Pitch Rates and Pellicles

This picture was taken at 5:30 pm after pitching yeast at:

10:30 am according to the brew-day schedule.  The yeast was SafAle WB-06, pitched 36 hours previously as a one-quart starter.  The grain bill was again 3:5 raw wheat to Pilsner malt, this time just a 1 hour mash and 1 hour boil.  0.75 oz house-aged Willamette hops at 60 min.

While the previous Cantillon bottle-harvest starter had a lag phase of about five days, this had a lag phase of about seven hours.  Now, I could have (and plan to) do a better job at getting that bottle harvest starter going, but I let myself get too excited and didn't give it time.  It is nice to see yeast doing what they do well.

On the subject of the Cantillon attempt:

It now has a nice thin pellicle on it, which I have read is a good sign.  To be honest, this just looks like kahm yeast that you find on some vegetable ferments, however I will say that it looks less "brittle" since it has survived quite a bit of shaking, as it sits on the table next to two carboys full of wine that I shake routinely.

It appears that I am well on my way to a series of beers at this point, all with the same grain bill and minimal variations in hops, but with different brew schedules and very different yeast strains.  I've currently got a really wild one and a very tame one, with several more planned.

Distillados de Agave

A bottle of Agave spirits given to me by my friend Lou who runs S.A.C.R.E.D. and has access to some of the worlds best examples.  This stuff is unreal.  It's always special to get something from Lou, and he likes my wine, so we keep each other happy.  Symbiosis, baby!

My Actual Hobby

Ah, eight cases of clean bottles; a beautiful sight.  This is, of course, what I actually spend most of my "homebrewing" time doing: washing bottles.  And carboys.  And kettles.  And hoses and pumps and fittings and the floor of my basement.

But that's what we're doing when we are homebrewing (and I think it occupies a significant amount of time at a real brewery.)  When you are trying to create conditions that favor the microorganisms you want, you have to scrape out everything you don't want, hence the cleaning.  My homebrewing friends and I often debate what it means for something to be "clean" and I think of it like this.  There are three levels of cleanliness that one can strive for:

1) Clean
2) Sanitized
3) Sterile

I think sterility is a myth, especially in a garage or a basement or your driveway where most of us are making beer.  Trying to get here ends up doing more harm than good.

Getting things sanitized is nice, but if you are doing everything well: good wort with plenty of digestible sugars and strong pitch rates with plenty of the yeast (etc.) that you want, they will overwhelm the bad guys and it will come out fine.

Cleaning stuff, which I define to be removing any chunks of stuff or films lining your glassware, is what you really need to do, and this is really pretty easy.  It can be boring and repetitive, and I tend to get frustrated with some of the more stubborn schmutz that gets stuck in the bottom of some bottles.  Sometimes I just toss them if it seems like too much work.

It's Alive!

Clear signs of microbial activity.  I was pretty sure that things were going OK earlier this week because I could see more and more yeast building up on the walls of the carboy, and there was a nice, slightly lighter layer of yeast accumulating on the bottom.  But today, there is finally the beginning of a kreusen.  This was pitched on Saturday, today is Thursday, and it's still got a long ways to go, so it's a really long lag phase.  It is starting to smell great too, just like the sour it's harvested from, so I'm not worried at all.

Brew Day of Long Mashing

Today was a brew day, and on deck was a sour beer in the Belgian Lambic style, but first a word about the brew system.  The stainless kettle on the right has a PID controlled 5 kW element heating it, and clean water is circulated through the "outside" of a counterflow chiller (or in this mode, counterflow heater.)  Let's just say heat-exchanger.  The blue mash tun on the left has a false bottom and circulates wort through the inside of the counterflow, bringing it up to the temperature in the heated kettle, hopefully close to the set point on the controller.  This is my conception of the classic "three vessel system" with just two vessels, except for the fact that I use the red cooler on the bottom as a sparge vessel, so it *is* three vessels, but one of them is totally passive.

 Here's another shot showing the exhaust fan to try and help take some of the steam out of the room through an adapter to the dryer vent.  Technically I can't really brew and do laundry, but those are the sacrifices we make.

