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.

I recently brewed a Saison, it was the first beer I’ve brewed using all grain (no malt extract) and also my first attempt with the Brew In A Bag method of brewing all grain.

Let me start by saying it wasn’t a complete disaster because I did make beer, and I think it will taste pretty good. Of course I did do a few things wrong.

First off, I didn’t start with nearly enough water. The link above says you need to start by adding all of the water. All of the strike water, all water for any infusions, and all of the sparge water. Since I’ve never brewed all grain before I didn’t really know what this meant and, like an idiot, I didn’t really research it to find out. Because of this I ended up having a pretty poor efficiency (~50%) in my mash and when all was said and done I had about 3.5 gallons of boiled wort instead of the 5 I was planning for. I ended up adding 2.5 gallons of water back to my wort and adding some corn sugar to beef up the gravity.

I should have had a gravity of around 1.060 but instead ended with 1.045 after adding the corn sugar.

The other problem I ran into was burning a hole in my bag. I was using a large wire strainer to keep the bottom of the bag off the bottom of the kettle but some got around the strainer and melted. So that was fantastic. Fortunately I didn’t lose too much grain out of this hole, but the bag was shot after that. I wasn’t able to detect any burn/melted polyester flavor in the wort so I guess it’s not so bad. I’m considering just converting a cooler into a mash tun, but if I were to Brew in a Bag again, I would make a bag out of cotton fabric.

Now, about the beer: I brewed a Saison. Saison is an old style of farmhouse beer from the area of Northern France/Southern Belgium. It was brewed in the spring as a beverage for the seasonal farm workers during the summer (hence the name). I based my recipe on a Belgian Saison from Brasserie Blaugies called Saison d’Epeautre. The grain bill calls for 33% Spelt (Epeautre), many saisons use adjunct grains since the farm was basically making beer out of what it had on hand.

A few months back I had a bottle of Bam Biere from Jolly Pumpkin Brewery and I harvested the yeast from the bottom of the bottle and fed and cared for it. I used that yeast to ferment my saison. It worked pretty quickly and added some great sourish and spice notes to the beer (based on tasting at bottling). I’m pretty excited for this beer to be ready in a few weeks or so.

As far as All Grain Brewing goes it wasn’t too bad even with my mistakes. I’m not sure if I’m going to bother with brewing in a bag again or not though.

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!

Last month I finally got around to making wine from the cherries we picked last summer from the cherry trees growing on the grounds of nearby St. Francis Seminary. I had them stored in the freezer and I set them out to thaw for a few days last month. We has picked a little more than 20 pounds which should be enough for a decent 3 gallon batch of wine.

After the cherries had thawed they released a lot of their juice, freezing the fruit helps break the cell walls and causes the juice to flow. I took a gravity reading if the juice and it was 1.050 pretty sweet considering it didn’t tase terribly sweet. I chaptalized with about 4 cups of white sugar and also added about a gallon and a half of water. Tossed in some pectic enzyme and pitched Montrachet yeast the next morning. The starting gravity was 1.087.

Three weeks later I pressed the cherries and transferred the wine to a 3 gallon carboy. Gravity at pressing was 1.002, I expect to to go down to around 0.995 before it finishes.

I didn’t press the cherries too terribly hard, I didn’t want to damage any of the pits and add excessive tannin to the wine. I also saved the pressed cherries and put them back into the freezer with the intent of adding them to a future beer.

The wine at pressing was decent, though pretty tart, I’m not sure this will be too great if I leave it dry.

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.

I saw this article the other day and found it rather interesting.

Most of us still let others do the fermenting for us—we buy our bread, our beer, our bratwurst—but Kelly is obviously one of a growing group of home-based bacteria wranglers who are willing and eager to dive into the unseen world of microbes and do the fermenting themselves.

“Well, you know, I really had an interest in getting back to more real, traditional foods,” Kelly says about her path to fermentation. “And that kind of led me on the journey to finding more local, natural, organic foods. And from there I just kind of kept learning and decided I wanted to maybe make my own yogurt, and then I discovered kefir, which is like yogurt on steroids.” That eventually led Kelly to the impressive array of fermented foods in front of us.

“This is what people have done for thousands of years,” she says with a true believer’s passion. “This is how they preserved their food. In that same way it also helped them stay healthy and, you know, all this beneficial bacteria that are in these foods, the body needs that, and we’ve pretty much eliminated that from our modern diet.”

There seems to be a renewed interest in home fermentation, especially in the home brewing realm but it’s not limited to that. Katz’s book Wild Fermentation is a pretty good resource if you can get past his weirdness.

Last year my friend and fellow wine maker Steve gave us about 25 pounds of elderberries. We took them home and threw them in the freezer. This past winter we had to make room in the freezer so it was time to make Elderberry wine.

Elderberries are a big pain in the butt to process. Tons of them grow on these very thin stems that you don’t really want to have in your fermentor. So you have to destem them, actually freezing the berries and stems first helps in this process. However it still took two evenings of destemming to get through them all. Additionally the edlerberries are a deep reddish purple and they like to stain things.

Elderberries have very little sugar of their own so making wine from them is pretty much impossible without chaptalizing. I added around 10 pounds of sugar as well as water to bring my volume to 5.5 gallons. The starting gravity was 1.102 and I pitched Premier Cuvee yeast.

After about a week of fermentation I pressed the wine gently to remove the berries and transferred it to a secondary it was nearly done fermenting by then and had a good flavor. Most recipes for elderberry wine say to sweeten it but I think this could make a pretty decent dry wine after a few years of aging.