Glasgow Beer and Pub Project

Oregon artist Eric Steen is going to be doing an art project in Glasgow during April, based around the beer and pub culture of the city.

His project blog is at http://glasgowbeerandpubproject.blogspot.com/. It looks like an intensive bit of work. There will be a series of events, called Pub School, every week in April followed by an installation at the gallery. All very interesting stuff:

The Pub School will be a weekly event series in April where the general public can learn about beer, take homebrewing demos, have samplings, learn about the history of it, and possibly even do some pub-crawls. I would love to get homebrewers involved in this by leading some of these demos and workshops. Then on April 30th, I am opening the Market Gallery Pub, which will be a one night installation that looks at homebrewing as an art form. The gallery will be turned into a functioning pub and I would like to feature a large menu of homebrewed beers…

Sounds like a lot of fun. Geoff from Hop Topic will be leading a homebrewing demonstration and the Williams Bros have agreed to recreate the most popular beer at the Market Gallery Pub at their brewery.

Eric is still looking for homebrewers to supply beer for the Market Gallery Pub. If you have spare beer, let him know.

Beata Bitter

The last time I bought some hops there were a variety I hadn't had before – Beata. They were very cheap so I got some and decided to use them in a golden ale to show off their flavour.

15:00 Rubber shoes, on. Circuit breaker, on. Death trap hot liquor tank made of discarded mango chutney drum and Asda kettle element, on.

15:01 Now to decide what to brew.

15.06 Look at hops in freezer. I have Magnum and Beata and East Kent Goldings. Hmm, Magnum as bittering, Beata for aroma? Beata are supposed to be good lager-type hops, and Magnum yer bog-standard clean German high-alpha bittering hops.

15.10
4 g gypsum
1100g maris otter
1910g lager malt
100 crystal malt

15.30 Move 10L mash water to mash bucket. Discover it is only 63ºC instead of 75ºC. Curse and put the kettle on.

15:41 Top up mash with approximately 2L boiling water, bucket now completely full but has reached 67ºC.

16.31 First runnings only 1.046 (unadjusted). That's 1.056 adjusted though. Guess I shouldn't sparge too much.

16.53 Batch sparging with another 10L at 78ºC, after 20 minutes: 1.010 at 47º - 1.019 adjusted.

17.10 Boiler coming up to boil, time for a beer and a sandwich.

17.30 Rolling boil, 15g Magnum in, 75 mins starts here.

18.10 Wallpaper hasn't peeled off the walls yet. Another half hour to go!

18.30 Late hops - 15g Beata. 15 minutes more!

00.00 I don't have a wort chiller. Bastard wort is still at 35ºC. When I make a cup of tea it's stone cold within twenty minutes. What gives?

00.10+1 Final OG is 1.046, collected about 15L of wort including trub.

03.30+1 Down to 24º. Pitched yeast.

15.16+1 Still no visible activity.

00.10+2 Tiny bubbles. Start worrying and make another yeast starter.

08.00+2 Foam! Don't need second starter after all. Yay!

KKKK

I brewed this months ago thinking it would be nice to have a strong ale around for Christmas time. Now it’s nearly Christmas time already and I opened a bottle to test it.

Sadly, due I think to my sloppy bottling practice, it’s quite badly oxidised. If you can ignore that, it’s alright. It’s quite syrupy but I deliberately hopped it quite highly to avoid it being sickly sweet. Lovely whisky aroma (or, if you dislike whisky, I guess you would say a harsh alcohol aroma) with floral, woody notes.

Can’t quite decide whether it’s good enough to offer to my friends. I poured most of the bottle into the roasting tin for the roast pork I’m cooking.

Mild

I have been brewing recently, just not as much as I'd hoped. I still need to get my electric boiler and coolbox mashtun built and ask my local breweries if they'll flog me some malt.




Mild. Mashed warm at 70ºC. Mostly pale malt with some chocolate malt and 10% Coco Pops.
Hopped with Challenger and Bramling Cross and fermented with White Shield yeast.

Another attempt at hoppy, hoppy pale ale

I got hold of some Chinook hops – I'd wanted to try them for a good while – and used them in a nice bitter beer. They're 12% alpha acid, so well suited for the task.