 On to the beer!  Grain Bill:

3 lbs Raw Wheat
5 lbs Pale Malt

Lambic grain bills tend to use 30% - 40% raw wheat, and I liked this because it is a nice 3/8:5/8 ratio (37.5% wheat.)  I think I was also supposed to use Pilsner as the base malt, but oh well, there will be a next time.  It was hopped with Williamette, 2.5 oz at 120 minutes.  Lambics are supposed to be made with aged hops, so these were in a paper bag on top of the furnace for about a week.  Probably not aged enough, and the wort does taste hoppier than I wanted, but hopefully it will fade in the finished product.  It came out looking great after a vigorous boil, with a dark blond color and crystal white head.

Here's the brew day schedule, which is a nice addition to what I usually do, i.e. unrecorded chaos.  It's a little hard to read, but the basic rundown is dough-in at 111 °F.  This is really low, but there's a ton of raw wheat to work on, and you're supposed to do a turbid mash to lock in some starch to feed the wild microbes.  Then an 11 degree step-up every 15 minutes until you get to 166 °F, mostly because I liked the numerology of 111, 122, 133, 144, 155, and 166.  I let it go a full half hour at 166 °F, and by the time I started sparging, it had been a full two hour mash; you're looking for tannin extraction in a sour.  The boil was also two hours, to really cook things out and concentrate sugars.  All in all, it took 5 hours, but considering the double mash and double boil, I am really pleased with the time efficiency of this system.  Having all the right tubes in all the right places really helped.

Y'all want this party started, right?

Cantillon bottle harvest yeast starter.  It has been going for a week and there finally seems to be more live yeasties floating in it, and it is smelling sour today, like its mother bottle.  I think these bugs are slow, but I have heard they are thorough.

Hollow Brass

I got some new brass for the system; a few more sets of quick disconnects, and the 1/4" NPT / 1/2" hosebarb connectors I need to tie them in to everything else.  Both were somewhat tricky to find, but they work so well, it's worth it.

When I was originally thinking about the design and layout, I was going to go all stainless.  I have a couple stainless valves on some of my kettles, and a few stainless fittings here and there.  It's pretty painless to tack on a few extra dollars for one thing at a time, but when I started to add up how much a dozen stainless quick-connect couplers costs, plus valves, plus elbows and T's, it gets pretty scary.  I was still going to bite the bullet a few things at a time and just deal with it, and then I read somewhere that brass and other copper alloys are mildly antimicrobial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass

I think breweries of any appreciable size use stainless steel because it can take basically unlimited cycles of almost any chemical at any concentration you want to throw at it.  So you can brew, pump caustic soda through it to eat all the organics off, flush and circulate an acid to get the scale.  These are the things one would need to know if he/she were running a brewery.

That's *Brewing*
I'm *Homebrewing*

So, kiss my brass.  Plus I kinda like how it looks.  I like it when it is new and shiny, and I like it when it's worn in with a nice patina.  A lot of the stuff I have gets a matte golden brown color; it's clean but it looks well used.

The System is Up

New PID controller (no, not that PID, as ma femme suspected) and a new brewstand re-purposed after updating the shelves in our kitchen to something a little more NSF compliant.  Control panel is hung, pumps have a dedicated place to sit, and the whole thing just seems more like it belongs.  Like it is a complete unit, and not a bunch of pieces linked together with wire and hose.

I did a test run with plain water today, just to iron out the kinks and see where I need to lengthen or shorten a hose.  Or maybe where I need to add one of my limited number of quick-disconnects.  And how many more quick-disconnects I need to add to that limited number.  The system performed well, with the critical "end-of-mash-to-start-of-sparge" time around 15 minutes and "element-covered-to-full-boil" time around 20 minutes.  Since this was a no-grain run, it was never limited by pump speed, so I'll bet I can be at a boil before I'm even done sparging an actual batch.  There is very little fumbling around to figure out what to move when changing modes, so we are homing in on an ideal (to me) setup.

I need to add a quick-disconnect for sure where the wort leaves the counterflow, to facilitate the transition from circulating mash to sparge.  I was going to skip this as a theoretical exercise in today's test, but I'm glad I didn't since it was one of the most awkward parts of the run, and can be easily remedied.  All in all, we are in a good place.  Next week is go-time for Cantillon Clone 0.9.

