Golding Hopped English Bitter Recipe

I had a tap open on my kegerator, so I "had" to brew something quickly, so I came up with a recipe based on what I had on hand.  Bitters are some of the fastest and easiest beers to make due to their low gravity and simple recipes, and since I hadn't brewed one in awhile it seemed like the perfect choice.  I also wanted to get a big yeast cake for a Munich Porter and a Sour Mashed Old Ale that I've had on my brewing schedule for a while.  What I got was a great, malty, balanced English ale that I was able to put on tap just 10 days after I brewed it.

This was my first time using Wyeast's London ESB - 1968.  I was impressed not only by how quickly it completed fermented but also by the speed it dropped bright.  I brewed on a Tuesday and by the following Sunday the beer was at its terminal gravity and crystal clear (and the following Friday I was drinking it).  Luckily the flavor of the beer turned out to be just as impressive.  Finally in this strain I've found an English yeast that I'm really happy with both for how it behaves and the beer it makes, hopefully the Munich malt based porter it is working on now won't let me down.

I went with a simple malt bill: mostly Maris Otter, with a bit of medium English crystal malt for sweetness/caramel, and some amber malt for that bready/toasty maltiness.  The hops were all whole Goldings from Freshops.  They are American grown, but they still provided a combination of herbal/earthy/fruity character that is a classic component of many English ales.  I spaced the hop additions over the course of the boil to ensure a saturated hop contribution that isn't too heavy on the aroma so the malt and yeast will be able to make their presence known.  I think session ale recipes should be pretty simple, if you want something to be drinkable don't muddle it up with more than a handful of ingredients, and make sure the ingredients you do select are all high quality and flavorful. 

I did an all-day (~7 hour) mash while I was at work (which boosted my efficiency making this bitter Extra Special).  A long mash is a nice way to shave some time off of a weeknight (or early morning) brew, but make sure to either do a mash-out or use very hot sparge water (180+) since your mash temp will most likely dip down 10-15 degrees.  Despite better than expected extraction the beer still only ended up at 5% ABV.  I decided to keg condition it with 2 oz of priming sugar both for authenticity's sake and because this beer only had 5 days in primary before I needed the yeast cake.  I thought it would benefit from some extra time for the yeast to continue cleaning up before it was chilled down to 45 degrees for serving.


Golding Medal Bitter

Recipe Specifics (All-Grain)
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Batch Size (Gal): 5.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 9.61
Anticipated OG: 1.054
Anticipated SRM: 11.1
Anticipated IBU: 33.4
Brewhouse Efficiency: 77 %
Wort Boil Time: 60 min

Grain
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88.5% - 8.50 lbs. Maris Otter
6.3% - 0.61 lbs. Crystal 55L
5.2% - 0.50 lbs. Amber Malt  

Hops
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1.00 oz. US Goldings (Whole 4.15% AA) 48 min.
1.00 oz. US Goldings (Whole 4.15% AA) 24 min.
1.00 oz. US Goldings (Whole 4.15% AA) 12 min.
1.00 oz. US Goldings (Whole 4.15% AA) 6 min.
0.13 oz. US Goldings (Whole 4.15% AA) 0 min.

Extras
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0.50 tsp Yeast Nutrient @ 9 min.
1.00 tsp Irish Moss @ 9 min.

Yeast
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WYeast 1968 - London Extra Special Bitter

Water Profile
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Profile: Washington, DC (Carbon Filtered)

Mash Schedule
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Sacch Rest 420 min @ 154

Notes
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Made a starter 3/15/10 with 2.5 oz of light DME, 1 qrt of water, and 1/4 tsp of yeast nutrient.  Good activity by the next morning.

Brewed 3/16/10 started mash before I left for work.  Really hot sparge 180-185 to get the grain temp back up from ~138.  Collected ~6.75 gallons of runnings.

Added 6 g of gypsum to the kettle during the sparge to up the sulfate content to ~200 ppm.

Boil was a bit weak for the first 30 min, so I switched to a different propane tank to finish out the boil.

Used whole Goldings from Freshops, adjusted AA% down from 4.5%.

1 tsp of Irish Moss, rehydrated, along with the Wyeast yeast nutrient.

Chilled to ~69.  Pitched the already flocculating starter.  Shook to aerate.  Placed in the basement ~62 degrees.  Good fermentation after 12 hours.

Fast start to fermentation, but the krausen never got more than a couple inches thick.

3/21/10 Gravity down to 1.015 (72% AA).  Racked to a keg and added 2 oz of cane sugar.

3/27/10 Moved to the kegerator, and tapped.  Good carbonation, nice head, great malty flavor.  The amber malt "biscuit" flavor really comes through nicely.

5/04/10 First tasting, nice malt/hop characters, but it has an odd cocoa finish that must be from the Amber malt.

