Belgian beers have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I live in the south of England, and the only Belgian beer you can get locally is Chimay which is priced as if it were unicorn blood*. Earlier this month, my girlfriend and I headed to London on a romantic day trip (pub-crawl-in-disguise) and in the evening we visited The Rake Bar, which I can only describe as beer-heaven. Here, I bought a selection of bottled beers from around the world to try when I got back home. The first of these beers was Barbãr.

*brewing-tips.com does not condone the unlawful killing of unicorns.

Name: Barbãr

Style: Belgian Honey Beer

ABV: 8%

Brewery: Brasserie Lefebvre, Belgium

Appearance

The beer poured a crystal clear deep yellow with a frothy white head which resembled krausen (the gnarled froth which forms on fermenting beer). Great head retention and clarity.

Aroma

A hint of sweetness on the nose but the overwhelming aroma is of metallic iron.

Flavour

From the aroma I was expecting a cloyingly sweet syrupy beer. Happily, this was not the case. The beer is very sweet, but it’s a natural, fresh sweetness and not at all what I had expected. The honey is subtle but unmistakable. The initial sweetness is immediately replaced by banana and cardamom notes which fade to a floral and slightly citrusy aftertaste leaving you wanting more. I drank this quite cold and as it warmed up during the end of the glass the high alcohol content became more apparent, but never harsh.

Conclusion

I must admit, I’ve never really enjoyed sweet beers. A beer to me  has to be refreshing and all too often sweeter beers leave me thirsting for dry hoppiness. Barbar was a beer which I really enjoyed despite its residual sweetness, but I would serve it with dessert rather than as a session beer. I’ll certainly be brewing a clone of it to this recipe.

Brewing-tips.com score: 68/100

Ratebeer Score: 87

Today, America is the front-line in the battle for great beer. With craft breweries opening daily in the land of the free,  more and more people are saying no to the beerhemoths of brewing, Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. Instead, the American public are choosing quality beer from small local breweries. A beer revolution is in full swing, and heading the fight are San Diego brewers, Stone Brewing Co. Today we will be reviewing one of their most famous beers, Arrogant Bastard Ale.

Firstly, a few facts. Arrogant bastard is a 7.2% ABV Strong Ale. First sold in 1997, the blurb on the side of the bottle reads, “This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth.” Arrogant, indeed.

Appearance

The beer pours a deep caramel red with a tan head which is retained for the entirety of the drink. Large bubbles of co2 and a good bright pour.

Aroma

Very sweet aroma, deep notes of blackcurrant and cherry which give way to fresh hops and a hint of alcohol harshness.

Taste

It’s certainly an aggressive beer as the label and name suggest. A panoply of complex flavours assault your taste buds, the usual dark berry, black chocolate and coffee notes are accompanied by charcoal and molasses flavours.  With my first sip I realised that this was a beer unlike anything I’d tasted before – it was challenging and raw, every time I tried to pin down a flavour it would evolve and change, confusing my unrefined palate. The beer has a certain earthy and feral taste, it’s a flavour I’ve experienced before with other dark american beers; I can best describe it as an earthy almost peaty taste which personally I dislike. Despite it’s high alcohol content of 7.2% there was very little alcohol bite to it.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of hype surrounding Arrogant Bastard Ale, it’s widely praised and has many many hardcore fans, but for me it just didn’t live up to my expectations. Perhaps my expectations were too high, if they were, that had something to do with the boasts of supreme quality and complexity printed on the label. For me, this beer just wasn’t the ‘unprecedented and uncompromising celebration of intensity’ which the blurb promised. I look forward to trying Stone’s more humble offerings, and will be taking a holiday to San Diego in September to visit their brewery (My girlfriend thinks it’s a beach holiday, don’t tell her!)

Brewing-Tips.com Score: 75/100

Ratebeer Score: 99

DIY Budget False Bottom

Items needed:

Oxo ‘Good Grips’ Splatter screen with handle:

Budget False Bottom

http://www.amazon.com/Oxo-Splatter-Screen-Folding-Handle/dp/B0007VO0DU

3x 16mm long M6 stainless steel bolts and nuts.

1 brass tank connector

Brass tank connector

Total cost = around £20 or $30 at most.

