Brewing Salts Really Are "Seasonings" For Your Beer

Now not to get ahead of ourselves, the flavors in your beer predominantly come from malt, hops and yeast byproducts. So as I've said before, dial that shit in before you start screwing around with your beer. Otherwise, it's analogous to dumping a full salt shaker onto a well-done steak and expecting that to magically transform it into a perfectly seared, crusty but medium rare and juicy steak. It just doesn't work. Now you're just eating an extra salty piece of crap instead of a piece of crap.

But once you've honed your process and want to think about tweaking the flavors in your beer to really bring out the profile you're looking for, it's time to start thinking about water treatment. (This post is only about the flavor additions - there's a lot more to water treatment. See this other post.)

Sulfate (SO4) and Chloride (Cl-) are the two primary ions which have an impact on beer flavor. The presence and concentration of either ion independently appears to be less important than the actual ratio between them. A ratio which favors a higher Chloride concentration will accentuate malt (bready, toasty, caramelly) flavors where a ratio with a higher Sulfate ratio will highlight hop bitterness and sharpness.

Jeremy and I have only really just started to successfully tweak this ratio of salts in our beers. We've brewed three batches of Russian Imperial Stout over the past year or so, partially out of need to fill a five gallon used whiskey barrel we bought this past winter. The first two batches were brewed last fall and were pretty solid, well executed beers. But something was missing. They lacked the velvety, chocolatey notes which make a big stout the kind of beer you want to slowly nurse out of a snifter, savoring the aroma and pairing with a brick of blue cheese or a cigar.

In hindsight, we totally screwed up the water treatment. We'd been brewing hoppy beers all summer, and without a real insight into the balance necessary in our water, dumped a boatload of gypsum into the beer. Our Chloride to Sulfate ratio was something like 1 : 3, which completely over-accentuated the bitterness and downplayed the malt. On our re-brew we were 1.5 : 1. The third round has those massive chocolate, stone fruit and roast notes that make it characteristic of the style.

Furthering the cooking analogy, the first two stouts were nicely cooked steaks but lacked something almost intangible. We made a tiny adjustment, just like learning to salt the meat and let it warm up to room temperature in order to create that perfectly caramelized crust. The more I brew, the more these little adjustments start to really matter and impact the finished beer.

(Bad choice on the analogy. Now I want to eat a steak and drink one of those stouts at 8 in the morning...)

Barrel Yum Yum

Oh what's that? 5 Gallons of Russian Imperial Stout getting dumped from a used blue corn whiskey barrel? Yup. It is. Round 3 of this recipe, competition bound... 

(Sorry - no useful information here today. Just a little bit of beer porn.)

Water Basics

I had the opportunity to talk about the basics of water as it relates to brewing with the soon to be founder of Panic Brewing at the last Square Kegs meeting. Rather than re-writing the whole talk, I've posted the notes here. Gary took the liberty of adding some of the more technical details based on his education at the American Brewers Guild.

You can check it out here.

A Tale of Two Pales

These are actually the same beer. Same malt bill, same process other than a slightly longer mash on the darker one, different hops in the same quantity, and different carbonation levels. The left beer was hopped with Pacific Gem (13.2% alpha) and Australian Galaxy (13%) and the right was Columbus (13.9%) and Simcoe (13%). Never mind the shitty picture quality - you can still get the point.)

They're all small differences, but this is one of those one of those experiences that continues to blow my mind and preconceived notions about what matters in brewing.

I'm not sure where the dramatic difference stems from, but here are a few possibilities:

• There are a few episodes of Can You Brew It where Jamil talks about how particulate still in solution in the beer can actually make it appear lighter. 
• The actual oil levels in the hop combinations were different. I know that hops and yeast tend to do a little chemical dance at different points of fermentation, so it's possible that the beer on the right flocculated out better because of this.
• The dissolved volumes of CO2 were different (I carbonated the left and Jeremy did the right), which again could affect color
• One of the two beers (I didn't take great notes on the order we brewed them in) was mashed about 15 minutes longer than the other. I don't think that would have a significant impact, but in this case I can't rule it out.

So ultimately I don't really know how two beers with the same malt bill ended up looking so different, but it was an eye opening experience. 

10,000 Hours?

Hey J - you look pretty bored. Oh and Diesel is characteristically
not giving a shit about anything. Except maybe that squirrel.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule. His poses the theory that to really reach mastery of any skill or craft you need to spend at least 10,000 hours honing it. He talks about the Beatles spending 10,000 hours over a few years playing in Hamburg Germany and about Bill Gates growing up spending his weeknights and summers in a computer lab starting at a young age.

I'm positive I haven't spent ten thousand hours brewing. Since I started tracking with BeerAlchemy in December of 2010, I have brewed 32 batches (195.75 gallons) either solo or with Jeremy. I started brewing in early 2004 and conservatively did about another 30-40 extract batches in that period of time. That probably works out to a bit under 1000 hours of brewing and cellar maintenance during fermentation. I've listened to most of the programming the brewing network has put out there, read a rather ridiculous volume of books and blogs, and certainly spent many many hours seeking out and trying new beers.

