Belgian Wit Review

Today was a brewing triumph. A week ago last Saturday I brewed my first attempt at a Belgian Wit beer, aiming for something a bit like a Hoegaarden - following a recipe out of Belgian Ale, by Pierre Rajotte which included crushed coriander seed and orange peel. I used the peel off a fresh organic orange rather than the prescribed dried peel as I didn't have the latter and thought it was worth a try. Reading through the book this week, it was clear that the traditional wit beer was always drunk very young, because in the days before hygiene was invented it began to sour very quickly (due to loads of lactic bacteria). So I thought why not go with that idea and cut right down on the brewing time. So tonight, it came straight out of the primary fermenter and into a keg - and on tap! 2 oz of brewers glucose in there, plus a teaspoon of lactic acid to bring the pH down a little (Pierre should it should be pH 3 point something, which is pretty acidic).

9 days total production time! I thought if it tastes to bad I can always let it sit a few days. It was pretty cloudy but generally looked the part. So, 5 minutes later I tapped off a small trial glass. So - how was it? It was, to be immodest, sensationally good. The flavour was much closer to the craft-brewed Huyghe wit beer sold by Tesco and M&S as a premium beer, with more body than Hoegaarden and more flavour - especially up the orange end of the palette. The body was higher than Hoegaarden and Huyghe though, which may be an illusion caused by the un-fermented glucose (which should ferment out over the coming week or so. There was already a modest but pleasant carbonation since it is just out of primary. And  it was white with yeast and general haze - some of which might come from the coriander I think. It was truly a white (wit) beer.

Anyway, the conclusion: Wit is the fastest brew in the west to get in a drinkable condition - could be great for summer barbies too. You just need some decent quality and freshly bought coriander seed that you crush just when you need it (Asian cooks swear coriander has to be very fresh for the best flavour) and a really fresh organic orange. Next time I might try adding a little wheat flour to the mash too (sprinkled on top is the way to go) to add a further authenticity and some more alcohol!

American Amber Review

I thought I'd do some quick notes on my American Amber - which was brewed on 3rd March and I now pronounce as ready. This was brewed from my Altbier book - Altbier by Horst Dornbusch. It was supposed to be a classic Dusseldorf Alt (although that style (even in the city itself) is a broad church). Actually, due to me messing up, it became something else! The recipe was actually contributed by the head brewery of Schumacher Alt Brewpub in Dusseldorf - which is the oldest alt brewery in the world. The recipe is unusual in that there are just two ingredients: Munich Malt and one type of hops. The plan was to use Mt. Hood (American hops) in place of the Hallertau Mittelfruh called for. In fact I messed up and used Target instead for the bittering - which gives a load of extra bitterness. In tune with what Herr Dronbusch called for I did a full 4 step mash. See earlier post for full details. Anyway, the result:

Opening: This has loads of carbonation. Served at 10c it began to froth slightly in the bottle and needed to be poured fast.

Colour: Surprised by how light it came out for an all Munich brew. It's the colour of an English bitter and a bit lighter than a typical alt (see Schumacher's page!). It has a nice red hue I like.

Pouring: Pours nicely but need to go slow - this has a lot of head. Not quite as much as say a Heffeweiss but more than any UK beer I've tried or brewed. Deep head (see above) lasted half an hour or more.

Aroma: Uncompelling to be honest. The original hop choice would have given something better maybe?

Flavour: It has loads of body and a super-silky texture. Powerful malt flavour balanced by a big load of hop bitterness, flavour and aroma - but not excessive. More than an English bitter but not as much as an American IPA. Target is not a classic craft brew hop but this works for me. The hops balance the maltiness to give a strong impression. 

All in all I'm really pleased with this. It's maybe something like a bitter, much fuller version of Alaskan Amber (from what I remember of drinking it in the US)...

Brew Day - Belgian Wit

The assembled brew kit. Left to right: Paddle (made by Rob), lauter tun, kettle (for mashing and boiling) atop 8kw propane stove, hot liquor tank (Burco, at the back!).

