Pictorial brew tutorial - An attempt at a Kentish Ale.....

Two things have arrived at beer, bands and balls hq recently that have lead to what is going to be a very different home brew post today. Firstly, relatives in Kent sent up some hops that were growing in their neighbours garden for me to utilise in my brewing. The Kentish home of the hops leading to the obvious choice of a Kentish ale as my next home brew - straying away from the usual German style brews. So i adapted a recipe i found online for one to the ingredients i could get from the brew store and the equipment i have (i.e. replacing all grain brew for part grain, part malt extract brew).

The second arrival being our fab new camera which allows for excellent close up pics with great clarity which means i can take you through the brew process in pictures. Enjoy :)

 The Ingredients

100g Brown Sugar

1.5kg Coopers Light Malt Extract

100g Kentish Hops (goldings?)

500g Malted Oats

1kg Crystal Malt

1.5kg Pale Malt

A pinch Of Irish Moss

Irish Moss (inside box)

White Labs WLP005 Liquid British Ale Yeast

Method:

Mated Oats into 2l boiling water

cover and boil for 30 mins

The other grains into 6l boiling water

cover and boil for 30mins

Place Can of liquid malt in hot water

open can

pour contents into fermenting tub

pour some boiling water into can and swirl to loosen the rest of the liquid malt and pour into fermenting tub

add sugar to malt extract

add 1l boiling water to fermenting tub

give the mixture a good stir to desolve all the sugar and remove any syrupy residue on base of fermenting tub

after 30mins, add the hops to larger pan of grains

take a pinch of irish moss

add some to the large pan

Give it a good stir

also add a pinch of irish moss to small pan

Cover both and boil for another 30 mins

to drain grains i find it easiest to place the pan on the floor next to the fermenting tub

Scoop up some grains

and place in sieve over fermenting tub, 

Repeat until sieve is full of grain and pour boiling water over to rinse grains.

repeat for other pan, scoop grains

into sieve over fermenting tub

repeat until all grains out and rinse with boiling water

top up fermenting tub with cold water

until the liquid level is at 23l

Add the yeast (the temperature in the tub should be around 21-23 degrees celcius)

give it a stir in

Cover the fermenting tub and put somewhere free from fluctuating temperatures (our cupboard of doom does the job) and leave for 2 weeks to fement.

Crowd Brew Competition: Home brew ingredient talk - Water.

Sorry its been a wee while since my blog announcing my crowd brew competition (remember all you need to do is vote on the facebook page or comment here to contribute to my crowd brew initiative at any stage and you'll be entered a draw to win a 6 pack of the finished beer). As i stated i will doing 4 blogs about the ingredients that go into beer and voting for which ingredients to use in a specially created crowd brew. The first vote will be for the style of beer, and the first ingredient talk is about Water.

There is a general rule of thumb that if your tap water is good to drink then it is good to brew with. So most people will happily use their tap water without much treatment. However, different types of water (such as hard or soft) with differing levels of additives that are added when drinking water is treated. For example, water supplies with high levels of chlorine can lead to an off tasting finished beer. A soft water is more coducive to a a lighter beer, where is hard water is more conducive to a darker beer. So in terms of tap water it can be helpful to contact your local authority to get a break down of whats in your water supply (they will be legally obliged to provide this information upon request). Though some additives are good, because they provide nutrients that help yeast in fermentation.

In cases where the tap water is not of a quality you want to use for your brewing there are a couple of options you can take.

There's the expensive option of using shop bought mineral or spring water. This certainly allows you to buy waters from other parts of the world where it may be softer or harder than your tap water and therefore better suited to the style of beer you want to brew. It also should be clear of the type of additives that can be harmful to a beer and ruin its taste.

The other option is to distil your water. Which essentially is a system of boiling the water to remove the impurities from it. It also softens hard water - though it is not useful for all grain brewing as minerals are needed to aid fermentation.

Campden Tablets can also be used in tap water to reduce chlorine levels and other harmful materials in
water.

CROWD BREW:

The first vote will be on the style of beer we will produce, this will inform the options for malts, hops, and yeasts.