That is the Sound of Inevitability

So it turns out that after a couple years of trying and continuing to hate them, I like sour beers now.  Apparently all it took was a trip to Brussels.

Note the Cantillon in the above pic, that's one of the six I brought back with me.  Shortly after taking this photo, I opened it and pitched the dregs into a cup of starter wort.  I'll scale it up to a full sized yeast starter with the rest of a quart and brew a batch of lambic (65% pale / 35% raw wheat) next Saturday.

Random Post of Intent

I need to start blogging more.  Again.  I brought some Geuze home from Cantillon on my trip to Europe, and I want to try making it.  It's going to be awesome.

Now is the Summer of This Content

Bacon in its early stages.  For this year's attempt, I am going back to a dry salting, at a rate of 1.75% vs. the weight of meat.  Generous but not excessive amounts of ground black pepper were added, along with cumin and cayenne pepper.  

It looks great.  I was worried when I got the belly that it was so thin.  But wedging it into the cambro I got for makin' bacon seems to be contracting it and thickening things a little.  The salt is finding its way in, and the lean is pinking up nicely.  I suppose that must have a contractile effect?  There's a little bit of water in the bottom of the tub, but not really that much.

I'm about to quit my job.  It feels so good to be on the brink of a new beginning.  Very encouraging is how excited ma femme is for me.  I hope I get a lot done in my time off before whatever happens happens.  I have a list of Things to Clean, Things to Fix, and Things to Make.  They are full and filling up.  I shall not want for lack of things to do.

Kombucha

Brewing tea: some for me, some for the tea mushroom.

I recently went on a winter camping trip, and it was very cold.  Normally this is not a problem.  We also walked very far with heavy packs.  Normally this is also not a problem.  Our camp stove did not work properly.  This can be overcome.  All things can be overcome.  

Just not all at once.

I don't know whether the cold and exertion weakened my immune system, or whether the snow we melted and neglected to boil (because the campfire was going out and it was getting dark and I was starting to shiver more than I like) had something in it.  Maybe it was those things combined with the heavy, fatty, dairy-rich meals I had on my return.  Let's just say that on the Oregon Trail of life I was one of the innumerable victims of dysentery.

So to counteract the bad bacteria I had picked up, I went to the store and bought everything I could find with good bacteria in it.  Three kinds of 'kraut, kimchi, GoodBelly juice, and some NessAlla kombucha.  Within 24 hours, I was feeling better.  I've been sticking to a much healthier diet for about two weeks since then; I feel great, and I'm losing weight.

Making pots upon pots of high-quality whole-leaf tea continues to be part of my "routine" so there's plenty of tea around to make kombucha. 

Candi Sugar

Come closer...

Closer...

Closer still...

Too close!

No, wait, that's actually the most delicious thing I've ever tasted. 

I made some Belgian candi syrup to add to the Westvleteren 12 clone I will attempt to brew.  I bought some readymade syrup to compare, and what I made came out pretty close.  And it was a lot of fun, watching the sugar boil and slowly evolve as the temperature crept up.  It seems to take forever as its climbing up (a watched pot and all that) but then it's all panic as you approach the target temperature.   

Fall Activities

Harvest time.  Time for renewal, even though that renewal looks like preparation to go dormant.  With the harvest comes surplus, and to preserve the surplus, we can always turn to the special bacteria and yeast that got us here.  In this case the surplus is extra red cabbage slaw from ma femme; you take what you're given.  It's got peppers and parsley and carrot and onion in with is, so it should make for an interesting mix.

Also, in residual #fermfest news, having taken a class on baking sourdough and slow rise breads from Shawn at Water House Foods, I'm going to try and get better at making bread.  He really demystified the whole process to getting a sourdough starter; like almost everything here, the secret is "just do it."  If it dies (it's going to die) just do it again.  The loaves above are not sourdough, but a long double-rise french dough with that Reinheitsgebot of bread: flour, water, salt, and yeast.  The flavor is wonderful, and I guess I developed enough gluten, as it has good texture, but it was too dry of a dough and didn't rise much as loaves or in the oven, and is quite dense.  Still, there's nothing better than cool butter on bread still warm from the oven.  

