24 Hour Sour IPA (closed system kettle sour mash)

What if you could make a very sour beer using bacteria in 24 hours? Would you be interested in that?

One of the great things about home brewing is the ability to do whatever the hell you want. The cost of failure is practically nothing at this scale. Even if the beer ends in complete failure, the few dollars wasted on ingredients is well worth the knowledge gained. The beer brewed in the lab this past week falls squarely into the experimental (otherwise know as fuck it if it doesn't work) category.

Sour beers are all the rage these days. I have long been a fan of these beers but I do have a limit on sourness. More and more it seems some brewers have tried to take sourness to the extremes. To each their own, but sourness for the sake of sourness is not drinkable at all for me. I want to taste layers of flavors in my sour beers, not just sourness. 

I have done a few sour beers over the years. The big issue I have with brewing them is that many of the techniques either produce unpredictable results or take a very long time. These are things I have little patience for. One of the techniques I have used is making berliner weisse by pitching lacto and ale yeast. There are theories abound as to when to pitch the lacto and when to pitch the yeast. In my experience it is still always a crap shoot as to what you will end up with.

A friend and I have been thinking about doing a sour beer for some time now. To get around the issue of unpredictable pH and or long timelines we decided on a sour mash. Sour mashing is a technique where wort is soured pre boil, and then finished as you would with any other beer. This way you get an idea upfront on the level of sourness and it is very fast. The other thing to note with this method is that the beer will never really get any more sour over time.

Over the last few months we have refined the concept to try to keep the souring as clean as possible. What that meant was not doing the most traditional method in which wort is left in contact with grains in the mash tun. Sour mashing gone bad can result in many unpleasant vomit inducing smells.

The closed-system soured mash procedure

The first step is mashing and sparging as normal. Once all the wort makes it into the kettle a quick boil is in order. This was mainly done so we could use the boiling wort to sanitize the plate chiller we used to cool the wort down. This could also be beneficial for killing anything that made it through the mash process. However you could simply let your wort chill on its own to ~120 degrees and probably still be fine.

The next step is to move the wort it into a 15.5 gallon sankey keg (you could use a corny keg as well). The idea/benefit around moving to this vessel is that you can purge all oxygen. The nasty bugs that are possibly going to make your sour mash smell and taste terrible all need oxygen. Luckily our Lacto doesn't need that.






There are a number of ways to inoculate the wort. One is to add some crushed grain. It's cheap, but it is also somewhat unknown as to what all is on that grain besides the lacto. It may not matter much in this closed system, but you never know. Another fine option is to buy a lab produced lacto. Can't really go wrong there. However with this beer we used plain yogurt to introduce the souring bacteria we needed. I went with a brand called Siggi's as it had multiple cultures including the delbrueckii strain.




At this point you have a keg filled with wort that is ideally around 110 - 120 degrees and ready for your bug pitch. After pitching the keg is purged with co2. An hour or so into the process pressure was beginning to build again so released it and placed an airlock on the keg (Remove your gas in post and place a short piece of 1/2 inch silicone tubing on it with an airlock) This is the closed system. It took only 24 hours for the pH to drop to 3.1. The other great thing is that the wort had no strange smells or flavors. It tasted like a pilsner lemonade since the wort was sour, but also still sweet.

The last step is to finish the boil. This will also kill off all of the bacteria. When using yogurt some extra filtering is needed. The yogurt seemed to curdle so in order to keep those solids out of the kettle I threw some cheese cloth into a strainer and drained the wort through the strainer. From there a 90 minute boil was kicked off.

The eDrometer reading

Hot break

This method can be used for any style of sour beer. This version happens to be designed as an sour IPA. A sour IPA would not be possible without utilizing some sort of sour mash, or adding lactic acid after fermentation completes. This is because Lactobacillus cannot handle hop levels much over 10 IBUs. Most people would say bitterness and sourness are a bad combination. Maybe it will be terrible, but I have had a sour IPA from Trinity Brewing called Red Swing line that was amazing. This is an attempt at brewing something similar but is not in any way a clone of that beer.

One other issue you will need to consider when pre souring is the fermentation. The low pH is going to be stressful to the yeast. The lower the pH, the harder the time the yeast will have. You should still be able to use ale yeast into the mid 3's, but you will want to use a very large and healthy pitch. The other option, and the one I went with is to use brettanomyces. It has some additional tolerance when it comes to pH levels.

