Northeast-ish IPA brew day

May 26, 2016 by Dickie Mok

It's not often that we're blessed with the presence of multiple Hong Kong Homebrewing Contest Champion Tom Hanson, but he somehow agreed to join us on our latest brew day (don't believe us? Check the gallery!) In all seriousness - an absolute pleasure.

Water has been something that has been our minds a bit recently. Having notched a few batches under our belts, it felt a bit rich to pretend that Hong Kong tap water was simply fine to brew with without adjustment. In particular, it looked like problems such as less than stellar efficiency and commonly an astringent hop quality might be related to off-kilter mash and boil pH. Armed with a fistful of brewing salts, a shiny new pH meter, and a lot of fiddling with Bru'n Water, we were ready to tackle the issue head-on - and ended up sitting on a mash pH of 5.6. Well, we'll get better at it (although this may already be an improvement from prior batches). Acidulated malt, acid or buffer additions going forward may be options.

We'd been meaning to brew a riff on the Mad Fermentationist's take on a Northeast IPA for a while, having become enamoured with the juicy, hazy hop bombs from recent beer tastings. The style appears commonly brewed with a kind of English strain (Conan), but we opted for good old California Ale yeast. (If we were being pretentious, we'd make a reference to how John Kimmich had once mused on taking Heady Topper on a west coast ride with WLP001, but clearly we're above that) We opted for hop shots for the bittering charge, given the amount of beer we would already lose to the copious hop additions.

While we were at it, we also decided to bottle the sour cherry saison we had brewed a few weeks ago. It seems to have come out quite decently so far - bone dry (1.004 FG) and pleasantly tart, with a hint of stone fruit and a nice saison profile. Look forward to cracking one of these open in a couple of weeks.

At our request, the LHBS had ordered a ton of souring bugs and sour blends. Looks like our next beer will also be a sour!

Cheers,

Northeast IPA

Recipe Specifics
-------------------
Batch Size (Gal): 5.50 lbs
Total Grain (Lbs): 13.00 lbs
Anticipated OG: 1.050
Anticipated SRM: 3.2
Anticipated IBU: 60.9
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Grains
----------------
0.80 oz Cara-Pils/Dextrine4.2 %
8.00 oz Oats, Flaked4.2 %
4.00 lb White Wheat Malt30.8 %
7.00 lbsBriess 2-Row Malt 53.8 %

Hops
------
3.00 ml Hop Shot @ 90 min
2.00 oz Citra (pellet, 13.4% AA) @ 0 min
2.00 oz Mosaic (pellet, 12.6% AA) @ 0 min
2.00 oz Citra (pellet, 13.8% AA) @ dry hop
2.00 oz Mosaic (pellet, 12.6% AA) @ dry hop

Yeast
------
WLP001 California Ale Yeast

Mash Schedule
-----------------
Mash @ 155f for 55 min


Notes
-------
Brewed 22 May 2016

Treated 7 gallons of filtered water with 0.5 Campden tablet
Heated 7 gallons treated water to 166f and added grains. 
Added 6g gypsum and 6g calcium chloride at dough-in. 
Attache sous vide circulator and set to 155f.
Iodine test showed starch conversion in around 30 minutes. 
Total mash time of 55 minutes.Cold sparge with 1 gallon of distilled water.
Allowed flameout hops to steep for 10 minutes before chilling.
Post-boil volume of approx. 4.8 gal. Topped with distilled water to reach 5.5 gal. 
Measured OG at around 1.048.
Shook to aerate, let cool to to 70Fbefore pitching liquid yeast.

25 May 2016:Added 2 oz citra dry hops

It Puts the Yoghurt in the Wort

May 01, 2016 by Dickie Mok

Like homebrewers everywhere, we have recently caught the kettle souring bug. How can you blame us? The prospect of producing quick sour beers in a matter of weeks, not months (or years), is too tempting not to consider.

As our first kettle sour beer, we wanted to keep things as simple as possible, just to get a basic idea of the process. The plan: make a simple low OG wort from extract, pitch a tube of pure lacto and then let the wort sour using a sous vide circulator for a couple of days until the desired tartness was reached. The problem: our LHBS was fresh out of lacto! Thankfully, Milk That Funk has a helpful resource on alternative sources of souring bacteria.

We ultimately decided to make an attempt at culturing lactobacillus using yoghurt. The process was fairly simple: make a simple starter wort, add a couple spoons of yogurt (we used Fage non-fat Greek yoghurt), and maintain a temperature of around 40 celsius overnight. The lacto starter was then pitched into the full extract wort as intended.

