Seaside Saison Tasting

I always find writing tasting notes on my beers tricky as I often don't have the time/energy to sit down and write out formal notes and when I'm having a beer I am generally giving most of my focus to something else. I'll get a good impression drinking multiple bottles from a batch over time (and to some extent observing the progression can be equally valuable). I'll generally write a line or two to record my overall thoughts, but having a more detailed and critical assessment can be really helpful in building subsequent batches and other recipes. And it is something I'd like to do for every batch. Having this blog helps a bit as it forces me to go through the full review process for recipes that make it up here.

So here is my review for a saison with locally grown and malted barley and a small amount of sea salt added that I am calling Seaside Saison:

Aroma: Great floral/fruit aroma. It is a bit minerally (though this is something that I am looking for in this beer, so that might influence it). There is a Dupont-esque edge in there but this is more earthy. The beer as a nice graininess with some tangy fruit (lime). Overall it is a touch on the sweet side with some toasty grain. It smells tarter than it tastes. Some alcohol seems noticeable in the aroma which surprised me a bit given that the ABV isn't very high.

Appearance: Beautiful fine white head, excellent retention, leaves a chunky lace. The color is a pretty clear gold. I am really happy with the appearance of this beer.

Taste: Over-ripe fruit is forward in the taste (peach, cherry and other stone fruit) along with floral and some citrus (lime comes forward). I like the fruityness here. The beer is mildly tangy, which might be influenced by both acidity and salt. There is some mild but present alcohol. It is subtly but identifiably minerally. I think the salt is at the right level for what I am looking for. The hop presence is pretty low - a bit lower than I'd like and lower than what I expected given the recipe. Perhaps this is influenced by this beer having a much different SO4:Cl balance than my saisons normally do. I'll probably bring the hops up a bit next time. There is some roughness in the finish that I think the salts accentuate a bit. There are some clove-like phenols, which aren't really the type of phenols I am going for.

Mouthfeel: High fine carbonation. This beer has a great mouthfeel - light and fluffy with some creaminess (which I presume is from the flaked grains but it might be helped by the salt as it is more creamy than other recent brews with a similar amount of flaked grain). Dry finish with a fruit skin like character and a light tangyness (probably a combination of salt and acidity).

Overall: This is pretty nice overall and it hit the mark on the general goal very well. The salt amount seems right on (maybe it could be a touch lower but not higher). Now the beer needs some fine tuning. I'll need to take a new run at the fermentation with a different yeast blend (probably back to just using 3724 and 3711). I'm getting a bit more phenolic character here than I want and/or they aren't the right phenols. So dropping the 3726 should help this. And I'll also try to get a bit more crispness and take out some of the roughness. I think the beer needs a bit more hop presence. That should add some crispness. Driving the FG down a bit would also help here and possibly remove some of the perceived sweetness in the balance. I like the graininess and will keep the grist as it is.

I like the OG being in the mid 1.040's, so I'll leave that there. I don't know where the perception of alcohol is coming from. It might be leaving the fermentation warm with these yeasts, or yeast health going in, or pitch rate or something like that. But that is something I'll have to work on. It isn't strong but it is in there and I'd rather it not be. I see a similar sort of alcohol presence in the Dupont beers, but for some reason there it doesn't bother me as much.

So overall success with some room for improvement.

CBC Take Homes

Due to my recent minor involvement with a local brewpub (Moon Under Water) I was able to attend this year's Craft Brewer's Conference. If you don't know about this conference, the Craft Brewers Conference is for professionals in the brewing industry (you have to be a Brewer's Association member so breweries in planning can attend but general homebrewers can't). The conference was in Portland, which was an excellent location for such a thing, and was about a month ago. It was a great experience and I'm very glad to have gone.

I meant to get this up closer to the conference but as these tend to go, I've been delayed. I'm always surprised that it takes me this long to put up posts so I suppose I better either change that or get used to it... Anyway, here are some of my big takeaway from the conference. I'll focus mainly on a couple of presentations, with a bit to say about other presentations, the exhibitors, and the conference in general. Sorry this is relatively heavy on the text and thin on pictures. i guess that's the nature of the post...

Presentations:
The biggest thing I can say about the presentations in general is get in early. Many of the talks, especially those on hotter topics like sour/mixed-fermentation beer tend to fill up. And many people that are interested in the talk end up not being let in. There is time between talks to get to the ones you want to early enough, but it is even better if you can stay in the same room and/or duck out of a previous talk a bit early if it is less informative for you to ensure that you get into the talks you really care about. When the doors opened for the Mixed Fermentation panel there was a steady stream of people entering and it filled really quickly, so if you wanted to show up a couple minutes before it started and still get in you were out of luck.

I'll focus here on two talks - Kara Taylor's Titratable Acidity talk and the Mixed Fermentation panel led by Garrett Crowell of Jester King and including brewers from Sante Adairius, Crooked Stave and New Belgium. Both of these got me thinking and I was especially inspired by the mixed fermentation panel. But there were definitely other excellent talks. Some of the other presentations that stood out for me were a dry hopping talk from Dr. Tom Shellhammer's group at Oregon State. They are at the leading edge of hop research in North America and their talk had some cool information in it. I was most surprised to learn that in some cases oxidized alpha acids may account for the largest portion of bitterness in a beer (between isomerized alpha acids, oxidized alpha acids, and oxidized beta acids). I had heard that oxidized beta acids may have a significant contribution to bitterness, especially when using aged hops in beers following the traditional process of lambic, but had not heard about oxidized alpha acids before. Both oxidized beta and oxidized alpha acids are soluble in beer. And because isomerization does not occur with oxidized alpha acids, they can directly add bitterness without being boiled.

The other presentation I'll mention briefly before jumping into more detail on others was the kettle souring presentation by Ben from Breakside, Ben Love from Gigantic and Sean Burke from Commons. The three brewers described their process and reinforced that they don't believe that kettle souring is a very good technique to make a fully sour beer, and that it should instead be used to add a bit of tartness to an otherwise clean beer. I think that this can't be said enough. I see a lot of breweries and homebrewers getting into quick sours and in my experience these beers are under-attenuated and one dimensional. However, I think it is a great way to add tartness to a beer that is fermented cleanly or to drop the pH a bit before using brett and/or bacteria as I outline in this post. With this said, not all the brewers seemed to follow their own advice as one of the three example beers served was prominantly and one dimensionally sour.


Kara Taylor from White Labs gave a pretty interesting talk about Titratable Acidity. This is something winemakers think about but brewers don't think about it so much. And for the average (or even advanced) homebrewer it may not be especially applicable in everyday brewing. But it may have some really powerful potential when it comes to blending multiple barrels of aged sour beer, especially in a larger commercial setting where testing out the possible combinations becomes a bit more daunting.

