Hybrid Wine-Beer Sour Tasting

I’m not a frequent wine drinker. While I don’t mind the flavors of a big red wine, they have a tendency to overwhelm my palate to the point where I can only taste three things: dark fruit, tannins, and alcohol. The New York Times had an interesting article a couple years ago on how diluting beverages like wine, coffee, and whiskey with water can help bring out subtle flavors and aromatics. 

To create this wine-beer hybrid, Nathan and I aged four gallons of our red wine barrel aged sour beer on a gallon of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes (the last of a five gallon bucket). The beer dilutes the intense flavor of the grapes, which helps my palate pull out lighter and more interesting flavors usually obscured in wine by their high concentration (oddly). Unlike water though, the beer adds its own flavor, preventing the combination from tasting thin or watered down.

Cabernet Sauvignon "Golden" Sour

Appearance – The light pink head evaporates almost instantly leaving a beer that looks more like a rosé.I'll admit that a stable head would be nice, but it certainly adds to the vinous vibe.

Smell – The aroma is rich with grapes, but it doesn’t smell like wine. The fruit is lighter and fresher than red wines tend to be. The Cabernet gives a complex blend of aromatics, grapes sure, but also cherries and raspberries. Brett funk makes an appearance as well, with more classic leathery funk than the other version of this beer. Just a hint of vinegar is released when I swirl the beer.

Taste – Solid tangy lactic sourness, along with a big fruit character. Similar grape character and level to Cantillon Saint Lamvinus, bold, but not dominant. In the flavor the fruit comes across even more like raspberries than in the nose; I'm not sure what fruit I would guess was added. Not sure if the slightly toasty flavor is from the malt or the Brett. A wisp of residual sweetness helps to balance the acidity. The grapes mostly obscure the oak flavor, but I’m sure the barrel helps the beer taste more wine-like.

Mouthfeel – Moderate body, although it feels a bit fuller than the non-fruited portions of the batch. The prickly carbonation is just about right for my tastes.

Drinkability & Notes – I couldn’t be happier with the way this portion of the solera turned out. It is interesting that diluting the grapes compared to a wine actually brings out more of the subtle flavors from the fruit. I’ll have to buy another bucket of frozen grapes the next time I have a couple sour beers ready for fruit.

What beer serving method is best?

On Tap - 52%
On Cask - 28%
In a Bottle - 19%

I think the answer to what is the best serving method for beer is so much more complex than my simple poll allowed. Expectations differ by the type of beer, where I am drinking, and the brewery. I think each method has times when it is the best and the worst.

When the right beer is served on cask, and it’s done correctly, there are few better drinks. However, too often in America casks are served by bars that don’t treat them correctly. My primary complaint is that casks are served too warm; there is a big difference between cellar, and room temperature. Other problems include murky, oxidized, or otherwise off tasting beers being served on hand pump and gravity pour. Not many breweries have large cask programs, so many bars around here are desperate for beers to put on cask. The result is that many have styles on that don’t benefit from the serving method; I once had a weizenbock on cask at a local bar, bad choice. Imported beer on cask are always a risk; English milds and bitters rarely travel well. The only time I order a cask is if it is a local moderate alcohol beer or at a bar that takes their casks seriously.

Draft beer tends to be the most consistent since it is usually stored cold and sold relatively quickly. However, they have their share of problems as well. Many bars only have a single serving temperature, which tends to be too cold for most beers. I really respect a bar that can keep their draft list tight and well chosen rather than having 50, 75, or even 100 taps. The more handles you have the more likely it is that some of the kegs will sit around for too long. Off-flavors from poorly cleaned lines are a big problem, although it seems like, at least here in DC, beer bars are taking the quality of their draft beer more seriously. When buying a draft, I usually go for IPAs and other beers that are best fresh. I also am a big fan of small samples, a chance to try an interesting beer without investing in the now universal bomber.

