Tag Archives: micro organisms

Sep13

The Brett Tasting: comparing Brett types, pre/post fermentation additions

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Blind tastings are fun with friends

Here is another section of my journey into souring beers.  For this part, I really wanted to focus on Brettanomyces and the impact it can have on beer.  While Brett is not the main souring organism in sour beers, I have heard far too many different opinions, so I decided the only way to really grasp what this yeast does is to try it myself.  I decided to make 5 one gallon batches (X, Y, 1, 2, 3). Of these 5 batches; Y was the control with only Saccharomyces, X was Brett B added after Saccharomyces fermentation was complete, 1 was only Brett L, 2 was only Brett B, and 3 was both Saccharomyces and Brett B pitched together at the beginning of fermentation.  All Brett was from Wyeast.

tastings:

Y (control): a mild flavor with light chocolate, roast, and fruit flavor. some bread character with a slit astringency. big bodied

X and Y

 

X (Brett B added after Fermentation): a light cherry citrus nose with hints of strawberry, some cardboard in the taste but the flavor stands out more. chocolate in the front and a solid head. mild astringency

1 (Brett L only) Smells like sour strawberry and Worcester sauce.  The taste was reminiscent of ketchup and chocolate. no head retention

2 (Brett B only) An acetic hint in the nose with the same citrus cherry character.  Tasted very chocolate and was mild and balanced. best beer!

1 and 2, 3 was so gross that there is no pic, just bad memories

3 (Brett B and Sacc pitched together) smelled and tasted like vinegar. sharp acetic. ack. vinegar!

These beers were vastly different, more than I would have thought.  I can still run through this experiment two more times, can’t wait to see what changes.

Apr26

The sour beer experiment cometh..

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Recently I have begun souring beer, which is a simple process of inoculating (infecting) beer with specific micro organisms that like living in beer.  So far, I have soured left over beer that was less than perfect, like my earl wit that had a bit too much gypsum and a poor fermentation. I decided to repurpose this beer into a Lambic.  I have also started souring my casks, starting with quad/ homemade wine into a rye cask with Roeselare Blend from Wyeast.

Now, repurposing beer is cool, and a great way to start souring beers, but I have way too many questions about the variables in souring to just use my leftovers for this.  It was time to brew a 10 gallon batch of Flanders Brown Ale. The brew day was easy for this beer, all until I transferred the cooled wort into all the different fermentors.

So, what am I going to do with all this beer to sour!? that’s right, use up every one gallon jug i can find.  To start off I took 5 gallons and put it into a normal 6 gallon better bottle carboy, which I pitched American Ale  yeast . This 5 gallon fermentor will be inoculated with Roeselare Blend after fermentation is complete.

VARIABLES!

The rest of the batch left plenty of room to play with, so I split up the beer into 1 gallon jugs and labeled them 1,2,3 and X, Y.  Y is the clean fermented beer that will act as the baseline for comparison (control).  1 was only Brett L, 2 was only Brett B, 3 was yeast and Brett B pitched simultaneously, and X will be Brett L added after regular yeast fermentation.  I also used a growler for my wild yeast, which will have US05 added after 3 weeks fermenting.

The beers with only Brett fermentation was very interesting to watch.  Brett L seems to be the same micro that infected my Earl Wit.  The Brett B fermentation looked crazy for about a week, then everything flocculated.

Brett L infection

Brett B infection

1L : brett L 2B: brett B

Now it’s a long wait to start bottling/ blending. which will take about a year!

Mar20

OH NO! My sour cask wants to be a volcano?!?!

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I’m not sure if it is the teaching, the brewing, or just “grown up” instinct, but I’ve become accustomed to hearing loud noises and running directly toward the sound.  This reaction has proved to be tremendously valuable .  Last week I saved my clothes from a growler that felt like becoming a bottle bomb in my closet. While today, I was lucky enough to be in front of my computer when my recently inoculated (Roeselare Blend from Wyeast) and filled cask started going off like a second grade science project. This makes sense, but I’m surprised at the force that the beer was coming out with.  If you have ever taped a keg of beer, without realizing that the tap was not connected to the disconnect, that’s the pressure I’m talking about. Cask volcano will now be the artwork for this beer!  I fixed the problem by using some duct tape to barely hold the cork in place (I don’t have an airlock that will fit) emptying out some of the beer and putting the whole cask in a styrofoam cooler.  BTW, friends that order Omaha Steaks are great to know if you’re a homebrewer.

RED LAVA IN THE TIP JAR

problem solved! until an airlock comes to me...

Mar7

The Souring of a Cask

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Which one shall I choose?

One of the most fantastic rewards of having casks to play with is the ability to make sour beers.  A cask is the perfect vessel to keep micro organism cultures happy.  There is always a little oxygen sneaking into casks and our friends Lactobacillus and Peddiococcus love that.  In many ways, preventing them from developing in casks can be an exercise in futility, but I am taking steps in three casks (Scotch Casks, Blaton’s Bourbon cask, and Evan Williams bourbon cask) which will be a future post.  One of my casks, the rye cask, has been giving off some winey characteristics in the beers aging and I felt like it was about time to push this one over the edge.

