I dubbed this beer a “whatever” since It’s not really any particular style, maybe Belgian Dark would be the closest, but it doesn’t use a Belgian yeast. I’m not even sure it’s an ale since it fermented with wine yeast (though it did ferment at ale temperatures).
Here’s the story of this beer: There are a couple of cherry trees in the St. Francis Seminary and last summer (summer of 2010) the trees had a bumper crop of cherries on them. This doesn’t happen every year since they don’t prune the trees; this summer there were barely any. But last summer we filled 4-5 gallon ziplock bags with cherries and took them home and put them in the freezer. I’m not totally certain of the variety of cherry but they are bright red, about the size of a nickel and sour.
This spring I thawed the cherries out and made a cherry wine from them. When the wine had just about fermented out I pressed the cherries and saved them. I then mixed up a mead and added the pressed cherries to the mead. The yeast that was still hanging out on the cherries quite happily fermented the mead and then I pressed the cherries once again. And once again I saved the pressed cherries. Then I made some wort.
I used dark malt extract and some left over specialty grains from my Backyard Anarchy experiment. I used 4 ounces of hops, which makes this beer the hoppiest I’ve ever brewed (~41 IBU). The hops came from my friend Steve’s Cascade plant, which my own cascade plant is a child/clone of. I used a hop schedule of 2oz at 50 minutes, 1oz at 5 minutes and 1oz dry hopped. When the wort had been brewed and cooled I added the 1oz of dry hops to a muslin bag and then also added the pressed cherries to the bag and added it to the fermentor. I wasn’t sure how much cherry flavor would be left in the twice (soon to be thrice) fermented cherries but I figured it was worth a shot, even if no cherry flavor came through it’d still be a decent dark beer. After two weeks in the fermentor I took the cherries (and hops) out and pressed the bag (because why not?) in my fruit press, but I was a lot more gentle this time than I was with my other pressings of the cherries. Then I added priming sugar and bottled the beer.
I’m really pleased with how this beer turned out. It is dark, malty, hoppy, and cherry all at the same time. It is surprisingly well balanced considering I was working with some unknowns (how much cherry flavor would be imparted by the cherries, what sorts of flavors would the Montrachet yeast contribute especially after the ‘third’ generation, etc). I’m going to be very sad when this beer is gone because I doubt I will be able to replicate it.
So after my somewhat successful attempt at a gruit I decided to make a real recipe using grains of my own choosing and quantities of herbs from the yard. I decided I wanted to use the Sweet Cicely and Monarda (Bee Balm) that are growing in the yard. We had also been harvesting a lot of Rasberries at the time so I decided to use some raspberry leaves in the brew as well.
I used the green seeds of the sweet cicely plant, well muddled and added them at the beginning of the boil. I added a handful of raspberry leaves and a lot of monarda (both leaves and flowers) at 30 minutes and then some more monarda leaves and flowers at 5 minutes.
The grain bill consisted mostly of Belgian Pils with a little cara-pils for body (which is stupid when you’re using a wild yeast that most likely contains brett) and some Belgian Special B for color and flavor. Here’s the full recipe on Brewtoad.
The brewing went well enough, the herbs smelled pretty good, obviously the Monarda dominated everything. Once the wort was cooled I pitched my wild yeast that had previously fermented the Backyard Suburban Nightmare and set it aside to ferment.
Then it got hot. I’m pretty sure the beer fermented at over 80F the entire time. I believe it was the hot temp combined with the lack of hops that led to the emergence of the lactobacillus. At least I’m pretty confident it was lacto, though it could simply have been the brett yeast, but it added a lot of lactic acid. It also formed this fun pellicle.
I bottled it anyway, it wasn’t terrible, just fairly sour and tasting/smelling of Monarda.
The beer pours a beautiful reddish hue with little head that dissipates quickly. The aroma is very distinct, smelling of Monarda, and some of the sourness is also detectable here. The taste is very sour and herbal with a slight malt background. I don’t think I’ll brew this again, but I’m glad I tried it. I’m not terribly displeased with the results and I’m sure I will slowly be drinking these beers until they’re gone. The lacto wasn’t intended but I really can’t be upset about it especially when the beer is called Anarchy.
