Got Wood?

Decided to add some wood to the lambic. There are several reasons for this; I wanted to give a slightly more authentic environment for the brett which (based on my limited understanding will use some of the wood sugars as part of its life cycle) and also I'm hoping that the brett will make a home in the wood (from which it can venture forth into future brews). The basic idea for using a notched piece of wood to carry over yeast propagation is based on the concept of a "brew stick" used by the vikings and early celtic brewers (Palmer briefly discusses this in his online book How To Brew, and several other books I have touch on the topic). I've been kind of interested in older and strange techniques lately so this seemed like a fun way to add a little adventure to both the current and maybe some future brews.

I had some alder left over from a bunch of scraps that I picked a couple of years ago from a furniture store. Traditionally you'd use beech, but alder is also a relatively mild wood so I thought it would serve for this purpose. I cut several 6" long by 1/2" square pieces then cut a bunch of notches into each piece with a saw about half way through and 1/2"-3/4" inches apart. The notches will add surface area for the yest to (hopefully) infect the wood through and should also help with the rapid emulated aging process.

Since it was "fresh" wood that had never been used for beer (albeit quite dry) I wanted to get most of the flavor out and definitely any residual wood resins. To do this I boiled it in 5 changes of water until it didn't really change the water color after a 30 minute boil (each change was boiled for ~30 minutes). Hopefully this will mellow it to close to the right amount of wood character for the size of batch I'm making and still leave enough surface area for the yeast to take hold. The basic idea was try and simulate several years of leaching and aging in the kitchen in a couple of hours. After boiling it I put it in the oven at 400F for 45m (at which point it was pretty dry looking) and then put it under the broiler (on low),
until it started to smell pretty toasty. It hadn't quite changed color much yet, but was close, this should carmelize a small amount of the wood sugars and add a little bit of interesting character. I quick chilled three of these sticks under cold wate rand then tossed them into the lambic.

We'll be taking a sample in a month or two and see how its going :)

Peachy Keen Nut Brown

Info:

• Brewer: Ryan
• Mash: british straight infusion
  
• Date: 01/10/2009
• Size: 5 gallon post-boil

Grain Bill:

• 9.75lb pale 2 row malt
• 0.75lb Special Roast
  
• 0.5lb Victory
• 0.5lb Crystal 40L
  
• 0.25lb Chocolate (350L) - this was a little darker than we had wanted, prefer pale choc, but what you have is what you use..
  

Yeast:

• Danstar Nottingham dry
  

The Mash:

• Add 190F water to 152F rest 60 minutes (I used the remnant sparge water from the Lambicus Insanitus batch since I had planned this as a filler brew ot kill time while it was boiling)
  
• sparge with 180F
• collect 7 gallons
  

The Boil (60 minutes):

• 1.2oz US Goldings (5.1aau) @ 60
  
• 0.5oz US Goldings (5.1aau) @ 5
  

The Finish:
OG: 1.055

The Fruit:

• 6 lbs of defrosted frozen peaches saved over from last spring pitched into primary after initial fermentation had taken off (next morning around 11:00).

Notes:

This is a beer I've made variations of several times before with slightly different base recipes, the nut brown tends to compliment the peaches sort of like an inverted peach cobbler where the savory and nutty components of the beer are complimented by the peaches and residual malt sweetness.

Lambicus Insanitus

nfo:

• Brewer: Ryan
• Mash: Turbid Mash (Wild Brews by Sparrow page 141)
  
• Date: 01/10/2009
  
• Size: 6 gallon post-boil

Grain Bill:

Main Mash

• 8.5 lbs 2 row malt
• 5.5 lbs unmalted wheat (hard white, ground to a mix of coarse grist, graham flour texture, and flour)
  

Yeast:

• Wyeast 3278 Lambic Blend
  

The Mash:
This is the mash schedule from "Wild Brews" by Sparrow (pg 141). I basically treated it like a series of batch sparges where you denature the resulting liquid to stop conversion. Actually doing this really helped me to understand what the constituent components of the final wort are like. With a decent mash tun with a false bottom this isn't as hard as its often made out to be, although be prepared for it to take a while and to have a relatively long boil at the end.

