Salty Daddy Brewing

Ingredients and process are the focus of this beer. No hiding, no masking, no filter. There’s no secret recipe: Just straight up floor malted bohemian dark malt from Weyermann and loral hops, RO water and WLP 800. Reinheinsgebot, I thank you!

Traditional triple decoction was utilized not due to the malt modification (this malt is as modified as the regular Weyermann Pilsner malt), but due to achieving the flavor and color without using specialty malt, as well as brewing using soft water that could utilized an acid rest.

It’s amazing how tedious it was to brew this simple SMaSH. It’s also amazingly satisfying to enjoy the final product.

OG 1.054, FG 1.014, 29 IBU

Due to my recent obsession of brewing Pilsner/Lager using floor malted bohemian malt, I’ve been neglecting my fruity hops in the freezer. In order to clear space in the freezer for Saaz/Mt Hood/Liberty/Hallertau hops, I made a 10 gal quick turn around pale ale, using up my remaining bravo/mosaic/Amarillo. (Still have a pound of Citra, maybe another quick Citra IPA down the road) I haven’t had a fruity hoppy APA/IPA on tap for a while, this should please some of my friends when they come over for the Super Bowl/Superb Owl party. My friend Mark Tobler loves fruity APA/IPA, and this has a nice amber color to it, hence the name Mark Toblerfest.

The reason for the quick turn around was of course, the mighty Voss kveik. I chilled to 90 deg F and pitched about 1.5 L of starter from the 3 L starter I did with a vial of Voss from TYB. I saved the other half for another starter for future brews. Here’s another revelation: you can underpitch Voss kveik and it’ll still attenuate the same with no off flavor! It’s a b(y)east! I let it ferment in the stainless boil kettle with fermwrap set at 88 deg F, dry hopped 12 hours into active fermentation and packaged 4 days later after reaching TG. Packaging was a breeze as I just rotate the weldless ball valve to rack above the yeast cake, just like the SS brew bucket rotating racking arm feature. I did nothing to seal the fermentater, I just put the lid on and CO2 bubbles through the tiny vent hole of the lid, or through the side of the lid as it’s not a tight seal anyway. (Pseudo open fermentation!)

It turned out pretty fruity and citrusy. Due to water adjustment about 1:1 chloride vs sulfate, the finish is well rounded, kinda reminds me of Envie.

Recipe as follows:

OG 1.052, FG 1.014, 38 IBU
85% 2-row, 15% Munich I, single infusion at 154 deg F
Bravo 60 mins (12 IBU), 30 mins (9 IBU)
Mosaic 15 mins (9 IBU)
Amarillo 15 mins (8 IBU)
2oz of each Amarillo/Bravo/Mosaic at flameout
2oz of each Amarillo/Mosaic dry hop 12hrs into active fermentation for 4 days
RO water with about 1g/gal calcium chloride and 0.75g/gal gypsum

Time flies but turkeys don’t! What a year I had in homebrewing. Looking back 2017, it’s definitely a year of several highlights. For me, 2017 for Salty Daddy homebrewing is the year of:

1. Sigmund’s Voss Kveik
2. One Mash Two Beer
3. Pilsners and Lagers
4. Zweimaishverfahren

Sigmund’s Voss Kveik

Thanks to this super yeast, I churned out more beer than I could ever imagine. Chill beer to 100 deg F, pitch and let it roll above 90 deg F reaching final gravity in 3 or 4 days. The fermentation is so clean that I have used it to brew imperial stout, Irish stout, Czech dark lager, Vienna lager, and kolsch! Using brulosophy’s yeast harvesting method, I was able to use one vial for generations. Currently I’m on my 5th generation of yeast, and each generation of yeast I reused the yeast cake for 3 or 4 times. That’s a lot of beer. I was trying to purchase a new vial in September but they were out of stock. I just checked today and it’s in stock again, so I purchased a new vial for 2018 brewing!

