West Coast Pale Ale

Last Friday Luke and I brewed a West Coast Pale Ale, which is pretty much defined by being more amber colored than a typical pale ale. So into the mash tun went a bunch of pale malt and some caramel 80. This is a darker caramel malt than I typically use in a pale ale, but that's the effect you're going for with this style. Pretty simple malt bill.

I wanted this beer to feature a new hop variety (well, new to this brewery), Columbus. This is a high alpha acid West Coast hop. The description from Hopunion:

Originally bred for its alpha value, it has also
become popular for its oil profile. Great for dry
hopping.

This last sentence would prove to be a beer saver. It turns out that when my last hop order was shipped they neglected to include the bag of Columbus. I didn't realize this until brewday because they were listed on my email order confirmation and I assumed they were in the box. They of course were not, so it was time to adapt.

I had wanted to use the Columbus in a couple of addition for bittering and aroma, but substituted Cascade as a first wort hop and Cluster for some additional bittering. Amarillo and more Cascade went in for flavor and aroma. This is all fine but I had really wanted this beer to be something different, not more of the same.

So the solution will be to dry hop the heck out of it with Columbus, which are supposed to, finally, be on their way.
I'll let you know how it turns out.

2112

Yes I'm a Rush nerd, but that has nothing to do with the title of this post. That honor goes to the yeast of the month - Wyeast 2112. I'm sipping right now on a pint of St. Croix Crossing Steam Beer and admiring the smooth  malty roundness you get with this yeast. That's not to say that it leaves a lot of sweetness. The finish is fairly dry, and leaves plenty of room for the palate cleansing hop bitterness of this beer.

Seeing that this yeast is amazing, we decided to use it in another beer. Last Monday, Memorial Day, we brewed an Amber Lager with Pale Malt, Bonlander (a 10L 2-Row Munich malt from Briess), and Caramel 60. It was hopped with 4 additions of Mt Hood and only Mt Hood. The brew day went off without a hitch and the beer had a starting gravity of 1.053, which was right where I wanted it. We'll be fermenting it cooler than we did the Steam beer to try to get a more traditional lager character out of it. I'll let you know how that works out.

The Mother of All Recaps

The Black Belgian Wheat turned out awesome. The color is a deep brown/ black with a dark tan head. The aroma is fruity, spicy, and slightly phenolic from the yeast. The flavor is deceptive in that you expect it to be roasty, but it's not. What you get spicy wheat beer flavor and when it warms up a little you get a lot of dark, dried fruit flavors and some licorice. The finish was nice and dry with a hint of bitterness.
It's already gone, so if you didn't get any, too bad for you. No, not really. It was so well received that we are going to brew a big batch of it in a few weeks, so you'll get your chance to try it.

Right now we're working on dressing up some of our regular beers just to make something fun and interesting for summer. We're going to be putting on the Chipotle Chocolate Porter, Blackberry Chocolate Porter, and when this batch of Golden ale is done, we'll have Raspberry Golden.

During our tasting event we brewed wheat based pale ale with wheat (obviously), pale, Ashburne, and caramel 20. Hopped and dry hopped with nothing but Amarillo, and fermented warm with Wyeast 2112 Steam yeast. Its name is Aromarillo, and it will be awesome. Look for it next week.

Black Belgian Wheat

So Craft Beer Week is coming up and I wanted to do something fun for it, so I present to you - Black Belgian Wheat. I know you're thinking "WTF is that, I never heard of that style." That would be because I made it up. I'm sure someone else has made something similar, but I never saw it or drank it so I'm calling it my own.

BBW is a small 10 gallon batch brewed with American Red Wheat, American Pale Malt, German Munich Malt, Belgian Debittered Black Malt, and Belgian Special B. Hops are exclusively Mt. Hood in two additions.
It's being fermented with Wyeast 3942. From their website - " Isolated from a small Belgian brewery, this strain produces beers with moderate esters and minimal phenolics. Apple, bubblegum and plum-like aromas blend nicely with malt and hops. This strain will finish dry with a hint of tartness."
Sound good to me.