Update: After some adding this beer turned out to be great! It will be brewed again!

Sauvignon Saison-brett [A split fermentation and re-blend with Saccharomyces and Brettanomyces]

More and more I have been successfully using brett as a primary fermenter. I have been very impressed by the fruit forward character  and restrained or non-existent barn flavor that a beer fermented only with Brux trois can deliver. I want to keep playing with this, but also want to try new things as well.

A mixed fermentation is a pretty typical way in which both brett and sacch yeasts are used. Think of the commercially available blends of these yeast such as American Farmhouse. I have used that particular yeast and found it to be good, but it is unknown what the ratios are. It is most likely that the sacch is by far the dominant fermenter and the brett is only there to provide a bit of flavor complexity as it would if you pitched sacch, attenuated, and then pitched brett.

I wanted to do a mixed fermentation, but I wanted something a little different than using a pre-formulated yeast blend. I still wanted to bring in the flavors associated with an all brett fermentation. What I proposed was a split fermentation with 50% of the wort fermented with saison yeast and the other 50% fermented with only brux trois. Then blend the two beers back together in some ratio yet to be determined.

I started with a base of imported pilsner, domestic pilsner and 2-row. I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, but I also had other things to consider because I was fermenting with brett.

One thing I wanted to do was bring in a low but perceivable amount of acidity without the use of any bacteria. I am trying to turn this beer around in 30 days and bacteria just wasn't really an option. It is also difficult to ensure you get the pH level you are looking for with bacteria. To the mash I added 10% acidulated malt to bring that nice brightness I am looking for. Lastly I wanted to add a level of mouth feel and body that the brett version would not have. To do that I used a small amount of flaked wheat and golden oats. A touch of special b was used to add some color. The mash temp was kept at a low 148 to help the saison yeast bring the gravity of the beer down to what I hope to be about 1.004.

For hops I wanted to continue to play with and compliment the fruit forward nature of the brett. The main hop used is Nelson Sauvin to provide it's well known citris, fruit, and white wine notes. For bittering I used Rakau, another NZ hop that is well known for it's soft bitterness when used early in the boil. Planned is a dry hopping with more nelson, but that could always change based on how the beer tastes after blending.

Gravity, Alcohol Content and Color

Measured Original Gravity: 1.052 SG
Measured Final Gravity: ? SG (estimated 1.005)
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 6.8 %
Bitterness: 27.9 IBUs
Est Color: 6.6 SRM

Update 6-17
The brew day went very smooth and I produced 16 gallons of this wort. 8 gallons was pitched into my conical with a 2000ml starter of French saison at 70 degrees. The other 8 gallons was pitched into a sankey keg that I use as a fermenter. I left about 1 gallon of a highly aromatic all brett trois pale ale in the sankey to kick off the brett fermentation. I could have tried to wash or decant the yeast it in, but it seemed unnecessary when the contents within were still so amazing.

48 hours after pitching the 1.052 wort, the trois version was already down to 1.012. It is super aromatic with tropical fruit, mainly pineapple and mango. The flavor is like that of amazing unsweetend pineapple juice.

The French saison version is sitting at about 72 degrees now and is down to 1.026 after 48 hours. While it still has some sweetness, the french saison esters are there in both the aroma and flavor.

In the next few days I plan on pushing the trois version into the conical. There I expect the saison yeast to go to work on the left over sugars the brett version is not going to touch in the hopes of getting the gravity down even more. It's an interesting concept to think that the sacch yeast is the one drying out this mixed sacch/brett blend.

Update 6/22

The two batches have now been a blended back together. On the 21st the saison fermentation was down to 1.003. The blend was not quite 50:50. I saved 1.75 gallons of the all brett version before adding the rest into the conical with the French saison version. Today the airlock is showing activity once again as the yeast works on the sugars introduced with the Brett version. Still undecided on dry hopping at this point.

6/24

I just received a new order of hops. One of them was 2014 Galaxy. The smell of that one was amazing! One of the most amazing smelling hops I have ever obtained. So of course the idea of dry hopping with more Nelson went out the window. Instead I added 3 oz of Galaxy. I will add a few more oz of Nelson in a few days.