I cut the handle off the splatter screen and then cut and flattened the handle mounting point securely. I then cut the hole for the tank connector, and the 4 holes for the bolts (which are used as stilts to keep it from collapsing.) I fitted the tank connector and bolts fixed with nuts on the underside. I then grabbed the angle grinder and cut two slots in each side of the mash tun’s opening so that I didnt have to make the false bottom a folding one. I plan to fix it with 15mm copper pipe using a small length of hose to join it to the outlet. The weight of the grain bed will hold it down.

Cheap false bottom

DIY False Bottom

Make a mash tun false bottom

And that’s how you make a budget false bottom for a mash tun.

- Brewing-tips.com Staff

Beer Kit Instructions – How to brew beer from a kit

Two can or all malt beer kits are the pinnacle of beer kit brewing, these kits are available in a wide range of beer styles and are the best that can be experienced in home brewing before taking up extract or grain brewing.

This kit is Bardon bitter from Matchless Homebrew.

Brewing beer from a kit

The kit contains two cans of hopped malt extract, comprehensive instructions and a sachet of yeast.

Brewing Beer kits

Recommended equipment is two 30l fermentation buckets with lids and taps, your choice of sanitising solution, a kettle, thermometer, hydrometer and trial jar and campden tablets or campden powder.
The first stage of the process is to clean and sanitise the fermentation buckets.
My recommendation before doing anything further is to dechlorinate your brewing water. Using 1/2 a crushed campden tablet or the equivalent of campden powder stirred into 25L of tap water will immediately remove all chlorine and chloramines which can give your finished beer a chemical or medicine taste.
Adding the campden powder to the tap water

Adding Campden to brewing water

Take the water required to be heated from the treated water and boil it in your kettle.

Making beer from a kit

Standing the two cans in hot water for 5 minutes prior to opening will soften the contents and make them easier to work with. Make sure to use a clean can opener.

Cans of hopped malt extract

Empty the can contents into the fermenting vessel.

Pouring malt extract

Use some of the boiled treated water to rinse out all of the can contents.

Get the malt extract out of the can

Empty the dissolved contents of the cans into the fermenting vessel.
Warning the can will be very hot, use oven gloves or similar to protect your hands!
Stir to dissolve the bulk of the malt extract in the hot water added from the can.

Stir to disolve the Malt Extract

Using the tap on the bucket containing your treated water, drop your treated water into the dissolved kit contents. This will ensure thorough mixing and also aerate your wort to give the yeast the best possible start.

brewing with a beer kit

Check that the temperature of your wort is between 20 and 28 Celsius.

The right temperature for fermentation

If the temperature is correct add the yeast.

Adding yeast to a beer kit

Take a gravity reading. In this case 1.040. If you plan to return the sample to the fermenter make sure that the hydrometer and trial jar were sanitised.

Taking a hydrometer reading

22.5 Litres of Bardon bitter waiting for the yeasties to do their thing.

Yeast pitched

18 hours later at 20C and the yeast crop is beginning to form nicely

Yeast krausen appears

28 hours in and the yeast head looks like this.

Full yeast head

7 days later and fermentation is finished
This is how it looks after a week, after another 3 days, it’ll clear down considerably and be ready for kegging.

Fermentation complete

OK so it’s been 8 days, gravity is 1.012, but now it’s time to keg.
I will be using a plastic home brew keg for this how to.
The keg was cleaned with Oxyclean, then sanitised with a solution of cheap, thin, unscented bleach. Then rinsed well with cold tap water and finally swilled out with a kettle of boiling water. (Be careful)
50g of sugar (I used demerera, but use what you prefer) was weighed out.

Sugar for carbonating beer

The sugar was added to the keg.
Using a length of hose from the tap on the fermenter, the beer was run into the keg which mixed in the sugar.

Racking beer to keg

Once all the beer was in the keg a burst of gas from an S30 cylinder was added.

S30 co2 cylinder

After 5 minutes to allow the CO2 to settle, the lid was cracked to vent the air in the keg and leave a protective blanket of CO2.
This keg has a mechanical pressure relief valve, a further squirt of gas and the indicator can be seen to be OK (Green showing)

Kit beer brewing

40 Pints of Bardon bitter conditioning.

Beer conditioning

Give it a couple of weeks before checking for clarity.

