Hot answers tagged ale
20
You are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Many people are far too quick to drink their precious homebrew and most beers benefit a lot from aging. A few months for ales and simple lagers.
Beers with a high ABV should be aged much longer. I make a Chimay Grand Cru clone that I typically don't try for 4-6 months. Aging remove a lot of the "hot" taste from ...
11
There could be a few things going on:
High Alcohols can improve in flavor after some time in cool, dark storage
Sediment can drop out of beer after long, cool storage leading to better head formation and retention (since the sediment is no longer there to form a big nucleation site)
Yeast in the beer, if still active, could be cleaning up some byproducts ...
6
Not all beer matures at the same rate, and not all beer drinkers have the same tastes. For some examples, I like to drink really hoppy beers while they're fairly young and the hops are still vibrant. An altbier I'll cold condition for a couple months. Something like a tripel I prefer with maybe a month or 2 of age on it. The best thing to do is ...
6
The best choice is Kolsch Yeast.
White Labs: http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/strains_wlp029.html
Wyeast: http://www.wyeastlab.com/rw_yeaststrain_detail.cfm?ID=144
Only downside is 68-70 ambient temps. Those yeasts need to ferment around 65, so try to get the temp down a little more. Put your carboy in a water bath and drop in a few frozen water bottles ...
5
The distinction comes from the beer's tradition and history.
Strictly speaking, lagers are fermented with lager yeast (S. carlsbergensis) and ales with ale yeast (S. cerevisiae). Traditionally, ales ferment quickly near room temperature and are served fresh. Lagers ferment slowly, coolly and are stored near freezing for a period of months.
The BJCP lists ...
5
Hygiene Hygiene Hygiene.
Champagne yeast works well with apples.
Pasteurize of the juice. There's a lot of nasties in natural fruit that will spoil the batch. Purists will probably tell you not to pasteurize, but I feel it's a necessary step.
EDIT: This link says to pasteurize between 185 (85) to 200 (93) degrees. So the 165 degrees mentioned in the ...
4
Southern English Brown is mildly sweet and Porter can be fairly dry and and roasty. I think it matters upon the substyle of Porter one is looking at. Robust Porter is the substyle most people are familiar with and I view it very different in flavor and composition that a Southern English Brown.
If I was forced to draw the line to bend my thoughts to your ...
4
If you have a cooler that will hold your fermentor (i've used my mash tun with a blanket or sleeping bag draped over it to hold the cold in), 4+ plastic bottles that you can fill with water & freeze (ice packs also work), and a closet that you can keep at a semi-stable temperature, you might be OK with either of them, but you'd probably also want room ...
4
I'll put in my two cents.
I would say the best analog of the clean, crisp taste of a (pils) lager would be a California Common.
Wyeast's WY2112 is actually listed as a lager yeast, but has a much higher temperature profile than standard lager yeasts. I do not consider WY2112 a lager yeast, but there it is.
WLP001 is White Labs California Common yeast, ...
4
These gravities are pretty close together so it doesn't really matter much which you brew first. As long as the yeast is sitting in the base of the fermentor as a tight cake you can pull more than enough beer out without it effecting the next one too much. And you don't need to pitch the whole cake, just half a pint or so. I have done this with good ...
4
You can always take a gravity reading and taste the beer to determine if you even need to do a diacetyl rest. When you raise the temps on a lager for a diacetyl rest, the purpose is to make the yeast more active in order to reduce the diacetyl. Even if the yeast is less active, giving it more time accomplishes the same thing. That's true of ales, too. ...
4
Adding pure sugar to any beer style does a few things.
First, it increases the ABV. This is only an issue if it gets you an alcohol % that is noticeable in the flavor profile of the beer. Brown Ale certainly has no tolerance for any kind of warm alcohol flavor (unlike Barleywines, or big Belgians), so make sure your ABV doesn't go up past 7-8%.
Second, it ...
3
Nothing at all! Just switch the yeast and see how you like it. Changing the yeast WILL change the character of the finished beer, but you can go back and adjust based on what you taste.
Note that when you do this you will most likely need to calculate the proper pitching rate for the new yeast in this recipe. Also due to the lower temps you can expect a ...
3
Well it depends on what you want out of the brew. If you want some maple syrup flavor in the final brew, using syrup is the way to go. Adding it late in the boil with preserve some of the aromatics. It is nearly 100% fermentable, so using it for priming is probably the best idea to really preserve flavors.
Sap tastes like a strange water. If you boil 6 ...
3
There are a number of ale yeasts that stay clean, but you'll be hard pressed to achieve that at those temps. And then keep in mind that you HAVE to cold condition the beer after fermentation to get anywhere near a lager. I don't find kolsch (WAY too fruity IMO) or CA common yeasts clean enough for pseudo lagers. My go to yeast for that is WY1007. ...
