Wedding Beer Labels

The wedding I brewed all those beers for came and went a few weeks ago. I wasn't well enough to make it on the day but I heard it was a pretty fantastic afternoon. The weather was certainly perfect for it. I figured it was worth posting up the awesome labels designed by Shiloh, a friend since primary school and the wife of Will, one of my brewing assistants. We called the Pilsch a Kolsch on the label to avoid confusion for the guests.

Tasting notes: Buck Mulligan Golden Ale

Brewed 22/11/13, bottled 07/12/13, tasting 07/01/14. No photo for this one because my brain doesn't always work and I forgot.

OG: 1.046

FG: 1.013

IBU: 25

EBC: 5.3

ABV: 4.4%

Aroma: ginger, kiwi, melon, pepper. Could be a nice aroma but it's a bit too aggressive. A victim of my rush of blood to the dry hops.

Appearance: cloudy and yellow. Pours with a sticky, dense head that lingers and laces down the glass.

Flavour: more of the ginger initially. Pleasant malt and some wheat. Light fruitiness in the finish. Overwhelmed by the hops.

Mouthfeel: probably the best part of the beer. Nice and creamy quality that I assume comes from the wheat. Carbonation just a little below average.

What I wanted with this beer was something very much in the character of Buck Mulligan, boisterous, clever and down to party. But instead I ended up with a blunt instrument of a beer. Way over-hopped and anything but clever. I guess this is what happens when you dry hop at stupid levels with a hop you haven't used before. It's not awful, just quite disappointing compared to what I had imagined.

I tasted the beer after primary fermentation was finished and there was little to no hop presence beyond a mild bitterness. I suspect the yeast stripped most of it out but it's also possible that uncarbonated, the aromas just weren't carrying. Without thinking too much about it I just chucked in a heap of hops in the hope that it would give a big, fruity aroma. What I got instead was a whole lot of spice, ginger and pepper. It settled down a bit over the month in the bottle before the wedding but it never fully recovered from my recklessness.

The malt was just right, the pilsner and wheat malts did exactly what they needed to. The creamy mouthfeel and the flavour was delicious. I think this beer could be a good version of the style with a better choice/application of hops. 

Next time: there's no need for dry hopping, just use a yeast that won't strip out the hop flavour/aroma. It could work very nicely as a vehicle for different single hops. 

Tasting notes: Mr Darcy Hefeweizen

Mr Darcy is a hefeweizen I brewed for my friend Adam's wedding on December 7 and bottled on December 21. This tasting was on January 14. No photo for this one because I was too busy drinking it.

OG: 1.043
FG: 1.011
IBU: 13
ABV: 4.2%

Aroma: Banana city, y'all! Of course there's banana. There's also a hint of clove and some decent wheat notes. There's no mistaking what it is.
Appearance: A thick, creamy white head with a cloudy yellow body verging on gold where the glass is a bit thicker. Beautiful.
Flavour: The clove gets a bit more space in the flavour of the beer. Banana, wheat and pilsner malt all tied up in a delicious way. The bitterness is very light and strictly complementary.
Mouthfeel: A creamy mouthfeel that somehow exists despite a moderately high level of carbonation.

There's a divide among people who like hefeweizens. It's between those who are fans of banana and those who love the clove. This beer would make the banana fans happy but would leave the clove fanciers wanting a more. As far as I can tell, this beer has no off flavours from the fermentation, the banana is not subtle but it's not out of control and the malt flavours are delicious. Overall, it's a good version of the style without quite hitting the Platonic hefeweizen. I think I'd like a little less banana.

The thing I really like about this one is what it looks like. Some people get weak knees at the sight of a beer that's so crystal clear you can read a newspaper through it. That's fine I guess but I much prefer the texture and depth of colour of a cloudy hefeweizen. Top that with a large, dense head and that's just about perfect. Weird since hefeweizens aren't even in my top 10 favourite beer styles.

It's a little embarrassing but I have always had my temperature controller set at the temperature I wanted to ferment at. For this beer it was 17 celsius. My temperature probe is taped to the side of the fermenter and insulated with some wetsuit material. I didn't take into account the heat developed during active fermentation and I've since read that inside the fermenter is generally a 2-3C higher than outside. So I was really fermenting at 19-20C instead of 17. Clever. That's where the banana was coming from and probably meant that the extra clove I was after was suppressed. Next time, Gadget.

Next time: ferment a couple of degrees cooler to lower the banana a little and let the clove come out a bit more. I'd also like try one or two different strains since all of my wheat beers so far have been with WLP300/WY3068.

Tasting notes: Johnnie Rico Pilsch

This was the first beer I brewed for Adam's wedding. Brewed with Huw on November 14, bottled on November 30 and this tasting on January 10.

