Bottle Day and Tasting – Ye Old Confused Brown Ale

With this Brown Ale being my first try at home brewing, I was a little like a new father.  Always looking in and checking it, at one point even sitting quietly and listening to the sound of the airlock bubbles popping.  It was oddly relaxing and enjoyable.  A week before I was planning on bottling, I was asked to travel for business for 3 weeks.  I was a little concerned but decided instead of bottling early or transferring to a bright tank, to just leave it alone in the primary fermenting carboy and let it go.  All in, the beer was primary fermenting for 5 weeks.  I put it in the refrigerator in the basement for 24 hours at about 5°C(41°F) in order to “Cold Crash” the beer and encourage the yeast and any other particle floating around in there to fall.  Once I finally made it home I got down to my first beer bottling.  I have never bottled beer before but have bottled wine with my mother (Mama Thirsty we shall call her) back a few years ago.  For a couple years Mama Thirsty and I split on batches of wine at one of the local “Make Your Own” shops.  These shops are fun in that you can have some of the experience of making your own wine without the expense of all the equipment and all the work associated with cleaning, sanitizing and testing.  You get to pour in the yeast and let someone else manage the fermenting and racking activities and then all you need to do is bottle the wine.  As I said we did this for a year or two until Papa Thirsty admitted that he really didn’t like the wine that much and he’d rather buy his favourite brands. 

After that extended tangent, I’ll get back to bottling the Brown Ale.  2 days before we were supposed to fly back to Canada to celebrate Christmas with our family, I decided I had enough free time to bottle.  I added 67g of corn sugar to a small sauce pan with a half litre of water and brought it to a boil.  While waiting for that to cool I pulled a sample of the Brown Ale to get a final gravity reading and found that after 5 weeks the gravity was 1.018.  This means the final beer should be around 7.7% alcohol by volume and may be on the sweet side.  The corn sugar solution was added to the bottling bucket and the Brown Ale was siphoned on top so that it mixed well.  From this 20 half litre bottles were filled and boxed up.

All in all the bottling was really easy.  I fully expected to spill half of the beer on the counter or something to fall into the bucket.  This whole process has been too easy despite the mistake with the boil pot, so I’m fully expecting lightening to strike or something.  This is the very first time I’ve tried to do this, in a country where I’m not really confident with the language, with ingredients that are not usual. 

Showcasing GF Engineer's new label - Christmas gift from one of the best Brother in Law's around!

Tasting

Let’s move forward in time about 3 weeks or so.  We arrived home from out Christmas Holidays with the families and I had about 3 days at home before it was back to England for another work trip.  Saturday before I flew out I put a couple of the Brown Ales in the fridge and decided to give them a try. 

I popped the top and poured one into a glass.  A nice, frothy, white head formed as I poured the beer, about 3cm thick.  It didn’t last very long but left some nice lacing on the side of the glass.  The most surprising thing about the beer is how beautifully clear it looked.  It was a beautiful dark gold in colour and crystal clear.   I don’t think the colour is appropriate for brown ale but I’m more than happy with it.

The smell of the beer is sweet and nutty with a little bit of the hops coming through.  The first taste is sweet.  There isn’t enough hop bitterness to balance the sweetness.  I don’t think the grains come through much, but then I haven’t done a beer with only rice syrup to compare.  There is no hint of alcohol in the taste, which I fully expected.

Overall this beer is quaffable and more than a little dangerous.  If the calculated alcohol content is true, then it’s close to 8% and doesn’t taste like it.  I think this is going into the re-brew pile but with adjustments to the hop schedule to help balance it out.  I’m also going to put a few at the back of the shelf and see how it ages, maybe if I’m lucky the hops with make a reappearance.

This was a good way to start 2013.

Enjoy!

Photos courtesy of Mrs. Thirsty

Brew Day - Ye Old Confused Brown Ale

One of the more popular brews on Home Brew Talk Gluten Free Forum seems to be LCasanova’s American Brown Ale.  After searching all over Europe for Briess Sorghum Extract Syrup, I gave up on trying to replicate the exact brew since there wasn’t a source for Sorghum Extract in Europe and shipping it from the good old USA was going to cost at least $100USD.  Looking at what I had local, I came up with using Brown Rice Syrup.

Brown Rice Syrup is basically made by boiling brown rice or brown rice flour to get as much starch out as possible, then an enzyme is added to convert the starch to sugar and the whole thing is reduced to get it to the right consistency.  Commonly the enzyme comes from sprouted barley, which is a no-no for any GFer, but gluten free versions can be purchased that are made from a fungal enzyme. 

