I love working with adjuncts. I think finding the different qualities fruits, vegetables and obscure grains can bring to your beer is amazing. The only issue with that is some of those malts or other little fellas can up the protein in my mash. Possibly leading to off flavors or bad conversion.
That’s when I need to take a little more time to enjoy some more homebrew and go with a protein rest. A protein rest helps to breakdown proteins into smaller proteins and amino acids, plus it’ll let you get at more of those starch strains letting your saccharification have more potential for a good efficiency.
While it does add to the brew day, it’s going to also add to the quality of your final product. Along with making you an amazing homebrewer that makes you the envy of the species… well at the very least be able to drink tasty beers.
I use a lot of adjuncts in my brewing and there are a ton of ways one can go about adding fruit to their brew. I don’t like to mess with extracts and I don’t really like the way juices work in beer. However adding a little juice to your beer till you get the flavor you want is a good way to test how much you may need to add without spoiling a whole batch. You just want to be sure to use something that doesn’t have added sugars because it will completely through you off.
There are all sorts of considerations when talking about what to do with different fruits but if you’re just looking to get started I have a few recommendations for you.
Use whole fruits. A lot of the flavors you want from the fruits are in the skin.
Freeze your fruit first. Freezing burst a lot of the cell walls in the fruit allowing access to more sugars. Whether you’re putting it in the boil or in the fermentor it’s just going to benefit from this. A
Prepackaged puree/concentrated is just fine. Just don’t get any with added sugars or preservatives.
If you’re going to add it during fermentation do it in the secondary. The beer environment at this point is a low pH, less oxygen and has alcohol. Which is not a very good environment for other bacteria and yeasts to grow in.
Don’t squeeze your bags. If you’ve put your juice mush into a muslin bag or similar, just lift and let it drain when you take it out. Squeezing will impart more bitterness than you want to get out of fruit.
Compliment with hop profiles. I find there are a lot of similarities in hop profiles and fruits. Finding hops that compliment your fruits really help the flavor come across. But don’t overdo your hops!
After a couple of weeks of kicking around some recipe ideas with Chris and finding the best time to brew we finally were able to collaborate on a new batch of beer. I got to brew into the wee hours of the night with Chris on his 2 bbl system to create Navidad Voyage. A recipe I based on a story that compliments some of the fare you’d find on their menu.
The story behind the beer is based on the third voyage of theSanta Maria, which we all know as the first ship in Columbus’ fleet to land in this great country now dubbed the U-S-of-A. Basically Columbus was not happy that he never really got to explore the West Indies like he had intended and wanted to take a crew down there to check it out. Well it just so happened by the time they got there it was Christmas Eve. And like a bunch of good Americans they decided to celebrate by breaking open the ale barrels.
As the crew started to celebrate more and more they were getting past the ability to steer the ship. So the duties passed off to the lower and lower crew mates until eventually the ship was being guided through the sea by the cabin boy. Not being very experienced at steering a ship he ended up running it into some rocks and damaging it beyond repair. The crew woke up to found they had crashed on Haiti and not being able to salvage the boat they decided to strip the timbers and turn it into a fort. He dubbed it La Navidad. And there it lives to this day. The boat that started it all crashed by a bunch of beer drinkers sitting on an island in the Caribbean.
Using this story we came up with a recipe for a standard English Bitter that they would most likely have on board. But decided to add some local flare with some Guava and All Spice. And being that we had so much fruit in the recipe we decide some salt would be a good addition to bring out the sweetness. Knowing that salt is a tricky substance to work with in beer this seemed like a prime opportunity to play around with it.
The beer is chugging along right now and we’re hoping to have it on tap end of the month. But if you’re not busy anyway why not stop by 508 for any of the other delicious brews on tap and come meet Charlie Papazian Oct 28 while you’re at it! If you can’t catch him at 508 head over to his book signing at Bitter & Esters Oct 29.
Chris has an amazing brewing system that he retrofitted in the restaurant basement. Not originally being thought of as a location to brew beer it’s amazing what one can do with a little creative energy. Just like any NYC homebrewer this system is something that’s unique and you wont find similar builds listed on r/homebrewing. I was super excited and lucky to brew on this set up even the cleaning didn’t seem like a chore! Thank you Chris for giving me the opportunity!