Johnnie Rico Pilsch
OG: 1.035
FG: 1.009
IBU: 25
ABV: 3.4%

Aroma: Lemon wafts up from the glass. A closer inspection also reveals spice, honey, pils malt.
Appearance: It pours crystal clear and a sparkling pale straw-yellow colour with a dense and sticky white head. It looks very nice.
Flavour: Very clean flavours. Light pilsner malt sweetness with spicy Saaz, lemon, hints of honey and firm but smooth bitterness. There isn't any lingering aftertaste, it fades very quickly and demands another sip.
Mouthfeel: Fairly light mouthfeel, relatively high, prickly carbonation which accentuates the bitterness.

The Pilsch also goes well with cricket

I'm delighted with how this one turned out. It's spot on. So easy to drink, light and refreshing. It's perfect Summer beer. It wouldn't do anything for a beer geek obsessed with hops and exotic ingredients but it's a really nice beer. It feels weird and wrong to talk up my own beer like this but it's delicious.

The subtlety of this beer is what really makes it. Even though it's just using one malt (Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner) and one hop (Saaz), it's got a depth that goes far beyond that simplicity. It's a beer that rewards drinking, there's something new in each glass.

I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading about beer and brewing on the internet. I tend to read and then get excited and then write up recipes inspired by people's descriptions. The problem* is that some of these descriptions are really well written and they raise my expectations to the point where I get disappointed with the resulting beer. The Pilsch is one of those but fortunately it clears the expectations comfortably.

Next time: As far as I'm concerned this recipe is essentially spot on but it might be interesting to try it with a hop like Styrian Goldings or First Gold for an orange/mandarin dose of citrus rather than lemon.

* Using the word 'problem' quite loosely.

Tasting notes: The Lorax Pale Ale

This was the 3rd beer I brewed for Adam's wedding but the first I've gotten around to writing tasting notes for. It was brewed on November 30th and bottled on December 14th.

Aroma: Pine and passionfruit greet you at the door. There's a little dankness with them.
Appearance: Very nice clear gold colour with a couple of fingers of clean white head that diminishes slowly. Lots of happy little bubbles shooting to the surface.
Flavour: Nice maltiness that supports the hops but doesn't take away from them. With the hops there's a herbal quality there along with more of the same hop flavours as in the aroma.
Mouthfeel: Carbonation on the high side of medium and moderate bitterness for a pale ale.

The kind of quality photography I bring
every time

It's not high praise but this beer more or less does what it's meant to do. There are no fermentation-related off flavours or off flavours of any kind that I can detect. It's clean, the malt is good and the hops are decent. The problem is that the hops aren't exactly what I'm after. It's easy to find a good hop combination, it's much harder to find a great one. I have a hunch that the Simcoe I used was past it's prime. The overwhelming impression I get with the hop aroma and flavour is of Columbus. There's some Simcoe in there but it's not as assertive as it should have been. And the result is nice, but it's not stellar.

I'm pleased with the malt character. The Golden Promise and biscuit malt work really well together. It's not very prominent but it does let you know that it's there. I'm very happy with what Bill, my malt guy in Launceston, has produced. I hope he goes all the way and starts his own malting business one day.

It's a nice beer. A pleasant beer. At a wedding in a garden on a Summer's day, it's not far off from where it should be. But I'm drinking this in my bedroom on my own and it's a setting for a more critical assessment. If I bought this at a bottleshop I'd enjoy it but not be impressed by it.

Next time: Use hops that are absolutely fresh! Refine the combination or work out a different combination of hops in pursuit of that winning blend.

Wedding Beer Catchup #4: Mr Darcy Hefeweizen

The last beer for the wedding is a hefeweizen. It's hard to argue with a hefe on a summers day. Although I guess if you're trying to argue with a beer you have other problems. Beer can't talk. I feel pretty confident with my process for hefeweizens and that kind of security is good when brewing for other people.

Yeast on a plate ready to go into a 5ml vial

Stepped up from 2ml to 20ml

The yeast was one I'd made a plate of back when I brewed the leichtes weizen. It was a simple matter to use my sterilised inoculation loop to scoop up some yeast and deposit it in the vial. Once the yeast was happily fermenting in the vial I stepped it up into a mini erlenmeyer, then into a 250ml erlenmeyer and finally into my 2L erlenmeyer. Several steps but it worked out very well and each time I do it I feel a bit more confident about my processes.

Bernie milling the grain and pulling faces

This brew is pretty similar to the leichtes weizen I brewed for the competition. I went for a 30 minute ferulic acid rest and was planning on a gravity of 1.046. My efficiency was a bit lower than I expected, something that seems to happen often when I use wheat, and I ended up with 1.043 in the fermenter. Will and Bernie helped out with this one and it all went nice and smoothly.

