Une Autre, SVP! Tasting

This week we tried our saison for the first time and we're thrilled with the results. The beer has a nice citrusy lemony flavor and a great flavor contribution from the French saison yeast. I think as Spring rolls into Summer this will be an excellent warm-weather beer - just like a saison should be!

While this is technically our second beer where we used a yeast starter, it's the first one we're tasting as the breakfast stout still has a few days to go before it's ready. Honestly it's a bit hard to say what the flavor improvement might have been compared to pitching a yeast pack directly into the beer. With a beer this light too, the difference in yeast count between the smack pack and the starter probably wasn't that high anyway. Still, it would be a lot of fun to do a comparison test at some point where we split a batch of wort and use a starter in one and a smack pack in the other.

The other new thing we did with this beer was use fermentation control all the way from the start of fermentation. There is a ton of (mis)information on the internet in the home brew community about the right way to control fermentation temperature. The core of the confusion comes down to the "ideal temperature" for the yeast mixed with the fact that a wort at the height of fermentation can be as much as 10F degrees higher than ambient. So if my saison yeast likes 71F, do I set my temperature-controlled room at 71F ambient and let the beer naturally rise above that during early fermentation? Or do I try to control the ambient temperature in a way that keeps the wort temperature closer to 71F?

I talked with the owner of my local home brew store about this, and he said to just set the ambient at the desired temperature for the yeast (71F in this case) and then don't worry about the wort temperature. The issue with trying to use something like a thermowell (putting the temp controller sensor inside the wort itself) to control the ambient temperature is that by the time you've heated the air around the wort enough to get 3+ gallons of wort up to temperature, the air temperature can be well over 100F. Then just because you're turning the heat source off, you still have super-hot air that ends up causing the wort to overshoot the desired temperature.

If we were using a heat source such as an electric wrap around the fermentation vessel, where it turns off all heat completely as soon as the wort reaches temperature, then it might be a different answer. With our setup though, we went with just setting the temperature at 71F and left it there for the whole fermentation, even if it meant that the actual wort temperature was rising above that during some of fermentation.

Again it's hard to really say specifically what this particular beer would have tasted like without temperature control, or with a cooler ambient temperature during the height of fermentation (more experiments ideas!), but the fact that we used temperature control and the yeast starter this time with tasty results is a great sign that, at the very least, we don't seem to be screwing anything up. Hopefully I don't eat those words in a day or two when we try the breakfast stout. :-)

One thing I noted in the brew day post for this beer was that we came in 4 points shy of our 1.050 original gravity target. Conveniently our final gravity also ended up 4 points low of the recipe (finishing at 1.004) so we still ended up right at our target of 5.5% ABV. Apparently the issues we had with the strike temperature didn't hurt us too much.

As for the name - it's mostly just a reference to the French saison yeast we used, but also sort of borrows from a funny little interaction with a waiter in Paris when we were there for our honeymoon. Amy was trying to order another of the same beer (Une autre de la meme chose) but butchered the phrase. The waiter just smiled at us and happily brought her beer. Just one of many cases of the Parisians being so much nicer than their reputation. :-)

[ Saison Brew Day ] <---

The Quad Of My Dreams Tasting

After 3+ months of waiting, our Belgian quad is finally ready to drink - mostly. In the last few weeks we've opened about a half dozen bottles and been about 50/50 on whether they're carbonated. I'm not sure what's causing the inconsistent carbonation with the bottles. Maybe we just tried opening them too soon and in the last week or so they're finally starting to be more reliably carbonated. It'll be interesting to see going forward if any of the rest of the bottles are also not carbonated.

The first one we opened was definitely not carbonated, and an uncarbonated beer has a significantly sweeter taste due to the unfermented sugars, in addition to obviously being flat. Amy's assessment of that first tasting was "This is not the quad of my dreams."