Brew length 10 L

2 kg pale malt
10g crystal malt

25g Chinook 12.7% 90
25g Chinook 12.7% 0

Mash 67ºC, 1 hour

Yeast: US-05
Original gravity: 1050

I made a hop tea from the bittering hops before throwing them into the brew, and held it back to add to the fermenting bucket with the cooled wort. A full pint of hop tea is a pretty intense thing.

Update: 1st August this has reached 1.010, but hasn't cleared, so I'm going to dry hop it for another week.

Mint Beer #2, and small beer

Back in March or thereabouts I made some mint beer. I was inspired to do it by some of the very hoppy new-wave real ale I've drunk in the past, in particular the IPA from the Verulanum Brewery in St Albans which had an almost menthol-like flavour. This brewery made very hoppy beers indeed and many a brewery would have been proud to have its ordinary bitter as their IPA, so you can imagine how bitter the IPA was.

For menthol flavours, why not use actual mint? I did a pilot brew and it was great. Now with summer here I made a larger batch for summer drinking. The method was pretty much the same: make pale ale and throw in a big bunch of fresh mint 5 minutes from the end of the boil.

I also added some mint humbugs in the kettle to see what would happen. I wonder if any flavour will remain from the mint oil in the sweets? It certainly smelt amazing during the boil, but I've learnt that that doesn't tell you much about how the beer will taste.

As a further recycling experiment, I kept the spent grain and made small beer from it. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

KK Sulphury Bitter

I'm fairly sure I'm in a minority on this among beer drinkers, but I do like a decent whack of sulphur in my beer. The legendarily hard water of Burton-on-Trent historically gave a sulphury character to the beer brewed by Bass, Allsop's, Ind Coope and Marston's among others. People say that this so-called "Burton snatch" is far less prominent in the likes of Marston's Pedigree than it used to be, but in the bottle it's still pleasantly noticeable (I haven't drunk it on draught recently). Can't say I can get it in Worthington White Shield though.

I've also detected sulphur in certain Franconian beers, though I shall have to look into which areas of Franconia (if any) have hard water.

There's a passage in one of Michael Jackson's books where he is tasting a Japanese microbrewery's beer and remarks that it's rather sulphury. The head brewer replies "Yes, that is intentional. We want the beer to smell as fresh as a bath-house." Which just goes to show that there's also an element of cultural context involved in whether you find it pleasant or not.

I wanted to make a souped-up beer inspired by the famous Burton bitters. For me these are about being about to taste the minerals in the water, about an intensely dry bitterness and a nice deep red colour, but not too dark (it's a pale ale after all). It's not really about hop aroma or full, malty body, although a bit of toffee is not bad.

So that means adding a stupid amount of gypsum to the brewing water, hops mostly for bittering, and crystal malt.

5L water heated with 1 tbsp gypsum

200g crystal malt
1800g pale malt

Mash at 68º for 180 minutes (they did long mashes in the 18th century … oh, all right, I went back to bed and fell asleep)

Sparge with 4L @ 80º and another 1 tbsp gypsum in the sparge water.

Boil for 90 minutes.

30g Challenger (5.1%) 90 minutes
10g Challenger 0 minutes

The wort doesn't taste sweet because of all the minerals and hops, but the OG is right at 1050.

It wouldn't be right without a Burton yeast, so I kidnapped the sediment from a bottle of Worthington White Shield and cultured it up. I was very impressed with how well the yeast recovered.

The temperature according to my thermometer is still under 23ºC, but I don't believe it. We shall see – the last couple of brews seemed to do quite well despite the heat in my flat.

Peanut butter beer

So: I had this poll a few weeks ago, about which adjunct I should use in a forthcoming beer.
I'm not sure this was a good idea.

Marshmallows : 1 (16%)

Cornflakes: 0 (0%)

Coco Krispies: 0 (0%)

Peanut butter: 2 (33%)

Ready Brek (honey and cinnamon flavour): 2 (33%)

McCowan's Highland Toffee: 1 (16%)

Joint winners were as seen above, peanut butter, and honey and cinnamon Ready Brek. Peanut butter wins by default since Ready Brek doesn't actually come in that flavour (I was quite surprised to discover that).

