Non Enzymatic Mashing, Take 2

Today's brew was the other method of Non Enzymatic Mashing (NEM). You can read about my overview of NEM HERE, and you can ready about Take 1 of NEM HERE.

The goal of today's NEM brew was to separate the mashing into two parts and combine them back together, hoping to get more contrast in flavor of the beer. Here is the workflow:

Today's recipe consisted of:
8 pounds 6 row
3 pounds Marris Otter
0.75 lbs Crystal 60
2 ounces Acidulated Malt
90 min boil
1 tsp gypsum & 1 tsp calcium chloride @ boil start
1 oz Chinook @ 60 mins
0.5 oz Simcoe @ 30 mins
1 tsp irish moss and 9 grams yeast nutrient @ 20 mins
0.5 oz Simcoe @ 10 mins
1.5 oz Cascade @ flame out

Like the partigyle method yesterday, all grain (minus 1 lb 6 row and the 2 oz acidulated malt) was ground last night and soaked overnight for 10 hours at ~ 36 degrees. I mashed the grain with 4 gallons of cold water to a little over 10 lbs of grain. This morning, the smell was again herbal, grassy, and vegetal and lacked the caramels of a traditional hot mash.

After lautering this morning and sparging with an additional 1.5 gallons to get 4 gallons of pre boil cold wort, I wound up with a gravity of 1.020. It failed the starch test, as expected. The cold wort was very cloudy and turbid. I now know what starch soup looks like!

The cold wort was heated until 150* and left to "mash," since 100% of the enzymes existed in this starch soup.

Meanwhile, the spent grain needed to be dealt with. There was still 75% of the starch left in there, and based upon yesterday's experience, there are ZERO enzymes left with that spent grain. I hit the spent grain with hot water and recirculated the wort until it also hit 150*, then I added another pound of 6 row plus 2 ounces of acidulated malt to lower the pH. After a typical 60 minute mash, the spent grain converted. Seems like 10% of your grain bill only needs to have enzymes to convert the other 90%.

The additional grain for starch conversion of the spend grain

After confirmation of conversion using iodine, I mashed out the grain, lautered and sparged into the kettle with the former cold wort which was already mashed out, combing all of my liquids together for a pre boil volume of 8 gallons with a pre boil gravity of 1.044.

From here, it was a typical brew. Bring to a boil and follow your boil schedule. I wound up with a post boil gravity of 1.058.

Take away
The biggest question with this split mashing is: Will this actually yield a different and more interesting tasting beer than doing a traditional single infusion mash?

Tomorrow I will be brewing the single infusion version of this beer, and in a few weeks once everything is fermented, racked, and carbed up, we will do an A/B taste comparison. That is the only way to know.

I had one hiccup today. One of my propane tanks ran empty pretty early on, which meant I had to juggle my heating between only one tank. This kinda lengthened the day a bit. Going forward? Make sure you have two FULL tanks, since you are heating two vessels at the same time.

Non Enzymatic Mashing, Take 1

Today the local homebrew shop owner and I brewed the partigyle method of a Non Enzymatic Mash (NEM), aka, cold mashing. I outlined this process HERE.

The partigyle method is to cold soak your grain overnight, then extract off the cold wort into your kettle, sparge with more cold water until you hit your preboil volume, then heat this cold wort through your typical mash temperatures to convert any starches to fermentable sugar.

The reason for the cold mash is that a beer's enzymes, body, and color are all cold soluble and will be extracted via this cold method, yielding a beer that contains only 25% of the starch, yet ALL of the enzymes, and most of the color and body, leaving behind "spent grain" that contains 75% of the starch, yet zero enzymes, and very little body and color.

The cold mashed beer is good for creating a session beer: low in alcohol, but high in body and color. The spent grain is then hit with hot water and traditionally mashed, giving you a high sugar, low body and low color beer: think Belgian Golden Strong or Belgian Tripel.

