I cooled the rice down to 86˚F (30˚C) and put it in a stainless steel bowl. I sprinkled 3 grams of Koji mold (Koji-Kin) evenly across the rice. Then I put the bowl of soon to be Koji rice in my oven without turning the gas on. I put a thermometer in the rice and checked it periodically to make sure it stayed at 86˚F. I kept the oven door slightly ajar and was able to maintain the temperature pretty well. After about 40 hours the rice was covered with a fine white mold, it was now Koji rice!
This may seem like a lot to do, but it is mostly a lot of waiting and is a very important step in the whole process.
If you’re familiar with mashing malted barley for beer, then you’ll see the similarities between the two processes. Koji mold converts the rice starch to sugar just like mashing malted barley does in beer making. The big difference is that the Koji rice is added to more steamed rice and water along with lager yeast. As the mold breaks the starch into sugar the yeast consumes the sugar and creates alcohol. This happens concurrently allowing the yeast to adapt slowly to the alcohol in its environment making it able to ferment higher levels of sugar and survive in more alcohol than it normally can. Typically beer yeasts start stalling out once they reach between 10-12% ABV, but Sake can climb up to 18% due to the addition of the koji mold.
Perfect your Rice Steaming Skills
Once I had the Koji mold ready it was time to…steam more rice. Five pounds of it! I was able to do this in a larger strainer over a larger pot, but if you don’t have a big enough steamer you can do it in batches. The process is the same, rinse, soak, drain, and steam. While I was busy steaming the remaining rice, I used that time to prepare for fermentation. I added the following to a sanitized, 2 gallon food-grade plastic bucket (with lid, to be used later):
We add the acid specifically to help keep any spoilage bacteria from forming during fermentation (bacteria don’t like acidic environments). Once the 5 pounds of rice was finished steaming I cooled it down to room temperature (68˚F, 20˚C). I then added the cooled steamed rice to the water mixture and gently stirred it with a large sanitized steel spoon until all of the rice was submerged. It will be very thick and difficult to mix, so be prepared to get a small workout.
Once everything was mixed well, I covered the bucket lightly with a lid. Making sake starts with an open fermentation so I kept the lid loose. After a few hours the rice absorbed the water and became pretty solid. Doing my best to not break the rice up too much, I stirred the mixture every 6 hours. After a while the Koji mold starts breaking down the rice and liquifying it. It literally turns from a semi-solid into a mostly liquid form as the rice breaks down, which is pretty cool! Each time I stirred I made sure I kept the rice below the water line to prevent any contamination. After about 2 days it was obvious the entire batch had liquified. Now fermentation could begin!
Slow, cool fermentation makes the best sake, which is why we used lager yeast. I put the loosely covered fermenter into my wine cooler at 50˚F, stirring it once a day. I put a small cookie sheet under the fermenter to catch any spillover from fermentation. Good thing I did because it bubbled over after the first few days. I kept the outside of the fermenter clean by wiping it with a paper towel soaked in star san solution.
I stirred the sake every day and watched it ferment and bubble. I waited until there was no noticeable sign of fermentation (about 6 weeks) and then let it sit another two weeks just in case. I tasted it along the way and I was surprised and impressed at how good it was tasting! With beer we usually know when fermentation is complete because we know the Original Gravity and the estimated Final Gravity. There is no easy way to know your ABV (alcohol by volume) with sake as it is fermenting at the same time as starch conversion, and therefore no “true” Original Gravity. There is a calculator that can get you a pretty good approximation of your ABV, but it requires taking both a hydrometer and refractometer reading once your fermentation is complete. My sake came out to 14% ABV.
Once fermentation was finished I could have drank the sake if I felt so inclined. Unfiltered sake is called Doburoku, and it is delicious, but I wanted to experience the whole process and get as much sake out as I could after waiting so long.
I could have just poured the sake into a mesh bag and squeezed it by hand into another vessel and then bottled it, but Shinobu told me my yield would be less. After all this time I wanted as much sake as I could get! I procured another 2 gallon bucket and drilled a bunch of small holes in the bottom. I then poured my sake out of my fermenter into a clean pot, cleaned my fermenting bucket out and put the bucket with the holes drilled in it into the fermenting bucket (and sanitized both buckets).
They were the same size so they stacked. I then took the sake and poured it into a mesh bag in the drilled bucket. I folded the bag over and put another bucket on top with a 20 pound weight as a press. I put a siphon hose on the fermenter spigot and pressed the sake into a one gallon glass jar. I let this go for two days, occasionally flipping the bag of sake over so I pressed every grain. I yielded almost a full gallon of sake in a one gallon jug. It was still somewhat cloudy but no large chunks. I realized while I was doing this method that I could have also put the bag with the sake in it into a colander with a lid and weight on it and pressed it into a pot.
