Leftover Ingredients? Brew with Them!

This weekend as I was cleaning my Man Cave (really it’s just a musty basement) I walked by the 5 gallon bucket where I throw all the leftover grain from ingredient orders. You know the deal. Partial bags of specialty malts, some crystal 40 here, black patent there. When I saw the bucket, I thought, I better do something with this before all this goes bad. So I sat down to do an inventory. When you inventory your leftover grain be thinking in terms of recipe. Ask yourself, “If I was reading this list of ingredients in a recipe, what style of beer would I be looking at?” If you have English pale malts and some crystal, for example, you may think, “bitter.” You can brew good bitter with either American or English hops, so don’t worry about pairing it up with English hops only. If you are looking at a bunch of Vienna malt (like I was) you may think something along the lines of a Vienna lager (or a faux lager with neutral ale yeast) or some other toasty malty beer.

I had a lot of Vienna, but I had no Munich with which to pair it, so the Oktoberfest was out. I had a few pounds of base grains left from previous batches. I saw some Golden Promise, pilsner, 2 row, various crystal malts, and various and sundry other items. I already have 5 gallons of bitter in the beer fridge, and I have been brewing those a lot lately, so I kept thinking. A quick check of the freezer revealed partial hop packets of Warrior, Horizon, and Amarillo. I had a few full packets of Centennial and Simcoe. It should be obvious what my next thought was. . .IPA, of course.

The guys in the brewing class I am teaching with Jeremy had talked about how much they love IPA. A small batch could probably be ready to drink before the 5 class sessions over the next month and a half end. Since I didn’t have quite enough base grain to to a full 5.5 gallon batch, I quickly scaled down to 3 gallons and improvised a recipe. Here is what I came up with:

4lbs 12 oz Golden Promise

1 lb 5 oz Pilsner

8 oz Crystal 15

4 oz Dark Wheat

3 oz Crystal 40

3 oz 2 Row

3 oz White Wheat

0.2 oz Horison 11.5%AA @ 60 minutes

0.2 oz Warrior 16%AA @60 minutes

0.6 oz Centennial 9.5%AA @ 10 minutes

0.6 oz Simcoe 12.5%AA @ 5 minutes

0.6 oz Amarillo 8.2%AA@ Flameout

Mash at 149F for 90 minutes, 90 minute boil, Safale US-05 Yeast fermented at 67F.

That gave me the following specs in BeerSmith: Batch Size-3 gallons, OG of 1.066, IBU-65, FG of 1.012, ABV-7.1%, 7.6 SRM.

What came next was a frenzy of compiling and crushing all the grains and a quick small batch brew day. While I was at it, I had a Super Bowl gathering to attend later in the day, so I decided I’d dry some of my spent grains and whip up some of Jeremy’s Spent Grain Buttermilk Biscuits that he blogged about here earlier. They would go well with a backwoods Super Bowl party.

Be right back after brewing. . .

Well, sometimes the brew gods give, and sometimes they take away. I missed by original gravity on this recipe by a long way. It was supposed to be 1.066, but I ended up at 1.052. I imagine the small batch size and different equipment profile threw off my BeerSmith calculations. Not to worry, it will just be one of those “session ipas” I keep hearing about. In any case, relax, don’t worry, have a homebrew.

My 90 minute boil may not been vigorous enough, but the volume hit pretty spot on. With the early Mississippi February daytime temperature today at about normal at 57F, and night time temps hitting near freezing, my groundwater is pretty cold. I was able to chill this small 3 gallon batch well below 70F with my copper immersion chiller in no time at all (ok. really about 15 minutes). That’s my favorite thing about winter brewing in the South. Quick chilling but still not bone chilling cold on the patio. There is no way you can chill with an immersion chiller and ground water in under 45 minutes or so in summer time here.

Anyway, I went straight to the fermenter, straight away pitched my US-05 yeast, and then straight to the fermentation chamber. The wort smelled fantastic, and it foreshadows a wonderful “session” IPA. I will let you know how it turns out in a couple of weeks.

