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.

Hoegaarden and other heirloom beers

Down at Cafe Rouge for Sunday lunch, courtesy of some Tesco vouchers to bring the price for the four of us down from eighty quid to around twenty. Really nice meal (especially for a fiver a head). Decided to have the Hoegaarden - thankful that they have a couple of nice beers (Leffe also)... I wanted to compare it with the nottle of M&S Belgian Wit I had the night before (which is brewed for them by the Huyghe Brewery -who also brew some of Tesco's finest range, along with Delerium Tremins and many other beers pretty much unobtainable in the UK). Hoegaarden held up well - slightly lighter and fruitier, and equally refreshing.

Since you see Hoegaarden all over the place these days, it's easy to forget that the beer style to which it belongs - the Belgian Wit style - was effectively extinct for many years, until it was revived by Pierre Celis (former milkman), the founder of Hoegaarden, who started a little craft brewery that brewed the style. He eventually sold up to the big boys and moved to Austin, Texas, where he founded another brewery making effectively the same style. Tom Man! 

I've been wondering how much of the diversity of olden-times brewing has been lost, and how much could yet be recovered. Happened upon this great page on legacy (pre-lager) German beer styles, which makes fascinating reading. I'm still only part way through digesting it - but what jumps out is how many legacy wheat beer styles there were. Also how the surviving Altbier (Old beer)style of Dusseldorf and north Germany is just the tip of an old iceberg of ale styles - some of which were very different from any surviving styles. I also read somewhere (must find the ref) that Cornwall also brewed a white beer in times past. So many beer styles to brew - so little time. It's making my head spin...

Shopping for Beer

Saturday tends to be my shop-beer day. Here was today's purchase Batemans Dark Lord at an excellent price of £1.39 in Aldi today. Since I tend to end up brewing dark beers (there is somehow an attraction to them - kind of an extra perceived value or something) I've started to gravitate towards them on the odd occasions I buy beer. This happens less and less, because I'm finding the stuff I'm brewing is mostly much better (a few exceptions - Bristol Beer Factory often seem to hit the spot). When I buy beer, I'm looking for:

1. Style - continental craft-brewed ales are top of the list. German, Belgian, French Biere De Garde if I ever see it (which is seldom - why has French beer disappeared from our supermarket shelves?). I'm trying to find really great craft-brewed British beers too, but they're not the norm.
2. Strength - for everyday I'm looking for a five point something. The big beers are great with food but (for me) overpowering on their own. I like the idea of them but find I seldom drink much when I have them in.
3. Bottle and label. The bottle has to be good, strong and REUSABLE (by me!), which means the label needs to be paper, stuck on with some kind of normal glue. Handily, the Belgian and German beers are always like this - they must know about the thrifty reusing of bottles. Sadly many many British ales are a challenge - look out for plastic labels with shiny bits - they're hell to get off (I end up using white spirit - it really shouldn't be necessary).

Back to Batemans Dark Lord (enjoyed with a plate of jerk Chicken Rice and Peas). It claims a gold medal at the worlds top 50 beer competition. To be honest though I was only mildly impressed. It has a colour similar to my Dark Alt (my all-time favorite brew) - claiming to be a ruby ale, it's almost black until you hold it to the light, and see the lovely clear ruby glow. But the head disappeared in a few moments - and the beer drank rather thin. I'm not crowing about my beer - but mine was silky-rounded smooth and dark, with a deep-seated bitterness. This was lighter bodied, less bitter, and didn't have the silky texture. There was a rather nice toasty flavour in the Dark Lord though, and the it was refreshing but satisfying with the food. I think the big difference in the beers is the Munich malt I use, plus the Altbier step mash. But it all just shows once again, I just like my beer better. Mmm. 

Top 5 Beer Blogs

Top 5 Beer Blogs. All found recently during a quest for other like-minded and more evolved bloggers. All awesome!

