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 1st 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.
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