Category: Cypress

After brewing the Washougøl, I read the book Viking Age Brew by Mika Laitinen. He mostly talks about Traditional Sahti brewing in Finland, but he also touches on the brewing of Maltøl in Norway and the unique brewing processes involved in making both beverages in the traditional way. He encourages people to brew beers inspired by these traditional beers, but respectfully asks that you not call them Sahti or Maltøl etc. unless you are following the traditional brewing processes to make them. In fact he says that following the processes is more important than using the exact correct ingredients (other than the yeasts). It’s for this reason I renamed my beer Washougøl as I had been calling it Washougal Maltøl, though it is not brewed in the traditional process that creates maltøl.

All of that to say that after reading the book I wanted to brew a beer that did follow the traditional brewing process for Maltøl. For the process I turned to Larsblog’s post about brewing Maltøl in Hornindal. For 120L of beer Terje Raftevold uses 25kg of pilsner and 25kg of pale malt, 300 grams of saaz (or whatever they sell at the pharmacy) hops, an unspecified amount of juniper branches and his family’s kveik.

I scaled his recipe down to fit my 15 gallon system (basically halved the ingredients). I substituted my homegrown glacier hops and cypress boughs instead of juniper. I split the batch three ways between 3 different kveik yeasts: Imperial Loki (an isolate from Voss kveik), Imperial Bartleby (an isolate from Hornindal kveik) and Ebbegarden kveik (original culture).

Terje’s process is to mash in very hot at 165F (74C) for an hour to an hour and a half with juniper infusion. So you boil the water with the juniper, then let it cool to mash in. Honestly at that high of a mash temp and that huge of a grain bill, just about boiling is where you want the water to be. After the mash rest (basically while the sparge infusion water heats to boiling) you drain and add more infusion to sparge. There’s no boil so the hops are added in a mesh bag to the hot wort as it’s run off. Once all the wort is collected you remove the hops and proceed with chilling the wort to around 90F or so and then pitch the yeast (and don’t forget the gjærkauk, of course).

For my attempt I initially missed the high mash temp by about 12 degrees so it sat at around 154F for ~20 minutes or so while I boiled up a couple more gallons of cypress infusion and added that, which pushed it right up to where I wanted it. 55lbs of grain is about the maximum my mash cooler can handle, the mash was incredibly thick and I let it rest at 165F for about an hour and a half and then began draining it into my kettle with a bag of 6oz of homegrown glacier hops and my wort chiller.

Terje drains into metal milk cans and then immersed them in cold water to chill, I used my wort chiller which probably works a bit faster. After the sparge had been drained and I had gathered around 16 gallons of wort I chilled to around 90F, drained the kettle into 3 carboys and pitched the three different kveiks. The OG of the wort was 1.108, this was WAY higher than Terje’s 1.075 so I guess either he gets terrible efficiency or I get good efficiency.

I placed the fermenters into my fermentation chamber with the temperature set to 33C. By the next day they were all full on fermenting and I let them go for a week to a week and a half before kegging them. Ebbegarden was finished and stable first (after about a week) finishing at 1.032 and 11.2% abv. Voss (Loki) was second with 1.016 and 13.4% abv. After a week and a half the Hornindal (Bartleby) was still working, but I needed to get it kegged to bring to a homebrew meeting where the topic was kveik. I kegged the last batch at a FG of 1.013 making it 13.8% abv. It was around this time that I realized that I had made 15 gallons of 11 to almost 14% beer to drink mostly by myself. Needless to say I was a little concerned for my health.

All of the beers were really good, incredibly malty and fruity tasting with a good mouthfeel. There was a hint of the peanut butter flavor going on that I’ve noticed in some previous raw beers I’ve made but it wasn’t nearly as pronounced, you really had to be looking for it to notice it. I suspect this is because my previous raw beers used wheat and these did not.

Despite Ebbegarden’s higher FG it didn’t taste much sweeter than the other two, I think it did produce some acid which helped to offset the sweetness. Ebbegarden was also my favorite of the three, it had a lot of pineapple and banana flavor going on. Voss was tropical and orangey, but not as orangey as I had expected based on what I had read. Hornindal was just tropical fruity, but nothing I could specifically say it tasted like.