After around 2.5 days souring, the wort was definitely sour - fairly assertive but not overly so. The wort seemed different than usual (aside from the sourness), with a tiny bit of Chinese herbal tea going on. It didn't taste like anything had gone seriously wrong, however, and we decided to go ahead with the beer (a cherry saison - see recipe below). We'll see how it looks in a few weeks.

What you see above is a few of the beers we had submitted to the (only) home brew competition in Hong Kong. We didn't win anything, but we got some very good feedback and felt we were trending in the right direction with our beers overall! The citra pale ale (from our 26 February 2016 post) and the raspberry saison were highlights. We'll have a separate update on these beers soon, hopefully.

Sour Cherry Saison

Recipe Specifics
-------------------
Batch Size (Gal): 3.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 3 lbs
Anticipated OG: 1.040
Anticipated IBU: 12.00
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Extract
----------------
3.00 lbs Briess Pilsen Light DME 

Hops
------
0.40 oz Saaz (pellet, 4.00% AA) @ 60 min

Yeast
------
Danstar Belle Saison

Others
-----------------
1 litre Sour Cherry Juice

Notes
-------
26 April 2016:Prepared yoghurt starter.Mixed 1 litre of filtered water with 100g of DME, boiled 5 minutes and chilled to 40 c.Added around 2 tsp of Fage non-fat Greek yoghurt, held at 40 c.

27 April 2016:Mixed DME into 1 gal of distilled water and 2 gal of filtered water, boiled 5 minutes and chilled to 40 c.Swirled yoghurt starter and pitched into wort.Held wort at 40 c using sous vide circulator.

Brewed 30 April 2016. 

Boiled soured wort.Added 1 litre of sour cherry juice with 5 minutes left in boil, topped with filtered water to reach 3.0 gal. Measured OG at 1.040. 

Shook briefly to aerate, pitched rehydrated dry yeast.Chilled to 66F overnight.

Citra Single Hop Pale Ale

February 26, 2016 by Dickie Mok

Happy New Year (and Happy Chinese New Year, too)!

It's been far too long since our last post, with both blogging and brewing becoming casualties of real life. The brew must go on, though (what with Hong Kong's only real homebrewing competition coming up in April). We've been doing a little bit of experimentation lately; we recently brewed a hefeweizen using homemade yuzu honey to prime the bottles.

This past weekend, we brewed a batch of a basic citra single hop pale ale. Not terribly interesting in and of itself, but we decided to try using an Anova sous vide circulator to keep a consistent mash temperature. Process wise, it made life super easy, especially for a 90 minute mash. We noticed that efficiency may have been down a few ticks, however, and wonder whether it was due to the Anova (perhaps it was too hot near the element?). More testing appears warranted.

An update on our previous beers. The raspberry saison has turned out extremely well, if a little bit over carbonated. The flavour profile has turned out almost exactly how we wanted it. The English IPA is a complete mess, sadly, completely unbalanced with a medicinal tang. On to the next!

Single Hop Citra Pale Ale

Recipe Specifics
-------------------

Batch Size (Gal): 5.50 lbs
Total Grain (Lbs): 12.00 lbs
Anticipated OG: 1.051
Anticipated SRM: 3.7
Anticipated IBU: 45.9
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Grains
----------------
0.80 ozCara-Pils/Dextrine4.2 %
0.80 ozCaramel/Crystal Malt - 40L4.2 %
1.00 lbWhite Wheat Malt8.3 %
10.00 lbsBriess Pilsner Malt 83.3 %


Hops
------
0.50 ozCitra (pellet, 13.8% AA) @ 60 min
0.50 ozCitra (pellet, 13.8% AA) @ 15 min
1.00 ozCitra (pellet, 13.8% AA) @ 5 min
2.00 ozCitra (pellet, 13.8% AA) @ 0 min


Yeast
------
Safale US-05 American Ale Yeast


Mash Schedule
-----------------
Mash @ 153f for 90 min


Notes
-------
20 February 2016: Treated 7 gallons of filtered water with 1 Campden tablet

Brewed 21 February 2016

Heated 7 gallons treated water to 162f and added grains. Attached Anova sous vide circulator and set to 153f and mashed for 90 minutes.

Allowed flameout hops to steep for 5-10 minutes before chilling.Post-boil volume of approx. 4.2 gal. Topped with chilled sanitised filtered water to reach 5.0 gal. Measured OG at around 1.050.

Shook briefly to aerate, pitched hydrated yeast.Chilled to 66F overnight.

23 February 2016:Vigorous activity, thick krausen. Allowed temp to rise to 70f.

Raspberry Saison Bottling Day

January 07, 2016 by Dickie Mok

With apologies for the overly dramatic header photograph, Happy New Year! Here's to many wonderful beers in 2016.

