Category: Raw Ale

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.

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.

Appearance: The beer pours a hazy light amber with a ton of foamy white head. As the foam collapses it forms a dense foamy cap that does not dissipate, or at least it hung around until I finally drank it down with the final gulp. Lacing is abundant.

Aroma: Wheaty with a slight maltiness, but the dominant aroma is of the spruce tips, a hint of pine but mostly a sort of cool fruity citrus? I know that doesn’t make any sense, deal with it.

Taste: Spruce up front, not piney but more fruity with a hint of ascorbic acid that grudgingly gives way to malt/wheat on the finish with a very slight fusel alcohol burn probably from the hot ferment.

Mouthfeel: Very full bodied despite the FG of 1.003, probably due to the extra protein.

Overall impression: This is a good beer, but not great. I’m not sure if that’s particularly due to the fact that it is raw, I think it’s more due to fermenting it too hot than anything else. I also think it could use a little more hop presence which can probably be achieved with additional mash hops and/or some hops in the first wort/whirlpool.

I’ve read that raw ales do not last more than four to six weeks (though I’m not sure when you should start counting). It’s been nearly a month since brewing this beer and it’s only improved thus far. I’ll be sure to update this post if it declines (or if it doesn’t).

A few weeks ago I brewed up a bunch of raw beer. Go read about it if you haven’t already. I brewed two different beers of 12 gallons each and split them into two different fermentors per batch. As of now three of those batches have been bottled/kegged and one, fermenting with a wild sacc and brett blend, remains in primary. I’m not totally sure how to approach this so I’m just going type out a bunch of words and see how that goes.

• Everything fermented at 75F because I wanted to see what my wild yeasts would do at that temp. Conclusion: I think they’re better fermenting a bit cooler but still made good beer.
  • Sub note: the two spruce beers were fermented with locally harvest strains that were harvested at different times and from different sources (wild grapes last fall, and a plum blossom this spring) but the beers tasted identical, which helps point to this yeast being the dominant strain in the area. Conclusion: build a coolship.
• After one week all of the beers were very well attenuated with gravities around 1.003 for each batch. Conclusion: I need to mash hotter or use crystal malt or both.
• After one week these beers were not ready to drink, in fact I was really concerned about them as they had what I can only describe as a peanut butter flavor to them, the cypress and lemon balm beer being more peanut buttery and the spruce beer being less so. Thankfully this lessened with time (yeast probably cleaned up some) and is completely gone when the beer is cold. I’m wondering if the extra protein in the beer is a contributing factor here? Possibly the non-hop herbs are also a contributing factor. As a counter point my wife did not get any peanut butter flavor from the sample. Conclusion: next time just use hops.
• All of the beers are very malty, which is not a big shock
  • The spruce beers weren’t very sprucey tasting, in retrospect, this should have been obvious before I even brewed it, historical spruce beers were often brewed with spruce essence which was basically just a super strong boiled down (for hours) spruce tea. I added some spruce tips in the keg to add some sprucey flavor to one of the beers. Conclusion: next time add spruce to the strike/sparge or make a spruce essence.
    • For the other non-sprucey spruce beer I juiced 5 pounds of wild harvested blackberries and picked an ounce or so of sage from my yard, added those to the keg and then racked the beer on top to fill it up and put it in the kegerator a few days ago.This has the potential to be very good, though it seems the acid from the juice has caused a lot of the protein in the beer to coagulate and the first few pours have had a lot of curds…
  • The cypress lemon balm beer has a very slight hint of a sort of dirt? flavor that’s followed by a touch of lemon and herbal flavor, though this dirt flavor seems to be going away. I wasn’t expecting any lemon from the lemon balm having brewed with it before and not gotten any. I added some additional cypress in the keg to boost the cypress flavor. Conclusion: lemon balm is a poor brewing herb, stop putting it in beer.
• None of the beers have any hint of DMS, half of the malt in the lemon balm and cypress beer was pilsner and still nothing. This is the main argument (that I’ve seen) against raw beer and it is not an issue.
• None of the beers were infected. Or if they were the infection hasn’t manifested itself after three weeks.
• The beers were not hoppy at all, this was expected, but they are really not hoppy, at all. The spruce beer was supposed to be ~15 IBUs which I know is not a lot but it seems like it may be even less? Or perhaps the extra protein in the beer is also a contributing factor here? I’d like to pick up some Polaris (~20% AA) hops and see how a raw ale with those hops comes out.
• I don’t think this is going to completely replace boiled beer for me, but I will definitely keep it in my repertoire as a viable option for making good beer.
• Supposedly raw ale does not have as long of a shelf life as boiled beer, this remains to be seen as it’s only been three weeks since they were brewed. I plan on letting the batch with brett go for a couple months in primary so I guess we’ll see how that turns out too.
• If you care about clear beer, this is probably not the technique for you.

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