What Homebrew Are You Drinking - July Edition

I'm cracking some older bottles tonight it seems. Here is an English Mild which a small batched off of another brew. 3.5% and smooth malty goodness! Cheers!

 

Last one for tonight. Biere de Garde brewed with 2 lbs of oranges from my own tree. Much better than I was hoping. 5.6% with dry Abbaye ale yeast from fermentis. Cheers!

 

Opened my last bottle of Patersbier we brewed in early June...

 

Guava raspberry gose

 

Throwing down some None More Black.
Left pour has raspberries, cacao nibs, and rye whiskey oak. Right pour has a heavy rye whiskey oak treatment. Both are fucking face melters.

 

What's the ABV on those and how long does it take from brew day before they're drinkable?

 

20%+. I let them age three months before kegging and tapping.

 

Damn! I'm surprised it doesn't need 12+ months to mellow out. I want to do something like that eventually, maybe closer to 17%, but I was concerned about how long it would take. I typically give anything over 10% at least 6 months.

 

Do you keep the beer on the yeast cake throughout this entire time, or do you at least do a secondary?

 

Are you conditioning/aging in bottles, or are you bulk aging in a carboy/fermenter that entire time? A few months in a carboy will have a much, much greater impact on mellowing things out vs having the beer in bottles that long. It also helps that I ferment this beer cool, and that I'm used to drinking this shit.

I ferment for ~ 3 weeks in primary, then get it off the yeast cake (autolysis is a much bigger risk with a high abv, vs a regular brew). I then let it sit in secondary until ready.

 

So you start pitching your sugar additions after high krausen every 2-3 days?

 

For strong ales I typically do primary for a month, secondary (usually on oak cubes) for 5 or more months. I usually wait 2 months to pop the first bottle and find they get better and better after that. I've wondered what the affects of bulk aging vs. bottle aging are, so I'm glad you brought that up.

LOL

 

At last, @OldSock's Hoppy French Saison! I'm pretty happy with how this beer turned out - I had a run of a few batches with off-flavors, but this one seems to be fine. It's very light (despite an ABV of ~7%), with just a hint of tartness and, uh, yeasty flavor? Sorry, I'm really bad at describing flavors. The head is pillowy soft, but it doesn't hang around forever the way you describe it on your blog. Anyway, it's a great beer for the hot weather we're having, so thanks for the recipe!

Question: if I wanted to make the same beer but get a bit more of a peppery phenol flavor, what could I change?

 

Once the brew hits 1.028 or less (takes a few days) I start feeding 16-24oz of sugar every 8-12 hours. As it slows I slow feedings to every 16-24 hours while reducing the quantity of sugar (dextrose) to 8-12oz. I try to time it so that my last addition barely ferments out, maximizing the boozy goodness. The batch I'm working on right now started with an OG of 1.097, and I fed 13lbs of sugar into it, with the gravity sitting at around 1.028 now.

 

Thanks for the tips. Bad ass.

 

Try adding a ferulic acid rest (~113F) at the start of the mash.

The other option is to try a different saison yeast strain. French Saison tends to be one of the more fruity, less spicy options.

 

Thanks for the suggestions! I read up ferulic acid rests and it sounds like that would give me more banana/clove flavors, which isn't quite what I'm looking for. Maybe I could try making the same recipe, but swap the yeast for WLP565 to get some more spiciness and black pepper flavor?

 

Ferulic acid frees a phenol precursor, so it certainly wouldn't increase banana (ester isoamyl acetate). The tricky thing is that I haven't ever been able to figure out what specific phenol is responsible for the "peppery" flavor of Belgian strain. It may be 4VG (the same as clove in a hefeweizen) with a different impression because of the other compounds.

Another option is to simply add a few grams of black pepper at the end of the boil.

 

Wow, Such Peaches, my white peach gose. Used the white peach puree from The Perfect Puree and it's fantastic. Tastes like a salty peach Jolly Rancher.

 

Carbonation test of my Stone 11th Anniversary Sublime Self-Righteous Ale
10 days on the bottle
Dry hopped with 70 g Amarillo/Simcoe /11 L
yeast slurry harvested from Stone IPA



I think this is the first Black IPA I've tasted that actually tast hoppy, very nice