We have finally gotten over the holiday festivities, and yesterday we bottled the batch of raspberry saison we had sitting in secondary. An early taste is promising, with a fairly assertive berry presence and decent tartness. A little bit of cough syrup character at the moment (not dissimilar to berry beers I've had in the past), but we'll see how it tastes after carbonation. If nothing else, the colour of the beer has turned out superb!

Now that we have a free fermenter, what's next? A stout perhaps, or another saison?

Batches from the Past

December 30, 2015 by Dickie Mok

Having not brewed in a couple of weeks, it seems like a good time to go revisit some of the batches we had brewed in the past...

Wheat Pale Ale (Bottled 19 October 2015)

When reading homebrewing forums and blogs, the piece of advice that appears most often dispensed is "patience". This batch certainly had several lessons to teach in that respect.

This batch, our second, was an extract session IPA with a hop bill that was loosely inspired by Stone Brewing's lovely Go-to IPA (for the curious, our first batch was an all-grain Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone that ended up tasting like cider). From the get go, a bit more patience might have made a world of difference. I panicked when fermentation did not start until 24 hours in, I racked to secondary after a few days despite the slow start to fermentation, and bottled a scant 11 days after brewing.

The beer tasted a mess a week after bottling (also far too early to start tasting!) Too hoppy for even the most die hard hop head, with no malt backbone to balance it out and a prominent buttery funk that we were sure was diacetyl or an infection. We were pretty sure it was a kitchen sink beer (as in, you should pour it down the sink).

A funny thing happened after a couple months in the bottle came and went. The malt and hops came into balance (though still hop heavy), the body improved and the big buttery funk somehow mostly disappeared. Surprisingly, the beer has really come into its own and became a very solid session IPA. All it took was a little bit of patience! A lesson duly learned - sometimes you just need to get out of the way and let the beer do its thing.

Appearance: Pale gold, slight haze, prominent white head.
Nose: Citrus and some stone fruit, some breadiness setting in.
Taste: Big resiny hops dominate, some citrus around the edges.
Mouthfeel: Light and quenching, with some oiliness.

Novembeer: The Phumpkin Menace (Bottled 3 December 2015)

As mentioned in a previous post, pretty much everything went wrong on brew day. In retrospect far too ambitious a brew for our level of experience, our idea was to do a pumpkin Belgian-style strong ale with ginger, honey, cloves and cinnamon.

Going with the brew-in-a-bag method, we had added roast pumpkin directly to the grain bag. What we got was such a thick wort that we could barely sustain a rolling boil even on our gas burner and ended up well below our target OG. This rendered our choice of yeast (WLP500 Monastery Ale Yeast) unsuitable, but we didn't really have a backup to use. Finally, our spice infusions were either too conservative or perhaps the yeast was stripping the delicate aromas out, and we needed to make three separate additions to get even a subtle spice note.

Despite all that, the beer is actually turning out quite nicely. Although the body is a lot thinner than originally hoped, the subtle spice is really coming out, and if nothing else the beer is actually quite pleasant. Still clearly under carbonated, without much malt sweetness. We reckon we'll try it again in a couple more weeks to see where it is.

Raspberry Saison

December 22, 2015 by Dickie Mok in Recipes

A few weeks ago, we had brewed a batch of a simple extract saison. This was largely to use up the ingredients from our previous all-grain pumpkin saison, the brew process for which bent out of shape so spectacularly that we ended up naming it "The Phumpkin Menace" (it is, however, turning out pretty solid). Our intention was to rack the simple saison onto raspberries in secondary to get a fruity saison ready just in time for what passes for spring in Hong Kong.

This would not be our first shot at using fruit in secondary. Purely for the sake of experimentation, we had earlier infused an amber-brown ale we had brewed in separate carboys with cherries and strawberries/raspberries. The base beer however suffered from too much chocolate malt, which resulted in a prominent acrid burnt note in the beer that did not agree with the fruit. The strawberry batch also seemed to have a plastic/gasoline aroma to it. It was, however, a good learning experience overall.

We cracked open the fermenter to prepare to rack the saison onto secondary yesterday. The gravity clocked in at 1.007, a bit drier than estimated. It was also delicious, with bright spicy notes balanced by a slightly more assertive bitterness and nice roundness. So delicious, in fact, that we briefly contemplated foregoing the fruit altogether and bottling the batch as it was. But then, what to do with these raspberries...

We ended up going with our original plan. Hopefully the raspberries end up playing nice with the saison!