The more and more I brew the better and better I try to get at my efficiency. The first couple of batches I was plugging away into brewing calculators and getting amazing potential gravities from my recipes. The only problem was every calculator I was using was thinking I was getting 80% efficiency. As I failed to hit the ABV I wanted I read more and more on honing in on your brew setups efficiency.
One thing to check out is the °Lintner or Diastatic Power of your grain bill. Lintner and Diastatic power both translate to the ability of your malts to convert starch into sweet-sweet sugar (maltose!). They need a minimum of 35 °Lintner to properly convert your starches.
This is where you need to make sure you check the Diastatic Power of your TOTAL grain bill. If you’re using some type of malt that has less than 35 °Lintner then it’s affecting the overall total of your Diastatic Power. If you’re getting poor efficiency on some brews vs others this could be a big reason why. This is why there are so many typical base malts. They contain the Diastatic Power you need to convert your starches to sugar.
It’s also another reason why barley is so heavily used in beers. It’s just got what it takes to get things going. I recently mashed some Malted Millet from CMC all by it’s lonesome. While I did get some conversion out of it the amount of sugar I got for 5 pounds of grain was only 1.017. HARDLY FERMENTABLE! I guess that’s why there is Sorghum syrup.
ME! I couldn’t have been more excited for this event and the fact that I took home first place was amazing. I’m still shocked! I huge shout out to Bitter & Esters for putting on the event with the help of Robert and Xavier who were the catalyst for procuring the amazing location Covenhoven. And another huge shout out to Singlecut and Brian Dwyer for taking the time to collaborate with me as well as letting me brew on their pilot system. FIRST TIME WEARING BREWER BOOTS!
The event was a lot of fun. All the homebrewers turned out with great interpretations of beers for their partner breweries. I had my own favorites as well but I’m still glad I was able to take the win. Next up going to brew at 508 with Chris Cuzme on his 2 bbl system in the basement of a Manhattan Restaurant. Couldn’t imagine a better prize!
I recently created a beer that included cayenne pepper in the mix. I used about 1.5 ounces for my 5 gallon batch and I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. It didn’t leave the traditional sting on my mouth most oils from other peppers do when I have them in beer.
It may be because I used the powdered version. I did supply some nice heat to the beer but was only present after you had a complete swig of the beer. It was a nice compliment to the sweet flavors coming across in the beer and definitely gave me more hope for future explorations with peppers in my recipes.
I added it at flame out which was plenty of time of it to build into the wort without overpowering everything. What surprised me most is how apparent it was when I tasted the wort, then almost completely gone right before the cold crash. By the final tasting though it was right about where I wanted it to be.
I have a converted 10 gallon igloo cooler for my mash tun and I have tried preheating vs higher strike water temperatures to maintain a consistent mash temperature several times.
With all the times I’ve tried this in my set up it seems that preheating the tun is the way to go. It may seem small if the temperature only varies in a few degrees but those few degrees have screwed up my efficiencies on several batches.
All I do to heat mine up is heat about a gallon of water to 200°F and toss it in the tun and let it sit for about 20 mins with the lid on. I don’t heat it to the boiling point as to reduce wear and tear on my cooler, the boiling temp is a bit too high for it and can potentially warp it.
This works well for me anyway since I’m waiting for the other 6 or so gallons of water to hit the right temperature I’m looking for.
Mashing out is an important step of the process that has all kinds of science built into it. I’ve done plenty of brews where I didn’t mash out due to not enough time and have still made many a tasty brew. But why not continue to control your brewing methods? It means more repeatable tasty brews down the line.
Here’s the key things to know about mashing out.
It protects your fermentable sugar profile by stopping any enzymatic actions.
It makes the grain bed and wort more fluid. Meaning better clarity in your brew!
What is a mash out? Essentially it’s raising the temperature of your mash to 170°F to stop the enzymatic reactions.
How much water you use depends on batch size and grain amount so be sure to do your calculations for a mash out ahead of time!
Look Barley I like you. I love you, you might even say. But sometimes… sometimes I just need somebody else to sweeten things up if you will. And sometimes I get all CRAZY and I need somebody that not even my Brewer’s Friend will know about. I just want to get WILD and try something different. But don’t worry Barley… you’re still invited to the gig.
