Earlier this month we talked about the easiest of the many fining agents that can be used to clarify (or “fine”) your homebrew: Irish moss.  In the commercial brewing industry, particularly in the United Kingdom where cask ales are still produced in larger volume, the most common fining agent is Isinglass.  Irish moss works to remove proteins from the beer which may cloud it, and is added during the boil.  Isinglass is added to the beer as it goes into the secondary fermenter.  As you know, we recommend a two stage process as recommended in our guide.  As with all fining agents, this is not something a complete beginner should worry about.  Make some batches, get things working well and then play around with clearer beer.  Start with hazier styles where this is not a factor.  But back to the topic at hand.  When the Isinglass is in the secondary it helps contribute to the flocculation of the yeast the clumping helps it drop out of suspension in the beeer, yielding a clearer brew.  But what is it and how do you use it?

First lets say this is not a product for strict vegetarians or vegans.  And it’s controversial (what isn’t these days?) as some people feel adding an animal product to the process, even if it doesn’t end up in the final product, is a pollution of the beer.  But rest assured it has been used for centuries in producing clearer beer and it’s harmless.  Isinglass is basically the swim bladder of a fish.  Originally it was exclusively that of the Beluga Sturgeon, but in modern times it’s made from many different kinds of fish, largely tropical and sub-tropical.  It’s similar to gelatin, but with different amino acids that give it enough different chemical properties to work better than gelatin for this purpose.

Because this is an animal-derived product it’s more sensitive to temperature and acidity than other additives.  Generally it should be fairly fresh and refrigerated if possible.  Often it’s not refrigerated and it works just fine, but the reality is that the fresher it is kept the more effective it is.  As with everything else, there is no point worrying too much about it.  Just make sure it’s not too old and hasn’t been stored in the sun, etc.

It’s sold either as a “liquid” which is more like a jelly, or as a powder.  Really the liquid is easier to use as it’s ready to go as-is.  But in the event that you need to use the powder you need to boil about a pint (500 mL) of water to sanitize it, let it cool, then mix in the appropriate amount of powder for your batch.  The instructions on the package will tell you the exact amount.

So here’s what to do with it:

• At the coolest point in your fermentation process, usually just as you’re going to move to the secondary, you will add it to the fermenter (the secondary one).  You don’t want to significantly cool the beer after this as it can re-cloud from chilling.
• Put the Isinglass in the secondary fermenter before you start to siphon in the beer from the primary.
• Siphon the beer from the primary onto the Isinglass.  This will help it mix well into the batch.

That’s it!  Proceed as normal with the rest of the fermentation process.  When you move the beer from the fermenter to the bucket for bottling, the Isinglass will be left behind with the yeast sediment.  You will not be drinking fish bladders.

Are there any drawbacks?  The main drawback is that it can sometimes take a little longer for bottle conditioning when using Isinglass.  This is because you are leaving behind more yeast than you might otherwise and that means those that are left have to work harder and that takes longer.  This is a small difference, and the tradeoff is clearer beer.  It’s your call!

We discussed Munton’s malt a little while ago.  The big name in brewing malts in North America, however is Briess.  You will undoubtedly find their malts at any homebrew store you visit in North America.  So how do their malts stack up to Munton’s?  They are excellent quality products and are used in commercial and homebrewing extensively.  We’ve never noticed a huge difference in the quality of the dry malt from Briess vs that from Muntons.  Some people prefer Munton’s malt extract to Briess and we’ve found that it may sediment slightly less than the Briess DME.  However, that being said, this is still an excellent product that will make great beer.  If price is important to you this will almost undoubtedly be cheaper in North America than Munton’s will. 

The big advantage to Briess malts is that they are widely available here in liquid form.  That is our preferred malt packaging, and malt is substantially cheaper that way than in dried form.  We have had great success brewing with Briess liquid extract.  In particular their wheat extract is excellent and works very well for German style Hefeweizens.  The company has been in business since 1876, so they are certainly doing something right.  Homebrew is just a tiny part of their business, but they seem to meet homebrewing needs with the same level of quality that they provide to their commercial partners.

Since I normally have enjoyed Widmer beers and I felt bad about how terrible their W’09 Belgian Style ale was, I thought I’d review one of their best beers.  This is an amber ale and it’s not in an established style.  It’s a Widmer creation and it’s seriously good on any evening, in any time of year.  Lightly malted and lightly hopped, it’s a medium beer in many ways, but the recipe just works.  The inspiration is a convertible ride on a summer night and the logo is a dog hanging his tongue out over the side of the car.  Definitely appropriate.  But make no mistake, this is a great all season beer and you can’t go wrong picking up a large bottle or six pack of this one.  Here in Portland it’s available in 22oz bottles, six packs, and twelve packs.  I know that on the US East Coast it’s available in the same.  Everyone else worldwide are on your own.  But if you’re in Portland and want to sample one of the city’s greats, this is, in our opinion, one of the high flyers.

