Wild Yeast Ideas

A few months ago, a friend of mine posted about trying to capture some "wild" (actually local, not necessarily wild) yeast to use in his bread making endeavors. I pointed him towards The Mad Fermentationist, hoping I might help him be successful. Of course, revisiting Michael Tonsmeire's work sent me down the rabbit hole... Where I discovered Sui Generis Brewing and http://suigenerisbrewing.com, which I also shared with my friend.

For years, I have dreamed of cultivating yeast from my own yard in order to brew beer. Between hearing about relatively low success rates and the amount of time I actually have been spending on brewing the last few years, the idea has gotten shelved almost as soon as my mind has wandered to the topic.

Although I had not yet recommitted myself to brewing, watching Bryan's videos at Sui Generis got me thinking about local yeast again... My new "small batch" mindset seems perfect for a little bit of yeast experimentation!

Several types of berries are currently ripening around my yard, and I have always considered these when thinking of trying to collect local yeast:

• salmon berry (Rubus spectabilis - usually the first to ripen each year; very tart, even when ripe; rare to find fully ripened [red] berries - they are a favorite of the robins!)
• thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus - usually ripen following the salmon berry; red raspberry-like fruit; sweeter than salmon berry, but not super sweet)
• trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus - usually ripens in August, but is ripening early this year; the only blackberry truly native to my area; sweet and highly sought after, especially by wild berry snobs)
• red huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium - usually ripens mid-summer; tart)

In late summer and early fall, I will also have access to:

• Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus - ripens late summer; large, juicy berries - extremely sweet; considered a noxious weed, and ill-favored by wild berry snobs)
• evergreen blackberry (Rubus laciniatus - ripens late summer; often intermingled with Himalayan blackberry; larger, seedy berries - tart; considered a noxious weed and not picked by anybody)
• evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum - ripens late summer/early fall; small black berries - sweet)
• salal (Gaultheria shallon - ripens in late summer/early fall; mealy berries - not much flavor; I have seen robins get "drunk" from eating extremely ripe salal berries in the fall!)
• Oregon grape (Mahonia nervosa - ripens late summer/early fall; small, purple berries - tart)

Tonight, I decided to get the ball rolling. I boiled up a batch of weak starter (1.020 w/ ~8 BU; 100g DME/200ml water). My father-in-law gave me his old 22-quart pressure cooker (in all its yellow enamel splendor, complete with the 1980 sales receipt!), so I made plenty of starter wort and canned it in pint mason jars.

Brew Year's Resolution - in July (There's a Pattern)

Some people do New Year's Resolutions. Apparently, I do summer resolutions!

Here it is July again, and I find myself gravitating back to homebrewing. Again. I only brewed 5 beers in 2019, and 4 of them were brewed in the summer. I would like to say that this will change for the remainder of 2020 (which has obviously been a doozie!) and into 2021, but I say that every year...

I like planning - developing recipes. I like brewing. I certainly like drinking the results. But like so many other brewers, I hate cleaning! The setup and time for an all-grain brew day is a bit of a drag as well. I suppose that there are ways to make setup more efficient, which might shave some time off of that step. An extract or extract with steeping grains batch can reduce the brew day a great deal. There are no real shortcuts for cleaning, however.

This summer, I find myself analyzing brewing a bit differently. Along with the simplified analysis of what I like and don't like about brewing in general, I decided to think about what I like about drinking  beer. Above all else, I love the refreshing variety of flavor and style options. My wife is always asking me why I need so much beer; the answer is choice. I like to have choices!

Some days I want something light and refreshing - a craft lager or pilsner hits the spot (and because of hockey, I also always have some locker room beer like Rainier or PBR). Other days, I crave something hoppy - an IPA, pale, or session pale are there for me on those days. When I long for something dark and roasty - a porter or stout fits the bill. Besides simply matching the hankering in the moment, I also like to match the beer to the food I make.

Brewing that much variety in 5-gallon (or larger) batches is an undertaking. I do have a 4-tap keezer, but brewing and keeping 20 gallons of beer is kind of a big deal. When I used to brew with friends, it was easier; one year, a friend and I brewed over 300 gallons! Nowadays, however, it seems like I barely brew 20 gallons a year! Clearly, a different approach is in order...

