Wild Brewing Pale Sour Ale

6/15

The calm before the storm.

Tomorrow will be the first brew day for Wild Brewing. The plan is to brew a rather simple Pale Sour Ale. If everything goes perfectly 1 year from tomorrow a magnificent beer will finally be ready for drinking. We will be following a rather simple recipe of 90% pale malt and 10% carahell. The wort will be lightly hopped to 24 IBUs with 10 ounces of Halleratu hops.

Other than getting together the equipment the biggest challenge is getting enough yeast ready to ferment 30 gallons of beer. You would need to pitch at least 6 smack packs from wyeast to have enough microorganisms to bring the batch to completion. Instead of purchasing so many packages of yeast I have been using a stir plate and a 2 gallon fermentor to grow yeast. Hopefully by tomorrow afternoon I will have turned 2 packages of Roselare yeast into a slurry large enough for our beer. In the future we will be using the yeast cake from the previous fermentation for the following batch. I will also be adding some other cultures to the fermentor as I get them ready. They will include cultures from the dregs of a few Russian River beers, New Belgian beers, and some pure cultures of Brett and Lacto. The variety of bugs should help make the finished profile more complex. In addition, the cake will change over time as some species are better able to establish themselves. In order to help create balance I will be adding a new package of cultured Roselare each time to help ensure that everyone is getting a fair shot at helping make these beers great!

Cooler to Mash Tun Conversion

Although we are ordering the majority of the equipment that we will be using for our Wild Brewing project we will also be constructing a few of the items that we need. Vital to the brewing processes is mashing the grains. The mash activates the enzymes in barley allowing them to break down complex sugars and starches into simple sugars that the yeast will be able to eat and turn into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

A mash tun is essentially a large insulated pot for making barley tea. The temperature inside the container needs to stay relatively stable which makes a cooler an ideal vessel to use (very little heat loss). Instead of buying a pre built mash tun I decided to take the more economical route and build one myself. Here is how it works in case anyone else ever wants to construct one.

What you need...

1. A large cooler, the size is really up to you. You can fit at least 15 pounds of grain and the mash water into a ten gallon cooler. I am hoping to use this cooler to make 15-20 gallons of beer at a time, so I bought a 30 gallon cooler.
2. Cooper pipe (the amount will vary based on how big the cooler is, I used 6 pieces of 1/2 inch pipe)
3. 5 T push on connectors
4. 4 90 degree elbow push on connectors
5. A1/2 ball valve
6. A 1/2 male to 3/4 barb plastic fixture
7. A 1/2 male to 1/2 male connector
8. A length of plastic tubing to fit onto the 3/4 barb
9. A hack saw to cut the pipe
10. Washers to seal the the outside and inside of the cooler with
11. A shark bit connector to hook the 1/2 pipe to the 1/2 male to 1/2 male fitting

  

How to put it together....

1. First I cut slits in the pipe about 1/3 of the way deep every 3/4 inches along the entire length of the pipe. The silts will face down and will work to filter the grain from the wort as it runs off
2. I laid the pipe out to get a better idea of how many cuts I was going to need to make
3. I made all of my cuts, making sure to measure
4. Slip all the connectors onto the pipe and push them tightly together.
5. Build the drain valve.
1. I pushed the 1/2 male to 1/2 male connectors half into the wall of the cooler after taking out the previous drain.
2. To the out side I added a washer and screwed on the ball valve adding the barb to the ball valve
3. Next I screwed the shark bite connector to the 1/2 male to 1/2 male connector and added washers to make it seal tightly, and  then pushed it onto a piece of 1/2 copper pipe

 

 

It was about that easy! It took a little over and hour and a half to cut all the pipe and put it together. Total cost was 150$ which is a lot cheaper than trying to order something like this online!

Finding Barrels

Task number 1 is to gather the equipment that is need to start brewing. One of the most important items to find are some high quality used wine barrels. For a variety of reasons wine barrels make the perfect habitat for all the souring organisms that will turn otherwise plain beer into a wild ale.

Thankfully we were able to find used barrels of the correct size from Select Wine Barrels.

We purchased 2x 30 gallon barrels to start with but plan on buying at least 2 more when we get closer to having beer to put into them. For now we are still focused on purchasing grain, hops, yeast, and brewing equipment. Hopefully by the end of the week everything will be in the mail or will be available to pick up from out local brew store The Brew Hut where we looked at fermenters and other odds and ends last weekend.

Luanching Wild Brewing

Excellent News!

Wild Brewing was able to raise $6000 + dollars towards brewing a series of barrel aged beers!

I would first like to thank the donors that made this possible...

Rob Nash-Boulden, Tricia Jablon, James Lilliestierna, Ben Woodward, Keith Peetz, Dan Church, Jordan Verlare, juleslandis, Chris Bass, Kelsey Whitesell, Brian C. Natale, Greg Hoth, Amy Lassen, Erik Johnson, Gene Farnsworth, Brian G, Paul, Mac Crawford, James Zdrowski, Jesse Perlmutter, Mike, Julya Bridgewater, Brandy Renee. Rebecca Bennett, Monte Mitchell, and Barry

Without your generous support this would not be a possibility. 