I could have bottled it right then but I wanted it to be clear so I capped the gallon jug and put it in the fridge for a few days until the sediment settled out (also known as “cold-crashing”). Then I simply siphoned the clear sake into bottles which yielded about 3 quarts. I also bottled the cloudy stuff at the bottom because I wanted to see if it was appreciably different. Shinobu told me that the finished sake would not be shelf stable for very long so I had to either drink it quickly, or pasteurize it. If I didn’t pasteurize it it would eventually go sour or become dangerously over-carbonated (i.e. a “bottle-bomb”). So, I opted for pasteurization - which was pretty easy and meant I could enjoy my sake at a reasonable pace.
After I bottled the sake and before I capped the bottles I put the bottles into a pot of boiling water with a thermometer in one of them. Once the sake got to 150˚F I turned off the heat and let it sit for one minute. I then covered the top of the bottles with some foil and let it cool down on my kitchen counter until it was cool to the touch. Then I put it in my fridge to get cold. Once they were cold I capped the bottles.
And there you have it, I had successfully made a gallon of super delicious sake. Unlike the stuff they heat in restaurants in the United States (which Shinobu informed me is usually used for cooking rather than drinking in Japan), my sake was smooth, and slightly sweet with rice aromatics.
Shinobu brought some of the one gallon batch sake he made at the same time as me to our monthly beer swap and I poured the sake that I made. Everyone was really impressed that I could make something almost as good as Shinobu, especially for the first time.
I highly recommend making your own sake, it takes time and some dedication but it is fun and is quite delicious. Learning the process has really informed my appreciation of sake as well - I’ll never look at it in the same way again!
Thank you to Shinobu and Kato sake works for all of their help throughout this project.
John LaPolla
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One of my favorite places in Brooklyn (besides Bitter & Esters) is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I have been fortunate to both live and work near this amazing place. It is an oasis in the chaos that is NYC.
Over the course of my many trips through the years to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden I’ve befriended Maeve Turner, who runs the Herb Garden there. Maeve is also a homebrewer (great minds think alike) and has been growing Nugget hops at the garden for a few years and generously lets us brew with them at the shop.
This year she grew barley for the first time and asked me if I would like to have it. The funny thing was that she gave me the barley plants, stalks and all. Typically homebrewers get their barley directly from a maltster who has already converted the barley into a finished product that is ready to use, in the form of malted barley. My business partner (Douglas) and I had to hand thresh the barley to remove the seeds from the rest of the plant. This took us several hours and in the end we ended up with a pound and a half of barley.
We weren’t sure if we should just roast the barley to use in a larger batch of beer, or malt it. Malting the barley involves starting the germination of the seed to create enzymes that unleash the starches that will eventually turn to sugar during brewing. We’re always up for a challenge and the opportunity to learn, so we decided to try our hand at malting instead of roasting.
It took us seven days of soaking, sprouting, drying, kilning and cleaning, but in the end we had a pound and a half of malted barley ready for brewing. Such a small amount of barley would only yield about 6 bottles of beer at ~4% ABV. Coincidentally, it’s harvest time for hops as well, so we were able to use barley and hops from the BBG to make our beer.
The last thing we needed was yeast. Yeast are the single-celled fungi that convert sugar into alcohol and it’s an integral part of the brewing process. Usually, homebrewers will purchase a specific strain of yeast from a lab that’s been cultured and built-up so that a healthy amount of yeast will be available to ferment a beer. Given that we were already using barley and hops from the BBG, we thought it only prudent to source our yeast from there as well.
Yeast can be found almost anywhere, especially on fruit. Maeve had given us a few pears from the garden and we cut them up and added them to a barley sugar solution called a starter. There are many other microbes living on fruit besides yeast, so there was no guarantee we would get yeast from the starter. We made four small starters, of which two grew mold (which is not unexpected) but two of them cultivated yeast! You can tell by the smell and look of it that it is yeast. I built these yeast starters up (growing more of the same yeast) by adding them to subsequent starters until I had a healthy slurry of wild yeast. This was thrilling! We were going to make an all Brooklyn Botanic Garden ingredient beer!
With the help of our employee Jack we then proceeded to make the beer. This would be the test to see if we had malted the barley correctly. We added crushed malted barley to water around 155℉, which activates enzymes that were created during the malting process which proceed to break the starches down into fermentable sugars that the yeast will consume and create alcohol. If we did not malt it correctly, this process (called “mashing”) would not happen.
Thankfully, we did it right because the starch converted to sugar! We then took this sweet liquid called wort and boiled it. While boiling we added the hops flower from which the bitterness is extracted to balance the beer's flavor. The aromatic oils of the hop boil away during this time so adding more hops after we were done boiling allowed the hop aroma to remain in the beer. After cooling the wort to room temperature we then did the most important part, adding the yeast (this is called pitching). We had previously made a test beer with the garden yeast to make sure it tasted good (which it did).
The next part of the process involves a whole lot of . . . waiting. We let it sit for two weeks, while the yeast consumed our barley sugar and created alcohol. Once fermentation was finished we transferred the beer into bottles with a little bit of corn sugar. The yeast consumes this sugar and creates CO2 gas that gets trapped in the beer and carbonates it.