Would I brew Maltøl again? I think I will but I’ll aim for a more reasonable OG next time. Despite really enjoying the beer I couldn’t drink more than one a day without getting hammered so it took a while to get through it all. I also really want to make a Sahti where the mash is done in the kettle and slowly brought to a boil. Yes, the entire mash gets boiled and then drained off to ferment.

Washougøl is a beer that’s inspired by Norwegian Maltøl. If you’re unfamiliar, Maltøl is an indigenous Norwegian farmhouse beer style. Traditional brewers use juniper branches to make an infusion and use that as their strike and sparge water, often juniper is used in the mash vessel as well to create a filter. These beers are very lightly hopped, if at all. They are fermented with landrace yeast that’s been handed down in the families and villages for generations and is known as kveik. You can read a lot more about this sort of beer and the different kveik yeasts over at Larsblog.

Maltøl is a bit of a catchall blanket term that encompasses a few different sub-styles that exist in Norway. Since my own version deviates in a few ways from these sub-styles that I’m aware of and since I live in Washougal and not in Norway I’ve called my beer Washougøl. Anyway, let’s talk about the differences and my thoughts/reasons behind them.

Juniper. Juniper is a staple in Norwegian farmhouse brewing, indeed it seems to be a staple in nearly all indigenous Nordic brewing from Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States and probably into Russia as well. The species used is Juniperus communis which is super abundant in these areas. Brewers basically cut a few branches from their hedge or whatever and they’re ready to go. While Juniperus communis does grow in certain parts of the pacific northwest it’s not incredibly abundant and mostly grows at the higher elevations of the Cascade mountain range. Instead of driving up to the mountains I decided to use an evergreen that’s very abundant on my property: Leyland Cypress. Leyland Cypress is a fairly common hedge tree in suburban PNW. It also makes a delicious tea as well as beer. For this beer I cut a few boughs and used them in the mash and also to make infusions for the strike and sparge water.

Hops. In traditional Maltøl hops are very restrained or even not used at all. They are typically homegrown or procured at the local pharmacy.  For my Washougøl I used only homegrown Glacier hops (partly because I have a shit ton of them) to give just a touch of bitterness to the brew and help beat back lacto. I suspect my Glacier hops have a rather low alpha acid in the 2-3% range, but I aimed for an IBU level of around 12 using hops in both the mash and toward the end of the boil.

Kveik. Kveik is yeast that has been passed down for generations from brewer to farmhouse brewer in Norway. While kveik is starting to become available to brewers around the world and is certainly an option for Washougøl, it wouldn’t be especially Washougally to use yeast from 5000 miles away. Instead I chose to use my local wild yeast culture that I’ve been using for 6ish years now. It’s obviously not handed down from my great grandfather but it does seem to be the dominant yeast in this area and it makes delicious beer, I’ve been using it for a while and it’s one of my favorite yeasts. You can be sure, if my daughter takes up brewing I will be handing it down to her.

Malt. In traditional Norwegian farmhouse brewing the malts were made on the farm. This is mostly due to a long standing Norwegian law left over from temperance times stating that anyone wanting to homebrew had to do so with homemade malts. A previous even longer standing law said any farm in Norway must produce beer. Both of those laws have been repealed in Norway and while some farms do still produce all the malt they brew with, most just buy pilsner or pale malt from continental Europe. For the Washougøl I used locally malted Superior Pilsen from Great Western Malt and Rimrock malt (a sort of vienna style rye malt) from Mecca Grade in Oregon. Rye is actually more common in Finnish Sahti than Maltøl but I wanted to give a little of that rye mouthfeel in this beer that I knew would be quite dry due to my (likely) STA1+ yeast selection.