The thing I really like about bottles is that many breweries indicate on them when the beer was packaged (I hate best buy dates, seriously a year for Pilsner Urquell?). However, many brewers' bottles still do not have this basic piece of information. Bottles have a tendency to sit around too long, especially at places with extensive selections. A deep bottle list makes much more sense for liquors, which can sit indefinitely. Like drafts, I would like to see a well chosen and frequently moved beer list, especially of things that need to be served fresh. No problem having a big backlog of stouts, strong Belgian beers, sours and others that have a long shelf-life, but don’t carry 15 IPAs in bottles on top of a deep draft list.

This is all to say that what I choose to buy and drink is highly situational. In most cases I avoid bottles when I am out because I can generally buy the same beer at a store for less than half the price (and take a look at the bottling date before I buy). There are also some breweries that just do not have their bottling where it needs to be. A beer is fine on draft, while bottles are infected or have carbonation issues.

For my homebrew, I try to keep the beers in my kegerator restricted to only those that are best consumed quickly and in quantity. I bottle anything that will not be harmed by months or years of aging. The rare occasions I put beer on cask it is for parties when I know we’ll be able to work through the large quantity of beer in a reasonable amount of time.

Easter Spiced Pomegranate Quadruppel

I tend to deflect most requests to brew a batch of beer for someone else’s event. So little of the cost of a batch is the ingredients, the real expense is the time and effort I spend both in brewing and planning. However, I’ve made a couple of exceptions recently. First there was the parti-gyle (should I say "combined grist brewing" as Ron Pattinson suggested in the comments) English Oatmeal Porter that I brewed with my friend Nate. However, I ended up with close to five gallons between the two batches, so not exactly an act of charity.

A few months ago I bumped into my neighbor Dan. He remembered that I was a homebrewer and offered to start rinsing and saving empty bottles for me. Dan homebrewed while he was a grad student, but hadn’t made a batch since getting married, leaving grad school to become a reverend, and having kids. He hasn't lost his interest in good beer though, he and the reverends he works with hold weekly meetings at Pizzeria Paradiso (one of the three or four best beer bars in DC). It was at one of these meetings while planning their annual Easter Vigil that they struck upon the idea of brewing a batch of beer to serve to the several hundred attendees.

I kicked a couple of ideas around with him over email. My assumption was that they’d want something light and accessible for such a big group, maybe toss in some biblical spices? A couple weeks ago he and one of the other reverends came over to drink a few homebrews and plan the recipe. Dan and Tommy were especially intrigued by my Sour Cherry Bourbon Porter. In the end they decided on a Pomegranate Cardamom Quadrupel. We chewed on a couple malts, their favorites were CaraMunich, for dark fruit flavor, and just a touch of Carafa Special II, for darker roasted coffee aromas. Pomegranate is one of the few fruits mentioned in the bible, which is why He’Brew uses it in their beers so frequently. It is also suspected of being the fruit that Eve ate from the tree of knowledge (apples were unknown in the dessert of the Middle East).

I realize religion is beyond this blog's usual purview, so I apologize. I was raised Catholic, but haven’t been a religious person for the last ten years or so. Oddly I don't have a particular memory of losing faith, it was a gradual erosion until one day it was the only honest choice remaining. However, unlike many atheists, I still think that religion can be a force for good in the world, although that certainly isn’t always the case. My central concern is that having faith in something (including, but not limited to a god) makes a person an easier target to be taken advantage of or misled. That said, faith also makes it easier to convince people to help others or sacrifice for the benefit of society. Reverend Dan seems like the sort of person who is doing things the right way. In the hours we spent together brewing, he didn't ask me about my beliefs or suggest that I come to his church. When several of his young kids came across the street for awhile to watch the brewing, they were well behaved and inquisitive about the biology of fermentation.