The wait was worth it! We ended up with 6 bottles of a golden wild ale. The color was a sparkling hay, the taste reminiscent of a fine saison, crisp and dry. The aroma included peppery phenolics, and dare I say, a hint of pear? The hops balanced the yeast and malt flavors perfectly.
But don’t take my word for it, Maeve was kind enough to set up a meeting for us with Adrian Benepe, president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden! We sat outside on a terrace on a warm fall day and enjoyed this delicious beer. Both Adrian and Maeve were impressed by the final product and asked if we’d like to do it again next year! Yes, yes we would.
We liked this beer so much that we sent a sample of the BBG yeast to Bootleg Biology for them to isolate. Hopefully in a few months we will have this yeast for sale at the shop!
All in all this was a wonderful learning experience and a way for us to make something truly local. Thank you to Maeve and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for their help and for providing the ingredients. We hope to do it again next year!
Check our instagram for some videos on how we made this happen!
]]>On Saturday, June 19th 2021, Bitter & Esters will have been open for ten years! I have been thinking about how to describe this momentous occasion. Should I talk about all of the awesome people we’ve met? All the cool events we’ve hosted and attended? The brewery bike rides? The authors and brewery owners we’ve presented at the store? All of the breweries that have opened in the city by both customers and former employees? Should I speak of all of the incredible homebrews we’ve had the pleasure to sample? Speaking of sampling homebrew, what about the beer swaps we’ve hosted every month? The one and only Brewminaries homebrew club starting out of said swap? The Homebrewsicians? The See what you Can Brew podcast? Winning homebrew shop of the year in 2019? I have to at least speak about the support and love we received during the Covid-19 pandemic. So much I could talk about since Doug and I had this crazy idea to open a homebrew shop.
It would be a long post and a lot of these things I have already documented throughout the years in our blog. I decided to talk about you, the customers and supporters of our little shop in Brooklyn. You see, all of those events, classes, beers, swaps, everything that happens in and around the store, would not exist without you. So I can talk about these things, but you already know about them because you were there. Maybe not at every one of them. (I was at every one of them. Yikes.)
If you are reading this, you were part of making it all happen, whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or just learned to homebrew. A small business is not just the owners or the employees, it’s also the customers. We can humbly say that this particular small business has had the best customers any business could have. That is why we have been here ten years and why we will keep crushing it. Thank you so much for the happiness, love and support you have showered us with in the past ten years, through the good times and the bad. We are truly blessed.
John & Doug
(and the rest of the B&E Crew)
]]>First, I contacted my friend Chris Cuzme, a real idea guy. Chris is an owner of the soon to open brewery Fifth Hammer in Long Island City and co-host of the podcast Fuhmentaboudit with his wife Mary Izett. Chris was excited about Stan’s visit and he suggested we set up a Foraging event in Prospect Park with Wildman Steve Brill. Steve is a local character who has been running foraging events in NYC since the 70’s. The idea was to gather a bunch of homebrewers and see what ingredients we could find that would work in beer. If brewers were interested, they could then make a beer using foraged ingredients. Beer enthusiasts and homebrewers would then meet Stan at Fifth Hammer in August and taste these beers.
We had over 40 folks show up at the park on a beautiful July day to forage with Steve and his daughter, Violet. After introductions were made, Steve serenaded us with a tune by clapping his hands in front of his mouth and then we immediately got to work looking for delicious foraged ingredients.
Not even two feet into the park we came across Hedge Mustard, a four leafed plant that looks like clover and has a bitter/mustard flavor. It was a good start, I pictured using this as a late edition in a belgian style beer. A few more feet into the park we found Wood Sorrel. A very pleasant lemony herb that might be interesting in a pale ale or wit. Soon after that we came upon Mugwort, a plant used for centuries in beer making in an herb combination called gruit. A very aromatic plant that might play well with the wood sorrel.
My favorite find of the day was Garlic Mustard. At this time of year it is mainly seeds that have an amazing mustard taste and aroma and is widely available in the park (if you decide to try and find some yourself). I decided this was the plant I was going to make my beer with. A Belgian Dubbel with lots of Garlic Mustard late in the boil.
Overall, we spent over two hours walking through the park and learning about edible plants with Steve and Violet. They were very entertaining, filled with jokes and anecdotes and we plan on foraging again with them in the spring.
Seven brave brewers signed up to make beer for Stan’s visit to Fifth Hammer with ingredients that they foraged locally - we look forward to drinking them! So join us at Bitter & Esters on Friday August 18th at 6pm (my birthday, I’ll be there!) to meet Stan, get your books signed and ask some questions. Then come to Fifth Hammer on August 19th at 6pm with Stan and try all the beers made with foraged ingredients. Both events are free and open to the public. RSVP here!]]>I also wanted to get some feedback from the clubs about what we should be offering via our webstore. We know that not everyone can make the trip into the shop (but we appreciate it when you do!) and we want the webstore to offer the same experience you’d get in the shop, with super fresh ingredients, tried and true recipe kits and our awesome customer service. We launched the new version of our webstore this fall and it’s been a great success, but we’re always looking to improve. We want to be able to reach brewers that are a bit far away from Brooklyn, so I asked some of the homebrew clubs if I could stop by one of their meetings and talk about the store.
