BBB Brett Swap Article

A very nice article by Steve Gale about a 100% Brett beer swap I participated in. It was great to have so many homebrewers experienced with Brettanomyces in addition to Tomme Arthur (Pizza Port/Lost Abbey) taste one of my beers. The range of Brett beers was really phenomenal, in fact the swap included twice as many all Brett beers as there have ever been brewed commercially. I can't describe how much my eyes were opened to the flavors that Brett can produce.

Here is the section on the beer I contributed my:

Brewer: Michael Tonsmeire, Washington D.C.
Beer: Cherry Bretta
Strain: Claussenii
Starting Gravity: 1.060
Finishing Gravity: 1.010

Mike is fairly new to brewing, having started 2.5 years ago after taking a Beer Brewing and
Appreciation class during college. Despite this, in the last year he has produced 8 batches with
brett. This one had an interesting twist, beginning life as a Mo' Betta Bretta clone. But Mike added1 lb or dried cherries that had been rehydrated in Pinot Noir to the secondary. We tasted this brew having been in the bottle only 3 months – quite an infant for a brett beer!

SteveG: Cool aroma - autumn spices. Smells like potpourri.
Mike T: It is a Mo Betta Brett clone (Brett C) with dried sour cherries and pinot noir wine.
Cisco: Big cinnamon, with cherries in the background.
Mike T: I gave this one 60 seconds of O2 and servomyces.
Sean Paxton: Very nice, cinnamon, cherry, hint of oak.
AlB: The pinot was w/ the cherries yes, no oak right?
Mike T: The cherries were rehydrated at 160 in pinot noir, drained and then pureed with about a cup of "fresh" pinot.
Cisco: How was the cinnamon added?
Mike T: No cinnamon, just the yeast I guess.
SteveG: Mike - how much of this autumn potpourri thing do you attribute to the cherries?
Mike T: Not much of it, although this was my first time using dried cherries. I think it is an interaction of the cherries and the yeast, I think the fruit/wine is covering up some of the yeast flavors making what remains taste spicy.
Sean Paxton: Almost a clove/allspice finish.
SteveG: Sean, this is like a glass of apple pie!

Have you brewed a beer with wild yeast or bacteria?

Not, bad about 50/50.

Yes 36 (47%)
- Glad to hear a good chunk of people who are already brewing sour beers are visiting the blog. Hopefully my blog was able to answer a question or inspire you to start another batch of funky beer.

No 40 (52%)
- I should have put another option for people who haven't brewed any beer. Regardless on how you stumbled upon the blog hopefully you are considering adding some funk to your beer (or your bread, vegetables etc...).

Russian River's Bugs and Critters

At this year's National Homebrew Conference Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River gave a speech about brewing sour beers at home. Sadly, I didn't attend but between Basic Brewing Radio, The Brewing Network, and the BBB I got to listen to the speech, an interview with him, and read his slides. I won't go into the details except to say that Vinnie is a generous man who is essentially willing to give away almost all his secrets for the benefit of homebrewers.

In addition to the knowledge he gave out he also handed out small baggies of oak chips:

"The oak chips were used in Batch 23 Damnation, which was a beer that we made to celebrate the 23rd bottling of Damnation. After the oak chips were removed from the Batch 23 Damnation (no bugs or critters in the beer), I soaked them in four strains of Brett, as well as Lacto & Pedio and our house "wild" culture. They stayed soaking for 3 or 4 weeks before I removed them and dried sun dried them on the roof of our building. From there I bagged them up."
- Vinnie

Needless to say I was very excited when James from Basic Brewing Radio/Video offered to send me a bag of these gems to play with. Since they were already pushing 6 months old I decided I would give them some time to perk up in a starter before adding them to a full batch of already alcoholic beer. I made a starter just like I would have for any other beer (OG of 1.040), except that 25% of the volume came from an already fermented beer that I added at flameout (I wanted a bit of alcohol to help protect against any mold spores that may have landed on the chips as they dried). I also did not aerate as Pediococcus does not do well in the presence of oxygen. After just a few days there was a short burst of strong activity, followed by continued signs of activity (formation of a small pellicle, occasional bubbles in the airlock). I have no idea what grew, but I was assured that something was still alive and ready to start fermenting.

