Relative Spice & Herb Amounts

I am writing a short post today to capture an idea that I have had for quite a while concerning spices and herbs in beer.  I occasionally (and many times unsuccessfully) brew a series of beers that feature herbs and spices.  In some of my wheat and lighter beers I’ll use judicious spice additions that I brew all the time.  I am comfortable with amounts of coriander, but after a while I just want to branch out. 

Often when I “branched out,” with a spice or herb that I haven’t ever used I seem to either add way too much or the addition is barely noticeable.  The only way to prevent this is to do as much research on recipes others have written using the same spice as before.  There are a lot of variables in this approach that the researcher cannot ever find out.  One, is the consistency of recipes you might find.  By that I mean did you get the recipe from a random BeerSmith search, or did you get it from a site that is heavily trafficked and reliable like the Mad Fermentationist. Even if you obtain the recipe from a reliable source you never had the opportunity to taste the end result.  I have too many recipe ideas to brew a single one several times.  There had to be something more scientific.  Shouldn’t you be able to use a ratio of one spice to another for a good starting point?

So I started to look to the culinary world for inspiration, a source that is far too often ignored in the beer world.  I recently had the opportunity to have a conversation with Peter Bouckaert about this very topic.  He said that beer was just another food, and he had consulted with chefs and books on cooking for his inspiration.  Some of my sources of inspiration have always been Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking for theory and Karen Page’s The Flavor Bible for flavor combinations.  There still was a hole in what I was trying to achieve putting herbs and spices in beer.

In a foray into sausage making I found the start of exactly what I was looking for in Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages better known as the green bible in sausage making circles.  In this book, the Marianski brothers present a chart of common spices used in sausage making and usage amounts per 1 kilogram of meat.  They reproduced the chart on their website.  Once on the website, scroll down to the Guidelines for Spice Usage section. 

Looking at the chart from the perspective of beer, the genius isn’t in the usages of each individual spice, but the authors had (perhaps inadvertently) developed a chart of ratios of spice intensity against one another.  Let me present an example of what I mean.  So say that I really like 1 gram per 5 gallons of cinnamon in an amber ale.  I really would like to place another layer of complexity with cardamom at the same intensity.  I can go to the chart in cinnamon, which it recommends 0.5 – 1.0 grams (per kilogram of meat).  Then if you look again at cardamom, the chart recommends 1.0 – 2.0 grams.  Conveniently, 1 gram of cinnamon in my example beer makes the math pretty simple.  That means that for every 1 gram of cinnamon, I should use 2 grams of cardamom for the same level intensity.

Oddly enough, the chart’s recommendations for 1 kilogram of meat seems to be remarkably close to a subtle effect in 5 gallons of beer.   I have used it with success in a few recipes.  There are however a few more factors you have to think about.  Most notably, this is relative intensity.  This is where I go back to Michael Ruhlman’s book.  Your favorite wit recipe might use 10 grams of coriander, and this level of spicing works perfectly and harmoniously with the wheat base and yeast characteristic.  The coriander provides a firmly citrusy, earthy punch that is quite complimentary.  But you want your wit to have another layer of complexity with say cinnamon.  If you use the chart to get the same level of intensity of spice with a ratio, the suggested amount would be 5 grams.  The resultant beer might be nice, but a dominating note of cinnamon might push the beer more into the Christmas Ale category.  In which case, I would default to the subtle effect and add 0.5 – 1.0 grams. 

There are a few shortcomings of the Marianski chart.  The most notable is incompleteness for the variety of herbs and spices that one can use in a beer.  I also don’t know if I would use garlic, onions, or paprika in a beer.  Prove me wrong.  I guess the only way you could make it better would be to collect more data points like the Milk the Funk Wiki page is attempting, but at least the Marianski chart is a start on some commonly used spices. 

Saké & Brett Brux Beer

After reading a few people talking about using wine yeasts in beer on the Milk the Funk Facebook feed (in which they linked this discussion), I kind of wanted to give it a go myself.  Although probably not exactly a wine yeast looking at the latest yeast genetic studies, I really like the aromas and flavors that you can get from saké.  Specifically, I like the fruity flavors that come about without being too watery.  Every time I drink an unfiltered saké, it makes me think that I would like to create that yeast character with a wit grist, so that’s essentially the direction I headed.

