Tafelbier - Low Gravity Brewing

If you follow anything related to homebrewing you will quickly realise that there is definite tendency for homebrewers to brew high ABV beers. Big beers create big impressions and when you want your beers to get noticed, this is often the easiest way to do it - particularly in competition. However, I think brewing big is also a way for mediocre brewers to disguise flaws in their beers and can quite often be a marker for lazy, unadventurous recipe formulation. Who cares about the correct yeast pitching rate, or eliminating off flavours, when you mask it with a couple of dry hop additions?! Sure it might be enjoyable to drink, but are you actually becoming a better brewer?

So as a bit of fun recently, one of the homebrew clubs I'm a member of (Bristol Craft Brewers) lay down a challenge to everyone to brew a low gravity beer for the August meeting. Quite a few people weren't all that interested in taking part, which is fair enough. Another problem with homebrewing is finding the time to do it and brewing an extra low abv beer just doesn't fit in with a lot of peoples' schedules, but hopefully there will be a few examples to try out.

The thing that I find so appealing about brewing a low abv beer is that it's a real challenge to get right. There's going to be a small grain bill so every bit counts. You also need to find a way of increasing the body so it doesn't taste watery. Hop bitterness will be overpowering in a light beer, so you can't just throw hops at it as you might a high gravity IPA. There is also the appealing factor that pretty much any colour/style of beer has the potential to be made into a low abv version. There are so many ways of building body in a beer - higher mash temperature, dextrin malts, crystal malts, yeast choice and so on - that you can choose whichever way suits the style best.

For my effort I took inspiration from a Belgian Tafelbier that was brewed to replace fizzy drinks in school! Yes, those crazy Belgians gave beer to school kids as a response to child obesity. So this is a very light beer brewed with some belgian yeast character, aiming to be refreshing and easy to drink (without getting drunk). Due to time constraints I only had a limited window to brew this between festivals this summer, and I was unable to order in any specific ingredients. This meant the only yeast I could get hold of was Safale T-58, a dry yeast that I haven't used before, and the specialty grains were led by what I already had. Having said that, I was happy with the recipe that I put together, I would've liked to have got hold of a more expressive and less attenuative yeast.

Ingredients

Amt Name %/IBU 1.700 kg Pilsner (2 Row) UK (7.0 EBC) 73.3 % 0.250 kg Vienna Malt (7.0 EBC) 10.8 % 0.150 kg Caramunich I (Weyermann) (100.5 EBC) 6.5 % 0.120 kg Aromatic Malt (51.2 EBC) 5.2 % 0.100 kg Cara-Pils/Dextrine (3.9 EBC) 4.3 % 5.00 g Magnum [14.20 %] - Boil 60.0 min 9.3 IBUs 0.50 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 mins) - 3.00 g Peppercorns (Boil 5.0 mins) - 1.0 pkg SafBrew T-58 -

Brew Day - 20/07/2014
O.G. 1.027

I mashed at 69C to increase the amount of unfermentable sugars in the wort for extra body. The first gallon of runnings was boiled for an hour to reduce it to just over half of it's previous volume. This was intended to increase the caramel impression of the beer. The gravity numbers were a little higher than predicted, but I decided not to adjust it as the abv will be so low anyway.

Unfortunately, brewing on one of the hottest days of the year means that an immersion chiller isn't all that effective. The temp dropped quite well initially, but then stayed at around 23C. A check of the mains water temperature (20C) made up my mind that it wasn't going to drop too much more like that, so I ran it off into the fermenter and put that in my new brew fridge! I've set that for 17C, so hopefully it will be able to bring the wort down to a more realistic pitching temperature for the yeast.

The fridge took a few hours but got the wort down to a pitchable temperature of 17.9C by the end of the day. I was a bit concerned that the rehydrated yeast would've been at around 22C (ambient temp) when I pitched it, but there was not a lot I could do about that!

Summer IPA

I haven't brewed for a couple of weeks and I've got some free time this Sunday, thanks to there being no Six Nations to watch, so I've put together something hoppy. Kind of a pancake day brew this one. I wanted to use some Summer hops that I've had in the freezer for a while, so I put this recipe together to be a moderate alcohol IPA. I've not found much information about Summer hops other than they're supposed to give an apricot aroma and are suited to dry hopping. Apart from that I've heard that they aren't a very dominant flavour hop and can get a bit lost in the mix.

Today's hops.