Process. Maltøl is typically not boiled at all, though one sub-style boils for around 4 hours. I boiled Washougøl for one hour. I didn’t go for a raw ale because I want this beer to have a longer shelf life. Raw Maltøl contains a lot more protein and typically goes ‘off’ after a few months (though this may also have something to do with sanitation practices and the sparse use of hops). Boiling precipitates a lot of protein out of the beer and also gives opportunity to boil hops.

Recipe. My recipe was as follows for a 10 gallon batch:

Grain:
20lbs Great Western Superior Pilsen Malt
4lbs Mecca Grade Rimrock (to impress those judges)

Hops:
2oz homegrown Glacier hops in the mash
2oz homegrown Glacier hops @15 minutes

Other:
A bunch of fresh cut Leyland Cypress boughs in the strike and sparge water as well as the bottom of the mash tun. I didn’t weigh it.

Yeast:
1L starter of my wild(feral?) Abbey yeast culture, probably an underpitch…

Process:
Fill kettle with water for the strike, cut Leyland Cypress branches and stick them in a kettle and turn on the heat. Also cut boughs and lay them in the mash tun, I stuck smaller branches under the manifold in my tun. Target a mash temp of 156F, it’s also not a bad idea to actually heat the water up to boiling and then let it cool down to your strike temp to get a good cypress infusion.

Add 2oz of homegrown hops to the mash when mashing in, let it sit for one hour. While mashing add water for the sparge to your kettle along with more cypress boughs and heat that to boiling, let it cool a bit while you drain the mash of your first runnings, vorlauf if you feel like it. I’ve stopped bothering to aim for a specific mashout temp but you can target 168-170F if you want.

Drain the sparge into the same kettle with your first runnings and begin to heat the wort to boiling. Add 2 more oz of hops to the boiling wort with 15 minutes left in the boil.

When the boil is over, chill the wort, drain to fermentors and pitch yeast. I fermented at around 85F, for kveik you can push it even higher, I’ve fermented with my yeast up to 100F outside during a heat wave and had good results. 85F is about as hot as my chamber can get with its current heating elements. After about a month of fermentation I cold crashed the beer for a month or so before getting around to bottling because the competition I brewed it for got postponed.

I bottled with a low level of carbonation, around 2.0 volumes. Typically Maltøl is minimally carbed or even served completely still.

Appearance: Fairly clear light straw color with minimal head that dissipates quickly into a thin surface lacing. Vastly different from the other raw beers.

Aroma: Slightly hoppy with a rustic barnyard note: earthy, herbal.

Taste: Grainy, herbal, a touch of citrus/lemon, funk throughout. I love it. The taste is everything I want out of a farmhouse ale.

Mouthfeel: Fairly thin but not watery; hard to explain.

Overall impression: This is a great beer; like I said above, it’s everything I want a farmhouse ale to be. I’m really pleased with this, especially since I was initially considering dumping it. This was the other half of the batch with the cypress/lemon balm wort, fermented with a wild sacc/brett mix for four months. It had this sort of unpleasant dirt flavor going on that I really disliked, I think from the lemon balm? I figured I should try dry hopping it so I filled a bottle from the fermenter, dropped a couple of horizon pellets in and a carb tab, after a week it was pretty good. I tried it again with some glacier pellets and it was also good so I kegged it with both and I was blown away! The dirt flavor is gone and replaced by this pleasant citrus note. Additionally the hops just seem to accentuate the funk from the brett. I need to dry hop with these hops more, they really are my favorite varietals.

Another thing rather striking is the clarity of the beer. Considering the other raw ales were quite hazy this one is downright transparent. I don’t know if that’s from the time or the brett or both.

Appearance: The beer is a pale amber and slightly hazy with a large pillowy head of foam that dissipates very slowly and never fully goes away. Quite a bit of lacing here as well.

Aroma: Grainy with a touch of an earthy herbal aroma and some fruitiness with a hint of lemon that comes out more as the beer warms up.

Taste: This is a malty beer with a fruitiness from the yeast and the herbs involved, it actually harmonizes quite well, nothing dominates. It’s not bitter but there is some hiding in the background, due to the beer’s dryness it, again, balances very well.