One Mash Two Beer

I love brewing 10 gal batches, as it takes roughly the same amount of time as a 5 gal batch. Instead of having 10 gallons of the same beer, I have been making split batches of different beer! Most split batches I did were pale and dark beer, for example, a pilsner and a schwarzbier. I cold steep the dark grains in room temperature water, then split 5 gallons of the wort at the end of boil during whirlpool to another pot and pitch the cold steeped wort to sanitize, while the other half received whirlpool hops. In another split batch brew, I used different yeast, half of the wort using Voss kveik, and the other using WY3724. I also did a split batch kolsch to compare Voss kveik to WLP029.

Pilsners and Lagers

Despite the recent craze for hazy IPAs and juice bombs, I can hardly drink more than a pint of it at a time. I’m a big fan of Czech/German pils and helles. Summer in New Orleans is stifling, so I want something that will quench my thirst and go well with my light salad. Since autumn comes later than Oktoberfest, I’ll drink a Vienna lager or Marzen waiting for that first crisp dry air from the North. When the temperature drops below 50 deg F, I prefer dark lagers to stout/porters. As I don’t need my fermentation chamber for ales (thanks Voss kveik!), I have space for my bottom fermenting house “pets” (W34/70 and WLP800). They are happy all year long eating maltose in ~50 deg F environment. This year at Nola on Tap, I had folks coming to our booth appreciating us serving Festbier and Vienna lager, so they could take a break from the hops/juice bombs and roasty stout in a balmy 90+ deg F with 90+% humidity! As of lately, I have been using Weyermann’s Floor-Malted Bohemian Pilsner Malt, thanks to Brewstock for putting in special orders for me. This malt is tasty! Note: this malt is fully modified. Apart from the spec sheet data that indicates full modification, I cut the malt in half and the ascrospire growth is almost the full length of the kernel.

Zweimaischverfahren

To tell you the truth, I can hardly taste the difference between infusion vs decoction mashed beer. However, the process is super fun and since this is a hobby, I don’t mind spending time doing it! The opposite would be like making roux for gumbo. Since I don’t like making roux, I buy roux from Rouses, and people can’t taste the difference! That’s a pretty crappy analogy, but you get the idea. However, I do notice that decoction leads to a clearer beer with better head retention (don’t do protein rest as you can hardly find malt that is under modified). I like to do the enhanced double decoction recommended by Kai Troester. It skips the protein rest all together. Since the floor malted bopils malt is fully modified, that’s the method I choose for decoction. Also, reading both Brewing Lager Beer and New Brewing Lager Beer by Gregory Noonan helped me a lot in the details of decoction mashing.

Looking back 2017 of homebrewing definitely has me grinning from beer to beer. I’m looking forward to another great beer of homebrewing in 2018. I wish y’all a happy new beer! Prost!

I bought some South African hops from my Cape Town trip. My buddy Steve requested to name one of the beer Soul Pig, in honor of his beloved partner, kAte. Out of the six hops I bought, the only hop name that doesn’t start with “Southern” is the African Queen hop. Hence I named this Soul Pig’s African Queen! I love this faux SMaSH beer (used Bravo for bittering as I have limited African Queen supplies). 5 gals, 100% Rahr 2-row, 11 Brix OG, 35 IBU, flame out and dry hopped with 0.9oz of African Queen each. Tasting/Aroma notes include melon (awesome!), tropical fruit, and citrus. Southern Hemisphere hops don’t disappoint. Cheers to Muller and Beukman for being such great hosts to us during our visit. Please come visit us so we can return the favor.

It was satsuma season and my buddy Timmy had a few trees in his backyard, so he asked if I could brew him a satsuma beer. I wouldn’t say no to fresh satsumas, so I brewed a simple wheat ale, 10 gal batch, 70/30 2-row/wheat malt, OG 1.044, 20 IBU. I chilled to around 100 deg and pitched Sigmund’s Voss Kveik, and called Timmy to harvest some fresh satsuma that evening.