Recipe: 

Grains: 2.5kg lager malt, 2.5kg wheat malt

Hops: 1oz Saaz

Spices: 1oz crushed coriander, 1oz orange peel (off a fresh orange)

Mash: Step mash in 16ltr of filtered water, water pH pre-adjusted to 6 with carbonate reducing solution (CRS). Mash adjusted to pH 5.2 with lactic acid. 

Schedule: 15 min at 50c, 30 min at 62c, 15 min at 68c, 10 min at 70c, raise to 78c for mash-out.

Boil: Boil 1 hour with hops. Spices added at flame-out. 

Cool: 30 mins with immersion cooler

Result. Collected only 19ltr at 1050. The mash volume should (by my reckoning) have been only 13 ltr - may have caused an inefficient mash.

See Also: My beer design spreadsheet. All sorts of useful calcs. Take a copy and use! <link>

Brew shop

I went to buy some yeast for today's brew (Fermentis t58 - its Belgian - I use it all the time) - couldn't resist also buying heffeweiss, kosch * 3 (plus Free Glass), Fraoch heather ale and a Keller bier (on the right). Not quite sure what the latter is - presumably kind of a bottle conditioned lager... It has a yeast sediment in but not like heffeweiss - more grainy looking.

Love My Beer

Tonight's tea: Kerela prawn curry (this is a great recipe - one of the simplest curries ever, and one of the best), washed down with some of my American Amber (what I'm calling my over-hopped altbier). The amber is going down rather well, but I'm a little worried about the carbonation. I opened one yesterday and it proceeded to froth a fair amount of the contents out of the top of the bottle over the course of about a minute. From now on I'm gonna have to give it a good chill before I serve it. It's not that its ultra-high carbonation, although I do find the altbier yeast just goes on steadily but relentlessly fermenting for weeks in the bottle (or cask) - it must be more pressure tolerant than most yeasts or something! (contrasts with my Belgian strain, which needs months to reach a decent carbonation level). I think the problem is that the combination of the pure Munich malt grain-bill, the protein rest to push up the body, and a yeast with an intrinsic tendency to froth A LOT has added up to a very frothy beer.... It's great stuff once you get it in the glass - a good two inches of head that lasts forever - hence the use of my oversize LOVE MY BEER glass. But the glass does not lie.

Next Brews

My malt and hops order finally arrived (including six kilos of pale wheat malt) so I'm planning a brew day for the weekend! I have enough for two five gallon batches of wheat-based ale - first a Belgian Wit and following on a Westphalian Alt - both made with my pet house yeast strains German Alt and miscellaneous Belgian ale respectively. 

I've been re-tasting a few versions of the Belgian Wit style - Hoegaarden, Blue Moon (stateside version with some oats in there too) and Tesco's finest Belgian Wheatbeer - which comes in a nice Champagne-topped 750 bottle - made for them by Huyghe Brewery, who also make M&S Begian beers (I enjoyed the cherry wit) and Delerium Tremins. The Huyghe version was very good, but I'm afraid I liked Hoegaarden best. The Hoegaarden has quite a light body (and colour) and a mild fruity note, the Huyghe was fuller bodied and flavoured but had just a little too much of the orange peel flavour for me, and the Blue Moon was just a bit too understated. My recipe (out of my Belgian Ale bible) recommends coriander seed and orange peel as the flavourings, plus a light dose of Saaz hops. I'm using wheat malt rather than raw wheat just because it's a little easier (although probably less authentic). I'm wondering about the orange peel though as I don't want it to come through strongly like in the Huyghe version - one thing that crossed my mind was to try a little of a herb like lemon balm - which just happens to grow like a weed in my garden - instead of the orange peel. The prospect of overdoing it though, and brewing something that smells like washing up liquid, is a worry. I may just play safe and stick with a standard recipe for the first shot at the style.