Cherry Blossom Competition

Thursday was the DC Homebrewers inaugural Cherry Blossom Competition.  Inspired by the annual blooming of the Cherry Blossoms here in DC each entry was required to contain a flower derivatives other than hops (entries used jasmine, chamomile, honey, vanilla, and cloves among others).  The competition entries were divided based on the meta-categories from the Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition.  Since the Cherry Blossom Competition emphasizes weird ingredients it didn't seem worth judging the beers in accordance to the BJCP classic styles, we just wanted to split the entries into flights of similar beers and have people judge them based on their enjoyment.

Everyone who attended the contest judged one of the three flights in the first round (ensuring that no one was judging their own beer).  The best of show round was judged by members who either didn't enter a beer or didn't have their beer advance.  For scoring we used a modified version of Charlie Papazian's score sheet from the Complete Joy of Home Brewing with some points allocated for "flower" aroma and flavor. We left how the winners were picked up to the judges, in the first round each table filled out score sheets for the beers in their flight, but each one ended up just discussing which two beers to send on.  During the final round though the judges decided to use a straight average of their scores to pick the winner (ranking the beers 1-6 ended up being too hard to do by consensus).

I entered my Honey Wheat Sour Flower (brewed long before the contest was proposed, but the orange blossom honey and chamomile made it a perfect fit).  It ended up getting fourth place, which I was pretty happy with considering sour beers aren't for everyone.  Scores from five of the six best of show judges ranged from the high 30s into the mid 40s out of 50, while the sixth judge gave me a 13 (it was the first sour beer he had ever tried).  That is one of the problems with a hedonistic rating system, it is hard to argue against someone who just doesn't like the flavor of a beer. 

It was really interesting to try the other entries, one thing that really annoys me about most competitions is that you never get to taste the other beer to see what you were up against.  Overall I thought the beers were very good, and the first and second place beers were my two favorites (so the judging worked well from my point of view).  The second place beer (which I actually thought was the best) was a wit with 2 oz of hibiscus flowers (jamaica) added along with the usual coriander and orange peel with 15 minutes left in the boil, it was light, fruity, and slightly tart, very refreshing.  The winning beer was a clove dunkel weizen with 1/4 tsp of whole cloves in the boil and another 1/4 tsp added to the primary after fermentation, it was very good but the clove contribution was slightly more aggressive than I would have liked (we were drinking the beer less than 3 weeks after brewday so the clove character may mellow a bit with additional time).

The club is planning on holding this as an annual event each March, it will be fun to see how the entries evolve over time as people figure out which flowers/techniques work and which ones don't. The next contest up is the second annual Iron Mug where each brewer receives a secret ingredient(s) two months before the contest to be included in their batch (the first year white wine concentrate and woodruff were the required ingredients).  The contest is held between DC Homebrewers and the Wort Hogs club of Northern Virginia (we hope to avenge our loss last year by winning this time around).  The club is still trying to come up with ideas for two more contests each year, if your local club runs does anything interesting/unique please post about it in the comments.

2010 NHC Entries

Despite being BJCP certified and the Competition Co-Chair for DC Homebrewers I've never been too enthusiastic about entering my own beers into competitions.  I only do it about once a year, most contests put too much focus on brewing to style, and not enough on innovation and creativity (which is what I'm really interested in).  That said, for the first time this year I decided to enter a few of my beers in the National Homebrew Competition.  I've taken a couple medals at the Spirit of Free Beer which draws entries mostly from the Mid-Atlantic, so I thought it was time to take on the rest of the country (although as a resident of DC in the first round of the NHC I'm only up against KY, MD, OH, VA, and WV).

I chose six beers to enter, including four sours since that is what I'm most proud of (there were only 160 entries spread over 10 regions last year).  The fact that the NHC only requires 1 bottle per entry made it easier to enter some of my favorite batches (as you can see I don't have many bottles in my cellar...).

My entries:
1. My most recent batch of Berliner Weisse, which is tart and spritzy, but might be a bit too sour for the style, although that is what I thought about my first batch and it won me my one and only gold medal. 

2/3. The Wine Barrel Flanders Red, which I think is one of the best beers I've had a hand in brewing.  I also entered a bottle of the sour cherry aged version in the Belgian Specialty category. 

4. Weizenator, which I think will do well in the Weizenbock category despite my unconventional use of Extra Dark English Crystal for most of the color.

5. Wheat Triplebock, which took a silver a year ago at the SoFB as an Eisbock and has only gotten better.  It wasn't actually eis-concentrated, but it's too strong and dark to enter as a Doppelbock.

6. Just for fun I entered a bottle of Sour Squash, although I doubt it has enough butternut squash or spice character to do well in the Spice, Herb, or Vegetable category. 

