DIY stir plate

My friend Jon says that the essence of hardcore punk is 'DIY'. I love that as a definition of punk and I like the idea of being a bit handy but I don't have a great DIY track record myself. This is my attempt to build a stir plate, something that will help my yeast starters to grow big and healthy.

It took:

• A PC fan
• A 12v adaptor
• A couple of crazy rare earth magnets
• A LED dimmer (for speed control)
• A plastic container
• Bolts, nuts, washers, blu-tac

I drilled holes in the lid to mount the fan. 4 bolts, each with 3 nuts between the lid and fan to provide a bit of space for the magnets to sit on top of the fan. A couple more holes in the container, one on the end for the speed controller and one on the side for the power chord.

Magnets nicely balanced and spaced for my stir bar

After stripping the wires for the power supply and the fan, they were hooked up to the speed controller.

I attached the magnets to the top of the fan as in the picture. I'd read that some people had difficulty getting them balanced and others had difficulty with spacing the magnets. I wasn't confident to just glue them down and blu-tac made it easy to get it right. It also means that I can easily move the magnets if I get a longer stir bar.

DIY stir plate in action

Pretty simple and totally effective. The bar spins well and stays spinning properly even at full speed. 

Normally, I'll be putting an erlenmeyer flask of wort and a bit of yeast on the stir plate. The idea is that as the magnetic stir bar in the flask spins, it keeps the wort moving and doesn't allow the yeast to fall out of suspension. It helps the yeast to be active and also introduces oxygen into the wort. These are perfect conditions for the yeast to flourish and quickly build up numbers before pitching into a brew.

Can Beer Save America?

Interesting article on the battle between craft brewers and the major brewers in America. If people in general are willing to pay more for better quality beer, it really turns the industry on its head.

The article notes that craft beer has 5.7% of the US market by volume, 9.1% in dollars. We noticed when we were there that craft beer is way more common than in Australia. I got stuck in supermarkets because I had to inspect the whole aisle given almost entirely to craft beer.

In Australia the craft beer market is only around 1% of the total volume and our laws make it harder for craft brewers but even so, the craft industry is growing while overall beer consumption declines.

Bottle dregs

It's not normally worth saving the yeast rich dregs of a beer for later use. You can build a starter from dregs and get decent results but with easy access to healthy, fresh and pure strains of yeast, it makes more sense to buy.

The exception to that is when the bottle of beery goodness you're drinking holds a yeast that you can't buy.

De Ranke XX Bitter, I love you so much

I only recently got my hands on De Ranke's XX Bitter and it was a revelation. Every beer since, part of me has been saying 'Why are you drinking this? Get another De Ranke!' Inspired, I've been planning something in a similar style.

Part of the planning is working out what yeast to use and the internets weren't very helpful for once. Having searched, it looks like they used to use yeast from Rodenbach but since then they've changed and there doesn't seem to be any clarity about what they're using now. The yeast doesn't seem to be as bold as other Belgian beers but there is a nice clove character in there buried under the hop assault and I'd like to at least try it out so to the dregs it is.

Plenty of yeast growth

I boiled up some dried malt extract in water and poured about 150ml into a sanitised erlenmeyer flask. Once it was cool, the De Ranke dregs went in and I covered it with gladwrap. A week later I stepped it up from 180 to 800ml and now it's about ready to go into a brew.

Brewday: 100% Brett Brown Ale

It's taken me ages to get there but I've finally managed to get a 100% brett fermented beer underway. Because it's a world I'm unfamiliar with I adapted a recipe from the Ryan Brews blog. It should be malty and give plenty of room for the yeast to shine.

Packet of goodness

This beer was also fun because I used my home made brown malt for the first time. It's had a few weeks to de-gas so it should be spot on now. It definitely added plenty of colour to the wort, in the fermenter it looks like it's going to be red-black. I'm looking forward to seeing how it tastes.

Recipe:
11.5 litre batch
OG: 1.058
IBU: 23

2.5kg Pale malt
250g Brown malt
200g Acidulated malt
125g Crystal 120ebc
20g Carafa Special III

10g Citra hops @ 60 minutes

The yeast is WY5526 Brettanomyces Lambicus. From what I've read it should give a fruity, black cherry aroma and flavour to the beer.

Brett Brown looking good in the fermenter

Beef and Stout Stew

I had some stewing beef that needed to be used and my Imperial Stout to cook it with. It turned out pretty well so I thought I'd record it for future reference.