The first club I visited was Brewstoria in Queens. They meet at Astoria Brewhouse every first Wednesday. Such a great bunch of homebrewers who are quite knowledgeable, they poured some very tasty beers. I gave a short talk about the webstore and then gave a mini-lecture on brewing water. They just achieved non-profit status and that night they elected officers. They also held a mini raffle to help raise funds for the club. We talked about moving one of our monthly swaps to the second Wednesday so we can have some Brewstorians join the party!
The next night I visited Pour Standards Richmond County Homebrew club in Staten Island. Bitter & Esters and Pour Standards pretty much grew up together. These men and women are a very philanthropic bunch. Among other things, they organize an amazing homebrew charity event every year called Brew for Autism that raises a ton of money for Autism Speaks. An awesome bunch of brewers, three of them are in the process of opening Kills Boro brewery. They meet the second Thursday of every month at Flagship Brewery, although this month was on the first Thursday because of the holidays. It’s easy to get to if you’re traveling from Brooklyn or Manhattan, right off the ferry.
It was an interesting evening because all of the women in the club were listening to Lauren Grimm of Grimm Artisanal Ales give a talk in the brewery for the monthly Women’s Craft Beer Society meeting. So it was just me and the guys in the tap room, sitting on couches by an awesome fake fireplace, drinking their delicious brews. Great time and great meeting. Extra thanks to Lauren for the ride back to Brooklyn!
The next day was a bar crawl organized by B&E and the Brewminaries homebrew club in Brooklyn. The Brewminaries are the largest homebrew club in NYC and started out of our monthly beer swaps. We were celebrating the release of a beer that we all collaborated on with Kings County Brewers Collective, called Nightmare on Troutman Street. So not officially a meeting, but I still got to hang out and drink beer with the Brewmies, at seven bars by the store!
On Monday I visited the Dive Bar Homebrewers Symposium. Not a club but a meeting of like minded homebrewers who get together to share beer, much like our swap.They meet on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the Dive Bar on 96th and Amsterdam. The symposium I went to was their anniversary / holiday party. They had a cask of delicious juniper ale tapped that they collaborated on. Interestingly enough the Dive Bar had Nightmare on Troutman street on tap. Of course I had to have one! Again, great people, great brewers.
If you are a homebrewer and not a member of a homebrew club, I urge you to join one. Not only do you get to meet great people and drink great beer, if you are a dues paying member you get discounts at Bitter & Esters. Check out my earlier blog on all of the clubs in the city.
I plan on hitting up the rest of the NYC homebrew clubs in the new year. Three meetings per month is my limit! Thank you to the clubs for having me and a big thank you to all of the venues that host the homebrew clubs.
We’d also love to have you check out the new webstore. We are offering free shipping to all readers of my blog until the end of December. Just use code BlogFreeShipping2016 at checkout.
I’ll see you out clubbing!
John]]>Bottling is a great way to package when you first start homebrewing, and priming your beer has it’s advantages. With the help of a little more sugar, the beer goes through a small secondary fermentation in the bottle. This helps condition your beer and make it taste a little smoother (among other things). All you really need to package your beer is bottles, corn sugar, caps and a capper.
While bottling can be easy, it doesn’t mean it’s not a bit of a chore. For five gallons you need 48 bottles (which need to be stored somewhere). You have to clean, sanitize, fill and cap them. And then you have to wait again! Two weeks at least, three weeks is better. If you are like me, you tend to open them way too early because you just want that beer! You should keep the bottles at a cool, yet not cold, temperature while they condition. You have some control over the amount of CO2 you get in your beer when you bottle condition, but sometimes things get weird and you have foamy beer, or worse, bottle bombs!
So how does the intrepid homebrewer speed up the time it takes to get from grain to glass? Kegging. It’s a great alternative to bottling that has some higher upfront costs, but saves you a ton of time and effort down the line. It’s just one vessel to fill (and clean and sanitize). It can be carbonated in a few days (or one hour if you use the new Quickcarb from Blichmann) instead of two or three weeks. It’s great having only one large vessel to clean and sanitize instead of 48 small ones. You only have to transfer your beer once. And you can dial in how much CO2 gets in your beer. The very best part is you have beer on tap. Drink as little or as much as you want!
The only real drawback to kegging is that you need somewhere to keep the keg cold both while carbonating and serving, like a chest freezer or a dedicated fridge. You have to buy extra stuff like a regulator, a small CO2 tank, a keg and some hardware. But once you get up and running, no more bottles! If you want to bring beer to a party you can always bottle up your beer using the Blichmann beer gun. The truth is, once you start kegging you’ll never go back to bottling.
