Gone Mild

Over the weekend, I fired up the brew kettles and made 10 gallons of Biere de Garde, a malty Belgian/French country ale that finishes dry and complex.  The challenge is, I’ve never been to Flanders (the region of origin for this style), and commercial examples aren’t often found on local shelves.  On top of that, there are 3 varieties of the style (blonde, amber and brown) that make it even tougher to get a handle on what a great Beire de Garde should taste like.

That’s one of the joys of homebrewing.  You can read about something different, decide you want to taste it, and give it a shot.  Assuming you’re using good ingredients and proper techniques, you can be pretty certain that whatever happens, you’re going to wind up with drinkable beer, whether it comes out as a perfect example or not.

A Biere de Garde is a fairly strong, malty, balanced beer that was brewed in rural Northern France and Belgium in late spring, as one of the last batches before it got too hot for brewing.  It was made stronger and boiled longer, then stored in barrels in the cellar for drinking.  In the 1950s, the brewer Brasserie Duyck started selling it in champagne-style bottles, and the style began to develop from a minor regional beer of farmhouse convenience into a recognized style.

In brewing my version, I wanted to get a strong malt presence without the sweetness that my bock carried.  The key to achieving that is a strong thorough fermentation, and that requires lots of sugar eaten up by lots of healthy yeast.

I went with a grain bill of 6 pounds of continental pilsner malt, 10 pounds of continental pale malt, 6 pounds of munich malt, 2 pounds of aromatic malt, and 2 pounds of Victory malt.  The aromatic and victory malt are specialty grains that add a lot of flavor, while the others are base malts that provide the backbone and essential amino acids to convert all that malt starch into sugar.

Usually, I’ll find a recipe that looks pretty good and tinker with it a bit, but there aren’t a lot of published homebrew recipes for Biere de Garde, so I tackled this one pretty much on my own.  Most published recipes use more pilsner malt than I did, but I prefer using pale malt.  The differences between the two are less striking than many brewers seem to think, and pilsner malt carries a greater threat of creating an off-flavor of cooked corn due to a substance called DMS.  Pilsner does have a sweeter, candy-like malt flavor compared to pale malt, so I wanted to include some of it.  I would describe pilsner malt as providing the treble in the malt flavor, while the munich provides the bass and the pale malt provides the volume.

I soaked the grain in carbon-filtered water between 147 and 149 degrees for an hour and half.  That temperature allows the amino acids in the malt to work on the starches and convert them to sugars.  Then I drained the liquids away for boiling.

I also included 2 pounds of piloncello, an unrefined Mexican brown sugar that adds a subtle caramel taste while, paradoxically, drying out the beer.  You might expect adding sugar to a beer would make it sweeter, but the opposite happens.  Sugar is easy for the yeast to digest, so it ferments out almost completely, making the beer drier and thinner.  It has been kind of a “lucky ingredient” for me ever since I used it in my “Triple Sugar Tripel” that won the first 75th Street Homebrew contest.

Hops aren’t supposed to play a major flavor role in this beer, so I used an ounce of Nugget hops that I boiled in the kettle for around an hour.  I boiled the whole batch for nearly two hours, both to drive away the DMS components from the pilsner malt, and also to add a richer malt flavor to the beer.

For yeast, I knew I wanted to have a large population of hungry yeast to ferment this beer completely, so I used the leftover yeast from a batch of Brown Ale I kegged from the primary fermenter yesterday.  If that sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, it only means that rather than just using a packet of yeast, I used all of the yeast that had been produced in the process of making a different beer.  I also used a bit of yeast nutrient for good measure, and a tiny amount of olive oil for oxygenation.

The 10 gallons of beer is now sitting in two big glass jugs on my basement floor, at around 68 degrees.  The liquid is foaming and throwing off carbon dioxide, as the yeast perform their magic of converting sugar into alcohol and gas.  I will let it ferment for a couple weeks or until the yeast stops working, and then I’ll put it in kegs and store it for a few months.

When the beer is ready for tasting, I’ll run out and buy as many of the commercial examples as I can find: Jenlain (amber), Jenlain Bière de Printemps (blond), St. Amand (brown), Ch’Ti Brun (brown), Ch’Ti Blond (blond), La Choulette (all 3 versions), La Choulette Bière des Sans Culottes (blond), Saint Sylvestre 3 Monts (blond), Biere Nouvelle (brown), Castelain (blond), Jade (amber), Brasseurs Bière de Garde (amber), Southampton Bière de Garde (amber), Lost Abbey Avante Garde (blond).  I’ll taste my beer in comparison to what I buy, and see where my recipe needs to  be tweaked to produce a first-class Biere de Garde.  Or, as sometimes happens, I’ll decide that I like mine better than the commercial examples, and I’ll have 10 gallons of beer I like to share with friends.

I’ve written about my willingness to violate the German purity law in making my homebrew, but I never thought I would go this far. I’ve started adding olive oil to my beer.

The issue is oxygen. Yeast need a certain amount of oxygen to do their work in converting sugary wort (the beer juice that you boil) into beer. The amount they need is a bit more than will wind up in the wort under normal brewing conditions, employing normal brewing techniques.