We are currently pricing the equipment that we need so that we can start brewing within the month. If you are curious about what we are getting or where we are getting it you can keep checking back here and we will keep you posted on what is going on. I will also be posting frequent updates as we start brewing and aging the beer.

Once again thank you everyone that made this possible!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mai-Bock

I find that I too often brew ales. There is so much variety when it comes to them that you could probably spend your whole life brewing them before you ran out of new things to try. However, in order to be a bit more well rounded one should at least occasionally brew a lager. Lager yeast ferment very cleanly and without all the esters and other compounds produced by ale yeast allowing your malt profile comes through much clearer. This allows you, in my opinion, to get a better grasp on how your malt choices are really affecting the beer.

Since it is spring time, and the month of May is coming up, I decided to brew a Mai-Bock (May Bock). I wanted it to be a refreshing and crisp beer that would remind the drinker of the season. Here is my recipe, but first a quick note on the batch size, I only have a 5 gallon and a 3 gallon fermenter (better bottles) that can fit into my mini fridge, for that reason all of my lagers have to be brewed in a 3.5 gallon size so that I can fill the 3 gallon fermenter I use for secondary to the brim.

3/31 Mai Bock
Brewed with Andrew

3.5 Gallons
OG- 1.040
FG- 1.015
IBU- 28

1 pound Vienna
1 pound Munich
1 pound Malted Rye
1 pound Carapils
4 pounds American 2-Row

Single step infusion 2 quarts/pound 152 F for 1 hour
Batch sparged with 176 F water 30 minutes

Hallertau pellets 7.9% AA, 0.25 oz, 60 minutes
Hallertau pellets 7.9% AA, 0.25 oz, 45 minutes
Tettnang pellets, 4.8% AA, 0.50 oz, 25 minutes
Tettnang pellets, 4.8% AA, 0.25 oz, 10 minutes

1/8 oz coriander added 5 minutes before flame out

Fermented 55 F

4/16 gravity 1.015
4/29 gravity 1.015 Bottled with 1.4 oz table sugar

5/24 Tasting

Appearance: Straw yellow- golden in color. Not much head and carbonation appears to be a little low. There are a good number of bubbles rising from the bottom of the glass. The head lingers as a lace around the rim of the glass.

Aroma: Nice malt aromas, very clean. No aroma at all from the yeast. A slight hop spice appears in the background.

Taste: Crisp and sweet. Starts off a little sweet with a nice silky mouthfeel, really coats the whole mouth before it finishes with a crisp bite.

Overall: I think this was a solid attempt at brewing a Mai-Bock. I would have liked a little more alcohol and the beer to be drier. That being said it is incredibly drinkable and it is going to be gone fast! We added coriander at the last minute hoping to give the beer some citrus aroma to make it more refreshing, it did not really come through but certainly did not take anything away from the beer.

Yeast Starter

Making a yeast starter is a necessary skill for someone who wants to brew beer. A yeast starter takes either a small quantity of yeast and grows it to the volume needed to ferment a batch of beer or takes a culture of yeast that is not healthy enough to brew a batch of beer and produces new cells that will be able to ferment the beer, or both.

In order to create a yeast starter you will need a few basic things...

1. Dry Malt Extract
2. A sterile vessel 
3. Tinfoil
4. A stir plate (not essential)
5. Yeast
6. A sterile toothpick of inoculation loop
7. Scale

Directions...

1. The first step is to make a wort that is about 1.040 gravity. This is easy to do using Dry Malt Extract, simply add 1 oz of Dry Malt Extract for every cup of water. 
2.  Boil the wort to sanitize it
3. Sanitize the inoculation loop and whatever you will be growing the yeast in
4. Add the wort to the vessel and place tinfoil over the top, allow the wort to cool to 80 F
5. Add the yeast, using sterile practices, to the wort (you will only need a very small amount of yeast, a few colonies will do)
1. If you have a packet from Wyeast or a tube from White Labs you can add the whole tube 
6. If you have a stir plate available to you you can place the vessel on the stir plate in order to promote propagation. If you do not you should pick up and swirl the vessel as often as you can in order to keep it oxygenated.

The only tough decision is how much of a starter to make. If you are using a tube or packet from a commercial yeast producer you probably want to use a quart of wort. If you are picking single colonies you will only need 2 cups of starter (that you can then step up to a quart if you would like). I like to place my starters in the fridge after they have grown for 2 days in order to make the yeast fall to the bottom. I can then pour off the majority of the liquid and add only the yeast to the beer. A starter is good for a week in the fridge before you need to think about starting over.

Wild Brewing: Update 1

So far we have raised just a little under $1000!

Thanks to all of our sponsors!

We still have a ways to go and anything (even 5 bucks) goes a long way to helping us reach our goal!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/498841754/wild-brewing?ref=home_location