Over the last 5 months, Piet and myself have brewed over 200L of various styles of beer. That's 606 x 330mL bottles - 50 dozen. Each brew yields about 22L of finished beer (we can change the volume, but 22L seems to be a good number), so that's about 66 x 330mL bottles per brew. Awesome.
Just for shits and giggles, I'll go through - from the first brew to the last - and give a brief description of each...
Cloned American Pale Ale - Our first brew (~6%abv)
So... Where to begin? Our first brew day was far from smooth. We had plenty of booksmarts, but little knowledge on how to actually use those smarts with our own equipment. We hadn't yet discovered the beauty and gracefullness of using software and calculators to create the best recipes, so we had just modified a pale ale recipe from 'Clone Brews'.
There were only a few differences, such as us using chocolate malt instead of a certain caramalt, and tweeking the hops to suit what was available.
We mashed in the boiling pot using a stockinette, and needless to say, there was sugary wort everywhere. It was like the floor was covered in glue...
We eventually got the boil going fine, and added our hops (which, looking back, were WAY out of balance).Once the boil had finished, we took our two boiling pots to various locations to try and cool the wort in a water bath... Interesting. Kind of messy.
The fact that our beer did not acquire an infection is a miracle. It's like we completely forgot aseptic technique whilst transferring the wort to the fermenter...
About half way through the boil, we realised that our yeast needed to be activated. We had bought some pre-packed stuff from our local homebrew supply shop. We tried out best to activate it, but it was showing no signs of life when we pitched it.
In the morning, there was no activity at all, so we went about bought a sachet of dried yeast, and chucked it in the fermenter. The next day, our first all-grain brew was bubbling away happily.
We bottled about 2 weeks later, and tasted soon after that. I'll give you the notes I wrote, using a bottle that was aged a few weeks:
Beer pours a bit hazy red/brown hue, with a thin off-white head. Aroma had cherries (especially in the older bottles), some chocolate notes, and strong grapefruit-like cascade. Flavours have some coffee-ish chocolate malt, with zesty hops. Reasonably bitter near the end - but a good bitterness. Carbonation is good. Medium to light bodied.
Overall, it was an enjoyable beer (especially considering the sloppiness of the brew!), and even got some good reviews from my friends in Wellington. I would place this one far above the mainstream, mass produced beers you find in the fridge at the supermarket, and it's not nearly as expensive!
German Pilsner Disaster (~5.5%abv)
Well.. This brew sure was interesting. We found an old sac of grain from Piet's old workplace, and decided it would be good to make a Pilsner-style lager.
We did everything in a similar, yet slightly more efficient fashion, than the last brew, and so the only really terrible thing was our ingredients.
Our hops were fine, but we added way too much for the bittering stage, and so the bitterness in the final product was kind of astringent.
The grain we used was old and probably stale, and shat out immense, agglutinated protein during the boil... Perhaps we should have done a protein rest?? This protein looked like grey egg matter, floating in the pale liquid.
Trying to brew a lager with our limited experience was a bit naiive, as we still had little awareness to the importance of hot/cold breaks, and finings. Our cooling system was still a waterbath and about 40 minutes of stirring....But anyway, we got it into the fermenter and pitched our activated Wyeast Bohemian Pilsener sachet (we had learned not to get old, home-packaged yeast anymore)...
We fermented relatively cold (about 8-10 degrees). Over the next few weeks the fermenter smelled like a volcano - massive amounts of sulfur being processed by the yeast (see my other post about Saccharomyces!). We had heard about the sulfur gas being produced in cold-fermented lagers, so we let it continue. I think the sheer amount of protein from the grain was to blame for the huge sulfur smell (as sulfur is bound within protein).
Fermentation finished and we bottled. Lagering means 'storing', so we decided to let it lager in the bottles.
After a few weeks we opened a bottle and got nothing but fart - still way too sulfury. The flavours were slightly sulfury also, and there was that astringent bitterness from the hops.About 3 months after bottling, our pilsner had lost almost all of it's sulfur (thanks yeast) and was now bearable to drink. But still a bit soapy, and far too bitter in the initial palate. We still have two bottles left, so I'll have to write some proper notes for it.
The Dunkleweizen (~5%abv)
Admittedly, this was only my third brew, and Piet's fourth, as I was sick when he made a Belgian Witbier. Since then, however, we have made another witbier which I'll describe in more detail, later.
The dunkleweizen is a German dark wheat beer, and was one of our more successful brews.
Unfortunately, my notes on this aren't very comprehensive, so it'll be a short entry...
We decided to do this one because we still had wheat beer yeast from the previous brew. The malts we used included 2 row pale, wheat, chocolate, carapils and crystal, and we used Jade and Hallertau hops.
The methodology was rather the same as the other brews, but we had come closer to perfecting our mash (using a spare fermenting barrel) and we had devised a better cooling system (running the hot wort through copper tubing submerged in cold water).
The ingredients and yeast worked together beautifully to create an effervescent, flavourful (yet moderately alcoholic) brew, that was enjoyed rather quickly! The hops were well balanced with the sweetness of the wheat and the roastiness of chocolate malt.
Definitely one to brew again.
The Stoat - Dunedin Oatmeal Stout (~6.5%abv)
Wow. I fucking love this beer. This one was Piet's recipe, and was a great success, so much that we entered it into the SOBA National Homebrew Championship (we're still waiting for the results).
Everything seemed to work out very well on the brew day. We carried out a protein, then beta-glucan rest on the flaked oats (with added barley - for enzymes) and then added it to the rest of the grain. This was the first of our brews where we controlled the pH of the mash, which we think helped a lot. The rest of the procedures went rather smoothly, although things seemed to take longer (e.g. the sparge took nearly one hour and the cooling was very slow - probably due to the viscosity of the wort).We fermented using Wyeasts Irish Ale, which worked beautifully to give a lot of dark fruit-like esters, and a hint of toasted bread.
The 7 different malts were balanced only by 3 additions of Fuggles, imported hops from the UK. The fuggles added a lovely earthy character to the beer.
I'm lacking a set of decent tasting notes to go with this beer, but we still have a few bottles left. I'll probably add some on here in the next week (along with the results from the competition! Wish us luck).We have done a number of other brews, which I'll get around to describing. Look out for Part II!