Mouthfeel: There is good body, it’s not thick like the spruce ale, but a nice body that sticks in your mouth for a bit after swallowing.

Overall Impression: This beer is very good, it’s extremely well balanced (toward the malty side). Considering that it’s a ‘herbal’ (not sure if cypress counts as a herb?) beer it’s not punching you in the face with either the cypress or the lemon balm and if you weren’t told they were in there you may have difficulty picking them out.

Filling fermentors with unboiled wort

This past weekend I was able to try a brewing technique that I’ve been wanting to do for a few months now: Brew a no-boil beer, AKA Raw Ale. most brewers have been taught that you have to boil beer, that’s just the way it is and it’s not something to be questioned. Kind of like how beer always has to have hops and barley. None of these is necessarily true, and most of these requirements stem from laws governing commercial production of beer some of them dating back hundreds of years. The truth is, before the advent of large metal pots for boiling in and cheap abundant fuel sources, it was more likely that most beer was not boiled, just heated enough to hasten the conversion of starches to sugars. I’ll admit right off that the historical aspect of this is appealing to me, but more appealing is the amount of time and fuel I can save by brewing this way; practicality FTW.

But wait, you say, isn’t boiling necessary for various practical purposes, like sanitization and hop isomerization? The answer is not exactly. The three main reasons to boil your beer generally taught is to pasteurize your wort to prevent unwanted infection, to boil off DMS which will otherwise make your beer taste like canned corn, and to isomerize and dissolve alpha acids from hops into the wort to lend bitterness to your beer. There are some other things that also happen in the boil but these three are often touted as the main reasons why you have to boil your wort. Let’s talk about them.

1. Boiling pasteurizes your wort. Actually pasteurization can happen at much cooler temps than boiling. It will happen in 30 minutes at 150F and in like 3 seconds at 160F. So your standard hour long mash should be effective pasteurization for your wort.
2. Boiling drives off DMS. This is true, the thing we’re missing is that DMS doesn’t form until the wort reaches 175-180F so if you don’t go above this you don’t get DMS.
3. Boiling isomerizes and dissolves alpha acids from hops. This is true and is the biggest drawback to brewing raw ale. However you can get some isomerization and IBUs by putting hops in your mash. By using high alpha varieties (I like Horizon) and in large quantities you can achieve an IBU level that is fine for a number of styles; styles I happen to enjoy. You’d probably have trouble getting to IBU levels required for a double IPA with this method, but for belgian/farmhouse styles 10-15 IBU is ok. I’ve also thought about adding hops in your strike and sparge water, I’ve read that you need some sugar in solution to get isomerization but have never actually seen any science backing this assertion up.

So having rationalized away most of these requirements, I felt confident to give raw ale a try. Due to it being Father’s Day weekend and me having an awesome wife, I was able to brew on Saturday and Sunday. This did indeed shave a couple hours off of my brew day so I was happy about that (and so was Anne). I brewed a spruce beer on Saturday and a lemon balm and cypress beer on sunday. I used slightly different techniques for each to see sort of what that would do for the beers.

Spruce beer

hopped strike water in the mash

For this beer I used the following recipe:

• 14 lbs Northwest pale malt
• 6 lbs Munich 20L
• 4 lbs Flaked wheat
• 4 oz Horizon hops (11.5% AA) in the mash for 70 minutes (60 minutes saccharification + 10 minutes mashout)
• 4 oz Spruce tips in the mash for 70 minutes (60 minutes saccharification + 10 minutes mashout)
  
• 4 oz Spruce tips in the mash for 40 minutes (30 minutes saccharification + 10 minutes mashout)
• 4 oz Spruce tips in the mash for 20 minutes (10 minutes saccharification + 10 minutes mashout)

