BIAB#19: Pilrig

After an unplanned, life and motivation-centred hiatus, I’m going to try and get back to blogging our homebrewing exploits again. Hey, I’ve been busy brewing too… so, I guess that’s a decent excuse.

I thought I’d just start with the most recent beer and see how we go from there, rather than take on the – frankly intimidating – task of catching up on all the brews I’ve missed out.

This was the first brew on a new kit. It may not be the biggest, fanciest or shiniest kit on the block, but it’s an exciting step-up in volume for us. In one swoop, we’ve gone from a maximum brewlength of about 10 to more like 25 litres. More beer! Sounds great. It should also allow us to get more control over the brew, especially mash temperature. This was an ongoing problem for us with our old kit.

For your delectation, here’s the upgrade. It’s an Electrim Digital Mashing Bin. So we’ll still be brewing in a bag and this will be used as both mash tun and boiler. This will allow us to reach and hold temperature much more easily and precisely.

For this first brew, we played it safe and went for 20 litres of something pale and not too hoppy. It was an also opportunity to use up an ’emergency’ pack of US-05 that Kev had in the fridge. It was getting old and couldn’t comfortably have managed much more that 20 litres at this gravity.

Pilrig (20l)

Grain
3500g Pale (75%)
1000g Munich (21%)
300g Wheat (6%)

Hops
10g Magnum @ 60m [11AA]
50g Citra @ 0m – 30m hopstand [14.5AA]

50g Citra DRY HOP for 5 days

Yeast
Safale US-05 (1 pack rehydrated)

Vital Statistics
OG: 1.048
FG: 1.014
ABV: 4.9%
IBU: 43
SRM: 5

Tasting Notes
Definite positives and negatives to this beer for me. On the plus side, using really fresh Citra has clearly proved a winner. It’s wonderfully fruity, with a hint of something a little dark and suspicious… just how I think Citra should be. Hopstand technique working well again.

Very much lacking in body and bitterness, though, and am struggling to disentangle the two a little. Less bitterness is fine… much as I’m very happy with ruinously bitter beer, not everyone is and maybe this will be a positive for others.

Or, maybe the hopping schedule of just 60m plus hopstand has left it lacking a little something that some hops in the boil can help with. Will be interested to hear what others make of it.

Definitely too light a body, though. It was mashed at 67c (according to the new digital display), so will try mashing higher on future brews, especially relatively low gravity ones. Think we might also need to start experimenting with caramalts for future attempts at the style.

And it’s under carbed. Again! Was looking to prime to 2.5 volumes, but it doesn’t really feel like it. Hoping the colder weather means it’s just taking it’s time and it’ll get there in the end.

Anyway, bottles will be tasted by others soon, will post any comments here.

SOLO BIAB#4: Wheat is this?

SOLO BIAB#3: Wheat Is This? (Wheat Wine)

As is often the way with blogs, I imagine, I have fallen very behind with posting, but do want to try and get all the recipes up here. So, I’ll keep this fairly brief.

Wheat Wine is an unusual beer style (certainly in the UK) and something that I’ve heard tell of, but never drunk before. I needed no further incentive or encouragement to give this a go. I found a Wit Wine recipe in Radical Brewing, made a few changes here and there, especially around removing the wit-style spicing, and came up with the following:

Wheat Is This? (6l)

GRAIN
1000g Wheat
430g Pale
390g Lager
400g Brown Sugar
HOPS
25g Hallertau Hersbrucker @ 60m
20g Saaz @ 20m
30g Saaz @ 5m
YEAST
White Labs Strong Belgian Ale Yeast (WLP545)

VITAL STATISTICS
OG: 1.006
FG: 1.085
ABV: 10%
IBU: 41
SRM: 9

This was my first properly big beer and found this really useful set of advice (originally from @thornbridgedom) on high gravity brewing from the Manchester Homebrew website. Thanks to the tip-off from @mpdutton.

Following this advice, I did a 90 minute mash and shook the bucket very vigorously both immediately after pitching (having remembered to fit the lid first!) and about 24 hours later. This, plus the persistence of WLP545, did a great job of fermenting the beer.

I only did a 6l batch of this as that was all that one vial of WLP545 could comfortably handle. The plan was to treat this as a kind of hybrid between a beer and a yeast starter… the yeast cake from this beer will be washed and used to make a second batch of something similar in the future.

