramel malts here, no thank you — strong ales like this always push what I can handle enough as it is. I really detest cloying sweetness, can you tell? Ironic in a maple syrup beer, but that's how it is.

Subjectively, I think the results are quite tasty, but more critically, and hypothetically, there definitely could be More Maple Character, in a perfect world. Subjectively, again, this may be one of my favorite "strong ale" or barleywine-type beers that I've had in years — it's generally not high in my list of favorite styles, so there's some competitive advantage to be had by anything a bit different, but I really like this direction this takes the genre in. Just enough character from that syrup to be unique, but all-in-all a very strong representation from the base beer: clean, malty, not overly cloying, a rich(ish) indulgence that's a bit too drinkable for its high ABV.

Of important note, though: my strategy of adding Lots of Maple Syrup is likely uneconomical for brewers who are not maple farmers or friends with maple farmers. One third of a gallon is about 42 ounces (maple is actually easiest to weigh, I found, so again: 3 lbs. or 1.36 kg), but any way you slice it, that's an awfully expensive addition. Way more than the cost of the rest of your ingredients, most likely. And frankly, I would suggest adding even more, if you can. This right here is exactly why you don't see that many maple beers on the market: it can quickly become prohibitively expensive without enough payoff to be worthwhile.

But then again, sometimes you just have to treat yourself, right? A 5 gallon batch of maple strong ale with half a gallon of maple syrup might sound expensive outright, but it's still cheaper than buying a similar amount of a similar beer commercially. This is one of the main advantages of brewing at a homebrew scale: even when you splurge, you don't have to splurge that much.

Of course, I must now admit that I sweet-talked my way into doing a brewing demo for Crown Maple at Madava Farms, a producer of fine maple syrup in the Hudson Valley. This had its advantages, ie. maple syrup. And also real life taste-tasters! After brewing the test batch over the summer, I returned to Crown Maple the other week and poured samples for visitors to the farm at their harvest festival. The reception was I think universally positive, though I'm always the first to point out that the reception to any free beer regardless of quality is usually universally positive. Regardless, no one spit it back out in my face, and so I must thank Crown Maple for the syrup and the opportunity to get some good feedback on an adventurous brew-concept.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Single infusion mash at 156 F
Fermented at 66 F in temp control fridge
OG: 1.078
FG: 1.010
ABV: 9%

Malt-
35.7% [#5] 2-row malt
21.4% [#3] flaked oats
21.4% [#3] Grade B maple syrup (added after primary)
14.3% [#2] Munich malt
7.1% [#1] oak-smoked wheat

Hop Schedule-
1 oz. Northern Brewer @60

Yeast-
Safale US-05 American Ale
London ESB (pitched at addition of maple syrup)

Other-
Keg conditioned with 4 oz. maple syrup

No-Hop, No-Boil, Lime-Zest & Kiwi Gose - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Alagoas
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Gose
Brewed: 8.05.14
Kegged On: 9.06.14
ABV: 4.2%

Appearance: golden yellow, slight haze, ample head, good retention
Smell: lime, citrus, lemon, lactic sour, mild funk
Taste: lime, lemon, upfront lactic sour, rounder soft fruits, tangy acidity, slight salty finish
Mouthfeel: high carb, light body, crisp, puckering lingering sour in finish

Perhaps being the Fermented Man has its advantages as far as my control of bacteria, or perhaps the lactobacillus strains I welcomed into my house last year have gotten a whole lot more comfortable since I began inviting so many of their peers to party. Whatever the reason, I took an even bigger gamble with this summer's "quick sour" beer, but in spite of the added difficulty, the result is far more delicious than any of last year's attempts. If I'm feeling really generous, I might even go ahead and call this one of my favorite batches of sour beer that I've made.

Why did I decide to do a sour, salty gose with kiwis and lime zest to be ready just in time for late September? Let's pretend it's not just because I don't have very good organizational skills to keep my brewing schedule on track and say it's a f*** you to July-released pumpkin beers via reverse seasonal creep. Sure.

There was actually a brief window in which I considered dumping this batch, funnily enough. Not because it tasted bad or anything, but because I thought my sheer, glaring negligence must have ruined it in some way. I had always wanted to do this as a gose with no hops added and no boil — just run straight off the sparge into a keg. I would then purge the keg of oxygen because kegs are really great for that kind of thing, and oxygen is bad for sour mashes and can lead to domination by bacteria that make your beer smell like puke. I've tested out various methods to avoid this with last year's Bearliner Weisse and a few other previous brews, but the basic strategy is pretty straightforward: avoid oxygen when doing something like a sour mash and using bacteria from raw grain. 

