Schwarzbier, and other updates

It's that time again! Brewing time. Drawing on our inspiration from our last Europe trip, my friend Noah (the other bearded guy in the picture at top right) and I decided to brew a dark lager, a Schwazbier.

Normally I'd do some research on the style, read internet articles, consult Designing Great Beers and come up with my own recipe, but I was at work until 5am yet again the night before we went to get brewing ingredients. Instead, I went with Brulosophy's May the Schwarzbier With You recipe. Besides the amazing name, the recipe looks pretty solid too. 

We've done two lagers so far: the first was a Marzen that we used the kegerator fridge for a true lager schedule, starting at 50 degrees and ramping up to the 60s before crashing down; the second was one made with San Francisco Lager yeast and no temperature control other than a cool SF summer. 

This recipe calls for Kolsch yeast which is technically an ale yeast, but is clean enough that it can be mistaken for a lager. San Francisco has been pretty cold recently with days in the low 60s and nights in the mid 50s and my storage area has been keeping a steady temperature around 62 degrees, so I think the Kolsch ale yeast will be perfectly happy and won't produce too many esters at this temperature.

After 4 days' fermentation

Recipe

Grain

8lbs Pilsner

2lbs Munich

0.5lbs Carafa II

0.4lbs Crystal 60

0.25lbs Chocolate Malt

Hops

1oz Warrior @ 60 minutes

1oz Saaz @ 15 minutes

Yeast

WLP 029 German Ale/Kolsch

Expected OG: 1.048 @ 65% efficiency

Actual OG: 1.048 (12 Brix as measured by my new refractometer)

Notes:

Mashed in with 5 gallons of water, it was a little too hot at 170 degrees

Ran off 3.5 gallons

Added 4 gallons of sparge water, just from kitchen tap set on hot but without waiting for it to heat up

Ran off 4 gallons

Boiled for an hour, cooled to 72 in about 25 minutes, got about 5.5 gallons into the ported fermonster

Got the yeast starter going that morning, it was fairly active by the time it was pitched. Great activity in the beer the next morning.

Timeline

11/18/2017: Brewed
1/7/2018: Kegged

Thoughts

Really good beer! Like all of the darker beers we brew, this is very creamy, not too roasty, and a smooth drinker. The appearance is black, I wish it was more ruby and had some clarity. I could use some more yeasty lager notes to get closer to what we had in Prague, some slight slight sulfur would be ok. I should start controlling my water, I think to get closer to what it is I want out of a dark lager like this I would need to do that.

Still, I will happily drink my half keg of this, but I will rate this a homebrew only, needs work to serve this at a brewery.

New Kegged Beer

From my last post above, I had tried to naturally carbonate my saison with the Mad Fermentationist blend in the keg with brown sugar a few weeks ago. I was a little worried when I noticed that there was no pressure to be released when I checked on it and my suspicions were confirmed when I hooked the CO2 up and there was clearly a gas leak around the lid. Whoops. I changed out the o-rings and all was right again, minus some beer that seeped out of the picnic tap while force carbonating.

It's a really nice beer though, I find myself having one or two glasses a night. The overall impression I get is a loamy, earthy yeastiness without too much of the belgian spice. There's a bit of brett funk but not much, probably because it only sat for a month and a half before being kegged. I would re-brew this and bottle next time. I'm a fan of the bitterness from the hops, it definitely underlines the character of this beer and yet there's a nice lactic tartness at the end of the sip that dries your mouth out and makes you want to keep taking another sip and another sip.

Overall I would rate this beer: great first effort, needs to be re-brewed to perfect. It's not that it's not a good beer that I wouldn't want to drink; I really love drinking this beer. I just think that for what it is that I want it needs just a little bit more. A little bit more funk by bottling it, a little more tartness by maybe reducing the boil hops and dry hopping after the fact, and a bit more time. 

If I was served this at a brewery though I would not be mad. It's a great beer to have on tap at home, a real every day drinker.

Accidental followed by Purposeful Infection

The other annoying thing that happened after I got back from Europe is I found that the airlock had gone dry on the Dunkelweiss I had brewed the day before I left. Fuck. I guess there was a crack in it and I came back to the beginnings of a pellicle.

I took a quick taste; it wasn't very dunkelweiss-y but also didn't have much brett character yet. I took a gravity reading and it was around 1.011. So I decided to say fuck it and added a pack of Funk Weapon #3 that I had gotten. This was a month ago or so. I took a gravity reading a week ago and it was at 1.009.

I'm carefully considering my next steps. I could wait another 3-6 months for the gravity to be stable followed by bottling it. I could rack it into a keg and forget about it. Or I could do something else.

The something else is what I'm leaning towards. I've wanted to take some time off next month after the crazy hours I've been working and I want use that time to brew some beers of course. What I've come up with is:

1. Rack part of it into my 3 gallon fermenter up to the neck to age.
2. Brew a dubbel style beer and ferment it out
3. Blend half of the dubbel with the remaining dunkel and add dregs from various sour beers to it (possibly a full sour yeast blend as well?)
4. Take the other half of the dubbel and age it with Wyeast Brett L (which has been on my list to use)

So in the end I'd have:

1. 2.5-3 gallons of Dunkel with FW #3 (plus whatever thing I picked up accidentally)
2. 2.5-3 gallons of Dubbel with Brett L
3. 4-5 gallons of dunkel/dubbel blend with sour beer dregs + store bought mixed culture (potentially)

Basically turning 2 brews into 3 distinct beers to experiment with.

Next thing will be cleaning up the storage area to have room for all these beers...