I was going to write about how the 1815 Dorchester Ale had turned out. So, I thought I should pour one for myself to drink while I wrote about it. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, I hadn’t restocked any in my refrigerator after drinking the last one. What was in the fridge was a Black IPA that I had brewed in an experimental batch. I had brewed this as a small batch to try it out before brewing a larger batch. I brewed slightly less than 1.2 gallons, which turns into a twelve pack after it’s been bottled. You might think that I called this an experimental batch because I did a small batch to experiment with the recipe. You would be only partially correct. There was another experiment that I was trying out. There is a technique in brewing called dry hopping. This consists of adding extra hops to the beer as it’s fermenting. My additional experiment was to dry hop with different hop varieties. So, after I added the yeast, I split the beer into three different containers to ferment. After a week I added in the hops to each container. You might wonder what I used for my containers as this is not a size that most home brew supply stores would sell. I used my leftover Simply OJ pulp free bottles. I drill a hole in the top and jam an airlock into the hole. These have the added advantage of fitting into my cooler. I can throw them in and use ice packs to control the temperature. Bottling is easy; I just pour the beer into each bottle (using a funnel, of course.) And instead of having to clean them out when I’m done, I can just pitch them out. But, back to the beer. I added one variety of hops to each container. Then I added two different hop varieties to two of the containers. I had a bunch of leftover hops in my freezer, so this gave me a chance to use some of them up.
After the beer was bottled and ready to drink, I had a couple of my brewing friends over and did a taste test. Without telling them which hops had been used in which glass they were drinking we each tasted all three of the beers. We all preferred the same beer. Now I know. I’m going to make a few minor tweaks to the recipe and brew it again at a higher volume. I’ll use the dry hop combination that produced the best beer. Hopefully, I’ll have a good beer. I’ve been enjoying drinking one while writing this, and it wasn’t even the variety we all preferred.
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I have to start off with an apology. I’ve been trying to keep a schedule of posting every two weeks. But I just checked the website and found my last entry was not posted but was in as a draft. I’m posting this now and will resume my regular every other Tuesday schedule next week. My last post was about my plans to brew a beer based on a recipe I found in a book from 1815. I’ll let you know how the brew day turned out. I had a couple friends over to help with brewing and sampling some other beers. I had said that I was shooting for an alcohol content of 5.56% based on what I had seen in another old book. However, when I read that book a bit closer it said that the 5.56% was based on what so-and-so said and he was wrong. It didn’t give what the author thought the right number was, so I decided to stick with the wrong number. In my earlier post I had developed a recipe based on brewing 2.5 gallons. I made some adjustments to the recipe based on comments from a friend and some further research. I also decided to brew 5 gallons. Here’s the recipe that was brewed: Grains 5.00 lbs. Muntons Pale Ale Malt 3.75 lbs. Maris Otter Pale Malt 0.80 lbs. Caramel / Crystal 40L 0.70 lbs. CaraVienne 0.25 lbs. Caramel / Crystal 60L Hops 2 ounces East Kent Goldings Other Ingredients 5.6 grams freshly grated ginger 1.4 grams ground cinnamon 2 tsp. calcium 2 tsp. gypsum 1 Whirlfloc tablet Wyeast yeast nutrient Yeast Danstar Nottingham Ale Yeast I was using a brewing method known as BIAB or brew in a bag. The first step is to heat the water up. When it gets hot enough we put the grains in a bag that had been put in the kettle. Think of it like steeping tea. The heat converts the grains into sugars that the yeast can eat. When the yeast eats the sugar, it gives off alcohol as a byproduct. But, that’s jumping ahead to the fermentation process. Let’s go back to the grains steeping. The temperature is held at 148 degrees for an hour. At that point the grains are removed, and the remaining liquid is brought to a boil. When the liquid began to boil the hops, ginger and cinnamon were added. The liquid, which at this point is called wort, is boiled for an hour. After the boil is done, the wort needs to be cooled before yeast can be added. When it is cooled enough the yeast is put in. That’s when the wort becomes beer. It’s also when the yeast starts eating up all the sugar and converting it to alcohol. In order to figure out the final alcohol content of the beer, you need to know how much sugar the yeast ate up. Brewers measure the sugar content of the beer before the yeast starts it’s work and then again afterwards. This measurement of the sugar in the water is knows as a gravity reading. The original gravity (before the yeast gets to work) and the final gravity (after the yeast has finished) are used to figure out how much sugar the yeast has eaten. And from that comes the calculation of the alcohol content. We took a reading just before pitching the yeast into the wort. If we had brewed everything perfectly the reading should have been 1.057 according to the recipe. Our reading was 1.042. Much lower than expected. That would mean the beer will have a lower alcohol content. To me that’s not the end of the world; it might make a great lawnmower beer. The kind you want to drink after a hot afternoon of mowing the lawn. But, I still need to understand why the gravity reading was low. Otherwise, I’ll end up repeating my mistakes. What happened? Partially it’s due to miscalculating the amount of water. We ended up with 5.5 gallons. By my calculation, that would have lower the gravity to 1.052. So, there is still something else wrong. My friend remembered that when we were looking at the grain, he had mentioned that it looked like it hadn’t been milled very well. So, that could cause the lower gravity if the grains weren’t crushed well they would not convert into sugars as expected. He also suggested the solution. Next time I buy grains at the local homebrew supply store, I should mill them twice. The book from 1815 recommended a cool fermentation. So, we split the beer into two carboys. I can fit these into a pair of coolers I have. I kept them in the coolers and alternated ice packs to keep the temperatures low. I soon had a nice vigorous fermentation going as you can see from the video. Soon, I’ll be able to bottle the beer and a few weeks after that I’ll be able to enjoy drinking a bottle.