A keg is the perfect way to purge oxygen from headspace and keep it out. But you'll have to excuse my short-sightedness here: this summer was, quite frankly, a bit rough. I was a little fried, a lot stressed, distracted, and disoriented. And it didn't occur to me until I already had the not-boiled wort in the keg: what would happen if the bacteria started kicking off a lot of CO2?

My original plan beyond this point was not to rely on just the lactobacillus from the grains (whatever survived the mash, since I wasn't boiling anything at any point), but to pitch some of my house culture to ensure ample souring. As this was all happening in early August, I even thought about putting the keg of souring wort in my car for a day, which was the hottest location I could think of at the time. But okay: what if I put the keg in my car and it started fermenting furiously? Not all strains of lactobacillus produce much CO2 — there are homofermentative strains and heterofermentative strains, but it's hard to know which you have, especially when, like me, you planned to pitch a blend of house cultures. And while I could check on the keg fairly frequently to pull the pressure relief valve, I suddenly didn't feel very comfortable about those sporadic purgings of CO2 build-up being the only thing between me and a car bomb.

So I stalled, kind of got busy and distracted and unfocused, and the wort / beer sat in the keg in my apartment for a few days without any additional microbes pitched. Once or twice a day I would pull the pressure relief valve to vent any built-up gas that might be accumulating, should some spontaneous fermentation be occurring. After a day or two it was clear that there was no gas building up, and therefore likely not much fermentation happening. Should I pitch bacteria into the keg anyway and just keep on pulling the pin, hoping that would be enough? Or should I just transfer the whole thing into a bucket, even though that maybe defeats the point of my oxygen-avoidance plan in the first place? And should I be worried about some sort of unfriendly microbe taking up residence in the wort due to the multiple days it sat without fermentation to ward off hostiles? Cthulhu knows I've read plenty about botulism this year, and still haven't been able to determine exactly why it never seems to be a concern in unfermented wort. While debating the safety of this batch — and yes, even briefly considering dumping it — I reminded myself that many breweries buy wort and ship it in sealed containers. In Europe especially, a lot of this packaged wort is destined for lambic production, where the full onset of fermentation may not occur for a few days. There are definitely situations out there where it sounds like botulism should be a concern, and yet I've never heard of anyone dying of botulism from beer (have you?). My guess is that the pH of wort even before fermentation may already be too low or something. In either case, I had also added 14.5 grams of sea salt to this batch, it being a gose, and with that added buffer, I decided I'd once again embrace my destiny as a death-defying, botulism-dodging crazy-person badass and go for it.

[Editor's note: Speaking of which, while I have your attention — please consider pre-ordering my book, which will allow me to tackle even more crazy experiments, and allow you to read about them. In addition, if you'd like to drink some of my crazy experiments, such as this gose and many other sours, I'll be hosting a book reading preview party / fermentation sampling event next May. I will go out of my way to ensure epicness. Sign up for it now via my IndieGogo dealy. Okay, thanks, cheers, back to the brewing!]

The exact fermentation of this gose would be hard to replicate for anyone lacking the means to break into my apartment and steal some of the jars I keep sitting around, as much of my souring cultures are not available commercially, and, I'm guessing, have mutated quite a bit as I've maintained them and let them adapt to their new bear-focused environment. However, with this batch, I did introduce Lactobacillus brevis, newly available from Wyeast, to the cocktail. But in general, I've found that I'm getting a much cleaner, rounder, fuller lactic sourness from letting the lacto do its thing over time, rather than trying to pump it up for a frenzied, brief sour mash period.

As this entry is already getting long, I won't get into how brewers have this weirdly intense fear of letting lactobacillus survive in their beers... even brewers who are otherwise happy to embrace Brettanomyces. We'll save that one for another day. But as you may have noticed, this beer was never boiled or in any way pasteurized (other than from the temperature of the mash itself), and so the bacteria remained very much alive throughout and to the present. I don't find any danger of lactobacillus making the beer "too sour" or something; but then again, I like my Berliners and gose to have a very full tangy sourness. (For comparison, if you've had Westbrook Gose, I would say the sour character in this batch of Alagoas is very comparable). Nor does letting lactobacillus live require extended aging periods, in my experience. I always add Brettanomyces to my quick sours, and even so, they're done after about a month. Speaking of which: why add Brett when there's already so much going on here? The main danger of having an aggressive sourness in a beer like this is that Saccharomyces could stall out due to the pH level falling too low before it can fully attenuate. Brett is much more pH tolerant, and will help the beer finish out dry; at least, that's the idea. This finished out at 1.008, which might be on the high side for the style, but has the benefit of providing some body and balance that a drier version might otherwise lack.