Ingredients:
750g cubed gravy beef
2 carrots cut into chunks
2 sliced onions
4 cloves of crushed garlic
330ml of my Imperial Stout
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 handful of barley
Bunch of silverbeet
Salt and pepper

Method:
Brown the beef and set it aside, fry the onions in some oil, added the garlic and cayenne pepper. Then chuck in some beer to deglaze the bottom of the pot, give it a stir and add the rest. Chuck in the carrots and beef and put it into the oven on low heat for as long as it takes for the meat to get tender. Add barley with around 45 minutes to go. Chop the silverbeet and stir it in when it's ready to serve.

I enjoy cooking but haven't done much over the last couple of years. I'll have to learn more about cooking with beer and matching beer and food. Sadly the stocks of my Imperial Stout are running low. I'll have to get brewing again.

Van Diemen Brewing - Hedgerow Autumn Ale

It's so exciting to be able to buy a sour beer that's been brewed in Tasmania! Van Diemen's 2012 Hedgerow Autumn Ale has hit the shelves. The label says that it's aged for 12 weeks on rosehips, hawthorn and sloe berries, partially barrel aged.


Aroma: Berries, some sweetness, strawberry, and definitely a sour edge. It reminds me a bit of the aroma of strawberries mixed with balsamic vinegar.

Appearance: I really love the appearance of this one. It's burnt red in colour with a light haze. Attractive. It pours with a two finger head that settles to a dense 1cm of foam, leaving sheets rather than lacing down the glass.

Flavour: Given the label and the aroma I was looking for sourness but what I found was only a very light sourness. The flavour is dominated by prominent oak and smokey, burnt notes. There's some delicate berry notes underneath that tease but it seems like the malt has been largely subdued by the oak and tannins. It just feels like it's missing a big part of what's meant to be there. I want more berries! Hmmm... perhaps currants in the aftertaste.

Mouthfeel: The beer dries on the palate which with the oak/char leaves an astringent taste and feel in the mouth. It has medium carbonation. I thought the beer as a whole might get better as it warmed up but though the berries came out more with a little warmth, the beer felt even more thin.

I really need to get more, better beer glasses

Overall: What kills this beer is that as it beer dries on the palate it emphasises the tannins and makes it astringent. I want this beer to be amazing but it doesn't take me there.

My hunch is that it's ended up with a foot in two camps by not wanting to be too risky. The problem is that the char/oak that comes from the barrel ageing don't combine well with the dry finish. I think it needs to be either more sweet or more sour. The sweetness (just a little) would give it enough body and flavour to counter the oak, perhaps more sour might achieve a similar effect, at least it would give something else to focus on.

I'm a bit disappointed but hopeful that this will just be the first of many Tassie produced sour beers. Well done Van Dieman Brewing for daring to do it. I think I'll pick up another one and let it age for a while to see if it evens out over time.

Brewday: Hefeweizen

It happened like this: I had a packet of the WY3068 Weihenstephaner yeast that was pushing its use-by date and I just received my order from a bulk buy organised through the Aussie Home Brew forum. I had to brew and it had to be a hefeweizen. It was out of my hands.

My old German teacher would not approve, he's not a fan of Bavarians

Weihenstephaner's Hefeweizen was an early part of my craft beer education. In a beer scene that can get pretty silly with stuff like 'I bet I can melt your face with my IBUs' (which I love by the way), these beers just quietly do their thing and do it so well that they're still favourites of mine years later.

I now have ALL the grain

Getting a grain mill changed my life for the better

It's a really simple recipe, the magic comes from the yeast and the job of the brewer is to treat it right and get out of the way. It's 50/50 wheat and pils malt. Thanks to the bulk buy I now have some good German pilsner malt which should help. I used 8g of Tasmanian Hallertau, not very authentic but since it's gone in at 60 minutes and is only contributing 13-14 IBUs I don't think it'll be too much of a problem.

Water nearly ready, just put the bag in place

This was my first attempt at a stepped mash. The idea of a stepped mash is to allow the enzymes active at different temperatures to contribute their thing to the mash process. I'm hoping that it will provide better mouthfeel, a good head, good attenuation and maybe even better efficiency. And everything. Make my beer amazing, please, stepped mash.

First step

The plan was for rests at 55/67/72/78'C and it went ok but my first rest was a bit high and the second (the main rest) lost lots more heat over the hour than normal. It's a pretty cold day in Hobart though so I guess I'm just going to have to factor that in during winter. The other two were spot on. It took quite a bit longer than my normal mashes but I had back to back NBA games to watch so that wasn't a problem. Next time I'll be better prepared and I think it'll go really smoothly.

90 minute boil, hops in with 60 minutes remaining.

Mug-o-hops

At the back, living with the Stout and Brown Ale

Nice and easy. I'm planning on using some of the yeast slurry from this batch for a Dunkelweizen next week. Might as well make the most of it.

Brewday: American Brown

I did a brew with Mark, a mate who just lives around the corner. We've lived near each other for about 2 years yet somehow hardly ever meet up. Among its many virtues, brewing provides a great opportunity to hang out.