In contrast to pH, which measures a combination of the strength and concentration of an acid  by
measuring the amount of the acid that has separated, titratable acidity measures the total acid concentration. For a brief chem overview, you can think of an acid as HA, where the H+ is a hydrogen and the A- is something that this hydrogen is bound to in an exchangeable way. pH measures the H+ part, so the stronger the acid (the more the H+ separates from the A-) and the more of a given acid present, the more free H+ there will be and the lower the pH. Here is a simple diagram similar to one Kara showed where the yellow dots represent the H+ part and the blue dots represent the A- part. Titratable acidity measures the amount of acid, independent of strength, by measuring all of the yellow dots whether they attached to an A- or free. Neither technique is able to fully distinguish one type of acid from others, but equal concentrations of acids of different strengths will have different pH values while having the same titratable acidity.

All that is fine, but what we really care about here is how the beer tastes. In her talk Kara presented that titratable acidity has a better correlation with perceived acidity than pH. In this way, for brewers to target a certain perceived acidity in their beers, titratable acidity might be a better measure than pH. What was even more cool is the possibility of targeting a given perceived acidity from titratable acidity and residual gravity. A higher final gravity or more sweetness in a beer correlated with lower perceived acidity than the titratable acidity would suggest. And with the preliminary data Kara presented, there was potential for a linear relationship between the perceived acidity and the ratio of final gravity divided by the titratable acidity (Plato/TA). A lower Plato/TA value would mean either lower final gravity or higher titratable acidity (or both), and low P/TA beers showed higher perceived acidity. The data set Kara had was very preliminary and was mostly based off of a cluster of low P/TA point and one lone higher P/TA point, so it is hard to tell if there is really a linear relationship. But the idea is pretty cool. And if it is correct then it can be a very powerful asset when blending.

Unlike pH, both titratable acidity and residual gravity will mix linearly. If you mix equal volumes of a 1 plato beer with a TA of 20 with a 2 Plato beer with a TA of 10, you end up with a 1.5 P beer with a TA of 15. In some cases pH may mix logarithmically, but things like different abilities to buffer acidity and the strengths of weak acids will also influence pH, so it may not necessarily mix logarithmically either. For targeting a given perceived acidity in a final product, a brewer blending many barrels can calculate the final gravity (at least before any potential refermentation) and titratable acidity of the blend given the components, and then choose to omit certain barrels or include a desired amount of an acid beer to hit a given P/TA ratio in the final blend. So again, for the homebrewer this may not be as useful as you can more easily taste the combinations you are thinking about, however knowing the titratable acidity and gravity of the beers you have for blending can help give you a starting point for thinking about which beers to try blending together for taste samples. And especially as a larger commercial brewer introducing TA measurements could be really useful tool for blending.


The other presentation I'll focus on here, and the biggest highlight for me in the presentation realm, was a panel discussing Mixed Fermentation led by Garrett Crowell from Jester King and including Chad Yakobson (Crooked Stave), Jason Hansen (Sante Adairius) and Peter Bouckaert (New Belgium, formerly Rodenbach). In this panel, each of the brewers gave a quick rundown of their experience and process and how they adapted what they were doing to use their cultures to produce better results. For the 3 younger brewers/newer breweries, this was mainly about how they formed their house cultures and how they use these cultures in the breweries. All of these brewers were using mixed cultures that can't be reproduced with microbes bought from a yeast supplier. They were mixed cultures maintained in house, with influence from some combination of wild microbes from the environment around the brewery, bottle dregs, commercial cultures, natural drift and brewer manipulation/guiding of that drift. To balance this discussion out, Peter focused on his work with Rodenbach to use lacto in stainless tanks and how they had to adapt their process and let their culture change a bit in order to get the results they wanted.

Some of the brewers also talked a bit about what mixed culture fermentation meant to them. I found this part inspirational and I was really excited to see this mentality to balance out the fast sour methods that seem really popular in North American craft beer today. Not that fast sour beers are inherently bad. I see them as different from mixed fermentation beers and I am not as excited about them because I think many people producing fast sours don't see a difference between these beers and more developed sour beers. When I go for an acidic beer, I almost always do so because I was a complex, well attenuated and drinkable beer. And in my experience fast souring tends to not create this. The beers are frequently unbalanced, not well attenuated, and one dimensional. So while that can produce a fine beer, it doesn't generally produce the developed and complex beers that I am looking for. I think Garrett said it well when he differentiated quick sour beer from mixed culture fermentation "We could make a sour beer very quickly at low temperature, but that kind of deviates from the ambition of mixed culture fermentation in which you have many components that you are trying to represent."

The overarching theme to me in this presentation was that the production of world class mixed fermentation beers takes a different mindset than what brewers are used to for beer production. There is no single set of rules/process/recipes/etc. tat will produce excellent mixed fermentation beer, and this is very different from a lot of other brewing. I've described it a couple times already by comparing mixed fermentation to pilsner. For a pilsner, there is a well established general process and recipe, and following those well and knowing what you are doing will yield a good pilsner. That is not to say that it's easy. Given the number of not excellent pilsners out there it definitely isn't that easy. But with mixed fermentation beer there is no set of steps to follow for success. The brewer must learn his or her culture, his or her process, and how the two relate to each other. And adaptations must be made to guide the culture toward producing the results you want. These brewers came from diverse backgrounds ranging from advanced degrees in brewing to never having worked at a professional brewery before this, and whether the brewer took a more scientific/technical or a more artistic approach to the beers they were making, they had this mindset and followed no technical set of rules. They had an understanding of their culture and how it behaved based on their process. They knew how to increase or decrease acidity, they knew when the beer needed more time, how to maintain their culture and work with or control the natural drift, etc. They knew this from experience with their cultures and careful observation, and they were constantly learning more about how to work with their cultures.

That's not to say there wasn't any information to take out of the talk. All four of the brewers talked about exerting some control over the balance of microbes and the acidity by factors such as IBUs, gravity, temperature  oxygenation, and pressure from larger vessels that can be applied by other brewers. The first one is pretty straightforward - elevated IBUs inhibit bacteria. OG influences production by higher OG (and therefore higher ABV) inhibiting bacteria more than yeast. Depending on the strains you have, temperature can be a bit more complicated. The classical understanding is that elevated temperatures promote lactic acid bacteria. However Garrett at Jester King mentioned that when they ferment cooler, they get faster acid production. This seems counter-intuitive at first, but it makes sense if you consider that they are using multiple saison oriented strains in their culture that like to be at elevated temperatures. And working at lower temperatures may cause those sacch strains to be less active and may leave more for the bacteria. Oxygenation is also a bit more straightforward, with more O2 promoting yeast growth and depending on the specific bacterial strains, maybe inhibiting bacteria. Conversely low oxygenation inhibits yeast growth and leaves more for the bacteria. While both yeast and bacteria don't like increased hydrostatic pressure, Peter mentioned that high pressure seemed to inhibit lacto more than yeast. So there was plenty of technical info in the talk, just no clear set of rules/process/ingredients to follow to get world class mixed fermentation beer. A lot of these aren't necessarily revolutionary (though that Jester King temp experience is contradictory to the classic idea of how the system works) but they show the relatively simple and well grounded thinking that these brewers begin with to manipulate the cultures and process to end up with beers they like. And they show the ability to accept that results may be opposite of norm given their specific set of circumstances.