I mash in a cooler and I add water that’s well above my strike temp to the room temp cooler, then let the water cool to my strike temp before doughing in. Right before I added the water I though, i should add some hops now, so I dumped in about half of the 4 oz right before I added the 180F water to the mash cooler. It took about 12 minutes to cool to my strike temp of 166F when I added the grain the rest of the hops and the first charge of spruce tips. After 30 minutes I added the second charge and sorta kinda stirred them into the mash and the same again 20 minutes later. After the full 60 minute mash the temp was down to about 150F which is more than I typically lose. I’m going to blame opening the mash up twice and adding cold/frozen spruce tips to it; still an acceptable loss. I vorlaufed about 3 gallons until it was running quite clear and drained the mash. My first running gravity was 19° Brix (1.077) according to my refractometer. I added 7.5 gallons of sparge water at 180F and achieved a mashout temp of 168F that I let sit for 10 minutes and then vorlaufed and drained again. Second running gravity was 8.4° Brix (1.034).

After draining the sparge, I began chilling the wort for pitching yeast, hey, it’s a no boil! Chilling didn’t seem to be much shorter than when I boil which does make sense. Once I got it down to 80F I drained into two carboys and pitched yeast. For this beer I’m trying out a new local yeast I harvested in some final runnings from my last brew day in the spring that I left sitting open to the air while I cleaned and put everything away then I added a plum blossom from my tree and it was fermenting by the next day. The other half got my other test local yeast that has proven itself in a few batches already and I’d like to see the differences between these two. As part of my ongoing investigation into the theory that the dominant yeast around my neighborhood is an expressive fruity bubblegum belgiany yeast. The OG for the beer was 12.4°Brix (1.050) according to my refractometer and 1.046 according to my hydrometer so I’m not sure what to believe.

Update: Tasting notes for the spruce beer

Lemon balm and cypress beer

Lemon balm, cypress and hops in the mash cooler

On Sunday I brewed this recipe:

• 11 lbs Northwest pale malt
• 9.25 lbs Pilsner malt
• 3.75 lbs Munich 20L
• 3 oz Glacier hops (5.6% AA) in mash for 80 minutes (+ mashout)
• .75 oz East Kent Golding hops (5.9% AA) in mash for 80 minutes (+ mashout)
• .75 oz Fuggles hops (6.3% AA) in mash for 80 minutes (+ mashout)
  
• 8 oz Leyland Cypress boughs in mash for 80 minutes (+ mashout)
• 7 oz Lemon Balm plants in mash for 80 minutes (+ mashout)
  
• 1 oz Glacier hops in first wort/whirlpool?
• .5 oz Saaz hops in first wort/whirlpool?
• 4 oz Leyland Cypress boughs in first wort/whirlpool?
• 7 oz Lemon Balm plants in first wort/whirlpool?
  

For this beer I just dumped all of the herbal and hop mash additions into the mash cooler before I added the hot water that had to cool down it also took about 12 minutes to cool to strike temp and then I mashed for 60 minutes at 154F then I added 4 gallons at 207F to step up to 170F for 20 minutes. Beersmith says I should get around 8.5 IBUs from these mash hops. Then I did a vorlauf and drained into my kettle that had the first wort/whirlpool (i’m really not sure what to call that addition? first wortpool?) herbs. Then I sparged with 3.5 gallons of water at 170F to get a rinse of the remaining sugars. First running gravity 15° Brix (1.061), second running gravity was 9° Brix (1.036). Then a chilled, split between two fermentors and pitched yeast, one a combination of my two wild strains that contain brett and the other my first local yeast from the area. OG 13.2° brix (1.053).

Hops, cypress and lemon balm chilling in the first wortpool

My thought with the first wort/whirlpool additions is to get some more flavor and aroma from those hops and herbs. I’m not certain I’d really get much in the way of IBUs out of hops in this addition, but possibly? The reality of hops is that it’s not IBUs that give their preservative effects, if it was then stuffing casks of IPAs and other beers with dry hops for the voyage to India would have been pointless for the British. I also know a guy who added hops to a batch of pickles and they didn’t ferment, so IBUs don’t matter for preservation, just bittering, though other hop flavor compounds can give a perception of bitterness as well.

Update: I’ve added some misc notes and observations in a new post. Tasting notes to come soon.