Here are our findings:

Overnight Mash
The shop owner mashed the grain bill, 16 pounds of equal amounts of Mecca Grain, into a large bucket with 2 qts/lb of water. He left it sit overnight at a cold temperature.

The next morning I joined, and the mash was very very fragrant. It was more on the grassy and vegetal side of the aroma spectrum than a caramel aroma from a typical hot mash. The lauter went easily with no issues of a stuck mash, since the mash never fully gelatinized. The color of the wort was a nice amber.

We tasted this wort and it was sweet. Not just sweet as in a surfer dude hitting a wave and his buddy going, "SWEET, BRO!" but it was actually sugary sweet, like some conversion actually happened at a cold temperature. We were wondering just how much conversion actually occurred with just how sweet it was.

Lauter and analysis
After the lauter to a pre boil volume of 6 gallons, a gravity measurement showed 1.022. Pretty low for the sweetness we were tasting, but! this number makes sense. Given 16 pounds of grain, that should yield a potential in the 1.08X range, so 1.022 is roughly 25%. The folks at Briess weren't lying!

So what accounted for that sweetness despite the low gravity reading? We are guessing body. Body was making up for that sweetness.

Boil
We treated the beer as a session Americal Pale Ale and used 100% Citra hops with the following schedule:

90 min boil
1 oz @ 60 mins
1.5 oz @ 10 mins
1.5 oz @ 0 mins

The final gravity yielded 1.028.

Spent Grain
While the session beer was starting its boil, we dealt with the leftover spent grain which still contained 75% starch.

We were unsure just how many enzymes were left, so we did a starch test after we got the temperature into saccharification range. The starch test, using iodine, was negative. Bummer. There were no enzymes available. So we hit the mash with some liquid enzyme, but to no avail. The mash did not want to convert! Fortunately we had some Distiller's malt, and we used 2 pounds and that did the trick as a positive iodine test ensued.

So that pretty much settled it re: enzymes. The cold mash literally sucked out 100% of the enzymes needed for conversion. We figured there had to be some enzymes left. Nope! Nada.

For this remaining mash, we lautered and made a Belgian Tripel. The pre boil gravity was 1.050, while the finishing gravity was 1.067. We used a combination of Mt Hood and Crystal hops.

Control Beer
Meanwhile, another associate at the brewshop made a "control" beer of the American Pale Ale: single infusion beer with the same grain bill and the same hop schedule.

Never seen a Grain Father in action.

Will be interesting to see how both beers compare once they are done.

Takeaways
The two biggest takeaways of this process were division of starch and the extraction of enzymes. Briess reported that 25% of starch will extract via the cold mash, leaving 75% behind. They also reported that all enzymes will be extracted as well via the cold mash. We confirmed both of these findings.

What differed from their findings was beer color. The Tripel (even before adding the distiller's malt for conversion) still had quite a bit of color. It was lighter than the session beer, but not completely colorless. I find it not to be that big of a deal re: color. Color is merely for show.

Would I do this method of NEM again? Sure! It takes some preplanning, but to get a session beer and a bigger beer out of one mash is a neat time saving trick, especially if your session beer gets way more body than a traditional mash.

Will report back on the beers once they are finished fermenting.

Non Enzymatic Mashing, aka "Cold Mashing". Is this paralleling an art technique of range and contrast?

This is a new mashing technique that came across my radar. The owner of my local homebrew shop gave me a little talk about it today. It is called Non Enzymatic Mashing (NEM), or "Cold Mashing."

I like the term "Cold Mashing" better, because Non Enzymatic Mashing is kind of misleading. First let me explain what this is all about, then I'll tell you why the term is misleading.

This technique comes from Briess Malting, and involves mashing your crushed grain with cold water for 8+ hours, or if you can agitate it, only 1 hour. After this cold mashing period, you draw off your cold wort from the grain, mash this liquid at normal mash temperatures, then bring to a boil.

