Tasting Notes: Table Beer III

I damn near ruined this beer by letting it get too much flavour from an oak spiral.  This is particularly frustrating as I'm usually very conservative when it comes to adding oak to beer, and also because without the oak I thought this was the best table beer I brewed so far.

How did I end up adding too much oak?  The spiral I used came from my attempt at spontaneous fermentation.  Before brewing that beer, I had boiled it for about thirty minutes in some hot water, and allowed it to soak for several weeks in my house culture.  It then spent a few more weeks in the (unfermenting) wort.  I wrongly assumed that by this point most of the flavour would be gone, and added it to the secondary vessel containing the table beer in the hopes that it would add some wild yeasts to the fermented beer.

This was actually all part of a long-term plan.  My thought was that once the spiral was inoculated with various bugs from my house culture and the spontaneous fermentation, I could use it as a way of inoculating other beers in turn by adding it to the wort during primary fermentation.  Sort of like a poor man's version of fermenting in an inoculated barrel.  Its potentially a good idea, and one I still intend to implement, but I now know to make doubly sure that all the flavour is stripped from the oak.  Its currently sitting in the jug containing my house culture again.

Appearance: Most bottles of this beer were a hazy golden yellow, but this last one (which has been in the fridge a while) has dropped bright.  Foamy and lingering head.

Smell: Lemons and white grapes, but then straight up wood underneath it.  By the end its like you are sniffing a brand new American oak spiral.

Taste:  Lemony and slightly spicy at first, before the wood comes on.  The first few bottles tasted like licking an oak spiral, but now that's faded a bit such that other flavours come out as well. A nice tartness has developed since the beer was bottled, which I think also helps offset the wood.

Mouthfeel: Medium carbonation, doesn't feel particularly thin, but still very easy to drink. Slight lingering astringency from the bitterness and wood.

Drinkability & Notes:  I had no trouble getting through this batch (unsurprisingly, I find these table beers are a nice accompaniment to dinners during the week, after which I often have to spend time prepping classes for the next day), but the oak was far too dominant in most of the bottles I drank.  I think without it this would have been my favourite table beer so far, and I'll definitely brew this recipe again.  I have a slightly stronger version, blended with no-boil sour, conditioning in bottles at the moment, and I've put a rebrew of this table version in my brewing calendar for next month.

Brew Day: Table Beer III

The school year is well and truly underway at this point, and brewing (and this blog) must to some extent take a backseat while I'm preparing for classes and grading papers.  But I did manage to fit in quite a few brewing-related things this weekend, and I have more planned for the coming month.  In this post I thought I'd write something quick about a low-alcohol saison I brewed on Saturday.

I've tried making table beers before---that is, light beers with around 3% ABV that I can drink on a week night without worrying about how sharp I'll be the next day.  I was quite happy with how those beers turned out: noone would confuse them with a higher strength beer, and their shelf-life was somewhat short, but while they were in their prime they were both flavourful and refreshing.

The beer I brewed on Saturday was a variation on Table Beer I: another hoppy saison.  For the earlier beer I relied on the glycerol produce by Wyeast 3711 to ensure that the final product was dry but not too thin.  But while the mouth-feel and high attenuation of Wyeast 3711 are both attractive properties for the kind of beers I want to brew, I often find the flavour profile a little lacking: I've had it vary from muted citrus with earthy notes to full on stewed oranges and black pepper, and while its worked better in some beers than others I can't say that any of the saisons I've made with it have been among my favourites.

This time round I decided to come back to another strain I'm ambivalent about: Wyeast 3726, supposedly the strain from Brasserie de Blaugies.  I've only used this strain in one series of beers (so three or four total), and again I had mixed results.  All of the beers tended towards a fruity profile that almost reminded me of white wine: pears, grapes, white stone fruit, etc.  Since I seem to prefer beers with more esters than phenols, this ought to have been a desirable result---but some of these beers, despite their dryness, seemed almost cloyingly sweet because of all the fruity flavours.  A single glass was enjoyable enough, but I never found myself going back for a second because the fruitiness was a bit overwhelming (and I still have a few bottles lying around as a result).