3
Look into Keeving. A brewer at my local club made an excellent, bright, crisp cider using this method. It may seem complicated but it's really quite simple (providing you can get hold of the PME enzyme it's just a matter of letting fermentation happen naturally and having patience).
Read this link for details:
http://www.cider.org.uk/keeving.html
2
There is only confusion if you mix the definitions. The BJCP style guide sorts this all out.
Essentially there are three definitions of "lager".
A type of yeast.
A temperature dependent beer making process.
A beer style, known for its clean taste.
Steam beers use an odd lager yeast but don't use the lagering process nor are they categorized as a lager. ...
2
WLP001
This yeast is famous for its clean flavors, balance and ability to be used in almost any style ale. It accentuates the hop flavors and is extremely versatile.
Attenuation: 73-80%
Flocculation: Medium
Optimum Fermentation Temperature: 68-73 °F
(20-23 °C)
Alcohol Tolerance: High
I've used this yeast myself. Its a good yeast, clean, with good ...
2
I think Porters are also more dark, maybe the darkest beers in the style. Also Porters should have more chocolate and roasted flavors then English Brown Ales - they have more caramel and toffee flavors then porters and also they have often medium to medium low body. Porters are more full bodied I think.
There are also different styles of porters - Robust, ...
2
Th singe in your nose was the CO2 you get a wiff of. It tends to 'burn' the mucos membranes a bit in the nose. (If you've ever had to lean into a near empty dry ice bin to scoop out dry ice you'd know what I am talking about). So that part is quite normal.
The temperature that you fermented and the choice of yeast may have created some higher order fusel ...
2
I brewed with heather in a gruit, and spent some time beforehand experimenting with teas in combinations of other herbs. There is a lack of solid information regarding gruits, much less heather. My reading material included GruitAle.com, Radical Brewing, Sacred Herbal and Healing Beers, forum searches on HBT and AHA, etc.
For bittering, the recipes I ...
2
It basically looks completely fine to me. From the pictures its impossible to tell if its contaminated. As long as your sanitation was good before the wort went in, and you kept it closed for the first 7 days, I am sure its fine.
If the temp has been swinging a little bit its normal for the bubbles on top as CO2 is trying to escape as it got warmer.
If ...
2
There's good news and bad news here. The good news is that if you bottle your beer tomorrow and drink it within the next few weeks, then it should still be ok, maybe with a touch of sourness.
The bad news is that does look like contamination. Your photo mentions "flavor bubbles". Often there are fine bubbles from the CO2, like in your first photo, but not ...
2
It is generally recommended to brew low-gravity beers before higher-gravity ones when re-pitching yeast. It is often said that you should also pitch light before dark beers. I asked a question about this recently. Color transfer isn't usually a problem, but you should pitch low- to high-gravity. With this in mind, I would brew the Scottish Export first, ...
2
I suspect the sludge is starch and carbohydrates from the pumpkin. The only solution is to wait for it to settle out naturally. Getting the beer as cold as possible will make it happen faster.
You wouldn't attempt to cold crash it until fermentation is done. But it might be hard to get an accurate gravity reading with the starches in there. Doubtless ...
2
Pumpkin leaves a ton of goo in the fermentor. It's mostly fiber, which is what makes pumpkin such a good food for you. Whatever is oozing around in the beer will undoubtedly settle down and sink to the bottom over time, it might just take a few extra weeks. The colder you can keep the secondary, the better. Go ahead and rack it if it smells good.
If after ...
2
It is really as simple as putting in some priming sugar and letting it go to "keg condition" for carbonation.
In a true real ale situation you might rack from primary to keg when there is still <10% of the sugar remaining. In this case you are not adding any priming sugar.
But there's nothing more to it than sealing the keg and getting the beer to ...
2
Real Ale, that's
"beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide". (CAMRA)
As homebrewers, we can emulate this by:
Not pasturizing our beer...(ok that was easy!)
preparing the corny for use as secondary/fining/dispensing ...
1
I made Heather ale about 30 to 40 years ago when I was living in Scotland. I found a recipe in a book called The Scots Kitchen by F. Marian McNeil.
I only made this once, but it was delicious and extremely fizzy, so much so that one of the plastic water bottles I kept it is burst.
The recipe only states to use Heather, barm, hops, syrup ginger and water. ...
1
Williams Brothers, from Scotland, brew a range of traditional ales, one of which, Fraoch, is a heather ale and has been around for over twenty years. If you are interested in the history of heather ale, then Martyn Cornell's book Amber, Gold & Black has a whole chapter on it.
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