Having a go brewing rice wine

I can't stand up long enough to brew beer but that hasn't stopped me fermenting things. I’ve been brewing soft drink and kombucha for several months, more recently I've been brewing milk kefir and last week I started a batch of rice wine. The great thing about these fermented goods is that they are no more difficult to get started than a cup of tea.

Rice wine at the beginning

I was inspired to make the rice wine by a thread on homebrewtalk.com, part of it's beauty is that it only uses two ingredients, cooked rice and rice yeast balls (generously delivered by a mate from Sydney). The method is very simple:

1. Rinse and cook 2 cups of rice, it needs to be fairly glutinous type. Let it cool to room temperature.
2. Pack the rice into a large, clean jar, layering rice and a crushed up yeast ball. Cover the jar with a loose fitting lit or gladwrap/aluminium foil secured with a rubber band. You want some air to be able to escape but keep it protected from other bugs.
3. Give it time in a warm but dark place, mine lives under a cloth at the top of a cupboard. 
4. After 3 or 4 weeks at room temperature the wine should be ready. Strain the remaining rice solids through some cheesecloth and bottle it. The wine should be stored in the fridge as it may continue to ferment. Plastic bottles are probably a good idea to avoid the potential of exploding glass bottles.

Look for these at Asian supermarkets

That's it! Over the time in the jar an enzyme produced by the mould from the yeast balls will break down the rice, and the yeast will ferment the sugars produced by the enzyme. Mine is 4 or 5 days in and the rice in my jar is floating on top of 3cm of liquid. It’ll come out somewhere around 20% ABV. You can try different kinds of rice, different methods of preparation, and addition of fruit post fermentation. There's lots more fun to be had with this I think.

Competition Results

My brewing and posting has been put on hold again thanks to stupid CFS but I'm trying some voice recognition software so I can actually post. Looks like it's working!

The Saison

I got my results back from the ACT Amateur Brewing Championship. Tasmanian brewers get to enter through the ACT competition but get judged separately. So there is an embarrassing scoresheet for the Tasmanian portion of the competition which lists all the entries: Simon's and mine. Next year I hope we can round up a few more Tasmanian entrants.

Overall I was very happy with how my beers went. The big news is that my Leichtes Weizen scored 132/150, it was the highest score of any of the low alcohol beers in the competition by a decent margin. I've sent it off to the national competition, the Australian Amateur Brewing Championship, and we'll see how it does there. I'm not expecting very much though as an extra three weeks of age will certainly hurt it.

The other beers didn't do as well but I was not expecting very much from some of them. Simon's very good Altbier (112/150) was the next best of the six we submitted between us, Then came my Tripel (103.5/150) then Saison (103/150), then the Export Stout (93.5/150) and as I expected, my Blonde Ale (82/150) came last of the lot. I may review each beer and include the feedback from the judges if I can manage that sometime soon.

Overall it was a really good experience and I'm glad I entered. I've learned quite a bit and will work hard to make my entries next year of a more even and higher standard. One thing that let me down this time was my use of poor quality dried yeast. The dried yeast I used in the Blonde Ale and Stout left a sulphur aroma and other off flavours from fermentation. I've learned my lesson and will not be getting yeast from my LHBS again. The other big thing I will try next year is brewing further in advance. I brewed 8 beers in the month before I had to send off the entries and I think this compromised the quality of some of the beers because I was rushing and because some of the beers didn't have enough time to mature.

I was pleased that my thoughts on the beers generally lined up very well with the judges impressions. It was encouraging having them point out f lavours and aromas that I detected but couldn't necessarily put a name to. I'd like to get the BJCP judging qualification or do some other kind of training in beer evaluation so I can do a better job of brewing.

Competition entries

Now winging their way to the ACT

Today we posted our competition entries for judging on October 12 & 13. You can get 3 of the Coopers PET bottles in one express post satchel so we've entered 6 all up, 5 of mine and 1 of Simon's:

• Leichtes Weizen
• Blonde Ale
• Export Stout
• Tripel
• Saison
• Dusseldorf Altbier (this one is Simon's entry. It's delicious)

I'll post tasting notes for all of these ones soon and the competition results, good or bad when they're back.

Brewday: Barclay Perkins 1859 EI Porter

As I type I'm brewing a beer from 1859, the Barclay Perkins EI Porter. Thanks to Ron Pattinson's dedication to the obscure and his relentless pursuit of historical minutiae, recipes and detailed information has been freed from the archives and put out there for anyone to read. His blog, Shut Up About Barclay Perkins is an internet treasure trove if you're into that kind of thing and well worth following. I've got a list of about 15 beers from there I'm hoping to brew my way through over the next year or two.