The strain worked best in beers that had some tartness to set against these esters---in fact, used alongside brettanomyces and lactic-acid bacteria it produced one of my favourite home-brews to date.  I'm going to try to keep this in mind as I use it this time round by setting its fruity flavours against some tartness in the beers I brew with it.

Well, except this table-saison.  Since this beer is doing double-service as an extra large starter, I didn't want to throw in any LAB from the start, as this would determine what I could brew in subsequent batches.  And as it was such a low-gravity beer, an extended secondary fermentation with brett and bugs didn't seem to make much sense.  Instead I focused on making something with a little spiciness and bitterness that might also balance the fruity esters of the hops.

The grist was very simple: 70% pilsner and 30% rye.  Unlike Wyeast 3711, I don't remember this strain giving much mouthfeel to its beers, so part of the reason for including the rye was to yield some body in the final product.  The other reason was to get a little bit of spiciness alongside the pilsner---and it was building on that idea that led me to chose Bramling Cross and Saaz Special as the mains hops.  I'm hoping all of this combined will provide a nice contrast to the yeast, leading to a beer that is refreshingly crisp and drinkable.

Of course, the other nice thing about table beers is that if these flavours don't balance in the way I'd hoped, I haven't wasted much grain or hops in producing the beer, and it will provide me with harvestable yeast however it tastes.  I overshot my predicted O.G. by a few points, aiming for 1.024 but ending at around 1.027.  No big deal. I'll be harvesting before next weekend, and I plan to use this in a couple more saisons over the next month or so.

Recipe:

Measured O.G: 1.028
Measured F.G:

Mash: 149°F:

Malt:

70%  Pilsner
30% Rye Malt

Hops:

Bramling Cross       60              10.0 IBUs     (8g@6.3%)
Bramling Cross       20              6.3   IBUs     (15g@6.3%)
Bramling Cross        0               0.0  IBUs     (15g@6.3%)
Saaz Special             0               0.0  IBUs     (10g@6.3%)

Yeast:

Wyeast  3726

Tasting Notes: Table Beer I

This is the first of two table beers I made earlier this summer.  As a recap, the idea (borrowed from Basic Brewing) was to make a pale hoppy beer with a grist consisting entirely of wheat and rye malt.  It was fermented with The Yeast Bay’s Vermont Ale strain, and came out at 2.4% ABV.

Appearance: Pale, hazy straw colour.  Thick head that lingers for a good while.

Smell: Berries and stone fruit. J says passion fruit, but I don’t know what that tastes like.  Slight dankness.  Very pleasant.

Taste: Follows nose, but not as pronounced.  A touch grassy.  Some sweetness from the wheat, quickly transitioning to a very firm bitterness.

Mouthfeel: A bit thin, but pretty great considering that its only 2.4%.  Bitterness and relatively high carbonation make it a little astringent, though for me not unpleasantly so.

Drinkability & Notes: Very happy with this one.  The taste and flavour aren’t particularly remarkable---its not going to win any competitions---but its tasty and very drinkable, which is exactly what I was going for.  Most of the batch has gone already, and since I’ve been off work this week I’ve enjoyed one with lunch more than once.  If I were making this with someone else in mind I might dial back the bitterness slightly---it is a bit harsh and biting

Brew Day: Table Beer II

This is a beer I brewed last weekend, before the grain from the group buy arrived.  Its another attempt at a table beer---a refreshing, low-alcohol beer for everyday consumption.  Since J and I both teach and/or study most days, we need to be fairly clear-headed, which means being careful about how many beers we have in a night (even with the low-alcohol beers I normally brew).  I’d like to come up with one or two recipes for table beers that we could always have on hand: one with American hops for J, and one with European varieties for me.  Table Beer I was an attempt at the first; this is an attempt at the second.

Its loosely inspired by Jester King’s Le Petit Prince, though based more on the description of the beer than any real familiarity with it.  I had a bottle a year or two ago, but I don’t remember anything much about it.  It would have been made before the brewery incorporated their house culture of wild yeasts and LAB into all their beers, so its possible that the current iteration of the beer tastes different anyway.  J brought me back a bottle of Noble King from Houston last time she visited, and the souring bacteria and brettanomyces from the house culture were very evident in the flavour profile (it had a lovely lemony tartness, but some of the other flavours were a little strange).