I wanted to start out the beer out as a clean beer, just to see how far it would ferment out.  If it was good where it was, or fermented out completely, I thought I might split the batch and pitch B. Brux on the other half.  If it didn’t ferment out well enough, I would just inoculate the whole beer with Brett.  Here is what my recipe looked like:

Recipe: Sake Beer v2

Style: Specialty Beer

TYPE: All Grain

Date: 20 Nov 2015

Batch Size (fermenter): 5.50 gal  

Estimated OG: 1.057 SG

Estimated Color: 4.4 SRM

Estimated IBU: 21.6 IBUs

Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00 %

Boil Time: 75 Minutes

Ingredients:

Rice Hulls (0.0 SRM)                                         1.5 %        

Pilsner (2 Row) Ger (1.9 SRM)                        82.3 %       

Wheat, Flaked (1.6 SRM)                                 11.5 %       

White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM)                            2.7 %        

Aromatic Malt (26.0 SRM)                                2.0 %        

Willamette [4.40 %] - Boil 60.0 min                 20.7 IBUs    

Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 10.0 mins)

½ t of Wyeast Yeast Nutrient at 10 min

Crystal [3.30 %] - Boil 2.0 min                         0.9 IBUs     

Sake No 9 (White Labs #WLP709)

Brettanomyces Bruxellensis (White Labs #WLP650)

Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Medium Body, Equal Run

Mash In       Add 16.24 qt of water at 160.0 F 147.0 F  75 min       

Mash Step   Add 3.84 qt of water at 206.9 F   157.0 F  15 min       

Sparge: Batch sparge with 2 steps (Drain mash tun , 3.46gal) of 185.0 F water

Fermentation started at 64*F and rose to 68*F over 15 days

Fermenter moved to a closet for ambient temperatures (mid 70s F) for the remainder of fermentation

Primed with table sugar and bottle conditioned at 74*F @ 2.5 volumes

Process and Observations:
Brewday went as expected.  I produced wort with an OG of 1.057.  I oxygenated it and pitched a decanted starter of the saké yeast that I had prepared a few days before.  I did add a little too much lactic acid to adjust the mash, and it resulted in a mash that measured 4.84 pH.

The saké yeast took off sometime in the night.  It fermented very much like a lager yeast with small bubbles coming to the surface of the beer.  There was no big explosion of yeast and krausen, and it was pretty slow and steady the whole time.  By the 13^th day, it appeared that any yeast activity was complete.  The beer measured in at 1.020 specific gravity as expected. The aroma was heavily yeasty, fruity.  It tasted bready/doughy with fruit (citrus and cantaloupe) with notes similar to wheat beer. 

I let the beer sit another 8 days and the gravity stayed at 1.020, so I decided to pitch the B. Brux for the whole batch.  A single tube of WLP650 was pitched into the beer without a starter.

I didn’t take a measurement on the beer for a little over 3 months.  At that time it measured 1.011, and out of fear of a bottle bomb, I was going to let it sit for another month.  The funny thing is that I found out later that my refractometer doesn’t reliably measure under 1.010 even with accounting for the alcohol.  I still haven’t taken a measurement with a hydrometer.  From tasting it, I would put the beer more in the 1.003 to 1.006 range, maybe someday I’ll de-carbonate one of the beers and do it properly. 

At this point my tasting notes were “Awesome. Not struggling Brett taste, but more of a 100% Brett taste mixed with the saké yeast character.  Citrus, tart, maybe melon fruitiness, very clear and drinkable.”  By “not struggling Brett taste” I mean less funk and more on the fruit side.  It has a definite Brux note that I get in the other beers I have fermented with it, but it was nicely restrained.  Perhaps it was because of the higher starting gravity of the beer when the Brett was added, 1.020. 

Almost a year since I brewed this beer, it is still drinking nicely.  It has developed a funk characteristic in the nose, but it is not overwhelming.  For my preference, it is the perfect balance of Sacch and Brett characteristics in a light and easy drinking beer.  There is no alcoholic hotness that I can detect and while tart, has a nice subtle perceived sweetness in the finish that compliments the fruit.  Nothing really dominates. 

Going forward, I am excited about experimenting with other non-beer Saccharomyces in mixed fermentation beers.  My intuition after this one example would lead me to believe that with a wine yeast crapping out at about 1.020, provides Brett with a lot more to chew on and thus produces a softer Brett character.  This supposition is based on the theory that you get more funk the more a Brettanomyces yeast struggles during fermentation, or so I have been led to believe.  So with less sugar in the beer when Brett is introduced, the more it is going to give off funk flavors and less fruit.  I’m sure there is more complex chemistry relating to certain precursors at play that are way over my head.  Obviously, this isn’t going to work as well if you are trying to achieve maximum funk, which should be a band name if there already isn’t one out there.  Something to look out for though, is certain wine yeasts are “killer” strains.  Although Brett is not affected, many other yeast are.  You can read more about it here on MTF wiki.

