Saturday, June 5, 2010

PCTBB Recipes & "Round Table" Tasting

A few months ago my buddy Angelo, a local beer writer and founder of Brewpublic, asked me to be an contributor for the website. I think it will be a cool opportunity to add a homebrew-y perspective to an already great craft beer publication. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to write about, but I'll just write when I get an inspired idea. I don't really want to do the "Brewery X releases yadda-yadda limited release" thing, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's being done plenty well by plenty of beer writers already.

For my first piece I invited some local homebrewers to my place to do a "round table peer review" of our Portland Cheers to Belgian Beers homebrew entries. It was a lot of fun for everyone involved, and you can read the full article here, including a tasting of the 2 recipes below.
Here are the 2 recipes I submitted to the PCTBB competition. Neither of them placed, but they scored well and I am happy with how they both came out. I'm not sure how many Belgian Specialty ales were entered exactly, but it was probably around 20.

The first beer, which I entered as a "Dry hopped Belgian Bitter", was inspired by De Ranke XX Bitter, but it tastes more like a super hop-fruity saison, a lot of tangerine and citrus going on with some bitterness and also some residual sweetness.

Brewed on 3/5/2010
Recipe is for 7 gallons pre-boil, 5.7 gallons post-boil, all grain
O.G. 1.067 F.G. 1.010 IBU's 63 ABV 7.5%

6.5 lb. Great Western Superior pilsner malt
5 lb. Belgian pale malt
.25 lb. aromatic malt

11 gr. Nelson Sauvin (2008) pellets 11% AA 60 min
28 gr. American Perle pellets 7.5% AA 20 min
28 gr. Styrian Goldings pellets 3.5% AA 10 min
28 gr. Czech Saaz pellets 3.1% AA 0 min
21 gr. Hallertau pellets 3.1% 0 min
14 gr. Willamette whole 4.7% 0 min
42 gr. Sterling pellets dry hopped cold for 12 days

Mash: 4 gallons + 4 gr. gypsum + 1 gr. calcium chloride
150 for 1 hour
Sparge with 5 gallons
Collect 7 gallons at 1.054 = 84% efficiency
Boil 90 minutes, with additions of whirlfloc and wyeast nutrient at 15 minutes
Oxygen for 75 seconds
Pitch Wyeast 3724 Farmhouse Ale Yeast at 66 degrees
Raise to 80 degrees over 10 days, then finish ferment at 75
Racked to secondary after 13 days to harvest yeast for the second batch.
Racked to keg on 4/10/10 and force carbonate, also dry hop in keg.

The second brew I did was a "Cascadian Dark Saison", which is basically very similar to the "fresh-hopped black saison" I did last October. Of course I used the Farmhouse yeast strain to make it eligible for the competition, as well as lowering the amount of base grain to get the alcohol down a bit. I used all dried hops this time, concentrating on American varieties that I thought would compliment a saison yeast but also be very up-front in the aroma.

Brewed on 3/18/10
Recipe is for 7.1 gallons pre-boil, 6 gallons post boil, all grain
O.G. 1.063 F.G. 1.008 IBU's 55 ABV 7.25%

6.5 lb. Great western Superior Pilsner malt
2.5 lb. Weyermann Pilsner malt
1.5 lb. Munich malt
.75 lb. caramunich 60L
.5 lb. Carafa Special III 600 L

28 gr. Magnum whole 12% AA 60 min
28 gr. Amarillo whole 8.6% AA 15 min
28 gr. Crystal pellets 3.2% AA 15 min
28 gr. Amarillo whole 8.6% AA 0 min
28 gr. Crystal pellets 3.2% AA 0 min

Mash: 4 gallons H20 + 5 gr. chalk, 3 gr. gypsum, 1 gr. calcium chloride, 2 gr. baking soda
148 for 60 min, then raise to 160 over 8 minutes, rest 15 minutes.
Sparge with 5 gallons, collect 7.1 gallons at 1.053 = 86% efficiency.
Boil 90 minutes with whirlfloc and Wyeast nutrient at 15 minutes
Oxygen for 75 seconds
Pitch 1/2 cup thick yeast slurry of Wyeast 3724 from the first recipe.
Warmed to 74 over 3 days and left it there for 7 days.
Finished out at 80 and racked to keg on 4/14/10, force carbonated.

Just for fun here are some photos from the PCTBB event hosted at Hopworks. It was a really fun day! I got drunk. Lots of great beers to taste and a few bad ones.










1 comment:

Paul! said...

dang man that dark saison is hop soup.


oh and the second picture in the series from the PCTBB event is awesome, The guy in the center totally photobombed your picture