PPG! Points! Pound! Gallon! PPG is what we use to measure the amount of solubles in our wort to gauge our final yield in a brew! It’s easy to know what the PPG is of most grains as the malters will provide a malt profile that includes the PPG for us. Making it all easy to understand and create recipes.
But how do we solve for when we want to create a brew that uses something like Pomegranate juice? Well the easiest way is to take a gravity reading of the juice itself. One pound of sugar in a gallon of water will have a SG of 1.046. Which is great! But what’s the PPG of that?
Well friend lets do some math!!!! To calculate in terms of PPG, multiply the number of gallons of wort you collected (1 gallon of water) by its gravity (46 Note: I’m still learning why they move it two decimal places, but just do that and you’re fine) and divide that by the amount of malt that was used (1 pound sugar).
1 (gallon of water) X 46 / 1 (pound of sugar) = 46 PPG!
If you were a fan of crating whirlpools as a kid you’ve got yet another reason to love brewing! Whirlpooling is a technique used to separate trub and leftover hops from the wort. It’s a very simple concept, essentially you make a whirlpool by circling your spoon in your finished wort, let it sit for awhile as the whirlpool slows on it’s own and rack as normal.
Breweries usually have a separate vessel if they’re using this technique. They shoot the wort into the whirlpool vessels at a high velocity to create the whirlpool opposed to using a very large spoon.
So if you’re looking for ways to clear up you’re beer, maybe get your whirlpool on. Be careful not to add too much oxygen to your wort though. NO SPLASHING IN THE POOL!!
The recipe I’m working on with Singlecut is a hop forward ale that’s inspired by Link Ray. Link Ray is famous for the many songs but most notably Rumble and he influenced a TON of rock gods. He also was the first person to really get down and dirty with some distortion and paving the way for the future or rock, grunge and metal.
Link had an amp that he stabbed with a pencil to produce the distorted sound he was looking for in his songs. He called it “fuzz tone”. Link was also a southerner born in North Carolina. It’s these two facts that stood out to me the most about Link and I used for my catalyst to create a recipe.
I originally wanted to create a sour beer but given the time from brew day to the event I really can’t mess around with any Brett (as recommended by Singlecut). So instead we’ll focus on some wheat malts in the recipe to let a funky flavor shine through in the beer, representing what I think as fuzz tone.
And one thing I know about folks from North Carolina is that they love their BBQ and it is very different from other states BBQ. I did a lot of research on different NC style recipes and found they use brown sugar, molasses, cayenne and pepper corn in a lot of their sauces.
I’m going to use the brown sugar and molasses to add some flavor to the beer and make it even more funky but also to increase the ABV. And being that Link was such a trendsetter and really stood out from the other artists of his time I wanted to leverage the spice in NC recipes to make the beer grab your attention with a little kick.
I’ll be working with some Chinook and Citra hops to bitter and bring on a lot of aroma, this is something that Singlecut does with a lot of their beers. It’s going to be a hop forward ale leveraging the yeast from the brewery themselves. I’ve been in many email communications with the brewers themselves over this recipe and we’re all very excited to give this one a whirl.
There will be a follow up post for this after brew day, so stay tuned!
I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I was a lucky son of a gun and was selected to compete in the NY Pro Am Brew PIT. The first step in the process is to be paired with a brewery and then spend some time at their location to learn their process and how the formulate their recipes. From this experience the home brewer is sent off to his respective inspiration zone and create a recipe in the style of the brewery.
The brewery I’ve been paired with is Singlecut Beersmiths. To be honest I was a bad beer fan and had not visited this brewery before even though it’s in an adjacent borough. Same on me. But after spending the day there and learning about the brewery and tasting their delicious beers I realized I’ve done myself a disservice.
Singlecut specializes in unique lagers and hop forward ales that are inspired by rock musicians. The term “singlecut” comes from the style of guitar that has a single cut in the neck and makes it a more difficult instrument to play. And that’s how they approach their brewing. No shortcuts!
This is a great mantra to pair with my home brew and personal style. I’m excited to collaborate on the recipe. Future post to come!
