Cheese Making | Lewy's Blackout IPA

The more that I brew, the more I become enthralled by the transformation that takes place during fermentation.  One good way to look at the steps involved in making a beer is simply the process of catering to the needs of a microscopic dynamo.  Proper temperature, pitching rate, oxygenation, time, darkness, food source and a myriad of other variables combine to make yeast (and the other organisms that ferment wort) do so in a way that speaks to our taste.  In a BN Sunday Session interview (begin listening at 47:00) with the owner and brewer of Cantillon, Jean Van Roy, he makes a telling statement about his role as brewer, saying, "The beer doesn't need a brewer...I'm not a brew master.  A master dominates the product, a master controls the product.  I can't do it...the beer is a partner."  His words make a lot of sense to me, as letting go of control is an essential part of brewing complex beers.  An artisanal product requires contact and connection with its producer, but will languish when that producer attempts to impose complete control.

Beer is just one of many products that are "alive" and influenced by yeast and bacteria.  Beer, wine, pickled foods, breads, cured meats and cheeses are just a few examples.  I've made bread for years, in traditional ways and using a bread maker, and have started to do so with more frequency.  Bread making is a craft that provides almost undelayed satisfaction.  You can bake a loaf of bread and eat it within a few hours or a day.  This makes it easy to experiment and easy to enjoy.  It also makes mistakes much more bearable.  But, there's something exciting about products that have to ripen and change over time.  It forces the producer to let go and have faith in the process and requires the embrace of uncontrollable variables.  It's one reason why I tend to gravitate toward beers that need aging and blending and other processes that require the influence of time to be effective.  It's also the reason why I started making cheese.

Cheese Making

Cooking curds

Partially pressed Jack cheese

Cheese and beer have a lot of similarities.  You can make a simple, enjoyable beer with basic, approachable processes, and plenty of room for error.  You can do the same with cheese and related products, making yogurt and cultured buttermilk and other simple dairy-based products that can be made and consumed quickly.  But the big, complex flavors you find in aged and bacterially influenced beers and cheeses requires patience and faith in the above-referenced uncontrollable processes.  So after making yogurt and getting a feel for the process, I made what will become my first hard cheese.  It's a Jack cheese made using a recipe provided by a cheesemaker named Brad Sinko and reproduced in Mary Karlin's excellent book Artisan Cheese Making at Home.  I made a few mistakes, pressing it in the wrong size mold, and struggling to maintain some of the temperature variables while cooking the ingredients, but the process was enlightening.  I was also able to use some of the left over whey to make bread.  The Jack will age in my fermentation chamber for the next two months while time conspires with the unknowable to make it into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Blackout IPA

Lewy's Blackout IPA

I also found time to make a beer.  In the course of close to 10 years and nearly 120 batches of beer, I've never reproduced a beer made by another homebrewer without altering it in some way to suit my tastes.  I decided to recreate an outstanding Cascadian Dark Ale made by my friend Lewy, following the recipe he provided as strictly as possible.  Blackout IPA is dark and hoppy, but different than most other similar beers I have experience with.  Lewy uses Glacier hops as the primary aroma component, making the beer unique and enjoyable.  He was nice enough to give me hops for the beer from his immense cache.  Read Lewy's original post here.  I hope my version can do it justice.  

Carnelian Red Rye IPA | DREGS #8

My hobbies are starting to rub up against one another, in a bad way.  I like to run.  For fun, 5Ks, half marathons, triathlons.  In the back of my mind, I always felt like brewing (and the subsequent drinking and consuming of calories) gave me a reason to exercise.  From an opposing perspective, exercising with intention seemed to provide me with license to imbibe.  Lately, it feels like the two are less complimentary than they have been in the past.  When I should be running, I find myself drinking a beer.  When I want to brew, I don't because I won't have time to run.  Maybe it's the holidays, but often I don't seem to have energy to do either.  Every time I find motivation, something interferes and prevents my good intentions from being realized.

