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 …
Tag: 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 …
Partigyle, Rebooted: Wonmisan Silvered Moon Barleywine
Note: This brew is part of a single parti-gyle batch of beer brewed on the 6th of February. The other half of the batch, Wonmisan Mild Brown Hound, is discussed here. However, the majority of the discussion of the parti-gyle itself is here. I have been considering making a barley wine for quite some time now, but I have never actually gotten around to it until now. Since I am eager to produce a batch of Mild ale for Miss Jiwaku, I figured now would be the perfect time to go ahead and make a smaller (10L) Barley Wine, using …
Partigyle, Rebooted: Wonmisan Mild-Hearted Brown Hound
Note: This brew is part of a single parti-gyle batch of beer brewed on the 6th of February. The other half of the batch, Wonmisan Silvered Moon Barleywine, is discussed here. (The majority of the discussion of the parti-gyle itself is on that page, not here.) For those not interested in the link above, briefly, Wonmisan Mild-Hearted Brown Hound is my attempt at Mild, using the second and last runnings of a partigyle for a barleywine.
Experimental Minibatch: Wonmisan Grätzerexperimente
I now have a tiny, 1L batch of Grätzer fermenting in my brewcloset. This may sound insane, and it probably is, of course, but how it happened is perhaps an amusing story.
Smoky Brewday: Wonmisan Grätzer
Grätzer is one of those almost-extinct beer styles that people have started talking about again these days. The basic idea is that it’s a 100% smoked malt, low-ABV beer. We’re talking serious smoke, and seriously low ABV, like 3.5% or less. Sounds good to me, so I decided to make some. Thing is, that’s a more involved proposition than I first imagined.
Batch Management
Well, it’s February, and so far I’ve only made three batches of beer this holiday. However, I’m about to start brewing a lot more, and that means I need to empty out my fermenters and sort out my kegs.
Pale Brewday: Wonmisan Belgian Pale/ESB
I’ve felt like getting back into Belgian brewing, but at the moment I have a nice cake of Safale S-04 (the English Ale yeast) in the bottom of a carboy, and I’d like to pitch onto it, so I figured today would be a great day to do a double batch, split right down the middle, with half going onto Belgian yeast and half going onto English.
Classic Beer Style Series #6: Belgian Ale
The old Classic Beer Styles Series books are a mixed bag: some, like Smoked Beers (by Ray Daniels and Geoff Larson), and I have to say, while Pierre Rajotte’s Belgian Ale entry into the series was probably useful at the time it was published, it’s dated and one is better off checking out the Belgian Brewing series for a more practical and up-to-date look at brewing these beers. That’s not to fault Rajotte — but his book is the product of a different time. (Notably, at one point he explains who it was once common to be able to buy beer …