I decided to ferment in the brew kettle as I had bunch of satsuma peels to “dry hop” the beer, and I didn’t want to split the wort into 2x 7.8 gal plastic fermenter buckets. The krausen was already so thick (3 hrs post pitch) when Timmy brought me around 7 lbs of freshly harvested satsuma. I proceeded to wash them with tap water, then utilized a peeler to get the nice fresh peel. The kitchen smelled so great! It was pretty hard to get the peel as the skin was very thin. It took about 45 minutes to get a bowl full of peels. Then I squeezed the juice out of the remaining fruit (got about 2 quarts) and kept it for conditioning the beer post fermentation.

I did not weigh the peel, it must have been around 12 oz (a big bowl). I stuffed them in a nylon stocking and dropped them straight into the brewpot with 1 oz of Amarillo for some mysterious biotransformation  action. 3 days into fermentation, I measured the FG, and it was done fermenting. I proceeded to kegging, gave the ball valve a little 90 deg turn to avoid racking in the trub/yeast cake, and dosed about 1/2 quart of juice into each keg (drank 1 quart of the juice because it was so sweet and fresh!). I put in a pressure gage to check for pressure increase. After a week, it only went up to 8 psi, so I had to force carbonate.Final product was pretty good. Satsuma flavor was evident but the beer still taste like beer, not like satsuma juice. I am very pleased with the balance. If I want satsuma juice, I’ll juice a satsuma. But for fruit beer, I want the flavor to meld with the base beer in a subtle way. This beer is perfect for summer, but we don’t have fresh satsuma in the summer, so I’ll save this one for 70 deg New Orleans winter weather.

Fall is upon us finally in New Orleans. That makes me want to hang out in my backyard all day to soak up the nice crisp cool weather. I was looking for an activity to do while enjoying the weather, hence it’s time to try out decoction mashing! Back in the day when thermometer had not been invented yet, the brewers figured out how to extract sugar out of barley starch by measuring volumes, using their body temperature, and boiling. They used body temperature ~97 to 100 deg F to gauge how warm the water should be for initial mixing of water and grains, then transferred about 1/3 of the mash to boil it, and return back to the main mash to raise the temperature. They did that three times, and called it dreimaischverfahren (I think drei = three, maisch = mash, verfahren = process). Little did they know, the process that they invented essentially hit all the crucial temperature rests for extracting sugars out of the barley. With modern day malting technology and process, decoction brewing is not needed anymore due to highly modified malt that allows brewers to infuse the malt using a single infusion temperature to let the enzymes convert all the starch to sugar. However, brewers still utilize decoction brewing for various other reasons. Some want to keep up with the tradition, some may argue that it enhances the Maillard reaction that improves beer flavor. My personal opinion is that I probably won’t be able to taste the difference, but I just love to try different brewing processes! On contrary to the old days of no thermometer, I utilized it constantly to confirm the temperatures, mainly because I did not know the heat loss of the equipment that I used.

I special ordered a sack of Weyermann floor malted Bohemian pilsner malt (FM BoPils) from the LHBS for this bohemian pilsner. After checking the spec sheets from Weyermann, this malt is actually fully modified. Hence, instead of doing triple decoction, I opted to do an enhanced double decoction (zweimaischverfahren) with a very short protein rest that I learned from Kai Troester.

Grain bill is 10 lbs of FM BoPils, Sterling hops in 90/60/30/15/0 min additions to ~40 IBU, and W34/70 harvested from a previous batch Bohemian pilsner brewed from Weyermann regular pilsner malt. Target OG 1.050 (around 12 deg Plato).

I used my 8 gal aluminum pot with a thick bottom to prevent scorching, and my 10 gal igloo cooler for the decoction process. Instead of doughing in the cooler, I mixed in the grains into 5 gal of RO water (2 qt to 1 lbs) treated with 1/4 tsp calcium chloride and 1/4 tsp lactic acid at 102 deg F (overshot a little but it’s okay) for a 10 minute acid rest, pH was 5.4. I then transferred 1/2 the volume (3 gals) of thin mash into the cooler, and left the other half of thick mash in the aluminum pot and started heating to the first saccharification rest.

