My First Kegged Beers

Its taken me a while to get a kegging system, mainly because I don't have the space or the money for the kind of multi-keg setup I'd like.  But after my trip home this summer I decided it was time to look into something basic, if only so that I could brew the kind of fast, low-ABV beers I missed from home without the hassle of bottle-conditioning.  I already had a very small fridge that I'd picked up for cheap from a graduating student---barely enough for one three gallon keg and a five pound CO2 tank, but I had to start somewhere!

I actually bought this fridge over a year ago, and it was only when I noticed the relatively cheap prices for new three gallon kegs at RiteBrew that I finally decided to put it to use.  I bought two kegs, even though I knew I could only fit one in the fridge.  My idea was to prime most beers with sugar, allowing one keg to condition at room temperature while the other served beer from the fridge.

This has worked well so far, and is even easier now that I've built a basic spunding valve to regulate the pressure in the keg.  It also fits with one of my ambitions with these kegs, which is to come as close as I can to something like cask-conditioned beers from back home.  I took my lead here from Terry Foster's advice in his book Pale Ale:

An argument against the use of kegs is that you have to push the beer through the serving line and tap by carbon dioxide pressure.  This might be all right if you are operating at CO2 levels of 2.0 or above, but it is not so good if you want a less gassy beer... There is a very simple way round this that I use.  When I fill the keg, I set the regulator to around  5 pounds per square inch and let the beer equilibrate over a few days.  I draw off a pint or two, set the regulator to 10 pounds per square inch, open the valve, allow the pressure to balance, and then turn off the valve.  The valve is opened only when the flow of beer slows while serving, and it remains open for just a few minutes.  In that way, the pressure in the keg always remains close to 5 pounds per square inch and the beer is perfect, no gassier than real ale served from cask by a beer engine.

So far I've found that I don't need to close the valve: setting the regulator to around 5 lbs per square inch is enough to serve most of the keg, and I can just turn it up for a minute if the flow stops entirely.

The results so far are still a way from cask-conditioned beer, though certainly closer than anything I managed with bottles.  For one thing, the serving temperature is too cold---I've bought the parts to build a temperature-regulator for the fridge, but I need to borrow some tools from a friend to do the wiring, and haven't got round to it yet.  Another problem---obvious in the pictures below---is that all of the beers I've brewed so far have chill-haze, meaning they are not at all bright.  I suspect this is a result of my BIAB process, combined with the shorter conditioning time.

Below are descriptions and photos of the first three beers I served from the keg: all dry and bitter, with a low-ABV.  I expect I'll mostly be brewing beers along these lines, sticking to bottle-conditioning for my saisons and sours, but serving almost everything else I brew (almost all of which is what people call 'session beer') directly from the keg.  In fact, I have a kolsch lagering in the fridge right now while I take a few weeks off booze.

One thing I'm particularly looking forward to is brewing some beers with American hops, something I haven't done for quite a while!  I gave up on making IPAs and pale ales early on, once I realised that it would be impossible to make really excellent versions until I could minimise the amount of oxygen the beer was exposed to.  To solve this, I picked up a cheap second-hand five gallon keg, and my plan is to use this as a primary fermentor for hoppy beers (another use for the spunding valve), transferring them directly to a serving keg (with dry-hops) with CO2.  I found this post from Ales of the Riverwards very helpful here.  But more on that in a month or two.

Bitter

Grist: Golden Promise (97%), Medium Crystal (3%)

Hops: EKG, Styrian Goldings

Yeast: Wyeast 1318

O.G.: 1.044

IBUs: 45

ABV: 4.4%

A standard recipe here, going for a lighter-coloured bitter without too much crystal malt character, nice and dry, with a moreish hop bite at the back end.  Most of the bitters I brew look something like this, though sometimes with slightly more crystal malt, and sometimes with a darker crystal malt.  Besides the bittering charge, this one had an addition of EKG at 20 minutes, and some Styrian Goldings at flameout.  In my experience, Wyeast 1318 tends to mute the hop character a bit, unless your dry-hop, so the end result was a sort soft hoppiness that blended well with the slightly fruity character of the yeast.  Very drinkable: this was my first beer in the keg, and it was a bit of a shock how quickly I finished it!

Dry Stout

Grist: Golden Promise (69%), Flaked Wheat (17.2%), Roasted Barley (6.9%), Chocolate Malt (4.%), Dark Crystal (2.8%)

Hops: Northdown, Challenger

Yeast: Wyeast 1318

O.G.: 1.044

IBUs: 39.5

ABV: 4.2%

What's not to like about dry stouts?  Bitter, roasty, and with a low ABV to boot.  I think I'll be making them a lot more frequently now that I have a keg.  I've been trying to come up with something a bit different from the standard home-brewer Guinness clone: something with a bit more hop character, bearing more than a passing resemblance to De La Senne's Stouterik.  The bitterness was nice in this one, balancing well with the fuller mouthfeel from the wheat, but I would have liked a bit more roast and/or chocolate.  Next time I might try pulverising the roasted barley and adding it post-mash, or perhaps backing down on the roaster barley adding more chocolate malt.  

