What's on tap - Tastings

Again, I am so bad about going back to do tastings of the recipes I've posted here. Sorry. I hope these are worth reading... the beers are tasting good! I pulled some samples yesterday while planning out what's going into kegs next, what's getting funk-dafied, and what's going on fruit. Later in the evening, Clarissa and I went up to the soft opening of Grain & Gristle, a new bar/restaurant in NE Portland that is a collaboration between Alex Ganum, owner of Upright Brewing, and a few other partners. The tap selection was great and the moules et frites was great too. So check it out if you're in Portland. Now for some tastings:

Saison:

Color is like a hazy pilsner, on the light side for a saison, with a thick standing head with good retention. Aroma is very "saison-like" with a good balance of fruity esters, hops, and peppery phenols, and a background grainyness from the pils malt. A little more bubblegum/clove than I usually get when using only Dupont yeast, which I attribute to the secondary addition of the DeRanke yeast. Flavor is complex, starting with a medium-full body impression from high carbonation, some sweetness from the pils malt and esters, and hop flavor that it sort of earthy. It is dry and leaves the palate with a hoppy bite that encourages another drink. Alcohol is moderate but slightly warming with no "hotness". Overall, I think it's actually one of the best saisons I have made. It is not an over the top saison, but very drinkable while still remaining complex.

Rye-Amarillo Pale Ale:

Clear copper in color with a thin, wispy white head. Hoppy, slightly lemon tea-like aroma, some grapefruit, and slight caramel/biscuit flavors from malt. Clean esters and alcohol. Medium-full bodied pale ale flavor with a fairly good balance of malt and hops. Creamy mouthfeel from the rye and fairly high final gravity. Overall, I like this beer and it's very drinkable, but I would like it to be a little drier, and I would like to mix up the hops a little bit more to get a better complexity. Very drinkable, but not astounding.

Flanders Red-Kriek:

Big frothy pink head that dies quickly, on top of a cherry-red ale with a slight haze. Aroma is full of cherries and there is a spicy quality from both the brett and the innate spicyness of sour cherries. The acidity is noticable and very clean, as in lactic acid, not acetic. It does not smell exceedingly sour, but it is noticable. A little caramel malt background, no hops, low alcohol. Flavor is clean and lactic-sour, with a subtle maltiness. Maltiness could be higher to give the cherries and sourness more foundation. Nice carbonation, nice cherry flavor that blends with a touch of burnt sugar. The brett comes through well, as well as a hint of almond flavor from cherry pits. Overall, it's great, one of the best sours I've ever made. It could still use a touch more maltyness and maybe a touch more acidity, but I am very happy with this beer. It's not up there with the best commercial krieks, but it's very good and I'm proud of it. Its clean flavor and modrate sourness almost make it a session beer. I could drink 2 pints of it, whereas I would like it to be a slightly more intense beer that you would want to drink a small glass or two of.

Saison De Duas Notas So

Saison season has opened! That's right, we are in the middle of Oregon's mild excuse for a summer (it's currently 63 degrees at 2:30 pm). This would typically warrant only saison homebrewing in many other cities, but here the only difference is the groundwater temp goes up a bit and it's a littler harder to chill the wort properly with your heat exchanger. I was planning on doing another Saison Dupont clone attempt, but when I went to the homebrew store, all they had was $2 an ounce, 2008 crop American Goldings sitting in a refrigerator. No way I am gonna get jacked like that, so I had to come up with a different idea.

Luckily, I had an idea earlier that week to try some Northern Brewer hops in a saison, and they had a good selection of NB from 2009. This is a hop I have hardly used at all, and I want to isolate it by using it as the only hop to try and get a feel for the flavor and aroma potential. I decided to leave everything else very predictable and clean, to really let those hops shine through. So, I went with 100% Pilsner malt and 100% Northern Brewer, and Dupont yeast. If the Northern Brewer proves to be a good hop for this, I might try to substitute some American malts next time to get a real "American" saison.

The name of this recipe comes from a play off an old Samba song called "Samba De Uma Nota So", or "One Note Samba". This is my 2-note saison.

Above: THE MAN, Joao Gilberto!

Saison De Duas Notas So

Recipe is for 7 gallons pre-booil, 6.2 gallons post-boil, all grain

O.G. 1.055 F.G. 1.007 ABV 6.4% IBU's 32

10 lb. Weyermann Pilsner malt

14 gr. Northern Brewer whole 7.8% AA (First Wort Hop)

12 gr. Northern Brewer pellet 9.8% AA 90 min

45 gr. Northern Brewer whole 7.8% AA 0 min

Mash: 4 gallons H2O + 4 gr. gypsum + 4 gr. calcium chloride

Mash in to 128, hold 15 min

Heat to 147 over 10 min, hold 35 min

Heat to 158 over 10 min, hold 10 min

Heat to 170 over 10 min, hold 5 minutes and begin sparging.

Add First Wort Hops to kettle before sparging.

Sparge with 5 gallons H2O at 170, over 40 minutes

Collect 7 gallons at 1.049 = 90% efficiency

(I checked my last runnings which were at about 1.014)

Boil 90 minutes, additions as noted

Wyeast nutrient & Whirlfloc at 10 min

"Topped off" the kettle with some water to 6.2 gallons at the end of the boil.

Whirlpool & rest 15 minutes while setting up heat exchanger.

Ran through plate chiller over 10 minutes, to 76 degrees

oxygen for 60 seconds

Pitched a 1 liter, stirplate starter of Wyeast 3724 Belgian Saison yeast.

Fermentation rose on it's own to 81 over the first 24 hours

Raised to 88 degrees by day 3, left there until day 5, when I lowered the thermostat to 84.

***Racked to secondary after about a week so I could collect the yeast. Kept at above 80 for 6 weeks total, the damn beer was still at 1.020!!!***

Alex from Upright hooked me up with a krausening wort from his fresh hop beer. I pitched about a quart of this into the beer which helped get it going. This was the De Ranke isolate.

Racked to keg on 11/8/10. The sample tastes freakin' awesome. 1.007. I also filled a growler and I am going to bottle condition it. Can't wait to do a tasting of this beer and maybe do a side-by side with keg & the bottle conditioned growler.

Upright Gose Brewday

Here are some pictures form my first day helping out Upright Brewery as an intern. Above is the tasting room. Most of the beers are named by number which is analogous to the original gravity (i.e. the Four is about 1.040 O.G.).

Here's a view of the other side of the tasting room, where many barrel projects are aging.

Their brewing system is a 10 barrel system. The strike water is heated with an electric element, and the boil kettle is direct-fire gas. It's made fairly locally, but I don't remember the name of the company. I stirred in the mash on the Gose, which was a fairly small grist, since we were only shooting for a 1.040 or so beer.

I didn't get a picture of this, but they did an overnight sour mash on about 20 pounds of grain in a cooler. This was smelly pretty sour and funky (think rotten fruit) when we got in, and I added it to the mash as I doughed in.

Here's a view of the open fermenter room (the gose didn't go in there, we put it in a conical). Upright's house yeast is Wyeast 3711 French Saison, which I've been a big fan of since the first time I used it last year. We used the house yeast on the Gose too.

Here's Alex operating the hand-cranked bottle labeler to label the 5, a hoppy pale beer.

We did some science stuff that I had never seen before. Garrit showed me how to a cell count on our pitch rate. After the beer was pitched and well mixed in the fermenter, we took a sample and dropped it onto a slide. The slide has a grid pattern and you can count how many yeast cells are in each square. I don't remember the cell count we got on this, but it was an ideal pitching rate, so we were pretty stoked!

It's cool to see yeast under a microscope. I had never seen that before!