Finally, what says "October" better than kiwis and lime zest? I had 2 lbs of kiwis sitting in my freezer for months that I was just waiting to use for something, and while I knew they wouldn't add much character (especially at that very low ratio — typically I'd add fruit at 1 lb per gal. or more) I figured I'd toss them in anyway. I added 2.8 grams of lime zest (and also squeezed out the juice from the limes into the beer as well), targeting about 200 ICUs based on Shaun Hill's scale. The plan was to add more, almost double that, but when I tried the beer a few days after that first addition of zest, the lime aroma was beautiful and the flavor perfectly subtle, supporting of the sourness, it was already exactly what I was looking for. Not wanting this to be an aggressively lime-forward beer, I decided to keep it at that lower dosage and went ahead and kegged the beer.

The result is the most crushable beer I have ever made, and a base I'm looking forward to trying with many other variations of fruit and zest.

BRB time for a keg-stand.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Double infusion mash at 122 F / 148 degrees F
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.040
FG: 1.008
ABV: 4.2%

Malt-
43% [#3] Pilsner malt
43% [#3] white wheat malt
14% [#1] special roast

Hop Schedule-
N/A

Yeast-
House Lactobacillus cultures

House Brettanomyces cultures

London Ale III

Other-
14.5 g sea salt
2 lbs. kiwi fruit
2.8 g lime zest
juice from 3 limes

Blended Farmhouse Technique - Fermenting Brett and Saccharomyces Separately Before Blending

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Farmhouse Ale
Brewed: 6.02.14
Bottled On: 7.10.14
ABV: 6.5%

50% Saison + 50% Brett C:

Appearance: pale straw yellow, thick head, lingering foam, good retention
Smell: citrus, orange, grass, soft spice, meadow, yeast, mild clove / pepper

Taste: zesty citrus, orange, lemongrass, soft spice, yeast, dry fruit, low bitterness

Mouthfeel: high carb, velvety nouthfeel, light body, dry, clean finish


50% Saison + 50% Brett Trois:

Appearance: pale straw yellow, huge fluffy head, lingering foam, good retention
Smell: grass, spice, meadow, citrus, orange, perfume, pear, mild clove

Taste: zesty citrus, soft fruit, orange, pear, spice, yeast, low bitterness

Mouthfeel: high carb, creamy mouthfeel, impression of body, dry, clean finish

What's the primary difference between most serious homebrewers and most professional breweries? There's the equipment and scale, sure, but regardless of your system, the goal is just to produce good beer. And that can be done at any size, so long as a few basic factors are met. But the perhaps the most significant difference is operational: most professional brewers are brewing a lot; a couple times a week, or maybe even around the clock. If not brewing exactly, then there's someone in the brewhouse, doing... something. Most homebrewers brew a few times a month, maybe. They have limited fermentation space, and knock out one batch at a time. In general terms, it's just the difference between a hobby and a job, but in practical terms, it means a professional brewer can, theoretically, do more things with more beers.

As a homebrewer, it can be very hard to get into blending. The variety of batches, the number of fermentors, the time involved — the opportunities for blending don't always present themselves, and require some planning. Of course, those elaborate blends that we mostly think of when we think of blending — geueze blenders taking shares from an entire cellar worth of barrels — are perhaps beyond the scope of what would be a sensible amount of effort for most of us. Sour blends from even just a handful of beers require a reasonably deep pipeline.

But lately I've been wondering: what about more straightforward, head-to-head blends? Maybe it's misleading to call this blending at all; it's more... pairing two beers, uniting separate, established flavors, and seeing how they split the difference. It's not a novel idea, to be sure; my inspiration was simply all the times I've seen discussion of using English and American yeast side-by-side. Two complimentary strains, each doing their own thing in their own way... and then combined. Why not?