9/1

I entered this beer and the brett only version into my local home brew competition the Beehive Brew off. They did not place, but they got good scores.

The brux only version actually brought the highest score I have ever received with a 45. The saison was well liked, but some of the judges felt there was not enough spicy phenolics for the style. It got a 32 which is pretty good considering they felt it was out of style.

Recap: Lauterday brewers pour at the Mountain Brewers Fest!

On Saturday June 7th the Mountain Brewers Festival in Idaho Falls was crashed by home brew hooligans, The Lauter-day brewers! Formed in Salt Lake city in the fall of 2012 the Lauter-day brewers or LDB are the newest home brew club in the state of Utah. Since that time the club has grown to more than 35 active members and held many cool events all while helping each other improve brewing knowledge and skill. Just prior to the brew fest the club brewed and filled a red wine barrel and brewed a collaboration beer with Epic Brewing that will be on tap at The Annex soon.

With the Mountain Brewers Festival they turned their attention to educating the public that home brew is not what it used to be, and great beer can be brewed at home. Armed with what had to be the biggest selection of beers at one table the festival has ever seen, LDB showed up with 17 distinct beers that were served throughout the day. Many of these beers were very unique styles and might have been completely new to many of those tasting them. The feedback throughout the day was fantastic and many were taken by surprise to find out LDB is not a commercial brewery somewhere in Salt Lake City.

Just a sample of the beers served: Gose, DIPA, Black DIPA, Saison Brett, Cask hopped pale ale, brett pale ale, honey blonde, Roggenbier, and a number of other pales, IPAs, and others I can't recall at the moment.

It was a great experience for all, and was a great way to increase the exposure of the club! A huge thanks to all the LDB members that participated!

My first Commercial Brew day with Epic Brewing and The Lauter-day Brewers

A few months back my home brew club got an invitation to do a collaboration beer with Salt Lake Citys Epic Brewing for their gastro pub The Annex. The club decided to turn the collab into a competition.  With close to 40 members it would be difficult to come to any consensus so we randomly created 5 groups. Each group was tasked with coming up with 2 beers to submit to a testing panel made up of Epic brewers. The rules were to use ingredients from their inventory, keep it at 4% or under (Utah draft beer law). and turn it all around in just over 30 days.

It was a really fun event and my group ended up brewing 7 beers in a single day! We brewed 3 different variations of a wit and 2 variations of white IPA.  We also did two all brett pale ales. The wits turned out being too experimental and needing some refinement. The white IPAs were both pretty good. One of the brett beers was not good, and one was excellent. My group ended up presenting a white IPA and an all brett pale ale with Citra and Amarillo.

Epic narrowed it down to two beers, the brett pale with citra and amarillo and a hibiscus wheat from another team. Epic's head brewer, Kevin Crompton, liked the hibiscus beer a little more, but due to the non-beer ingredient the beer would need approvals and that would have pushed out the brew date too far. So the brett pale ale is what was brewed.

It seems to me that this beer will have much more appeal and will give many people their first taste of an all brett beer like this. Most of the time when people think of an all brett beer they think of funk, barn, dryness, and other things that are present in beers that have used brett in some portion of the fermentation or conditioning of a beer. This type of beer is not like that at all. When Trois is handled just like it's sacch yeast, it produces a beer that has almost none of the flavor traditionally associated with brett. Instead there is a flood of ripe tropical fruit flavors and aromas.

About the beer

I have done a number of all brett beers using the super tropical brux trois. This is probably my favorite beer I brew,  but I have never done one at 4% and I normally put little to no hops in the boil. For this one we went for a more traditional pale ale. The grain bill we used is from another non-brett 4% pale I have brewed The only change was made because of the low ABV and brett's inability to produce much if any glycol. We we added 10% rye malt to help with the perception of body. In my other brett pales I use white wheat which also really works well. Water was adjusted slightly to increase bitterness and we mashed at 157-8 to create our own dextrins.

For our brew day at the annex we followed the recipe very closely. The big difference was the use of 25% RO water, and no other mineral additions. A 45 minute mash instead of 60, and the use of BSI Brux Drie instead of the white labs Brux Trois.

The beer should be getting dry hopped right now and will be ready to be served at the annex in a week or two.