One of my plans for this year is to try souring a batch of this recipe with the Omega Yeast lactobacillus blend.  My thought is that I could split this into small jugs, and then add it to regular batches to give a little lactic bite, either blending it in the keg and relying on the hops to keep the lactobacillus at bay, or maybe even adding it to the kettle for the last 15 minutes of the boil.  Watch this space.

Pale Bitter

Grist: Golden Promise (92.6%), Torrified Wheat (7.4%)

Hops: EKG

Yeast: Wyeast 1318

O.G.: 1.038

IBUs: 37.6

ABV: 3.7%

Here I was going for a pale beer, along the lines of the historical Boddington's Ordinary Bitter, or its modern counterparts like Marble Manchester Bitter.   Its supposed to be where Wyeast 1318 came from, after all! The original Boddingtons was reputedly intensely bitter, but I've also read that it didn't have much in the way of hop character.  With this in mind I decided to keep all my kettle additions before the final 30 minutes of the boil.  I did add a very light dry-hop to the keg though, giving it a delicate citrus aroma.  

I liked this beer A LOT, but I'm sure I'll tinker with the recipe a bit in future, perhaps trying a blend of different base malts.  To finish, here's a picture that gives a better sense of the colour of this beer (and also shows you where I write these posts!):

Using a Corona Mill to Make Fresh Masa

In keeping with the general theme of finding multiple uses for brewing related ingredients and equipment, I thought I'd write a quick post about an alternative use for Corona mills.  In fact, I shouldn't say 'alternative', since these mills are sold for grinding nixtamalized corn to make masa, and are being re-purposed by budget-conscious homebrewers like me for crushing grains.

To make masa you need dried field corn.  I've been using this stuff from Amazon, but when I get back from England I plan to see if I can find wholesale suppliers for all the unmalted grains I use in brewing and baking.  I also plan to try using this corn in some beer---either ground up into grits and boiled in a cereal mash, or maybe even in the form of mealy masa added straight to the mash.  But that's another post.

Once you have your dried corn, you need to nixtamlize it so that it will form a dough.  I first learnt about this process on an old episode of Good Eats, but recently I've been relying on the excellent description of the process in this post.  Nixtamlizing the corn involves boiling and soaking it in an alkaline solution: the most common way to do this is by using 'cal', which is also sold as pickling lime.  I add one tablespoon per pound of corn, make sure its well covered with water (it will expand as you soak it), then bring it to a boil for twenty minutes before letting it soak and cool overnight.

The next day you need to give the corn several rinses in clean water to get rid of the lime.  At the same time, you should try to agitate it or rub it together so that the hulls fall away from the corn (this will already have happened to most of them---they seem to sort of dissolve).  Then once the corn is clean and drained its time to get out your Corona-style mill.

Unlike brewing, we're not at all concerned to preserve any husk material here, so its fine to screw the mill down to its tightest setting.  I go down as tight as possible, so that it won't move, then back off a fraction and crush the corn.  Its a bit of work, and often frustrating as the mill works itself loose, but ultimately not that much effort.  The result is a mealy grain that compacts into a rough dough.

Now comes the hard part: do you want to run the grain through the mill again?  Lots of people recommend this, and it certainly leads to a finer texture in the finished product.  The problem is that milling the meal is much harder than milling the corn (at least with my Corona), because you have to force it into the drive shaft as you mill (it won't fall in by itself as grain or whole kernels do).  This makes milling the grain a second time significantly more difficult and time consuming.  I've done it four of the five times I've made masa, but on my most recent attempt I only milled it once, and I thought the results were acceptable in the tacos I made.

Once you have your meal, its time to decide what you want to do with it.  I've made tamales in the past, but the easiest thing (if you have a tortilla press) is to make tacos.  You work small amounts of water into the meal until it forms a smooth dough.  Be careful here: if you add too much at once, the dough will get sticky and it will be difficult to press it.  I've settled on a consistency I like through trial and error, but I get there by touch rather than specific amounts.  I then press golf-ball sized rounds of dough on a cast iron press lined with a cut-up ziploc bag.