2016 NHC Silver Medal Beer for Specialty

I wanted to write up a little bit about my beer that was fortunate enough to place second at NHC this year.  I was a little bit shocked when I had found out how well it had done (first round and second) because I just didn’t figure it would do that well.  It was the first time I brewed the recipe, it had received fairly low scores at a local homebrew competition, and I didn’t hold out much hope for a beer that was entered into the Specialty Beer category.  Specialty included a whole host of beers that were new to the BJCP guidelines, so I figured that the category would be packed.  It was with 810 entries.

I was doing a round of recipes off of a single vial of White Labs WLP645 Brettanomyces Claussenii.  I had grown it up in a starter per the Milk The Funk wiki guidelines over the course of a week.  The first beer it went into was a bastardization of an American Sours recipe and one of my own.  It was an experiment with buckwheat trying to draw the esters out of the caprylic acid from the buckwheat.  It was a good beer, but not great.  I really didn’t know what flavors where coming from the yeast, the grain bill, or the hops.  So, I had decided that for my next beer, it needed to be a lot simpler.  I needed to fight my homebrewer instincts and not throw the kitchen sink at the recipe.  That way, I could discern what the Claussenii was doing to my beer at the 80*F fermentation temperature. 

So looking around to get some ideas, I based my grain bill and hop schedule off of the Singularité recipe from Jeff Sparrow’s Wild Brews.  The author described it as, “Bitterness is moderate and malt character low to accentuate the yeast character.”  It was the recipe I could have come up with myself, but I thought, hell, he’s probably at least tried it out a couple of times if he put it in the book.  So I just went with it.  The main difference between his recipe and mine was the fermentation schedule.  I was going to pitch it at room temperature and just let it ride until it hit terminal gravity.  Living in Southern Arizona, room temperature is 80*F for me.  Sparrow had recommended two weeks at 65*F, followed by a week at 78*F, finishing up with a secondary storage period at 55*F for 2-4 weeks.  That was just going to tie up a fermentation chamber too long for me.

So my recipe looked like this:

Recipe: Singularite v3

Style: Belgian Specialty Ale

TYPE: All Grain

Date: 23 Oct 2015

Batch Size (fermenter): 5.50 gal  

Estimated OG: 1.062 SG

Estimated Color: 4.3 SRM

Estimated IBU: 25.5 IBUs

Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00 %

Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:

Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (2.0 SRM)                     88.0 %       

White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM)                         8.0 %        

Acid Malt (3.0 SRM)                                      4.0 %        

Crystal [3.30 %] - Boil 60.0 min                   25.1 IBUs     

Crystal [3.30 %] - Boil 2.0 min                       0.4 IBUs 

½ t of Wyeast Yeast Nutrient at 10 min   

Brettanomyces Claussenii (White Labs #WL645)

Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Medium Body, Batch Sparge

Mash In      Add 17.92 qt of water at 161.2 F  148.0 F    90 min       

Mash Step  Add 3.04 qt of water at 207.7 F    155.5 F    15 min        

Sparge: Batch with 2 steps (Drain mash tun, 3.53gal) of 185.0 F water

Fermentation started at about 80*F and was at 76*F three months later

Primed with table sugar and bottle conditioned at 76*F @ 2.5 volumes

Process:  The brew day was a pretty straightforward one.  I brewed it with my normal process and chilled it down to around 80 degrees.   My OG was a little high at 1.067, but I didn’t bother to correct it.  I did not oxygenate the beer with pure O2 like I normally do.  I just splashed it into the glass fermenter when I transferred it with my racking cane right on to the yeast cake from the previous batch.  There were a couple of days lag time before the Brett kicked off, but I had observed that with the previous batch.  My first batch took 5 days to develop a krausen, so I’m pretty confident that the batch wasn’t contaminated with Sacch.  After about two months, the bubbling had stopped, and I measured the gravity at 1.010.  I left it a month to ensure that it was in fact at terminal gravity, and it measured 1.010 just as it had before.  That put the alcohol at ~7.7% ABV.    After a month bottle conditioning the beer was ok.  The more I allowed it to age, the more it seemed to come together. 

Some comments I received on the beer, because I think others describe it better than I can:

“Great Belgian Golden flavor with just the right amount of Brett”

“Drink it soon before the body goes away”

“Very balanced, it is a Belgian Str. Golden AND has Brett”

“Notes of pineapple [in the aroma]”

“HUGE FLUFFY WHITE HEAD COTTON CANDY TEXTURE” [it was in all caps on the judge sheet while the other notes were lower case]

“Slight alcohol warmth, appropriate for style”

The best compliment I got on the beer was at my homebrew club.  One of the members refused to believe that I didn’t add any spices to the beer. He was amazed that I got such an array of flavors from just the yeast.