The choices are:

Wheat Beer

Golden Ale

Pilsner

Lager

Dark Ale


Vote in the comments section or on the facebook page.

Home Brew - Ingredients.

I know some of you have been interested in home brewing yourselves, and i hope my previous blogs about the process of brewing have been helpful in that regard. I'm now going to go back to basics and look in more depth about the ingredients that go into making your beer. Looking at how each ingredient affects that overall flavour, colour, style and indeed drinkability of the beer. With your help at each stage, through the comments section at the bottom and voting through the facebook page - i'd like to come up with a crowd brew recipe for my next brew and one collaborater will receive a case of 6 bottles of the finished brew.

So, this post will give a general overview of the ingredient areas and how they affect the beer, and then i'll do seperate blog posts giving different ingredient options for each area from which we chose what goes into the final brew. So those areas are Water, Malt, Hops, Yeast.

Water is a lot more important than you'd think. It's the biggest part of your beer in the end and you'd be surprised how much of an affect different impurities and additives to the water supply in different areas of the country can radically change the taste of a beer. This is why different countries and different regions produce vastly different tasting beers even when the other ingredients are fairly similar. To this end a lot of home brewers use mineral water where the local water supply is not so great, or boil their water first to boil off impurities. Additives can be added, to change the characteristics of the water as well, such as the Gypsum i've used in my Hefeweizen recipe. Water quality is that important that in Germany there was a law (now not enforced) called the Water Purification Law that set a standard of water purity that must be used in the brewing process.

Malts inform the colour and the base flavours of the beer as well as providing the majority of the sugars that will be turned into alcohol in the brewing process. They can come in the original grain format, which needs mashing (essentially boiled in water for a long period to extract the sugars and flavours and create a wort (the liquid extraction of the malt). It can also come in liquid malt extracts which make for easy home brewing by providing a wort in a can that just needs poured into your beer mix. Lastly, Dry Malt extract which i haven't actually encountered yet but which is a dry powder that you add to hot water to create a wort. There are a world of different malt varieties to choose from and you would normally use a mixture of malts to create a complex flavour base. The main characteristic you'll get from a malt is its colour rating, which will be found as a score under the Standard Reference Method (SRM) scale. I've read a bit about this scale and don't quite understand how it works but essentially a lower score is a lighter colour and a higher score is a darker colour. A lighter colour will generally have a more delicate flavour and a darker one a more intense flavour. Low levels generally being single figure and a higher level being 20+.

You can also get speciality grains that will have flavourings such as whisky malts which can be added to add an extra flavour dimension to the brew.

Hops provide the top notes of the beer and affect the aroma, and the aftertaste of the beer. These provide the spicy, floral notes that you get in some beers. Like malts these can come from a more than one form, you can get pellets which are a concentrated form of hops or leaves which is the natural form of the hops. The main characteristic you'll look at in a hop is the alpha acid level. This will normally be given in the form of a percentage level from a low acid hop of around 3-4% to a high level of around 13-14%. This figure affects the bitterness of the beer, the higher the alpha acid level the more bitter the beer will be.

Yeast is the ingredient that will determine how much of the sugars in your brew will turn to alcohol and how quickly this will happen. Yeast has a huge say in the style of the beer you will produce and how strong it will be. There are two scales that you can look at to see what a yeast will do to your beer. These are attenuation and flocculation. Attenuation is a simple percentage that refers to the percentage of sugars in your beer that will be turned to alcohol. Flocculation refers to the clumping together of the yeast once it has been turned into alcohol. The level for a yeast will be given as high, medium or low. This refers to how quickly the yeast forms together and either rises to the top of the beer or sinks to the bottom out of the main body of liquid. A high flocculating yeast is quicker than a low one. Yeast can either come in liquid form or as a dry powder.

When making a recipe it is important to make sure all these ingredients compliment each other and are well balanced. Too hoppy and you'll get an overly bitter beer, too malty and it'll be more cloying, not enough malt or sugar and you'll have a very low alcohol beer, too much and you'll have a high alcohol beer.