Once the starter had worked for a week I added some medium toast French oak cubes that I had boiled in several changes of water. I plan on drying these out after they have a few weeks to soak in the starter so I can save the bug blend for future beers.

The big advantage of this blend over say just using the dregs from a few bottles of Supplication is that it contains all of the microbes that Russian River uses while a bottle might contain only a small subset. As a funky beer ages it continues to get more alcoholic and the pH continues to drop, this will kill off some of the microbes that are active early in the fermentation. In particular Russian River has a large amount of Kloeckera apiculata in their barrel aged beers. Kloeckera is active early in the fermentation as it can ferment glucose, but not maltose. According to Wild Brews while Kloeckera can produce some interesting esters, they are too volatile to survive into the finished beer. On the other hand, Vinnie claims that “Our spontaneous fermented beers have a strong fruiting, floral, & citrus character, a trait exhibited by Kloeckera apiculata.” I'm not sure which one to believe, but I have never heard any negative aspects of it, so there is really no risk.

Since then I have added some of the starter and oak to a clone of Russian River's Temptation (a Belgian blond aged in chardonnay barrels with Brett), and I am planning on adding the rest to my Cable Car Clone.

It'll be awhile before I really know how well this blend does, but what I have heard from people who pitched the fresh oak into beers 6 months ago, I should expect a rich complex sour/funky beer.

Cable Car Clone - Brewed

Over the last few weeks I brewed the three "treads" for my Cable Car clone. The Avant Garde clone is finished fermenting, the Saison yeast is taking its time to finish the Red Barn Clone, and the Amigo Lager clone has just started fermenting.

I have to do this a bit faster than I wanted to so all the beers are ready for secondary by the time I leave for the holidays. Ideally I would have time to lager all of the beers for a few weeks after fermentation to clean them up before I add the funky microbes. 

3 gallons of Red Barn Clone (Brewed 12/02/07)

Pictured to the above

6.5 lbs Golden promise
10 oz Flaked wheat
4 oz Quick oats
5 oz Table sugar

Mashed at 150 for 60 min

OG 1.065 

90 min boil

3/8 oz Target @ 60 min

.5 oz Tettnanger @

27 IBUs 

Spices:

Ground in a coffee grinder and added @ 7 mins

2 g Sweet dried orange peel

1 g Black pepper

.5 g Dried ginger

.5 g Grains of paradise

Fermented around 82 with Wyeast 3724 Saison

------------

2 gallons of Avant Garde Clone (Brewed 11/27/07)

4.5 lbs Golden Promise

6 oz Home toasted malt (Toasted golden promise in a pie plate on my pizza stone @ 400 for 25 minutes, stirring every few minutes, smelled like Butterfingers when it was done)

2 oz of Honey malt

Mashed at 147 for 60 min

OG 1.058

130 minute boil

.25 oz Sterling @ 25 min

.25 oz Styrian Golding @ 25 min

.25 oz Saaz @ 15 min

19 IBUs

Fermented around 60 with Wyeast 2206 Bavarian lager

-------------

1 gallon of Amigo Lager Clone (Brewed 12/09/07)

1.75 lbs German Pils

.75 lbs Golden Promise

Mashed at 148 for 60 min

OG 1.048

75 minute boil

2 g of Magnum @ 60

1/8 oz Saaz @ 15 min

18 IBU

Fermented around 50 with Wyeast 2206 Bavarian lager

---------

After losses to sampling/transfers I hope to have about 5 gallons going into secondary. They will get a bit of time to lager and drop out any yeast/protein, I'll rack again into a 5 gallon better bottle and add a blend of souring/funky microbes. Sadly I don't have the actual microbes that Lost Abbey uses, but I do have a blend that originated at Russian River. After a year with the bugs and .75 oz of Medium toast French oak I plan on bottling.

12/29/07 Left it in MA in an inside closet, left airlock on and beer near top of the carboy.

4/25/08 Airlock filled up with a gross mold. My father cleaned it, but left it dry for a couple days.

7/21/08 Added 1 oz of the Lost Abbey Red Poppy oak cubes because the beer was tasting rather bland (not much sour, not much funk). I may feed it with some DME in a month or so if it still needs help.

8/11/08 Was getting pretty oaky, so I racked it off the oak and added 3/4 cup of light DME boiled in a bit of water.