Of course, to me, this experiment seemed particularly appealing with the complimentary profiles of a saison yeast and a Brettanomyces strain. Not that there's anything wrong with the usual methods of fermenting a Brett saison, and I've found that pitching both Saccharomyces and a small dose of Brettanomyces at the same time can get you a beer that's fermented out in a very reasonable time-frame — a month or so — and still has a nice, mellow Brett character. So why ferment them separate and then blend? It's not like 100% Brett-fermented beers are funkier, as we know. But they are, nonetheless, distinct. I often find myself mostly loving the unique weird funky fruit essence of a new Brett strain, but just not super into throwing back pint after pint of it. Brett strains sometimes have a hard time creating a desirable mouthfeel and body in a beer, so where the flavor and aroma may even be super appealing, they still drink like something weirder than they truly are.

I went with Wyeast 3711 French Saison for the "straight saison" portion of this batch, because it's such a monster attenuator (meaning, I figured, the batch could be done faster if there wasn't much gravity for either side of the split to munch on), and because 3711 is known to create a slick, full-bodied mouthfeel despite the lack of residual sugars. The idea being that even if Brett didn't create much mouthfeel, the other half of the blend will help to boost it — each split, hopefully, complimenting the other. French Saison can get a bit spicier than I prefer, on the other hand. I do like my saisons rounded off and balanced either by some fruity Brett funk (which literally reduces the sharper saison character by consuming some of the other yeast's by-products) or some acidity, or both. The saisons I most enjoy find a way to balance that farmhouse character without losing its complicated essence. Here, instead of letting Brett chew on the esters and phenols like a scavenger, the idea was to blend the character down, cut it with the more fruity Brett fermentation. My friend and I did some proportion tasting before we actually blended, but for simplicity, we ended up going with an even split of 50% Brett and 50% saison into each final blend.

The results are promising, though not yet what I would call a unqualified success. My conclusion, for now, is that you'll have to really select the right strains in order for this technique to set itself apart. Proportions of the blend will make a big difference, as would the timing of when you blend — things we weren't really able to fiddle with due to the aforementioned challenges of the homebrew scale. And I guess that all goes without saying; this was just a very basic demo of a concept. Worst case scenario, here, you have a beer that just kind of tastes like a standard farmhouse ale.

Trois fared the poorest of the two blends I tried, but I think my particular stock of that is getting on in age, as the base beer didn't have the depth of explosive juicy character I've come to expect from it. The blend that came out is totally overshadowed by the saison yeast, with its coarser, slightly spicy yeast-notes more apparent than I'd like, and a finish that's very much like a typical saison. It's still a really nice saison, dry and highly drinkable with some intriguing and complex fruit stuff going on in the background, but there's not quite enough different about it to be worth the effort.

Brett C held up better in the blend, as that strain (quickly becoming one of my favorites for versatile 100% Brett batches) leaves a succulent tropical orange flavor and drinks almost as clean and smooth as a 'normal' Saccharomyces beer on its own. Blended, it cut down a bit more on the forward 3711 notes, added some more complexity, and actually managed to taste like it brought something new into the beer. 

The merits of this technique, or some variation of this technique, will come down to whether or not it can produce a beer that's unique and distinct from those made with more conventional fermentation and blending methods. With a whole barrel room full of various farmhouse and Brett beers, you could combine them in any way you wish until something tastes fantastic. But for most, that's not an option. I'll try a few more simple experiments with this blended farmhouse / Brett technique in the future, because I do think something very exciting could come out of it with very little extra effort or resources. Simply using different strains may make all the difference: I actually think I'd use something other than 3711 French Saison for this, because it is too dominant in the resulting beer, and doesn't seem to give the Brett as much to work with afterwards as I would have thought. I've always been a fan of White Labs Saison II, and would like to try this again using that strain. The Brett strain (or strains) used obviously make just as much of a difference, so that presents dozens more opportunities for experimentation, as well. Finally, even the timeline of blending should have a significant impact. I brewed this at my friend Phil's house, since he's got one of those 'basement' things that come in so useful for carboy storage, but the result was that we didn't get to blend the beers as early as I would have liked — it was over a month after fermentation until they were united. Had we blended, say, a week or two into the fermentation, when the yeast were still actively doing their thing, the finished character may have been a more seamless merger, with Brett having had more time to reduce phenols and round off the beer before fermentation ceased.

As always, there's plenty more work to be done. For #Science.