Kegging is super easy. It’s just transferring your beer into the sanitized keg, getting the beer cold, putting it on CO2 and waiting a few days. Then you just dispense your beer either through a handheld “picnic” tap or a faucet like you see in a bar. If you want to get fancy you can add nitrogen instead of CO2 and pour your beer with a nitro tap to make those awesome creamy stouts. You can’t do that with bottle conditioning, but that is a blog for another time.
Kegging intimidated me a little at first, but after I kegged my first beer I couldn’t believe I waited so long to do it. I learned everything I needed to know from this booklet from the American Homebrewers Association. It teaches you everything about kegs, how to clean them, how to transfer beer and what pressure (PSI) to carbonate at. One disclaimer, the booklet is from the 90’s so please ignore the prices!
Bitter & Esters has everything you need to keg and we run free kegging demos every 6 weeks or so. And as always we are available to answer any questions you may have.
Happy kegging!
John
Image credit: Beer Taps by abruellman
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When you make Berliner Weisse Guy we recommend pitching yeast, lactobacillus and brettanomyces together. Primary fermentation will be around three weeks and then you’ll rack to a secondary glass carboy for around three months to get all of that brett goodness. This is a refreshing low alcohol beer that will be worth the wait.
If you want to sour right away, the quickest way to sour a beer is to kettle sour. This involves creating your wort, cooling it down to around 120F and either pitching in some Lactobacillus or a handful of crushed malted barley (which contains lactic acid bacteria) and letting it sit at that temp for a day or two until your wort is the sourness you would like. Once it is there you bring you wort to a boil as usual, add your hops and ferment with an ale yeast of your choice. It helps to have a heating blanket to wrap around the wort to maintain the temperature while the souring is taking place. It is also a good idea to purge your wort of oxygen with some co2 and cover it with plastic wrap to keep it from oxidizing. If it oxidizes you can get a cheesy flavor that will not boil or ferment out.
Brettanomyces can eat sugars that other yeasts cannot. Make sure you are done fermenting before bottling to avoid bottle bombs. It is also a good idea to repitch about a gram of fresh dry ale yeast for five gallons at bottling time to ensure carbonation. It is good practice to reserve the fermenters and tubing and such on the cold side of making a sour beer for sour beers. Many of these bugs have a biofilm that makes them hard to clean and sanitize. Using them for non sour beers just might sour them anyway!
For more information on making sour beers check out our friend Michael Tonsmeire’s excellent blog the Mad Fermentationist.
If you are new to sour beers, go to your local bottle shop and try a Berliner Weisse or a Flanders Red (Rodenbach Grand Cru is my favorite) or one of the many new American sours out there (Peekskill Simple Sour comes to mind). You will be pleasantly surprised.
John
]]>We also have several hop forward pale ale and IPA recipes. Two awesome ones are our Big Citra IPA (generously hopped with delicious Citra hops) and our Mosaic Pale Ale which showcases the amazing Mosaic hop.
Whatever beer you feel like making, think about adding dry hops to it. It’s a great way to make any recipe your own.
American Amber Ales are a newer style born out of the American craft beer movement. They lean towards the sweeter caramel malt flavors. They can be hoppier in flavor and aroma than their Irish counterpart (Americans love their hops!), but usually not too bitter. The hops used are classic American types that range from fruity to citrusy and even piney. Check out our Four Seasons Amber Ale, slightly sweet from caramel malts and hopped with Cascade hops for that West Coast feel.
Feel free to make (and drink) these styles year-round, but if you’re craving a beer to match the colors and aromas of the fall season these are both solid choices.
]]>If you’re brewing beer you probably already have most of the necessary equipment. The next step is to acquire some cider. During the fall many farms sell fresh pressed cider at a local farmer's market.
If using fresh pressed cider it’s best to buy UV (ultra-violet) treated so any unwanted yeast or bacteria are dead. If it’s untreated cider you can treat it with sodium metabisulphite (campden tablets.) Just crush one tablet per gallon and let sit for two days before fermenting. This will kill any wild yeast or bacteria.
If you’re feeling to the task, you can do a DIY crush and press of your apples at home if you have a juicer. Clean your apples thoroughly and juice them. Strain your juice into your sanitized jug and squeeze the pulp in a mesh bag through a funnel. It is a good idea to add a campden tablet to your juice. You don’t have to add any sulphite to your fresh juice if you don’t want to. Wild fermented cider can be delicious, but it might not be. Adding yeast is a way to ensure that you’re not going to get cider vinegar.
You can buy pasteurized cider from the grocery store and good cider can be made with it. Just make sure there are no sorbates added, as this will hinder fermentation. If you want to bump up the alcohol, boil a cup of table sugar with a little water, cool and add to your juice.
The jug that you will be fermenting your juice in needs to be clean and sanitary. The best sanitizer is star san. Just ¼ oz to one gallon of water in your fermenter will sanitize everything within a few minutes. Do not rinse. You can save the Star san mixture in another glass jug for bottling day.