10/02/08 Update, looks like a decent krausen/pellicle is forming on the surface as a result off the DME.

12/26/08 Bottled with 3/4 cup of table sugar and some 71B-1122 (wine yeast). Tasted pretty good, nice citrus component, but still not as sour as I would have liked.

If you want the details of how I came up with the recipe check out this.

4/15/09 First tasting, doing pretty well.

1/03/10 Second tasting, alongside an actual bottle of Cable Car.  The results were pretty close, but I would add the microbes sooner to boost the acidity and tone down the honey malt and toasted malt in the Avant Garde portion since mine was maltier.

1st Kosher Dill Pickle Tasting

A tasting of my first attempt at Kosher Dill Pickles.

Appearance - Army green skin with a darker green interior than a commercial pickle. It is amazing how much the appearance changes, getting darker the older they get.

Aroma - A bit of sourness with some dill and garlic. Rather earthy, maybe coming from the pepper.

Taste - Lots of salt with some garlic in the finish. They are lightly tart, but certainly not as sour as many pickles. The sourness is lactic and tangy, not the sharp acetic (vinegar) character that I really dislike. They also have almost no sweetness unlike some commercial pickles.

Mouthfeel - Very crisp, great crunch and snap. I love salt, but here the salt asserts itself a bit too much, making it hard to eat these in quantity without an accompaniment.

Eatability/Notes - Pretty solid first attempt, they are getting saltier the longer they sit in the brine in the fridge. I'll definitely cut down on the salt for my next attempt and maybe even water the brine down further for storage in the refrigerator.

Anatomy of a Clone - The Lost Abbey's Cable Car

There is always a lot of talk about cloning (copying) commercial beers in the homebrewing community. Personally I don’t care for cloning commonly available and relatively cheap craft beers (popular targets include Boston Lager, Guinness, Fat Tire, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, etc…). People often just take a recipe from a homebrew magazine, book, website, or homebrew shop and use it verbatim. This is all well and good, but if the beer is rare or obscure you probably won’t find a recipe for it, and even if you do, obscure clone recipes are often badly off the mark.

I enjoy the challenge of researching and designing a recipe almost as much as I enjoy the actual brewing process. I often clone beers that I have not had before, either because they are no longer produced like Courage Russian Imperial Stout, or because of their scarcity like Mo’ Betta Bretta. Trying to copy a beer that you have never had can be very tricky as you have to rely on other people’s accounts of the beer to help you develop the recipe.

So I thought I would post my method for going about researching and writing a clone recipe for a beer that I have never had. For this exercise I chose a beer that couldn’t be more complex or interesting, The Lost Abbey’s beer for the Toranado’s 20th Anniversary celebration: Cable Car. I thought it would highlight the various techniques I use when making a clone, many of which can be applied to any beer that you, the reader, are interested in developing a clone recipe for.

Finding general information on a beer:

A google search is often a good place to start. I found The Lost Abbey blog, which contains this snippet:

“Cable Car was a special blend of three oak barrels which was created for the Dave Keene and the world famous Toronado at 547 Haight Street.”

So we are dealing with 3 separately brewed and aged components which are then blended together.

I posted a question on ratebeer.com to see if anyone knew the three components, luckily someone did:

“Its an american wild ale. 3 part blend of barreled/funked beers. majority was red barn, with avante garde and amigo blended in.”

Luckily I have had Red Barn and Avant Garde, so I have personal experience with two of the three component beers.

Like many great breweries the Lost Abbey/Pizza Port isn’t afraid to publish the ingredients of their beers on their website. This is probably your greatest asset when either trying to clone a beer or just take inspiration from a craft beer recipe.

Here is the ingredient list for each of the three components and a little more info I picked up in other places:

Red Barn (Formerly SPF 45, but the recipe is much less complex):

Malts- Two Row, Flaked Wheat and Flaked Oats
Hops- Phoenix and German Tettnang
Yeast- Belgian Saison Yeast
Adjuncts- Dextrose, Ginger, Orange Peel, Black Pepper and Grains of Paradise

OG - 1.065
TG - 1.012
6.7% ABV (This abv doesn’t match the OG/TG)

Amigo Lager (I have read that Tomme keeps a barrel aged version of this that he refers to as “Mellow Yellow” around for replacing beer that evaporates from the barrels during aging.)

