Skip to main content

Late-Hopped Blonde Ale

The finished beer, poured a little too hard
Earlier this year, I built from scratch a recipe designed to be a vehicle to deliver orange flavor in a beer. I created a blonde ale recipe, adding sweet and bitter orange peel, orange blossom honey, and hopping with Mandarina Bavaria hops - known to impart a mandarin orange flavor.  That beer took second place in the 2017 Ohio State Fair's Fruit Beer category.  The judge mentioned in the notes that the base beer probably tasted great, too.  I decided to find that out.

I stripped the recipe down to the malts, hops, water, and yeast, then scaled it to a 1.2 gallon batch for the Zymatic.

At right, you see a glass of the finished beer. It's a slightly hazy gold color with thick, white, long-lasting head that leaves behind tiny clouds of lacing. Aroma is mildly hoppy. The flavor is malty with a moderate bitterness with hints of orange and grapefruit.

Ingredients

1 pound plus 14 ounces of 2-row Brewer's Malt
9 ounces of Munich Malt
2 ounces of Cara-Pils/Dextrine Malt
0.5 ounces of Mandarina Bavaria hops @ 6.8% AA (10 minutes)
0.25 ounces of El Dorado hops @ 12.8% AA (5 minutes)
1.62 gallons of tap water in the Zymatic keg

The Picobrew web site predicts the following characteristics for the finished beer:
  • Original Gravity: 1.054 SG
  • Final Gravity: 1.008 SG
  • IBUs: 23
  • SRM: 5
  • ABV: 6%
  • Batch Size: 1.2 gallons (the approximate size of my smaller fermenters)
Mash

I used the high-efficiency mash parameters in the Picobrew recipe editor, as these were the closest to what I had done to make the original beer in The Grainfather.  This means a mash schedule of:
  • Dough in: 102F for 20 minutes
  • Mash step 1: 152F for 30 minutes
  • Mash step 2: 154F for 60 minutes
  • Mash out: 175F for 10 minutes
A sample of wort tested at 1.050 SG after the mash, and before the boil, so I think it should be no problem to hit the gravity target of 1.054 SG after the boil.

Boil

A 75-minute boil was scheduled:
  • 75 minutes: No hops additions
  • 10 minutes: Mandarina Bavaria hops added
  • 5 minutes: El Dorado hops added
Despite there being no hops additions for the first hour of the boil, the beer should still finish out at 23 IBUs and a BU:GU ratio in the vicinity of 0.42.

After the boil, the wort was pumped into a kettle and an immersion chiller used to reduce the temperature to yeast-pitching levels.  

Fermentation

The wort was then poured hard into a little Big Mouth Bubbler and the yeast pitched into it.  The beer was allowed to ferment out at ambient basement temperatures, which are 60-65F this time of year at my house.  Following fermentation, the beer will be bottled with carbonation drops and allowed to bottle condition for two weeks before taste-testing.

Post-Mortem and Other Notes

The Zymatic is definitely unleashing my brewing creativity.  It's great to be able to formulate a recipe, scale it down to a 1-gallon size, measure the grain and hops, crush the grain, measure the water, load the Zymatic, and set it to work.  I don't have to worry that I will screw up the mash schedule, miss a hop addition, or make other timing-related mistakes that could alter the finished beer's flavor.  

So far, the biggest drawback to the Zymatic for me has been the 9-pound grain hopper size limitation.  If you make a full-size 2.5 gallon batch, even when using the high-efficiency mash schedule, you have a definite upper limit to gravity that is much lower than The Grainfather.  This gravity limit can be compensated for by adding malt extract to the brew, but this means it will be difficult to scale the batch up for an all-grain brew in The Grainfather or another system - since malt extract contains an unknown mix of malts and an unknown mash schedule.  This means I will probably still use The Grainfather for my high-gravity brews like Belgian Quads and the like.

I'll be back to discuss the beer more when it's been bottled.

12/24/2017:  A quick check this morning showed a thick, healthy-looking krausen atop the beer, and plenty of airlock activity.