Once you have your juice in a sanitized fermenter it’s time to add nutrient and yeast. Wyeast makes a wine nutrient that works great for cider. Just add quarter teaspoon straight into your juice for a healthy fermentation.
The next step is to add your yeast. Most yeasts come in packs that are good for five gallons, so eyeball a quarter pack and sprinkle it into your juice. Wrap the package tight with a rubber band and store it in your refrigerator for up to a month. You can use it for your next batch. There are several strains of yeast good for cider making. We recommend Red Star Premier Cuvee or Lallemand EC-1118.
Once your yeast is added (pitched), cap the jug with a cap that has a hole in it and put an airlock with sanitizer in the hole. Let sit for a three weeks in a cool spot away from light. During this time the yeast are going to eat up all the delicious sugar and create alcohol!
After three weeks you are ready to bottle. If you want still cider, just siphon your finished cider directly into bottles using the siphon tube and racking cane. Make sure the bottles and siphoning equipment are clean and sanitized! Cap your bottles and let them sit for a week to mellow out. When making still cider you can use wine bottles but you’ll need to cork them.
Put them in the fridge for a day or two and then drink. Congratulations! You are a cider maker!
If you want sparkling cider add one or two carbonation tabs to each bottle before bottling. Make sure to leave a half inch of headspace in the bottle so the cider can carbonate. Do not use wine bottles. You need something heavier like a beer bottle. Once it’s bottled and capped, keep them at a cool room temperature for two weeks before putting them in the fridge. Enjoy!
]]>They can also be darker, like our Dark Pumpkin Stout, with dark roasted malts, golden naked oats and spiced with lots of cinnamon, ginger and even licorice. This is a great one to have by the fire, if you have a fire. If not, a large candle and an active imagination will do.
If you want to find out what your Uncle George really thinks at this years Thanksgiving with the family, try giving him a few of our King Pumpkin Imperials. A big and bold 8% monster, it's definitely a sipper.
So don’t hate the pumpkin, embrace it! Brew up a batch for the holidays this year and show your friends and family, pumpkin beers don’t suck!
John LaPolla
]]>Probably one of the best things to happen this year is our friends Oskar and Erik Norlander and Peter Salmond winning Homebrewers of the Year at the National Homebrew Contest. They showed the world that New York City is kicking ass! Another cool thing is the issue of Zymurgy that featured those guys also contained a picture of me and Douglas with Charlie Papazian along with the recipe he created for our store. This blew our minds to say the least. All this over the course of 12 months including our fantastic monthly beer swaps, lots of beginning and advanced classes, brewing on premises and running a retail store! I wouldn’t change it for the world. There is no way any of this would happen without your support, thank you. Together we make this community. Let’s keep showing the world that New York City is a beer city. Thanks also to all of the breweries, clubs, bloggers, press and behind the scenes folks. Douglas and I also want to give a sloppy wet kiss super big thank you to our employees, Ovieh, John, David, Robert and Zach. You guys keep this machine running. We’re starting 2016 with Brewpiphany, a wort give away at Kelso brewery combined with our monthly bottle swap. A kick ass way to start a kick ass year! Happy New year everyone!
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Cider used to be a big thing in the United States but fell out of favor after Prohibition. With the consolidation of breweries and the lag time between planting cider apples and production, cider never had a chance in a post-prohibition world. Cider has recently had a resurgence and good cider is getting much easier to find. If you’ve never brewed a cider before, then no misconceptions await you - it’s quick and fun! For homebrewers who typically brew beer, brewing a cider can be shockingly easy in comparison, with results that are no less rewarding. You skip the time-consuming mashing and boiling aspect of brewing beer and go straight ahead to pitching yeast and fermenting. It feels a little like you’ve cheated the barley gods of their due and that you’ll pay for your betrayal at some point in the future. In the meantime, you can drink the fruits of your labor (literally) in the form of a delicious, dry cider.
New York State is known for the quality of its apples and getting good fresh-pressed cider around harvest time is a remarkably easy affair - no apple press required. Take a walk down to your local farmers market and chat up anyone who is selling apples. In my neck of the woods, Breezy Hill Orchard is always hawking their delicious wares. It is important that you find a producer who offers unpasteurized or UV (ultraviolet) pasteurized juice. Most apple juice/cider sold in stores contains potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate as a preservative (they prevent yeast from working properly) and won’t ferment very well. The next step is to pick your yeast. Typically, most people will use champagne yeast, like Red Star Premier Cuvee. It’s a reliable yeast that will ferment out dry and produce a tasty cider relatively quickly. It is not your only option though.
I’m an inveterate experimenter and have tried a variety of yeasts (both ale and wine) over the years including:
Overall, I’ve been less impressed with ale yeasts (despite what the AHA might tell you) and tend to gravitate towards wine yeasts as they tend to preserve the apple character more fully. I’ve been especially impressed with the Lalvin 71B-1122 and the Lalvin D47. The former is typically used for nouveau wines (young wines meant to be consumed within a short period of time) and the latter is better for something you plan on aging. It’s important to consider the alcohol level of your cider and factor it into your yeast selection. Most fresh pressed cider will clock in with a specific gravity ranging from 1.040-1.050. As ciders will finish dry (all the way down to 1.000) that means your cider could range from 5-7% ABV.