Since then though, the bottles that have been carbonated have actually turned out pretty well. The beer absolutely tastes like a quad, and finished up just over 10% ABV. Initially I was worried that some of the sweetness or alcohol sharpness that I first tasted in our quad were off flavors, but after tasting other quads since then I've realized that those are just normal properties of the style. This has been one of the unexpected side-effects of making our own beer - that tasting the different flavors of a beer we make in a particular style makes me more aware of different flavors present in that style even in commercial beers.

As of this writing, we have our saison in the fridge ready to be tasted for the first time and our breakfast stout only a week away from being ready. They're our first beers with starters and with start-to-finish temperature control, so I'm really excited to see how they turn out. Stay tuned!

[ Westvleteren Abt 12 Brew Day ] <---

Saison Brew Day

I'm falling behind on blogging, but a couple weeks ago now (March 28th), we brewed our lightest-colored beer ever - a saison! We were looking for some variety from all the dark beers we've brewed, plus with the weather getting better we wanted a nice lighter flavored refreshing beer. There aren't a ton of great Spring seasonal beer styles, but Amy and I both love saisons and found a good recipe online.

This was our second attempt at using a yeast starter. It was much smaller this time, despite the same batch size, because the saison is so much lower gravity than the breakfast stout. We used Fermcap this time and there was no foaming over while boiling the starter!

The biggest problem with the brew day this time was the mash temperature. We used the auto-calculated strike temperature in BeerSmith of 160F, but ended up with the initial mash temperature of about 157F instead of down around 149F. I had to mix in some ice to the mash to get it down to temperature. The biggest concern with the temperature being too high is that it would result in a lower-attenuating wort. The recipe calls for a starting gravity of 1.040 and a final gravity of 1.008 for an ABV of about 5.5%. The low final gravity is from a highly attenuating wort. If the mash is too hot then the wort won't get to as low of a final gravity, resulting in a lower-alcohol (and potentially sweeter?) beer. Our starting gravity ended up at 1.036 instead of 1.040 too, so that will also contribute to a possibly lower alcohol. We'll have to wait and see what gravity we reach after fermentation to see how much of a problem the temperature was.

After the brew day, I spent some time adjusting the numbers in BeerSmith to hopefully calibrate it better to what we're seeing in reality. I changed the grain absorption rate slightly to match the water we're losing during the mash so that we're better at hitting our pre-boil wort volume. I also changed our brewhouse efficiency so that we should get closer to our intended starting gravity. The third thing I changed was the mash tun temperature, which was listed as 71F originally. Since we're doing BIAB, the "strike" water is actually in the pot getting warm along with the pot itself, so it's not getting poured into a mash tun and losing temperature from the cool mash tun itself. By making BeerSmith think the mash tun temperature was actually around 155F, it looks like it'll give us a more accurate strike temperature, so that after we pour the room-temperature grains in we're at the target mash temperature. I'm looking forward to brewing our next beer and seeing if the number adjustments help us get closer to the targets in the recipe.

---> [ Une Autre, SVP! Tasting ]

If This Is Too Good For You I've Got Some Crap

Back in mid-January we cracked open the Oatmeal Stout we brewed with Craig and got our first taste of the finished product. The regular stout is a tiny bit on the sweet side, but does have a little bit of roasty malt character. The bourbon-oaked version seems to have lost all the real "bourbon" flavor that it had when we bottled and only the oak and some vanilla remain. The result is a beer that tastes more like a really oaky chardonnay than a roasty (let alone bourbon-flavored) stout. Still, both beers are totally drinkable and hopefully Craig had fun being involved in the brewing process.

The name was all Craig's idea and I absolutely love it. It's based on a quote from the Simpsons episode "Burns, Baby Burns." Our non-bourbon version is "If This Is Too Good For You I've Got Some Crap," with the bourbon version being "If This Is Too Good For You I've Got Some Bourbon Barrel Aged Crap." Super-long names for sure, but every time I see them on untappd I smile.

[ Oatmeal Stout Bottling ] <---