On Mt Hood here in Oregon you can ski nearly year round. Sure, the skiing isn’t great in the summer, but you can do it if you want to. On the other hand, the winter skiing is quite good. When you’re coming off the slopes (and not driving all the way home!) it’s often time for a little warmth. Luckily just below the town of Government Camp is the Mt Hood brewery. It’s Oregon, after all. One of the greats on tap at Mt Hood is the Pittock Wee Heavy, named for Henry Pittock, an avid outdoorsman and the man who built the Oregonian newspaper into a dominant force. His stately home is still operated as a museum by the city of Portland. But back to the beer.

This one is in the Scotch style: heavy, malty and mildly hopped.  Alcohol content is quite high, but like all good beers with high alcohol content, you can’t tell immediately from the taste.  The brewery holds a portion of each batch to be aged and then blended back into a future batch.

Here in Oregon there are other pubs around the state that serve this gem of a beer, so if you’re not in Portland no fear, you may be able to find it locally. The brewery states that none of their beer is sold outside of the State of Oregon, much to the loss of the rest of the planet.  But if you’re in Oregon, and anywhere near Mt Hood, it’s worth the stop for the Pittock Wee Heavy if not the scenery alone.

Malting is the process of taking grain and turning it into a combination of sugars and proteins. This is key to the production of great beer since malt is essentially what’s fed to yeast to produce beer.  Large breweries often do their own malting, taking barley and hops, and sometimes wheat, in and producing beer.  Other companies, and most homebrewers rely on someone else to handle this early stage of the brewing process.  We do exclusively extract brewing for reasons of time and space, so we rely on good quality malt for our end products.  Beer is mostly malt, so making that decision matters.

One of the celebrated names in malting is Muntons.  Their own slogan, as we mention in the title, is “World Class Malt.”  And that it is.  Muntons is based in the UK but their products are available worldwide.  If you speak to any experienced home brewer they will tell you that Muntons’ products are as good as any out there.  We’ve always had good experiences with both their liquid and dried extracts.  The dried extracts are much easier to find stateside for reasons of shipping cost. They also make home brewing ingredient kits, but since we’re partial to our own recipes we have never tried them. Given the quality of their other products, these are likely to be good.  We always lean toward fresh hops, however.

There are plenty of other companies that produce good quality malt.  However, if you’re buying top shelf ingredients, Muntons is probably on your list.

I’m usually a big fan of Widmer Brothers’ products. Nearly all of their beers are at least worth drinking, and some are excellent. So it was with pleasure that I tried the new Widmer W’09 release in the Brewmasters’ Series (W09). This one is intended to be a golden Belgian style ale described as having “an estery fruitiness with peppery tones.”  I was a little suspect about the description: the peppery part made me think bad thoughts. But it’s Widmer, right? How bad could it be? Train wreck bad.

Belgian ales are not generally heavily hopped.  There was that fruitiness you would expect in a Belgian beer, and the color was right.  Unfortunately there was a strong aroma of American hops and a bitter after taste that contrasted sharply with the malty, fruity goodness that is usually found in this style of beer.  Ok, so we wouldn’t expect it to be identical to Belgian beer: it’s not intended to be a precise copy.  That would all be well and good if the combination worked.  It didn’t even come close to pulling it off.  I had this particular beer on tap at the Widmer establishment and I can say it’s the first time in memory that I sent a beer back.  The waiter was not at all surprised if I read his expression well.  It speaks well to the Widmers, though, that there were no questions asked.

All-in-all a really disappointing showing from a well-respected brewery.  One for whom I have a particular fondness given that I live about a 10 minute walk from the brewery.  If you’re looking at a pack of Widmer W’09 in the grocery isle, take a pass and be glad you read this first.

Having just been on the topic of bottling, this seems like a good time to address the age old question about which base to use for priming your bottles, corn sugar, or dry malt extract?  There are, of course, other sugars that people use for this purpose, including molasses, table sugar, brown sugar, priming drops from various manufacturers, and a whole lot more.  But the two main staples are the two in the title of this post: corn sugar and dry malt extract (DME).  To understand which is better for your purpose, you need to understand what you’re doing when priming.

Bottled conditioned beers are carbonated by the gas produced by a final stage of fermentation.  The yeast is given some sugar to eat, it produces carbon dioxide, and the close confines of the bottle force the carbon dioxide into suspension in the liquid since there is nowhere else for it to go.  We’re not trying to change the taste of the beer here, nor produce more alcohol (though a little is formed).  The chief concern is getting the yeast to efficiently generate carbon-dioxide, while not affecting the high quality of our beer.