 

 

Harvesting your “Crops”: Top Cropping Yeast for Homebrewers

John Smiths Brewery
John Smiths Brewery

Happy New Year! I suppose this entry about harvesting your abundant crop should have appeared at Thanksgiving, but better late than never, and it’s never too late to give thanks. So here we go.

You’ve heard and read about it a thousand times in your books about classic brewing techniques. You often see the phrase “a true top cropping strain” when browsing the White Labs of Wyeast yeast inventories. Read an article or watch a video about British brewing and you’re almost sure to hear or see it mentioned. The famous yet elusive top cropping of yeast.

A conversation about top cropping would certainly be incomplete without mention of the famous Yorkshire square. Without going into too much detail the Yorkshire square is a fermenting vessel dating back some 200 years. Traditionally, it is a 2-story square fermenter built from Welsh slate. The top story has a walled deck with an open top. Fermentation takes place in the bottom chamber and the yeast foam pushes into the top chamber and settles onto the deck. The fermenting wort from the bottom of the chamber is pumped over the foam in the top to keep the yeast mixed in. Eventually, the pumping stops, and the beer in the bottom settles and clears. This beer undergoes further manipulation, but that is not relevant to our discussion here. Some breweries still use the old slate square fermenters, but many modern breweries have turned to stainless steel squares or even cylinders. It’s not the shape or material that is important; its the method. Several breweries use the Yorkshire square method including Samuel Smith’s, Theakston, and Black Sheep. Black Sheep explains their process on their website. Also, this guy built his own Yorkshire square with, apparently, nice results. You may have to scroll down his page to find the square. However, before you go on a slate search, remember, it is the process, not the shape or materials used that we are worried about.

 

Yorkshire square with yeasty head and the fan shaped recirculating arm visible.
Yorkshire square with yeasty head and the fan shaped recirculating arm visible.

One of the advantages of using this “open fermentation” method is that the brewer can “crop” or collect yeast by removing the foam from the top of the fermenting wort, thus the name top cropping.

Before this post becomes a lesson on Yorkshire squares, let’s get to talking about harvesting yeast by top cropping. There are several methods used by homebrewers. One involves using a big blow off tube from a carboy running into a sanitized container. When the brewer fills the carboy, he or she leaves minimal head space. As the “true top cropping strain” begins to work, the foamy, yeasty head will push out through the blow off and into the container. However, this method seems a bit messy and complicated for me to mess with. I would prefer less clean up.

The method of top cropping I use is much easier in my mind to accomplish. My method is similar to the method of Arcadia Brewing except on a much smaller scale. They use buckets and trash cans with big cylindrical fermenters. I use a spoon and mason jars with an 8 gallon Ale Pale. I start by selecting a strain of yeast that lends itself to top cropping. (A list of top cropping strains appears at the end of this post.) For this post I chose to brew a best bitter using Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire Ale. This yeast is the yeast used by the Timothy Taylor Brewery of Landlord fame.

I brewed my beer as I normally would. I’ll spare you the boring details since, I assume, if you are reading a blog post about top cropping, you probably already know how homebrewing works. I’ll stick with things relevant to top cropping

  1. It works best to use an 8 gallon fermenting bucket for this method.
  2. Pitch a normal amount of yeast into the bucket with your cooled wort. Place the bucket
    Dirty foam just before the first scraping.
    Dirty foam just before the first scraping.

    lid loosely in place and ferment as normal.

  3. 24 to 48 hours after pitch remove the lid. A “dirty” foam will have appeared on your beer. Use a sanitized spoon to remove the “dirty” parts. This will consist of hop bits and protiens that get pushed to the top by initial fermentation. Discard this foam. Reset lid loosely in place. Boil about a gallon of water and place in the fridge to cool over night.
  4. 72 hours after pitch reopen your bucket. At this time you should see a nice thick cleaner foam on your fermenting beer. Use a sanitized spoon to scrape this foam off and place it into sanitized mason jars. Use as many jars as you need. Use the pre-boiled
    Harvest with a sanitized spoon. I know this looks a lot like the dirty pic above, but it is vastly different. I promise.
    Harvest with a sanitized spoon. I know this looks a lot like the dirty pic above, but it is vastly different. I promise.

    cooled water to fill the mason jars full of foam. You can pour right on top of the foam. Loosely close the lids of the jars and refrigerate. Finally, completely seal your fermenter lid complete with air lock.