In years past, I have mashed and brewed a bigger batch - to the tune of 10-12 gallons - and split it into two smaller batches. That worked well enough: more beer for not much more time on a brew day (running two burners for the boils). I have tried parti gyle batches, were I got a bigger beer and a smaller beer; I have made different beers from the same wort by varying hop charges and yeasts; and I have brewed very different styles from the same base wort by utilizing steeping grains. Each of these double batches got me two kegs. I'm not sure that any of these methods will get me brewing more often though.

Even if I were to go the double batch route, and fill all four of my taps, that might be 2 or 3 brew days, which is reasonable. Although four choices is technically quite a bit of variety - I could easily cover my bases with a lager, something hoppy, something darker, etc. - that's 5 gallons each; roughly 36 pints each keg. The novelty of those specific varieties often wears off before the keg is blown.

When I first begain brewing, doing extract batches on the stovetop, I often brewed smaller batches. Not only was it easier to manage, I also got to try my hand a lot of different styles! Back then, bottling 2-3 gallons of beer into some combination of about 24 bottles, 12 ounce and 22 ounce, was a lot less daunting task than bottling a full 5-gallon batch as well. After watching James Spencer brew up a one gallon batch on Basic Brewing Video, I even did a bunch of those batches, which yielded about a six pack of finished beer (that was a lot of work for six beers - I would recommend doing a 2-3 gallon batch over this method, unless you were conducting experiments).

These days, I have four 2.5-gallon kegs, which I have used for the occasional 1/2 batch (or when I brew something like a mild for a yeast starter). When I eyed those smaller kegs the other day, it got the gears turning... The smaller volume might get me over the "I'm kind of tired of this" hurdle. The smaller size also means that I can potentially fit more into my keezer - if I stack them; if I add some new taps, I could potentially double my choices (withiout having to drink 5 gallons of the same beer!)!

The prices have come down quite a bit on the smaller kegs (at least since I first bought mine about 5 years ago). I'm thinking it is probably worth investing in few more 2.5-gallon kegs. I already have quite a few 3-gallon carboys - more than enough to get a handful of beers going. Scaling recipes is a snap.

All of this has me a little bit excited - more excited than I have been about brewing for a while! My plan for reinvigorating my brewing is to go small! It is undoubtedly too early, given that I have not even begun brewing aything yet, but I am dubbing this the "brew-a-week" plan...

Finally! (Parti Gyle Complete)

In true Medius Nox Noctis form, I finished my parti gyle brew in the wee hours of the morning...

First of all, it is a crazy brewer who tries to brew multiple all-grain batches in one day. The brewer who thinks they can do three should not roam the streets of his free will. I will never do that again (even if my wife would let me)!

Besides time, the biggest challenge I faced with my parti gyle brew day involved brewing software. I do own BeerTools Pro, but I am usually too lazy to use it; maybe there is parti gyle formulation capability built into the software, but I wouldn't know. I primarily use the BeerTools.com website for my recipe formulation. It is not as robust or flexible as the BeerTools Pro standalone software, but it is quick and gets me in the ballpark for all my recipes; plus I am a "Gold" member, so I can store up to 256 recipes online.

The online recipe calculator has no parti gyle flexibility - or much in the way of sparge adjustments at all. It simply takes your grain bill and your recipe volumes and calculates out your gravities. This works great for the average batch or fly-sparged recipe. But for no-sparge or parti gyle? Not so much.

At any rate, I ended up pretty close to the predictions on the first batch (the Old Ale), which came in just over 1.100 OG with 5.5 gallons into the carboy. For the second beer, a Northern English Brown, I could not figure out how to make the adjustments in the interface to calculate the second runnings separately... I ended up just plugging in a completely new recipe, preserving the grain bill ratios and hop additions, but scaling it down to the actual gravity I pulled into the kettle.