Carnelian Gemstones

Yesterday, I got a decent run in right after work.  5 miles through a canyon nearby with no one else around.  I didn't feel tired or distracted or out of sync.  Then last night I brewed for the first time in over a month.  I used rye for the third brew session in a row and made a beer that I hope will be reminiscent of Alpine Nelson, but with more caramel malt character.  Carnelian Red Rye IPA uses sizable portions of Nelson hops in the flavor and aroma additions and in dry hop additions as well.  There's plenty of rye in the malt bill along with American 2-row and a variety of Caramel Malts rounding out the malt profile.  I used rice hulls for the first time to offset the gumminess of the rye and avoid a stuck sparge.  Safale US-05 yeast provides the magic.  It came out a nice deep red color (hence the name, Carnelian).  Check the recipe below:

Carnelian Red Rye IPA

I had a bottle of Oude Gueuze Tilquin á L'Ancienne that I'd been wanting to drink.  Gueuzerie Tilquin blends gueuze the traditional way, using worts from a variety of Belgian producers like Cantillon and Boon.  It's a beautiful beer in my opinion.  It's very tart and aromatic.  There's heavy citrus notes in the taste and the finish is wonderfully dry.  It's funky, but not in your face.  I decided to make a dregs beer using the yeast dregs, so I made an extra gallon of wort when brewing Carnelian RedRye IPA.  I admit, the profile of the base beer doesn't exactly scream wild fermentation, but I guess that's sort of the point with dregs beers.  You get to combine ingredients and processes that aren't "supposed" to play well together.

DREGS #8: Gueuzerie Tilquin - Oude Gueze Tilquin á L'Ancienne

Next, I'll be brewing Lewy's Blackout IPA.  It'll be the first time I've replicated one of his recipes exactly and it's a personal favorite of mine.  Can't wait...

Mixing Ingredients In A Big Pot | Crystal Rye

About a month ago, I set off to brew my third Flanders Red.  I had a new recipe and couldn't wait to get started.  I've been a dedicated patron of the largest homebrew supply store in the area for 10 solid years.  In that time, I've watched them expand their home brew shop as well as their brewing, and despite my appreciation for the beer they make, have found myself a little disappointed in the selection, knowledge base, business hours and customer service on the homebrew end.  As I started to measure out my Flanders recipe, two of the five malts that I had planned to use were sold out.  Both Special B and Caramunich were out of stock.  I had experienced similar disappointment often in the past, arriving with a recipe in hand, only to find that I can't brew the way I'd planned and changing it on the fly for better or for worse.  I decided to head elsewhere.

The Best Damn Homebrew Shop inside of Krisp Market reminds me of what my old homebrew supply store used to be like.  It's homebrewing done on a smaller scale and without pretense.  Why is pretentiousness a factor?  I've waxed philosophical in the past about homebrewing being more than just mixing ingredients in a big pot.  I still feel like it's a creative outlet akin to art, and that exclusivity and elitism cheapen it in the extreme.  You take simple, fresh ingredients, combine them with intention, control (but ultimately just embrace) the intangibles in fermentation, and end up with a product greater than the sum of its parts on many different levels.  There's no reason why you should have to navigate any false terrain in the process.

The Best Damn Homebrew Shop has a good selection of malts, many that are new to me.  One of the most interesting is Caramel/Crystal Rye.  Rye adds a distinctive spicy, dry flavor to a beer when utilized correctly and with appropriate subtlety.  I'm a huge fan of Alpine's Nelson which makes great use of rye in conjunction with Nelson Sauvin hops, and I've used rye with some success in the past (most recently with Ryenoceros IPA).  Crystal Rye is something I don't have experience with, though.  It's toasted like any other crystal malt and ends up at roughly 100 L. Tasting it in its raw form gives the impression that it will impart the same flavors as its unkilned counterpart but with the additional roundness and intensity of flavor you'd expect in a crystal malt.  The last two beers I've made have used Crystal Rye and I'm excited about the possibilities.  Recipes and descriptions below:
 

Dotted Line Rye Mild

A recent issue of Zymurgy focused on SMASH beers and included a Rye Mild recipe.  Two weeks ago I decided to brew something similar but substituted Crystal Rye for standard Rye and made some adjustments to yeast and hops to suit my preferences.  The Maris Otter base malt and single bittering Fuggles hop addition are classically British. I pitched WLP039 East Midlands Ale Yeast to maintain the British flavor profile. The result is a 4.8% ABV Rye Mild that's conditioning right now and should be on tap in a few days.

Handsome Grandson Double Rye IPA

Yesterday, I brewed a double rye IPA with Lewy, Eric and my new friend, Bill.  I looked at a lot of different recipes when formulating this beer and decided to stay relatively true to what's worked in the past.  A large amount of American 2-Row provides the bulk of the fermentables with a pound of standard Rye and a half pound of Crystal Rye adding complexity.  Over a pound of the hops I bought a few weeks back find their way into this beer (Chinook, Amarillo, Columbus, Centennial, Cascade), and I'm hoping that they leave some room for the rye to shine in the final product.  I'll be dry hopping it three times before it's done.