I'll close out discussion of this talk with two quotes from the talk that sum up to me what the talk was about - learning how to use your own culture to get the results you want rather than following a specific procedure:

It's been a lot of fun not really following any guidelines that have been set out for making beer but learning alongside of the mixed culture. - Garrett Crowell

That's really the biggest thing within our brewery and working with those mixed cultures: how do they work within your process, and how can you work with them and how can you make them work for you. - Chad Yakobson

Exhibitors

There are a huge number of exhibitors at these conferences. I walked around the exhibit all countless times and noticed new stuff every time. And I know I missed some cool stuff as well. Many of the exhibitors are giving away free stuff (yeasts, hops, oak cubes, nutrients, whirlfloc, flavorings, etc. in additional to general non-ingredient swag) so that breweries can try out a bit of the ingredient on a small pilot system. This is especially valuable for homebrewers as our systems are roughly pilot batch sized or smaller. There was quite a buzz at the exhibition about one of the brewhouse manufacturers bringing a coolship. I'll admit, it was impressive and really cool to see that the idea of a coolship is so desirable/mainstream that a manufacturer would bring one rather than a small commercial brewing system (that's probably the best part of it for me). I try not to bring up much negative stuff on here but I think it should be said that cool though that was, the welds looked pretty bad. They were far from sanitary. So my takeaway from that was while manufacturers are interested in getting in to some possibly specialized/less common equipment that brewers of funky/sour/wild beers would want, the execution may not be quite there yet. Or possibly that they are looking to cash in with flashy stuff rather than providing quality/function. But I hope it's the former...

One exhibitor stood out to me as being rather relevant to home brewers in the products they sell as well. This was King Orchards, a company in Michigan producing tart cherry (Both Montmorency and Balaton), pear and apple concentrate. These concentrates are 68-70 brix and are are pure fruit (no other ingredients). Commercial brewers have had access to products like this before with Oregon Fruit (though I'm always happy to see another option on the market). But I think King Orchards is an especially good option for homebrewers as they sell 1 oz packs (the main target audience here seems to be people wanting a single glasses of juice) as well as pints and quarts of concentrate. These small sizes seems perfect for homebrewers playing around with adding cherry to 1 gallon jugs up to normal batch sizes. It might take a bit of work to get the ratios right, but it should be too hard. There might be other comparable products (pure non-frozen juice concentrates) available to you locally, but if not these guys might be worth checking out if you want to try out a small amount of sour cherry in a beer.

The conference in general
Alright, just a bit to close this out on the conference in general. It was a great time. The conference is full of people with an unbelievable amount of knowledge in brewing equipment/process/ingredients/etc. And many of them are there to share that knowledge and pick up what they can from others. I was generally surprised by how friendly and open people were. Especially people like Vinnie (even though he is notoriously open and friendly) who probably get strangers coming up to them dozens to times a day. Sure, there were a bunch of pretty strange questions at talks and some not so informative talks (the biggest disappointment to me was a talk about transitioning from home brewing to pro brewing given by someone who had never homebrewed), but with an open mind and a reasonable amount of desire to look into the odd thing here and there rather than taking everything as pure truth/the best way, there is a lot to be learned.

The conference sat somewhere between a big party (generally not in an irresponsible drinking sort of way but in a having fun and lots of responsible drinking sort of way) and the sort of academic conferences I am used to. CBC is definitely not an inexpensive conference. And personally I might like to see a bit less of the production side of the party (huge trays of not inexpensive food, fire dancers, etc.) and a lowered cost. But maybe that is part of what makes the environment for the rest of the conference what it is. Overall it is hard to put a value on what I got out of the conference. Did I learn my registration price of information from talks? No, I don't think so. But I enjoyed the talks and there were some really inspiring ones (and it is hard to put a dollar value on that). I think the greatest asset was the networking with others in the business. Learning from (or even about) equipment manufacturers, talking with other brewers at the conference, meeting people I look up to in the industry, etc. So it was absolutely worth it. If I was on a tight budget opening a brewery I would probably put that money into equipment rather than heading to the conference again. At least for a year or two. But who knows, maybe if that time comes I'll find myself unable to miss the conference...

Pale Sour Blending

This post details my process for blending together a series of aged sour beers. In 2013 I brewed a good number of turbid mashed sour beers which were fermented with dregs and/or commercial mixed cultures. I had brewed sour/funky beers before these, but these were my first serious directed brews in the direction of what I consider to be the best commercial beers out there. These sorts of beers benefit greatly from blending - taking advantage of the different directions each beer went to create a more complex and balanced final product. My brewing of these beers was aided by moving temporarily to Germany for 8 months, giving plenty of time for these beers to age and fully develop. Leading up to my move I knew that I wouldn't be able to bottle and drink beers that I was brewing but I wanted to keep brewing. So I shifted focus toward long aging beers that I could brew before I left and leave in carboys while I was away. And I have a great friend here in Victoria who was willing to house the carboys (I think about 8 in total) in his basement and check on them to make sure the airlocks didn't go dry. This allowed me to continue brewing before my trip and let me (temporarily) forget that I had these beers aging so I gave them enough time to develop. All together I had 5 sour blond beers between 20 and 27 months old to blend together into final products.

This is a pretty long post, but perhaps that is fitting for beers that took ~2 years to produce and that still have a few months (hopefully not more) until they are ready. I'll present some of my thinking process for production unaltered from my notes. It wasn't a perfect run through but I think it was pretty good for my first go at it and there are things I would do differently next time.


These beers were heavily influenced by Belgian lambics - spontaneously fermented complex acidic beers from the Senne valley of Belgium. Four of the five brews were turbid mashed with a high component of unmalted grain, generally wheat (the fifth brew had ~15% flaked grains). Four of the five had aged hops and were 'coolshipped', or cooled by leaving them open outside overnight. Many brewers, both homebrewers and commercial brewers, apply to term lambic to beers such as these. And there is some debate in the brewing community about whether or not it is fair to use this term. Based on my not calling these beers lambics up to this point, perhaps it is clear that I fall on the 'not using the term lambic for my own beer' side. Many of the best brewers of North American spontaneous beer (De Garde, Russian River, Allagash, etc.) don't apply to term Lambic to their own beer. Some of these brewers are on record saying they choose not to do this out of respect for the Belgian producers whom they hold in high regard. In addition, I more frequently see the term lambic applied to non-spontaneous commercial beers (fermented with pure purchased yeast cultures and blends) when those brewers seem to have less understanding, and possibly less respect, for Belgian lambic. This is certainly not a rule but it is a correlation, and personally I am less likely to buy a North American made beer calling itself a lambic than one calling itself a spontaneously fermented beer. At least in the latter I know what I am getting and it is not fermented with pitched microbes from a lab.