I mentioned before that I’m going to label beers fermented with my wild yeast under the name Feral. Well as a sort of sub-Feral line I’m going to label beers hopped/spiced/flavored with items from my yard under the name Backyard. These are currently all very experimental beers (obviously).
The first in the series is called Backyard Suburban Nightmare. I decided I’d make a beer using edible weeds, particularly clover and dandelions. This beer has no hops and it is spiced with Dandelion Root, Clover Blossoms, Ginger Root, and Cardamom.
I made this beer by straining hot water through my not quite spent grain from my Saison (remember I had crap efficiency). That gave me around a gallon and a half of not terribly sweet wort which I added a few cups of table sugar to and boiled with some muddled dandelion roots, a few dandelion leaves, a lot of clover blossoms, a tablespoon of ground ginger and a dash of ground cardamom (because it was there).
Cooled and pitched my Feral yeast onto it the next morning. It fermented like a normal beer and I bottled it. It turned out decent, mostly to me it tastes like an alcoholic ginger beer with a slight astringency. Looking back I wish I hadn’t added the ginger since it dominates the flavor and I can’t really taste the other herbs. There’s a slight lemonyish flavor hiding in the background which may be from the clover and/or possibly the lacto bactria hiding among the yeast in my feral blend.
I’m very interested in Gruits, or beers that are brewed with herbs that aren’t hops. Hops are actually a rather recent addition to beer as an ingredient. (Please note: the following history lesson is mostly hearsay.) You may have heard of the Reinheitsgebot or German/Bavarian Beer Purity law limiting the ingredients of beer to water, barley, and hops (yeast was not yet understood as an ingredient).
Before the widespread acceptance of this ridiculous law, beer was brewed with a lot of different herbs. There was a system of Gruit houses that were controlled by the Catholic Church, they were a monopoly that controlled the distribution of herb mixtures for making ale (called Gruit) and the Beer Purity law was partly a Lutheran rebellion against the Catholic Gruit. Gruit was a proprietary mixture of herbs but common herbs in the mixture were Yarrow, Sweet Gale (aka Bog Myrtle), Marsh (or Wild) Rosemary, and Mugwort. Though other herbs such as Heather, Juniper, and Sage were also common.
In today’s terminology Gruit is a sort of generic term for a beer made without hops. I’ve been interested in what sort of brews I could make with the variety of herbs and plants that are growing in my yard.
The guys over at “There’s a Year in My Beer” blog have written up an extremely complimentary review of our Sage Ale.
The beer was incredible. There was no hops in it. The sage did all the work that hops usually does, bittering and aroming. It was really crisp, with ace carbonation. The sage was incredibly pungent and delicious – it made the beer into a different beast than anything I’ve ever tried.
Quality-wise, it was very much on par with the only other sage beer I’ve ever had, Stillwater’s Cellar Door.
Thanks, Michael for the awesome review and very nice compliments. We’ll definitely be giving you some more beer to review for your excellent blog!
I decided to brew a wheat beer with my wild yeast strain. I’ve decided to label my wild yeast beers under the name Feral, and for this beer I sort of wanted to brew a Belgian Style Wit, even though it turned out to be somewhat almost completely off style.
It had been a little while since I brewed and some of my ingredients had been misplaced so I ended up brewing this “Wit” with 4 pounds of wheat malt extract and a half pound of roasted barley that I had left over from a previous beer. So not exactly the traditional Wit grain bill. I also had a bunch of ‘aged’ cascade hops from my hop vine (yes, I know it’s really a bine, but no one knows what a bine is) I had ‘aged’ them by baking them at the lowest temp my oven would allow (170F) for like 10 hours. So I used those. So wrong hops, wrong grain bill except for the base wheat malt, how is this a Wit again? Oh, I added a half oz of orange peel and crushed coriander seeds at the end of the boil and left them in the primary for the fermentation.
After the boil I took a gravity reading and it was pretty low (1.02 something) so I beefed it up to 1.033 with the addition of some corn sugar. I tossed in the remains of my original wild yeast from the jar I had first cultivated it in, including the dessicated remains of the grapes the yeast originally rode in on.