1. Beerly Cohereny - lots of good beer reviews and comments. An awesome collection of Belgian beer reviews and an acknowledged reference on the subject
2. Belgian Beer and Travel - lots of beer and travel . Very knowledgeable!
3. Have Beer Will Travel  - this man has a remarkable appetite for beer, food and travel. Respect!
4. A Beer in the Afternoon - Wide ranging, cosmopolitan beer man!
5. Pete Brown's Beer Blog - beer writer Pete Brown's blog. Very good, with lots of writing but less hands-on-the-beer stuff.

Free Beer

I'm a bit slow - I should really have heard of Free Beer. "Free as in free speech" as it says on the website.

Free Beer is - in case you as slow as me, an open-source beer brand invented by some Copenhagen IT Students along with Superflex - a Copenhagen art collective. The idea is that the recipe and the branding are open-source, so anybody can use them to make beer and sell it, provided that if they make a change to anything they have to put the changes back in the open-source - which means making it publicly availabe free of charge with the same conditions.

Nice idea - but apparently the early recipes weren't that great. The current one - Version 4.0 (!) looks good though - in fact very good!. For posterity here it is (reproduced with no change to the T's and C's and wotnot)

INGREDIENTS

MALT:
3,8 kg Maris Otter (3,0 SRM)
800 g Munich Malt (7,1 SRM)
200 g Crystal Malt (66,0 SRM)
100 g Brown Malt (95,4 SRM)
80 g Carafa Special Type III (710,7 SRM)
HOPS:
7.48 AAU Northern Brewer hop pellets (FWH.)
(25 g of 8.5% alpha acid)
2.92 AAU Williamette hop pellets (7 min.)
(15 g of 5.5% alpha acid)

SPICE:
35 g Guaraná berries
Crush Guaraná beans and infuse in 1 quart of hot boiled
water (max temperature 78 °C).
Filter the mixture and add to the boiling wort the last 15
minutes.
YEAST:
London Ale (White Labs #WLP013)

STEP BY STEP

Mash crushed grains at 66,0 °C in 13,5 L of water.
Hold mash at 66 °C for 60 minutes.
Heat to 72 °C.
Hold mash at 72 °C for 5 minutes.
Heat to 78 °C.
Hold mash at 78 °C for 10 minutes.
Sparge with 15,5 L of 78 °C water.
Collect 22,7 L of wort.

Now this looks like a good, well balanced recipe - a bit of Munich to give it a silky smoothness and that Carafa III will give it a darker colour - pretty dark in fact. The proportions look very like one of my altbiers - hence the nice red colour in the pic. The Guarana is a bit of an issue - I have no idea where to get raw guarana berries around these parts. They're high in caffeine so this could end up like a beer red bull. Good for a night out!

I might give it a shot and take it into the office one Friday - along with garish labels, but I might just rock the boat and leave that guarana out.

Best

Returning at 9:30pm after a session down at the climbing wall, and hurting all over (in a good way), I needed something restorative. I reached to the very back of the beer cupboard to find the second-last bottle of something I brewed back in September  It was supposed to be a regular altbier - based on a recipe I fond posted on HomeBrewTalk for Uerige, that reportedly came from the head brewer (the guy on the video from my post a couple of days ago). Anyway - I made a few errors - some Caramunich malt went in, that shouldn't have been there. Too much of the dark malt went in (I was working against the clock). Anyway, what came out was a DARK beer - almost like a London porter, but not quite that dark. There's no normal equivalent to this beer (that I've tried) and it is just silky smooth.Now after 6 months it's reached a silky perfection. It is my ultimate beer. And I only have one, maybe 2 left. Ain't it always the way. Note to self - don't start drinking until its ready. Second note to self: keep better notes of what ACTUALLY went in the brew.

Here, for posterity is roughly what went in to a 5 UK gal batch (that's 6 US gals) (I think!). Note, this was my old inefficient mash method so only 60% efficient...