Doughing in 102 deg F

Transfer 1/2 mash to cooler

Constantly stirring to prevent scorching at the bottom of the pot, I brought the temperature up to 148 deg F and rested for 10 minutes.

Constant stirring to prevent scorching

Sacch I rest at 148 deg F

At this point, it was beer break before checking on the conversion. The first test still indicated presence of starch in the wort, so I took another beer break. Thanks to the good tip that I learned from Kai Troester, I started doing iodine test on a chalk and it’s working great! Just one drop of wort on the chalk and a drop of iodine onto it. Once the test is done, I cut the tip off and it is ready for the next test.

Beer break while waiting on sacch I rest

Iodine test indicated starch presence

Beer break #2 while waiting on conversion

Iodine test #2, looks good!

The first saccharification rest took 15 minutes before it was converted. Then I heat up the decoction to 156 deg F and let it rest for 10 minutes before bringing it to a boil. Right at boiling, I transferred some mash into the cooler to bring it up to ~120 deg F for a short protein rest while the rest of the decoction boiled for 10 minutes. Then I transferred all the thick mash into the cooler to bring up to saccharification rest of 148 deg F for 30 minutes. After another beer break, I drew off around 3 gallons of thin mash and boiled it for 10 minutes before returning it to the cooler for a mashout of 168 deg F. I batch sparged with room temperature RO water because I was lazy, and I was able to collect 7.5 gal of 1.040 gravity wort. I noticed that was a significant amount of decoction protein break on top of the grain bed before batch sparging. I have never seen that in infusion mashing.

Boil first decoction for 10 mins

Return to cooler for a quick protein rest, then the rest for sacch I rest

Beer break #3 for mash tun sacch I rest

Look at that layer of gunk that you’ll never see from infusion mash!

Then, I proceeded with a 90 min boil, hopped as scheduled, added a whirlfloc tablet with 15 minutes left in the boil, chilled to ~55 deg F, and pitched the W34/70 slurry harvested from a previous BoPils brew. I did have to add about a gallon of RO water to bring up the final volume to 6 gal. OG was at 1.051, my guesstimate was spot on!

90 min boil

Chilling

Food and drinks made out of billions of our house pets aka yeast

Amanda baked some bread and made some tomato soup. We chowed down dinner with some homebrew and it was awesome. A great way to end a tedious brew day! I will post a review on the Zweimaischverfahren Bohemian Pils in a few weeks. Hopefully I have some BoPils (single infusion mash, regular Weyermann pils malt) left so I can do a side by side tasting.

Even though this beer is a simple SMaSH, it is a very demanding brew session.

Here’s more on decoction if you want to read more about it.

Check out the beer list under “Beer”. I will continue to add to the list when I brew a new beer. Since it’s Oktoberfest, enjoy the picture of the homebrew festbier in a stein. Prost!

I have been propagating Voss kveik from TYB as my house yeast for summer brewing. I started out with a 3L starter. I pitched half of the starter and saved the other half for another 3L starter for future brews. I’ve only regrown the yeast twice using this method, as most of the time I just rack the chilled wort right onto the yeast cake.

I’ve made several observations over several beer (saison, wheat, IPA, sour, kolsch) I brewed using this yeast. Almost everytime I pitched at >90 deg F, with the exception of a raw sour ale, in which I pitched at 78 deg F room temp after a day of L. Plantarum souring. This yeast has almost zero lag time. The airlock will show activity an hour post pitch. The beer is usually fully attenuated after 3 days. I don’t maintain the temperature over 90 deg F, I just let it drop to room temperature. I noticed during the first day of rigorous fermentation, the beer was hovering close to 90 deg F in a 78 deg F ambient temperature.

The flavor is consistently clean, lager like, with a hint of citrus. This yeast will flocculate without cold crashing, making it easy to rack to the keg. Head retention is tremendous, and will consistently leave lacing on the glass.