It's definitely the weirdest option in the list. The others sound strange in association with beer but are basically just cereals and sugar when it comes down to it. Aw no, I could have used Turkish Delight as well.

All I did was make a bog standard pale ale and bung a jar of peanut butter in with the boil. It didn't dissolve as I was hoping, but instead disintegrated into lots of tiny greasy smears. Nonetheless, I cooled it and set it to ferment.

I finally bottled this the other day. As usual with experimental beers, fermented in a demijohn, it was an awful mess trying to syphon stuff out again, made more difficult by avoiding the thick layer of peanut oil that had collected on the surface of the beer.

It's not good. Lots of high alcohols in this, not unpleasant but not pleasant either. Not much peanut flavour either. I don't know if the taste is down to the peanut butter or the high temperature. It's been pretty warm here lately. My thermometer is only showing 23ºC air temperature but it feels like more than that. Fortunately, I don't have to drink it; Anders does.

Smokebeer #2, and new poll

The last poll I had asked what kind of beer I should brew next. The winner was Smokebeer with one vote. Good luck that I just bought a bag of smoked malt at the weekend and I brewed this last night. It's nice to know that I can get a full-mash brew done on a school night – one of the advantages of doing small batches.

Brewlength about 9L

1.9 kg Rauchmalz
40g black malt (for colour only)
25g Northern Brewer 12%

The original gravity turned out at 1052 and I used Safale S-04 yeast. There seems to be an awful lot of trub, which happened the last time I used smoked malt too. I think I may have over-hopped it slightly, but we shall see. I've noticed in the past that the smoked character doesn't really appear until the beer is finished.

So I also have a new poll, which already has twice as many votes as the last one, and there are still five days to go! Please vote for which mad additive I should put in a beer. Remember, you don't have to drink it.

War bread

The economic crisis hasn't got so bad yet that I have to make bread out of whatever is available like people do during wars and famines. However this bread does involve a bit of recycling of stuff that would otherwise get thrown away.

150g cold porridge
Handful of spent grain from Sunday's brew
Left-over sweet wort ditto
Salt
Enough chapati flour and strong white flour to make a soft dough.

I've heard of old-bread soakers and the odd handful of cooked rice making their way into bread, but recycling left-over breakfast porridge into bread somehow makes me feel filthy, like those people who fry everything in the same ancient bacon grease kept permanently in the pan. I try to put such thoughts out of my mind, but at the same time I'm not philosophically keen on my bread becoming a sort of bin for using up old stuff.

The bread is quite nice though. Chewy crust, nice oaty flavour. Here it is pictured with some of Iain's fantastic fennel salami from Gusto & Relish.

It's flat as a pancake because the dough is so soft, but that doesn't bother me too much.

Brown Beer #2

This is the first beer I've made for quite a while – I think it's been almost two months. I've been paralysed by trying to decided whether to get an electric boiler or keep on with the small stovetop batches. But my stocks are running low, so it's about time to get some more on.

510g Maris Otter low colour
2kg Belgian pale
100g chocolate malt

Mash at 65°C 60 min
Mash started 1345
Boil 1610
Finish boil 1738

40g Bramling Cross 90
10g First Gold 90
6g Styrian Goldings 5
8g Styrian Goldings 0

Hop tea made from 10g First Gold

Yeast: Muntons Gold

OG was 1050.

I just realised I forgot to add any minerals whatsoever to the water. Oops.

Last bottle of KK

I drank the last bottle of KK the other night. This was brewed at the end of November so it's had three months maturation in the bottle. It was pretty harsh tasting back then as I used about four times the recommended amount of gypsum in it trying to achieve that nice sulphurous Burton taste. Now it's smoothed down quite a bit and is pleasantly bitter. As it's now all gone, I need to make some more. I will use a tad less gypsum, but not ver much.

