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 …