Yeast week

WLP007 1L starter

So this past week saw a scheduled Friday off.  A day that is usually consumed with way too many chores scattered through-out the day to plan anything fun.  Even if it’s just lunch downtown with the wife.  Even though I caught a little expected grief on missing lunch I was excused to finally brew at the house.  I also threw some meat on the smoker.  It’s an inexpensive one from Academy but will do the job once I figure things out.  The second smoking was better than the first, so hopefully I’ll have it figured out next try.  It’s not near as bad as brewing beer.  I haven’t dumped a smoked butt yet.  It all gets eaten!  But I digress.  Back on topic of yeast.  I recently posted about washing yeast for the first time.  This is the process of saving $8 per brew to reuse yeast from the previous brew.  “Shit actually works!”

WLP007 & WLP300 starters

We wandered into 5 Points Growlers Beer & Brew Supply awhile back when Amber & Ty were in town for fills.  I always check out the yeast cooler to see if they have what I want or I’m curious about.  I found the only vial of White Labs WLP-007 Dry English Ale yeast and its fresh w/ a best before by date of 4/11.  Which means it was packaged on 1/11 this year.  Most beers aren’t that fresh.  Usually Monday before brewing is just recipe creation day, but I have more up my flask this week.  I made a 1 liter starter with that WLP-007 vial.  Denver used this in an IPA and it kicked ass.  This yeast is highly flocculent with high attenuation, which means it makes a clear beer and eats lots of sugars to produce a dry finish.  I want to use this yeast in a pale ale brewed at Gratis, so I can’t ‘waste’ it in this week’s brew.  Which means on Wednesday I ‘stepped’ it to 2 liters.  I crash chill the starter for the day and make a 2 liter starter on Wednesday after work.  I decant off the beer and pour the yeast slurry into a new starter.  I wake up Thursday morning to find it’s blown through the airlock.  Thankfully I save Star San while these things are happening.  I pull the airlock to cleanse and sani it before work.  By the time I make my sandwich for lunch the krausen is already pushing into the airlock.  “Hope it (the airlock) stays wet until I get home!”

I also got a 1 liter starter going with the White Labs WLP-300 German Hefeweizen yeast along with 1/4 tsp of yeast nutrient.  When I checked on the yeast Thursday morning I was overly excited to see this yeast going strong.  Success!  A quick manual stir and the krausen woke up and spit right out of the air lock.  Now I’m not only cleaning up krausen from the WLP-007, but I have foam running down the cabinet doors in our laundry room.  If I shut the door with the HVAC vent open this room will stay almost exactly 70*F all the time.  Which is near perfect for ale yeast fermentation.

Thursday I finished a recipe and decide on a white pale ale.  This style recently came to life from a few select brewers and is still not recognized by the BJCP.  Some of the more famous beers are Deschutes Chainbreaker IPA, Westbrook White Thai and the Founders Brewing collab with Green Flash for the Linchpin White IPA.  The differentiating here is that I’m doing a pale ale, or a pale wheat and using a blend of WLP-007 and WLP-300.  While I didn’t measure yeast counts, I feel like I had a bigger slurry of 300 over 007, thus hoping to have a dry finish with a cloudy beer.

Friday rolls around and NO WORKY FOR ME!  I realize quickly that I’ve driven over my good water hose end and it’s inoperable, SOB!  So out comes the old hose which thankfully isn’t frozen.  I get the coolers sanitized to get some ice and Gatorade in them.  Finally get some charcoal burning in the smoker and get the pig’s bottom and whole yard bird on there with hickory chunks.  It’s too bad it’s Friday and no one is in the cul-de-sac to salivate other than me.  I’m pretty impressed with myself in that I get the mash water heating up at noon and by 5pm the yeast is pitched.  The grain bill is simple in Brewer’s Malt, White Wheat and some Cara-Pils along with some Sorachi Ace hops from Japan which are known for their lemon/citrus flavor.  Throw in the common American Cascade hops at 15 minutes and 5 minutes along with some fresh orange zest at 15 minutes and we should have a great citrus white pale wheat with around 5% abv just in time for front porch homebrew this Spring!

Don’t forget that the Classic City Brew Fest is just around the corner.  Go ahead and buy tickets, you may get a chance to brew with The Southern Brewing Company on their pilot system along with a tour of their new space before it’s open.  I’ll post links tomorrow, or just Goggle tonight.  Hope to see everyone there.

Slainte!