Update: Tasting notes for the lemon balm and cypress beer

In Norway there is a tradition in a lot of farmhouse brewing to use a juniper infusion for your strike and sparge water. Basically, strike and sparge water are heated in the kettle with juniper boughs. Additionally, juniper boughs are used in the mash vessel as a filter bed/false bottom to aid in lautering.

I don’t have access to much juniper where I live, but I have a bunch of Leyland Cypress trees on my property and the boughs of this tree make a really nice tea. So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try making beer using cypress infusion in the spirit of traditional Norwegian brewing. It didn’t hurt that I am of Norwegian ancestry either.

So I trimmed a few branches off of a tree and set up my HLT and mash vessel with a bunch of cypress boughs for the brew.

I also took this opportunity to attempt a 15 gallon batch of beer. I have a 19 gallon boil kettle so I can’t quite do a full boil without making a huge mess via boiling over but I can get pretty close. I figured I’d just top up at the end of the boil before chilling, which is what I did.

The strike water had a nice piney aroma to it, I hopped with all glacier hops, which, if you’re not familiar with them, they are described as ‘hoppy’ which seems unhelpful, but it actually fits quite well. I really like these hops and I’d like to get some rhizomes to grow them next spring.

For the 15 gallon recipe I used the following ingredients:

• Loads of spruce boughs (I didn’t weigh them) for the strike and sparge water, and also in the mashtun.
• 18lbs Pilsner Malt
• 2lbs Aromatic Malt
• 2lbs Cara-pils Malt
• 2oz Glacier Hops (first wort) @90 Minutes
• 1oz Glacier Hops @10 Minutes
• Mute Dog Abbey Yeast
• Mute Dog Palatki Yeast
• Brewery Ommegang House Yeast

Each of the three yeasts fermented a separate 5 gallon batch of the beer. I ended up unintentionally mashing a lot lower than I had planned. I think my problem is inaccurate volume measurements when I pour the strike water into the mash vessel. Anyway I mashed at about 148F for an hour and did a 90 minute boil. At flame out I topped my wort up to 15 gallons and chilled it down to 75-80F and drained into 3 separate carboys for fermenting with the three different yeasts. The OG was 1.039, one point higher that BeerSmith calculated.

After 2-3 weeks of fermentation I took some gravity readings and the gravity for each batch was crazy low ~1.001. I sampled all three batches and they were good, very dry somewhat saisony tasting. I kegged the batch that fermented with my Abbey yeast and left the other two batches alone.

After drinking off the keg for a bit, I felt like you couldn’t really taste much in the way of cypress in the beer. There was just a hint of something slightly different about the flavor of the bitterness that maybe might possibly be cypress, but it if you didn’t know about the cypress, you probably would even notice, let alone identify it as cypress.

I decided to try dry cypressing one of the other two batches. The beers had been in primary for about two months by this time. The batch with the palatki yeast looked to be forming some sort of brett pellicle so I figured I’d leave that one alone to get funky and dry cypress the batch with the ommegang yeast. I took another gravity reading and it had gone down to 0.997!

I collected 12oz of additional cypress boughs and added them to a brew bucket, then I racked the beer onto them, sealed up the bucket and put an airlock on. I let them steep for about a week before racking the beer into a keg. The beer has been in the keg for almost a week now and it is just beginning to get fully carbonated. It tastes incredible. I may have overdone the dry cypressing, it is intense in the aroma and flavor of the beer. An earthy, woody, aroma, followed by a fruity, almost christmas tree but not quite, citrusy/ascorbic acid flavor, with some malt and hop bitterness in the background.

I really like it a lot.

I’m not sure what fate lies in store for the last 5 gallon batch, I figure I’ll let it hang out for a few more months and see if the brett does anything interesting to it. I do know that I definitely like this beer and it will likely need to become part of some sort of seasonal rotation or something. I do want to see how the flavor might be different from boughs harvested in the spring vs late summer as my wife tells me she can definitely taste a difference in the tea she’s made recently vs the stuff made in the spring.

View all the photos from the creation of this beer on imgur.