After a standard mash and boil, at flame out we added a small dose of white cardamom. Not to be confused with the smoky turpentine notes of the black cardamom that Noah, Alex, and I used in the second iteration of our annual Dark Saison. White cardamom is most often associated with Scandinavian baked goods and coffee (previously I also used a pinch in my Scandinavian Imperial Porter). It is always easier to under-spice, and add more later rather than risk adding too much. For yeast we used the Belgian strain from the Westmalle Trappist Abbey, White Labs 530, naturally. The pomegranate flavor was contributed by tart, raisiny pomegranate molasses that Dan's wife procured from a local Turkish market. We added a total of one pound split between the secondary fermentors. Hopefully it will be enough to add a slight tartness, à la Ommegang Three Philosophers.

My payment for the time and effort will be a six-pack taken from the batch at kegging. Talk about a selfless act, especially considering how good the sample we pulled tasted!

Russell's Quad

Recipe Specifics
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Batch Size (Gal): 10.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 39.38
Anticipated OG: 1.091
Anticipated SRM: 22.7
Anticipated IBU: 24.2
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59 %
Wort Boil Time: 80 Minutes

Grain/Sugar
--------------
83.8% 33.00 lbs. American Pale Malt
5.1% 2.00 lbs. Beet Sugar
5.1% 2.00 lbs. CaraMunich Malt
5.1% 2.00 lbs. Pommegranate Molasses
1.0% 0.38 lbs. Carafa Special II

Hops
------
2.50 oz. Hallertauer Tradition (Pellet, 6.00% AA) @ 65 min.

Extras
--------
0.50 Tsp Yeast Nutrient @ 10 min.
1.00 Unit(s)Whirlfloc @ 10 min.
0.5 g Cardamom Seed @ 0 min.

Yeast
------
White Labs WLP530 Abbey Ale

Water Profile
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Profile: Washington DC

Mash Schedule
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Sacch Rest - 60 min @ 152

Notes
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2/2/12 Made a 1.5 l starter with 2 tubes of 530 on the stir plate.

Brewed 2/4/12

Batch Spargeed with 180 F water. Collected 9 gallons of 1.092 runnings including 2 lbs of table sugar added to the boil, plus 1 gallon of final runnings (boiled seprately on the stove).

.5 grams of ground white cardamom added in the last few seconds of the boil

Chilled to 67 F, 60 seconds of oxygen for both halves of the wort. Pitched half the starter, not decanted, into each half. Left at 63 F to ferment.

2/20/12 Fermentation appears complete, racked to secondary.

2/17/12 Racked both halves to secondary.

3/1/12 Added 1 pound of Pomegranate molasses and 1 gallon of distilled water.

Wine Barrel Golden Solera Tasting

For each of our two solera barrels we are bottling some of each pull as is for a baseline to compare all of our other variants against. This is the first pull from the wine barrel golden sour we brewed two years ago, hopefully the second pull will be in about six months.

Golden Solera - The Plain

Appearance – Clear golden with a thin white head. Looks just like the dry hopped version, right down to the mediocre head retention (not too surprising for a sour beer).

Smell – Deep oak, damp basement, and fruity Brett. There is a hint of acetic acid in the nose as well. A relatively clean aroma, lacking the layers of funky complexity that the best sours have.

Taste – Firm and clean lactic sourness on the first sip. A complex overripe apple fruitiness follows. The farmyard funk is subdued, but present. The oak is great, soft but pervasive. The wine character from the barrel is nice as well. The flavor has so much going on than the aroma, but it also has a light Flemish pale vinegar character.

Mouthfeel – Medium-thin body, with a slight tannic character. Medium carbonation, with more bubbles it might taste lambic-like.

Drinkability & Notes – For an unblended beer it has a good balance of oak, sourness, and Brett. Straight the oak and funk come out more than they did in the dry hopped version. However it is missing the aromatic complexity that even the low level of hopping provided that version. Not one of my favorite sour beers plain, but it is a good base for other flavors. It comes off as similar to Petrus Aged Pale, which is hard to complain about.