[Update – Since, I wrote that the beer was bottled, and a final gravity reading was done. It was 1.002. This was lower than I expected. Meaning there are less sugars in the beer, so it will be dryer and not sweet. The alcohol content calculates to 5.3%] My interest in homebrewing began after I bid on a silent auction item to see how homebrewing was done. I’ve donated the same thing to a silent auction fundraiser for the youth at my church. On the afternoon of May 20, I’ll be showing a group of people how to homebrew by brewing up a batch of beer. There are some spaces still available, if you’re interested contact me. I’ve been homebrewing for several years now. I don’t remember exactly how long. I know it was sometime before Debbie passed away four years ago, so it’s probably at least five years. Over the years I’ve brewed many different styles of beer. I’m trying something different for my next brew.
I found a book online at Project Gutenberg called The Ameican Practical Brewer and Tanner by Joseph Coppinger (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20663/20663-h/20663-h.htm#162). It was published in 1815. I was looking through this book and found some recipes for brewing. One recipe that said this ale was, “by many esteemed the best in England.” I decided I would give that a try. Here are the ingredients copied from the book: · 54 Bushels of the best Pale Malt. · 50 lb. of the best Hops. · 1 lb. of Ginger. · ¼ of a lb. of Cinnamon, pounded. This is for a yield of 14 barrels. Several Google searches allowed me to convert barrels to gallons and bushels to pounds. After doing the math I came up with 4.3 pounds of malt per gallon of beer. I plugged that into the online recipe calculator at Brewer’s Friend (https://www.brewersfriend.com) and it came up with over 10% alcohol content. That seemed a bit high to me. I decided to do some more online research on Dorchester Ale. I found another book from 1834 that gave the alcohol content as 5.56%. With that I can work backwards to the amount of grain required. I plugged the numbers in and picked by malts to use. Some of the malts chosen were based on what I have left over from my last batch. Looking at the predicted color and alcohol content the beer looked to be close in style to an English Strong Bitter. I decided to try to get close to that style. A couple notes here. The styles I refer to are used for judging beers in competition. You don’t have to brew to match a style; I just made that choice here to be close to a typical type of beer from England. Also, the Bitters’ styles are not actually bitter. Ask someone from Britain to explain it to you. The recipe instructions from 1815 called for the hops to be boiled and the water added to the recipe. I wasn’t sure how to convert that to the pellets that are typically used today. So, instead of doing that I picked a typical English hop variety and calculated how much to use based on what would get me in range for the style. For the ginger and cinnamon, I calculated the amounts based on converting the amounts in the recipe. I usually brew either 2.5 gallons or 5 gallons. My recipe below is based on 2.5 gallons and if I make 5 gallons I’ll just double it. Grains 3.75 lbs. Muntons Pale Ale Malt 0.80 lbs. Caramel / Crystal 40L 0.70 lbs. CaraVienne Hops 0.8 ounces East Kent Goldings (60 minutes) Other 2.7 grams freshly grated ginger 0.7 grams ground cinnamon English Special Bitter Yeast There’s a lot of chalk in the area around Dorchester, so their water contains a lot of calcium. So, I will add some calcium to the water. According to the online calculator this should be close to the style I was trying to match. The alcohol content will be around 5.2% and the color of the beer will be close to a new copper penny after it’s lost it’s shine. Should be interesting to see how this turns out. I’ll let you know how it tastes in a later post. |
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