I would not be surprised if breweries start using this yeast for their lager and have it turned around in less than one week. The secret is out!

Brewing in summer has been really uncomfortable. My number 1 annoyance is mosquitoes. They are everywhere! They don’t go away during the day, and they love to hang around and sting you when both your hands are at work. Thank god I have Sparky, I could swat randomly and electrocute mosquitoes with one hand. I don’t mind the heat as much, but the chilling of the wort gets harder as tap water is coming out at 85 deg F. The other problem is fermentation temperature. I keep a range between 77 to 80 deg F in the house, so that throws fermentation in room temperature out the door. I could ferment saison/belgian ales at this warm temperature, but I still prefer to start my fermentation cool at around 65 deg F before I let them free rise to room temperature.

Sparky to the rescue! Mosquitoes be toasted in electricity!

I’m fortunate to have space to hold 3 kegerators for serving, and 1 old fridge that I use primarily as a fermentation chamber (it holds a sanke 1/2 barrel keg, or 2x regular 7.8 gal buckets, or 4 corny/sanke pony). Occasionally, I had to free up one of the serving kegerators and make them into a fermentation chamber. Hence, I need to do some juggling managing spaces and plan my brews accordingly so I have sufficient space to ferment/cold crash/force carb. That limited the volume of my brews. Unlike brewing for Jazz Fest in which I had the luxury to ferment at room temperature with unlimited space around the house.

I plan to have 4 beers for Nola on Tap. The first brew would be the one that required the most time to ferment and condition – Czech dark lager. I named it NOirLAger, a wordplay to spell out NOLA with bad french grammar. I was inspired by Michael Tonsmeire’s Tmave Pivo recipe. For the first brew, I used a domestic 2-row instead of pilsner malt (coz I was cheap and wanted to save 50 cents/pound instead of getting the awesome Weyermann pils malt). I decided that with 18% specialty malt I was able to get away with it. Instead of Munich I used Vienna. Below is the recipe that I came up with for NOirLAger version #1:

10 gal batch

65% domestic 2-row, 16% Vienna, 12% Caramunich III, 7% Carafa II special (dehusked)

Saccharification I at 148 deg F for 30 min, saccharification II at 158 deg F for 20 min

OG 1.057, FG 1.015

30 IBU – 1 oz Magnum at 60 min, 2 oz Czech Saaz at 10 min

Saflager W-34/70 dry yeast

2 weeks fermenting at 65 deg F using Brulosophy’s high temp lager fermentation method

Transfer to serving keg – 4 – 6 weeks lagering at 35 deg F

The resulting beer was clean tasting, malty, and had some slight roastiness to it. I brought some samples to Kyle at Brewstock, and he was surprised that I fermented at ale temperature.

I tweaked the recipe for Nola on Tap, this time I decided to be more authentic to the beer style. Due to price discrepancies, I decided to go cheap again on the base malt using domestic pils malt:

10 gal batch

68% domestic pils malt, 17% Weyermann dark Munich malt 10L, 9% Caramunich III, 6% Carafa II special (dehusked)

Protein rest at 128 deg F for 15 min, saccharification rest at 150 deg F for 50 min

OG 1.050, FG 1.012

30 IBU – 1.5 oz Sterling at 60 min, 2 oz Czech Saaz at 5 min

Saflager W-34/70 dry yeast

2 weeks fermenting at 65 deg F using Brulosophy’s high temp lager fermentation method

Transfer to serving keg – 4 – 6 weeks lagering at 35 deg F

I reduce the malt bill to make the beer lighter for summer drinking. The first brew was slightly heavier at 5.6% ABV, while this one for Nola on Tap resulted in 5% ABV beer. It had the same flavor/aroma profile as the first brew. I incorporated a protein rest in this brew, so the head retention was way better. It has a solid head that leaves nice lacing on the glass as you sip down the beer.