Tasting my first two all-grain brews

Unfortunately my Broken Scales Guesswork Ale developed a thin layer of mould on top. I went ahead and bottled it anyway and I seem to have added a goodly amount of sugar, as it's well carbonated after less than a week. It tastes strange, but not bad. It has sort of creamy, vanilla-y flavours and a little bit of hot alcohol, although that may be me projecting and associating the vanilla with whisky. It's very full in body, perhaps I was mashing too hot after all. Because I know it has Bramling Cross hops in it, which are notorious for blackcurrant aroma, I wonder if what I called vanilla is actually the hops.

Meanwhile, Pale Ale with Hops and Dimethyl Sulfide is calming down; it's drinkable if heavily chilled. I'm in two minds as to whether to drink it up and get rid of it, or push it to the back of the shelf and see if it gets any nicer.

Attempt #2 at US-style Pale Ale

This is what the DMS disaster was intended to have been, my second attempt at this style. This time, instead of lager malt I used low colour Maris Otter and I approximately doubled the amount of hops (First Gold and Cascades for bittering, more Cascade for finishing, of course). Rather than sparge and end up with too much wort, I just diluted the first runnings with water and kept the second for my experimental mint beer. I still ended up with a starting gravity of 1060, just what I was looking for.

Mashing went more smoothly that my first couple of attempts, I think because I actually bothered to calculate what temperature the hot water should be so that I get my target mash temperature without adding cold or boiling water.

I brewed this on Saturday and peeked in the fermenting bucket yesterday. The yeast head has formed and subsided again already! That S-04 yeast is mental fast. That's actually a bit of a pain as I was hoping to harvest some of the yeast.

I hope the mould that got at Brown Bitter Beer has been vanquished. I gave the bucket a good long soak in bleach before using it again.

Mint beer

I can't remember where I got the idea for this. I think I was drunk at the time, but since then I've been meaning to do an experimental mint beer.

Mint beer has been done before, but most commercial examples seem to be mint stouts. While Mint Imperial Stout (mint imperials + imperial stout, geddit?) is a catchy name, I thought mint might also be nice in a hoppy pale ale. I think of the menthol harmonising with the resiny, citrussy American hops.

I brewed up some left-over wort and malt extract with a few Cascades, boiled it for an hour or so, and added a handful of fresh mint, stalks and all, five minutes before the end of the boil together with the finishing hops (more Cascade). I am quite looking forward to tasting it. I imagine the fresh mint will make it more reminiscent of Moroccan mint tea than the Fry's Chocolate Cream aroma that using oil or sweeties in a stout might give.

Miscellaneous rambling

I just had a sandwich with the bread I posted about this morning. I need to acquire some pink salt so I can make my own ham to go with it. I'm still hungry though because I cycled to Partick and back, a 40 minute round trip (this is, however, quicker than any public transport would be ... and it's nice in the summer when I can leave my desk at half past five and be drinking beer in the Three Judges by ten to six. [Oh, despite the usual tired real-ale stereotypes journalists don't seem able to resist, that is about the best article about the Three Judges that Google knows about. The only other link I even considered posting was one of these review sites where one reviewer complains that you can't get a flirtini there, whatever that is, and the other spends three quarters of his review telling an anecdote about how he was knocked off his bike in Glasgow city centre.]). I went to the home brew shop for some pale malt. I seem to have got low colour Maris Otter and now I'm wondering whether I should make pale beer with it rather than waste it in porter as I was intending.

On the agenda for tonight is making some bread with the spent grain I have in the fridge. My sourdough gunge is feeling neglected.

Smokebeer and rustic bread

Two of my favourite beers in the whole world are the Rauchbier from the breweries Spezial and Schlenkerla in Bamberg. They have a lovely smokey-bacon aroma and taste, but this isn't a novelty; the underlying beer is a great lager in its own right. So when I got into homebrewing it was only a matter of time before I would attempt to make a beer from smoked malt too.

I did an experimental brew with 100% Rauchmalz. The shop only had 1kg available when I popped in, so it was a very small brew. People are always warning you not to use more than 10 or 20 % Rauchmalz, but Schlenkerla and Spezial use almost all Rauchmalz in their beer and I don't find it overpowering. I read that they also use a little Munich malt, which makes sense - the Bamberg beers are very dark.