Caramunich-  500g, (or did I use a darker crystal -m I can't remember!)
Munich malt - 1kg
English lager malt - 4.5kg
Carafa 3 roast malt - 75g - but maybe much more! I reckon the colour is around 80 EBC

Hops:
Perle: 30g
Tetnang: 15g

I used an English infusion mash at 65c for 1h 30.

Enjoy.

Papal Ale

These reports of the papal conclave being provided with an official beer by Benedictine monastery in San Benedetto, Italy... Is this for real? I'm not sure where this story first appeared - but its quoted on a BeerAdvocate thread see here.

Are those guys really Benedictine monks? Three observations: 1. The beards look just a little bit like they were stuck on. 2. They look like they're sharing some kind of in-joke (at our expense?) 3. The little guy looks like Will-i-am. Might be real of course - if it is, I'd love to try that Italian-Benedictine-monastery ale. I almost hope it is, as the idea of a load of Cardinals having a boys night in with several cases of beer is somehow really cheering.

Movie Night

I just discovered how to add videos to my blog. Like a kid with a new toy... Here goes!

Here are the good people of the Bristol Beer Factory... They do make exceedingly good craft beer. But who are those girls, and why are they hot-tubbing in the brew-house equipment?

Moving swiftly on...

Zum Uerige - Düsseldorf's favourite altbier brew-pub (arguably). That stuff looks good! Surprising how much pressure the wooden barrels will hold... Think I need one of those!

And here is how they brew it. A less than exciting presentation to be honest - unless you are very into beer.

Finally a greeting from the De Koninck brewery in Antwerp (that's in Belgium, if you're American (and of you're not)). Interesting fact: The class that De Koninck is served in is called a Bollick (in case you wondered what he said).

Next time on Old Bull Brewing... some more about beer.

More what's on

I noticed my post "What's on" gets more traffic than any other post. So - I continue with the winning formula.

Tonight I'm drinking mostly cider (hard cider if you hail from the USA). This is in honour of local footy (socker for those in then US) team Bristol City FC - who's fans call themselves the Cider Army - and have the most cider-inspired array of songs of any football team in the world. (Thatcher's GOLD - always believe in your soul - you're indestructable... always believe... etc). God, I love this city.

Anyway - BCFC are sponsored by Blackthorn cider - which is okay for a big commercial cider (and they have the money and the excellent sense to sponsor a fine football team), but not as good as say Thatchers (see above hymn of adoration), who make some really fine ciders (Thatchers Gold is actually their high-volume cider and it isn't top-of-the tree) . Or what I'm drinking - which is one I got for Christmas, and is just pure nectar - the real deal. Wow - they have a nice little website too - Pips Cider - although presumably they don't make many bottles. Mine's hand-numbered in biro - 1110. This stuff is just natural fermented apples - like it should be.

Size Doesn't Matter

Any kind of beer-related web search will probably come up with a hit on the RateBeer site, the main feature of which is a crowd-sourced ranking of every beer in the world (pretty much). It's an amazing resource - they've reviewed a lot of beers! What interested me was to take a look at the top-ranked beers in the world, in the opinion of the many reviewers. This is a very American centric site, so the perspective was very interesting.
What you notice straight away when you view the top of the list is that it dominated by Big Beers - the Biggest of Big Beers! Half a year ago it was all Imperial Russian Stouts (or interpretations thereof) - mostly at the top end of the strength range. Now American Double IPA seems to be in there too - plus a few Trappist styles. I must admit that the only example of the double IPA style I've tried was a British one - brewed by those Brewdog boys (interested to note they were trained at Heriott-Watt brewing school - part of my old university). Can't say I was that keen - sorry. A bit like chewing hops (If I want to chew hops I have a fridge full of them - but I actually don't...). Also interesting was the comments attributed to some classic mid-strength European ales... De Koninck (Antwerp's classic pale ale) is dismissed by one reviewer with "Weak caramelly and minerally aroma. Weak caramelly taste with minimal hoppiness. Shockingly bland"... Schumacher Alt (classic Düsseldorf Altbier) gets a comment "Okay fresh malt. Not much else to see here". I'm speechless  It seems like in the world of RateBeer its got to be Big to be worth a second look. Belgian beers especially only seem to be worthy of attention if they're super-strong Trappist beers like Rochefort Trapistes. The Belgian dislike of excessive hops doesn't chime well with the US raters of beer. Fortunately there's plenty of craft brewers in the US who know better and brew beautifully balanced beers in styles that span the beer world - I just hope the less vocal US drinkers of beer hang in there. I guess this is just the pendulum swinging the other way after decades of ultra-bland lite lager. Maybe the pendulum has reached the other end of the swing... Personally I kind of hope so - although I hope it never swings back the other way... If extreme beer is just a sign of a vibrant beer culture I'll take it as a positive - but leave the drinking of it to those who like that kind of thing.