Regardless of which side you are on for the debate on whether the term lambic can be applied to non-Belgian beers, I think my beers discussed here are clearly not lambic for one main reason: they are not spontaneously fermented. I did pitch microbes into these beers. Sometimes it was dregs from commercial sour beers (both spontaneously fermented and pitched) and sometimes it was pure yeast cultures or blends from yeast labs. All of these five beers were open cooled and in some cases I waited an extra day or two to pitch cultures/dregs into the beers, so hopefully I got some contribution from ambient microbes. But whatever the case they are non-spontaneous beers and therefore, whether or not using the term lambic for beers made outside of Belgium is appropriate, these are not lambics.

Alright, sorry that was a bit of a long tangent. It is something that I my thoughts are developing on, especially after beginning friendships with some of the Belgian lambic producers. I get frustrated by seeing breweries around me and across the US and Canada throw the term around to mean sour beer so I feel I ought to make the distinction clear between these beers and lambics.

 The Beers

L to R: Muse #1, Saambic, Sour Saison

For many of these my process was pretty similar. I suppose this is because they were brewed at roughly the same time and I didn't have beers of this sort ready to drink in between these brews so I couldn't really examine my methods with results. Most of the time the unmalted wheat is red wheat and the turbid mash process is the Cantillon-esque one outlined in Wild Brews by Jeff Sparrow. The dregs are generally from cultures I grew rather than straight from the bottle and I proofed the cultures for off aroma (and sometimes flavor if I felt they were fermented enough) before adding them. The biggest thing I'd change about the brew day and microbes would be not using WLP644 (it was new and exciting then), but I'm happy with the results so I suppose it couldn't have been too big of a deal. I was pretty careful to keep O2 out after primary fermentation was done (excepting the oak thing discussed below), so anytime the carboys were opened to add dregs, take samples, or top up after the main fermentation I purged the headspace with CO2.

Muse #1

Muse #1 - Brewed 5-January-2013. 40% local unmalted wheat, 60% 2-row. 0.89 oz/gal (6.66 g/l) aged hops, open cooled, pitched with a bunch of spontaneous beer dregs (2 different 3 Fonteinen geuzes, Tilquin gueuze, Boon Marriage Parfait, Cantillon gueuze and Rose de Gambrinus) and WLP 644. After a couple of months when visible activity was done I swapped the airlock for an oak rod fit inside a stopper. I used white oak, which allows more gas transfer than red oak. This is another thing I'd change (I wouldn't do it at all). This beer got a bit acetic. Not aggressively so but a bit more than my taste preference. That may have been from the white oak (or oak in general), it may have been from this being the oldest beer and I might have fussed with it more, or it might be unrelated to those. Anyway, I think the oak stopper idea isn't necessary or even possibly beneficial (and the general community seems to have moved away from this method as well). I swapped the rod back for an airlock after 6 months. This was topped up after about 6-7 months and transferred to my friend's basement for storage.

Sour Saison

Sour Saison - Brewed 17-February-2013. This is the only non-turbid mashed brew of the bunch. This beer came out of a big brew day with my local homebrewing club BrewVIC. I didn't want to worry about sanitation when I was brewing somewhere else without access to all the things I usually have so I went with a purposely sour beer. The recipe was 65.1% Pils, 14.5% Flaked Triticale, 9.6% Vienna malt, 7.2% Munich malt, 3.6% Acidulated malt. It was hopped with Hallertauer Mittlefrueh and Saaz to 27 IBU with first wort and flame out additions. I open cooled the beer and, along with Wyeast 3724 and WLP644 Trois, I pitched commercial dregs (Brasserie a Vapeur, Upright, and Cantillon). At ~ 5 months it was topped up with unpitched saison wort and a bottle of saison and transferred to my friend's basement.

Saambic

Backyard ambient starter

Saambic - Brewed 30-March-2013. This was my first attempt toward focusing on local terroir, but I did end up pitching microbes into it so actual terroir will have to wait for a future brew (which has already happened but is much to young at this point). It had 40% local unmalted wheat, 60% locally grown and malted barley and 0.45 oz/gal (3.4 g/l) locally grown aged hops. 2 days after brew day I pitched an ambient microbe starter made from leaving wort outside to spontaneously ferment (see this post from the Mad Fermentationist), dregs from Boon Marriage Parfait, 2 different 3 Fonteinen Geuzes, Cantillon Gueuze and a homebrew Russian River Sanctification clone from my friend Dylan. At 4 months it was topped up with unpitched wort from a saison brew and transferred to Mark's basement.

Wild Rye

Front yard ambient starter

Wild Rye - Brewed 28-July-2013. 39.5% local unmalted rye, 60.5% Franco-Belges Pils malt, turbid mashed. 0.5 oz/gal (3.75 g/L) aged hops. This beer was open cooled and pitched with 2 ambient microbe starters and WLP 644 Trois the morning after brewing. About a week and a half later it was transferred from a 6 to a 5 gal carboy and topped up with more from the ambient starters and the trois along with dregs from 2 different 3 Fonteinen geuzes and some ECY01 starter. Two weeks after that it was topped up with ~150 mL of dregs starters from Brasserie a Vapeur, Upright, and Logsdon Cerasus. A week later it was moved to my friends temp stable cool basement and topped up to the neck with ~1.4 L of homebrew saison.

ECY-01

Grain storage room starter

ECY-01 - Brewed 24-August-2013. 39% local unmalted wheat, 2% Acidulated malt, 59% European pils malt, turbid mashed, aged hops (~5.7 g/L, 0.75 oz/gal). This beer was cooled open outside and was pitched with ECY-01, an ambient spontaneous starter, 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze dregs and a small amount of WLP644 Trois 2 days after brew day. Two weeks later, after primary fermentation was done, it was topped up to the neck with a starter saved from extra wort from this brew along with some more dregs (3 Fonteinen, Cantillon) and more spontaneous starter as well as a bottle of homebrew saison. After this the beer was transported to a basement with exposed rock which stays stable and appropriately cool year round.

Notes from tasting the individual beers

Tasting, and Determining Blends

After gathering all of my carboys back from Mark's excellent care, I took samples of each carboy using a wine theif. I tasted each blend, paying special attention to general level of acidity (and how that compared to what I ideally wanted in a final blend), acetic acid presence, fruity/funky flavor balance, and any other prominent or 'off' flavors. After tasting each sample on it's own and thinking about those aspects, I started working on some blends. (Note- Ha, I just noticed my cross out out of "lambic" in my brewing book. See, these notes really are unedited and are exactly as they appear in my book. For clarity/simplicity sake I am fine using the term lambic to convey an idea amongst others who know how I feel about the use of the term, which is why I had initially written it in my book before quickly crossing it out.)