Brown rice syrup is on the left.

Using Beersmith, which is a brewing calculator, I substituted Brown Rice Syrup for Sorghum Syrup and charged ahead.  There are certain values that are tracked and talked about when it comes to brewing, and by trying to maintain these values; I was able to come up with a clone recipe.  The basic values are Original Gravity (OG), Final Gravity (FG) and International Bitterness Units (IBU).  OG and FG are measurements of the amount of sugar in a liquid at defined times in the brewing process.  OG is a measure of the sweetness of the wort (beer before it hits puberty and begins that special time of change that will turn it into an Adult BEvERage) before the yeast is added.  FG is the measurement of the sweetness after the yeast is all tuckered out and there isn’t anything left for them to eat.  By comparing the difference between OG and FG you can find the amount of alcohol in the beer.  IBU is a measure of how bitter the beer is.  For example Bud Light chimes in around 6.4IBUs.

From the boiling pot to carboy.

This worked out great I thought, until brew day and I realized that I carried the wrong 1 somewhere and my brew pot was way too small to boil the full 10L of beer I was planning.  No big deal, I just moved forward with my plan putting only about 6L in the pot.  Everything was running fine, I steeped the grains that I had roasted 2 weeks before, boiled the hops and syrups as I was supposed to and after 90 minutes, set it all to cool outside.  When the wort cooled and I topped it off to the right volume, took a gravity reading (how much sugar is in there).  The OG was almost 20 points higher than it was supposed to be. 

No surprise an Engineer's mind came up with this set up!



Hydrometer

What was I to do, I could add more water and dilute the sugar, but that would also dilute the hops and it would wind up tasting like bland, thin tea.  After some thought I pitched the yeast as is, and by the next morning it was burbling away happily.  After going back into Beersmith and adjusting for my brew pot and the partial boil I realized that some of my assumptions of the syrups are off.  I adjusted the Maple Syrup and Molasses so that the estimated OG matched the reading with the hydrometer.  All that done I found that the bitterness might wind up a little low (with an IBU at about 13) and the beer may finish a little high on the alcohol (8.3% ABV).  Either way, I’m going to let this one ride, chalk it up to experience and I figure, it may need to age a while, but I’ll probably end up with something drinkable (eventually) and better than Redbridge.  Being the kind of person I am, I did a little research into Brown Ales.  In the 1700s Brown Ales were a lot stronger in alcohol than they are today with less of a hop bite.  So based on the history of brown ale and the fact that I used UK hops, this seems to fit right in with the English Brown Ales from the 18^th century.  Therefore, let me please introduce you to:

Ye Old Confused Brown Ale

Here’s the final recipe, I’ll follow up with some tasting notes before the end of the year.
Grain Bill
0.45kg Roasted Buckwheat – Steeped for 30 minutes @ 70°C
0.45kg Roasted Flaked Millet – Steeped for 30 minutes @ 70°C
1.8kg Brown Rice Syrup – Added 60 min remaining in boil
0.25kg Black Strap Molasses – Added at 20 min remaining in boil
0.25kg Maple Syrup, Grade C – Added at 20 min remaining in boil

Hop Schedule
10g Fuggles (4,98% AA) – Added at 60 minutes remaining in boil
15g East Kent Goldings (6.00% AA) – Added at 15 minutes remaining in boil

Misc Ingredients
5g Irish Moss for clarifying – Added at 10 minutes remaining in boil
100g Malto-Dextrin for body – Added at 10 minutes remaining in boil

After roasting the grains.

The grains were roasted to a nice brown colour with a little water added to the pan.  This is probably what gave me the most trouble through this whole process.  I didn’t want to burn anything so I went really slowly, with low heat and it took almost 6 hours to reach a colour I deemed good enough, though it might have been because it was 1am and I had to go to work in the morning.  Next time, I’ll use a higher heat to get less time and no water in the flaked millet; it just becomes a sticky paste that is a pain to work with.

Before nearly bursting open.

Another fun little lesson I learned is that the roasted grains soak up water like a sponge.  I think it was mostly the flaked millet, but good Lord the muslin bag nearly popped and I lost almost 2.5L of water from the brew kettle. 



All in all this was a fun experience.  Nothing disastrous happened (yet) so I think I’ll keep the hobby going.  I think I’ll plan on a Chocolate Oatmeal Stout next, Mrs. Thirsty loves chocolate and that should make the house smell like chocolate for a day or three.



Enjoy!

Photos courtesy of Mrs. Thirsty