Recipe-
Brewed 6.02.2014
Mashed at 150 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at basement temp, 75 - 80 F
OG: 1.053
FG: 1.003
ABV: 6.5%

Malt-
78% [#8] Pilsner malt
9.8% [#1] flaked oats
9.8% [#1] rye malt
2.4% [4 oz] rye malt

Hop Schedule-
0.5 oz Nugget @60 min
0.5 oz Nugget @10 min
2 oz Cascade dry hop for 6 days

Yeast-
Wyeast 3711 French Saison [Split #1]
Brett C [Split #2]
Brett Trois [Spit #3]

Perfecting Already-Good Recipes and Rebalancing IPAs - Experiences with London Ale III in American IPAs

Beer: Morgan Horse DIPA
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Imperial IPA
Brewed: 7.7.14
Kegged On: 7.31.14
ABV: 8%

Appearance: pale golden orange, hazy, ample head, good retention
Smell: grapefruit, citrus, peach, soft mellon fruit, dank, pine
Taste: zesty grapefruit, orange, citrus, soft peach, melon, pine, mild finishing bitterness
Mouthfeel: light body, medium carbonation, soft, crisp finish

You know when you have a goal in mind that you probably couldn't fully describe to anyone but a few of your imaginary friends (they're the only ones that get you, anyway) — you just know that you'll know when you get there? In previous years, I couldn't describe exactly why my IPAs kept falling short of what I wanted them to be. I just knew there was something else I wanted them to be. No matter how good I felt about them after a solid brew-day, or as they went through fermentation, a week or two after bottling, some slight disappointment would creep in. Maybe they were getting closer, but they weren't where I wanted them to be. And I wasn't even sure how to describe where I wanted them!

After much work and brainstorming and espionage, I think now I might be there — or at least, past the point where subsequent refinements will be almost unnoticeable to anyone less anal retentive than myself. I may not have the Ark of the Covenant in my personal possession per se, but at least, at last, I found the convoy of Nazis trying to make off with it, and I'm even reasonably confident I'm riding on the roof of the very truck they have the Ark inside. #metaphors

I don't think anything is ever beyond improvement, believe me. I'm not talking about perfection yet, not by a long shot — ie, a level of purity defying any further improvement. In this case, I'm just talking about meeting certain expectations. Expectations that, a year ago, I wasn't sure I'd ever meet. I was looking to get my IPAs to a certain level, make them drink a certain way, with a certain flavor profile, and not completely dive off a cliff after the first two weeks. Having a very good feeling about this batch from the start, I waited for my first pull off the keg until I was sure the beer would be properly conditioned, resisting the urge to sneak early tastes. I'm glad I did. With that first glass, I had one of those rare moments where, in spite of my overwhelmingly cynical nature compelling me to constantly be disappointed in everything, I found I had hit my goals. After a couple of sips, I burst out laughing.

Of course, I've been pretty happy with all my IPAs this year, to the point where most of the time I'd rather have one of my own than something from the average bar or bottle shop. If that sounds super snobby, or this whole post already sounds pretentious, consider that homebrewers have an advantage in catering things to their specific preferences, not to mention the advantage of freshness (provided you can drink the whole batch fast enough). Realistically, the improvements in these beers have been fairly incremental from batch to batch, and Morgan Horse IPA, an 8% just-imperial using Simcoe and Amarillo with a dash of Columbus, might just be me getting all the small things right, all at once. The batch previous to this (which I never wrote up, so I'm kind of lumping into this post) was pretty close to the best IPA I've brewed previous to this one, though it used hops I enjoy more: Mosaic, Galaxy and Amarillo. I loved the Azacca IPA I did in the spring, also enjoyed the Shrunken Heady I did, and the year's first IPA was also tasty as hell. My IPAs have been getting consistently better with almost every batch. Such a trackable progression gives me a lot of confidence. So what have I been changing?

The first big change I made to my process may still be the most important thing differentiating all these IPAs from previous batches. I started kegging, and immediately fixed up a rather elaborate set-up to better emulate the process a brewery would have. The beer gets transferred into a secondary keg fitted with two stainless steel filter screens over the dip-tube to prevent it from clogging. I'll usually do a first-stage dry-hopping at the end of fermentation in the primary, then transfer to the initial keg about a week and a half after brew-day. The second-stage dry-hops go into this keg, loose (the filters over the dip tube are much more effective than trying to constrain the hops themselves) for about five days. After five days, I'll cold crash in my keezer for another day or two, then do a keg-to-keg transfer into a serving keg. Perhaps I could just drink the beer off the first keg, but I like that this roughly emulates what a brewery would do (very few breweries would package their beers with the hops still in there, and my goal was to go at this from the same playing field). Theoretically, also, this gives me the chance to use the dry-hopping keg as a brite tank and clear the beer a bit more, though they've still been pretty hazy for the first couple weeks. (I used gelatin to clear my IPAs a few times, which helped. Then I sort of forgot about it).