 What I've decided to do is go for a simple grain bill of mostly Pilsner malt with a bit of light Crystal and a bit of Munich to add a bit of sweetness and biscuity flavour. This will hopefully give a reasonably neutral base to the beer without being bland.

For the hops I've gone with a relatively neutral bittering addition of Northern Brewer. I'm going to add Summer at all stages to get that flavour throughout the beer too. Other hop additions will be at 5mins, 0mins and dry hop. I was going to use just Summer and Cascade for these thinking that the citrus, grapefruit character of the Cascade would go well with the apricot. I then thought that it might be a bit too similar so I decided on a reasonably small addition of Amarillo at 5mins to give the beer an element of juicy fruit sweetness. So here's the recipe:

Ingredients

Amt Name Type # %/IBU 5.000 kg Pilsner (2 Row) UK (7.0 EBC) Grain 1 90.9 % 0.250 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L (78.8 EBC) Grain 2 4.5 % 0.250 kg Munich Malt (17.7 EBC) Grain 3 4.5 % 36.00 g Northern Brewer 2012 [9.70 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 4 35.7 IBUs 10.00 g Summer [6.30 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 5 6.4 IBUs 20.00 g Amarillo [8.70 %] - Boil 5.0 min Hop 6 3.5 IBUs 20.00 g Cascade 2013 [8.40 %] - Boil 5.0 min Hop 7 3.4 IBUs 10.00 g Summer [6.30 %] - Boil 5.0 min Hop 8 1.3 IBUs 20.00 g Cascade 2012 [7.50 %] - Steep/Whirlpool 10.0 min Hop 9 2.8 IBUs 20.00 g Summer [6.30 %] - Steep/Whirlpool 10.0 min Hop 10 2.3 IBUs 50.00 g Summer [6.30 %] - Dry Hop 3.0 Days Hop 12 0.0 IBUs

I will be using my new hop filter for the brew too. I bought this ages ago from Mr Lard (who I can absolutely recommend for homebrew kit), but it was too big for my boiler. Yesterday I finally got around to taking it apart and remaking it at half the size. Hopefully this is the end of standing over the kettle at the end of a brew day, sweeping hops away from the hop filter with my mash paddle, while the beer trickles out. Seriously, this has added an extra hour onto my last few brew days so if I can put a stop to it it'll be a big step forward!

New hop filter ready to go!

The water treatment will be nice and simple today with some acid to bring the mash pH down and some gypsum to bring out the hops:
Lactic acid: 5ml to mash
Gypsum: 2g to mash, 2g to sparge

Predicted mash pH 5.45. I use an adapted version of the EZ Water spreadsheet and I find it fantastic! I actually found a pot of pH test strips that I bought ages ago today. So I got to test the pH for real today. Although they're not the easiest thing to get an accurate value from, I measured it as being between 5.0 and 5.4. This is a bit lower than I was aiming for, but should be absolutely fine. Good to know the spreadsheet is pretty reliable.

Now that's how rehydrating yeast should end up!

 The brew day all went according to plan and was pretty stress free. I'm pleased to report that the hop filter worked like a charm and didn't get blocked up at all. Well worth the money. So I'm writing this at 4:30pm with a cup of coffee having brewed beer, tidied up, and cleaned the mash tun and kettle! I love it when a plan comes together!

First Foray with Rye - First FoRye?

There is a definite trend in my brewing decisions that goes along the lines of: I decide what to brew, buy all the ingredients, listen to a podcast/read an article about a different beer, get all enthusiastic about that, change all my plans! So staying true to this my plans to brew a big, possible double, IPA changed at the last minute to a pale ale with a high percentage of Rye.

I've never brewed with rye before, but from what I understand it brings quite an interesting peppery flavour to a beer. It seems like a grain that I should really know a bit more about and could be quite useful in future recipes. This new found interest came about after listening to another episode of Basic Brewing Radio. If you haven't listened to this podcast before I can highly recommend it. James Spencer has a really positive and approachable attitude to brewing, which makes the show entertaining whilst also being packed full of explorations in to the more technical aspects of brewing. I also really enjoy his interviews with local brewers which give some real insight into their approaches to brewing and their experiences home brewing too. James also has a website that runs as a companion to the podcast called Beer and Wine Journal. It updates every week (would that we could all be so reliable) and is required reading for me.