Why do this? Well, you can get two beers out of one with this process. Think partigyle. The whole point of cold mashing is to extract flavor, color, and body from the grain, with only about 25% of fermentable sugars, since you haven't completed a true starch to sugar conversion. What does that yield? A session beer. Low alcohol, but full body flavor. The article claims a 1.0-1.5% beer for a 1.050 intended brew (if mashing normal).

Now what about the rest of that spent grain that still contains 75% of the starch, yet little body and little color? After a traditional hot mash, think Belgian Triple or Belgian Strong, where it is all about the yeast creating flavor, rather than the malt, since what you will be getting is mostly fermentables.

So now why is the term "Non Enzymatic Mashing" misleading? From just hearing this term for the first time, you have to ask, "Without enzymes, how does the starch to conversion occur?" It doesn't. We know this, and this is why we strive for that range of saccharification temperatures of ~148-158*F to activate those enzyme and get that starch conversion. I think the term "Non Enzymatic Mashing" applies to the cold mashing portion of the brew, rather than the actual hot mashing of the spent grains after the cold wort has been extracted.

Application wise, you can do your session beer, then create your big beer with little body, OR! you could use both methods and combine them into one beer to create a beer with a lot more flavor range and contrast. How? Let me explain visually.

Back in high school, my photography teacher introduced me to a method where we split our exposures in half in the dark room, thus exposing our paper twice. We first exposed our paper with a high contrast filter and exposure adjusted to the highlight values of our image. Then we exposed it a second time with a different filter and exposure adjusted to the dark values of our image.

What happened? The following images are photoshopped to get my point across, but believe me, it worked!

Original

Exposure for Highlights

Exposure for Darks

Final Image

And the original compared to the final

Now, just seeing the original image on the left is still interesting. It is a pretty view of the Columbia River Gorge. But compared to the final image on the right, it is kind of washed out. By improving the tonal range and the contrast, the final image really pops out compared the original, right?

Now think about this same concept with your beer. Your "Cold Mash" is your darks exposure, giving you lots of body and depth, while your subsequent hot mash gives you a lot of the high notes of alcohol. Then you combine them together.

If this "Cold Mashing" approach can do to your beer what the above photography method can do to an ok image, how much better will your beer come out?

Whelp, there is only one way to find out if what I am proposing above has any merit. The plan here is to do two brews, side by side. One brew uses this new method, while the other brew does a straight up single infusion mash. Both beers will use the same recipe, boil, yeast, temperature. The only difference is the mash.

Here is my proposed workflow for the cold mashing technique:

I have decided to brew an American Pale Ale to test this theory out. This style asks for good body, with some hoppyness to balance it out. It also doesn't have too many adjuncts and no extra sugar added. Just malt, a tiny bit of crystal malt, and hops with a clean yeast to let the malt and hops do all of the talking.

Will update once both beers are done, and on the other process of cold brewing once it happens.

Long Term Fermentation Projects

I have decided to do two, very ambitious, long term projects, side by side. Both involve spontaneous fermentation and a 3+ year turnaround. Every 6 months, for the next 3 years, I am going to brew a wild red Ale and a Lambic, and spontaneously ferment every batch. In 3 years, I will have enough volume of various aging to do blending.

I am choosing March and October for the brew months, since March is when everything is starting to bloom, and October is when everything is starting to rot. Both months still allow cool enough nights to allow the beer to cool naturally in a timely fashion.

For the Lambic, the exciting part is that I will potentially wind up with a number of different beers.
- Geuze (Lambic blend of 1-3 year old lambics)
- Fruit Lambic (think Kreik, Framboise, Blackberry (Mure?), Aprictot, Peche, Fraise, you name it!)
- regular Lambic

I plan to steal 1/4 to 1/2 of every Lambic batch after every year and make a fruit lambic out of it. The other 1/2 to 3/4 will go on to aging, or a portion will be stolen to go as a regular lambic, if it lives well enough on its own.