Another recent change I've been trying out: English yeast strains for American IPAs. Conan was my go-to for the last two years, but it's a finicky strain to work with, and up until very recently there was no good source for the yeast other than culturing it up from cans of Heady Topper (itself quite difficult to obtain on a regular basis). Following lead after lead as I chased the secret of the great new-wave IPAs, I heard from a couple sources that one of my favorite Green Mountain state brewers was using the Boddington's strain, which is supposed to be London Ale III. And after hearing this same speculation a number of times, I had to give it a try. WWSHD?

Using English yeast strains in American IPAs isn't a totally novel idea — plenty of awesome breweries are doing it (Hill Farmstead, The Alchemist, Tired Hands, Cigar City, Three Floyds, Surly, Firestone Walker, Stone), and enough of them are brewing IPAs I love that I figured there must be something to it. While I prefer most styles of beer on the dry side, I also like my IPAs to be soft and silky and elegant, in contrast to the usual bitterness-focused West Coast model of the last decade. The logic behind the choices of these brewers makes sense: an English yeast strain might not attenuate as highly, but attenuation can be worked around, and careful management of the yeast will allow for a mild base of fruity esters to accentuate the brightness of the hops, soften the palate, and give an impression of balance without going overboard on the malts.

It especially makes sense when you're going for an IPA that drinks smoother and softer than the usual. I've been calling this ideal profile in my head the "Rebalanced IPA." I hate dividing up styles into sub-styles always, but there are enough breweries out there brewing this new profile of hoppy beer that I think it's worth considering that it may be a novel and separate approach, utilizing new techniques and a new way of looking at the structure that holds an IPA together. The Rebalanced IPA is as distinct to me, at least, as the old East Coast vs. West Coast IPA concepts.

Anyway, London Ale III seems to help with that balance. It also achieves the sort of saturated, soft mouthfeel I've been wanting for my IPAs. But then again, when it's cooperating, so does Conan. Similar somewhat, different somewhat, probably both with their pro's and con's. LAIII is a huge top-cropper, with a krausen persisting on every one of my brews for days after fermentation was over. Despite that, it starts up very quickly, very aggressively, and attenuates well enough. I've been nudging the temperature higher each time, against my original instinct to ferment in the mid-60's — I'm now thinking it likes it around 68 F, maybe even 70 F. But I'll keep playing around, of course. And soon, very soon hopefully, I'd like to do side-by-side batches with London Ale III and Conan. Gotta keep it scientific!

Finally, the mysterious world of water treatment. Undoubtedly hugely important! My take on this too has been evolving dramatically. But water gets so complicated, and to me, somewhat cryptic, perhaps it's an analysis left for vague unpacking some other time. I will say, for now, that a great place to start is deciding whether you agree with Vinnie Cilurzo's tips for brewing better IPAs. That classic treatment is great for a particular breed of IPA, but I'm fairly sure that a lot of the IPA brewers that I prefer are not, regardless of their starting mineral content, just dumping in some gypsum and calling it a day.

Recipe-
5.5 Gal., All Grain
Mashed at 152 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at 68 F
OG: 1.073
FG: 1.012
ABV: 8%

Malt-
76.5% [11#] 2-row malt
7% [1#] white wheat malt
7% [1#] Cara-Pils
3.5% [8 oz] Golden Naked Oats
5.2% [12 oz] corn sugar

Hop Schedule-
1 oz CTZ @FWH
2 oz Amarillo hop stand for 45 minutes
2 oz Simcoe hop stand for 45 minutes
1 oz CTZ hop stand for 45 minutes
1 oz Amarillo dry hop for 5 days [primary]
2 oz Simcoe dry hop for 5 days [primary]
1 oz Amarillo dry hop for 5 days [secondary keg]
2 oz Simcoe dry hop for 5 days [secondary keg]

Yeast-
Wyeast London Ale III