Notes from different blend trials

In general, as with above, I focused on getting the right acidity (by taste) with sufficiently low to below threshold acetic acid, and also appropriate flavor complexity balancing the fruitier/more citrus-forward beers with funkier/more earthy beers). I kept proportions fairly simple (1/2, 1/3, or 1/4) didn't try to involve more than 3 beers. I either based the blend on one of those two or three or did even splits. I started mostly by working with slightly more complex (three beer) blends and by seeing what proportions of the more acetic beer, which otherwise had nice flavor, were good before the acetic became too prominent. This was valuable but I then moved toward simplifying by focusing on my favorite individual beers and seeing how they complimented each other, and this is likely where I would start next timer After a couple blends working only with the four turbid mashed beers, I remembered that I had this sour saison around that was of similar age and had similar added microbes. Throwing that in the mix helped by providing another good tasting and cleaner beer for blending.

WLP644 beer for lowering acid in the fruit blend.

Once I had determined my favorite blends, I looked at what I wasn't using so much and thought about blends involving those that might be good for fruit (following the lead of lambic production - a lambic blender is not going to put fruit into their best lambics as this would cover up the complexities of the lambic). These less favorite beers weren't bad and they didn't have any big red-flag flaws (strong acetic or ethyl acetate, strong 'mousy' character, etc.) so I figured they would be a good candidate for fruit. Fruit is expensive and adding fruit is not going to remove a strong off character so I would not advise using fruit to cover up flawed beer. It will, however, work nicely with a good but perhaps not as complex/expressive beer since the fruit flavor is going to overwhelm many of the more minor complexities in the base anyway.

I did the blending for tastes by weight by pouring samples into a glass on a scale (0.01 g precision). This allowed me rather precise blend ratios and the ability to try a greater number of different blends but made sample sizes smaller than if I had blended with a graduated cylinder. For just doing this by myself, the weight approach worked out rather well. But if I were to do this with other people I might go with the cylinder approach. If I felt that a blend would be better with the ratios slightly tweaked, I didn't re-blend into my partially consumed taste sample. Doing this would have made determining the ratios very difficult to impossible. Instead I just did a completely new blend.

Planning for full carboy blending - siphon order and volumes
After determining the blends I wanted to do, I thought about the volumes of beer I had and the carboy sizes I had. I wasn't sure when I would be able to bottle and I didn't want to leave a bunch of head space in a half full carboy of a blend that I was waiting to bottle. I made an excel sheet for this based on the blend ratio that I chose and giving larger volume preference to the blends I liked more to fully use the beer I had either in a blend, bottling some plain, or racking some to a new carboy. This part was a bit tricky and it took some playing with to get everything to work out right, but basically I put my starting volumes of each beer at top and then put my blends in, subtracting what I was planning to use for each blend And I adjusted my blend volumes while keeping the ratios so that in the end I used all of each batch and got blends or single-beer transfers of roughly full carboys, with plans to bottle a left over gallon here and there. Once that part was done I re-arranged the blends so that I could rack one full carboy and then move on the next, minimizing siphon transfers. I also tried to minimize how long a carboy receiving a blend was half full. Once I had a racking plan and my blends figured out, all I had to do was wait until I had enough empty carboys of the right size, a good amount of empty bottles, and enough time to do this sort of thing. In early April that all came together and it was time to blend.

The master table for blend ratios, volumes, and siphon order.

Setting up for the blending

Blending day plans/color-coded flow chart

Blending day
As is probably apparent from the notes up until this point, I put a lot of thought into setting this up. I made myself a clear flow chart to follow on blending day. I labeled every carboy with it's blend numebrs and the proportion of each blend going in. The blend ratios were pretty simple so generally I didn't have to worry too much about putting volume markings on the side to tell me how much to transfer. One of the blends was going onto raspberries (8lbs/3.6 kg of frozen raspberries for a 5 gal/19 L carboy) so for this I marked out volumes, taking into account what the raspberries were already taking up.

The other tricky part was going to carbonating the beer, and this was probably one of my most poorly done parts. I had planned to add priming sugar and bottling yeast into bottles by pipet because I didn't want to prime each whole batch as I didn't know what I would be able to bottle that night after the blending. I decided to re-yeast with  RC-212 and, assuming 20 billion cells/g, I calculated how much water I would need to rehydrate that in to yield convenient transfer volumes (I have a 0.5 mL lab pipet) to yield 1 million cells / mL for 375 mL and 750 mL bottles (it ended up being one 5 g yeast pack into ~175 mL for a 0.5 mL yeast spike into 375 mL and 1 mL yeast spike into 750 mL). I rehydrated the yeast in a sanitized mason jar.

It took all my counter space to set this up

That part worked out well, but the priming sugar was a bit trickier. I was also planning on mixing this in a sanitized mason jar by weighing the sugar out and pouring the measured amount of boiling water in to dissolve it. I calculated the same sort of thing, how much sugar for the carbonation I wanted based on the bottle size. And it ended up being a pretty concentrated solution that I needed to produce. Well, I decided to make it a bit less concentrated and just pipet more, but I neglected to account for the volume that the sugar took up and my final volume was about double what my added water volume was. This further increased my necessary priming spike size, which ended up being something like 12*0.5 mL spikes for 375 mL bottles and 24*0.5 mL spikes for 750 mL bottles. This is still an appropriately small volume given my total bottle size and fortunately I wasn't planning on bottling much while doing the racking, but it was a real pain to pipet out. So form this I've learned that the mason jar idea was pretty good and that will work out well next time as long as I have the ability to easily transfer volumes of roughly 10 mL for the sugar.

Setting up for the blending

Once all my bottles and carboys were sanitized, CO2 purged, and pre-labeled it was pretty straightforward and I was able to go through the blending pretty smoothly. I left my bottle filling tip on my hose the whole time, which made it easy to start and stop flows, and I sanitized further up the outside of the siphon hose and handled it with sanitized gloves to avoid getting my hands into the beer. I started my siphon full of sanitizer, using the sanitizer to start flow (as I always do) and ran that sanitizer into an extra bottle (which I later dumped out) until I got to the beer. I racked each beer until I just started to draw air and then swapped the siphon to the next carboy, allowing me to start the siphon for the next beer with the beer in the line from the previous carboy. This was great and I didn't need to re-start any siphons mid-process. I ran that bit of air into a miscellaneous bottle to avoid putting it through the partially full carboys. By the end of the process I had one mystery blend bottle and a full glass of mystery blend from this technique and the siphoning was super easy. The flow was slow enough to allow me to comfortable re-arrange things as I was going, moving full carboys out and the next empty ones in mid-process.

The blending - siphoning beer 1.

It took a lot of setup but all that planning made everything run pretty smoothly. I was able to continue to use the re-hydrated yeast to bottle the future blends (I transferred by weight knowing that I had 100 billion cells in 175 mL and that the weight of yeast was insignificant compared to the water, so there were ~570 million cells/g) and for future blends I was able to re-yeast and prime full carboys, which was much easier.