I’m really happy with how this is starting to taste at three months old.  Still quite hot, but I’m pretty confident that will settle down and improve in time.  I was also really pushing the gravity/volume that one vial could handle without a starter, so some more undesirable/interesting (depending on how generous you’re feeling) flavours might have come from underpitching too.

I’m really happy with this beer, though.  Tasty in it’s own right, will give birth to a full 10l batch of something similar soon and was a generally successful foray into high gravity brewing.

SOLO BIAB#2: Barrel’s Bottom (IPA)

This was a quick and dirty user-upper brew. As beer stocks were looking low, there were a couple of bags of old hops and some ageing Crystal, Carapils and WLP001 knocking around, Kev couldn’t resist the temptation to put a nice and simple solo brew together. The intention was for an easy-drinking, 5-5.5% APA.

The was something quite comforting about planning a bit more of a back-to-basics, simple drinking beer too. Quite a few of the more recent brews had contained a lot of wacky flavours, with varying degrees of success. Now, much as Kev loves wacky as much as the next person, there was a definite appeal in trying to pin down a solid, go-to recipe.

This sort of lower risk brew was also an opportunity to work on a couple of things. Firstly, three of the previous four brews have been outrageously overcarbed and the suspicion was this was down to overpriming. This beer would be deliberately primed more frugally to see if that was the problem rather than an infection in the brewkit somewhere.

It was also the first brew done across two nights, with the mash & sparge done one evening with the boil, pitch, etc. done the next day. The hope behind this was that it would be a more time/family compatible way of getting a batch brewed.

Anyway, enough blethering, on with the recipe:

Barrel’s Bottom (10l)

GRAIN
2000g Concerto Pale Malt (83%)
100g Munich (4%)
100g Crystal (4%)
100g Carapils (4%)
100g Wheat (4%)
HOPS
10g Green Bullet / 10g Dr Rudi @ First Wort
10g Dr Rudi @ 5m
10g Dr Rudi @ 0m
DRY HOP (5g/l):
25g Dr Rudi / 15g Green Bullet / 10g Equinox for 6 days
YEAST
White Labs California Ale (2nd generation)

VITAL STATISTICS
OG: 1055
FG: 1007
ABV: 6.6%
IBU: 34
SRM: 9

This was a very straightforward brew all things considered. Nothing remarkable other than splitting the brewing across two nights. Which was brilliant, by the way. It takes a bit longer all in (prob about 20-30 mins to get room temperature wort up to mash temperature), but it’s all a lot more relaxed. Couple of hours each night – where I can also pick away at those less glamorous, household jobs I’d be doing anyway – with the brew doing its thing in the background works really well if, like me, you can’t even think about getting started until about 8pm. I will definitely be doing this again.

Thanks for reading. Questions, comments, etc. always more than welcome. Cheers!

UPDATE: 24/10/14

You may have noticed from the stats above that this beer didn’t end up quite as expected. Kev’s gentle 5%ish APA turned into some kind of accidental 6.6%er. He’s just going to call it an IPA and say no more about it. This was down to the yeast really and it attenuating much further than anticipated. It was fermented warmer than was ideal (c.25C) and the second generation WLP001 was clearly very happy with that. So it ended up being a drier, stronger beer than planned, but that’s no great problem. If this was the intent, Kev would have increased the IBUs but, actually, it turned out plenty bitter anyway.

The beer itself was a little underprimed but, actually, that was good news. There were two main theories as to what the likely cause of our recent, foamy beer was… infection in the kit somewhere or too much priming sugar. As dropping the amounts of priming sugar resulted in no foamy beer, this must have been the culprit. Just need to pay a bit more attention to sugar quantities when bottling, I think.

In terms of tasting notes, this was what the (mostly!) good people at our local homebrew club thought of it:

“Interesting use of Green Bullet. Gives a great taste and bitterness I’ve not come across.”

“Piercing, resinous, spicy. Could work well with full fruity aroma hops. Great potential for recipe development. Bit yeasty though.”

“Nice grassy wheat aroma. Very mild.”

“Quaffable. Would happily drink away. Think it would be good with meditteranean food.”

We’d generally agree. It could be more bitter, and the slightly odd New Zealand hops might not be to everyone’s taste, but this is pleasant drinking and deceptively strong. A solid recipe to work on.

Plan from here will be to tinker with the grain bill for a while and try and pin down a decent base IPA recipe from there.