Anyway, this isn’t really an attempt at a clone, but the recipe probably ended up being pretty similar to the one for Le Petit Prince.  I’ve listened to the Brewing Network interview with Ron and Jeff quite a few times, and I also watched this video---in which Jeff discusses recipe formulations---right about the time I came up with the grist and hops (warning: the video cuts out at some key points).  As a result I think the recipe is very similar, if not identical, to the one they use.  I’m relying on the French Saison yeast (WY3711) to dry the beer out completely, but also to give some mouth-feel to the finished product with the glycerol it produces.  The beer will also get a large dry-hop of Saaz in a week or two (Jeff says they dry hop at about 1lb per barrel, which works out at around 40-50g for my batch size).  As usual, the beer is also doing double-duty as a large starter for some other projects I have planned with this yeast.

Update: Tasting Notes.

Recipe:

Measured O.G.	1.024
Measured F.G.	1.000
ABV.	3.0%
Mash:	149°F
Malt:
84.7% Pilsner
13.2% Wheat Malt
2.0% Medium Crystal
Hops:
EKG	60 min	11.8 IBUs	(10g@ 5.9%)
EKG	10 min	3.5 IBUs	(15g@ 5.9%)
Saaz	10 min	1.2 IBUs	(10g@2.9%)
EKG	0 min	0.0 IBUs	(15g@5.9%)
Saaz	0 min	0.0 IBUs	(10g@2.9%)
Saaz	Dry Hop		(40g@2.9%)
Yeast:
Wyeast French Saison (3711)

 

Brew Day: Table Beer

Summer’s on its way, and I’m running low on grain: what better time to make a low gravity table beer?  Most of my beers are low in alcohol by American standards---its hard to convince people here that for the kind of beers I’d drink in pubs back home, anything over 4% would be on the strong side---but beyond a few berliner weisses, I haven’t made many that have been lower than 3%.  In part that’s because I find that lower gravity beers don’t do so well with bottle-conditioning.  The Quarter Session bitter I made a few weeks ago is tasting pretty nice (tasting notes coming soon), and at 3.5% that’s usually about as low as I’d go for something that wasn’t going to end up highly carbonated.

I’m planning to make a couple of very low gravity saisons over the next few weeks, but this is something altogether different.  The guys at Basic Brewing made a bunch of session beers last summer, and one in particular caught my eye.  Its the second beer they brew in this video: a 1.018 wort made with 3:1 split of wheat and rye malt, hopped in the boil with Mosaic and dry-hopped with Cascade.  The thought is that the relatively high proportion of rye will give the beer some body, compensating for its low gravity and ensuring that the beer does not taste too watery.  It seems that they liked the results, so I figured I’d give it a try.

For my version, I upped the rye slightly to something like a 70/30 split.  I also switched the hops around, adding Cascade for a 30 minute whirlpool, and digging out an ounce of Mosaic from the back of the freezer for a dry-hop addition in a week or so.  I changed the yeast too: I thought this beer would be a good opportunity to test out The Yeast Bay’s Vermont Ale strain again (I made a pretty tasty pale ale with it a month or so ago, very similar to this recipe).  Besides, as I’ve said before, these low gravity batches can do double duty as yeast starters when you’re growing your pitches up from slants, and I have a few other plans for this yeast.

I was aiming for a 1.024 starting gravity.  I’ve decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that that’s what I’ll do in all these table beers.  Even if it attenuates fully (as I expect some of the saisons to), this should still keeps me at or below 3%.  The wort came in at 1.025, which is just fine.  It certainly tasted thin though, there’s no getting round it.  We’ll see what the fermentation does for it.

 

Recipe:

Measured O.G.	1.025
Measured F.G.
ABV.
Mash:	153°F
Malt:
71.4% Wheat Malt
28.6% Rye Malt
Hops:
Cascade	FWH	12.6 IBUs	(8g @ 7.2%)
Cascade	Whirlpool (30 min)	15.8 IBUs	(28g @ 7.2%)
Mosaic	Dry Hop	0.4g/l
Yeast:
Yeast Bay Vermont Ale