The episode that inspired me here, was about James' attempt to brew a 100% Rye Beer. Rye is apparently very gelatinous and gloopy when mashed, and mashing a high percentage of it in a beer ofter leads to a stuck mash. To get round this, James used the brew-in-a-bag method to avoid lauter issues. Instead of running the wort out through the rye, he lifted the rye out of the wort - cunning! The resultant session beer (another first for me) seems to have been pretty successful, so I decided to give something similar a go.

Now, I'm not really set up for brewing in a bag, and I'm not sure how successful a smaller batch would be in my electric boiler. So I decided to scale the recipe up to five gallons. But I did take on board the inherent problems with Rye, so I made a 50% Rye recipe with 50% Low Colour Maris Otter and threw in a bunch of Oat Husks too, just to make sure I got a good lauter. I had some Citra pellets in the freezer from our last brew-club bulk buy, so I kept faith with James' recipe with them.

Ingredients

Amt Name Type # %/IBU 1.50 kg Maris Otter Low Colour Pale Malt (2.5 EBC) Grain 1 50.0 % 1.50 kg Rye Malt (5.0 EBC) Grain 2 50.0 % 300.00 g Oat Husks (Mash 60.0 mins) Other 3 - 26.00 g Citra [12.50 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 4 46.5 IBUs 30.00 g Citra [12.50 %] - Boil 5.0 min Hop 5 8.9 IBUs 1.0 pkg California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) [35.49 ml] Yeast 6 -

The first problem I encountered was that Rye malt wasn't in Beersmith's list of ingredients, so a quick search was required to find the values for yield etc. Everything else was nice and simple - using only one hop and two grains is great! I really like the simplicity of the recipe, it really suits my aim of getting to know what the Rye contributes.

The night before brew day I set out my brewing water and treated it with some gypsum to help with hop character and some lactic acid to bring down the mash pH. I then added a campden tablet to drive off any chloramines in the water and went out to meet a friend for her birthday.
 

Such a small mash!

 Brew day itself began at 1:30pm with a stonking hangover! Birthday celebrations had gone on till the early hours and all intentions of an early start had fallen by the wayside. So the brewer's friend came into play, the split brew day! Quite early on I decided that I'd leave the mash for the following day, this was not going to be a quick efficient brew as it was, without it going on late.

So, with a little trepidation I mashed in the malt and set the day in motion. I decided to mash with 10 litres of liquor so it wasn't too dilute, but had enough liquid to avoid it gumming up too much. I also decided to fly sparge this one. The thinking here was again to avoid a stuck mash. I thought that if I batch sparged there was a danger that it would all stick together as it drained. So I hooked up the only spare tubing I had for the fly sparge, unfortunately this was a bit too long for my original idea of sprinkling the sparge water. So instead I looped the hose on top of the grain bed and ran the water in slowly. This actually seemed to work quite well and didn't stir up the mash bed.

New sparging technique is not easy to photograph but seemed quite effective.

 

Look, no hands! Fly-sparge in progress.

The pre-boil gravity on this was predicted as 1.022, so you can imagine my surprise when it came out at 1.030! The mash efficiency was 93%, which on my system is unheard of! I can only assume that the yield figures for Rye malt are a bit low, so the prediction was out to begin with. Anyway, wort smelled amazing and it was still on for a sub-3% beer, which was what I was going for, so I wasn't too worried. This was now 7pm, so I decided it was time to pack up, seal the wort up, and crack on with the boil the next day.

The hot break was pretty dense from all the rye and it just kept coming!

The following day I had to work, but as soon as I got home I got the boiler on and got cracking with finishing off the brew 'day'. The boil went well and the citra hops just smelled incredible! I was totally knocked out with how good they smelled, I had to stop myself from eating them! Because of this I upped the 5min addition from 26g to 30g. I was going to go further but I didn't want to over-power the rye. I can do the hop bomb another time.

Citra - well fruity!

The temperature here is still unseasonably warm, so chilling the wort was a bit of an issue. Getting the last of the heat out of it just takes ages and it was already getting late, so I decided on a further split in the brew day. I got the temp down to 26C, ran it off into the fermenter, sealed it up and went to bed! Overnight it dropped the last few degrees down to 20C, so I got up early and switched on the aquarium pump for an hour's aeration and pitched the yeast before leaving for work.

Chiller in the wort, conical flask sterilising on the hob.

 Despite a somewhat haphazard brew schedule I'm pretty pleased with the way the beer's progressing and I can't wait to try the finished pint!