I wanted to brew something off the wall with a lot of interesting things going on. It will be dark yet light in body. Belgian yeast character plus a prominent hop aroma. Dried fruit from the Special B with plum like aromas from the yeast. Awesome.

We'll be tapping it in the brewery sometime during Crap Craft Beer Week, most likely Wednesday evening. This will be the first of, I hope many, 'In The Brewery' events, where we feature special brews, give tours, talk beer, and have a great time.

I'll tweet the exact date and time, so follow me @rickthebrewer on Twitter.

Bonus Tasting Notes

Fresh out of the bright beer tank.

Hop Tornado IPA - Deep orange color. Slightly hazy. Huge aroma. A whirlwind of fruity esters, floral, citrus, alcohol, toffee and malt. Flavor is just more of the same with some alcohol warmth and a nice hop scraping on the finish. The body is pretty light for a beer with an OG of 1.063, hence all the alcohol. Not that I'm complaining.

3 Beers Tasted

Some quick tasting notes on the next three beers on tap.

Oatmeal Stout - Opaque black. Dark head. Roasty/ charred/ slightly acrid aroma. Clean flavor with malt and a not too intense dark roast coffee flavor. Finishes clean with restrained bitterness and no acrid aftertaste.

Chocolate Porter - Reddish black with a tan head. Aroma chocolate and dark caramel. Bittersweet chocolate flavor with caramel toffee malt background. Slight hop earthiness. Tart roasty character on the finish.

Big Muskie Pale Ale (Plan B) - Deep golden color with orange highlights. Light tan head. Complex malt/hop aroma with notes of guava and passion fruit. Fruity, herbal flavor with malt backbone. Assertive hop bittering on the finish without being overpowering.

Tomorrow I'll be brewing a 10 gallon batch of my newest creation for Craft Beer Week - Black Belgian Wheat.

Check out my twitter @rickthebrewer for live updates.

Steam Recap

On Tuesday (April 19th) we brewed St. Croix Steam Beer. This beer is modeled on, and an homage to, Anchor Steam out of San Francisco, CA.  It seems a lot of people aren't familiar with Steam Beer, so a little background. Steam is a style that originated in California in the mid 1800's.  It was unique in that it used the new lager yeast strains that had become popular, but at warmer temperatures.

Why 'steam'? No one knows for sure. From Wikipedia:

"Explanations of the word "steam" are all speculative. The carbon dioxide pressure produced by the process was very high, and one possibility is that it was necessary to let off "steam" before attempting to dispense the beer. According to Anchor Brewing, the name "steam" came from the fact that the brewery had no way to effectively chill the boiling wort using traditional means. So they pumped the hot wort up to large, shallow, open-top bins on the roof of the brewery so that it would be rapidly chilled by the cool air blowing in off the Pacific Ocean. Thus while brewing, the brewery had a distinct cloud of steam around the roof let off by the wort as it cooled, hence the name. It is also possible that the name derives from "Dampfbier" (literally "steam beer"), a traditional German ale that was also fermented at unusually high temperatures and that may have been known to 19th-century American brewers, many of whom were of German descent."

Steam Beer is important in American brewing because it is considered the first microbrewed beer. The style was revitalized in the late 1960's when Fritz Maytag bought the aged and ailing Anchor Brewing Co.  At a time when breweries were turning to lighter and more corn-based beverages, Anchor revamped their recipe to make an all malt beer with an assertive hop character. Early microbrewers in California looked to Anchor and its Steam beer for information and inspiration. In fact it could be argued that Anchor created the American microbrewery movement.

St. Croix Steam was brewed with Pale malt and four kinds of Caramel malt (20, 40, 80, and 120) for a complex, layered malt flavor. It's hopped with Cluster, Mt. Hood, Glacier and Willamette for an herbal, earthy hop character. The brew day went off without a hitch, and our starting gravity was even better than I expected.

We brought in a new yeast for this beer- Wyeast 2112 - which is a lager strain based on the Anchor yeast. It's fermenting at around 60 F, as is traditional.

Next post I'll go over tasting notes on the beers so far.