  5. A couple of hours after harvesting vent the mason jars as the yeast foam will want to off gas. Once the yeast settles, seal the jars tightly and store in the refrigerator. You should get enough yeast in each jar for a 5 gallon batch if you use it fairly quickly. If not, just make a starter and move forward.
Harvested yeast after a day or two in the fridge.
Harvested yeast after a day or two in the fridge.

A couple of things to remember are that you can keep harvesting from this one initial pitch for quite a while before having to buy another smack pack. Just remember to skim and harvest on the same schedule for each subsequent batch. This will keep your yeast consistent. If you harvest early, you may get cells that are quick to peter out. If you harvest too late, you will increase your chance of getting cells that have a tendency not to flocculate. So keep it on schedule, and you should have no trouble fermenting later batches. Always try to harvest from lower gravity lower hopped beers. I have heard of 8 to 10 repitches using this method. I’ll edit this post after I brew with the cropped yeast to let you know how it went.

Top Cropping Yeast Strains

Wyeast 1187 Ringwood Ale

Wyeast 1318 London Ale III

Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire Ale

Wyeast 3068 WeihenstephanWeizen

Wyeast 3638 Bavarian Wheat

Wyeast 3944 Belgian Witbier

WLP 022 Essex Ale

WLP 038 Manchester Ale

WLP 039 East Midlands Ale

This is by no means intended to be all the strains that are good for top crop harvesting.

 

 

Tips and Tricks for brewing up a Berliner Weisse or Quick Sour Ale

Authors: Ron Unz and Jeremy Wickham
There are several things you need to brew the perfect Berliner Weisse. You need to chose a bacteria strain, control your fermentation temp, oxygen rates, and the amount of hops in your beer. By managing these four things, you are on target for a great berliner wiesse. Unlike other beers, the bugs in a Berliner Weisse don’t care much for standard conditions. So lets just jump right into some of the specifics of setting up the perfect atmosphere for souring up your beer.

Lactobacillus Strains

There are three primary lactobacillus strains available to homebrewers that can be used to brew a Berliner Weisse or quick sour an ale. Lactobacillus delbrueckii, lactobacillus brevis, and lactobacillus plantarum. Delbrueckii and Brevis are ones you are most likely to encounter during your adventure into brewing Berliner Weisses. The Berliner Weisse blend made White Labs is made with Delbrueckii and a Sacc. strain. Brevis and Delbrueckii are available through white labs separately. Some yeast vendors are starting to come out with blends that contain brevis. Plantarum usually isn’t found at your homebrew store, but it is known to be used as a probiotic, so you can pick this up online or at your local health food store relatively easily. You maybe able to plantarum from yogurt or other food product that contains it as a probiotic. Wyeast does distribute a lactobacillus buchnire strain, but we are not familiar with working with that particular strain.

Personally, brevis and plantarum are the strains of lactobacillus we would recommend folks using in their Berliner Weisses or quick soured ales. Brevis and plantarum work very well and quickly in fresh warm wort. We haven’t had much success using delbrueckii, so we would recommend avoid using it or blends where delbrueckii is the only strain of lactobacillus. If a blend has delbrueckii and another quick acting strain, go ahead and use it; just know that the tartness in the beer is most likely not coming from delbrueckii. Brevis and 2015-10-29plantarum also work very quickly, usually with in 24 hours to give the beer a very strong tartness. Usually a pH of 3.5 can be reached with in 24 hours. Both strains produce citrus-like flavors and provide a relatively clean sourness.