Support your local beer factory

Speaking of Bristol Beer Factory I found this blog entry about them. >>click here<<. I went to visit their set-up about three years ago and they hadn't quite reached the heady heights of high innovation they have today. They mostly did fairly traditional stuff, but they did let us try a German-style Heffe Weiss, which a German visitor on the same trip was absolutely amazed by, and they were doing their "twelve stouts of Christmas". I think their American assistant brewer has helped push them in some new directions, and some of their American craft movement inspired brews are really good - not because they're copies of the great American craft beers - Stone, Sierra Nevada etc.  but because they seem to bring the best of the US taste and blend it with English-style real ale culture ro make something new and fabulous.

Brew Dog have a newly opened place in Bristol - in Baldwin Street. Walked past it the other day and it looks good - but haven't sampled yet (maybe drop in tomorrow). I'm only familiar with their extreme-end output (their double IPA was just too much for me) so I'd like to see if they're making anything to compare with above mentioned local boys made good...

Brew Day

The supply company sent me out some replacement German ale yeast (which proved to be alive, thankfully) so today was Brew-day! It was rather a good one actually. I decided to brew a recipe out of my Altbier bible Altbier-History, Brewing Techniques, Recipes. Not just any recipe, but one contributed by Herbert Enderlein,  the brewmaster of the Schumacher brewery Dusseldorf - the oldest Alt brewery in the city. It's a a great recipe - because it's one of those classic beers that uses one type of malt and one type of hops (the other one I know is Hopback Summer Lightning (another beer classic). Enderlein's Alt uses Munich malt as the malt, and Halertau Mittelfruch as the only hops (Summer  Lightening is Marris Otter malt and East Kent Goldings hops).

The thing about full-mash home brewing is that there's a lot to do and a lot to remember, over the course of 4 hours or so. At any given time, you're doing one thing, while also trying to remember the things you have to get started to prepare for the next step down the line - like getting water heated ready to sparge (rinse the suger off) the grain. It's quite an intense few hours work - and there's always stuff that goes wrong. This time I nearly muffed the run-off - but thankfully I sorted the problem out and no harm was done. The mistakes get less each time, anyway, and its getting less stressful as I get the hang of it.

Anyway - it turned out well. I used the full Altbier mash recommened in the book - which is:

• 20 mins at 40 degrees (Celsius - this is Europe after all)
• 30 mins at 50 degrees
• 30 mins at 62 degrees
• 20 mins at 70 degrees
• Mash out (i.e. finish up before we run the finished wort off) at 76 degrees.

I tried (for the second time) the big pot on the stove method, stirring all the time with the big brew paddle my canoe building friend Rob made for me. This is more of a continental mash method (not many Brit homebrewers use it) but for me it works a dream and its pretty easy if you don't mind stirring a bit and you have a big paddle. The really pleasing thing was the mash efficency came out at 76% - which is really good for home brew. The Munich malt was pretty slow to drain, and I forgot the trick of cutting little lines in the grain layer to speed things up. But all in all, a good day's brewing. Can't wait to try this one - it came out this amazing amber colour.