Mr Darcy Hefeweizen (21L batch)

Will helping Bernie mill the grain

OG: 1.043
FG: 1.011
IBU: 13
EBC: 5.7
ABV: 4.2%

60% Best Malz wheat malt
40% Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner malt

15g Aramis @ 60 minutes

1.2L starter of WLP 300 built up from a plate. Shooting for a pitch of 190 billion cells. Fermented at 17C for 5 days and then increased to 19C to finish it off.

3g CaSO4, 7g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4 to increase the calcium and keep the profile balanced

Stepped mash: 42C (30 min), 63C (raised from 42C with an infusion of boiling water, 40 min), 72C (15 minutes) and mashed out at 78C.

60 seconds of oxygen after cooling

07/12/13 - Brewed with Will & Bernie

21/12/13 - Bottled

Wedding Beer Catchup #3: The Lorax Pale Ale

Earlier in the year I brewed a beer with my friends Adam and Will. It was a simple extract pale ale with some Weyermann CaraAmber for a bit of interest. It was hopped with Simcoe and Columbus and turned into an easy drinking, 4.6% pale ale with a huge tropical fruit juice flavour and aroma. When Adam asked me to brew for his wedding, this was one of the beers he wanted.

Instead of doing an extract batch, I decided to translate the recipe into all grain. True to form, I ended up playing with the recipe a bit so that the similarity between this recipe and the original is mainly in the hopping. I got some biscuit malt from Bill, a great bloke up in Launceston, who's been malting and roasting barley at home. Crackerjack, his biscuit malt reminds me heaps of Sao crackers we used to have growing up. My first batch using his malt got infected so I was keen to give it a shot here. I also increased the OG a little because the other wedding beers were all planned to be between 3.5-4.5% abv.

The Lorax Pale Ale (21L batch)

There's no real connection between the two except for the colour

OG: 1.051
FG: 1.011
IBU: 38 (estimated)
EBC: 10.1
ABV: 5.3%

95% Golden Promise
5% Not For Horses Crackerjack malt

30g Simcoe @ 60 min
30g Simcoe @ 0 min
50g Simcoe @ Dry hop
50g Columbus @ Dry hop

1.5L starter of WLP 090 (estimated pitch of 230 billion cells), fermented at 18C

60 seconds of oxygen

I added 8g CaSO4, 2g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4 to the mash to raise the calcium and get the sulphate levels to enhance the hoppiness and 125g acidulated malt for mash pH correction.

Stepped mash: 66C (40 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out.

30/11/13 - Brewed with Adam and Will

8/12/13 - Added dry hops

14/12/13 - Bottled

Tasted on 11/01/14

Wedding beer catchup #2: Buck Mulligan Golden Ale

Golden Ales aren't the most exciting beer but there's something fun in working with more subtle flavours to try to create something almost endlessly drinkable. With this one I'm following the lead of some English breweries. The Internet tells me that these kinds of beers are quite popular at the moment. The general theme seems to be: pale golden colour, 3.5-4.5% ABV, an English yeast and an American or New Zealand hop variety.

This is the perfect time to try out a hop variety that's new to me: Summer. It isn’t a brand new variety, it was developed right here in Tasmania in 1997 by Hop Products Australia. For a while it was called Summer Saaz as one of its parents was Saaz but now the Saaz seems to have been dropped and we have Summer. The description says that it has a balanced, sweet and fruity aroma of melon, citrus and passionfruit. It’s a fairly low alpha acid variety, this batch clocking in around 5.5%aa. In this beer I’m shooting for around 25 IBUs, enough to be there but not to steal the show. I’m after a decent hop aroma though, something surprising to people not used to craft beer but inviting at the same time.

Buck Mulligan Golden Ale (23L batch)
OG: 1.045
FG: 1.011
IBU: ~24 (this is a bit of a guess since most of the bitterness comes from the flame-out addition)
EBC: 7.7
ABV: 4.5%

80% Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner malt
20% Best Malz wheat malt

8 IBUs of Summer @ 10 min
50g of Summer @ 0 min
50g of Summer @ dry hop

Fermented with WY1026 @ 18 celsius

Water adjusted for a balanced profile and to get the calcium to a good place. 3g CaSO4, 6g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4.

