Ahab’s Ruin

With the success of my Dark Cherry Whatever I decided I would brew another beer and ferment it using the leftover pressed fruit from a wine. This time I used the crushed and dessicated grapes from my small grape harvest this year. I had enough grapes this year to make about a gallon of wine, I pressed the grapes and then added the pomace into a batch of Merlot that I made from canned concentrate, then I pressed them again and put them in the freezer until I was ready to make this beer.

After doing some research I found out that Dogfish Head had made a wine-beer hybrid call Red-White which was a Wit style ale with Zinfandel grape juice added. Since I like Wit beers and my grapes were red (they’re Marquette). The name for this beer came from a friend of mine suggesting I call these wine-ale hybrid beers ‘Wale’ so Wit Wale became Ahab’s Ruin which is probably a bit dramatic.

Here you can see the pot starting to heat up and some of my ingredients, including the grape skins and slurry in the plastic bag on the right.

I put together a fairly simple recipe for the beer, basically half wheat extract and half table sugar (to simulate the grape sugar if unfermented grapes had been added) a bit of Crystal 40 for some color and more complex sugars. Instead of the traditional hops, because let’s face it, this beer is already off the map in terms of tradition, I used Cascade hops from my yard (they’re free and I have loads of them) and, of course, coriander and orange peel. Half of the coriander came from my garden, but apparently an ounce of coriander is a lot of coriander seeds and I had to supplement with some store bought seeds.

Once the beer had been brewed and cooled I put in in the fermentor and added in the grape skins, seeds, yeast slurry and whatever other residue was left over from the wine fermentation that I had saved. I poured it into a mesh bag in the fermentor, which I highly recommend doing if you’re going to be doing this sort of thing. The beer/wale fermented fairly well though it took the yeast a little while to get started, I think this is probably because the yeast had been frozen, and maybe because the montrachet yeasts were like, “Hops? What the heck is hops?” But they got the job done in the end, fermenting down to 1.005, I was worried that it might end up being too dry.

Once the beer was done fermenting I kegged it since I recently got some a kegging system set up (which I can’t reccommend enough over bottling). It did not turn out too dry, there’s just enough malt sweetness to balance the spice of the coriander and the fruity sourness from the orange peel and grapes. I’m pretty pleased with how this came out and I’ll be making this again with next year’s grapes.