I used some interesting yeast strains (Wyeast Old Ale Blend for the Old Ale, and Wyeast West Yorkshire Ale for the Northern English Brown) this time around. The Old Ale, dubbed 'The Reaper', will actually get racked into a secondary to let the Brettanomyces do its work; it will eventually go into bottles as part of my gift beer for the Holidays at the end of 2011. The Northern English Brown ('The Creeper') will be ready much sooner, and I can't wait to pull some pints off draft in a few weeks!

A First: California Common!

I am hoping to brew 15 gallons of beer this weekend...

The first one I brewed was a California Common. I used JZ & John Palmer's How to Brew to formulate the recipe. My starter was going good and strong. The brew day and boil were cruising along without a hitch. All systems go, right?

Did I mention that I am planning to brew 15 gallons this weekend? Ten gallons are going to come from the same grain bill - a parti gyle (mentioned in a couple other posts this past week). This takes a bit of prep and coordination. My plan was to get an early start, and brew straight through the day, marathon style. Can you tell by all of these disclaimers that I have not yet gotten to the actual story?

So... I was pre-staging ingredients for the first brew from the parti-gyle (a big Old Ale) - getting the grain ready, weighing out hop additions, measuring my black treacle. My wife, who supports my brewing habit but doesn't get directly involved with the process (or any of my hobbies - obsessions as she calls them - now that I think about it?), was attempting to engage me in a conversation; the topic was definitely important, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. And then I was called upon by my sons for an expedient toy repair.

Amid the brewing prep and maelstrom of family activity, my timer went off. 10 minutes remaining in the boil. I grabbed the last hop addition, along with the treacle, and headed out to the deck to drop them into the wort along with the wort chiller. Ten minutes later, I killed the flame, partially replaced the kettle lid, and began chilling my California Common wort.

People who understand the BJCP style guidelines have already spotted my mistake... Treacle? In a California Common? WTF? However, at this point I had not noticed my mistake. Then I took a gravity reading with my refractometer - I overshot by A LOT? I did some quick calculations, and added back some filtered, boiled water to hit my gravity numbers.

It wasn't until I got ready to start on the parti-gyle that I realized what had happened. I went to look for my treacle, which should have been right there on the counter with my hops... Nowhere to be found. Oh crap! I freaked out!

My wife, again supportive of my brewing, managed to talk me down "off of the ledge" about my mistake. She convinced me that the beer would still be 'great' - just not what I had planned (only a small consolation, by the way!). So, technically, I have still never brewed a California Common.

Planning My First Parti Gyle!

Without getting too far into the details of the brewing process, parti gyle brewing is a traditional (nearly, extinct, commercially at least) technique. Most modern brewers make one beer from one mash/grain bill. In parti gyle brewing, multiple beers are made from one mash/grain bill. With current brewing techniques, the first runnings (first drain of sugary water from the grain) are combined with the subsequent sparge (rinsing of the remaining sugars) to make one batch of wort, which will become one batch of beer when the yeast are done doing their thing...



With the parti gyle technique (originating in Scotland), the first runnings are used to make a bigger (stronger/higher gravity) beer, and the subsequent sparge(s) is used to make one or more smaller (less strong/lower gravity) beers. In its simplest form, the first runnings compose the wort for one distinct beer, and each subsequent sparge creates another distinct beer. This is evident in monastic and farm brewing: the first runnings went to create beer for the abbot or landowner; the second runnings were for the monks or guests at the farm; and the later runnings went to create table beer for the laymen & pilgrims or the farmhands.



Another parti gyle technique involves blending of the various runnings, with the strongest of the line of beers being 100% (or near 100%) of the first runnings, and the lowest gravity beer being mostly last runnings. One commercial brewery that still uses this particular technique is Fuller Smith & Turner (aka Fuller's) in the UK. Fuller's Golden Pride is an example of the strong end of their line, with ESB and London Pride somewhere in the middle, and Chiswick Bitter at the bottom of the beer-strength continuum. The same grain bill is used to brew them all, but each is blended at a different rate from the runnings off of the mash.



For those brewers that brew two distinctive, individual (not blended) parti gyle beers, there is further variation.