Malts- Pilsner and Two Row
Hops- German Magnum and Czech Saaz
Yeast- White Labs German Lager

OG - 1.048
TG - 1.010
5.0% ABV

Avant Garde (A bit of research turned up a barrel aged version called En Garde that is aged in Meritage wine barrels for 3 months. Not sure if this is what was used or not, but it is certainly a possibility.)

Malts- Two Row, Honey Malt and Port Custom Toast (we make it ourselves in our Pizza Ovens).
Hops- German Brewer’s Gold, Strissespalt Spalt and Czech Saaz.
Yeast- House Lager strain with hybrid fermentation at ale temperature.

OG - 1.060
TG - 1.008
7% ABV (Again, this doesn’t match the calculation based on the OG/TG)

Ratio:
Now that we have a good idea of the component beers we can start looking at blending, let’s get an idea of what the ratio may be.

Again from the LA blog:
“We blended exactly 100 gallons of beer”

From the RateBeer profile (another valuable resource) I see the final beer is 7% ABV, heavily funky beers around that strength tend to finish out around 1.006-1.007 in my experience, if I had a bottle of the beer I could do a hydrometer reading to know for sure. From there I used the ABV calculator in ProMash to determine that I want this beer to start around 1.060-1.061 to hit 7% abv.

Another way we can try to determine the blend would be to look at the color descriptions in reviews of the beers involved. I tend to use reviews from BeerAdvocate because they are generally more in depth and descriptive, but some RateBeer reviews certainly contain good info as well. “Gold” seems to be a frequent word used to describe both Cable Car and Red Barn; Amigo Lager generally sounds a bit lighter than that, and Avant Garde a bit darker. Due to the fact that they all sound so close in color this doesn’t help much, but it confirms that these beers are logical components (we’d be in trouble if one was a stout and the blend was pale yellow).

The blend is a mainly Red Barn, so I would guess that Tomme used an entire aged wine barrel of the Red Barn. This would be around 62 gallons (62% of the 100 gallon batch). So for my 5 gallon batch about 60% (3 gallons) will be the Red Barn clone. To pull the average OG down to 1.060 I needed to figure out how much Amigo Lager clone to add, the rest will be Avant Garde since it has an OG of 1.060 we don’t have to worry about it.

(3 gallons * 65 gravity points + X gallons * 48) / (3 gallons + X gallons) = 60 gravity points

A bit of algebra and you get X = 1.25 (that is to say that you need 1.25 gallons Amigo Lager, to dilute 3 gallons of Red Barn to 1.060)

There are a number of ways that I could approach constructing this recipe. The most accurate would be to age each portion separately then blend to taste, as it sounds like Lost Abbey did. The least accurate would be to create a single amalgamated recipe and then brew/ferment/age it together; this would compromise the optimal temperature and time constraints for each component. I decided to take the middle route, brew/ferment separately and age as one.

Recipe(s):

60% Red Barn Clone
3.5 gallons (assuming I will lose .5 gallons before blending)

A basemalt, in this case 2-row, will generally make up the majority of the malt. The flaked grains need the enzymes from the malt to convert, so they cannot make up a huge proportion of the grist. I am going with more wheat than oats since that is a more common ingredient in Saisons, too much oat and the body would make for a slicker mouthfeel than I remember. I have read that the White Labs Saison yeast can have some attenuation issues, so I assume a little dextrose is added to ensure that the beer finishes dry.

7.5 lbs American Pale malt
.75 lb flaked wheat
.25 lbs flaked oats
6 oz dextrose (corn sugar)
OG 1.065

120 min boil, to get what should be light colored runnings dark enough to match the finished beer.

27 IBU (approximate IBUs for a Saison of this gravity according to the BJCP saison style guidelines and other sources.)
.5 oz Phoenix @ 60 min (enough to hit the IBUs)
.5 oz of Tett @15 min (looking to compliment the spices and yeast, without dominating or getting lost)

Spice blend ground up and added with 7 min left in the boil:
.75 g Ginger
2 g Orange Peel
1 g Black Pepper
.75 g Grains of Paradise

The spice amounts were taken from the spice advice in Farmhouse Ales, a great book about Saisons and Bier de Gardes by Phil Markowski, the brewer at Southampton Publick House. I want a subtle spice presence, which will be blend with the yeast and hop character.