I'm certainly not expecting to win the Ninkasi Award with beers that weren't brewed with the style guidelines in mind, I'm just hoping to have a beer or two sent on to the second round of the competition (last year just better than 1 in 7 beers advanced). 

I considered entering the terrific batch of IPA I brewed a couple months back, but the hop aroma is already starting to fade, and IPA is always one of the most competitive categories.  There were some other beers I considered entering, but at $9 an entry (even as an AHA member) plus shipping to Ohio, it didn't seem worth it.  On a side note, it is sort of weird that I have to ship my entries to Ohio when Philadelphia (6 hours closer) is one of the judging sites.

I guess it will be about a month before I get my scores back, hopefully FedEx gets the bottles to the competition unharmed and I get some judges who like sour beers. 

Anyone else entering this year?  Anyone have beers on the table with mine, East region in categories 5, 15, 16, 17, or 21?

Bourbon Barrel Wee Heavy Bottling

These days some of my brewing projects make me feel like I'm working at a small brewery rather than just enjoying the "hobby" of homebrewing.  For example, this past Saturday when our group of DC area sour-heads got together to bottle 45 gallons (~18 cases) of sour bourbon barrel aged wee heavy, then filled the barrel back up with 55 gallons of strong porter.  Moving around 100 gallons of beer in a day certainly doesn't feel like operating on a homebrew scale.

Compared to our first barrel bottling day, our little group of homebrewers is getting to be ruthlessly efficient, completing the whole operation in under five hours (including a couple breaks for beer and pizza).  The general strategy was to break into two teams; one transferred the beer out of the barrel, primed it with corn sugar (aiming for 2.2 volumes of CO2), and dosed it with rehydrated champagne yeast; and the other sanitized the hundreds of bottles, then filled them with beer and capped them.  Other than a pump to speed the transfer of beer out of the barrel, and a postal scale to ensure accurate measurement of the wort before priming/reyeasting we used pretty standard equipment (bottling buckets and wands, bench cappers etc...).

The final gravity of the beer was a bit higher than I expected at 1.014, but considering the original gravity was just shy of 1.100 this beer is right around 11.5% ABV.  It has been surprising that we have yet to see the hyper-attenuation that I usually expect from sour beers (most on my regular 5 gallon batches end up under 1.005).  The combination of sourness, high alcohol, and a touch of chocolate malt should make this beer a perfect candidate for aging many years.  While I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves over the next decade, at this stage I'm just hoping all that alcohol and acid doesn't prevent the yeast from being able to carbonate the beer. 

The bourbon character of the beer at bottling was a bit more potent than I ideally wanted, but it should slowly mellow as it ages in the bottle.  The balance was perfect when we tasted it a few months back, but it took time to get the eight of us to all brew our batches, ferment them out, and decide on a day we were all free to get together.  Being able to fill a barrel on short notice would be one of the biggest advantages of having a larger scale brewing system.

We took a break from the frenetic activity to try a sample of the second beer aging in our wine barrel, a pale Belgian beer inspired by Russian River's Beatification Batch 001/PH1.  After 4 months in the barrel it has improved greatly, the sulfur character it had when it was young has mostly cleared up, and the sourness is starting to come around.  The coming summer heat should spur the lactic acid bacteria to really sour it up.  It will be interesting to see if it gets ropey/sick like the Flanders Red that spent last year in that barrel.

Speaking of which, I brought a force carbonated sample of the wine barrel Flanders Red that I have been aging on sour cherries for the last few months.  It is just about ready to bottle since it has a nice cherry character, bright sourness, and beautiful balance.  Nathan (whose basement houses the barrels) was racking half of his share of the sour wee heavy onto sour cherries, should make for an interesting combination along the lines of Lost Abbey's Cuvee de Tomme (strong/sour, bourbon aged, cherries etc...).

With all three of our barrels filled in the last few months there probably won't be much we have to do with any of them until late in the fall at the earliest.

Sour Bourbon Barrel Porter

If there is one thing that homebrewing has taught me, it's patience.  It is amazing that our (sour) bourbon barrel aged "wee heavy" has already been relaxing in its oaky resort for more than a year.  In that time it has gone from a rich caramelly fresh beer to a sour, oaky, aged delight (although clearly not what we originally set out to make).  In a couple days we'll be repeating the efforts of our Flanders Red bottling day to prime and bottle the ~50 gallons of strong-amber-sour-beer.  It will be interesting to see how it tastes with some carbonation (assuming we find a yeast capable of dealing with the considerable alcohol and low-pH).

Once the barrel is empty we will immediately begin filling it back up with a new beer.  This time around the vote was to do something strong and dark enough to nearly be an Imperial Stout, if it wasn't going to be sour and funky.  Jolly Pumpkin's Madrugada Obscura was a big inspiration for the idea, although we were not in any way trying to clone it as far as the recipe goes. 