The brewer can choose a runoff volume ratio to determine how much wort is created for each batch. Common ratios include 1/3 first runnings to 2/3 second ruings, or 50-50. In the 1/3 to 2/3 ratio, the first third yields a stronger, richer wort in smaller volume which means less finished beer quantity; but it is higher in alcoholic strength and arguably the stronger flavor profile yielded by the combination of grains selected for the mash; the final 2/3 result in twice as much finished beer, but at half the strength and possibly less-pronounced or more subtle grain flavor profiles. The 50-50 method yields equal volumes, with less alcohol content and flavor differentials; the brewer still ends up with one stronger beer, both in alcohol and flavor characteristics, but simple chemistry and physics leads to a narrower extreme on both ends.



My first attempt will be a 50-50, just for ease of process. I will be making an Old Ale with the first runnings and a Northern English Brown with the second runnings (as opposed to a stronger Old Ale or Barleywine with the 1st runnings and a mild or or ordinary bitter with the 2nd runnings if I did the 1/3 to 2/3 method). Old Ale is a big English style ale, characterized by an elevated level of sweetness and alcohol. Originally, these beers were aged significantly before being drunk, but these days most commercial examples are either not aged, or a blend of aged and newer beer. If you can get your hands on them, good commercial examples include Theakston Old Peculier or Greene King lde Suffolk. Northern English Brown is a malt-balanced ale, with low hop bitterness and minimal hop aroma. Commercial examples include Newcastle Brown Ale and Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale (I am hoping for more of the Samuel Smith's version).



I have two special, limited edition Wyeast yeasts for these beers. The Old Ale Blend (WY9097) is a blend of alcohol-tolerant, dry English ale yeast with a bit of Brettanomyces (a different, non-beer yeast); the ale yeast will do a good job fermenting down the beer with a nice English character for starters, then the Brettanomyces will take over, fermenting some of the sugars that were unfermentable by the ale yeast, adding some rustic aged characteristics to the finished beer. For the Northern English Brown, I am using West Yorkshire Ale (WY1469), which should help emphasize plenty of the malt flavor and character, and finish dry and balanced with some nutty/fruity esters. We'll see.

Organization

Last weekend, I spent a lot of time cleaning out my garage... It was long overdue for a lot of reasons, but one of the motivating factors was brewing. I had a brew date on the calendar, and friends coming over to brew.

It feels so much better out there now. Everything is orderly and easy to find. I spent some time organizing and labeling bins, consolidating and arranging equipment. There is space to move around.

I recognize that I am a habitual planner - I have always like to sketch out plans, to make lists, to plan new creations. The reality is that I have always planned proportionately way more than I have executed. But even so, I realized that a major road block that was skewing this ratio even more than usual was the mess.

It was way more work just getting ready to brew. Where is the equipment? Is it clean? do I have everything I need? Which bin has the ingredients I need? You get the idea. Preparing to brew is still quite a bit of work, but I don't dread it now that I have things reasonably presentable!

3/5/10 - Dry Hopping & Kegging

This weekend, we are officially "reintegrating" the guys who recently (Thanksgiving) returned from Afghanistan into the unit... I have missed these guys a great deal - first while they were deployed, and more recently as they resettled their lives upon their return. Out of respect for their space, and knowing firsthand the heightened sensitivity to all-things-military, no matter how well-intentioned, I have kept my distance for several months as they adjusted to life back home.

I brewed up a couple of batches of beer for the occasion - one a Classic American Pilsener that I brewed at the tail-end of last year, the other an American IPA which I repitched on the yeast from the BYO/BBR Collaborative Experiment on extract techniques... The yeast had crashed out well, and it was time to keg it up. Actually I should have kegged it up last weekend.

I took the day off to go in and do some admin prep for the drill, but I started my day in the shop taking care of this beer! Since I did not keg it last weekend, and I wanted to dry hop both beers (a little bit of noble hop character in the pilsener and a hefty hop nose in the IPA), I had to alter my technique a bit... I opted for a "hop tea" added to the keg prior to racking in the beer.

I was adding about 2 oz of hops to the pilsener, so I boiled 2 cups of water for them; since the IPA was getting closer to 4 oz, I boiled about a quart for them. While they boiled, I weighed and bagged up the hops - nice and loose with lots of 'swimming' room! After 10 minutes of boiling, I cut the flame and tossed in the hop bags, making sure that each bag was entirely saturated... When I wasn't stirring, I kept the lids on the pot in order to trap in most of the volatiles.

