Absolute Homebrew

This beer was brewed on June 17. It was racked on Sunday June 24 - it provided the yeast for the demonstration beer. It was kegged today Thursday and will be gassed overnight and left for to condition for about 7 days. No particular reason for 7 days, it’s simply how long I think the current beer will last.

This demonstration beer was:

1400 g JW Pilsner malt
1400 g JW Vienna malt
1400 g JW Munich malt
150 g Weyermann Caramunich I

This was mashed at 66 degrees C in 20 litres of water - again the no sparge mash. The idea with this beer is a “mild Octoberfest”. Octoberfest beers usually come in at around 6% ABV. This is too strong to have in the shop. Generally Octoberfest beers tend to the sweet side and are hopped only to balance the malt. This is fairly typical of Bavarian beers.

After mashing for about 45 minutes 8 litres of boiling water was added to mash out. By raising the temperature like this the enzymes are denatured (broken) are the character of the wort is fixed. As well, the wort being hotter will run off more readily - this is the main reason for me because a full volume no sparge mash will cool considerably making the run-off sticky.

Once a few litres were in the kettle the heat was turned on.

Hopping was to about 22 IBUs with some older 5.7% Hallertau, possibly NZ Hallertau.
45 minutes 44 g
5 minutes 10 g

There was a slight problem with this beer - it was not boiled long enough. It’s good to boil the entire volume of wort for 30 minutes before adding any hops. For the sake of the demonstration I shortened this time. The result was the beer was over volume, under gravity (1038) and under hopped. The hopping can be fixed later by adding a hop tea.

The yeast was recylced W/34-70, OG 1038.

The mild pilsener - not so bitter, brewed on June 3 is now on tap at St Marys. It’s still a bit young of course. The bitterness is deceptive - slightly more than the planned 28 IBUs but it’s in a lingering aftertaste, we’ll see how it goes in a week or so.

I’ve been drinking some of the Jever Pilsner lately. It turned up at one of the local bottleshops. The Jever is quite bitter, about 45 IBU, and very dry. Some weeks back drank a bottle side by side with a Pilsner Urquell, the Urquell was kiddy sweet in comparison. So Sunday’s brew was Jever inspired.

The grain bill was:
3.5 kg Joe White pilsener malt
0.6 kg flaked barley
0.2 kg carapils
0.1 kg acidulated malt

It’s been a while since I’ve brewed a beer like this. Flaked barley will keep the beer very pale, it also adds a nice graininess - you need at least 10% of the grain bill to have a noticeable effect. The Carapils for a bit of body and sweetness, plus a little bit of background caramel flavour. The acidualted malt to help with crispness.

This was mashed at 65 degrees in 20 litres of water - this was a no-sparge beer again. Conversion was achieved after maybe 30 minutes, after 45 minutes 8 litres of boiling water were added to mash out.

Iodine tests are really helpful, especially if you are experimenting with new mashing methods or regimes. In the presence of starch iodine turns black, blue or purple like this:

At the end of the mash there should be no reaction, the iodine does not change colour.

If you have mashed at a higher temperature and have a very dextrinous wort then the iodine will react and turn a ruby or pale mahogany colour.

Boil time was 90 minutes with hopping as follows:
60 minutes: Northern Brewer @ 6.7%, 16 grams for about 14 IBU
30 minutes: Northern Brewer, 40 grams for about 21 IBU
Hallertau mittel-fruh @ 2.5%, 30 grams for roughly 6 IBU
5 minutes: Hallertau mf, 30 grams for a further single IBU for a total of 42 IBU.

Ended up with about 20 litres in the fermenter with a gravity of 1044. The yeast was recycled W/34-70.

I am beginning to quite like this no-sparge technique because it takes less time and simplifies things. It still needs some work to get the consistency right.

I now have no excuse to not aertate the wort properly. At the end of a 6 day week it is easy to get slack. What I had been doing is using a length of tube with a couple of holes pierced in it to aerate the wort as it ran out of the counter flow chiller. This time I aerated the wort properly, as I used to, with this little setup:

It’s very simple, just an aquarium pump and ceramic stone with an old Whitelabs yeast vial with some cotton wool as a filter. I add a little bit of the silver ions in hydrogen peroxide solution to the cotton wool to sanitise things.

Both of these beers are sitting quietly in their respective fridges nearly ready to be drunk. BL II is still being gassed and wil be on tap in the shop at Faulconbridge from the weekend onwards.

The poor old yeast had been left for nearly a week, but it had fermented the little starter to leave a reasonable sort of sediment looking like this:

You can see the darker layer on the bottom which is trub and dead yeast, and the nice healthy looking layer of tan coloured yeast above it, bu not enough to start a brew.

So yesterday afternoon, Saturday, I made up another mini wort of 200 or so grams of dried malt extract in two litres of water and a few hop pellets. Boiled it, forced cooled it and added it to the existing starter. By this morning this is how it looked:

The wort is turbid with yeast, the greeny-olive stuff in the foam is hop debris, and the brown much is trub. I’ve now put this starter in fridge, which is running at 10 degrees C, so that the yeast gets used to the proper temperature.

