Consecration - ZZ Hops Big Bad Barrel Part 2

Today I'm brewing 10 gallons of Consecration clone for part 2 of my club's barrel project. This beer will be fermented clean then racked to the barrel on a whole bunch of zante currants.

Here's the recipe as I made it adjusted for my efficiency

19.0 # Rahr Pale Malt

0.88 # Weyermann Acid Malt

0.44 # Weyermann Carafa II
0.44 # Special B

2.0 # Corn Sugar (10 min)

2.0 # D-180 Dark Candi Syrup (Flameout)

28g  Sterling (90 min)

56g  Sterling (30 min)

56g  Styrian (1 min)

White Labs WLP530 Abbey Ale

4.0 # Zante currants in secondary

Mash at 158F, 90 minute boil

Brewing Notes
This session was a bit of a bitch. I had a brain fart and forgot to put my hops into the hop spider. This caused problems during the whirlpool because it clogged my hop/trub filter. After a couple clogs I decided to just go ahead and pump into the fermenters. At least lunch was good...enjoying some smoked candied salmon with brown rice and Parmesan asparagus for lunch during the brew session.

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Milk Stout 2014

Today I'm brewing a Milk Stout that I'm hoping will turn out close to Left Hand 's Milk Stout. 825 State Stout from Epic Brewing used to be my favorite commercial stout. Last year at GABF I got to try Left Hand's Milk Stout Nitro and Wake Up Dead Nitro (RIS). I absolutely love these beers and try to stock up on them whenever I can find them. They are so smooth and so easy drinking with just the right amount of sweetness, chocolate, and roast. 825 State Stout is still up there for me, but I love LHMS.

This recipe is based on one I found on HBT. I tried to go back and find the author to give him/her credit but for some reason I can't find it.

Edit: Found it! Thanks to ADX for sharing this recipe

One thing I'm doing today that I haven't done for a long while...I'm using dry yeast. Here's the recipe as I'm making it:

4.75# Muntons Pearl
2.25# Rarh 2 row
1.0# Briess Roasted Barley
.75# Briess Caramel 60L
.75# Briess Chocolate Malt
.75# Weyermann Munich II
0.5# Flaked Oats
0.63# Flaked Barley
10g Magnum (60 min)
28g US Goldings (10 min)
1.0# Lactose (10 min)
Safale S-05
Yeast Nutrient (5 min)

Mash at 151F for 75 minutes. 90 minute boil. Ferment at 63F then raise to 68F over several days.

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Super Juice Solution - Trinity Brewing

Not too long ago I brewed a sour IPA inspired by Red Swingline from Trinity Brewing. It turned out to be a nice beer, but it's not anywhere close to Swingline. It has some really nice hop flavor and aroma plus a mild tartness in the finish, but no question, I missed the intended target.

To my surprise, I received an email from Jason Yester, "Captain of the Pirate Ship" (that has to be the coolest job title ever), aka Trinity's head brewer. He mentioned he saw my post and said to contact him if I needed any help with the recipe. Jason is putting out some awesome beers so I would have been a fool not to accept his generous offer. We exchanged a few emails and he graciously shared his recipe and some process information for one of their newer beers, Super Juice Solution. Jason also gave me permission to post the recipe, which goes to show not only does he make great beer, he's also an incredibly cool guy. 

Super Juice Solution is similar to, but a little different than Swingline (e.g. no aging in Chardonnay barrels). It's a sour session IPA and it involves a method of souring and a malt that I've never used before.

• Kettle/Wort souring - Usually when I brew a sour beer, I'll either pitch bugs early in the primary to give them a head start on yeast (see my Berliner Weiss posts) or I'll pitch a blend like Roeselare and try to be patient for up to a year while the souring microbes do their thing. This time I'll be kettle souring before the boil with lactobacillus then boiling, and finally fermenting with brett brux. After the mash, I'll collect 6.75 gallons of wort and take it up to a quick boil to kill off any unknowns before I pitch the lacto.  Next, I'll chill to around 114F then hold it at 114.5F for 22-23 hours until the pH drops to around 3.2-3.4. After that, I'll proceed with the boil. In order to maintain the temp during the souring process, I ordered a 60 watt car battery heater/warmer. This is controlled by my BCS-460. It probably wouldn't work that well in the garage in the middle of winter, but my garage is pretty warm in the summer so it's having no trouble maintaining the temp.

• Chit malt - I've never used this malt before and it was a bit challenging to find a source. Fortunately the guys at Salt City Brew Supply managed to track some down for me. It's basically a very undermodified malt somewhere between raw barley and more common well-modified base malts. I asked Jason if I could use any undermodified malt in this recipe (e.g. Briess' Under-modified Pilsner Malt) and he said no, Chit malt is essential and the key to sour beer. This malt is also commonly used in decoction mashes for German lagers (e.g. Rogue Farms Good Chit Pilsner).