01/02/2018:  The K-97 yeast did a number on the fermenter, creating a very thick krausen that left a mess on the inside of the fermenter. Fortunately, it'll clean up easily enough. There is little or no krausen left on the beer right now, so primary fermentation seems to be finished. The question now is whether I bother to transfer it to a secondary fermenter, hit it with gelatin, and chill it.  For a batch this small that is mostly experimental, I'm not sure the effort is warranted.

01/06/2018:  The beer was bottled. Yield was ten 12-ounce bottles. Each bottle was primed with a Coopers Carbonation Drop before capping, rinsed off and dried, labeled, and placed into my 80F "hot box" to finish carbonating. I expect the beer to be drinkable as soon as next weekend.  A taste left over in the bottling bucket was very interesting. Intense fruit aroma from the El Dorado and Mandarina Bavaria hops, moderate bitterness, and hits of cantaloupe and orange to the flavor.  I'm looking forward to trying it when it is ready. The refractometer measured the final gravity at 5.9 Brix, which (after adjustment and correction for alcohol) works out to 1.005 SG and an alcohol content of 6.5%. That's a bit more attenuation than I expected and a slightly higher alcohol content. According to BeerSmith, it's 90.3% apparent attenuation and 74% Real Attentuation.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Yellow Label Angel Yeast vs. Typical Brewing Yeast

I currently have my second batch of rice wine fermenting with the "magical" yellow-label Angel Yeast from China, and wanted to share some of the more unusual aspects of using it.  If you've never seen or used this yeast, I suspect you're not alone.  It ships in a 500 gram package that looks like this: What makes it "yellow label" is that yellow box you see in the upper left corner of the package.  This implies that it's yeast for distilling (though you do not need to have a still or distill the output to use it).  As I understand it, inside the package is a mix of yeast and other materials which will convert starch into sugar and directly ferment it, without the need for a traditional mash step.  This can radically shorten your brewing time.  For my most-recent batch of rice wine, I heated 3 gallons of water to 155F, poured it over 13+ pounds of uncooked rice straight out of the bag, let that soak for an hour, rehydrated some of this yeast in warm water,

2021 Batch 1 - Rice Wine made with Yellow Label Angel Yeast

I've become a big fan of the Still It channel on YouTube.  About a month ago, Jesse posted a video about how he made rice wine using nothing more than water, rice, and a purported "magic" yeast from China called Yellow Label Angel Yeast. Perhaps even more amazing was the fact that he was able to make the rice wine without gelatinizing or mashing the rice.  He shows three batches in the video.  One was made by cooking the rice before adding the yeast mixture. Another was made by adding uncooked rice to boiling water.  The last was made by adding uncooked rice to room temperature water.  All three fermented out to roughly the same amount of alcohol in about two weeks. He was amazed by this, as was I. I resolved to buy some of this magical yeast from Aliexpress.com and try it out. In the Still It video, the rice is ground up in the grain mill into smaller chunks to make it easier for the enzymes in the yellow label yeast to convert and ferment.  I'm changing this up s

Making Alton Brown's Immersion Cooker Fennel Cardamon Cordial

Alton Brown's "Good Eats" series is my favorite cooking show.  I love the way he explains the "why" and "how" of a recipe in detail, which helps you understand (if things don't go right) where you may have gone wrong.  In his episode on immersion cooking (also known as sous vide), he shows you how to make a cordial in an hour using an immersion cooker. It took me a while to locate all the ingredients here in Columbus.  I ended up getting the fennel and vodka at Giant Eagle. The cardamom seeds, pods, and anise stars came from Amazon.  The Fennel fronds and bulb came from Trader Joe's at Easton. Ingredients 32 ounces of 80-proof vodka 2 cups of fennel fronds 10 green cardamom pods 3 ounces granulated sugar 1 tablespoon fennel seeds 1 teaspoon black cardamom seeds 1 whole star anise Begin by loading your sous vide vessel with hot water and set your immersion cooker to 140F. While the cooker is getting up to that temperature, meas