I’ll leave the starter to ferment out and the yeast settle. Depending on how much yeast sediments I might have enough to brew with, or I might need to step up again.

This is the Wyeast 2124, Bohemian Pilsner yeast, which is supposed to be the same strain as the Saflager W/34-70. For the pale lager of last I used a couple of old sachets of W/34-70, it would be intereting to split a wort between the two yeasts and see what differences there might be. The only problem would be controlling the amount of yeast for each wort.

It’s a nice thought, but realistically I don’t think it’s feasible because I would probably need to bottle the beer rather than keg it.

If you use dried yeast you should rehydrate it as this will give you a much better fermentation. It’s an easy technique. Use about 10 to 15 ml of tepid water per gram of dried yeast in a suitable sanitised vessel. I like the clear(ish) plastic measuring cups beacuse you can throw them into the fermenter to sanitise and you can see what’s happening with the yeast.

For lager yeasts I like to use 2 sachets for the first use of the use. Because lager yeast typically reproduces four to five fold over the course of a fermentation compared to the seven or eight fold of an ale yeast you should always use more.

Here is the yeast just after adding to the water. At first they will sit on the top and then start falling to the bottom as they absorb the water. This cup is really too narrow to give all the granules of dried yeast good contact with the water.

After about 5 or so minutes swirl the cup to make sure any yeast still floating are thoroughly wetted. You might see here that most of the yeast has been wetted although some still clings to the surface.

Gradually the yeast will all drop to the bottom. After this some will rise to the top and start to foam. Despite the terrible photo you can see the yeast foaming. (I have never been a camera person - besides trying to hold a camera in one hand and pressing the autofocus and shutter button while holding the cover over the yeast and other such excuses).

At this point the yeast is ready to pitch. Generally the yeast should take 20 to 30 minutes to rehydrate and be ready for pitching.

Last week’s Black Lager was a trial run for the method I want to use for this months brewing demonstration. I still need to improve a couple of things with this no sparge method.

The grain bill was 4.2 kg:
200 grams Carapils
500 grams JW Vienna malt
3.5 kg JW Pilsener malt

Last week’s grain bill was 4.64 kg mashed in about 28 or so litres of water with no sparge. I found that the run slowed a lot towards the end and just generally thought it could be better. So this week I mashed at 66 degrees in 20 litres of water for about 90 minutes - this was much longer than I intended but then there were customers. A 60 minute mash would have been more than enough, thin mashes convert more quickly than thick mashes.

This time I saved the extra 8 litres to use for mashing out. Easy, just boil it and add it to the mash to bring the temperature to about 76 degrees. Mashing out has several benefits. By raising the temperature of the mash it denatures the amylase (starch reducing) enzymes and thereby fixes the character of the wort, it also makes the wort less viscous and the run off easier. This was the problem last week: the mash got too cool towards the end.

Hopping was 28 IBU:
45 mins - 70 grams Tettnang 4.2% for about 27 IBU
3 minutes - 20 grams Tettnang 4.2% for another 1 IBU

The finishing gravity was 1042 with a fermenter volume of just over 20 litres and another litre or so of kettle and chiller wastage.

Of course the Wyeast was no where ready to use so I rehydrated two sachets of the W/34-70.

The Danish Lager yeast had finished its run so time to move on. I had a very old pouch of Wyeast 2124, Bohemian Pilsener yeast that had been sitting in the fridge for ages, about 14 months. It had been an order for someone. Anyway I smacked it the previous Sunday, May 27. By Saturday June 2nd this is how it was looking:

It had fermented enough to be have a slight swelling.

If you are unfamiliar with liquid yeasts, two types are available in Australia. There is Wyeast who use a pouch in which there is another bag of nutrient mix. You hold the pouch down, locate the nutrient bag and then whack the pouch to break the bag. The other variety comes from Whitelabs which is a yeast slurry in a small plastic vial.

Which is the better? The one that is available and fresh.

So to resurrect the yeast the first thing is to make a starter. Use dried malt extract at the rate of 10 grams per 100 mls of water. Boil the water then add the dried extract along with a token hop pellet. Give it a boil for a few minutes - watching out for any boilover - then force cool it in a water bath.

Trnasfer the cooled wort to a suitable and sanitised bottle, add the yeast, cap the bottle and shake the hell out of it to aerate the starter.

For this one I prepared about 600 mls of starter. Actually it was too much, it’s better to start off with smaller amounts and step up with progressively larger starters. I was being overly ambitious. But by the following morning I had got a result:

It was not enough to use for Sunday’s brew. I will step it up over the course of this coming week.

The plastic bottles are handy to use for several reasons. You can see what’s happening and you can see how much yeast has been deposited. They’re good for aerating the starter, growing yeast need lots of oxygen. With the plastic bottle you can squeeze out the depleted air inside and suck fresh air in.

You can use the same method to culture up yeast from a bottled beer. Depending on the age of the beer and the amount of slurry use anything from a 100 ml starter for old and feeble yeast up to 500 mls for young and healthy yeast.