We did a simple American Brown Ale. I went for extract + specialty grains instead of all grain for the sake of saving some time and helping him get familiar with that step in the brewing pathway. Colour came from some Carafa Special III, Chocolate malt and some crystal. I'm still trying to use leftover hops and I thought Citra would be nice with the darker malt flavour. I also added Columbus and Galaxy. 1.052 OG and 32 IBUs.

Simple and good. Hopefully.

Export/RIS tasting then and now

I was sorting through some papers and discovered my initial tasting notes for my Export/Imperial Stout. I thought I'd put them up together to compare and see how the beer developed.

October 2011 Tasting:

Aroma: Chocolate, caramel, raisin-like aromas

Appearance: Black! Almost entirely opaque with a hint of red around the edges when held up to bright light. A dark tan head, thick and tight. Not great retention but a thin layer remains all the way down.

Taste: Roasty, chocolate, some alcohol flavours present. Mild hop bitterness. There's some astringency, not much sweetness. Unpleasant, vegetal aftertaste.

Mouthfeel: It has a dry feeling, a bit over-carbonated. The combination of carbonation, alcohol and astringency leave a sharp feeling on the tongue/throat.

Overall: A mistake in lots of ways, this beer almost pulls it off but the mouthfeel and aftertaste lets it down.

March 2012 Tasting:

Aroma: Not much of an aroma, a little of the roast and some alcohol. Nothing from the yeast that I can detect, I used US-05 so that's not surprising. 

Appearance: Utterly black with a two finger, dense, tan head. 

Taste: Big, roasty, chocolate, coffee. It has a dark fruity thing going on too. It's got an obvious sweetness to it, probably too much, or rather, there's not enough bitterness to balance it properly. You wouldn't sit and drink a few of these, but that's not really what you're aiming for with something this big anyway. The astringent notes I had a problem with earlier seem to be gone and the aftertaste is good. The flavour is so big that the alcohol isn't really detectable in the flavour until it warms up to room temperature. 

Mouthfeel: Syrupy and dense. The carbonation is a bit higher than I'd like but it's not too far off. Some warmth from the alcohol. 

Overall: This mistake turned out pretty well. I guess it's more of a Russian Imperial Stout than an Export Stout. If I was doing it again and intentionally aiming at a RIS I'd turn the bitterness up a notch or two and the carbonation down slightly. I'd probably also use a different yeast to get some fruity esters doing their thing. It'll be nice to have this on hand over the coming winter and I'm keen to follow Luke's lead and use it in cooking.

I'm glad that I found those notes. It's helpful to see how much the beer changed over time and a lesson to be more patient. I was surprised to read that I'd described the beer as being 'dry'. It's certainly far from dry now. I'm guessing that the astringency and mild hop bitterness contributed to that perception and as they've faded the sweetness is on the rise.

A new beer resolution

One of my favourite beer related memories is of 'Friday beers', a tradition that started in my last year of study and included anyone who was around knocking off at 3pm on Friday, coming around to my place and having a few drinks, debriefing, laughing and/or arguing.

The beer wasn't amazing stuff. The usual was Boags Draught unless something else was on special. But it was fine and looking back, Friday beers remains one of the highlights of that part of my life.

I was thinking about this because looking at the cupboard where my bottled beer lives, I don't have a beer in there that would quite do for a Friday beers type event or that I could give to a friend who's interested but not an adventurous beer drinker. I like big and bold flavours and that's what I gravitate to when I brew. The beers aren't bad, they all taste somewhere between decent and really good, and my beer geek friends like them, but none of them are quite right for a gathering that has beer but isn't beer centric.

I think that's a shame. Beer shouldn't be bad but it also shouldn't be inaccessible or pretentious. It also shouldn't need to be the centre of attention in a social setting but rather be the lubricant that helps the wheels turn. I want to have something on hand that can easily be thrown in the mix at a bbq or when having a few mates around that is nice and drinkable for someone who isn't a big or adventurous beer drinker as well as those who enjoy craft beer.

So I thought about what styles would probably get the job done. I came up with: 

• Ordinary/Best Bitter
• Irish Red Ale
• Australian Pale Ale
• Kolsch
• Witbier
• Mild
• Pilsner/Lager

And looking at it, I actually find that list intimidating. I've just brewed an Irish Red Ale so we'll have to see how that turns out but they all strike me as beers that are hard to do well. There are two difficulties: they're so simple that it's rarely going to be memorable and there's nowhere to hide off flavours. It really demands a good process and ingredients.

Getting on top of a couple of these styles is now one of my projects. They're not likely to set anyones world on fire but hopefully I can brew something that's an easy and pleasant drink that will contribute to more great beer memories.