Finally, I remove the bag and carefully peel off the tortilla: if you've got the consistency of the dough right this shouldn't be too hard, but sometime they stick, especially if the dough is wet.  I cook them on a wide griddle, following instructions from one of Rick Bayless's books: he has you lay the tortillas on part of the griddle set to low heat for about fifteen seconds, until they release from the metal.  Then you flip the to a hotter part of the griddle, cooking them for about 30-45 seconds on each side.  I like to transfer them to a basket lined with a kitchen towel at this point to steam for a few minutes.  After that, they're ready for filling!

I really like the results, but it is a lot of work, especially if you grind the meal more than once (this might be easier on a better mill).  We can get pretty good corn tortillas in the supermarket here (certainly much better than anything I ever had access to in England!), so this is only something I do when I have a bit of time on my hands.  That said, the masa seems to keep reasonably well vacuum-sealed in the freezer, so I've started making big batches and portioning it out for later use.  This means a lot of work up front, of course, but I think its worth it in the long run.

Beer Food: Limburger Sandwich

Here’s one for fans of funkier flavours: classic, working-class beer food that’s now probably an acquired taste.  Limburger starts off as a crumbly, salty cheese a lot like feta, but as it ages bacteria on its rind turn it into a pungent and creamy soft cheese.    The smell can be a bit of a shock if you’re not prepared for it: body odour, cheesy feet, that sort of thing. But the taste is actually fairly mild, at least at around 5 months which is when I prefer it.  After that it gets more savoury and tangy and can be a bit much for some people.

I didn’t know what I was buying the first time I picked some up: it was on sale, and I vaguely recalled hearing about it in some connection with beer.  Here’s what Wikipedia told me when I got home:

“In the early 20th century, Limburger sandwiches became a popular lunch for working people due to their affordability and nutritious qualities. They were frequently accompanied with a glass of beer.”

Apparently the sandwiches are traditionally made on dark rye bread.  I’ve never baked anything quite that dark, so when I’ve had these sandwiches in the past few months I’ve used slightly lighter rye breads.  One is Nancy Silverton’s Normandy Rye---something I started making to use up a bad batch of dry cider (pictured at start of post).  The other is a 20% rye loaf from the new Tartine Bread book (pictured right).

Besides slices of Limburger, the filling I use consists of sweet vidalia onions and spicy brown mustard, which play really well with the creamy cheese.  Other people include pickles, anchovies, and similar flavours. Finish it off with a glass of Table Beer I, and you have the perfect brew day lunch!

Next thing I want to try: boterham met plattekaas en radijzen and gueuze.

Beer Food: Sour Beer Sorbet

Michael Tonsmeire’s new book American Sour Beers arrived on Friday, and I spent this weekend reading it from cover to cover.  Its a great resource, especially for people new to brewing sour beers; but I think even people who’ve done a lot of brewing and research on sour beers will benefit from having all this information gathered together in one place.  Chapter five, which goes through the processes of a number of different breweries, was the highlight for me.  I really enjoy hearing people reflecting intelligently on their process, and at this point its often the thing I learn most from---that goes for brewing, but also for other activities such as baking and even teaching.

Anyway, besides reading the book I also managed to fit in a quick brew day, pitching the second generation of the Wallonian Farmhouse strain into something very similar to this `Farmer in the Rye’ recipe from Ales of the Riverwards.  The brew day was nothing special, so instead of posting about that I thought I’d write about one of the other projects I had going this weekend: sour beer sorbet.

J occasionally makes ice creams and frozen yogurts from this book, and flicking through it one day I noticed a recipe for sour beer sorbets.  The recipe called for adding 3/4 of a cup of lambic to a blend of fresh fruit and sugars.  My first thought was: who the hell can afford to pour lambic into an ice cream!    Most of the interesting flavours will be overwhelmed by the cold, not to mention the sweetness.  But I made a mental note of the recipe, thinking that it might be a good way to use my quick sours if they turned out poorly.

This weekend cherries were on sale in my local supermarket, so I decided to take a bottle of my quick sour brown and make a cherry sorbet.  The process is pretty simple: pureeing one pound of fruit, bringing it to a simmer with 3/4 cup of sugar and 1/3 cup of tapioca syrup (or corn syrup), then cooling it down completely and adding 3/4 cup of beer before churning.  Before cooling and churning the mixture, the biggest contribution from the beer seemed to come from the D90 candi syrup I used: as expected, the sweetness from the cherries and sugar suppressed the sourness, bringing out the dark fruit, toast, and chocolate notes from the syrup.

By the time it was cooled and churned, it was hard to pick out the beer at all.    If anything, it maybe added a depth of flavour to the sorbet that would have been missing without it, but this had more to do with the candi syrup than the sourness of the original beer.  Using a more sharply sour beer (maybe with sour cherries as well) might have helped accentuate its flavours, but all we ended up with was a tasty but sweet cherry sorbet.

So, not a complete success, but I’m glad I tried it.  I should have some more posts later in the week about beer related projects.