Check out some of the fun photos from the brewery below. Including an elevated stage for the rock shows they have at the brewery, 60 gallon fermentors on their laid on their side for a larger surface area and some photos of the brew that day Neil, an IPA blended in a Stout!
I’ve recently be using rye malt in one of my recipes and I have to say it really took the beer to the next level. When you first think of rye you might think of the taste you get out of rye bread. I haven’t seen that come across at all in the way I use it.
I’m using it at about 11% of my grain bill so I’m sure that’s part of the reason it’s not overpowering, but it seems to not only bring a little spiciness to the recipe but also completing the mouthfeel of my beer and making it much more smooth.
I did mash all my grains at a bit higher temperature however with some extra water as well. The big issue I did run into though was not completing a full beta glucan rest. I did not get my OG as high as would have liked. The next batch I’ll be doing will have a longer one and we’ll see how that affects the flavor.
If it looses the creamy feeling I’m getting now, I’ll opt for that opposed to higher alcohol. All in all it seems like an excellent grain for anyone to venture away from the traditional if you have the means.
I’ve fallen victim to this myself a million times in my excitement to try a new beer, but if you truly want to know what a beer tastes like it’s important to cleanse your palate before jumping into a new brew. Just like with wine a lot of different factors go into the taste of the beer. Left over tannins, off flavors, heavy flavors, acids and all sorts of other items could be hanging out in your face whole and can leave you with an unfair opinion of a new beer.
The easiest palate cleanser is some chilled water, it does a fairly good job at cleaning out your mouth if you give it a little swish around. Plus it’s typically free at the bar and it’s always good to hydrate if you’re going to go a little overboard with your “tastings”. But all the other norms are available to help clean out your tongue bin. Cheese, crackers and bread are mild and really help get the job done.
What really works is different for everybody so just experiment with fruits and other mild flavors between a beer to see what sets you back to ground zero. Just stay away from the salty, spicy and greasy if you’re hoping to get your tastebuds back in line.
A flat beer can lead to all kinds of flavor issues and doesn’t have quite the same refreshing qualities you want out of your brew. An over carbonated beer can lead to explosive results and also provide a flavor profile you’re not looking for. So lets take a minute to remind ourselves about proper priming.
First lets talk about our sugar source. I know most people will use corn syrup for their source. But I’m not a fan of processed foods so I’ve tried several other sticky items that I could can get my hands on, all with successful results. Below is a list of items I’ve tried. There are tons of other solutions that our yeast will eat but I can only speak to these.
Honey and brown sugar are great if you don’t mind the flavor addition.
Juices add a ton of flavor. When determining how much to use I treat it like honey when calculating how much to add. Be sure to buy something with zero preservatives or you’ll kill your yeast. Citric acid (sodium citrate) is just fine however as it’s all natural.
Priming tabs are super easy when you’re bottling but I’ve never used them while kegging.
Corn sugar. Works like a charm and is cheap, but I’m not a fan personally.
Maple Syrup. Another great flavor profile but I’d say in my experience this flavor comes across more than honey or brown sugar when used for priming. Also I find I don’t need as much as the online calculators state. I typically use an ounce or two less.
Next lets talk about measurement. Finding the amount of sugar you need for your carbonation level is not an exact science… oh… wait… IT IS! Yesssss. There are a huge number of online calculators to do the math, so just make sure to know what style of beer you’re going for and how much CO2 you want and you’ll be fine. http://www.northernbrewer.com/priming-sugar-calculator/
Temperature. Our little yeast fellas are pretty tired by the time it comes to carbonation but if you had healthy yeast pitched in at the beginning of fermentation you should have plenty of yeast buddies ready for action. Kicking the temperature up a bit to say the 70°F-75°F will get your yeast back to feasting. Just be sure to do it gradually, you don’t want to kill them in the process from shock.
Leak in your lid. If you’re bottling or kegging you could have gas escaping somewhere. Check your caps and lids for any leaks.
Dead yeast. This is a big problem and most likely you wont have made it this far in your brewing to realize you’re not making the beer you set out to brew. Any number of reasons could lead to this and since you should have already identified this problem before getting to this step we’ll save that discussion for another post.
Carpe Cervisiam! 