I just tried the beer, I’ll talk about that in a minute. First I want to talk a bit about the why and who.
I brewed this beer as a home brew size test brew last year, I didn’t think it had fermented very well gravity readings were around 1035 ish from what I thought was a 1115 original gravity (OG), it tasted a bit sweet. So I left it in the bucket on a shelf in my fermenting room for about six months (I can be lazy sometimes), then one day I decided to try it. It didn’t seem to have been affected much by the prolonged stay, in a not very well sealed brew bucket, in a warm fermenting room through the summer so decided to rack it in to a newly acquired Cornelius keg. I let the beer sit with 15psi CO2 for a few weeks, WOOW it had become a monster! The carbonation seemed to balance the sweetness, hops were there but very much in the back ground.
I kept trying the beer and giving out samples. I liked it best with a piece of mature cheddar and that’s how it was used for a while until one day Pete Brown came to stay, he really liked it, I mean REALLY liked it. Pete wrote on his round up of 2009 blog, that he would like me to brew it and bottle it in 750ml corked bottles. I’m not going to do corked bottles but I am doing 750ml ones with swing tops.
The brew day took some planning but we got there in the end Stefano (from Thornbridge) has been a good friend of mine since he first came over from Italy in 2005. Stef was really keen to see what happened on the brew day as he had never seen this technique for creating a strong wort. Pete also wanted to be here on the brew day so this made date setting even more difficult, but we got ther in the end and the sixteen hour brew day went off without a hitch.
The brew went of like a rocket and a gravity reading yesterday confirmed that the yeast had given up after six days and had fermented about 11.5% abv’s worth the wort, 75% of the sugars were fermented in to alcohol.
HPA28° has been chilling in the fermenting vessel since yesterday and just had a taste, WOOOW! I was really surprised by how much it tasted like the test brew (in a good way), not as hoppy as thought it was going to be, actually really balanced, so Chunk I might end up dry hopping the tank after all.
I’ll be transferring to the spare tank tomorrow because I want to get the beer off the knacked yeast cells. When the yeast has worked this hard the cells can rupture and start decaying in the beer and I don’t want all those, well, shitty farm yard/meaty smells in my beer.
Please ask questions, there will be stuff you don’t understand and stuff I haven’t explained well enough, just click the comment thing at the bottom.
Cheers
May 5th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
What colour is the beer? What style is it? (if you were forced to pick one)
Will there be a cask of it appearing anywhere?
May 5th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
I used all Pale ale malt, so its pale/light golden. I tweeted on the day that I thought it was going to be a triple IPA, but having tasted it now I would say more hoppy Barley wine(BigFoot being a super/mega hoppy Barley wine that really should be called a Triple IPA).
May 5th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Good work Stuart. Great Blog and an awesome sounding beer. i was a bit cheeky and took all the measurements from your first blog and scaled them back down to homebrew size. so found this quite amusing that thats how it started. i dont suppose you could tell me exactly what the grain mix was? i have it all as pale malt at the mo.
Roll on october.
will there be a launch party? i hope so. really looking forward to this monster.
May 5th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Thanks, yes it was just standard maris otter pale ale malt in both mashes (mash’s?) If you try it make sure you do it like me and get the small beer as well, you need 5 vessels at least 2 of them heated, that way you have enough room to store all the different worts before you need them.
May 5th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Stu hi,
Sounds splendid!
What’s the PG at the mo? Did you do WALs? are you priming it? What yeast are you putting in for bottle conditioning?
May 5th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
PG is 1026.5 at the moment.
WALs?
Priming, good question probably will but not till the beer is ready for bottling, its going to mature at about 20-25C for a couple of months.
I’ll probably use US-05 for the bottle re-fermentation.
May 5th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Wahey for dry hopping! Hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands on some of this.
Interesting points about getting the beer off the yeast. I always leave primary alone for 10 days. The time after fermentation appears to have finished, makes the world of difference to my final beer … all those yeasties clearing up after themselves.
On the lack of hop front … could it be that it’s still young and once the yeast has cleared up, some of the hop aroma/flavour will come to the fore?
May 5th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
forgot about the small beer. 5 buckets!!?? the girlfriend would kill me if she came home to all that. i’m allowed one 25 litre FV and the boiler and tun. anymore and i’m sleeping in the street.
i’m definately gonna hang on to the recipe. maybe i’ll be allowed some more buckets when we move. until then i’m gonna be eagerly awaiting the real deal.
May 5th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Sounds very interesting Stuart. With the Marble Special we kept it in cask for 9 months before bottling, and we dry-hopped in cask plus threw in a pint of 1030OG Dobber wort to protect it (I think it was that anyway).
And double mash brewdays ROCK! Haven’t done one in ages but I can feel a big beer coming on before the end of May…
May 6th, 2010 at 8:02 am
Chunk, with a beer this strong the yeast have worked so hard and so fast that most of them have killed them selves, and i don’t want there rotting corpses affecting the finished beer. I’m not taking all the yeast out though and the beer will be sat in a tank at ambient temperature for at least 3 months.
May 6th, 2010 at 8:06 am
We had the mash tun, kettle, hot liquor tank and two fermenting vessels. at one point in the process all of them had something in them. you could use anything clean that’s big enough to hold a brew, but you still need two fermenting buckets at the end.
May 7th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Why the need to add yeast when bottling? Is it because the prolonged ageing will result in too much of the yeast dropping out of suspension?
May 7th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Thanks for the response. Understand what you’re saying, probably not relevant because Im not going to brew anything this strong any time soon but it would be interesting to learn a bit more about where the boundary lies between it being better to leave primary alone vs getting the beer off the yeast.
May 7th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Dominic: How would the 1030 wort protect the beer? Not heard of a technique like that before, would be interested to understand more.
May 7th, 2010 at 9:40 am
the beer will be clear by the time I bottle, any yeast that was left in suspension would probably not be viable(dead. the final beer could also be affected by adding a different strain to the one used for primary fermentation. you could add a strain that doesn’t affect flavour at all or one that does.
May 7th, 2010 at 9:48 am
depends on viability if you could look at the yeast under a microscope you would be able to determine whether the yeast is healthy or not. in my case after fermenting such a strong beer the yeast is likely to be knacked because it has worked so hard. I’m just doing what I think is best, I haven’t got a microscope by the way, my set is no more sophisticated than yours, just bigger.
May 18th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Interesting to read a probrew using this method. I use it to brew high gravity beers except I use the entire wort from the first mash to strike the second. Good stuff!