Fermentation/Sour Wort Temperatures

Lactobacillus doesn’t like being kept cool. Most strains prefer being kept between 90° F to 110° F. Wort tends to sour more quickly the higher the temperature. Staying within this temperature region for 24 hours is generally long enough for beers containing lactobacillus to reach their minimum pH, usually around 3.4-3.5. If you don’t want to beer to be aggressively sour, you can ferment at cooler temperatures for 24 hours then pitch the yeast you plan on using to complete fermentation. We recommend pitching lactobacillus at warm temperatures (above normal ale yeast tempeatures, 90-110° F) and then cooling to ale temps after 24 hours and then pitching your favorite ale sacc. strain. We’ve had good luck using European Ale Yeast (WLP011) and US-05 in our berliner weisses.

Oxygen Pickup

Oxygen is your worst enemy when working with lactobacillus. You are almost in a tough place when working with lactobacillus. Lactobacilllus doesn’t like oxygen, but your standard brewing yeast does. However, in the presence of oxygen, there are many off flavors and aromas that can occur.

  • Acetic acid - think of how your standard white vinegar tastes. Although acetic acid in a Berliner Weisse is inappropriate for the style, it can be present in low levels in other sour ales such as a Flanders Red.
  • Butyric acid - you remember in college when you drank too much and here comes the McDonalds you ate after you left the bar? Yeah, that’s what butyric acid is. That is a flavor and aroma compound you do not want showing up in any style of beer.
  • Isovaleric acid - when you smell this beer you instantly want a plate of spaghetti. Not really, but with this compound it can smell like Parmesan cheese or some stinky feet that just got back from the gym.

Photo May 09, 11 52 20 AMWhen you are done boiling your wort for your sour ale, you do not want to oxygenate your beer. You want to transfer your wort from your kettle to your fermenter as carefully as possible. Some splashing is ok, but excessive amount could induce too much oxygen. If you are going to keep the wort in the kettle and kettle sour your beer, you will want to flush the wort and head space in your kettle with CO2 or nitrogen and then seal the lid by applying some tape or plastic wrap around the edge of the lid. You want to make the kettle sealed and full of CO2 or nitrogen.

One things we have both forgotten to do at some point while brewing up our first batches of Berliner Weisse is keeping the airlocks full. If you are letting the beer sit in primary for a long period of time and you let the air lock run dry, you run a very high risk of letting some of that lactobacillus produce some acetic acid. So, keep those air locks full!

Hops and Hoping Rates
Lactobacillus hates hops. Lets say this one more time, lactobacillus HATES hops. Most recipes call for 3-5 IBUs of bitterness in the boil. We find this to be too high for lactobacillus. Hops really are effective at keeping lactobacillus at bay, so you don’t want very much in your beer. We highly recommend going with no hops in your Berliner Weisse. Who can taste 5 IBUs of bitterness? The reason most recipes have hops noted is so they follow the Reingeitsgebot. If we had to guess, just about no one, so we just skip adding hops all together. However, what if you want hop flavor in your sour ales? Well, the best solution to that is to blend with a hoppy beer or dry hop your sour ales. A dry hopped Berliner Weisse/sour ale is quiet refreshing and the acidic character often times brings new notes to hops to the surface that you wouldn’t have noticed in a regular beer.

Levels of pH

Having a pH meter is not necessary for brewing up a delicious sour ale. However, they can be very useful in the fermentation process. Pitching rates, temperatures, and the type of wort the lactobacillus is pitched in can have an affect on how long it takes for lactobacillus to drop the pH of your beer. Having a pH meter gives you another tool to dial in your process and give you more control over how sour your beer is. Say for example you just want a slightly tart beer. Well you can let lactobacillus do it’s thing until you hit a pH of 3.6-3,7, then cool to your normal ale fermentation temps, and let the yeast finish off the sugars. Your pH will drop a little bit from the fermentation process, but you’ll be left with a tart beer and not a crazy sour beer. On the other hand, you can monitor the pH of your beer until it reaches its terminal pH and then ferment your yeast. A pH meter just gives you the ability to have more control of your fermentation process. We will be having a future post about how to measure pH and go about maintaining pH meters.
For deciding how far to take the pH with your sour beer, you need to know what pH gives you specific level of sourness. We have provided some basic numbers below.

