In the Lab: Recipe Formulation

I have received questions about where my recipes come from so I thought I would post on it.

Let me start by stating that The Brewing Network is the single best source of brewing knowledge available to anyone with an internet connection. PS - All of their content if free as well. Listen, learn, love it, donate.

I am a student of The Brewing Network (The BN) and of many of their guests. For years my homebrewing recipes and practices were an attempt at mirroring Jamil Zainasheff. I listened to every podcast, interview, and read every article I could that had Jamil attached to it. Three batches into my homebrewing career, I was brewing all grain and following Jamil's recipes that are available in his book Brewing Classic Styles. I brewed those beer for four years, trying to brew every style in the BJCP guidelines. Now that I am applying myself to commercial brewing I have put all of those recipes aside as I try and forge my own path in the world of zymurgy. However, that does not mean that I have moved on from the BN.

I am familiar with brewing american pale ales, but I have only brewed one american IPA. The reason I have shied away from them is that it is a difficult category to enter in competition and come away with a win. Your IPA's MUST be fresh, after six weeks IPA's are in decline. Also, judging order in an IPA flight is a wild card that is tough to overcome. Being placed late in an IPA flight can take a standout beer and make it taste like an average beer due to palate fatigue for the judges. It is just part of the game with competition brewing. So when I came to formulating my Professor IPA for Cranker's I found myself once again leaning on my original source of brewing knowledge, the BN podcast archive.

I went back and listened to interviews from brewers like Vinnie Cilurzo (Blind Pig IPA), Matt Brynildson (Union Jack IPA), Chuck Silva (Green Flash IPA), Mike "Tasty" McDole (Every Beer He Has Ever Made), and Nathan Smith (Dankness IPA). All of these guys are amazing brewers who give freely of their own knowledge for the betterment or craft beer. It is fascinating to look at the various approaches to creating amazing IPA's. After learning what each brewer is trying to accomplish with each ingredient and technique they employ I was able to create my own beer.

The Professor IPA batch number one will be boiling away in my kitchen in a few days. Sure it will take some iterations before I get the beer just where I want it, but I know the service that the BN provides has me well on the path to the beer I want to pour from the taps at Cranker's.

Drink good beer with good people!

To Helles Or Not To Helles

I am a bit of a beer purist. Magnify that by the fact the I teach and love history and you get some pretty old school beer style dogma. I am all for innovation in beer, but the old school styles are something special. Pilsner, munich helles, bock, vienna lager, dortmunder - all are beer styles that organically grew out of the agricultural and environmental necessity of their respective birthplace. I find it fascinating that german pilsner's color, malt, and hop profile are largely a result of creating the beer that went best with the water profile of Plzen (Pilsen). Talk about drinking locally. To me beer is history as much as beer is food (more on that on another day).

Every brewpub has it's light beer. Let me say first of all that there is nothing wrong with a beer that is gently flavored. If you are a BudMillerCoors (BMC) drinker that is fine. Those beers aren't for me and I would argue that they aren't for you either. In my opinion, all BudMillerCoors drinkers should be drinking well made fresh munich style helles. First of all, it tastes like beer. We all have a conception of what beer is supposed to taste like and a crisp helles hits those marks better than the BMC products. Munich helles has a light bready pils malt flavor with just a hint of herbal hop aromas. That leads into a low hop bitterness that provides a gentle malty sweetness that serves as the beer's focal point. It is light, crisp, and easily quaffable. Better yet, it is real, it has roots and history, and it is delicious.

It is a goal of mine to have the light beer of Cranker's Brewpub to be a munich helles. This can be tricky. A helles is a lager. That means that it uses a style of yeast, lager yeast, that is traditionally fermented in the 48-52F range. Ale yeasts ferment in the 60's to low 70's range. Because they work at lower temperatures lager yeast takes a longer time to ferment. As a homebrewer time is no issue. As a pro brewer on a production schedule time is more vital. It will be my challenge to produce a quality lager efficiently.

Now to the beer. I decided to go with all pilsner malt with a small portion of light munich malt. The munich malt is meant to add a slight malt complexity to what is a very straight forward pilsner malt base beer. I have been kicking around different concepts when it comes to hopping. I can either utilize a hop that has great bittering power called magnum, or use a hop that has less bittering power called hallertau. If I use the magnum, I will be adding less hops to the kettle. This will mean less hop mass which will lend less hop flavor and aroma to the final beer. If I use the hallertau, that means more hop mass in the kettle to achieve the same amount of bittering as the magnum. However, the greater portion of hallertau will lend pronounced hop characteristics compared to the magnum only beer. I brewed the beer with hallertau the first time and I feel as if it took the beer out of range style wise due to the hop profile, not that that is a serious concern for a professional brewer. I have kicked around the idea of blending the magnum and hallertau to dial down the hop impression. I am going to go with the all hallertau version for the upcoming Michigan Homebrew Festival and see how it is received there.

That's all for now. In the meantime, drink good beer with good people!

Salute!

Being the Bulldog

My employer Cranker's Brewpub has been interested in an amber ale to be our first beer in package available to the public. Throughout my homebrewing career I always stuck with recipes from a great book called Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. Jamil was really my brewing mentor. Aside from his book on recipes and beer styles he also hosts a couple of shows on The Brewing Network, a homebrewing podcast that I have spent countless hours listening to. (Did I already mention my 135 mile commute?) Jamil has won every homebrewing award and medal you can win and he is gracious enough to share any and everything he has learned with the public.

As a homebrewer and a father of three, now four, I couldn't brew whenever I felt like it. With the lag time between now and the opening of the brewery, I am branching out with the concepts that I learned from Jamil and forming my own recipes. Case and point: Bulldog Red.

There are a few ways to go with amber ales. Malt driven, hop driven, or a give and take of both. For my own personal preference, and per the style guidelines, I prefer this beer style on the hoppier side. The competition brewer in me is driven to brew that beer because that is what will score best with beer judges. The flip side is that I am not brewing for competition anymore, I am brewing for the public who will pay for my beer (hopefully).

With my first iteration of Bulldog Red I decided to go with a complex malt character achieved by using three different british caramel malts. I have heard from the brewers at Fuller's in England that the british caramel malts carry a different level of complexity than their american counterparts. I decided to go with two hop additions, a sixty minute bittering addition with magnum hops for the lions share of the beers clean bitterness, and a late kettle addition of chinook hops to leave a backing impression of citrus. The beer weighs in at 5% ABV with 25 IBU. I used the WLP007 Dry English Ale yeast from White Labs as it is a workhorse and flocks like mad. This is the ale yeast I plan on using for all of my ales brewed at Cranker's. It is very versatile.

I was pleased with the outcome with this beer but found myself feeding a critter in the back of my mind that was trying to get me to make this beer hoppier. I rebrewed this beer twice. Version #2 was the exact same beer as the first batch but dry hopped with amarillo hops to drive up the citrusy aromas. Version #3 used a different blend of caramel malts calculated to give me the same color as the original batch of beer. The goal here was to play with the caramel impression. I have both beers kegged up in the basement and will be bottling them up tomorrow for my employer. I am looking forward to these beers coming together for a week or two to see how they stack up to the original recipe.

I am really looking forward to the Michigan Homebrew Festival (www.mhfsite.com) in late August. I will be rebrewing the original Bulldog Red recipe and I will share the three versions with some trusted palates and use that feedback in going forward with the beer's formulation.

In the meantime, drink good beer with good people.

Salute!