Some people add sugars to their cider to boost the alcohol and to add other flavors. In that scenario, I’d offer up the same advice we give for high gravity beers, consider aging them to let them mellow. I’ve already made five gallons of cider this year (and have consumed at least 2 gallons of that) and plan to make at least five more. I like to split my batches and will be trying two new yeasts next time around. We recently got in a fresh shipment of Wyeast’s Dry Cider Yeast which promises a “crisp and dry [fermentation] with [a] big, fruity finish.” I’ll be splitting that with another (to be determined) wine yeast. As always, if you’ve fermented something delicious, no matter what it is we’d love to try it at our swap! Join us on the first Wednesday of every month at 6:30pm.
Johnathan Hagen
*I’m open to counter-arguments made in the form of a good bourbon.
]]>Thanks John & Doug
]]>*I know that more than a few people wish they could have been there. Thank you judges and stewards who couldn’t make it for doing an awesome job of taking care of NHC NYC!
]]>This past Wednesday Bitter & Esters had the good fortune to brew five barrels of Rye Pale Ale with the fine folks at Rockaway Brewing Company along with the members of the brand new homebrew club, the Brewminaries. How did a brand new homebrew club get to collaborate with one of Queens' finest breweries? It all started back in February of this year when I was a guest on Jimmy Carbone’s Beer Sessions Radio along with Chris Cuzme of Cuzett Libations, Kyle Hurst of Big Alice Brewing, and Marcus Burnett of Rockaway Brewing Company. We were discussing the upcoming Brewer’s Choice event where many of the breweries were pouring beer made from New York malts and hops. After the show Marcus asked me if Bitter & Esters would be interested in doing a collaboration brew with them on their five barrel system. They had an open fermenter available in March and since they started off as homebrewers, they wanted to do more events with homebrewers. I said of course, what a great opportunity! Later that week, Bitter & Esters regular Beer Swap attendees were represented at the great homebrew gathering Brewnity under the name the S.W.A.P Team (Swapping Wonderful Ales Periodically). We even had t-shirts made up, and we all had an amazing time. Afterwards the swappers realized they could combine their efforts and form an actual club. Thus the Brewminaries were born! They took their name from our employee Bobby, who called them our luminaries. The Brewminaries are dedicated to education, experiments and getting together to taste each other’s homebrews. They plan to bring samples of their experiments to our monthly swaps and share them with the community at large. Anyone can become a Brewminary, regardless of your brewing experience. All it takes is dedication and a strong liver. As of this writing they are 30 members strong, have a website and a twitter account. All in just over a month! As we were deciding how to go about our brew day with Rockaway we realized it would an awesome first project for the Brewminaries! And in what is turning out to be typical Brewminary fashion, they jumped right in with gusto. We decided that they should come up with the recipe and after some wrangling and horse trading, they came up with a rye pale ale hopped with Galaxy and Mosaic hops. Ryes of the Brewminaries was born! I expect that puns will be a running theme with the Brewminaries. Wednesday March 18th was decided as brew day. All of the Brewminaries wanted to participate but space was limited. So besides myself and Doug, Sheri Jewhurst (President, officially listed as Dictator!), Robert Sherrill (events co-chair), and Barry Wasser (Treasurer) represented the Brewminaries. We brewed with owner and head brewer Ethan Long. Ethan is a super nice guy, totally chill and brews awesome beers. He put us to work. We did everything from milling the grain, stirring the mash, setting up hoses, cleaning the mash tun and boil kettle and pitching the yeast. It was a lot of work and a great learning experience. You think you clean a lot as a homebrewer? Try what these guys do every day on a five barrel system, it seems like the cleaning never ends! After brewing we shared some of our homebrews with everyone and they let us taste the eight delicious beers they have on tap. Barry even brought stout brownies! The beer will be ready by the beginning of May, just in time for nice spring weather. Our plan is to organize a bicycle trip from Brooklyn to Long Island City for the release. That way we can do a bike tour of the awesome breweries in LIC. Ryes of the Brewminaries will be available at some of our favorite local beer bars including Covenhoven. Stay tuned for more info. Thanks so much to Ethan, Marcus, Ray, Justine, John and everyone at Rockaway, it was a blast! Can’t wait to try the beer. Keep an eye out for more great things from the Brewminaries. John
]]>Now lets go back to our math. Let’s say we want to pitch 1.5 million cells of harvested yeast/ml/°P.
1.5 million x 18927ml (which is 5 gallons) x 15°P = approx 426 billion cells.
426 divided by 1.2 (our estimated cell count per ml of trub at 40-60% yeast) = 355 ml. or 12 oz or a cup and a half of trub.