Getting Front Row Seats

If you're a fan of live music, then you've likely had this experience:

Your favorite band is coming to town to play a show, and tickets are scarce.  They go on sale on a certain day at a certain time.  You carve out that time in your schedule far in advance, making sure you won't have conflicts that might jeopardize your purchase, and when the tickets go on sale you're online, refreshing the page every few seconds until you're given the chance to buy them.  You don't worry about ticket price.  You're not concerned about convenience fees.  You know that if you miss the opportunity to see the concert, that you'll regret it and that's not acceptable.  In the mad rush to purchase you buy as many tickets as you can, thinking of your friends and knowing that they will certainly buy one from you, essentially spending their money for them without pause.

That same sense of urgency seized me this week as Hops Direct finished pelletizing some of the most sought-after hop varieties and placed them on sale earlier this evening.  I checked their site on Monday and saw that Amarillo, Chinook and Citra hops would be available for purchase on Friday.  There has been talk in the homebrewing community about the difficulty in acquiring certain hop varietals.  Some types are trademarked, and can only be grown in limited quantities.  Many of the most desirable aroma and dual purpose hops used in IPAs are purportedly difficult to find this year for the homebrewer with limited buying power.  I started to get anxious.  When would their website refresh?  Should I stay up until midnight with the expectation that 12:01 would be the start of my chance to purchase these hops?  Lewy and I discussed some strategy, but ultimately braced for disappointment.  Early this morning and then throughout the day, I checked Hops Direct and saw that the new varieties had not been added to their online store.  Away from the computer all afternoon, Lewy sent me updates periodically, telling me that there had been no change.  Suddenly, at ten minutes to 5:00, Lewy sent me a text message:

"Buy, buy!"

I dashed upstairs to the computer. logged on, and made my purchase, a pound each of:

Amarillo

Cascade

Centennial

Chinook

Columbus

By the time I finished checking out, the Citra and Amarillo were sold out, hundreds of pounds purchased in less than 10 minutes by the brewing public, hungry for alpha and beta acids in their homebrews.  Now it's time to tweak my favorite Double IPA recipe.

Three+ Years of Lambic -or- I Do a Decoction Mash

Step mashes are intimidating.  Different water volumes and temperatures.  Infusing here, removing wort there.  It's one of the more advanced brewing techniques that I have yet to take on.  When my friend Steve gave me over 20 pounds of fresh Cabernet grapes a few months back, I immediately added half of them to a nearly year old Flanders Red Ale.  I froze the remainder and started to mull over the best use for them.  Ultimately I decided to do the following:

• Brew a series of three lambics, each roughly one year apart
• Blend them when appropriate (3-4+ years) into gueze
• Add fruit (the cabernet grapes, tart cherries, etc.) to portions of them if appropriate

It's an ambitious plan when you think about timelines and the potential for error-much like mead in that sense.  The desired final product is close to half a decade in the making and that's a long time to wait for certain uncertainty.  I'm hoping that I can make a quality fruit lambic using portions of the first one I brew when it's less than two years old.  With this plan solidified in my mind, I set out to learn all I could about the complexities associated with traditional lambic brewing.  I reread websites and books that had offered guidance in the past and approached them with renewed creative context.  As usual, I scoured the web for more information, the jewels of experience that make such a huge impression on my resolve to go forward with something potentially disastrous.

First water addition.

Traditional lambic brewing in the vein of Cantillon, Haansens, Oud Beersel and others typically utilizes a series of steps.  Water of different temperatures and volumes is added at particular times to raise the mash temperature and convert different starches.  Likewise, runnings are pulled from the mash and heated to halt enzyme activity and provide some of the long-term fermentables that keep non-traditional fermentation agents busy and make lambic interesting.  I went ahead and followed a comparable procedure, taking much from the Mad Fermentationist and his post on turbid mashing among other sources.  It was complicated and a little nerve-racking but worked out well in the end  Here's how the decoction mash shook out:

Minutes	Action	Volume	Water Temperature of Addition	Resulting Mash Temperature
0	Add	3.1 quarts water	144°F	113°F
20	Add	5 quarts water	212°F	136°F
25	Pull	1 quart, heat to 176°F, hold
30	Add	6.5 quarts water	212°F	150°F
60	Pull	4 quarts, add to previous quart, heat to 176°F, hold
65	Add	5.4 quarts water	212°F	162°F
75	Add	5 quarts pulled, heated wort	176°F	167°F
85	Begin sparge

I adjusted volumes slightly on the fly in order to reach the desired temperature at each step.  I ended up gathering more than 8 gallons of wort when the sparge was complete, and a pretty hard two hour boil yielded the 6+ gallons I needed (5 gallons for the lambic and one gallon for a dregs batch made with Goose Island Sofie bottle dregs).  Pulling runnings from the wort at different times was really interesting, with the liquid coming out milky white and primordially hazy.  I ended up with a better original gravity than I expected based on past efficiency, and pitched Roselaire Yeast shortly after chilling.