For the wild red ale, well....I will wind up with a wild red ale! Think Rodenbach, just minus the foeder, and minus the pitching of yeast. Oh, and minus the whole Belgium thing :)

Speaking of oak wood and barrels......it is just not feasible to do this project with barrels. Fortunately! you can still oak a beer in a plastic or glass fermentation vessel by using oak staves or oak chips that have been severely denatured in strength.

For now, I have some time before I need to think about oaking. I think my plan is to take whatever form of oak and doing a rinse and repeat of boiling the wood then sticking it into high strength ethanol until the oak character is knocked down. I don't want to over oak my beer in 3 weeks after waiting so long to ferment and blend it.

It will be interesting to see if any trends form over the 3 year period, such as is there common ground amongst the March beers vs the October beers? Do only certain microbes come out in larger amounts in March vs October? Exciting things to find out!

One of this big missions for this project is to explore a new area for me in booze making: Blending.

I am telling myself right now that every batch I make will come out different, and not every batch is going to come out perfect. I repeat, NOT EVERY BATCH IS GOING TO COME OUT PERFECT!

That is why blending is so great. You take a little bit of this batch, to a little bit of this batch, and voila! You have the perfect batch! Or so we hope...

Cheers!

Founders Porter vs Deschutes Black Butte Porter

When I was living on the East Coast, finding Michigan's Founders beer was like taking the beer for granted; you could find it everywhere. After moving to the West Coast, suddenly drinking Founders was like finding Russian River on the East Coast; not easy!

Fortunately, Founders' distribution channels grew in 2017 and now distributes to the PNW. After having both Founders Porter and Black Butte Porter, separately, I always wondered if they were the same beer because they tasted so dang close to each other.  Are they basically the same? Drastically different? There was only one way to find out!

	Founders Porter	Black Butte
Appearance	Darker. Zero transparency; not as much foamy head, and not as much head retention	Dark, but a Bit lighter. Some slight transparency; larger foamy head; LONG head retention
Aroma	More caramel/toffee; red fruit	more roast; pear
Mouthfeel	thicker mouthfeel; not as carbonated	thick mouthfeel, but thinner than founders; sharp carbonation
Flavor	more bitter; lower notes of caramel/toffee	bit more sweetness; higher notes
Overall	a bit heavier, more toasty roasty and lower note flavors	a bit lighter, higher notes

Both beers are fantastic porters to drink. If you want a porter that has a bit more of an edge to it and some more roast, pick the Founders. If you want a bit smoother and slightly lighter (not much! but enough to notice!), pick the Black Butte Porter from Deschutes.

Both go well with shucked salted peanuts :)

Tree Bark Yeast, Part 3

Introduction
This is part 3 of 4 of my tree bark yeast wrangling experiment. Originally this was supposed to be a 3 part experiment, but the yeast isolation and testing has taken a bit more effort than initially thought. No big deal, it helps flesh out the entire process better.

You can read my progress for part 1 and part 2 by clicking the links.

Objective
To build a yeast starter for the six isolated samples of yeast found on the apple and oak tree bark. Use sensory analysis to determine if the sample is worth pursuing in producing a fermented beer.

Prediction
At least one sample each from the apple and oak tree bark will yield a positively smelling and tasting wort sample that will be used to produce a good tasting fermented beer.

Materials needed
DME
DI
Sanitizer
Stir Plate
Erlenmeyer flasks

Procedure
Coming out of the agar plates from part 2, I looped up some of the yeast and dunked it into a 75ml DME starter. This sat for a few weeks (longer than I had hoped...) until some activity occured and everything died down. From here I had a nice little layer of yeast on the bottom of the vials.

The 75 ml starter was stirred up and added to a larger 500ml starter. This was placed onto a stir plate and let rip for 48 hours to build up another healthy population.

Yet again, the 500 ml starter was bumped up to a final 3000ml starter.