My yeast is deceased

Yes - it's true. My Wyeast German Ale Yeast (ideal for Altbier) was dead on arrival at my house. It's not the fault of the extraordinary US beer yeast people at Wyeast Lab. Time of death for the little critters is unknown, but some time between the time over a year ago when they got sealed in their little plastic sachet (where they are only supposed to live for up to 6 months), and yesterday, when I burst the little container invisibly into the outer sterile culture medium. Sadly the supplier (who shall remain nameless) was to blame for loosing the pack in the back of the warehouse for quite a few to many months.... I did all I could to revive the patients with fresh food - but to no avail. RIP little chaps.

Altbier - eh?

So what is Altbier then, I hear you ask (well, I don't really - but who cares...)

Altbier is a relic of the old era, before lager brewing swept Europe in the 19th centurey. It's an ale style - as were pretty much all beers back then (lager had started out as a small niche style, and only caught on when people worked out how to replicate the cold conditions found in the caves where it was originally brewed). So - altbier is an ale style - not unlike English ale styles of today (and maybe more like the English styles of longer ago). In fact it's probably closer to traditional Scottish ale styles like 80 shilling - which are a little darker, a little less hoppy and fermented a little colder than the English ales. I'm not that up on Irish red ale styles, but I think they may be similar too. Back then, all the cities of Germany would have had their own ale styles, before they went all lager on us. The ale styles that live on (apart from the wheat beer styles, which are also ales) are in the north - in and around Düsseldorf, where you  find Altbier, and Cologne - where you find the Kolsch style. I found this pretty good appraisal of  Altbier on brew-your-own (a fine and learned site, to be sure).

Anyway - what it really is is a devine nectar. Its a bit malty, with a lovely continental hop aroma and its served cool and well carbonated. I have this plan for a beer trip to take in Belgium, starting with Antwerp, where they make  De Koninck - another ale kind of in the English ale mould - and then nip across to Düsseldorf for the ultimate altbier brewpub pub crawl. I'd have to take in Uerige, which is the only altbier the Amercians have heard of for some reason, and also Schumacher-alt - which is the oldest altbier brewery in the city. There are dozens of other brewpubs and brews to take in. Got to do it some time.

In the meantime there is always Beers of Europe to fall back on - an endless world beer tour in the confort of your own living room. Or you can brew your own world beers...

What's On

A quick run-down of my current stock:

• On daft, there is the easy drinking house lager - brewed out of a Coopers lager kit - with an extra 500g of light malt and a half ounce of Mt Hood hops added for aroma. Brewed with a Fermentis lager yeast at the right kind of temperature (cold fermented, in the coldest room in the (undeniably cold) house). Very good indeed!
• Latest brew: New Belgium Fat Tire clone. I had this beer in Vegas last year, and its incredibly more-ish. My attempt is good - but came out dangerously strong. Not a midweek beer. Warm good feeling to New Belgium Brewing - awesome beer and great alternative attitude to running a business.
• Then (as I recall) Westamale Extra tribute beer. The real stuff is only brewed for the monks to have with dinner - its about 5%. My Recipe
• A "Belgian Special" Made with a Wilko Beer Kit with home-made candi sugar (loads of) - probably around 7.5%.
• An exceedingly dark (oops) German Altbier - brewed before I got my Altbier book, and with an English ale yeast. a total mish-mash and really all over the place - but one of my favourite brews. Not much left, sadly.
• Belgian Abbey Beer - intended to be a bit like Chimay. Not like Chimay but really good stuff - again, not much left (sad face). It comes in 75cl old Lucozade bottles. First of the new brewing craze, and used out-of-date hops - but none the worse for it. First beer to use home-made candi syrup.

Six beers. Need more. Plagued by dark  fear of running out.