The liquid and saturated bags went into the sanitized kegs ahead of the beer, which I racked onto the bags and hop tea. I sealed up the kegs, and applied CO2 over-pressure to speed carbonate them in time for Sunday's picnic...

MMX Reflections...

I am off to a bit of a slow start on both blogging and brewing this year... I finally decided to move my blog. I started the old blog at the start of my deployment to Afghanistan, and underwent several evolutionary changes in the time since then. This new blog will be much more focused on my hobbies and how I spend my freetime - the name (which means middle of the night in Latin) reflects this. If you know me, you understand the name...

About three years ago, I brewed my very first batch of beer. Wow. I fully blame my buddy Robert for getting me into this hobby - here is how it started:

At the end of August 2006 in Afghanistan, I decided that I would go out with one of our teams - Robert's team. This was going to be different from other times I had gone out on "command visits" because I was going to replace one of the operators on Robert's team. Robert was the team leader, and I'm sure he was probably less than comfortable with having his First Sergeant join him on an extended operation - nothing like having senior leadership meddling in your day-to-day affairs! Meddling, however, was not my intention; it was Rob's team, and I was just a strap-hanger that was filling a shift on the team.

After only two or three days into what ended up being about thirty days, it was fully evident that Rob and I were definitely among the geezers on hill. Most of the younger guys spent their downtime talking about things like "hot chicks", fast cars, and how they were going to spend all of their money when they got home. We had not even seen most of the movies or TV shows these guys were talking about, and at nearly 40, our interests were significantly different.

I'm not sure who mentioned it first, but one of us brought up how much we missed good beer. As the conversation continued, Robert lamented the fact that he had a batch of unbottled homebrew sitting in a carboy back at his apartment, and how it would have spent over a year in the carboy by the time he got back to bottle it. I didn't really even know what a carboy was, but had been interested in getting into homebrewing for a long time.

Robert was full of great info, and most of our non-mission-related conversation for the rest of the operation revolved around beer and homebrewing. He told me that the best starting point was Charlie Papazian's The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing. He said that it was sure to get me started off on the right foot, and was an entertaining read to boot! As Rob described it, it sounded akin to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, philosophy and practical information rolled into one.

After thirty days without a shower or a hot meal, one of the first things I did was get online and order the book, along with The Homebrewer's Companion, also by Papazian (OK, the real order of events upon arriving back on base was more like this: 1) check back in with my commander; 2) attend our battalion's weekly command & staff meeting; 3) hot dinner - KBR never tasted so good; 4) hot shower and clean uniform; 5) amazon.com to order the book). After so much thinking about beer, I broke down and drank my first non-acloholic beer – Bitburger Drive – not great, but OK when it was ice cold, by the way.

Once Rob's team went back out, I had nobody to talk to about beer... It was going to be at least another week before my amazon.com order... I was going crazy doing internet searches... Then I discovered a couple of podcasts: Basic Brewing Radio and the Brewing Network. I downloaded everything I could, and spent a lot of time listening. When the books arrived, I read them over and over – three times before I got home.

My wife and I talked about delaying Christmas until I returned sometime in January 2007. When the topic about my gift came up, I took advantage and told her I wanted a homebrew starter kit. My wife must really love me, because she knows how I get about my hobbies (she often says I don't have hobbies – I have obsessions), but she still bought me that setup and my first beer kit. The shop owner (Bill at Olympic Brewing Supplies in Bremerton, WA) asked her what kind of beer I liked, then set me up with a decent all-extract Cooper's English Bitter kit (one can of Cooper's, supplemented with additional malt extract, and dry yeast).

I brewed it at the start of February, and when I drank the first bottle towards the end of the month, I thought it was the best beer I had ever tasted! It was probably pretty good, but we all know how our opinions are colored by our amazement on our first few batches. I followed up with a stout, modified from Papazian's Toad Spit Stout, which I dubbed “Dark Horse”, and ready in time for St. Patrick's Day. This one got rave reviews from more than just my family, and I was off and running!