I'm really excited to get this process under way and am already thinking about the recipe for Lambic #2, planned for roughly a year from now.

Red Giant Flanders Red and Zythos IPA

I brewed last weekend for the first time since mid-July.  It's the longest I've gone without making a beer in recent memory.  I was able to get two beers done, but it took all day:

Red Giant Flanders Red

Red Giant

After blending Flanders Red Ales with Lewy a few weeks back, we poured all of the remaining yeast cakes into a single carboy.  The huge cake comprised multiple pitches of Roselaire and innumerable dregs batches.  Seeking to continue some of the success we had, I brewed a new Flanders Red recipe and pitched it directly onto the cake after chilling.  The new recipe focused on Vienna as a base grain with some significant wheat for mouthfeel and crystal for color.  I had planned to use Special B but couldn't get my hands on any prior to brewing.  The brew session was sort of a mess.  I spilled a bunch of first runnings through a faulty seal in a bucket.  My SRM, gravity, and volume were all off.  My garden hose broke right when I needed to start chilling post boil.  It'll probably be the best beer I've ever made.

Zythos IPA

I bought a pound of hops from Hop Union that approached hops in a completely different way.  Traditionally, hops are always sold as harvested varietals, with the brewer deciding if and how to combine desirable flavors.  Hop Union created its Zythos blend of hops specifically as a multi-use hop for IPAs and other American-style hop-forward brews.  The idea of creating a proprietary blend of hop varietals and selling it under a single name is pretty interesting and Zythos is supposed to have many of the most desirable characteristics of favorites like Amarillo and Sorachi Ace.  I wanted to use Maris Otter in quantity for this beer and added a little bit of color and head retention properties with some non-fermentables.  A full 8 ounces of hops go into the recipe, and it's the first beer I can remember making that uses a single hop for bittering, flavor, and aroma.  WLP051 CA Ale V should impart some fruit notes to compliment Zythos' supposed tangerine, lemon, grapefruit and pine flavors and aromatics.

Looking Back...and Moving Forward

I made my first real homebrew on March 7, 2004.  I remember it being cloudy and overcast outside.  The sort of day that suggests activities inside. I had bought an aluminum pot, and made the beer on the stove in my kitchen.  The London Brown Ale recipe was chosen because it was supposed to mature quickly and be drinkable faster than others.  I was 24 years old, unmarried, no kids, no expectations.

Why was I brewing?  Because things that you make on your own retain more meaning than things you buy and consume passively.  Because I didn't have any money.  Because I wanted to make something unique.  Because I was (and continue to be) idealistic.  Much has changed since then.   In the interim moments between making my life something more than myself, I've found time to brew 112 beers.  Here's how they're      
categorized:

American Amber Ale	7
American Barleywine	2
American Brown Ale	6
American IPA	12
American Pale Ale	10
American Wheat or Rye Beer	1
Baltic Porter	1
Belgian Dubbel	1
Belgian Pale Ale	3
Belgian Specialty Ale	3
Biere de Garde	2
Bohemian Pilsner	1
Braggot	1
Brown Porter	2
California Common	1
Dry Mead	1
English IPA	1
Flanders Red Ale	3
Gueze	2
Imperial IPA	6
Imperial Stout	3
Irish Red Ale	1
Mild	2
Munich Dunkel	1
Northern English Brown Ale	1
Oatmeal Stout	3
Oktoberfest/Marzen	1
Other Fruit Melomel	1
Other Specialty Cider or Perry	2
Pyment	1
Robust Porter	6
Saison	6
Schwarzbier	1
Special/Best Bitter	2
Specialty Beer	6
Standard/Ordinary Bitter	1
Straight (Unblended) Lambic	1
Sweet Mead	1
Sweet Stout	1
Vienna Lager	1
Witbier	3

I've made plenty of beers in style categories that I love to drink, and I plan to continue doing so.  Pale Ales, IPAs, Porters and Saisons will always have a place in my kegerator.  However, I also want to make new beers and experiment.  Looking at the list gives me some perspective and provides guidance as to styles I want to brew soon:

English Barleywine
Northern German Alt Beer
Roggenbier
Hellesbock
Belgian Dark Strong Ale