• Target of 28qts (2qts/lb) total liquid addition
  
• add 5.6qts water (20%) at a little below boiling (roughly 190, with some tweaking) to target 113F, rest 15 minutes
  
• add 5.6qts water (20%) at a little below boiling to target 126, rest 15M
• draw off 4qts (~30% of liquid) to kettle, heat to 190 and hold
• add 8.4 qts (30%) water at 212 to target 149F, rest for 45m
• draw off 8.1qts (50% of liquid) to kettle, heat to 190 and hold
• add 8.4qts (30%) of water at 212F to target 162, rest for 30m
• draw off 11qts and start heating, the grain bed should be pretty much dry after this. Heat kettle to 190F
• Add all the liquid from the kettle back to the mash to target 172F, rest 20m
• my 10 gallon mash tun was almost completely FULL at this point
• Sparge with 190F water until around 1.008, this got me to right about 8 gallons pre-boil
• Pre boil gravity 1.050
  

The Boil (longer than you want):

• Strange mix of ancient hops I've saved up.
  
• .6 oz of 2003 tett
• .6 oz of 2003 williamette
• 3 oz of 2005 goldings. This is the only one with any real bitter left. The rest were long past the "cheese" state. Hopefully these don't throw the bitter to far over, the original recipe called for 4.8 oz of debittered, I'm at 4.2. Well we'll roll with it and see what happens. Post boil it was fairly bitter, but not overly so and since we're going for a ~6 mo+ fermentation I expect a lot of that will scrub out.
  
• Boiled down to 6 gallons over the course of almost 3 hours. While that was going on I basically finished my second batch (peachy keen nut brown, post to follow). I tried to keep it to a "soft boil", lightly rolling but not overly vigorous to minimize excess maillard.
• This is the first time I've used the converted keggle I got from a freind of a guy at work. It has a false bottom so I just pitched in the hops loose and crossed my fingers. Worked awesome, drained almost completely dry and basically no hops made it through. The old keggle will be retired and I may try to convert one of my 7 gallon pots to work the same.
  
• Cooled to roughly 80F
  
• Put in a 7 gallon carboy and pitched in the lambic blend.
  

The Finish:

• OG: 1.060
  

Commentary:

Was the turbid mash worth it? Well only time will tell, I can say that it definitely produced a different wort than any I've ever made before. It was very "bready" and had a definite dextrinous after taste/mouth feel to it. Could you emulate this by just adding dextrin? Maybe, but I don't think it would get the same mix of starches and sugars. The interim run-ofs were interesting to see and taste, there was a definite progression from the first run being almost completely white to the last being a pale golden straw color (which is what the final sparge was like). This definitely helped me grok at a more fundamental level what happens here since I could tast, smell, feel the product, which imho made it worth the experience. I would caution anyone else who wants to try this that this needs a decent sized mash tun (10g for a 5-6g batch) and a 10+gallon kettle because of the large volumes used. Would I do this again? Probably yes, its definitely way easier than a 3 step decoction :)

Updates

American Wheat:

• It's on draft
  
• The recipe came out on the maltier side for style, also low on the hops for my taste. Overall a tasty beer, though. Note: the mash/recipe was more complex than I would normally use for this style.
• Next time: 50% 2-row 50% wheat malt in a straight infusion with more hops.
• FG: 1.010
  

Smoked Porter:

• Hubba hubba! What a beer! Conditioning in the keg, can't wait to tap it :)
• Very chocolaty, with a hint of smoke. Good balance.
• Next time: add a small amount (4oz) of black malt to give it a small bite, more like semi-sweet chocolate than milk chocolate.
• FG: 1.017
  

Weizenbock:

• In secondary.
• Grain bill, mash, and hops were right on, I just with I had some authenic yeast.
• Next time: use a German weizen yeast, it'll be a real treat! I am going to use something that puts off a lot of banana and clove.

American Barleywine

• In secondary, dry hopped with a massive amount of Centennial and Amarillo
• Because of high OG, it's too early to tell what the final beer will be like, still a lot of sweetness because the yeast still has a ways to go. The rousing from the transfer to secondary perked it up quite well. Gravity at transfer was 1.029.
  
• After another month or two, I'll be transfering it to a tertiary fermentation, in which it'll sit until next fall. With the gravity where it is, the yeast will hopefully slowly chew it down to at least 1.018
  

Lambic

• fermenting slllloooooooowwwwwly, we'll give a full report next fall...
  

the Future

We started this blog with the header reading:

"The idea? Brew all 28 classic beer styles between Winter Solstice 2007 and Winter Solstice 2008. The results? Read and find out!"

Well, if you read the post mortem, you saw that we came close to the goal and fell short by a batch. No matter, we learned a lot and made some _awesome_ beer!

So, what does the future hold? The plan looks like this: keep on brewing.

Aside from that, we'll keep posting here about brews, equipment, growing hops, and everything else brewing related. We'll also be doing quarterly themes, based on the solstices of course :)

cheers,
the Brewers