Stepped mash: 66C (40 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out

22/11/13 - brewed with Huw's help

04/12/13 - dry hopped with 100g Summer instead of 50g since the yeast had stripped out almost all the hop character

07/12/13 - bottled

Wedding Beer Catchup #1: Johnnie Rico Pilsch

After my first post about brewing for the wedding, I obsessed and fiddled and changed the plan a bunch of times. The beer will be consumed primarily by people I don't know, and many of whom probably are not into craft beer. With that in mind, I've chosen to brew beers that are very approachable. They're all brewed now and ready to go with the wedding only 12 days away.

The final list:

• Pilsch
• Golden Ale
• Pale Ale
• Hefeweizen

3/4 of the beer, ready to go

I pinched the idea of the Pilsch from a write-up on the Devils Backbone Brewery on Fuggled. It's a low gravity Bohemian Pilsner recipe fermented with a Kolsch yeast. I was originally going to brew a Bohemian Pilsner but I got sick at the wrong time. I think this will do a similar job but took much less time to get ready. Light, low alcohol (around 3.3% ABV), crisp and with some spicy Saaz goodness. Just the thing for a wedding reception in a nice garden on a summer's day.

The recipe is very simple:

Huw, brewing assistant extraordinaire

Johnnie Rico Pilsch
OG: 1.033 (1.035 measured)
FG: 1.008 (1.009 measured)
IBU: 24
EBC: 3.7
ABV: 3.3% (3.4% measured)

100% Bohemian Pilsner malt

18 IBUs of Saaz @ 60 min
6 IBUs of Saaz @ 15 min

1L starter of WY2565

I added 1g CaSO4, 7g CaCl2, 2g MgSO4 to adjust my water profile to have a higher ratio of chloride to sulphate and enhance the perception of the malt.

Stepped mash: 66C (40 minutes), 72C (15 minutes) and a 78C mash out

Brewed 14/11/13

Huw generously gave his time to be my hands and get this beer brewed. We've moved house since the last post and although the new house doesn't have a garage like the old place, the kitchen is generous and there's plenty of storage space so brewing is actually a bit easier here. I've also come into a small chest freezer in addition to my fermenting fridge. It's helped me get the wedding beers brewed and I'm looking forward to having the space to brew lagers during 2014.

This was the first beer I used my new oxygenation kit on. I gave it 45 seconds before adding the yeast. The fermentation was extremely vigorous, being 90% finished after 3 days.

After 5 days @ 16C I increased the temperature to 18C for 2 days, then crashed it to 0C for a week, fining with gelatine 3 days before bottling.

Bottled 30/11/13

Tasted on 10/01/13

Blonde Ale and brewing for a wedding

In January one of my friends from school will be getting married and he's asked me to provide the beer for the reception. It's a fun project to plan and obsess over but it also comes with some pressure to brew for a range of people I don't know and who aren't necessarily into craft beer. I've written and rewritten the list of 5 or so beers that I'll brew and it will probably get some more revision before January. Still, at this point I'm planning:

• Bohemian Pilsner
• Dusseldorf Altbier (Simon's recipe, one of my favourite beers)
• Hefeweizen with Vienna malt
• Blonde Ale or American Pale Ale
• Belgian Pale or Saison

The dates for brewing are mapped out, the Pilsner is set for October 6th so it's got plenty of time to lager. I may get excited and brew an extra beer or two. Maybe an IPA or something a little more unusual. A Berliner Weisse might be a fun beer on a hot Summer day.

I brewed the Blonde Ale on the same day as the Pale Ale and they're competing for a spot in January. A Blonde/Golden/Summer ale is not the kind of beer I would usually bother brewing for myself. There are just too many others I'm more interested in. I'm sure there are well done versions but generally they seem to be a fairly bland entry level craft beer. The sort of beer that 'craft' breweries backed by big corporations have as their flagship beer.

The kind of thing I'm talking about

Anyway, enough raging against the machine. The recipe is very simple. Pils malt with a touch of wheat. I'm shooting for simple, fairly dry with a little fruity hop flavour and aroma. I overshot my gravity but that's not the end of the world. If I had more time/space in the fermentation fridge & freezer, I'd have gone with a Kolsch yeast or even the California Lager yeast for a super clean and malt friendly finish. If I end up choosing to go with the Blonde Ale, that's what I'll probably do and brew it side by side with the Alt.

Blonde Ale
OG: 1.050 (I was shooting for 1.047)
FG: 1.010
IBU: 8.4 (calculated, although I'd guess the reality would be more like 15-20)
ABV: 5.3%
EBC: 5

92% Best Malz pilsner malt
8% Best Malz wheat malt

20g Citra @ 10 min
30g Citra @ 0 min

US-05

Highly fermentable stepped mash: 62C/68C/72C/78C for 30min/30min/15min/10min

Added 1g CaSO4, 6g CaCl2 and 3g MgSO4 to get calcium and magnesium to a minimum level and enhance perception of the malt.