I think that's about it, though I'm sure I'll remember parts here and there down the road. Overall things went really smoothly and my big takeaways were:

Get a larger transfer pipet to prime each bottle (I still think priming each bottle is a good idea when bottling only one gallon from a 5 or 6 gallon carboy and blending the rest).

The blending - the two carboys that beer 1 was going into

Don't use oak rods/dowels/whatever in stoppers for aging. The beer can be great without it and it probably doesn't help. If it can help, the risk (both ruining the beer or a dangerous pressure build up) is not worth it in my opinion.

Maybe have a second set of hands around next time. Both for the trial blending for a second opinion and for the actual blending. Though overall it worked quite well and, as you can see from the pictures, there wasn't much room left in the kitchen for me, let alone someone else, with all the carboys and bottles in place.

The blending - siphoning beer 2

I think letting these beers go as long as I did was a good idea. Maybe I could have done this a bit earlier and the beers would have been about the same, but I didn't notice any problems/bad flavors from going this long and they are definitely way better than they were at ~7 or so months old (the age of the oldest beers when they went off to Mark's basement). I think if you are really trying to approach lambic-like complexity then patience is key. And heading off for 8 months was a great way for me to let these beers sit long enough to develop some of the complexity I was looking for.

I'll close this out with some extra pictures from my blending and will update as I think of more. Please ask questions about parts of my process if you have them. It may prompt me to remember stuff that I've forgotten and may give me some good ideas for next time.

The raspberry beer - 8 lbs for about 5 gallons

Corking and caging

Brett and Sour Saisons - Thoughts on production and strain choice

I realized recently that while I put up a bunch of recipes for saisons and generally mention that I split off a carboy where I add Brettanomyces (brett), and frequently Lactobacillus (lacto) as well, I don't generally talk about these funkier and tart versions of the saisons after the brewday. So I figured I would put up a post on my process with these beers. Some of the stuff outlined below might be obvious, but I wanted to be basic enough that people just trying it out for the first time wouldn't be lost while those that have done many brett saisons will still find some useful stuff. Quick terminology: I'll use the term 'clean' to refer to a saison with only Saccharomyces cerevisiae (not including WLP644 'brett' trois, as I will call Sacch trois). This is a bit of a long post, but it's an even longer topic and I think this is a good start.

Cask 200 at Sante Adairius.

Tartness/sourness and brett yeast character fit naturally into the saison style. Historically Belgian saisons have been described as similar to lambics (see Phil Markowski's Farmhouse Ales). Many modern versions, both Belgian and outside of Belgium, are now brewed without brett and bacteria (and I can be a big fan of these when done well). The ones that inspire me the most have a beautiful and balanced brett and tart character and sourness from an extended mixed fermentation. I prefer my sour saisons to be milder on the sourness end than a lambic or many 'American Wild Ales'. I find this lower acidity, somewhere between a normal 'clean' dry saison and an aged lambic, to be extremely refreshing and drinkable. And I find that this level of acidity is much better when produced by bacteria in a longer fermentation than quickly by bacteria in a sour worting or sour mashing or by the addition of elevated acidulated malt (though I like those processes for less acidic 'clean' saisons, see pre-primary souring). I think I prefer the extended aging as it gives time for other flavor production and slightly higher degrees of attenuation which I find lacking in many pre-primary/kettle soured beers.

Similarly, with funky saisons I am not looking for the funkyness of an aggressive lambic, orval-like funkyness, or the frequently even more aggressively funky North American orval-inspired beers. Rather I want something that fits the delicately balanced dry character of a good saison. Many popular North American styles (like IPAs, double/imperial IPAs, bourbon aged stouts, etc.) take the sledgehammer approach, knocking you out with flavor. This at times can be delicious flavor. But it takes a whole different mindset and set of tools to create a beautiful brett/sour saison. There are many great ones out there, and I haven't had most of them, but these are some of my favorites:
(from Belgium and perhaps not all intentionally or consistently with brett and bacteria) Saison de Pipaix, and most anything from Fantome, Saison d'Epeautre (and from the US) everything from the barrel aged saison lineups of Upright, Sante Adairius, and Hill Farmstead.

The mash tun and steam engine at Brasserie a Vapeur (home of Saison de Pipaix)

There is a common misconception that brett adds acidity, and that brett is what makes sour beers sour. It is important to note when discussing brett and sour beers that brett doesn't generally add much acidity. The acidity that brett can add is acetic acid (vinegar), which most people generally want to avoid. So beers with brett won't necessarily be sour beers (many are sour, but those also have bacteria). So if you want to make a sour beer with brett that isn't vinegar you'll want lactic acid bacteria. I'll treat the two (brett non-sour saisons and brett + bacteria sour saisons) together here. Not to try to confuse the potential differences between brett beers and sour beers that I've just outlined, but frequently the two are found together (I've never put lacto into a saison without brett) and having either brett or bacteria would lead to a saison that is not a classic 'clean' saison.

I brewed my first brett saison with a good friend back in 2009, but due to insufficient time to dedicate to brewing/other priorities, shifting general brewing focus, and three instances of moving internationally since then (which provided great opportunities for studying but really got in the way of brewing), it wasn't until summer of 2014 that I really started focusing on brewing them with directed goals and thorough notes. Consequently much of this experience is in development. My viewpoints on a couple strains have already changed over this time and I expect they will continue to change as I try out more strains in the future. I'll be revisiting this post (and/or posting follow-ups) to keep it up to date with my thinking on mixed-fermentation saisons.

Brewing brett (and lacto) saisons on the hot side:
I treat the hot side for saisons that I know will not be kept 'clean' the same as I treat clean saisons. Partly that might be because I generally split batches and do both with the same batch, but I have done the same when brewing an exclusively mixed-fermentation saison.

I am not a fan of mashing higher for lower fermentability for brett beers. This slightly dated practice comes from earlier days of using brett and the thinking behind it was twofold: that you provide more that the sacch can't ferment and it is therefore left for the brett and bacteria and/or you would produce extra unfermentable material to avoid a thin beer with brett. Since brett will ferment longer chain carbohydrates, the latter isn't really true. While the former may be true, I think this advice comes from before it was stressed that the ester and phenol activity of brett is independent of saccharide metabolism. This means that brett doesn't need sugar to change the beer.

I really like Chad Yakobsen's viewpoint on body in brett beers (as I've talked about in this post). He looks to add body from proteins in grains like oats, spelt, rye, and wheat rather than by dextrins. So if you want to build body in a brett saison follow this approach. I find that most saison yeasts produce a beer with a bit of a deceptive body (more than the low FG would suggest, presumably from glycerol production) and therefore haven't worried too much about building body into brett saisons. Mashing high to provide unfermentable sugars may still be a good approach and some folks recommend it, but I think it works better if you are prepared to spend a lot of time (such as in lambic-oriented beers). For saisons I want a faster turnaround and I don't think the beer will be best served by such a prolonged mixed fermentation.