Not quite the right one

Here's part of Ron's introduction of the EI Porter:

EI stands for Export India. This is the Porter that Barclay Perkins produced for the Indian market. It's the Porter equivalent of IPA. As I keep reminding anyone who will listen, there was probably more Porter exported to India than Pale Ale. But for some reason that seems to have been forgotten, with everyone focusing competely on IPA. It's most likely a class thing, IPA having been drunk by officers and officials, Porter by the ordinary soldiers.

Normally I write my own recipes. It's one of my favourite parts of the whole process. But this time I'm just along for the ride. It's good though, it makes me try different things. I'd never write a recipe with 185 IBUs and I'd never write a recipe with nearly 20% Brown malt so I guess it shows what I know about it.

BPIAB: Barclay Perkins In A Bag

Barclay Perkins 1859 EI Porter (18L batch)
(The original recipe)
OG: 1.065
FG: 1.017
IBU: 185 IBU
ABV: 6.5%
EBC: 57

72.5% Golden Promise
19.3% Brown malt
4.8% Amber malt
3.4% Black malt

150g EK Golding @ 120 min
60g EK Golding @ 60 min
60g EK Golding @ 30 min
25g EK Golding @ Dry hop

I'm using WY1968 because that's what I have available at the moment but I'd like to give it a go another time with WY1028. Fermentation will kick off at 20C and probably go up to 23C over a week.

The mash is being carried out without regard for history, I'm going for a fairly highly fermentable mash so that the yeast doesn't give up on my halfway through. It's a 64/68/72/78C mash for 20/30/15/10 minutes.

Wild yeast capture one more time

A while back I had a go at capturing some wild yeast. I had one promising jar out of four but whatever was in there wasn't able to attenuate the wort beyond 1.020 and it got dumped. I'm still pretty much in love with the idea of capturing some wild yeast and brewing with it, either lambic style or isolating and using a single strain. I've started growing some samples of my sourdough starter and kombucha on plates and I'm looking forward to seeing what will come of them.

Anyway, I had a little bit of left over malt extract agar when I made up the plates yesterday so I put some paper towel over it and left it outside overnight next to our hop plant. I brought it in again in the morning and it'll sit at room temperature for a week or two and we'll see what it does. Since it's a jelly, whatever grows on there will be on the surface and in theory, I'll be able to pick out the promising colonies.

How to make malt extract agar petri dishes for yeast ranching

This year in my blogging blackout I've learned a bit more about yeast ranching. Yeast management is probably the most significant factor in beer quality so my carefully cultivated ignorance of all things science could not be allowed to stand.

Virtually all the information I've used to get going with this has come from BKYeast with some additional help from Eureka Brewing and a couple of homebrew forum threads here and there. Both those blogs are excellent reads for anyone wanting to step into the Tardis that is the world of those microscopic organisms.

Malt extract agar

So today I made up some wort-agar plates for collecting and storing both commercial and wild yeast strains.

Recipe (to make up 10 petri dishes)
200ml water
4g agar
4g dried malt extract

Method
1. Weigh out water, agar and malt extract into a beaker, give it a stir and cover with aluminium foil.
2. Place the beaker in a pressure cooker on a wire rack to keep it off the bottom of the pressure cooker.

In the pressure cooker

3. Pour water into the pressure cooker up to the level of the rack.
4. Close the pressure cooker lid and heat on the stove. I let it go for 15 minutes in the cooker after it's steaming away.
5. Once it's done, let it cool until the beaker can be safely handled. Making sure you've got a clean space to work and a alcohol burner or butane torch nearby to create some updraft, pour into petri dishes and wrap them in gladwrap.

End product

Petri dishes all wrapped up

They're ready to go now but I'll let them sit at room temp for a week or so to make sure they haven't been contaminated. If they're clear, they'll go into the fridge ready for whenever I need them.

Little Beer Brewday Continued: Ordinary Bitter

Ordinary Bitter isn't a very inspiring label. Ordinary: pedestrian, plain, dull. We even use ordinary as a descriptor when we mean bad. There's something nice about the idea of an Ordinary Bitter though. Ordinary Bitter just is, no punching people in the face with high ABV or flavours turned up to 11. A well made Bitter has a place even though it can't compete with crazy Belgian beers and West Coast IPAs for straight up impact.