I was still addicted to surfing the internet for all things beer and homebrew, and was interested in brewing software... I downloaded many trial versions and tried them all out. I discovered Beer Tools, which offered a free online (simplified) recipe formulator. I used that to help me modify a few recipes from Papazian's books and from the homebrew shop. Then I ordered Beer Tools Pro, which was available for Mac, and I upgraded to a gold membership on their website...

By the time June rolled around, I had already brewed six batches, and was ready to move beyond extract batches with steeping grains. I think I ended up with 11 or 12 batches (at 5 gallons each) that first year, and I learned quite a bit about recipes and basic processes. That was a big year for me, and many of my friends had begun to ask me about my brewing, perhaps in part to get more homebrew!

As I look back over the past three years, I chuckle a bit about how much I thought I had learned and how much I though I knew at the end of that first year. Two of my biggest learning experiences actually stemmed from failures: one a probable sanitation problem that resulted in iodiney-gushers (bummer – my first all-grain batch!), and the other a drastic underpitch on my big holiday beer (anybody like flat banana beer?)... It is true that I did progress quite a bit in my brewing, but I had yet to make any changes that truly elevated my brewing and got me brewing consistently great beer.

Since then, I branched out and did much more reading. I listened to many more podcast episodes – the ones that got me started and kept me sane in Afghanistan, and some new ones as well. Brew Your Own and Zymurgy magazines were also full of great info. James Spencer of Basic Brewing Radio really got my head in the game, so to speak. But it was the Brewing Network content featuring Jamil Zainasheff that really helped me make better beer.

In my second year of brewing, I got a bigger brew pot and a propane burner so that I could do full-wort boils and I began pitching yeast starters. These two simple and relatively inexpensive steps improved my brewing tenfold. I had much greater control over my beer's flavor profiles, and my fermentations kicked off quickly and reliably, and progressed predictably. What a huge difference this made!

Thanks to a great article in BYO by Chris Colby, and info in Basic Brewing Radio and Video, I got set up better for mini-mashing (partial mash technique). Before I was trying to mash grains in my brewpot suing the oven for temperature control; I switched over to countertop partial mashing using a 2 gallon beverage cooler, and I gained a much better understanding of mashing grains, starch conversion, and individual grain contributions to my finished beers. My beers began winning medals and ribbons in competitions at this point. I also made the move to some all-grain brewing in a 5 gallon beverage cooler I had in my garage. Robert, the buddy who had gotten me started, began coming over at least once a month to brew... I also began kegging and built a kegerator from a converted chest freezer. My son's Kindergarten teacher informed me that he had shared that the most fun thing he did over a long weekend was helping his dad and friend Robert bottle their beer (my boys have a thorough understanding of the process and biology of beer, despite being 5 & 7 years old!). Things were really rolling!

Year three saw me continue striving to become a better brewer... In my National Guard unit, my soldiers were relying on me for a regular supply of good beer, including kegs to mark special occasions. My holiday beer baskets sell more tickets than any other raffle item at our annual holiday drill! Robert got roped into another deployment, though, and my feverish pace slowed quite a bit. While he was gone, I began getting other friends involved in homebrewing – in my National Guard unit, there are 5 or 6 guys that are brewing regularly now after an instructional brew day with me.

I still have averaged just under 100 gallons (not including root beer that I make with my kids or hard cider) in my first three years brewing. While I have come a long way, and enjoy teaching other people what I know, I realize that there is still a lot more that I don't know about brewing than what I actually know. I am hoping to get a few more people into the hobby this year, and I am hoping to break the 100-gallon mark for the the first time. Now that Rob is back, I am hoping to brew with him more regularly again.

So far, I've only brewed 12 gallons in 2010 (one Rye-PA and one American IPA as part of an experiment). I have those two batches, plus a dark lager that I started in December, to keg or bottle this weekend. And I have at least two batches that I should brew (one dry stout as a moving/housewarming gift, and one hybrid classic/American pilsner using SF lager yeast for a picnic in March)... And St. Patrick's Day is coming up! I guess I had better stop thinking about brewing, and get to work!