Some of the tickboxes from the NHC judgesheets:

Aroma: Spicy, Fruity, Citrus, Brett, Lactic, Apple/Pear, Banana, Grainy, Earthy

Flavor: Grainy, Citrusy, Fruity, Apple/Pear, Banana, Brett, Spice, Floral, Pepper, Pineapple, Earthy, Rustic, Malty, Grape

Photo of me an my beer as featured in Tucson Weekly

So from all of this there were a few things I learned about creating a 100% Brett fermented beer.  The first is that oftentimes simplicity can be sublime.  Every time I taste this beer, it is different.  Even as I drink it, it changes completely with temperature.  It is a little hard to fathom when the ingredient list is so simple. 

Brett does pretty well warm.  There seems to be a huge cadre of people who believe that you have to ferment these beers in a cellar like environment at 62*F.  That might be the case for a mixed fermentation batch (which is also debatable), but even the yeast companies indicate that the yeast does well warm.  White Labs quotes the optimum ferment temp as 85+ degrees.  It might come out tasting like an old sock at 95 degrees, so some restraint is probably warranted.  I think the same thing goes for those who think that you have to mash a 100% Brett beer warm, but I’m sure that will change with the yeast selection.  B. Claussennii is pretty well known to leave a little residual sugar when it is the only organism present in wort.

Brett doesn’t care too much about cell count.  I was worried about pitching the wort onto a yeast cake with way too many viable cells for a proper pitch count.  I think some of this has to do with my better understanding of brewing with Sacch.  I have since pitched quite a few beers on old, like 2+ month old, yeast cakes and the beer has never seemed to suffer from it.  Given the regimen for a Brett starter, it sure is easier to repitch onto the yeast cake.

As Michael Tonsmeire states in his American Sour Beers, lactic acid is your friend in a 100% Brett beer if you want the fruitiness that it can provide.  At 4% acid malt, that’s a little more than I needed to balance the mash’s pH, but I’ve used about the same on all of the 100% Brett beers I have created, and all have been fruit bombs.   As indicated on the Milk The Funk wiki, Brett esterfies lactic acid into ethyl lactate that is described as fruity, creamy, rum.  You won’t get any complaints for me, but I want to get more funk in future batches. 

Another thing I learned is not to let judging get under my skin.  When I submitted this to a local competition it scored a 29.  I got comments that the beer didn’t have any Brett flavor all the way to a paragraph long lecture that I needed to keep my equipment clean because this level of acidity was not possible without a bacterial infection.  When I got my results back from the 1^st round NHC, the beer scored a 44.5.  Maybe the beer was too young when it went the first competition (they were about 3 weeks apart), but I think that there is still a lot for people to learn about a style that is still pretty new to most.

As much as I hate it, I think there is something to the naming game.  By that I mean how you describe your beer in the description column to judges.  When this beer went to NHC, I described it as a “Golden Ale w/ 100% Brett Claussenii.”  As generic and safe as I thought that was, the judges in the final round seemed to get caught up on it.  What I think that they took from my description was that I was declaring the base style as Golden Ale.  I chose those words because it was and ale and the color was golden.  There is not a style named Golden Ale, but a few professional breweries produce beers with that name.  From the few that I have had, it is a simple grist beer that can be quite hoppy.  In the second round, I got the following comments: “Low hop flavor not very distinctive, unlike style … hop character muted” and “hops lower than expected for style ... hops could be brought higher to [be] closer to base style.”  I had no idea that an American Wild Ale (100% Brett) had to be hoppy.  It doesn’t, but I guess my naming convention led them astray.  Lesson learned.

The funniest thing of all is that I’m not sure that 100% Brett beers are my favorite.  When I see one on the shelf, I don’t yell, “Oh yippee.”  I like them just fine, and I believe that they have their place.  It is just a weird thing when you can create a beer that you get so much good feedback on and my feeling was, “Hmm, its ok.”  I don’t mean to be arrogant by that comment; I think it might be that I am my own worst critic when it comes to my beer.

Peeterman – A Happy Accident

I was scouring back though my brewing books trying to get motivation for a recipe, something different.  In Brewing with Wheat, by Stan Hieronymus, I came across a recipe for a Peeterman, a type of wheat beer.  It was bigger, sometimes darker and usually drunk fairly young.  It was similar to a Blanche de Louvain where “One third of the wort was brewed with hops.”