White Labs Saison (I know from previous research that Tomme is a White Labs guy) fermented at elevated temps, optimally into the mid-80s.

25% Amigo Lager Clone
Basically this beer sounds like a standard American Lager that is made without adjuncts (corn/rice). I just split the malts 50/50, this should provide a bit more malt character than just plain pils while still keeping the beer pale. For the hops I went pretty easy, but gave it enough hop flavor to make it “craft beer” worthy.

1.5 gallons (assuming I will lose .25 gallons before blending)
1.5 lbs Pilsener Malt
1.5 lbs American Pale.

15 IBU (a bit higher than a standard American/Mexican lager, but not by much.)
.06 oz Magnum @ 60 min (enough to reach the IBUs I am targeting)
.20 oz Saaz @ 15 min (should provide a subtle spiciness)

75 minute boil, this should be enough time to drive off any DMS without darkening the beer much.

White Labs German Lager fermented at lager temps for 2 weeks followed by a month or so of lagering.

15% Avant Garde
Based on the info about Bier de Gardes in Farmhouse Ales. The basemalt again dominates with some home toasted malt for complexity, and just a touch of honey malt which can easily get overpowering.

1 gallon, (assuming I will lose .25 gallons before blending)
2.25 lbs American Pale
3 oz Toasted Malt (toasted in a pie plate on a pizza stone)
1 oz Honey Malt
OG 1.060

20 IBUs (Since the OG is on the low end of the style I wanted to keep the IBUs low as well, especially because I remember this being a malt focused beer.)
.125 oz German Brewer’s Gold @ 60 min
.05 oz Strissespalt @ 15 min
.05 oz Spalt @ 15 min
.05 oz Czech Saaz @ 15 min
90 minute, “standard” boil.

White Labs German Lager fermented in the low 60s for 2 weeks followed by a month or so of lagering.

Putting it all together:
So after all three beers are done fermenting I will combine them in one 5 gallon carboy. I may also add a splash of red wine to mimic the wine barrel aging that I believe the Avant Garde (En Garde) went through before blending.

Sadly, I don’t have a sample of the microbes used in the original beer, but I do have a starter I made from oak chips that Vinnie from Russian River inoculated with his house culture and passed out at this year’s National Homebrewers Conference. I’ll add a few cups of the funky starter and attach an oak topper on and let it age for a year or so. The wood and oxygen diffusion should help to mimic barrel aging. After the beer has aged adequately I will bottle condition it, aiming for medium-high carbonation (2.8-3.0 volumes) based on reviews on BA/RB.
Hopefully I’ll be able to give the true Cable Car a try at some point to see how close I come.

Post Script:
After writing all of this, I decided to employ one of the best tactics of the clone recipe writer, contacting the brewer. I emailed Tomme to see just how close my estimates were, being the kind man that he is he gave me the blend ratio, 3:2:1. That is to say 50% Red Barn, 33% Avant Garde, and 17% Amigo Lager. Amazingly this works out to an effective OG of 1.0605, literally right where I pegged it! The combined gravity after primary should be around 1.011. Assuming the 7% ABV number is correct, it should land right around 1.006 at bottling time.

The difference between the ratio I came up with and the actual ratio is all due to the bad assumption I made that a whole barrel of Red Barn was used in the blend, apparently they blended from kegs. The lower portion of Red Barn then knocked off my percentage of Amigo Lager, with a lower amount of the relatively high gravity Saison I will not need as much Amigo Lager to lower the overall gravity. All in all though I think I came pretty close, and I believe that brewers are more likely to help you if you show that you have already put some effort into it.

I will post the full details of each of the brews when I get around to making them over the next few weeks. I will rescale the recipes using Promash above to do a 3 gallon batch of Red Barn, 2 gallon batch of Avant Garde, and a 1 gallon batch of Amigo Lager. I am also going to make some substitutions based on what ingredients that I can get locally, such as using Wyeast strains instead of White Lab and changing some of the hops around based on what is available.

Look for the results of this one sometime around the start of 2009.

In early 2010 I got the chance to taste my clone along with an actual bottle of Cable Car (Batch #2). The color was spot on, but mine didn't have quite the sourness of the original. I wish I had added the wild yeast and bacteria along with the primary yeast at the start of fermentation as I do for most of my sour beers.