Anyway, that's all for the weekend, but brings me on to the next thing... I just bought a book: Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation. I became rather excited about brewing gruit ales (see previous post) and wanted to get some more info on ingredients - but this book opens up a LOAD of other possibilities.Looks like one needs to go steady on some of the acred ehrbs though, judging from the book review I'm not sure if its in there, but one thing I'd like to try is brewing a full-strength malt-based version of an American rootbeer or a British Dandelion and Burdock (a similar old-style). I'm guessing that going way back they were once brewed as country ales - but I haven't fully researched that topic yet. Certainly haven't found a recipe yet, but watch this space!

Both Newer and Older Still

Going back ever further, to the time before hops swept across Europe's brewing scene, there was gruit. Seems like its making a comeback...Wall Street Journal article. It appears it could have Other Benefits too. Gruit ales also have their own website! www.gruitale.com. Interested to note from the abovementioned that Cologne - big brewing town and centre for Kolsch (the blond German ale cousin of Altbier) - was once a centre for Gruit ales.
I'm becoming increasingly intrigued by the prospect of  trying to brew a batch of gruit ale, especially as I read that the herbs involved are very different in their effect from soporific hops- with stimulant and possibly lucid dream inducing properties. I'm looking into sourcing some of the key herbs - sweet gale, yarrow and wild rosemary. Currently I'm drawing a blank in the UK, but I'm making enquiries!

New Brews from Old Roots

I'm planning two new beers for the coming weeks. First off is a Belgian Wit beer - brewed with a 50:50 mix of wheat malt and pale - with coriander and orange peel for flavour. I was thinking of using raw wheat, but my Belgian brewing bible, Belgian Ale - Pierre Rajotte, has two recipes - one with raw wheat and the other with wheat malt - so I'm going with the latter as its a little less scary (although probably less authentic). Wheat is hard stuff to mash with - you can get all sorts of problems with poor draining of the mash.
Beer 2 is going to be a shot at a wheat-based alt in Westphalian style. Again , nearly 50% wheat, but this time aiming at a German altbier style, and using some of the German ale yeast from my current altbier batch.

Pierre's book has some interesting background on Belgian wit brweing - including a complex account of how they used to brew. They had a really complex step mash a bit like the German decoction mash, but far more complicated, where you started with a cold mash and gradually heated it by taking some of the liquid, boiling it and re-adding it. It took all day to do apparently (maybe this fact led to its demise, and the temporary loss of the whole style). They used a system of lowered basket contraptions called stuykmandens to help extract the liquid from the sticky mash. I do wonder what kind of taste they got - and whether you could replicate the whole mash at home? Could be interesting. I found this like that might give some clues... Turbid Mashing.

The Westphalian version of altbier also interested me. The link I posted earlier to Old German Ale Styles contains a reference to the beers of Munster, in Westphalia - mentioning "As early as the 16th century Munster was a renowned brewing center. The main product of the town's breweries was Keut, a beer brewed from wheat, barley and hops. During the 1500's it had Gradually pushed out the older Grutbier. In 1591 the town boasted 56 Keut brewers, who exported as far as Emden and Osnabrück Ravensberg." A combination of wheat, barley and hops - This sounds very like my Wesphalian altbier recipe, suggesting to me that maybe modern Altbier and Kolsch are actually multiple separate survivors of the earlier pre-lager traditions. I'd love to know more.