Mashing is part of the all-grain brewing process. Put simply, it is the act of mixing malted grains with hot water to convert their starch into sugar, it is this sugar which the yeast convert into alcohol giving us beer. Mashing is half science, half art; there are many different ways of mashing grains, and everyone does things slightly differently to eachother. When you are starting all-grain brewing for the first time, it is best to stick to the tried-and-tested methods of mashing, and find one that’s good for you. In this post I will be summarising the four basic mash types, and with a little help from various online sources will try to explain what makes each one different.

Mashing Grains

The Four Basic Types of Mashing

1. Single Infusion Mash

The Single Infusion Mash is the the most simple, and arguably the most popular mashing method for homebrewers to use. In an infusion mash, room temperature crushed grains are combined with a premeasured amount of hot water at an exact temperature. By taking the temperature of the grain, amount of water needed, and the mash tun’s properties the homebrewer can determine the exact water temperature needed, to ensure that combined with the grains they will achieve a mash in the 148 to 158 F temperature range. Infusion is typically done at a water to grain ratio of around 1.25 quarts per pound of grain. The easiest way to calculate the proper infusion volume and temperature is with an infusion calculator or brewing software such as BeerSmith or Rackers.org. The mash is then held at that temperature, usually by keeping the mash in an insulated cooler for 45-90 minutes. At this temperature, the mash will readily convert starches into sugars. You can test for conversion of sugars using an iodine test. Simply draw a small quantity of mashed grains out, add a few drops of iodine to it. If the iodine does not turn blue, then the conversion is complete.

Types of Mashing

2. Temperature Mash

The Temperature Mash is an alternative to the Infusion Mash. Rather than adding a known quantity of hot water, the mixed water and grains are simply raised to the target mashing temperature and held at that temperature until the starch conversion is complete. While this is quite practical for a commercial brewer, temperature mashing presents challenges to home brewers. Most homebrewers use simple pots over a stove or propane burner, and it is difficult to hold a precise mashing temperature for an extended period using just a stove and pot. A popular homebrewing method for acheiving a stable temperature mash is the use of a HERMS (Heat Exchanged recirculating Mash System), or RIMS (Recirculating Infusion Mash System). These systems are expensive, complex, and are usually used by more experienced home brewers. You can find more information about HERMS and RIMS brewing here.

Commercial Copper Mash Tun

3. Decoction Mash

Dcoction mashing is a traditional German mashing method. In a decoction mash, some of the mash including both grains and water is moved to a second container where it is brought to a boil. The boiling mixture is then added back to the original mash to raise the temperature of the overall mash. Again, a calculator or brewing software is needed to accurately calculate the correct volume to decoct. Traditional decoctions were typically done at higher water to grain ratios of 2.0 qt/lb or more (a thinner mash). More modern techniques often use water to grain ratios closer to the 1.25-1.5 qt/lb range.

Big Mash Tun

4. Multiple Step Mashes

Multiple step mashes are very complex, and are not suitable for novice brewers. Although a single infusion mash is suitable in 95% of cases where modern well modified malts are used, some precooked adjuncts and undermodified malts require protein rests at lower temperature before the main saccrification (sugar conversion) step. These protein rests help to break down complex starches in preparation for saccrification. Infusion, temperature and decoction steps may be combined to achieve multiple step mashes. For example a complex three step decoction mash might start with an initial infusion step to an acid rest at 105 F, followed by a protein rest at 122 F, and a saccrification step at 155 F. In many mash profiles, a mash out step is used to raise the temperature of the entire grain bed in preparation for sparging. The mash out step helps to halt saccirifcation, and also helps ensure an efficient sparge by extracting sugars at a higher temperature.

Thanks for reading!
- Brewing-Tips.com Staff
Source: http://www.brewwiki.com/index.php/Mashing

This guide was written by The Homebrew Forum member, ‘Oblivious’. It’s a superbly simple ‘how to’ guide which tells you how to harvest yeast for brewing.
You can find the original thread here.