Until next time...

Ich trinke Tee

I showed up late for a tea class with the wryly funny (and fellow Blogspotonian) Cwyn of Death By Tea, but still learned a ton about the magic of Sheng Puerh Tea.

This tea is so good, you guys.

Other than soft tannic flavor, there's nothing even coming close to the bitter swill you get from leaving a Lipton teabag in hot water for more than 30 seconds.  You can steep it *many* times, and it changes and gets more complex and wonderful.  I'm drinking 2005 Naka Villiage raw Sheng tea tonight, which was brewed at the tasting, and that she gave to me and I kept in a sealed bag in the fridge.  This tea has made like ten pots of tea since Sunday.  It makes me so mad at all the other tea I've been drinking all my life.  I thought we were friends, tea?

I'm going to go throw away some tea that no longer brings me joy.  Right now.  I'm going to do it.

...

Aw mang.  That felt so good you guys.  Right in the compost.  F#(% you, $#!ty tea.

#fermfest

Another Fermentation Fest has come and gone.  It's still happening and there's a whole 'nother weekend of festivities, but it's come and gone for me.  I was filled with that mix of melancholy and bittersweet happiness that you get after something you're really looking forward to is over.

It was a great trip for me this year.  Maybe the best ever.  I got to befriend and spend a spontaneous, intimate, wonderful evening with the artists-in-residence of the Wormfarm Institute, sharing a meal in their little barn kitchen.  We had vegetable soup, chunks of bread and a huge log of butter leftover from a D'Tour giveaway, and at the end someone decided to make butterscotch pudding.  I paid for my ticket with the last of the homebrew I always take with me, and they were impressed, the way everyone is who is not aware of how easy it is to make fantastic fermented beverages.  The best part was a big, bursting heirloom tomato, a round of really fresh, salty mozzarella, and basil leaves plucked from a sprig in a vase on their counter.  I relived a whole summer of planting, growing, weeding, picking, and watching in one mouthful.

I made new friends and met up with old ones, learned and taught, took and gave.  And this morning I was kind of sad that isn't my whole life all the time.  There were bluer moments throughout the weekend, and I don't want to sound too negative or too teen-angsty, but I think it boils down to whether I think I'm making a difference or having enough of an impact on the world.  I found myself questioning (sometimes out loud, sometimes to myself) whether eating (and paying for) things like supremely delicious, single farm, fair-trade, chocolate is enough to end poverty.

I bounce madly from one hobby/pastime/interest/skill to the next, trying to find something that sticks.  Trying to fill a gap of meaning and authenticity.  I talk a good game, and I know a lot of stuff, and everyone likes me.  But I'm searching for something that I haven't found.  Maybe the lesson from this weekend is that I have found it, I just have to get better at slowing down and enjoying it.  Maybe I need to stop flailing around looking for the next best new thing, stop doing the stuff that's crushing me, and allow more space for the good stuff that's already going on.

I was so happy to be coming back to ma femme, leaving the chocolate shop after the butcher in Madison, and touching down in Milwaukee.  She's getting ready to tidy up.

Black Abbey 2015

It's bottled.  It's good.  It will get better.  It will be the best. 

Hotsauce!

Pre-blend. 

Post-blend. 

Hoo-wee this is some powerful delicious stuff. Hot, salty, and full of fabulous fermented flavors.  The first tastes were on fresh focaccia drizzled with olive oil.  O. 

Been a long time...

This may not look like much now, but it will become bacon.  More specifically, The Meatfest Bacon (TM).  I use a brine cure, because the saltiness is easier to control.  This time I relented and added some brown sugar:

1 gallon of water

1 cup of Mexican sea salt

1/4 cup of brown sugar

6 lbs of pork belly

It just barely fits in the tub, so I'm going to turn it over ever other day or so to make an even cure.  I also leave the skin on, because it seems like too much work to get off.  I know, L2 knife skills.  Whatver.  You'd eat it.

Spiced Cider

Big beautiful bottles of delicious spiced cider.  Its sharp and clean, the spice is in there, but not like it is in the Winter Spice Ale that I put the exact same spices in.  The ale is sweet and gingerbready, this cider is more like a white wine with really spicy notes.  It's different and very good.