The second beer for Nola on Tap is a saison, which I named SaintSaison. I love brewing saison in the summer as I could let it free rise to a really warm temperature. That’s when the saison yeast works its magic! I love using Belle Saison dry yeast as I love the flavor profile. I wanted to use domestic pils for this, but Brewstock Kyle ran out of it. So I asked for the next cheapest pils malt, and he mistakenly milled me the top notch limousine of malt – Weyermann pils malt, which is the most expensive one, instead of the regular Belgian pils malt, which would have been more authentic to style. He offered to remill the Belgian pils, but I told him not to worry about it, as it’s only $5 difference for 20 lbs. I didn’t know I was that cost conscious until that happened. It’s only $5, why did I care! I could have easily blown it on a pint at a bar. Speaking of cost conscious, I was almost at Brewstock’s 10% club (if you spend >$1000, you get 10% off subsequent purchases), oh the irony!

10 gal batch

90% Weyermann pils malt, 5% Vienna, 5% turbinado sugar

Protein rest at 118 deg F for 15 min, saccharification I at 144 deg F for 35 min, saccharification II at 160 deg F for 30 min (not sure why I did that)

OG 1.057, FG 1.001

30 IBU – 1.5 oz Sterling as bittering, 1 oz Czech Saaz at 10 min, 1 oz Czech Saaz at flame out

Belle Saison dry yeast

Started fermentation at 66 deg F, increased temp to 70 deg F after peak krausen, 75 deg F after reaching FG, then moved to room temperature (77 – 80 deg F) for conditioning before force carbing

I was pretty pleased with the result. I had Amanda tasted it and she commented that it was similar to Saison Dupont.

The next 2 brews were wheat beer. I started with the hit of Jazz Fest, Hawaiian Wheat. Non beer drinkers were commenting on how easy it went down and they would start drinking craft beer. Seasoned beer drinkers love the hops aroma of tropical fruit thanks to Nelson Sauvin dry hopping. I also added garden grown coriander in this beer for citrusy flavor. I added a few bulbs of 2nd year cascade hops from my backyard for the “terroir”. Amanda named it Hawaiian Wheat due to its tropical fruit aroma/flavor.

5 gal batch

48% domestic 2-row, 48% white wheat malt, 4% crystal 20L

Saccharification rest at 153 deg F for 60 mins

OG 1.057, FG 1.015

20 IBU – 1 oz  Czech Saaz at 60 min, 1 oz Czech Saaz/0.25 oz garden grown coriander/some garden grown cascage hops at 15 min, 1 oz Czech Saaz at 5 min

US-05 dry yeast 

2 weeks fermenting at 65 deg F, then dry hopped with 0.5 oz of Nelson Sauvin for 5 days

Last but not least, it’s my favorite named beer that’s going to be the Salty Daddy Brewing trademark/benchmark beer – JefeVincent. I love Hefeweizen. In NOLA weather, I could almost drink it year round! Moreover, it is easy to brew. It’s hard to go wrong with this beer. You can either get a lot of cloves fermenting it in the lower end of ale fermentation temperature, i.e. 62 deg F, or you could aim for lots of banana by fermenting it at the higher end of the range. As you can tell now I love using dry yeast. And one of my all time favorite dry yeast is WB-06. It gives out slight citrus, and more on the clovey side of the flavor profile I think. I don’t know why I opted for 2-row instead of pilsner malt in order to be more authentic, but oh well… I don’t think people are going to notice anyway, unless you are a super taster, or a super beer snob.

5 gal batch

57% red wheat malt, 41% 2-row, 2% melanoidin malt

Ferulic acid rest at 113 deg F for 15 mins, protein rest at 122 deg F for 15 min, saccharification rest at 150 deg F for 60 mins

OG 1.050, FG 1.012

13 IBU – 1 oz Czech Saaz

Safale WB-06 dry yeast

Started fermentation at 63 deg F for 3 days, raised to 65 deg F for 3 days, raised to 68 deg F for 5 days

I cannot wait for Nola on Tap. Come on over to Salty Daddy Brewing to taste all 4 beers!