Hoppy Golden Solera Tasting

Having 115 gallons of souring beer split between two barrels in my basement is a bit of a risk. I mean even the best brewers blend their beer, and on occasion are forced to dump barrels. However, when I remember that it cost less than $250 to buy and fill each one, and that cost was split with my friend Nathan it doesn’t seem so bad. The fact that our two "group barrels" in his basement have had such a good track record provide additional reassurance. More than the money, it is the huge amount of time and effort it required to produce that volume of wort using our undersized gear that would be wasted if the two beers don’t turn out well.

The wine barrel golden sour was brewed about two years ago. Primary fermented in the barrel with Al's (pre-East Coast Yeast) Bugfarm III. After 20 months we pulled 20 gallons, refilling with similar wort. We plan to continue this periodically, essentially creating a single vessel solera which will evolve with each pull. For more information on solera, read Will Meyer's excellent article La Método Solera.

We split the beer from this first pull evenly four ways: plain, dry hopped, aged on elderflowers, and aged on Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. This resulted in about a case of the four varietals for each of us. I decided to do the tasting of the dry hopped (Hallertau Tradition) first since those hoppy aromas are already fading. Sadly I took most of my share of the dry hopped portion to serve on tap, but the keg immediately turned sharp and highly acetic despite the fact that I double purged with carbon dioxide.

Golden Solera - The Hoppy

Appearance – Looks like Pilsner Urquell, with a brilliantly clear, golden-yellow body. The stark white head is thin, but remains at that level until the beer is finished.

Smell – Big sour fruit, hard to pick out exactly what the fruit is… Plum? Pear? The hops add a nice herbal note, but it is secondary to the wild fruit. The hops were never as bold as I had hoped they would be, and they have faded a bit since it was bottled a few months ago. Luckily I don’t find faded European hops offensive like I do citrusy American hops. There is also just a hint of chalky aspirin.

Taste – Solid lactic acid with some sharpness from acetic. It gets me right in the sides of the cheeks. The flavor is similar to the aroma, a complex blend of fruit and rustic farmyard funk. The flavor is more decidedly winey, with a big contribution from the red grape juice that once filled the barrel. The oak is subtle despite the 20 months in the barrel, spicy and nothing like the lumber many “aged on oak” beers end up with. There is still a touch of residual sweetness to help balance the sourness, but nothing like the really sweet/sour beers like Duchesse De Bourgogne.

Mouthfeel – Light body, with moderate carbonation. The carbonation could be slightly higher. Slight tannic roughness on my tongue from the oak. The acidity makes it seem fuller than it actually is.

Drinkability & Notes – Considering this was the first pull it will be interesting to see if the funkiness of the Brett is able to assert itself more in subsequent years. I would have liked more character from the nearly 4 oz of dry hops, but I think we probably loaded the hop bag too full to allow for adequate circulation.

11 Mistakes Every New Homebrewer Makes

I was inspired by coaching one of my coworkers through his first batch of homebrew (an English bitter) to write up a list of the mistakes that many new homebrewers make. Several of these are things I did on early batches, while others I have tasted at homebrew at club meetings. Many of these issues stem from poor kit instructions, bad homebrew shop advice, and common sense that just doesn’t work out.

1. Using the sanitizer that comes with a beer kit. This powdered sanitizer is slow and not especially effective. Instead get a no-rinse sanitizer like Star-San or Iodophor, which are faster and easier to use. Sanitize everything that touches your beer post-boil, and make sure it is carefully cleaned after each use (sanitizers are most effective on scrupulously-clean scratch-free surfaces). Keeping wild microbes out of your beer is the single most important step to brewing solid beer.

2. Starting with a recipe that is strong or unusual. Brewing a big complex beer is lots of fun, but play it safe on your first batch and brew something simple. High alcohol beers require more yeast and time. Interesting adjuncts add complexity to the recipe and process. These are things you don’t want to deal with on your first batch, so keep it easy.

3. Brewing with unfiltered, chlorine-containing tap water. If you are on a municipal water supply odds are that it contains either chlorine or chloramines. To remove them you can either charcoal filter or treat your water with metabisulfite, or alternatively use bottled water. One of the most common off-flavors I taste at homebrew club meetings is medicinal chlorophenol, which is formed by the combination of chlorine in the water or sanitizer and phenols from malt and yeast.