There are a few ways of getting more oxygen in the wort. One way is to shake the heck out of the carboy (the big bottle where you add the yeast and let it ferment) for a half hour or so. The downside of this method is that it’s a lot of work to shake up a 50 pound bottle of beer, and I make ten gallon batches, so the work is doubled.

Another way is to bubble air through an aquarium pump and aeration stone (usually employing a filter in the tubing to get rid of floating wild yeast, bacteria, etc.). The problem with this is that you get a ton of foam, and it takes forever to add some air, wait for the foam to subside, add more air, and repeat until you bubble enough air through. Plus, the foam you create is composed of the same proteins and stuff you want to help your beer form head when you pour it, and, in a nutshell, when you use it you lose it. So you might wind up with a good, but flat beer.

The most professional way is to add straight oxygen to the wort, again, using an aeration stone. There’s a little expense involved, and the stones are a bear to sanitize, but it’s the best way to add oxygen. Sometimes, though, it can be too effective, and too much oxygen in the beer can make the yeast generate all kinds of off-flavors.

A little olive oil avoids the need for so much oxygen. I’m not biochemist, but much of the oxygen needed by the yeast goes to help form cell walls. Olive oil reduces the need for oxygen in this stage, because it provides the kind of fatty acids that the yeast would otherwise need to create by itself. The science is complex, but here’s a 35 page thesis on the subject if you’re interested.

To adapt the process to homebrewing, you want to use a minuscule amount of olive oil. Too much could conceivably affect the flavor profile, and way too much could destroy the head.

For a few recent batches, I’ve split my wort into two 5 gallon carboys, and added a tiny amount of olive oil to one of the carboys. I’ve straightened a paper clip, flamed the end, and dipped the tip into olive oil, then mixed it in with the wort as it runs from the boiling kettle into the carboy. The other carboy gets my normal method of oxygenation, which consists of a splashy trip into the carboy and a bit of shaking.

The results have been subtle. In a recent Vienna Lager, both versions had the same final gravity, but the one with olive oil tasted a bit smoother. In an amber ale, the difference was again subtle, but I preferred ever-so-slightly the olive oil version. (It wasn’t a blind tasting, so it might reflect my bias in favor of a spiffy cheap way of improving my beer.) I’ve detected no downside to the method, and head retention is not impacted at all.

It sounds weird, but it seems to work. So, until I’m convinced otherwise, I’m bringing a bit of Italy to my homebrew.

On Saturday, I picked up my score sheets from the KC Biermeisters 27th Annual Homebrew Competition. I already knew I hadn’t won any awards, so I picked them up with some trepidation, mixed with eagerness to get some expert feedback on my beer.

Fortunately, the scoring was not as brutal as I had feared. I submitted 5 beers – 2 I knew were bad, but wanted some feedback on how to improve them, one that was pretty good but around a year and a half old, so well past its prime, and 2 I was happy with. I was surprised that my beers all wound up in the “very good” category, with 2 scoring 30, one 31, one 32, and one 34.

One of the 30s was one that I anticipated would score badly. It was a weizen that I thought had too much tartness and no head retention, and I’m not sure why. The judges, KC Wort Hog among them, picked up on the fact that I overhopped this one a bit, and focused their suggestions on that point. The feedback was good, and the Wort Hog suggested a potential cause of my dissipating foam.

The other 30 was my robust porter, which I knew was past its prime. The judges picked up on some phenols, and a bit of sourness. The feedback encouraged me to brew this one again – it really is a good beer when it’s fresh.

My Dark American Lager was one of the beers I expected to score badly, but it got a 31 (including a 34 from a Nationally ranked judge). A dark American lager is a tough beer to brew well – it should have relatively little flavor, like a Michelob Dark, which means that off-tastes stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. I made the beer for the challenge, and the judges seemed to enjoy it, with the only criticism being that it tasted a little too good; there was a bit too much malt and flavor for the style. Fair enough – I was glad to get the feedback without any glaring complaints about my brewing technique.

I love my schwarzbier, which scored a 32. Most of the judges’ criticisms focused on the fact it was overcarbonated – I’ve not yet mastered the science of filling bottles from kegs and preserving the proper level of carbonation. Again, I got helpful feedback from two nationally-ranked judges, which is pretty awesome. I’ve brewed another schwarzbier since I made the one I submitted, and I totally changed the recipe. I’d love to see how the two score side by side.

Finally, my milk stout scored a 34, which is a pretty respectable score. Unfortunately, there were LOTS of stouts entered into the competition, so I knew I was unlikely to bring home a medal unless my beer was darned near perfect. Again, it was overcarbonated. The judges picked up a lot of chocolate flavor; one suggested that perhaps I had added cocoa to my beer. I hadn’t, but I agree that the chocolate flavor developed from the interplay of the roasted malts was strong. It’s a likable beer, and I’m glad the judges enjoyed it.

I’m really happy I entered my beers into the contest. Sure, I want to win some more recognition, but I’d rather get the feedback to make better beer. I really appreciate the attention and comments from some top-notch judges – next year, I’ll be bringing home some medals.