White Pale grain

oranges

mash

1st runnings

gravity sample

smoked out

WLPOO7 harvest

WLP007 history

Dumb ideas that work

Some time back a fellow brew buddy offered up some 17oz. German flip top bottles. I would be a total dumbass to turn these down. Thankfully he dropped them off at the house one day and I left him some past home brew mix packs. I’m finally getting around to using them, so I started cleaning them yesterday. He’s made the switch to kegs, which obviously means he’s smarter than I am. Some of the bottles had some left overs in them. But before I keep going this is no way a complaint. It’s simply me proving how dumb I am and in fact the dumb stuff I think of actually works. I was having trouble getting the left overs out of the bottle. I typically don’t use a bottle brush, but pulled it on these naturally. My hands were getting raw twisting the brush between my palms as if I was trying to start a fire with a stick like my ancestors.

I decided to get my 18v drill out and to make this work I simply squeezed the round end together to fit inside the drill end.



Using the brush attached on the drill made this a thousand times easier. The biggest benefit was that the brush handle wasn’t straight. This allowed the brush to run an elliptical type circle and hit all sides (does a circle have sides?) of the bottle. The biggest trouble was getting the bottom corners. So I had to put some bends on the tip to get the bristles at that angle.

Now if anyone thinks, “Well I never clean my bottles, and I’ve never had off flavors.” then take a look at what came out of just a simple 20 bottles. I’m really excited about using these bottles. Hopefully my rocket problem will go away?
Also, if anyone is interested on the easiest way to remove labels. My trick is to take a pot of boiling water, usually 2 – 3 gallons, and dump into a simple cooler. Put the bottles in first to avoid burns from doing it latter. Open the lid a mere 40 minutes later and pull the labels off. They’re not pressed, but they have now been steamed away. A quick wipe with a brush will remove all the glue also. Now to bottle this ‘Hoppy Little Weizen’.

Cheers!

Wash my yeast

This post may not be much to any veteran home brewer, but if you’re new to the hobby (life) of brewing you may enjoy this. It’s not anything you will have trouble finding on the internet either.  I found a good video on Billy Brews and Denver references a short resourceful pdf from Athens’ local homebrew club.  Those are probably better places to look on ‘how to’, but this is my first try at it and how I went about it.  Will I do things differently next time?  Absolutely.  Do I feel there are things that I did to make it easier than others?  Well of course.

One thing you might have figured out is that I have finally brewed this year.  I didn’t get the yeast I wanted either, so I had to buy the German Hefeweizen WLP300 instead of the American version WLP320.  It was two months past best by date too, so naturally, as I always do, I had to make a starter.  Beer Smith suggested I make a 2L starter using two vials, but only one was available.  Or I could have checked the other local home brew shop.  I was starting to get a bit worried, but alas a few hours before I started brewing the starter was active on it’s own (without me swirling it).  I am piecing together parts to make my own yeast stir plate.  I’m pretty excited about that too.

So how and why does this work?  Basically for each five gallon batch of home brew you buy an $8-$10 vial or smack pack of yeast.  You make a starter using DME (dry malt extract) for the yeast to eat and multiply.  Once the beer, now called wort before fermented, has reached its final gravity or close, you rack off to secondary or straight to bottling.  The yeast has done its job and is tired and worn out.  But hasn’t completely given up yet, just tired.  Actually it’s eaten all the sugar it can.  So after the wort is taken off the yeast you want to pour in boiled, sanitized water.  This will remove the oxygen so the yeast doesn’t get excited and find something sweet to eat again.  You want to pour the water on the yeast and swirl to free from your vessel and removed any clumps.  Allow that to settle covered for 10 minutes or so, or just dump it all like I did.  I only had quart mason jars available so I used them.  Most recommend a gallon jar and I’ll do this next time.  Not that it’s hard to pour into quart jars, but as you’ll see below, you have more ‘room’ to pull yeast from.  Cap the jar or jars and throw in a fridge to speed the yeast settling.  The water will stay a float, the heavies will drop and in the middle a nice milky yeast slurry.  Here is what I prevail!  I used a sanitized turkey baster to preciously pull the yeast from the middle of the jars.  If it became to clear I’d lower it, or if I saw chunks I would apply pressure to the bulb and raise it back into the yeast area.  After you’ve filled your jars to the lid, cap them and chill in the fridge.  Being cool will keep the yeast cells hibernating.  Make sure you mark your jars with the strain, date and use cycle.  Mine are marked second generation since the first harvest was from the supplier.  Post in the comments with any suggestions, questions or just want to blast me.  I hope to use this strain again in about two more weeks.  Most Hefeweizens are only 4-5% abv, so it doesn’t completely exhaust itself eating sugars anyways.

Cheers!

These are the six jars of yeast right after pouring.

This is after 15 minutes of settling. I stared a lot between 1 and 15 minutes (not required).

This is 45 minutes after pouring and 15 minutes in the fridge. I stared even more between 30 and 45 minutes (not required).

The jar on the right is how much yeast I pulled from the first of six jars.

I filled this jar on the left from the four jars on the right, but there is yeast left in those jars.

Here’s the six jars I will dump and the two jars of washed yeast I will chill.