A while back, I made a beer based off of a Westvelren 12 Quad.  I have 5 gallons currently lagering for eternity… planning on waiting until December (12 months old) to pull it out at taste it. I also had 1.5 extra gallons of the base quad that was fermented separately from the other 5 gallons using Chardonnay yeast.  Both beers clock in around 11.5 % ABV.  I wasn’t planning on souring this beer, but i am finished looking at this beer sitting, I MADE IT TO EXPERIMENT DAMMIT!

The next part of this cask souring experience comes from an endeavor that was way to long in the making.  The Homemade wine, Pony Vino, that my room-mate Tom and I made about a year ago was finally bottled a few weeks ago.  The wine is okay, kinda like a sweet red, but drinkable.

Wait....How many ml are in 5 gallons?

Unfortunately, when we bottled the wine, my math was stupid and I ran out of wine bottles with about a gallon left over…

Then my worlds came together in a fantastic moment of clarity. The wine went right into the Quad, followed with a good 3 ounces of Fantome De Noel

yum yum yum

a splendid beer that was a gift my friend Degal gifted me.

The fermentor bubbled for two weeks before I got around to playing with the casks, so I’m counting on micro’s munching away in there.  I’m planning on pitching a commercial bought micro blend within the week to throw into the cask as well.

So far, things are pretty crazy on this beer, but was I done? no way!  Every summer, there is this totally awesome fig tree that grows in my neighbor’s backyard, and no one EVER picks the figs.  This last summer I felt like it was a duty of mine to do something more with those lovely fruits than simply feed the birds, so I picked about a pound and froze them.  I had planned to put them into the Quad when it was done fermenting, but I left in the freezer until now.  I also had 2 packages of Blackberries frozen, so I just put them all together into this project.

I defrosted the fruit, cooked them for about 15 min, mushing them up the whole time, and then blended them in my blender.  Once they cooled, I tossed the puree into the cask after the beer.

messy messy messy

I think I have been reading the madfermentationist way to much lately, but I’m very excited about where this beer will go.  Updates to come!

Feb7

Our Invisible Roommates Part 1

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Harvesting Wild Yeast

all my invisble friends!!!!

As a person who has found science and brewing to be a wonderful world of interest and excitement, I have recently been going back in time and revisiting some of the lab equipment that I had to use in college.  It turns out that a great deal of the science I learned in school is readily applicable to brewing.  The first process I wanted to focus on was harvesting wild yeast.  This is a practice that was the traditional procedure for brewing beer in history.  It can be traced back to the beginning of civilization, when people first started using our micro organism friends as workers. This is still practiced in Belgium and in many of the new craft breweries that are focusing on wild yeast and other micro organisms (Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, and Brettanomyces)
First off, I would like to say that this is a very challenging process, especially for someone who has been accustomed to modern brewing techniques, where sanitation is paramount to making good beer.  Harvesting wild yeast is not for the casual brewer, or in many ways, the professional brewer.  Controlling this process would be nearly impossible, the daunting amount of variablity would make products that vary from batch to batch. Blending can help, but wild beers are an intense idea. To get pure yeast, it’s really something that dorky scientist’s should to do, like my friend Dave. 

He's a Yeast Scientist!!

In order to harvest wild yeast, you essentially have to create an environment that only a few organisms will be happy in (like an alcoholic mixture with a low pH (BEER!)) and expose it to the air. If your lucky, you get S. Cervisae. If your unlucky, you can be harvesting a mixture of mold and dangerous bacteria. It was very challenging to get any success with this, with most of the samples being over run with mold. Let’s see what I got!
THAT’S NOT YEAST

This could be due to using a starter what was far too low of a OG.  I accidentally made the starter with only .3 grams for a 50 mL sample (OG 1.010???)instead of the 3 grams that was needed.  This could have made my results a bit unreliable, but I still got some samples with what should be yeast.

I started with 36 samples, placed randomly both inside a large room and outside by the Verrazano Bridge. I left them for 24 hours on a breezy windy early december night.  I then brought the samples in and let them sit covered for 10 days.  Out of 36 samples, only 5 looked to have yeast.  I put those samples onto petri dishes ( about 18 dishes) and let them incubate for another 5 days.  Of the 18 samples. 6 seemed to have yeast colonies. I then put these samples into 6 50 ml starters, then put them onto a stir plate or back into incubator. After 18 days, I took the FG reading on my refractometer.  of the 6 samples, 3 had fermented down to the low 1.030’s, from 1.045.  The other samples had no difference in gravity (into the garbage!)
the one on the left! that’s yeast! I hope….

Looks nice!

At this point, I’m planning on taking the sample with the most active yeast and get my science friend to tell me whats in it. Then, onto a test batch! MORE TO COME!!
Next time I plan on adding sterilization practices to this as well as making a correct starter