So lets analyze corn sugar and dry malt extract for that purpose alone, initially.  Corn sugar is made of simple sugar, all of which is fermentable.  There is nothing in corn sugar that will produce additional sediment beyond the yeast cells that will form no matter what sugar you prime with.  Corn sugar is easily and very efficiently consumed by the yeast to produce carbonation quickly and reliably in all bottles.

Dry malt extract on the other hand is made of several sugars, some of which are not easily fermented (or at all in some cases) and will take longer to produce carbonation.  It also costs significantly more than corn sugar, which is quite inexpensive by contrast.  DME will leave some leftovers in the bottle.  Some people claim these help with head retention in the resulting beer, but in our experience this is not noticeable.  On the other hand, in some cases a krauzen forms in the bottle when bottling with dry malt extract and that can be undesirable for the potential drinker of the bottle.  It is also more difficult to evenly distribute the DME in all of the bottles, resulting in less even carbonation among bottles.

It’s our opinion that in nearly all cases corn sugar is superior to DME for bottling.  This is not to say there is anything wrong with using the extract, simply that we don’t believe it works as well as corn sugar for this purpose.  As with anything in brewing, people will do what they want.  But our results have always been better with corn sugar, and we believe logical analysis is on our side.

In the future we may do a back-to-back comparison where we brew a single batch of beer, divide it in two at bottling time, and use corn sugar for half and DME for the other half.  If you’d be interested in seeing that, leave a comment.

Cheers!

One of the great satisfactions of brewing your own beer (and bottling it) is to look at the final product, all neatly in a row, waiting ready for a few weeks of bottle conditioning, and tasting it as it goes into the bottle.  This weekend we bottled a batch of lager we brewed at the end of November and had let ferment in the darkest corner of the basement for the last five weeks, first in the primary, then in the secondary.

When you bottle your beer, you always have to taste it.  Sure, it’s flat, but this is the first reward you get for the labor you’ve put forth so far.  And this batch was good.  Really good.  Assuming it tastes as good carbonated as it does now, this recipe will be going in our recipes section shortly.

Here’s a little shot for inspiration.  Remember, our guide has all the info you need to get started homebrewing great beer from the very first batch!

In our guide we describe the bottling process using a capper and steel bottle caps with standard beer bottles.  This is really best done as a two person job.  But lets say you’ve decided you want to keep homebrewing and you don’t want to have to find a friend every time you need to bottle beer.  There is a pricier alternative that makes life easier and requires fewer hands to do the job quickly: the easy cap bottle.

You are most likely familiar with these bottles from beer like Grolsch and Virgil’s root beer, among others.  In fact the Virgil’s and other brown bottles work well for this purpose.  We don’t recommend green bottles because of the light damage that can skunk your beer (sometimes this is desirable, but not generally).

At most homebrew shops, you can also buy these brown easy cap bottles by the twelve pack.  They are generally a couple of dollars per bottle, substantially more than their lesser brethren.  But if you brew a lot these are worth it.  You just replace the rubber seal every couple of batches.  Follow the same sterilization procedures that you do for normal bottling.

These can really make your life easier if you have to bottle solo.  It’s not the cheapest solution, but it might be worth it if you find yourself brewing often.  Just make sure you get them back from your friends.

I first had a Black Boss porter several years ago at a German restaurant here in Portland, known for their excellent import German beers: the Berlin Inn.  Black Boss, however, is a Baltic porter from Poland, the flagship product of Browar Witnica.  It’s heavy and thick, and delicious, packing a ABV in excess of 9%.  Other Baltic porters are excellent, but this is my favorite.  It’s common to describe other kinds of flavors found in beers.  I normally find that’s not terribly helpful, but in this case there really is a chocolate taste to the beer.  Being a Baltic porter, there is no burnt flavor, replaced instead by a heavy maltiness.

These are sipping beers, meant to last for an hour, not session beers to be drunk back to back.  If you drink it slowly, it’s a very enjoyable beer for an evening.  Don’t drink it in the afternoon unless you want to be asleep by 5 o’clock.

I’ve since had Black Boss several other places, including at the Krakow Koffehaus near my house in Portland.  But no one else have ever served it in a way that I first saw at the Berlin Inn.  As a float, with ice cream.  Yes, it sounds terrible and you’re now questioning my sanity.  But in all seriousness it’s great this way.  If you never thought you’d have a beer for dessert, with ice cream, no less, then you ought to pick one up and try it.  If you can find it.  It’s worth a search.