Brewing didn't go too well, and I thought this was a complete write-off. When I filled it into the fermentation vessel I managed to pour about half of it all over the floor and what did make it in was so full of trub and hop gunk that it didn't look like it would ever settle. It has settled further but the layer of trub at the bottom is growing thicker day by day.

More importantly, when I was brewing with it I didn't detect the smokiness at all. I'd already decided that the Rauchmalz I can get here was rubbish and resolved not to buy any more.

I tried some of it today. The smoke has magically appeared. This is shaping up to be good beer. Pity I'll be lucky to get a litre of it.

The bread in front is mostly white flour with a little spelt, made with the yeast left over from my DMS disaster. I like this yeast better in bread than I do in beer. I am really loving baking with the beer yeast. I'm making some of the tastiest white bread I've ever done. I just slap it in the oven and it rises beautifully. I don't bother shaping or slashing it so it turns out an irregular squarish lump, but you can get away with that if you call it "rustic".

I'm not happy

I've broken my kitchen scales. The nice digital ones I treated myself to last year when I started getting serious about baking. I'm rather upset because it was my own fault, and also because while you can cook pretty well without scales, and bake reasonably well without scales if you have enough experience, trying to brew without scales is a pain indeed.

So this is what I did on Saturday. Broken Scales Guesswork Ale.

Two-thirds of a bag Belgian pale malt
A handful of crystal malt
Some First Gold hops at 70 minutes
Some Bramling Cross at 0 minutes

The little canister of Ritchies yeast I bought doesn't seem to do anything, so I panicked and threw in a sachet of Muntons Gold.

DMS disaster

The other day I posted I didn't know as much about mashing as I thought I did. I know now that I know even less than I thought I knew when I wrote that. Here is the story of my first all-grain beer.

On the right is the notorious brew bag. It's held together with staples for now, because I couldn't be bothered sewing all round. I will do that later at some point.

The next picture is what 2.5kg of grain and some hot water looks like when you stir it about in a plastic bucket lined with net curtain.

Here's the recipe. I kept it very simple.

2.5kg lager malt
10g Cascade hops, 70 minutes
10g Northern Brewer hops, 70 minutes
30g Cascade hops, 10 minutes
Danstar Windsor yeast

I boiled on the stove and cooled in the kitchen sink as normal, except I had opened no tins of syrup.

This last picture is only of interest to homebrew geeks.

Three days after brewing, the beer is still very yeasty and opaque. I didn't know that lager malt has lots and lots of DMS precursors, so unfortunately it also has that vegetal aroma familar from second-rate German Hausbrauereien. I always assumed it was the hops or the funky smells given off by lager yeast that I encountered in their beer, but no, here is that peculiar smell back again. I hope it will die down with time.

Mash

I learned some things about mashing at the weekend.

1. I don't actually know the science of mashing that well
2. Grain has significant thermal mass -- I suppose that's why you get wheat pillows to warm beds and things lke that.

Because I didn't take the grain into account, my mash water wasn't hot enough and I had a few problems reaching the mash temperature I wanted; I was stuck in the low 60s and adding boiling water a litre at a time didn't seem to raise it much. But I checked with some iodine, and it didn't turn black, so I can only assume I did get conversion.

This made me think of a couple of posts I read about how brewers worked before they started using thermometers in the 18th century: applied to lager decoction and in general . You get all sorts of methods for judging how hot the water is, such as "When it has cooled enough that the steam has cleared and you can see your reflection in the water". Obviously brewers hundreds of years ago wouldn't know precisely how hot the water is, nor did they understand the science of why the sweet malt gave off a sugary liquid when mixed with hot water. But they still managed to make beer. But did it always work?

Well, there is still an expression in modern German: "Da sind Hopfen und Malz verloren". which means the situation is hopeless, and literally it means the hops and malt are lost, and that's a good description of what happens if you mash too hot. If that happens you destroy the enzymes which convert starch into sugar, and you're left with a starchy malt soup which will never become beer whatever you do. A lost cause, in other words.

I suspect that before the widespread use of the thermometer, this must have happened fairly often.