The roasted character will be a bit restrained (9% dark grain), although if I was the recipe boss I would have reduced the chocolate/roast and added Carafa for a soft roasted character (I'm worried that the roast won't seem smooth once the resident bugs and critters lower the FG).  We also wanted to keep the IBUs low so the bitterness doesn't clash with the sourness.

We kept the recipe pretty simple (as we usually try to), with complexity coming from the different malts we each chose to brew our batches with (not to mention the bugs and the barrel):

Sour Bourbon Barrel Porter (All-Grain)
84% Pale
7% Crystal (I used a combo of 55L and 150L)
5% Chocolate
4% Roasted Barley
Mash ~155 F (to hopefully save some body/sweetness even after souring)
OG ~1.080

90 minute boil with 25 IBUs of a clean hop near the start of the boil.

For yeast anything relatively clean was acceptable, American, English, Scottish, Irish etc... (I used Wyeast American Ale - 1056.)

This batch will get the same treatment as the Wee Heavy, clean primary fermentation by each of the brewers, followed by about a year in oak with the microbes now living int eh barrel, the specific time will depending on how the flavor and gravity progress.  Most likely the oak character will be lower in this batch than the Wee Heavy since the first beer probably pulled out a good deal of the wood's character.

3/20/10 Racked into the bourbon barrel in Nathan's basement on top of the last 2 gallons or so of  slurry from the wee heavy.

1/15/11 Bottled with 120 g of sugar per 5 gallons plus 2 packs of Champagne yeast for ~40 gallons.  Half my share went onto 2 lbs of sour cherries.  Gravity only made it down to 1.016.

3/12/11 Bottled the 2.75 gallons of the cherry portion 1.25 oz of table sugar.  Aiming for 2.0 volumes of CO2.  Added 1 gram of 71B-1122 to the bottling bucket.  Gravity back down to 1.016.

5/18/11 Despite its short time in the bottle it is already drinking well, great blend of coffee, vinous, tart, sweet.  Excited to see where it goes in another year or two.

6/27/11 The cherries add a wonderful secondary dimension to the vanilla of the barrel, really happy with how this one turned out.

5/7/12 The cherry version scored a 32 at NHC as a Fruit beer. Placed 3rd out of only 16 beers. Snippets of the judges' notes.

Dry Hopped Sour Squash Tasting

What I have sitting in front of me is a glass of quite possibly the first sour beer ever dry hopped with Citra (the variety Sierra Nevada uses extensively in their Torpedo Extra IPA). There is no way to be sure of that claim, but at least I'll guarantee that it's the first Citra dry hopped, butternut squash, sour beer... really stepping out on a limb there...

I got the idea for combination after the great results I had with the bottle hopped Flanders red (Amarillo and Cascade). In that beer the citrusy character of the hops really complimented the bright acidity and slight sweetness of the base beer. This sour/brown is pretty similar (big acidity, but still some malt, and no aggressive funkiness) I thought a hop like Citra would have the same magical effect.  I also thought it would be a good way to get a sense for a hop I had never used before, still not sure what I'll do with the other 4 oz I bought (maybe a hoppy American red?).

Citra/Simcoe Bottle Hopped Sour Squash

Appearance – Nearly opaque, ruddy, dark-brown.  One of the problems with bottle hopping is that it makes pouring the beer more difficult (the hops tend to clog the neck of the bottle) which makes keeping the sediment at the bottom of the bottle difficult. The thin tan head has moderate retention and lacing. 

Smell – Nice citrus/orange nose with some tropical fruit (mango?) and pine, as well as some dank/herbal notes.  The hop character has deteriorated a bit over the last few weeks (those dank notes are new), it has now been in the bottle for about 5 weeks.  There is certainly a sour/funky note to the aroma, but the hops cover up the nuances. 

Taste –  That bright/sharp acidity kicks off my first sip with a bang, but it seems mellower after that.  The finish is a bit yeasty/muddy, I really need to find a better way to dry hop sours.  I'm really happy with the combo of Russian River and New Belgium microbes in this one, plenty of acidity with a gentle funk. One of the sourer beers I've made, but there is a bit of sweetness to help balance it out.  Not too suprising that the squash and spices are nowhere to be tasted.

Mouthfeel – The acidity really puckers, but there is still some body to balance it.  The carbonation is moderate (bottle hops give nucleation sights for bubbles, so I'm interested to see how the non-bottle hopped version compares).

Drinkability & Notes – Tasty, but I need to be more careful pouring these bottle hopped beers to avoid getting so much yeast (I should also be quicker on the draw with these hoppy sour reviews).  Looking forward to cracking open some of the "regular" version of this beer soon as well.  Nice way to relax after spending my evening brewing a hoppy English ale.