Belgian Ale Two Ways

One of my favourite lunch meals back when I was a student was a beef and ale pie - served at the Ram bar with a half of Devenish ale. I've been meaning to try cooking with my home brewed ale for a while so I naturally gravitated towards Flemish beef in ale casserole - "Carbonades a la Flamandes" to give it a French name (can't tell you its name in its native Flemish). I picked out this version of the recipe - Hairy Bikers Carbonades Flamandes - because the Hairy Bikers (a very British cooking phenomenon I think) know how to cook - you're pretty much guaranteed of something that tastes right (they bear out the old observation that if you want great food, you need to look for the guy who likes to eat!). This recipe is really simple, but I think the original dish is even simpler - the bikers recipe has redcurrant jelly and vinegar to give the dish a little sweetness and sharpness, which the original doesn't. I used some of my tribute to New Belgium's Fat Tire as the ale - around 650ml of the stuff. After three or four hours in the oven the beef and onions and the beer had condensed down to dark deliciousness. Served with sweet potato mash and carrots and accompanied by more Fat Tire tribute ale - it was an immensely satisfying meal to ward off the ridiculously unspringlike weather (coldest March for 50 years here!).
To be honest the dish was just a little sweet for my taste - the ale was probably stronger and sweeter than the true dish would use - I believe it should actually be made with a low gravity Old Brown - which would be drier and also very sour. Sour beers are something I've not got into brewing yet (not really something you find in the UK). Maybe the trick would be to add some more vinegar to the dish and ditch the redcurrant jelly next time - or find some sour ale. It was good though.
On the altbier front, I tasted a little of what I bottled yesterday. I rather fear that what I though might have happened did happen. I used the wrong hops - Admiral rather than Mt Hood - for the bittering. It's definitely bitter. Not necessarily in a good way right at the moment - but I think with a bit of luck it should mellow out in a couple of weeks in the bottle. I may have to pretend its an American Amber Ale... After all, pretty much no one in this country will know the difference!
BTW to those Americans who swear Fat Tire isn't a Belgian Ale, of course you're right - its brewed in America therefore it is definitively American. But style-wise Belgian beer is about as broad a church and you can imagine - there are as many styles as there are beers - and Fat Tire is pretty close to the mid-strength ales you find a lot - like De Koninck. So - it's Belgian enough for me!

Satisfactory evening's work

Altbier... Done!

Well - ready in two weeks. All bottles I own are now filled with beer.

Risk of running out... Mitigated!

My Top Five Home Brewing Books

Here are my top five brewing books - in order of purchase. There were more before that, going back to my childhood (I started around age 12, making country wines). The first beer book I got was "Brewing Better Beers" by Ken Shales. That was one from a long time ago - when home brewing had only just been legalised in the UK. Quite a character in his day, old Ken - maybe worthy of more research. Anyway, my top five:

• Brewing Beers Like Those You Buy - Dave Line 
• Dave Miller's Homebrewing Guide
• Altbier - History, Brewing techniques, Recipes - Horst Dornbusch
• Belgian Ale - Pierre Rajotte
• The Brewer's Apprentice: An Insider's Guide to the Art and Craft of Beer Brewing, Taught by the Masters - Greg Koch, Matt Allyn

Next on the list is a book on French Biere De Garde - or maybe German Wheat Beers.

Small Beers

According to what I've read, altbier (my glad obsession) is traditionally served in a simple straight sided glass of capcity 200ml, 300ml, or 400ml. By English standards these are small glasses for beer - the UK pint is about 567ml, or 20 fluid ounces - bigger than the US pint, which is 16 ounces (which came about from a divergance when the US adopted the beer gallon as standard while we in the UK adopted the wine gallon... both had 8 pints, but were different sizes!). I now have pretty representative glasses of those altbier sizes. I have to say that the tiny 200ml is great for beer. If you have a draft system at home as I do, you can start with a small one after work - then enjoy a top-up or two with dinner, and eventually loose track by bedtime. I wondered if England always had an insistence on beer coming in pint and half pint sizes, given that our beers were once much stronger - at least the strong ales drunk by the better off were. I found this link about legacy measures. It seems in Australia they have (or had) a whole range of measures down to a fifth of an imperial pint (called a small beer), or a quarter (called a pony). I wonder if this a legacy of an earlier British system, but I can't find any record of it. Old measures link.
Somewhere else I was reading that in olden Germany practially every city had its own measures - many with a pint-like measure around the 400ml mark - so presumably that's where the Alt and Kolsch (Cologne's legacy ale style) glass sizes originate. I'd like to know more - I had some references I appear to have lost but I'll try to include them if I can find them again. For tonight, my small glass is empty and I'm done.