Racking a batch of saison into a barrel with ECY-34.

Brett (and lacto) saisons on the cold side:
I've generally had good results pitching everything in a mixed primary. Sometimes when using a brett blend that I am not as fond of in combination with more finicky sacch strains I have been less pleased with the results. This may be due to the brett strain choice as much as/more than when I pitched it. If the sacch goes trough a healthy and reasonably complete primary fermentation (and I don't see a benefit in trying to make the sacch do anything less than that) then I think adding brett and bacteria in the primary is a good plan. I may then leave it on the cake or rack it to secondary (hazy and still with yeast and bacteria in suspension), depending on how long I plan to leave it and how much hop material there is. Generally I just leave it as I'll bottle it in a few months anyway.

Bottling:
As with any bottling any beer, you'll want the beer to be done fermenting before bottling it. This is a greater concern when working with brett and heterofermentative lacto. Fortunately some of this is alleviated by working with highly attenuative sacch strains, which will do a good job of  dropping the gravity down to a level where you are pretty safe to bottle even if the brett and bacteria take it further in the bottle. I generally bottle at 2-4 months from brew day unless I am adding fruit or somehow changing the base. I may go longer if I feel it isn't ready or if I am barrel aging it, but generally this is an appropriate time frame to start developing the flavors I am looking for.

The beers definitely continue to develop in the bottle. I bottle in high pressure bottles so that takes away the more pressing potential carbonation related issues (there is still the possibility of high enough carbonation that the bottles gush). They don't get excessively carbonated, but I generally prime to the low end of high (2.7-3 volumes of CO2) knowing that the beer may develop a bit more carbonation and also that this is not so low that I will feel the beer is undercarbed. A drop of 1 gravity point will add about 1/2 volume of CO2, so it doesn't take much additional fermentation to increase the carb by a fair amount.

Bretts I've used and my thoughts on them:

My brett and bacteria pure strain and dregs cultures

I generally haven't been interested in some of the classic Belgian bretts (B. lambicus and B. brux) for brett saisons. This is partly because I am more familiar with them than a lot of other strains and partly because I'm not sure that they'll be the best pairing with a saison. As I mentioned above I am looking for more delicate bretts to pair with a saison. Maybe they would work well as a background addition  to a blend of bretts and bacteria. But in order to get to that point I need to come up with that brett blend. So that's sort of what this is - trying out individual strains/blends, bottle dregs, and blends of those to build toward a 'house culture'. I think going with a blend of bretts here will give the more rounded/balanced character that I am looking for so with many of these brett isolate trials I am thinking about what I like about the brett as well as how I think it would work in a blend. I could easily see myself using different blends for different beers depending on what I am going for, but that has to start somewhere. And I'd like to approach coming up with these blends by trying a bunch of bretts selecting for my favorite and really understanding what they do individually before going into a blend.

Brett C. starter

Pure strains:
WLP645 Brettanomyces claussenii - Upright uses a lot of Brett c. in their barrel aged beers and their barrel aged saisons are among my favorites. So obviously I was really excited to give this strain a go with my saisons. But initially I wasn't very happy with it. I don't have a very good description for it but it was weird. At a couple of months it was strangely sweaty (and this was an improvement on the previous). But it is starting to turn into something really pleasant. It's subtle and has a nice complimentary and different fruityness. Not really 'funky' but it definitely works well with a rustic (or rustic-inspired) beer which is more what I am going for. I also find this is one of the weirder strains when it comes to body. I find that it can be aggressively flabby. Thin and oddly viscous at the same time. This too seems to clear with time.

I could see this as being a background component in a brett blend in the future. Or even as a main component with the right background strains. I like what this strain gives after waiting out the strange months. It's not fitting for a beer I want to drink younger as I'd be forced to wait through a couple months of sweatyness, but I do think it adds nicely when it settles down.

Yeast Bay Locristi and Wyeast Lacto b.

Yeast Bay Lochristi Brett blend - Initially I was also not as excited about this one. I'm starting to come around, but it is still something I'm planning on (mostly) taking a break from. I find it gives a nice lemony flavor with some depth to it, which I like alright in the right context. But there is also something phenolic/plasticy about it. I had a friend describe it as fresh vinyl, like from a new beach ball or inflatable toy. I completely agreed and I have definitely found that with some Lochristi beers. I think with a bit more time this goes away and the lemon comes forward. Overall that lemon is cool but not what I'm looking for. As a contributing note I think I might like it, but I have to figure out how to get it without the beach ball.

One instance where I think this yeast shines more is when making a lemon beer where you want the lemon to be prominent and complex. I make a lemon saison (zest and juice of 1 lemon in ~3-4 gallons) with this yeast that I quite like. It is not subtle lemon but I think it works well with the saison and it isn't a sweet fruit beer. The Lochristi lemon (which isn't 1D) combined with both the zest and the juice makes for a rounded lemon character that as a cool depth to it. That said, in the latest batch at bottling I preferred the version which had Amalgamation to the one with Lochristi.

Yeast Bay Amalgamation blend - I much prefer this to the Lochristi blend. I find it gives lots of citrus oriented fruit. If I have any reservations about it, it would be that I find that there isn't a lot of depth beyond the great citrus and tropical fruit so this combines with the already estery saisons to make a bit of a fruit bomb. I could see with all the bretts in this blend that it would age very nicely and add a lot of complexity, and I haven't given it as much aging time or as many different tries yet. So for now this is looking pretty promising but I have some mild reservations.

WLP 645 Brett c. and WLP644 trois with Wyeast Lacto b.

WLP644 'brett' trois - I moved away from using this in saisons about the same time that the news broke that this is actually a sacch strain rather than a brett (see here and some more info here). My decision to move away from it in saisons happened before this identity info came out and was independent of the classification of WLP644, but I found the timing funny. The main reason that I'm not interested in exploring this further (for now) is that it just doesn't give the character I'm looking for in a brett saison. I find its fruityness pleasant but I generally prefer a well fermented Wyeast 3724 beer (either 3724 solo or as the main component of a blend) to the same with trois.

Sometimes I find the fruity character of 644 a little flat and it takes away from the sharpness I like in saisons. That's not to say that it can't be good. I've made some that I enjoy a fair bit and I'm sure there are many great saisons with it out there. But part of this search is not settling for good and looking for the best bretts for a saison. I'm looking for something that enhances the characteristics of a saison by doing something a little different from but complimentary to what the main saison yeasts are doing rather than providing another rather similar character (especially when 3724 is generally more appealing to me). I think WLP644 can have a place in brett saisons, but for now I'll be looking elsewhere and if I do come back to it, it will be as a minor contributor to a blend.