  • Photo Jun 23, 6 12 48 PM4.5-3.9: Imperceptible
  • 4.0-3.6: Perceived brightness to the beer. This is a great pH range for brightening up a fruit beer.
  • 3.5-3.4: Good level of tartness. Appropriate range for a Berliner Weisse
  • 3.2-3.3: Very sour
  • 3.1-3.0: Extremely sour
  • Less than 3.0: Will dissolve your teeth (joking). A pH and below 3.0 is for the hardcore sour ale drinker. Be sure to take your antacids.

If you are kettle souring, it is highly recommended to reduce the pH of your wort to 4.5 before letting your wort sit for a long period of time and boiling for the second time. You are limiting the types of bacteria that can thrive in wort by reducing the pH to 4.5. This will help keep the beer cleaner and keep unwanted critters from settling in. You can find lactic acid solutions (usually 88% by weight) at your local homebrew store. Just add small amount of this solution (start with 1 ml at a time) until your pH falls to 4.5. Then pitch your lactobacillus and you are ready to go.

We have a particular method for checking the pH of our sour wort. (Note: we always remove samples of the wort and measure the pH of the removed sample. We never check the pH of the wort by sticking the probe into the fermenter, doing so is a pathway for cross contamination.) For our sour ales, we typically remove about 6-8 oz of wort from the fermenter and place it into a sanitized pint glass. For all intents and purposes, we assume the wort in the fermenter at this point is homogeneous and the removed sample is a good sample of the wort in the fermenter. We measure the pH of the sample in the pint glass. Rinse probe with water and stick it back into its storage container. Then cover the pint glass with plastic wrap and keep it next to the fermenter so they are maintained at the same temperature. Do not pour this sample back into the fermenter. When it comes time to check the pH of the wort again, We just remove the plastic wrap and measure the pH again in the pint glass. The pH of the wort in the pint glass should be the same as the wort in the fermenter.

Special Equipment

Lactobacillus likes to hide in all of nooks and crannies of brewing equipment. It’s important that you have a duplicate set of any equipment that is made of plastic (example: racking canes, bottling buckets, carboy caps, air locks, etc.). Lactobacillus can be extremely difficult if not impossible to remove from slightly scratched plastic surfaces. If you don’t want to keep separate pieces of equipment, use equipment that is made of stainless steel or can be safely boiled without damaging the specific piece of equipment. We have boiled pieces of equipment like carboy caps to pasteurize with good success.

 

Brewing A Berliner Weisse

OPhoto May 01, 5 57 54 PMk, so we gave you a crash course on the basics of brewing a Berliner Weisse, so lets go through the whole process from start to finish real quick.

  1. You’ll need a wort that is around 1.030-1.035 OG that is roughly 50% continental pilsner and 50% white or red wheat. If you are an extract brewer, you’ll want to use a 50/50 mix of pilsner and wheat malt extracts.
  2. The boil
    1. If you are doing all-grain, boil for 90 minutes to drive off any dimethyl sulfide. If you’d like to experiment, you could look into doing a no-boil Berliner Weisse.
    2. If you are doing extract, bring your wort to a boil. You do not need to boil more than a few minutes.
  3. Chill your wort to 110° F.
  4. Carefully, without splashing, Transfer to a glass carboy or stainless fermenter. You can use a plastic bucket, but don’t use this bucket for anything other than Berliner Weisse or other quick sour ales and don’t leave it in there for more than a few weeks.
  5. Pitch Lactobacillus and maintain the fermentation temp above 90° F.
  6. After 6 hours, remove 6-8 oz from the fermenter (use a dedicated wine thief) and measure the pH.
  7. Check the pH every few hours. When the pH hits 3.5-3.6, move the beer to a cooler location so the beer can come to friendly ale fermentation temps. Assume the pH will fall to the desired 3.4-3.5 range during the cooling process.
  8. Once the beer has cooled to about 70° F, pitch your favorite ale yeast (WLP011 is the most traditional).
  9. Ferment for two weeks.
  10. Package as a normally fermented beer, but be sure to use your dedicated/separate sour ale transferring equipment.