Here’s the yeast at the bottom that I will use next home brew day. Costing me about 2.5 hours of time and saving me $8. But doing what you enjoy comes at no cost (free labor).

 

One beer six yeasts

Gratis Six Strain

Way back around the early part of June, shortly after Cloudy visited White Labs near tap-room sorta speak in San Diego, we decided to mimic the creation of brewing a single beer and fermenting it with different yeast strains.  What started out as a good idea on social media sites ended up being almost 13 hours of brewing.  Did I mention this was outside during June in Georgia?

The ‘on-going’ project was to brew the same beer and ferment it with different yeast strains to show the different styles of yeast.  So far we have only done three split batches which yielded six 5 gallon batches, all using Belgian style yeasts.  Belgian yeasts usually withstand the age of time, hence the reason to use them first.  Hopefully one day we’ll get around to brewing the rest of the 24 batches.  I won’t go into detail on the tastes of each pour, but just give the yeast manufacturer’s descriptions.  Seeing as how I’m struggling with picking up on the exact tastes that I’m getting from each strain.

#1 Wyeast 3711 French Saison

Wyeast 3711 French Saison – A very versatile strain that produces Saison or farmhouse style biers as well as other Belgian style beers that are highly aromatic (estery), peppery, spicy and citrusy. This strain enhances the use of spices and aroma hops, and is extremely attenuative but leaves an unexpected silky and rich mouthfeel. This strain can also be used to re-start stuck fermentations or in high gravity beers.

The French Saison yeast will do exactly what it says it will do, ‘re-start’ stuck fermentations.  I brewed a Saison a couple of years ago using their Belgian Saison yeast strain, 3724 I believe.  Just as it describes, it will ‘stick’ and will not finish out unless warmed just as the beers did in yesteryear during the summer months.  This was my second most favorite strain.  Remember that Saisons or farmhouse ales were brewed to quench farmer’s thirst during harvest (fall) months.  So the yeast strain had to withstand warmer summer months of fermentation.  Yes, even before Al Gore invented Global Warming.  (I read that on his internet)

#2 White Labs WLP072 French Ale

White Labs WLP072 French Ale yeast – Clean strain that complements malt flavor. Low to moderate esters, when fermentation temperature is below 70F. Moderate plus ester character over 70F. Low diacetyl production. Good yeast strain for Biere de Garde, blond, amber, brown ales, and specialty beers

My least favorite of all the strains.

#3 White Labs WLP568 Belgian

White Labs WLP568 Belgian Saison yeast blends – This blend melds Belgian style ale and Saison strains. The strains work in harmony to create complex, fruity aromas and flavors. The blend of yeast strains encourages complete fermentation in a timely manner. Phenolic, spicy, earthy, and clove like flavors are also created.

One of the prettier of all six of the beers.  My second least favorite however.

#4  White Labs WLP670 American Farmhouse

White Labs WLP670 American Farmhouse Blend – Inspired by local American brewers crafting semi-traditional Belgian-style ales. This blend creates a complex flavor profile with a moderate level of sourness. It consists of a traditional farmhouse yeast strain and Brettanomyces. Great yeast for farmhouse ales, Saisons, and other Belgian-inspired beers.

Middle of the road for me but it should develop more over time since it has a level of funky bacteria in it.

#5 White Labs WLP565 Belgian Saison

White Labs WLP565 Belgian Saison yeast – Classic Saison yeast from Wallonia. It produces earthy, peppery, and spicy notes. Slightly sweet. With high gravity Saisons, brewers may wish to dry the beer with an alternate yeast added after 75% fermentation.

The equivalent of Wyeast’s 3724 yeast that I previously used, this yeast will ‘stick’ and may need another blend to finish, or dry the beer out.  My favorite strain of the six.  While the description says it may stick, Cloudy nailed the fermentation and this finished out quite dry.  My favorite of the bunch!

#6 White Labs WLP566 Belgian Saison II

White Labs WLP566 Belgian Saison II yeast – Saison strain with more fruity ester production than with WLP565. Moderately phenolic, with a clove-like characteristic in finished beer flavor and aroma. Ferments faster than WLP565.

A ‘better’ strain than 565 for those that struggle, myself included, with controlling fermentation temps.

All I can say is how much fun it’s going to be going to San Diego and hanging out at White Labs.  I can’t say brewing three more batches for 13 hours in the middle of the summer will be fun.  But we had a damn good time doing it.  Also for those that are not aware, Gratis is going pro!  Coming early in 2014 Athens will be home to The Southern Brewing Company.  Gratis will remain Gratis, a true social learning environment for homebrew experimentations.  Just like we did with the Bumpkin brews this year.  Which are just now coming to proper carbonation levels.

More on the pumpkin porter I brewed during The Return of Bumpkin day soon.  Prost!

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