Getting started

Before you can get started you need a few things. First off, you need some ingredients - some malt, some hops and some brewing yeast are the bare essentials (and all you should use if you go with the old (and still well observed) German purity law - the Reinheitsgebot)
Then, you need some hardware. With luck you might almost be able to make a start with what you have in your kitchen. Basically you want:

• Big pot to mash in and boil in
• Big spoon (big enough to stir big pot)
• Strainer (or lauter) to strain the malt grain from your mash, and your hops out of your boiled proto-beer (they call it wort - for some unknown historic reasons I don't know). You can make do with a muslin bag for your first shot (This is called the Brew In a Bag (BIAB) method. Or you can make something out of stuff you found in cupboards (I did this - its the true way of the craft brewer) - or splash out and buy something from one of the many MANY online suppliers.
• Saucepan - to be used as a big ladle for slopping stuff around
• Fermentation bucket - they're cheap and last years
• Piece of tube for syphoning.
• Bottles - don't pay for these - save your empties (or other peoples) - don't leave that party empty handed.

One you're started you can just go on and on improving your kit. The money you save, you can plough back into a better and better brew set-up!

My new fave site for malt is The Malt Miller - they have a lot of exciting continental stuff as well as some standard British home produced malt and hops (US hops too) and they're really not expensive. For gear my faithful suppliers are The Hop Shop (good for hops too) and Brew UK.

As for know-how there are some good forums. Jims Beer Kit is a good one in the UK. For the US Home Brew Talk is great - and its a lot broader - lots of US craft beer types, and people trying to do continental styles (with a touching naiivity mostly). I'll write more about all the fine detail in the dueness of course. Browse those links for now!! 

BTW I'm looking for some good continental forums (German, Belgian, French, etc.) to trawl for ideas. Hard to find as a language-challenged Brit - any pointers gratefully received...

How I do it

I've been making beer on and off for quite a few years. In fact I started at university, making two gallon batches in the bin of my room, in halls. It was okay too (well, I thought so at the time).

Each time I return to the brewing thing I do it a bit differently. The last couple of years I've been doing what's called a full mash - which basically means you start with the raw materials - mostly crushed malt grain and hops. You soak the malt in hot water - at a prescribed temperature, then you strain off the liquor and boil it with the hops. That gets you to a stage that's equivalent to what you get out of a can when you buy a beer kit - in about four hours!

That may seem a big waste of time, but there's lots of reasons to do this. First off, its cheaper. I can make a batch of full-on beer for about £10 (UK pounds) because the malt is cheaper in the raw state. The real advantages though are taste (like the best beer you ever tasted) and flexibility. There are literally dozens of ways of doing a full mash - and they all produce a slightly different product. Add to that a thousand combinations of different hops, malts, adjuncts (i.e. other random stuff) and you have a hundred lifetimes worth of combinations to try. What I'm into is brewing stuff I can't buy. Continental ale styles like Düsseldorf Altbier, Antwerp Pale Ale, Belgian Abbey styles... American craft beer styles, defunct heirloom styles  You can create them all in your own garage. I'm obsessed with Altbier at the moment - the sad thing is, I've never tasted a real one - only my own (sobs).

Can't wait for the next brew day (but I need to find some more bottles as all mine are FULL OF BEER!)

Cheers!

This is a journey into beer... Not train beer (Rudolph the Red LOATHES train beer), but (mostly) my beer that I brew at home and other beers too. Its going to be a gas (mostly CO2).

Brewing has, of late, become a bit of an obsession. I like brewing beer almost more than drinking it. Sometimes I drink extra beer just to free up cupboard space for the next exciting (well, exciting to me) creation. I thought blogging is one way of recording what I'm brewing and how it turned out - so I can look back in future years and wonder what I was thinking of, and why I couldn't think of anything more sensible and life enhancing to do with my evenings. Also maybe some other people can read this and wonder the same thing, or, god forbid, start down the slippery slope that is brewing and consuming ones own ales.