So, today I gave the grätzer/grodzisky style another go. Well, some might correct me by noting it’s my first go in earnest: the last time I made this kind of beer, I used wheat smoked with hickory and other stuff, and it came out tasting more like bacon than anything else. Today’s grätzer was 100% wheat, cool-smoked with Korean oak chunks for hours and hours at a time. The malt was extremely smoky, and was only smoked approximately a week before the brewday. I used 3.3 kilograms of wheat, which makes for 23L of wort at 1.035, though I suspect my …
Category: BEER & HOMEBREWING
Brewday Hat-Trick
I posted last Friday about brewing up a Saison with some organic dry cereal; that was the first brewday of my weekend. The second and third brewdays followed back to back, and were scheduled group-brews down at Magpie Brewing. (The beer is for the Fall Beer Festival, about which I’ll post more later this summer. It’s at the end of September.) For each of the group brewdays our goal was to brew up 80 liters of wort, boiling them in separate batches that would boil down to approximately 20 liters each.) The Saturday brewday was a Saison day. We had …
First Saison of the Season: Wonmisan Ancient Grains Saison
Well, I’m back to brewing, finally. I had to put it off for a while, but now that I’m back at it, it feels good. Today’s brew was simply a Saison, the first of the summer — I plan on a few more — and has a bit of a twist. I mean, beyond the twist of using blue agave for my adjunct; I always use some kind of adjunct to dry out my Saisons, because I like them to fement down as far as possible, and normally get down to about 1.001 or 1.002 no matter what the starting …
Note to Brewer Self: CaCl in the Mash/Boil, and a Student Brew
So I’ve sampled some of the Mild ale I made for Miss Jiwaku, and my impression is that it’s not bad, but could use more… more of the maltiness, which is supposed to define the character of the beer. I was looking up some mash chemistry info to reply to a query by another homebrewer and realized that I hadn’t done any water treatment in making my Mild, but that adding Calcium Carbonate (CaCl) could help emphasize the maltiness of the brew. I shall have to remember that next time. My use of Windsor yeast certainly helped (the wort stopped …
Belgian Brewday: Wonmisan Wit Redux (Side by Side Yeast Comparison)
I’ve had the makings for a Wit beer around for a good long time — some torrefied wheat, some raw wheat, and some beautiful whole chamomile flowers I picked up in Fukuoka. However, I haven’t had a chance to get my Wit on… until yesterday. Earlier this week, I procured a sample of Wyeast Belgian Wit yeast from a brewer friend in Seoul, Bryan; this is supposedly the classic Wit yeast, in other words a version of the strain used by Hoegaarden. The last Wit I made, I used the other Hoegaarden strain, which is known as Forbidden Fruit; though …
Hoppy Brewday: Wonmisan aɪ pʰiː eɪ? (Partigyle Part 2 – the Micro-IPA)
This is the second brew of a parti-gyle brewing session. I discussed the first part of that session, and the naming of the brews, here. I decided to experiment with making a lighter, milder, but still-intensely hoppy IPA-ish brew after reading a bit about experiments towards that style by The Mad Fermentationist, and discussions among a few brewers here in Korea regarding the brewing of a hoppy session ale. I figured I would try making a hoppy, low-ABV beer with some of my favorite hops — Citra and Sorachi Ace — to see whether I could pull it off. Since …
Hoppy Brewday: Wonmisan aɪ pʰiː eɪ? (Partigyle Part 1)
I want to name today’s brews — a partigyle double batch, both in the AIPA-ish style — simply “IPA” but I want to write it in the other IPA — the International Phonetic Alphabet. Apparently, that looks like this: aɪ pʰiː eɪ? If I planned on bottling it, I’d probably have fun doing up a label, but I’ll almost certainly be kegging these two batches. As I mentioned, this is to be a parti-gyle brew, and instead of blending runnings, I’m simply going to cap the mash and let it sit for an hour more before pulling the second half …
80L Brewday…
For the last couple of weekends, The Magpie Brewing Company (with the support of Homebrew Korea and the inimitable Bill Miller) has hosted some 80L brewdays. The idea is: you take four homebrewers, get them together, and host a brewday at their brewing space, which has the equipment for you to brew up to 80L (or more?) of beer at one time. Since there’s four brewers, you can split the wort 4 ways, have them each pitch their own yeast into the beer, and then you end up (after four such brewdays) with 320L of beer, split into 16 different …
Busy Brewday: Wonmisan White Mahakala / Wonmisan Tokkaebi
I’m incredibly busy at the moment with a few writing deadlines, but I never feel quite right when my fermenters are all empty, so I figured I’d do a quick parti-gyle brew today and ended up with the simplest recipe possible: a partigyle, 50/50, with 7.3 kilograms of pilsner as the complete mash. I can split the wort runoff at the 50% point and end up with a good strong wort for making a Belgian Golden Strong Ale (adding a packet of clear candi syrup, of course) and still have a 1.031 wort to blend some honey into, in order …
Guest Brewday: Earl Wit, With Rowan
On Wednesday, I made the trek out to Hannam Hanam City, to the home of my friends Rowan and Sophie, in order to brew up a Wit beer with Rowan… a Belgian Wit beer made with Earl Grey tea… and that’s not the only thing that makes it unusual. This is the second experiment we’ve done with brewing a wheat beer, and the twist is that we supplemented the wheat with some pasta — in this case, rotini. We didn’t use a lot: though we added about 500 grams of it to the cereal mash, some got burnt to the …