4. Squeezing the grain bag after steeping. This releases tannins, which give the body a rough texture. Steep your grains in a small amount of water (no more than three quarts per pound) and then rinse them by either pouring hot water over the grain bag or dipping the grain bag into a second pot of hot water. Edit: I've had a couple people dispute squeezing being an issue in the comments. I've tasted some tannin-y beer from new homebrewers, but maybe it was just from a high water to grain steeping ratio. I'll have to squeeze the grain bag into a glass and have a taste the next time I brew an extract beer.

5. Using liquid yeast. "Pitchable" liquid yeast cultures barely have enough cells to ferment a standard gravity beer on the day they are packaged, and their cells die quickly from there. A high quality 11.5 g package of dried yeast starts with twice as many cells as a fresh package of yeast from Wyeast or White Labs, and retains high cell viability for much longer. Liquid yeast can produce great beers, but require a starter unless you are getting extremely fresh yeast and brewing a low-alcohol beer.

6. Not aerating the wort adequately. It takes several minutes of shaking for the chilled wort to absorb the ideal amount of oxygen to allow the yeast to complete a healthy growth phase. The healthier your yeast cells are the cleaner and quicker they will complete the fermentation.

7. Pitching when the side of the pot or fermentor feels “cool enough.” Use a sanitized thermometer to check the actual temperature of the wort before you add the yeast. Pitching when the wort is above 100 F is rare, but will kill the yeast. Ideally the temperature should be at or below your target fermentation temperature to allow the temperature to rise as the yeast grows and ferments. You can pre-chill the sanitized water you use to top-off after the boil to help bring the temperature down.

8. Fermenting at too high of a temperature. Take note of the ambient temperature of the room the beer is fermenting in, but realize that at the peak of fermentation the yeast can raise the temperature of the beer by as much as 7 F. Fermenting too warm can cause the yeast to produce higher alcohols and excessive fruity flavors. Letting the ambient temperature rise towards the high end of the yeast's range as fermentation slows helps to ensure a clean well attenuated beer, but for most strains is unnecessary. If you are unable to control the fermentation temperature, then choose a yeast strain that fits the conditions.

9. Racking to secondary. I know the instructions included in most kits call for transferring the beer from the primary fermentor to a secondary before bottling, but all this step accomplishes is introducing more risk of oxidation and wild yeast contamination. There is no risk of off flavors from autolysis (yeast death) at the homebrew scale in less than a month. At a commercial level the pressure and heat exerted on the yeast can cause problems quickly, but those conditions do not exist in a carboy or bucket.

10. Relying on bubbles in the airlock to judge when fermentation is complete. Wait until fermentation has appeared finished for a couple of days before pulling a sample of wort to test the final gravity. There is no rush to bottle, and doing so before the final gravity is reached results in extra carbonation. Once fermentation is complete and the beer tastes good, you can move the fermentor somewhere cool to encourage the yeast to settle out for clearer beer in the bottle.

11. Adding the entire five ounce package of priming sugar. In almost all cases this amount of sugar will over-carbonate the beer. Even for five gallons of beer this will produce too much carbonation for most styles and most brewers will end up with less than five gallons in the bottling bucket. Instead use a priming sugar calculator to tailor the weight of sugar you add to the actual volume of beer, the style of beer you are brewing, and the fermentation temperature.

Hopefully this list is able to help a few new homebrewers avoid some of the biggest pitfalls on their first batch. If any of the more experienced brewers out there has any lessons learned that are not included on the list please post a comment. You should also pick up a good basic homebrewing book, like John Palmer’s How to Brew, especially if you want to learn more of the “why” behind some of my suggestions.

There are many other things I would suggest as best practices, but they tend to be more style specific and are not worth worrying about on your first batch. I also think fresh high quality ingredients are a big key to making good beer, but most people brewing their first batch are buying and using fresh malt, yeast, and hops.