Here is a link to the original recipe

First Round NHC - 2014

This year I decided to enter the National Homebrew competition.  They implemented a random lottery to enter this year. You had to give them a few choices for judging location and a max number you wanted to enter. It was said you might not get exactly what you wanted. I ended up getting my first choice for location and the max numbers of entries that I requested, which was four. 

I am very happy to say that three of those four ended up taking a spot in the top three in their respective categories!

I sort of entered at the spur of the moment and had not planned out anything at all. I didn't really have much in the way of options of what to enter. It really was just what I had around at that particular time. Three of the beers were my most recently brewed, and one was brewed in 2010 (entered because I really did not have anything else).

#1 American Bastard - 8A English Standard Bitter – 2nd Place
Brewed with Tim Cantwell and Ryan Buxton

This is a really good 3.8% pale ale. Honestly this is more of an american style beer. It was fermented with conan yeast (said to be English), and uses some fruity american hops like mosaic and amarillo. Most of those were added towards the end of the boil. I entered it into English because I was a little worried about a small session beer like this competing against American pales that would have had higher OGs. Guess it worked!

#2 Tropic Thunder – 23A Specialty Beer – 3rd Place
This is a beer brewed in the style of an American Pale ale with two big differences. Of the 23 ounces of hops used in this 10 gallon batch only 6% were used in the boil, and those were @ 15 minutes. The other big difference is that it was fully fermented with brett brux trois. This was brewed right at the start of 2014. I thought this beer was amazing when it was young, but still really good at it's current age. The fruitiness from the brett early on has started to be replaced by some nice funkiness. A version of this beer has been brewed a number of times now. Here is a link to the first one I made.


#3 Behemothic – 26B Other Mead (Braggot) – 2nd Place
This is a massive 15% abv braggot I brewed back in 2010. It is very experimental and was brewed to have some similarities to a gruit. It was brewed with chamomile and meadowsweet and fermented with an old ale blend of sacch and brett. This has given it a slight tartness which I think helps with the very sweet nature of this brew. Here is my original post on this brew.

#4 High Seas – 22C – Wood aged Beer – Did not place  Brewed with Tim Cantwell

This was one I was unsure of entering. It is a blend of beers with the main one being a baltic porter that had just finished aging in a 1st use rum barrel. At that time it was really hot with rum so I blended in a little bit of a imperial coconut brown ale. The crazy thing is that now that rum baltic has mellowed it might be one of the best beers I have ever had. Seriously! I guess it was still pretty rum forward when it was judged.

Hair of the... IPA (Blue Dot inspired IPA)

This past weekend we did a second brew of a pilsner based IPA. It is very loosely based on Blue Dot from Hair Of The Dog. This is by no means a clone attempt. However the grain bill should be very close to Blue Dot. Blue Dot grain bill is just pilsner and flaked rye. For our version we replace a little of the flaked rye with some chocolate rye. I like the beer with a little more color.


We also went for a full 20 gallon batch. The boil kettle was ridiculously full. It was quite an effort the first 30 minutes to make sure it didn't boil over.

Here is our 20 gallon recipe

I am hoping to bring at least 5 gallons of this beer up to the Mountain brewers festival in Idaho Falls this June. My home brew club has registered for a booth. We will be serving our beers right alongside all of the commercial brewers!

El Jefe - India Dark Ale

I wanted to do something with all the Conan yeast sitting at the bottom of my fermenter. It seemed like such a waste to dump it. I first looked at attempting a Heady Topper clone. After looking at the thread on this subject on HBT, I decided to pass. That thread is over 200 pages and is a bit crazy if you ask me.

Instead I pulled out Mitch Steele's IPA book for something. While Heady Topper is not in this book, there is another recipe in that book from Alchemist.  El Jefe is a curious brew that I was drawn to when I first got the book, but never got around to brewing. It is not a Standard IPA, but it is not a Black IPA either. Kimmich instead calls this a dark India ale as the SRM comes in around 17. Besides the Conan yeast I was also drawn to the recipe because it is hopped entirely with simcoe, and it is a dead simple recipe.

While many brewers are adding a malt derived coloring agent in styles like black IPAs, it seems Kimmich just went for what tasted right, and left out the Sinamar coloring because in the end the beer doesn't have to be black. Again I like the simplicity of it all.

The brew day went off exceptionally well other than a slightly higher OG than I was shooting for.

Here is the recipe I used to brew this beer: