Summer is here and knowing that it will will only last a few days at most, I invited a bunch of friends over for a barbeque. Summer just isn’t summer without spending at least one evening defiantly trying to cook sausages in the pouring rain, or biting through the thick black crust on a piece of burnt chicken to find that it is complete raw and bloody in the centre. Yum…

It was also a good opportunity to crack open a few bottles of the unidentified homemade wines that are cluttering up the garden shed, sample the accidental cider, and at last to have my long-awaited mead taste-off with Fendog.

Firstly, the cider. Well, what can I say… it was sweeter that I expected, and flatter than Fendog’s wallet. After the explosive bottling episode, I had expected some secondary fermentation in the bottles but clearly the yeast had bought it. Still, it was very pleasant. I’m not a cider fan but could happily have enjoyed a couple of jars of this scrumpy. The Paramedic, who is a cider drinker, also gave it the thumbs up.

Next, the mead. We had to drink our way through three (still unknown) bottles til we actually located my mead, but we got there eventually, and thankfully Fendog had managed to distiguish his mead from his (potentially poisonous) ginger wine. Here is my completely unbiased review of the two meads:

Had to nip over to the boot fair this morning to pick up some dubiously cheap meat for tonight’s barbeque (don’t worry – it’ll be fine by the time I’ve carbonised it). Anyway, while I was there we had a quick look around for some toy cars for Boo Boo. No luck with that, but I did spot another Rumtopf!!! Oh, did my heart soar! I thought I got an amazing bargain last time when I paid three pounds. This time, they wanted just a quid. Thats what I’m talking about…

As with the other one, it looks totally unused. Its slightly larger, with a lighter glaze and will do the job nicely. Right, thats Fendog’s birthday present sorted! I wonder how many more of these things I can bag…

Today, I am going to start a new series of posts on how to taste beer. Hopefullly, this will build into a step-by-step guide on the art of beer tasting which will be useful to both the casual drinker and the expert brewer. The aim is to give you the tools asses the quality of your beer whether commercially produced or homebrewed, to better appreciate the unique qualities of a good pint, or even organise your own beer tasting evening.

I future posts I will provide a step-by-step tutorial, with various digressions to discuss more detailed issues. But here, I give a very brief introduction.

It seems to me that most people don’t choose their beer based on taste. This sounds ridiculous, but I think its true. People choose on the basis of price, name or image more than taste. With the rise of binge drinking, beer has become pretty much a functional item – its purpose is to get you drunk, rather than something to be enjoyed in the drinking. And yet, at the same time craft brewing is becoming ever more popular and appreciation of the complex taste profiles of beers has meant that good beer is being tasted and talked about in the way once reserved only for wine.

In fact, the art of beer tasting is based on many of the same priciples, though the things you are looking for are rather different.When tasting beer, there are three major areas to be assessed:

• appearance
• aroma (nose)
• taste (palate)

I will look at each of these ares in future posts, explaining what you should look for in each area and how to evaluate the quality of a beer.

But the first step is ensuring that you serve your beer in the correct manner. If you don’t serve your beer properly you wont be able to fully appreciate the above qualities. So that will be the topic of my next post in this guide.

Came across a useful looking hop growing website just now – hoping to get a few plants going on the farm next spring to follow in Trenchfootsteps.

http://www.growinghopsyourself.com/

This weekend I finally got around to bottling and kegging some of my brews.  On Saturday I bottled I think the second full-mash that I’d made, which I think was a clone of Old Speckled, which I was considering for Basil and the Senator, but now will use for the Stud’s Stag (early July).  It was good, a little bite to it, I think that’ll give it an interesting flavour.  We’ll see! 

(I might add, I am indebted to one of the Brewgroup suggesting the purchase of a pressure sprayer to aid with sterilising bottles.  £1.50 from Wilkinsons, one spray of iodophor and you’re ready to bottle!)

I then kegged the first of B & Q’s wedding brews (given the original working title Basil Pale Ale 1), which was marvellous.  I also transferred, what is BPA 4, into a keg to help it clear (this is the one where I pitched the wort onto the cake of BPA 3).  It tasted very bland and I now regret my slack approach, but we’ll see.

On Sunday I moved on to BPA 2 and 3, and was pleased with both of them.  I made up a hop tea for BPA 3 as during that brew I had run out of gas near the end, so missed the aroma hops.  I boiled 10g fuggles for around 5 mins in the priming syrup.  Again I was really happy with both of those brews.

In the end I primed with around 70g sugar dilted in 200ml boiling water, though was frustrated to find some of my brews were much longer than others, so should probably have varied a bit more!

Here’s the Recipe I used:

2.4 kg Marris Otter

2.3 kg Wheat Malt

270g Munich Malt

200g Porridge Oats

Mash 90 min 67 degrees Centigrade.

94 g Hallertauer Hersbrcker (2.1 % aa) 90 mins.

last 15 mins: 20 g Hallertauer Hersbrcker.  8g Irish moss.  11g crushed corriander seeds.  10g orange peel.

3 Brews.  One day.  Here’s how:

0700 Wake up and think about brewing.

0845  Put water on

0910 Weigh Grain for Brew 1 (Belgian Trappist)

0940 Mash in

0945 Start Mash.  20g gypsum.  pH 5.7. 67 deg C

0950 Drive to Stonehelm to pick up supplies

1040 Return.  Check mash temp.  It’s 66, rather than 67 I hoped for.  I ponder and figure it’s best just to leave it.

1055 Put sparge water on.

1120 Run off c.10 l of wort.

1130 Sparge.  1.5tsp gypsum.  pH 5.8

1155 Run off.

1205 More sparge.  (as the last runnings were still so sweet!)

1210 Weigh grain for brew 2 (Belgian wheat beer)

1215 Run off.

1220 Wash mash tun.

1225 Mash in

1230 Start the boil.

1300 Add hops to boiling Belgian

1320 Boil extra water because concerned running out.

1400 Run off brew 2 (wheat beer).

1415 Add hops, servimoces and irish moss.  Sparge wheat beer.

1430 Weigh grain for IPA

1435 Stop boil.  Run off wheat beer.

1450 Sterilise bucket, sieve and jug.

1500 Transfer Belgian from copper to brew bucket.

1510 Wash copper and start wheat beer boil.

1515 Collect Mash water from kitchen.

1520 Mash in

1535 Hops added to wheat beer boil.

1545 Put my washing on

1600 Went to neighbour’s for pestle and mortar.  No success.

1630 Crush corriander 11g and peel orange 10g.

1650 Add above to copper with hops and irish moss.

1655 Collect sparge water from kitchen.

1705 Sparge

1710 Sterilise brew bucket etc. to empty copper.

1715 Empty copper into brew bucket and clean.

1730 Tip IPA first  (brew 3) into copper

1735 Clean up

2020 Eat dinner and watch bear grylls

2210 top up with water and add yeast to belgian

Sunday

0845 top up and yeast wheat and IPA.

2355 went to bed and the smell of yeast was overpowering in my room.  DEEE-LIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!!!

______________________

Update 22nd June.

Although I had my two brew buckets, plus my mash tun / brew bucket, I think I could have done with another bucket, to deal with all the wort I was producing, as well as the remaining water.  And given that I was done in reasonable time, it would be worth giving the time to sparging properly (I was stopping when my runnings were definately still sweet, which was frustrating).

Goggs’ backup was most appreciated, no doubt.

With the reduction in temperature today, it seems natural to turn my thoughts to the chilling of wort.  Of the people I’ve chatted to recently about it, immersion chillers just don’t seem to chill the wort that far.  As their name might suggest, immersion chillers are those that are immersed into the wort.  They are copper coils, through which cold water is pumped.

Counter-flow chillers seem to be much more efficient.  These are normally made of a copper coil, inside a garden hose, and cold water is pumped through the hose, at the same time as hot wort is pumped through the coil in the other direction (and therefore the wort is coming up against increasingly cold water).

Described much better here, and further discussion on why chilling is important is found here.  This does make me concerned at not chilling my beer thus far, and might explain some of the off flavours I’ve had…

Finally got around to my bottles of Chimay this evening.  Decided to boil up all my gear to sterilise, and boil up the wort in one of my mason jars within the pan too.  I made up a smaller starter, so’s not to drown the yeast – 400 ml, with 40 g DME.

I think next time I’ll just sterilise using regular steriliser, and make up the wort in a pan, due to the issues of cooling a yar full of sweet syrup quickly, and doing stupid things like dropping the lid!

Anyway, harvesting yeast from a bottle you need to be anal about cleanliness.  So things like burning the rim of the beer bottle with a lighter before pouring out the beer.  This would seem to me to be something I’ve failed at.  Let’s wait and see.

One day on… there appears to be something of a sediment building on the bottom.  By the way, aeration is particularly important with this.  One of the things yeast needs to grow is Oxygen.  So a good shake as often as possible helps.

Two days on… frothy head and sediment appears to be fermenting.  Very pleasing!  Don’t know if it’d do this if it was spoilt?!

Eleven days on… finally stepped up the starter another level.  It had fermented out a long time ago and I was finally pushed into gear because I’m planning on brewing this weekend.  Surprisingly the Mason Jar had that delicious chimay smell once it was emptied.  It took ages for me to wash it up because I just wanted to keep smelling it!