Extract Raspberry Saison

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 4.00
Total Grain (Lbs.): 5 lbs.
Anticipated OG: 1.049
Anticipated SRM: 4.8
Anticipated IBU: 23.3
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Extract

3.00 lbs. Briess Golden Light DME (60.0%)
2.00 lbs. Briess Bavarian Wheat DME (40.0%)

Hops

0.50 oz. Styrian Goldings (pellet, 5.40% AA) @60 min
1.00 oz. Cascade (pellet, 5.50% AA) @ 10 min
0.50 oz. Mt. Hood (pellet, 6.00% AA) @ 10 min

Yeast

Danstar Belle Saison

Notes

Brewed 30 November 2015.

Mixed DME into 4.5 gal of filtered water and brought to boil. Topped up with sanitised filtered water post-boil to reach 4.0 gal. Measured OG at 1.050.

Shook briefly to aerate, pitched yeast directly from the package. Chilled to 65F overnight. Vigorous airlock activity began within 4 hours. Allowed fermenter temperature to rise to 74F over the next few days.

15 Dec 2015: Measured gravity at 1.007 (below the expected FG of 1.015). Sample tastes dry and fruity.

21 Dec 2015: Gravity stable at 1.007. Racked to secondary on 3.2 lbs. of frozen raspberries. Fermentation kicked up again shortly after.

31 Dec 2015: Took a sample and measured gravity at 1.005. Tastes drier than prior to the raspberry, with a good amount of raspberry tartness. The beer has taken on a lot of raspberry colour.

6 January 2015: Racked to bottling bucket from below the floating raspberries, collecting around 3.7 gal. Primed with sugar to 3.3 volumes of CO2. Filled 21 bottles.

Anglo-American IPA Brew Day (First Post)

December 21, 2015 by Dickie Mok in Recipes

Having not blogged in many years, I'm not sure how exactly one kicks off a blog. The hope with Midnightclay is that it it will be a place to keep a diary of our homebrewing recipes and exploits (lest we forget all our mistakes!) Commercial craft beers, music, art and culture may also make appearances.

Our brew day the last weekend was our sixth batch, meaning we are very much still in the learning phase. After a string of all-grain brews, we had returned to extract brewing for the last couple batches, the prime reason being time (a scarce commodity in Hong Kong). In this case, I was in a rush to catch the new Star Wars film that evening.

We had a pack of White Labs WLP002 English Ale yeast waiting in the fridge, and it seemed time to use it. Having long been fans of more balanced or malt-forward American IPAs (such as Firestone Walker's wonderful Union Jack IPA), we decided to shoot for something in the same vein. The hop schedule was largely pilfered from a particularly tasty looking recipe from the Mad Fermentationist, and we previously had luck with Briess' Bavarian Wheat DME in our session IPA. We were also intrigued by Special B from a fellow homebrewer's beer, and so in a bit went.

It will be interesting to see how the WLP002 attenuates. While the attenuation is listed by White Labs at 63%-70%, various homebrewers suggest it can be closer to 80% or higher. The alpha acid content listed on the hops also seem a bit off. We'll see how it turns out in a few weeks.

Anglo-American IPA

Recipe Specifics

Batch Size (Gal): 4.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 7 lbs 4.0 oz
Anticipated OG: 1.060
Anticipated SRM: 13.3
Anticipated IBU: 76.4
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Steeping Grains/Extract

8.00 oz Cara-Pils/Dextrine (6.9 %)
8.00 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (6.9 %)
4.00 oz Special B Malt Grain (3.4 %)
3.00 lbs Briess Pilsen Light DME (41.4%)
3.00 lbs Briess Bavarian Wheat DME (41.4%)

Hops

1.50 oz Centennial (pellet, 8.20% AA) – First wort hop
2.00 oz Amarillo (pellet, 8.90% AA) @ 0 min
1.50 oz Centennial (pellet, 8.20% AA) @ 0 min
1.00 oz Galaxy (pellet, 14.00% AA) @ 0 min
2.00 oz Amarillo (pellet, 8.90% AA) @ dry hop
1.00 oz Centennial (pellet, 8.20% AA) @ dry hop

Yeast

WLP002 White Labs English Ale Yeast

Mash Schedule

Steep specialty malts - 152 F for 30 min.

Notes

Brewed 19 December 2015.

Steeped milled specialty malts in 5 gallons of tap water at 152F for 30 minutes. Post boil volume of approx 3.4 gal. Topped up with chilled sanitised filtered water to reach 4.0 gal. Measured OG at 1.062.

Shook briefly to aerate, pitched the yeast directly from the package. Chilled to 66F overnight.

21 December 2015: The yeast was a slow starter, but now seeing vigorous airlock activity and a thick krausen.