Jason gave me the recipe based on their 12.2 barrel brew system which I scaled down for five gallons. Here's the recipe as I made it. 

5# 12oz Weyermann Pilsner Malt

1# 8.6oz Best Malz Chit Malt

12.3oz Weyermann Vienna Malt

12.3oz Weyermann Acidulated Malt

5.3oz Crisp C77

6oz Rice Hulls

WLP677 Lactobacillus Delbrueckii 

WLP650 Brettanomyces Bruxellensis

14g Summit (60 min)

5.6g Corriander (15 min)

131g Amarillo (10 min)

120g Amarillo (Dry hop @3 months)

20g Willamette (Dry hop @3 months)

10g EK Goldings (Dry hop @3 months)

Mash at 145.4 for 35 minutes. Collect 6.75 gallons and boil for 15 minutes**. Chill to 114F and pitch lactobacillus. Hold at 114F for 23 hours (pH should be down near 3.2) then boil. 90 minute boil. Ferment in the low 70's then ramp temps up into the mid 80's. Age for 3 months then dry hop. 

**Jason doesn't recommend boiling for 15 minutes. Something got into my first attempt at making this beer. I'm not sure what it was (microbes and/or yeast) but it was horrible smelling and tasting. I ended up dumping it before the boil. So just for my own piece of mind, I decided to do a short boil on the second attempt to kill off any unknowns. 

Brewing Notes

So I brewed this beer a little while ago. I was debating whether or not to post about it until I found out if I successfully made a decent sour IPA, but I figured I might as well post anyway. 

Things went well although I left it to sour a lot longer than 23 hours. I tasted the sample after 23 hours and I could detect some tartness but it was masked by residual sweetness in the wort. I tried pH test strips and they didn't measure a change, so I decided to let it go a bit longer. Well, life got in the way and before I knew it, an entire week had passed. I tasted it before boiling and there was noticeable tartness, but it still seemed to be masked. I went ahead with the boil thinking that once the brett ferments out the sugars, the sourness should come out. Time will tell if that theory is correct.

P.S. Even if I manage to screw up this beer, buy a couple bottles of anything you can find from Trinity. You won't be disappointed.  

Update 11/30/2014

Dry Hops were added today!

Update 12/27/2014
This turned out to be a nice beer but the tartness level is pretty low. There's some tartness in the finish, but it's much lower than I expected, especially considering the lactobacillus had a whole week to sour. I must be doing something wrong during the souring phase. I'll have to revisit this recipe in the future.

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Robust Porter 2014

I brewed up a Robust Porter over the weekend. The recipe was somewhat of a mix between the last two smoked porters minus the smoked malt. BJCP guidelines describe this style as A substantial, malty dark ale with a complex and flavorful roasty character. 

Here's the recipe is I made it:

3.25 # Crisp Maris Otter
3.25 # Muntons Pearl Malt
0.75 # Crisp Medium Crystal
0.75 # Crisp Light Crystal
0.50 # Crisp Chocolate Malt
0.25 # Crisp Pale Chocolate Malt
0.75 # Weyermann Munich II
0.30 # Briess Black Patent (added to the mash right before the sparge)
28g Chinook (60 min)
28g Willamette (20 min)
14g US Goldings (10 min)
1/2 Whirlfloc
1/2t Wyeast yeast nutrient
WLP862 Cry Havoc in 1L starter

Mash at 153F for 60 min. Ferment at 58F

Brewing Notes
No issues other than the gravity was a touch higher than I anticipated. Target was 1.061 and measured was 1.065. This brew smelled amazing during the mash. Looking forward to giving it a try when it's ready.

Update 7/2/2014

I was able to chill this beer down to the low 60's and put it in the fermentation chamber overnight to get it down to 58F before pitching. Fermentation took off fairly quickly. There's quite a bit of hop aroma coming off the fermentation. Hopefully I didn't overdo it for the style. I'm sure I'll like it, but I was planning on entering this one in a competition so hopefully the judges will like it too.

Update 7/7/2914

The krausen seems to be dropping but there's still a fair amount of activity. The fermentation chamber smells awesome.

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Sour Saison Experiment

I feel like I've been brewing a lot of sour beers lately, not a bad thing at all. I was at my LHBS a couple nights ago and they had a pack of Fast Souring Lacto GB110, a new offering from Gigayeast. My first thought was to brew up more Berliner Weisse, but I already have 10 gallons from our recent Big Brew Day event so I figured I'd try something different. I love saisons and thought it'd be interesting to do a sour version of the style. This recipe is a little more complicated than most recipes because it involves two boils.