So, we'll begin with Water - and ill have a blog up about that in the next few days.

Beer Review - Einstök Icelandic White Ale

Brewery: Einstök 

Location: Akureyri, Iceland - Just 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle - which provides a unique crisp clear water for their beers.

Style: White Ale

ABV: 5.2%

Appearance: Very light coloured, a truly white ale, very clear and bubbly. Looks like its going to be very refreshing.

Aroma: An exotic fruity aroma with a hint of spice.

Taste: Incredibly smooth and with a crisp refreshing finish. Hints of grapefruit and spice. Excellent after taste and overall just a very tasty satisfying beer combining the flavour of a good ale and the refreshment of a lager.

Where Can you Get It: It's available in Iceland, The UK and in the States or Florida and California. Online it's available to order from Beers Of Europe and Majestic

Price: £2.59 a bottle at Beers Of Europe: 12.99 for a case of 6 bottles from Majestic (or £9.99 if you buy two cases)

Overall Rating: 10/10

Notes: This was a beer that i was rather eager to try. I was following the Perfect Pint facebook page's world cup of beers that ran concurrently with the football world cup. During that i had noticed a bias from the follower's of the page towards English based breweries (the German contenders went out early because many users said they hadn't tried them). So i was intrigued when Einstök made it through to the semi's, so when i made an order from Beers Of Europe i was sure to add one of their brews. 

Spotlight On.......Franciscan Well Brewery.

The second in the series of spotlights on the best breweries around centres on the Franciscan Well brewery based in Cork, Ireland. I stumbled across them quite by accident as i went for an impromptu meal at Indigo Yard at Edinburgh with my Wife and found some of their beers on Tap. I tried a pint of their Friar Weisse which is a German style wheat beer - and an incredibly tasty example of one. The menu suggested that the brewers paid particular attention to the German Beer Purity Laws and from the website i see that the yeast is sourced from the Weihenstephan brewery. This all equates to a very high standard brew. The second i tried was their Rebel Red, a more typically Irish style ruby red ale which i found to have an excellently well balanced delicate flavour without the strong aftertaste you sometimes get with darker ales. These two pints were enough to make me want to find out more.

I got in contact with the brewery and asked a few questions about their set-up. Shane Long the founder of Franciscan Well was very nice and quick to get back to me and here's what he had to say.

Q1: How long have you been brewing and how did you get started? 

1998. There was a printing works behind the bar which had a manufacturing licence. when we were looking into what business would suit in order to keep the planning permission of this we came upon the idea of a micro brewery

Q2: How much do you produce and where can people get your beers?

Throughout all of Ireland both north and south and selected bars in London and Edinburgh

Q3: What brews are your most popular and have you noticed any changing trends in demands from consumers?

Our chieftain Irish pale ale and rebel red ale. The Chieftain came about from listening to what our customers wanted in a pale ale. trends are always changing and we move with them an example would be our Jameson stout which is aged in jameson whisky casks. This received a gold award at the international beer challenge last year

Q4: How do you approach the creation of a new beer? Is there a characteristic that is typical of your brews? 

Always ensure the malt base is right,  once i am happy with that we then play with various hops. As we have a bar attached we go to our customers to see what they would like us to create next

 

Q5: Do you brew for what you feel there’s a market for or do you create for your own palate?

 again this is all down to what the customer wants

Q6: Where do you see your brewery in five years time?

 in a slightly larger brewery and being able to meet the demand both domestic and export

Q7: Have you had any brewing disasters? 

no thank god

Q8: Do you have any tips for home brewers?

 think outside the box. dont be afraid to try anything we recently did a beer with rosemary and clementines

You get the impression from the website and the answers above that there is a real sense of pride in producing beers that really satisfy the customer. Their commitment to the highest standards of ingredients and a willingness to experiment should make for some interesting brews in the future. I really love how they've integrated the pub side of things to the brewery. Using that instant feedback of customers in the pub to inform their brewing, ensures that the standard is always going to be high. I'll definitely be thinking of a visit to Cork to see the place for myself in the future and i really hope they are able to expand so that more and more people can enjoy their beers.