ECY-34 Dirty Dozen brett blend -This is pretty young in the assessment stages but so far I am liking it. One beer is conditioned and in bottles with ECY-34 and it seems to add a subtle fruityness (tropical with a bit of a shampoo-like floral/fruit but in a good way) and a great earthy/more classically 'funky' character (but in a wonderfully subtle way). Maybe more on the hay/straw/earth side of barnyard than the goat/horse side. It wasn't as aggressive out of the gate as I was expecting, but perhaps more time will let that come out. But I like what it is adding. The bottled beer i have with ECY-34 also seems to have more of a roundness to it in the mouthfeel, but that could easily be from a factor other than the brett. I'll keep that in mind when looking into future ECY-34 beers. Although it is too young to tell for sure and I haven't replicated the characteristics with other beers, this seems to be hitting all the points for what I am looking for in a brett blend for saisons.

Lacto:
Wyeast 5223-PC Lactobacillus brevis- I really like this lacto strain and I wish it was available all year. I've kept a starter going with it so I keep access to it and I'm oping this lasts until the next release. I find over the course of a few months it develops the level of acidity that I am looking for in a 15-25 IBU beer, which I am really happy with. The fermentation character is otherwise pretty clean and I don't notice any odd flavor contribution from it. My starter is a bit green apple-y, but I suppose that's not surprising and that doesn't translate into the final beer.

Dregs:
Crooked Stave - This is the dominant yeast in the 30 gallon barrel I share with two other homebrewers. I really like the complex fruit forward character of these bretts and are quite happy with them. I feel like I want to come up with a blend similar in feel but different for myself, but I defintiely like what these bretts are doing and would not be opposed to adding them to a house blend.

Bretts waiting to be used:
These blends are either waiting to be used or in use but not yet bottled.

Brett anomala starter

ECY-04 Brett anomala - I have some stuff going with ECY-04 now but not far enough along to give a proper run down of how I feel about it.

ECY-30 Brett nardensis - I have a culture in the fridge but haven't put it to use yet.

BSI Brett drie - I've done one beer with this and am rather happy with the results, but I need to spend some more time with it.

Yeast Bay Beersel brett blend - Another one  that I've only done a batch with so far, but again rather happy with it.

Upright Flora dregs - As mentioned above, Upright produces some of my favorite brett saisons. Perhaps i'm not really getting anything from their beers that I couldn't buy from a yeast company but I don't really see harm in adding it in. I have many other dregs hanging around but I'm not sure that they will fit as well into saisons as Upright dregs do. I have one beer on the go with these but it is too early to evaluate it.

Dark English Mild tasting

Here are my tasting notes for a dark mild I brewed back in mid October (and took notes on in mid December, I know I'm behind). I didn't taste these side by side so the comparisons are based on having them repeatedly over a month or so and my memory of the beers while I was reviewing the others. As I outlined in the recipe post, I've found an unpleasant acrid/roast/tang in my previous milds and many of the commercial milds I've had. My guess going in was that this is due to a combination of the dark malts and low gravity, possibly with oversparging involved. To try to avoid that this time I decided to cold steep my darkest malts. The other new thing for this batch was using East Coast Yeast's British Mild strain (ECY-18). One carboy got ECY-18 and the other two got White Labs Dry English (WLP-007), as I had it on hand from an old ale. One of the two WLP-007 carboys also got a chunk of medium toast oak rod in the primary.

To give away the two big things that came out of this beer right from the beginning: I am very happy with the dark malt character I got out of the cold steeping and I am really happy with ECY-18. The yeast gave a great mild earthy/woodyness and let the malt shine nicely. The ECY-18 version definitely stood out from the others.


ECY-18

Aroma: Nutty, mildly woody, sweet dark caramel (almost burnt caramel), brown malt, wheat toast, chocolate

Appearance: This looks quite pretty. clear reddish amber, low off white/light tan fine head

Taste: For its strength, this has a pleasant rich maltyness. There is a reasonably amount of malt sweetness (not too much to be an issue but maybe a bit more than I'd like). There is a nice mildly toasty brown malt and some chocolate that almost approaches roast as well to help balance the sweetness. I like the yeast character. There is some earthy/woodyness and it does a good job of promoting the maltyness and making this beer seem like more than 3% ABV without being too heavy/sweet. A bit more dark malt might be good.

Mouthfeel: Appropriately low carbonation, medium/light body with a hint of wateryness. It is sweet overall in the balance with low/no hop bitterness (which is okay for what I was going for).

Overall: My favorite of the three. A touch sweeter than I'd like and i think pushing the malt slightly in a dryer/toastier/roastier direction would help to balance that.


WLP-007

Aroma: This batch seems much roastier than ECY-18 (possibly due to being dryer, possibly not). Brown malt and toast crust are on the front end of this beer, along with maple syrup and a nice woody/earthyness (but restrained compared to ECY-18).

Appearance: Medium/thick light tan head, creamy, good retention. Clear mahoganny.

Taste: Again, drier than ecy-18 with bread crust and brown malt. Dark caramel and maple with some woodyness but less than ECY-18. The roast is a bit rougher here, almost having a bit of char. Mild dried fruit and chocolate. Good malt depth but thin in the finish.

Mouthfeel: Medium carbonation (a bit higher than what I was going for), thinner than ECY-18.

Overall: This doesn't seem like the right yeast for the job. OK but the other two treatments are better. Thin in the finish and a bit rough due to thinness and carbonation. there is a bit of the tang that I've gotten in other my previous milds and commercial milds (I don't think it is contamination-related as it tastes otherwise clean and I think this is the yeast choice and the malts working together).


WLP-007 + Oak

Aroma: Strong chocolate and hazelnut, sweet maple syrup. The strong nutty/maple character is surprising

Appearance: Low tan head, fine bubbles, good retention. Clear pretty brown.

Taste: The oak is not easily identifiable but it definitely changes the beer. Richly malty and nutty. Hints at roast but not quite there. Sweet malt forward. Seems more similar to ECY-18 than WLP-007. Similar woody character to the other two.

Mouthfeel: Appropriately low carbonation, slightly watery (it is a pretty low strength beer with low carb, so that's understandable), softer and fuller than the normal 007 version. Low/no hop bitterness but appropriate.

Overall: Nice! The wood adds quite a bit to this without adding any actual 'wood' flavor. Good malt complexity and drinkability. This isn't far behind the ECY-18. I think if noticeable oak flavor came through I wouldn't be happy with it, but getting some of the other benefits of the wood without oak flavor worked out very well.

Overall I'll drop the WLP-007 and switch to a maltier English yeast. I'd like to keep using the ECY-18 when I can get it. And for when I can't, I'll keep working on the sanitized and somewhat neutralized oak for softening and adding complexity. Usually when I have non-sour beers with oak (and no spirits) the tannins tend to sharpen the beer but this did a nice job of smoothing and filling the WLP-007 beer out. I'll continue with the cold steeping and maybe push the malt bill a bit more toward the roast side (keeping in mind the poor extraction efficiency I got from this first try at cold steeping) to counteract some of the sweetness.