In that same section Hieronymus discusses how the beers from around Leuven (Louvain), Belgium were made.  One third of the wort was boiled with hops and the other two-thirds were ran straight into the fermenters.  These beers were tart to sour and so I thought, that this might be a perfect chance to make a modern take on this beer through kettle souring a portion.  I wanted to make a beer that was sour, but not too sour, and that didn’t have the chance to pick up any nasties. 

My idea was that I would make the wort, run off a third, and boil it with enough hops to contribute ~10 IBU to the entire volume.  The remaining two-thirds I would run off into a separate kettle and sour.  My idea of a modern take was to pre-boil the two-thirds wort for a few minutes and then pitch a 3 GoodBelly shots (Lactobacillus Plantarum) and let this sour for two days at 95*F.  Back to the first third, I treated it just as I would any of my beers, boiling it with the hops, cooling it to pitching temperatures, and then pitching yeast.  I would let this beer ferment for 2 days while the other portion was souring, as a kind of starter akin to the sake process, except on the second day I would boil the soured wort for 15 minutes and pour it back into the fermenting portion.  Get all of that?  It might take a flow chart…

My recipe looked like this:

Recipe: Peeterman

Style: Witbier

TYPE: All Grain

Date: 31 Mar 16

Batch Size (fermenter): 5.50 gal  

Estimated OG: 1.065 SG

Estimated Color: 5.5 SRM

Estimated IBU: 10.5 IBUs

Brewhouse Efficiency: 70.00 %

Boil Time: 75 Minutes

Ingredients:

6.00 ml           Lactic Acid (Mash 60.0 mins)

13.0 oz           Rice Hulls (0.0 SRM)                       4.9 %        

7 lbs 1.4 oz    Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (1.7 SRM)        42.8 %       

7 lbs 1.4 oz    Wheat, Raw (2.0 SRM)                    42.8 %       

15.1 oz           Oats, Flaked (1.0 SRM)                    5.7 %        

7.6 oz             Aromatic Malt (26.0 SRM)              2.9 %        

2.5 oz             Buckwheat, Raw (2.0 SRM)            1.0 %        

16.00 g           Crystal [6.00 %] - Boil 75.0 min     10.5 IBUs    

0.50 tsp          Yeast Nutrient (Boil 10.0 mins)

1.0 pkg           Belgian Wheat Yeast (Wyeast Labs #3942)

Mash Schedule: Single Infusion, Batch Sparge

Mash In   Add 21.92 qt of water at 163.6 F        150.0 F       60 min       

Sparge: Batch sparge with 2 steps (Drain mash tun , 3.52gal) of 185.0 F water

Fermentation started at 68 degrees and finished at 73.

The execution of this recipe was a disaster.  Like anything for the first time, I was running around trying to figure out what the hell I needed to do next.  I had also convinced myself that I could do both batches at the same time.  This led to a couple of errors on brew day, not oxygenating the wort and totally missing my numbers.

Missing the oxygen didn’t turn out to be a big deal, but I had never used this much raw wheat in a batch, and I totally missed my numbers.  What was supposed to be a big, sweet finishing beer, ended up at 1.043 preboil and 1.059 in the smaller one-third portion.  By calculation, I figured I would have somewhere around a 1.050 OG beer.  I chalked it up to a lesson, and moved on. 

From there the beer went on great.  The sour portion acidified down to 3.5 pH by strip, which is a little better than measuring it with my tongue.  The yeast in the clean portion ripped through the wort and was already slowing down when I combined the two beers.  It finished out nicely, albeit a little higher, at 1.012, approximately 5.0% ABV, and 3.6 pH. 

So even though this was probably nothing like a Peeterman, it turned out a mighty fine beer.  More so than other kettle soured beers that I have tasted and made, this beer had a lot of character from the Saccharomyces yeast.  This was a nice welcome to a beer that could have just been sour.  The finished beer had a good sour finish, but you could still catch that nice Belgian character with a bit of bubble gum and stone fruit.  I could not detect any major flaws, but as the beer became warm there was an interesting phenolic note, that I don’t know if I could describe.  No one else who tasted the beer was able to detect it.  If there was anything I would describe it as, it would be like a burnt rubber or plastic, but very, very faint. 

The lesson I’ve drawn from this experience is one of blending, or you might call it portioning.  It might be the best way to create a sour beer.  Aside from making a separate acid beer and blending it with others, I think that splitting a beer like this makes it a bit easier depending on your system, process, and space available.  You don’t have as much control as you would blending an acid beer, but you could be pretty exacting once you worked the percentages out for your particular desires or recipe.  I will definitely do this again in the future, possibly leaving the sour portion un-boiled.  Maybe I’ll even do a cereal mash for all that raw wheat!