How to harvest yeast for brewing

This is my method of yeast harvesting, this was done for my last brew a Saison with WLP550

After racking the beer to the keg pour the remaining liquid, trub and yeast into a sterilized container. I find one around 2 liters to be a good size. Place the full container in the fridge for a few hours.

Harvesting yeast

The trub being heavier, will settle out faster than the live yeast. It is the liquid part we are interested in as this will have a greater concentration of viable yeast. Pour this liquid off into a new sterilized container, this can be of a smaller than the first and place in the fridge over night.

Reusing yeast

As the liquid we placed in the container is yeast rich, we want to harvest the sediment in this container. Decant of the majority of the liquid and transfer the rest includin the sediment to your storage vessel, I use sterilized 50ml tubes.

Yeast Sediment

Yeast harvesting

Decant off the majority of the liquid and pour the yeast in to your selected container. I find there is enough yeast  in each of these tubes to pitch into a starter for a month or so. Over that it I would add two of the tubes to a starter.

Yeast Vials

What do we do in these situations? Panic.

“Is it ruined?! What if it’s infected? I must tip it all away down the sink because I messed up and ruined my beer! ”

What should we do in these situations?

RDWHAHB!

RDWHAHB!

Or in laymans terms: Relax, Don’t Worry, Have A Home-Brew!

There’s very little you can do to completely ruin a batch of beer. I once heard a veteran brewer give a panicking newbie the sound advice, “Unless you actually defacated into the fermentation vessel, your beer is going to be just fine.”

Whatever you do, do NOT dump a batch of beer. See how it turns out, and if it’s undrinkable after the full brewing process (after 3 weeks in the bottle!) you are then still not permitted to dump the batch. Beer gets better in time, and the yeast know what they’re doing. Besides, even if you do have an infected batch, it won’t do you any harm! No pathogens can survive in beer, due to the PH level. Even if your beer tastes like a small animal died in it, all it will do is give you an ‘icky tummy’.

So before you tip away that beer you ‘ruined’, give the yeast a chance to do their thing and clean up after your mistakes!

RDWHAHB!
- Brewingtips.com Staff

The answer is a lot simpler than you might think: Use a sanitised metal ruler!

Before you brew, fill your boil kettle up in small increments. Each time you add another litre of water (or whatever your unit of measurement is) – dip the ruler into the boil kettle and take a reading of the measurement. Then when you need to know how much liquid is in your kettle during brewing, simply dip the ruler in and check what volume was recorded at that measurement!

You could also do the same thing but using a wooden spoon – score a line for each litre and a thicker line for every 5 litres to make it easy to read.

Thanks for reading,
- Brewing-tips.com Staff

An airlock is a water-barrier that allows co2 to escape during fermentation, without allowing airborne particles, bacteria or insects to enter the fermentation vessel.

A U-bend Style Airlock

A blow-off tube replaces the airlock in a fermentation vessel. One end attaches to the top of the fermentation vessel and the other end is submersed in a container full of water.

A Blow-off Tube

Which one should I use?

For most brews, an airlock is fine. The advantage of an airlock is that it is relatively small compared to the blow-off tube, and is much easier to maintain. The problem with airlocks is that a very aggressive fermentation can clog the airlock with Krausen, causing a build up of pressure in the fermentation vessel. When that pressure gets too much, either the airlock or the lid of the fermentation vessel will pop off with great force, causing a big mess. A blow-off tube is much less likely to clog up than an airlock.

A Clogged Airlock

If you are brewing a beer using a top-fermenting yeast (most wheat-beers are brewed using this type of yeast), then you should always use a blow-off tube. This is because top-fermenting yeast produce a much higher, thicker krausen than regular ale yeasts and are much more likely to cause problems when using an airlock.

How to make a blow-off tube.

1. Attach a piece of sanitised tubing to the opening of your demijohn (or lid of your fermentation bucket) using a sanitised stopper with a hole in it.
2. Half-fill a small container such as a measuring jug or pint glass with water, and place the other end of the tube inside, below the level of the water. You do NOT need to use bleach or sanitising solution for this!

For an in-depth tutorial on how to build a blow-off tube, check out this article at examiner.com.

Thanks for reading,
Brewing-tips.com Staff

Thanks to www.rooftopbrew.net for this fantastic ABV Calculator.
- Brewing-tips.com