“Beer is meant to be drunk” is an axiom I’ve tried to really take to heart when it comes to beer. With my homebrew, I figure I can always make more, and there are new and exciting recipes and styles to try.  Just about every person who enters my apartment is offered the perfunctory first pint, as well as usually a second or third. If beer geeks are involved, I love to dig deep into the closet and pull out a big barleywine or imperial stout, if the imbibers on hand are sure to enjoy it. I also happen to consider myself something of a craft beer evangelist, and will try to bend the ears and taste buds of anyone who will listen.

With this in mind, I sent local pork hawker Ryan Farr over to a session of recording the Linecook 415 podcasts with a few homebrews, as well as a bottle of Russian River’s Blind Pig (it seemed appropriate.)  My first inkling that everything hadn’t gone to plan was a tweet from the podcast. A few days later, the whole thing was posted online for all to hear. Here’s what happened:

You can find the whole thing on Richie’s excellent Line Cook 415 Blog. My reaction was a mix of horror and amusement. They took it in stride, laughed it off and enjoyed the beer that was left in the bottle. The brew in question was a blend I had bottled a few months ago, made up of 75% Belgian Wit and 25% Belgian Blonde brewed with Wild Yeast.  The explosion has made me reflect a bit on just what kind brewer I am, and what kind of brewer I want to be. 

 

Of course, it didn’t really “explode” as much as was a gusher.  The beer was under way too much pressure, and when that pressure was released, it caused a chain reaction where the CO2 rushed out of the beer very, very quickly.  Essentially the same thing that happens when you drop a Mentos in Diet Coke. I’ve had plenty of professional retail beers do this – often from some of my favorite breweries.  Beer is a living creature, and can be somewhat unpredictable, especially when wild yeast is involved. 

Warning: geeky beer content ahead.  I’ll do my best to explain in plain english, but I don’t claim to be any sort of a biochemist.  If I get things wrong, I assume more dedicated scientists than I (looking at you Dad) will jump in to correct me. Most all beer is brewed with a strain of Saccharomyces Cerevisiae.  This yeast includes both ales and lagers, from your mass produced flavorless lagers to fruity belgian ales.  However, there are other, “wild” yeasts (and not yeasts) out there that can be used for brewing. These include Brettanomyces, Saccharomyces, and the bacterial strains Lactobacillus and Pediococcus.  There has been a resurgent interest in these alternate strains in the craft brewing world, buoyed by the trend of barrel aging. These wild bugs can produce a wide variety of different flavors, which can be considered funky, off, sour and delicious.  The easiest analogy is in the cheese world, where a hint of horse-blanket in cheese can be a very desirable thing.

The flavors created by wild yeast can add a depth and complexity to beer not otherwise available. It easily invokes “wine snob” like chatter about notes of passion fruit and tangerine, with a background of graham cracker and oak (I’m describing one of my favorites, Isabella Proximus.)  Traditionally (in America – we’ll leave Belgium out of this for now) these bugs have been shunned by brewers.  This is for several reasons, but a big one is that once you introduce wild yeast into your brewing system, you’re stuck with it. They just won’t die. Now, it’s being embraced by brewers who edge into the slow food movement’s principles, applied to fermentation.  The results are nothing short of extraordinary. 

Throwing caution to the wind, I decided a while back to experiment with these bugs, and brewed a beer using White Lab’s WLP655 Belgian Sour Mix 1.  This innocent looking vial contained a full assault of wild bugs, culled from a brewery in Belgium.   I brewed a batch of beer using this assortment of yeast and bacteria, and kegged it for later use.  Often times these beasties are added during secondary fermentation, or during bottling.  In this case, after I had brewed another batch of beer, I blended it straight into the bottle, using 75% traditional Belgian wheat beer and 25% wild beer. 

So what happened to make these bottles explode? Different yeasts work at different rates, and have different tolerances.  Some yeast only ferment about 75% of the sugar on hand (such as the traditional yeast) and others have their own likes and dislikes.  Changing the temperature, oxygen levels and final alcohol all affect how yeast behave.  When bottling, you ad a measured amount of sugar to provide a measured amount of carbonation. The wild yeast appear to have eaten up every last bit of sugar in the bottle, as well as the residual sugar left from the primary fermentation, leaving them with an inordinate amount of pressure, and bone dry. Open a bottle like that at room temperature… well, you know what happens. As a side affect, the farmhouse / horse blanket character is pretty overwhelming in the finished product, and needs other flavors to balance it out.

Like cooking or charcuterie, each batch of beer is a learning experience. Sometimes I learn what works, and sometimes I learn what not to do. In this case, I’m left with questions, but questions that with research and help with friends I can answer.  How I maintain some sugar in the bottle that the wild yeast won’t eat? How can I increase the wheat character in the finished beer? How do I regulate the horse-blanket character  of these wild beers?  Can it be done using the remaining gallons of already fermented wild beers? Right now, I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

I’m trying to be a better brewer. 

I’m trying to learn from these mistakes, and to revisit old recipes.  I used to brew every beer as a snowflake, and didn’t worry too much about consistency - after all, everyone who visits is just happy to get free beer. Yet revisiting recipes opens up new avenues of investigation – I can adjust the recipe, adjust my process, and really hone in on making a brew I can call my own. 

So what can I do?  Take better notes on my process.  Take more readings – how much sugar was in the beer when it went into the bottle? I have no idea – it always sorted itself out.  By paying more attention to the process and writing everything down, I can connect the dots to see the effect they have in the final beer.  Then, these notes act as a guide to disassembling what I did to track the changes I can make.  Like a cook wanting to visit the farms they source from, I want to better understand the contribution each beer ingredient and each part of the process is making to the final brew. Perhaps this sort of investigation is well timed, since there has been a big interest in single hop IPAs lately, which highlights just one ingredient being varied from batch to batch.

Yet the truth is, I doubt this will be the last beer I have explode on me. I’m sure I’ll eventually have other beers with no carbonation at all.  It’s the price I have to pay for experimenting, and pushing my own limits as a brewer. The change is how I handle it moving forward.  Do I give up on that recipe, or revisit it and try to perfect it?  

For me, I’d rather try to brew things I can’t necessarily buy.  After all, I don’t have to turn a profit, and it’s a fun hobby rather than my livelihood. These experiments result in beer, some better than others, but everything has to be drunk.  Just this last weekend I started a new beer that I’m particularly excited about: an imperial wheat beer, inspired by bananas foster.  I did a decoction for the first time, and will be adding rum soaked wood chips to the final product.  It won’t be done for a few weeks, but I’m excited. The high alcohol has resulted in a beer that I can hear gurgling from anywhere in the apartment. 

I took a gravity reading when I pitched the yeast, and it read 1.10 – which means that the final beer should be around 10% alcohol. I’m excited, and taking detailed notes on my process so that when the beer is done, I can look back at what created the final product, and tweak it, ever so slightly, to get the beer I want.

Hopefully, this refined homebrew doesn’t explode. But if it does cover another podcaster in beer, hopefully what remains in the bottle will be a better beer. 

Tags: homebrew, process

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.