It fermented slowly in my effing freezing house (avg temp 55F) for a couple of months and fermented down to 1.007 leaving a residual alcohol of about 3.5% ABV.
The taste is really good, very smooth, if that makes any sense. The orange and coriander are there but not quite enough to really identify the specific spices. It has a nice hop bitterness and a good wheat malt flavor. The color is a nice red/amber with a big foamy head.
The bottle label (if I ever get around to printing some):
Ingredients:
- 2 cans (6.6 Lbs) Liquid Wheat Malt Extract
- 1 Lb Crystal Malt 60°L
- 1 Lb Belgian Aromatic Malt
- 3/4 oz Tettnang Hop pellets for bittering (60 min)
- 1/4 oz Tettnang Hop Pellets for aroma (15 min)
- 1/2 tsp Irish Moss for clarity? (because I have a lot) (15 min)
- Fermentis Dry Wheat Yeast
Mash with the Crystal and Belgian Malts with a protein rest at 120F for 30 minutes, and saccarification rests at 150F and 158F for 10 or so minutes each.
Sparge the grains and add the liquid malt extract to the wort. Bring to a boil and add the bittering hops. Boil for 45 minutes and add the aroma hops and the irish moss. Boil for a further 15 minutes. Cool the wort and pour it into your fermentor. Top up to 5 gallons (if necessary). Once the wort is at the proper temperature pitch the rehydrated yeast. I pitched this batch at 80F, a little high but still safe.
As an experiment, once the beer was fermenting away farily decently I drew off 1 gallon of it into a seperate fermentor that also had added to it about 1 Lb of skinned and pulverized cucumber and about a half oz of grated ginger root. We’ll see how that turns out.
Update: The cucumber fermented batch went sour on me, after a week it smelled like pickelweizen so I dumped it.
As I experiment further with weird styles of beer and search for the boundaries of what can be considered beer I’ve become very interested in beers that don’t use hops. Mostly this is derived from my own personal dislike of the taste of hops in general, I do not care for IPAs or even PAs for the most part. So after doing some research on the internet I came across the Gruit Ale website. Gruit is what beer was before the widespread use of hops. Gruits are spiced and bittered with a wide variety of herbs (sometimes including hops).
On the Gruit Ale site I found a few recipes for brewing Sage Ale. I used the first recipe (a modern recipe) and slightly modified it during my brewing process:
Ingredients:
- 4 gallons water (for the boil)
- 4 pounds Light DME
- 4 pounds Brown Sugar
- 4 ounces culinary sage from my garden
- 1 ounce of licorice root (from Northern Brewer)
- 1 packet of Fermentis Safbrew WB-06 Wheat Yeast
I brought the water to a boil and added the licorice and 2oz of the sage and boiled for 30 minutes. I then added the DME and brown sugar and boiled for another 30 minutes.
Then I cooled the wort added the other 2oz of sage. I had about 3.5 gallons of beer, I checked the gravity, it was 1.110! At this point I decided to add water to push it to a 5 gallon batch. This lowered the SG to 1.072 still pretty high but not insane (for beer) this gravity will yield a brew of around 8% ABV.
I pitched the yeast and fermented it in my cool basement it actually took quite a while for this to finish fermenting, maybe around a month or so.
I mixed up the conventional amount of priming sugar for bottling though I think either by this point my house was just too cold or the yeast was suffering from alcohol poisoning (probably both) as I didn’t get too much carbonation from my bottle conditioning. There is some and the beer doesn’t seem to suffer for the low amount of carbonation.
Notes on some changes to the Gruit Ale recipe: You’ll notice I used one less ounce of licorice, that’s because like an idiot I didn’t bring the recipe with me to the store and didn’t realize it called for 2 oz, oh well. The next time I brew this I’ll be using 2 oz. Also the use of the wheat yeast was slightly unintentional as I thought I had a packet of US-05 but I did not. I’m sure by now you can tell my brewing process is highly sophisticated and well organized. I’m actually pleased with the results from using the wheat yeast and will use it for future batches, the fruity esters imparted by the yeast work well with this already weird beer.
