The omnibus worked for me so I might see if doing it this way will help me be a bit more regular in my blogging.
When I brew it tends to be a solitary exercise with me pottering around in the garage and kitchen. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it, but when you think about some of the best beer drinking you have ever done it is invariably a social experience with your good friends. So I was quick to say yes when my friend Ian (who has been in this blog
before) invited me around to his place to help him brew some beer. He has more experience in full mash brewing than I do so I was keen to learn a thing or two. By the time I arrived mid-morning Ian already had his mash well underway and was busy measuring out hops in the kitchen. They were
Riwaka hops. Ian was playing with a recipe that he had already brewed five or six times. In the past he had used a variety of hops but this time was going Riwaka all the way. He had it all set out in a nice clear pocket folder with details of the hops and ingredients he had used each time. He even had batch numbers. What a pro! We made our way outside where Ian had all his brewing equipment set up at the bottom of his garden. We were joined by our friend Ricky and Ian's brother in law and we proceeded to hang out, every now and then lending a bit of a hand but generally not adding much more value than company. It was good to see how they do stuff, particularly, with the sparging where the water volumes were all worked out in advance to get the right volume at the end instead of my haphazard keep adding water until I can't be bothered any more. We also got to sample some of a previous brew, which was very tasty. Hopefully the camaraderie will make the next brew spectacular.
All this brewing got me inspired so a few weeks later I got out my copy of
British Real Ale by Graham Wheeler. I had bought the ingredients to make a
Fullers London Porter when I made the APA back in November. I chucked all the ingredients in the mash tun and got the pot of water boiling on my new butane canister burner. Probably better for camping (which I have in fact used it for) but it slowly got the water hot and saved me lugging the big heavy pot to the kitchen and back. Once my mash was ready I realised I needed my pot for boiling the liquid so had to transfer it into my fermenter. Looks like you can never have too many vessels. After pouring the liquid into the pot I added my boiled water into the mash, left it for a while and then poured it into the boiling pot. I didn't really measure anything so ended up with too much liquid rather than not enough like I usually do. It was a slow boil but I eventually got there adding the hops at the appropriate times. My cooling coil had a tiny leak in the hose somewhere so I repurposed some drain pipe and threaded the hose through it which seemed to stop water spraying everywhere. Eventually the liquid was about cool enough so I transferred it into the fermenter. Because there was too much liquid I ended up leaving a bit behind, along with plenty of sludge. I hope that doesn't effect the flavour. I had also invested in some fancy yeast. I think a real Fullers London Porter uses an
English Ale Yeast but the place I bought my material didn't have any of that so I settled for a
London Ale Yeast. It was all nicely packed in cooling packaging and so it was a bit hard to see exactly what it looked like. I warmed the packet using the baby bottle technique (put it in a bowl of hot water) until it was hopefully ok. You couldn't really test it because it was all sealed up. I chopped the top and expected it to flow into the fermenter but it sort of just glugged out in a few clumps so hopefully it was OK. Guess we will find out later. No instant gratification in brewing. Now we wait.
I also had a few tries of my previous APA too. It was tasting nicely balanced having reached its stride about the middle of the month, unfortunately after that things went downhill. Every bottle I opened would start to froth up and slowly froth its way out for a long time making the bottle undrinkable. A bit of Internet research suggests it could be a number of things from overcarbonation, too much sediment or even an infection. Pretty disappointing. A suggested way to deal with this is to make sure the beer is very cold. It has been pretty darn hot for Wellington so that may be getting things going so I need to make sure I have the bottles in the fridge for at least a week to settle things down. I will try that and see how it works.
On a slightly different note I listen to a lot of podcasts about all sorts of stuff. This month I started listening to the
Beer Diary Podcast by
Phil Cook and George Langlands. Now it is pretty old, starting in 2011, but it is a really interesting time capsule of what the Wellington beer scene was like when it was first burgeoning. Looking back and seeing how things have grown and fledgling breweries are now major players is pretty cool. Definitely worth a listen.
I did get to try my porter this month. Good news is it didn't froth up like the APA did. Bad news is that doesn't mean it came out right. I believe the best way to describe it is faulty... As previously noted the colour is more a dark brown than an almost black, which is what I was hoping for. That is not the biggest issue though. The biggest issue is the sour taste. A porter is not sour. I understand this means my beer has an infection. I have tried a few over the month and my initial hope that it was just a couple of faulty bottles is quickly fading. I will continue to see how it goes but this is another batch that may again remain unshared.