All in all, I really don't know how much time I've spent in the hobby and related activities. But what I do know (and the picture in this post sums it up well) is that it dawned on me this Sunday that there were certain points of the brewing process during which Jeremy and I didn't even need to talk this weekend. We just flowed from one task to the next, having dialed in our process on our equipment. I was laughing about our first all grain effort in which we screwed up royally on the mash temp, didn't quite hit our numbers, spent the whole time freaking out about whether we were screwing it all up and just barely made it through the whole process in 7 or 8 hours. Contrast that with a day which looked a lot like that picture. Mostly we just stay a couple of steps ahead and then sit around and way until it's time for the next burst of activity.

I don't purport to be an expert. We're just barely scratching the surface of making predictably good all grain beer and understanding how the inputs actually affect the finished product. But I think Malcolm's on to something. Maybe in another few years when I actually hit that 10,000 hour mark I'll start taking home some competition medals or even a best in show. Although at this point, I'm not really that worried. I'm having way too much fun along the way.

Rebrew: Citra IPA

As Jeremy and I have really started to dial in our all-grain process, we've gone back to a couple of beers we brewed last summer and brewed them again. I'm still on enough of a learning curve that we've been able to noticeably improve on those earlier attempts.

In particular, we re-brewed a Russian Imperial Stout early this spring which we'd done in the fall. The original beer was pretty solid, but lacked the velvety, chocolatey notes which really needed to shine for it to be great. We treated the water with a mix of Calcium Choloride (CaCl2) and Gypsum (CaSO4) this time around instead of a single CaSO4 adjustment in the fall. We also pitched onto yeast cakes from ten gallons of Ordinary Bitter brewed the week prior. Between those two small tweaks, we ended up with a far better end product. The aforementioned chocolate and coffee notes were there. Using a substantially larger pitch of yeast got us to a better finishing gravity, and using a slightly different carbonation level produced just the right level of carbonation.

So up next, we're re-brewing our Citra IPA from last summer. It was already a damn good beer, so we wanted to brew it again this year. However, given the opportunity to tweak a few things I wanted to tune up the malt profile a bit and accentuate the unique character Citra brings to the party. Based on the recent process improvements we've made to improve on our hop character, I'm pretty confident we'll get there by using a low temperature whirlpool addition. With the malt character, we're going to use an English Ale yeast (Wyeast 1335) which should accentuate the bread / biscuit character a bit more than a clean american ale yeast. We'll probably also tweak the water adjustments a bit and go with a mix of calcium chloride and gypsum instead of strictly gypsum.

The yeast starter is going and brewday is Sunday. I'll have some results in a couple of weeks!

Wine Yeast Mythbusting

I listened to an episode of The Brewing Network's Sunday Session yesterday which featured an extended talk with Shea Comfort, a consulting winemaker who has adopted the moniker of "The Yeast Whisperer." (For those of you who listen to the BN regularly, there's a brief snippet where JP launches into a Caesar Milan impersonation where he's ranting about how "The yeast need to know that you are in control. You most be dominant over your yeast..." etc which had me rolling!)

Shea knows yeast. He presented a ton of useful information about yeast in general and wine yeast applications in beer in particular. There's a whole separate portion of his talk about using wine yeasts in beer in order to get some very distinct flavors. I'll save that for a separate post since I'm now pretty interested in doing some experiments with it.

He also cleared up some of the misconceptions that seem to be held pretty commonly amongst brewers about wine yeasts.

• Wine yeasts fall into one of three categories: Killer, Neutral, or Susceptible. Yeast, being a living organism with a desire to reproduce, have evolved over time. Some strains within Saccharomyces Cerevisiae (wine and ale) have developed the ability to produce and release a protein which literally stops other susceptible strains of yeast from fermenting. Many of the wine strains fall into this category. All (or most) of the beer strains are susceptible. As such, pitching Champagne yeast into an active beer fermentation will eradicate your beer yeast within about 12 hours.
• Wine yeasts are bad at breaking down maltotriose and other higher-order dextrins produced by mashing malted barley. Beer yeasts are also a little lazy and will start by eating glucose and maltose before moving on to maltotriose. If you're scratching your head, here's the practical application: Pitching Champagne yeast into a stuck fermentation likely will not "dry out" your beer and take it down to the final gravity you're looking for. If you have a stuck fermentation, your beer yeast has probably chewed through most of the lower-order sugars and is getting lazy about eating the higher order sugars. The wine yeast can't eat them and it'll kill your beer yeast once you pitch it. So you'll just have another layer of flocculated yeast in your fermenter at the same gravity. The only situation where this will actually help you is if you've handled your beer yeast poorly and it crapped out for a different reason. (Lack of nutrients, oxygenation, temperature stress, etc.)
• So in the case of a stuck fermentation, Shea recommended using enzymes which replicate the process which takes place in your mash. (He recommended using Convertase.) There are commercial enzymes which exist for use in brewing and distillation which will break down higher order dextrins into more easily fermentable compounds. Dosing stuck fermentations with a very small amount of these enzymes will help your lazy yeast out, and if done properly will help you nail your target final gravity without completely fermenting out. (The enzymes are essentially a protein which gets denatured and has limited capacity to convert higher order sugars, so they will run out of steam after a certain amount of activity.)

I have yet to try any of the techniques he mentioned, but you can be damn sure I will be running some experiments...