What Thinks the Knuttel?: Beer Updates

First things first

I have completed construction of my first wort chiller!

For those who do not know, a wort chiller is a device that is used to rapidly decrease the temperature of boiling wort so one may pitch the yeast into it, thus beginning the fermentation process of beer. This is done for two reasons -- 1) Beginning the fermentation and sealing the tank earlier prevents other unwanted organisms (bacteria and such) from also taking hold in your sweet sweet wort juice. 2) Bringing the temperature down faster helps improve clarity. Before I had the wort chiller, I used ice in various forms (but always barriered, you cannot let foreign water into your beer). The first all-grain brew, if anyone remembers, used the snow that was still on the ground, except we ended up losing a lot to evaporation and had to re-add bottled water to bring it back up (and somehow we only ended like.1 off target gravity).

There are basically 2 kinds of wort chillers -- immersion and counterflow. Counterflow cools wort down very rapidly, but uses a lot of water and is best suited for very large batches. It works by running hot wort in one tube against cold water in another. It also needs a destination, which conversely means you can take it straight from the pot and put it cool into the fermenting tank. Immersion cools wort down fast, but not quite as fast, by running cool water through a copper coil, which is placed in the wort.

I created an immersion wort chiller. I'm still working on a name, but Frostillicus is in the running. Anyways -- pictures.

completed coil sitting on a box of water in front of my mash tun

ready to use wort chiller with hose attachments

So anyways, I just had to test my wort chiller out. Today I made a saison, which I have titled "Les Saisons dans l'abime" after my favorite Slayer album, Seasons in the Abyss (direct translation).

Saison is a French/Belgian style, sometimes also referred to as Belgian Farmhouse ale. It was created for workers who harvested crops, to give them something to drink after a day of working in the fields (remember the water quality back then was shit, that's why they all made beer). So naturally the saisons in this early stage were all low in alcohol content and designed mainly to refresh. They were made with whatever they had on hand, so herbs were commonly thrown in with (or sometimes even in place of) the standard hop addition. Shortly after being called a dieing style earlier this decade, some magazine declared "Saison du Pont" the greatest beer ever made, marking a resurgence in the style. Notable examples of this in my Philadelphia-area state of mind are the one-off series "Saison du Buff" which was a collaboration between Stone, Victory, and Dogfish Head (Victory being from right outside Philly, Dogfish Head not too far away in Delaware, and Stone out in San Diego, but still available around here) and Yards' Saison. I've had the Dogfish Head version of 'du Buff (it was brewed in three batches, one at each brewery's site) and I desperately want to try Yards' take on the style for some reason (it just seems so out of their English-style element).

So I created my saison using a base malt made of Pilsner, Vienna, and Munich malts. The Pilsner provides a good backbone, and the Vienna and Munich also solidly provide said backbone while also imparting some color. I added 3 ounces of hops total at various stages and used a combination of herbs and lemon zest for flavoring.

The wort chiller worked like a charm, cooling it down to the 70-80 range in under 20 minutes. That is a very small fraction of the amount of time previously required.

I am going to ferment it until it appears to be done at a pretty high temperature and then I will put it in my newly purchased carboy for about a week or so to let the yeast settle and fall out.

As I am writing this, it is already fermenting.