What I like do is take about two-thirds of a cup of trub (around 210 billion cells in this example) and pitch that into a 2000ml starter. This allows my yeast to propagate once and get healthy and ready to ferment. If you’re not making a starter you can pitch the proper amount of trub directly into your next batch or store it up to two weeks in a sanitized jar in the fridge. The yeast will reproduce during fermentation and the other material from the trub will just drop out. But you can also separate the yeast from the trub by rinsing it. (Often I hear people refer to this as washing the yeast. Washing the yeast is a different process that requires using phosphoric acid to help kill of any bacteria. I am not going to get into that, homebrewers rarely need to do it). In order to rinse your yeast take your determined amount of trub and add it to a jar of boiled and cooled (i.e. sterilized) water. Refrigerate and allow it to settle. The yeast is lighter than the fats and proteins and will separate from them. After a few hours you will have three layers. The top layer will be mostly water, while the middle layer is yeast which you can decant into boiled and cooled water if you want to rinse it again. You can also decant the middle layer into a sanitized jar to refrigerate for later use, or you can pitch right into your wort. The bottom layer is all of the fat and proteins and stuff that you can just toss. When collecting yeast from your fermenter it is good practice to clear away the top part of the trub and harvest from the middle layer. These will be the medium flocculant yeast. If you want a higher flocculant yeast you can harvest from lower in the fermenter as these are the cells that dropped out first. By doing this you are selecting the yeast that you want to perform a certain way (flocculant vs non-flocculant). It is much easier to harvest from a bucket or conical fermenter than a carboy. I do know of people who harvest from carboys collecting the yeast that blow off during the initial primary phase. I have never tried it so I am not sure about the health or characteristics of the yeast you harvest that way. Yeast can be used up to 10 generations as long as you are careful with your sanitation. It’s important to remember when harvesting your yeast to make sure everything is very clean and sanitary and that you work in a draft free environment (good advice for any kind of cold-side operations). Additionally, if your beer had a very high gravity you shouldn’t harvest from it as there are too many chances for mutations. And of course if your beer tastes bad, don’t use that yeast, they don’t deserve another chance! Have a great harvest!
John
]]>I haven’t been able to brew nearly as much as I would like to these past few months (hello fatherhood!) but what I’ve lost in volume I try to make up for in experimentation. I recently started splitting my 5 gallon batches and fermenting in two 3 gallon better bottles (3 gallon glass carboys work just as well) for comparison purposes and to try yeasts that I haven’t used before. I stole this idea from our yeast class here at Bitter & Esters* where we brew the same beer with eight different yeasts to show just how much impact yeast has on the flavor of each beer.
While I’m not able to brew 8 beers at a time at home, splitting my batches has helped me hone in on what aspects of each yeast I like best and how I might use them in the future. One of the big advantages of splitting my batches in this way is that I’m also ensuring healthy cell counts. Homebrewers chronically under pitch their yeast (i.e. not adding enough yeast) and splitting your batches is a great way to ensure that you’re pitching enough yeast. If we’re using a pitching rate calculator (I like Mr. Malty’s) we can see that for a starting gravity of 1.050 we want roughly 175 billion yeast cells which translates into almost 2 (1.9) yeast packs if we’re not making a starter.
With this beer, I was actually over pitching a little as I was using two 11 gram-dry yeast packets for what are essentially two 2.5 gallons batches but I planned on fermenting at the low end of ale temperatures (60 degrees). If we adjust the fermentation type to Lager (to account for temperature) we can see that we’d want closer to two (1.7) packets of dry yeast. A quick rule of thumb to follow is that it is easy to under pitch yeast, but difficult to over pitch. If you’re concerned that you’re not pitching enough, consider a second yeast pack or making a starter. (Here are some quick instructions on a starter, but we won't be covering that in this post). I recently brewed a very simple pale ale and decided to split the batch between Nottingham and S-05. I tend to gravitate towards liquid yeast merely because there are more options to choose from, but dry yeasts are often a little bit cheaper, have higher cell counts (producing healthier fermentations) and can produce beers that are just as good as those made with liquid yeasts. For this beer, I wasn’t looking for anything particularly complicated and wanted two relatively neutral yeasts that would highlight the malt and hops but otherwise get out of the way (i.e. no esters, no phenolics).
Based on my past experience with these yeasts, Nottingham should give more English character with an emphasis on malt character with a pleasant hop bitterness, while S-05 should offer more emphasis on hop flavor and aroma with a serviceable malt backbone.
Nottingham tasting notes:
S-05 tasting notes:
Both of these yeasts fell in line with my expectations but overall I found that I preferred the Nottingham. The mouthfeel was creamier/fuller with more complex malt flavoring that was nicely balanced with the hops. The S-05 was thinner, more astringent and hop focused in a way that detracted from the overall balance of the beer. This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t use S-05 again, but I’d probably use it in an IPA that would benefit more from its focus on hop character. Next up I’ll be doing a Robust Coffee Porter that will be split between 1469 West Yorkshire and 1028 London Ale.
Johnathan Hagen
Certified Cicerone® (aka “Tastemaster General”)
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