The basic process is mash, sparge, split batch in half (one for souring, one for non-souring), boil separately with respective hop and spice additions, and ferment separately. One half will be fermented with the lacto and the other half gets WLP568 Saison Blend. My goal is to get souring from the lacto fermentation, and some nice Belgian yeast character from the yeast blend. When fermentation is done, they'll be blended together. Hopefully I end up with a really good complex sour beer and not a mediocre beer resulting from an unnecessarily complex process.

Here's the recipe:

16.0# Dingemans Belgian Pilsner
2.0# Weyerman Pale Wheat Malt
28g US Goldings (90 mins non-sour half)
28g Aged Hops (60 min sour half)
WLP568 Belian Saison Blend (non-sour half)
GB110 Fast souring lacto (for sour half)

The remaining ingredients are split in half with half going into each boil:
14g US Goldings (15 min)
20g Ginger root, grated (12 min)
2.0# Candi syrup, Simplicity
Zest from one orange (5 min)
8g Coriander, ground (5 min)
8g Grains of Paradise, ground (5 min)
20 Black peppercorns, ground (5 min)
14g Simcoe (2 min)
14g Amarillo (2 min)
1t Yeast nutrient

Mash at 150F. Collect 13gallons then split in half. 90min boil. Ferment at room temp allowing both to free-rise as much as they want.

Brewing notes:
No issues to speak of other than two boils make for a long brew day. We took a break between the two boils to listen to the NHC Awards ceremony to see if my Peppermint Chocolate Stout medaled (it didn't). The non-sour portion took off. The sour half is going a little slower.

Update 6/16/2014
The lacto seems to be taking off now. It took about 48 hours but it's now developing a bit of a krausen. On the other hand, the WLP568 took off like a rocket with a one inch krausen forming within the first couple hours.

Update 6/24/2014

Sour half is still chugging away. I'm going to try to pull a sample this weekend and see where it's at. 

The clean half seemed like fermentation had slowed so I swapped the blowoff hose for the airlock. Well it wasn't done and it blew the airlock out within 24 hours. Fermentation is still really active and doesn't show any signs of slowing down.

Update 7/2/2014

Both halves are still chugging along. The lacto half has a thin krausen but is still showing an occasional burp in the airlock. The saison yeast blend krausen has finally dropped a bit, but like the lacto it doesn't seem to be quite done yet. These might be ready for sampling in the next week or so. 

Update 7/7/2014

The unsoured half seems to be done, but the sour half is still chugging away. The krausen isn't as high as it was at its peak, but it's still there and the airlock is showing activity about once per 8-9 seconds. I'll let this ride for a few more days and see where it's at.

Update 7/9/2014

I got impatient and pulled a small sample of each half. Unsoured half has some nice yeast character that compliment the spice additions. The sour half is a little disappointing in that it is barely sour. My plan was to blend the two and end up with mid-level tartness in this beer; something noticeable but not mouth puckering. Based on my experience with Wyeast lacto in my Berliner Weiss, this should have been more than enough time to have significantly lowered the pH, but if I were to blend right now I don't think anyone would even know it was a sour beer. I tried measuring the pH with my 2.8 - 4.4 pH test strips and they don't even register. I decided to go ahead and pitch some of the Wyeast lacto + Jolly Pumpkin blend I saved from my most recent Berliner brew. In hoping this will help increase the tartness level.

Update 8/7/2014
I pulled a sample of each fermenter last night. The non-sour half is really nice with classic spicy saison character. The sour half is very similar but with some mild but noticeable tartness. It's about the level of tartness I was hoping to get by blending the two, so I don't think I'll be able to blend them after all or it'll just get lost. I think I might let the sour half go a little longer to see what happens with the JP dregs, but I'll probably keg the non-sour half this weekend.

Update 9/20/2014

Just got my scoresheets for the 2014 Grace Lutheran Bier Brauen (GLBB). I also entered this one in the Beehive Brew-off (BBO). Both entries were from the non-soured half. 

At BBO this beer scored a 36 with the only negative comments being that the carbonation was low. I had to hurry and get this in the bottle for BBO, so I tried to force carb it in about 24 hours and I knew it was a bit under carb'd. For GLBB I had a bit more time to up the carbonation and it ended up scoring a 44. Sadly, it did not medal, but I'll take a 44 any day. It had some great comments from the judges and I really dig this beer, so this recipe is a keeper. I can't wait for the sour portion to get a little age on it.

Update 10/7/2014
I pulled a sample from the sour half. I'm happy to say it has some really nice tartness. It's not as sour as my Berliners but it's not too far off. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the most sour, my fruit lambics are a 10, 2014 Berliners are about a 7, and this sour saison is a solid 6. I decided to go ahead and rack this beer to a keg to force carb. I'll probably go ahead and bottle from the keg after it's carb'd.

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