Bitter is better when pronounced 'bit-ta' like Roots Manuva

I brewed this one earlier in the year and I think it worked well. It was just 93% Maris Otter and 7% Medium Crystal with 35 IBU worth of First Gold hops. I carbonated some bottles as normal and carbonated others with only half the normal amount of sugar. When comparing them it was almost as if they were two different beers. This time I've run out of Medium Crystal so it's the less traditional Caramunich II instead and I've got East Kent Goldings instead of the First Gold. I'll start fermenting it at 20C and raise the temperature slowly over the week to 24C. Another time I'd like to leave out the crystal and just add a little black malt to adjust the colour.

It's not a revolution in a bottle, it's not different or new, it won't stand out. It's not meant to. It's just meant to be well brewed and good to drink. I like beers that are different and challenging but it's nice to just brew something that can be simple and good without any extra pretension.

Liberty Bitter (23L batch)
OG: 1.037 (1.038 measured)
FG: 1.010
IBU: 35
ABV: 3.5%
EBC: 11.6

93% Maris Otter
7% Caramunich II

25g East Kent Golding @ 90 min
30g East Kent Golding @ 20 min
30g East Kent Golding @ 0 min

1L starter of WY1968

9g CaSO4, 1g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4

80g Acidulated malt to adjust pH.

Little Beer Brewday: Leichtes Weizen & Ordinary Bitter

Yesterday I brewed my last two candidates for the competition, a Leichtes Weizen and an Ordinary Bitter. I left these till last because they'll both clock in at under 4% abv and I want them to be as fresh as possible when I send them off.

The Australian Amateur Brewing Championship guidelines borrow heavily from the American BJCP guidelines but differ at a few important points. The AABC categorises some styles differently so that instead of putting an Ordinary Bitter together with other English Pale Ales as in the BJCP, it gets put in Category 1: Low Alcohol (<4% ABV). That category also contains Leichtes Weizen, a low gravity German wheat beer (OG range of 1.025-1.035).

I've brewed a couple of hefeweizens, a dunkelweizen and a weizenbock but so far I haven't managed to brew a wheat beer that has exactly the combination of wheat, pils malt, clove and banana goodness that I'm after. Hopefully that's all changed now. The Leichtes Weizen was apparently an attempt of the major wheat beer brewers to compete with the 'Lite' beers of the big lager brewers. I don't know how successful this was but it makes for a tricky little beer to brew. It needs to have all the flavours of a Hefeweizen but in balance with each other and turned down a bit to fit in a lower gravity beer. Nothing should stick out, no aggressive cloves, no in your face banana, no hops, no malt dominance. It's a beer designed by removing parts of an existing style rather than built from the ground up.

So in the light of my earlier wheat beer failures, I've attempted to modify my process to hopefully hit the perfect combination. There's nowhere to hide if I've gotten it wrong, it'll be obvious and the judges will mark it down. I decided to try my first ferulic acid rest, probably something I probably should have tried earlier on a non-competition brew. It's a rest in the mashing process at 43C where, thanks to the work of some amazing enzymes, ferulic acid is released into the mash. Ferulic acid is a precursor to 4-vinyl guaiacol, a compound responsible for the clove flavour and aroma. So more ferulic acid = more clove flavour and aroma, something my wheat beers have lacked. It'll just be a short rest, probably 15 minutes because I don't want to go crazy with the clove phenols. I'll be fermenting at 17C as I've done in the past with WLP300 to keep the banana in check. I've also increased the percentage of wheat to 60% up from the 50% I've tended to stick with up until now.

Getting my ferulic acid rest on

Once again I've written so much about the first brew, I'll have to leave the Bitter writeup for another day.

He Ain't Heavy Leichtes Weizen (23L batch)
OG: 1.033 (measured)
FG: 1.008
IBU: 10
ABV: 3.3%
EBC: 4

60% Best Malz wheat malt
40% Best Malz pils malt

9g Aramis @ 90 min

750ml starter of WLP300 (shooting for a slight under-pitch of 0.625 million cells per ml per degree plato)

BrewSwede: Brewtas' Swedish spinoff

My youngest brother lives in Sweden and has started brewing this year. He sent a bottle of his Belgian Blond down and it was delicious with it's spicy and clove aroma and flavour. He lives in a tiny apartment with his partner and baby and doesn't have any kind of dedicated brewing area. What he's been able to do with limited resources has been impressive.

Simon, me and Dad with the beer in question

The recipe was a very simple extract brew, a testament to how much the yeast is responsible for producing delicious beer. Here's the recipe:

Ben's Blond Ale (12L batch)
OG: 1.060
FG: 1.010
IBU: 19
ABV: 6.6%
EBC: 10

92% Light DME
8% Table sugar

25g Tettnang @ 60 min

White Labs 570 fermented in a 21-22C apartment

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.