Then crashed, cleaned, and look at that amount of yeast!

First round of cleaning before final cold crash

about 100ml of a yeast slurry in a 200 ml sanitized mason jar

Analysis
The apple tree yeast totally flunked. The two saccharomyces strains grew brains and smelled aweful. The one brett strain didn't smell as bad, but still, wasn't that great.

But! The oak tree finished 2/3. One had a nice neutral smell with a tiny fruit hint, and the other had this incredible clove smell to it.

Conclusion
I am not disappointed about the apple tree yeast. I captured an awesome wild strain from the skins of apples from this tree a year ago and I have it banked. As for the oak tree yeast, this was what I was really hoping for all along. Did I catch S. Paradoxus? No way to tell, but I got a lead on doing some sequencing of the strain(s). Not sure when I will find the time for it, but I can get it sequenced down the street from me. Just gotta do a little research into a solvent for accessing DNA and the primers I need chop out a chunk of DNA for PCR. Then I ship it out.

But the next steps are to finally brew some beer!! That will be in part 4!

A Visit to a Real Beer Analysis Lab

Yesterday  I got the opportunity to visit an actual beer analysis lab where the lab analyzes a commercially made beer's bacteria count, pH, SRM (color), conductivity, IBU's, density and alcohol %. It was an amazing opportunity where I got to be hands on and my previous biology and chemistry class lab experience helped me not feel like I was walking into a nuclear reactor and asked to fix it.

The reason for these beer analysis labs is for smaller breweries who do not have internal labs to quantify their beer's quality control to compare to sensory analysis and also confirm that the labels they are sticking on their bottles for retails sales also match up with whats ACTUALLY inside the bottle.

Bacteria Counting
Because of the yeast plating I have been doing, I figured to count bacteria we would be using more petri dishes. WRONG! 3M makes disposable gridded pre-made media that look like sticky notes, except the media on the sheets can be tailored to whatever it is you are trying to grow or identify.

I first unboxed commercial samples of beers that came in from all over the country. Then I went through and labeled a corresponding 3M sheet to the sample given. I then micro pipetted out a small volume on to the 3M sheet, put the cover down and let it bleed out. These sheets will then incubate for 2-5 days to allow bacteria to grow. If it does grow, it will show up as little red dots. The sheets that have red dots will be cell counted to get an approximate bacteria count for the batch.

For all subsequent tests, all beer samples were portioned out into new beakers and labeled again. Small samples were taken.

I also got to use this handy dandy tool which makes pipetting SO easy! It uses vaccum pressure to pull up an amount and push out an amount. Where has this been my entire life?!?

IBU's
To measure the IBU's (International Bitterness Units) in beer, you use a liquid extraction technique described HERE in great detail, but to sum it up, alpha acid (humulone) is insoluble in water. That is why you must boil your bittering hops for at least 60 mins to get any bitterness utilization and isomerize the humulone. But to measure IBU's after the beer has been packaged you must extract those alpha acids OUT of the beer. You take HCL to break acid out, then use 2,2,4-trimethylpentane (isooctane) to snatch the broken out alpha acids to then test.

trimethylpentane on top, beer on the bottom prior to shaking

This sample with the HCl and trimethylpentane are then shaken for 15 minutes to emulsify, then centrifuged, then placed into a spectrophotometer where are wavelength of light is used to measure its absorbance. A final calculation is made with this value, and voila, IBU's!

This is the spectrophotometer

SRM (color)
Just like the IBU's, the spectrophotometer was used, however no preparation was needed of the beer sample, other than off gassing the beer and filtering it if it was cloudy, such as an wheat based beer.

Density & Alcohol %
This is where the expensive equipment was used. Density and alcohol % of an alcoholic beverage are linked, as long as you have pure ethanol in pure water. It is a simple D = M/V equation. However with beer, you have other solutes in the solution. So you need to separate the ethanol from the beer through distillation (which is time consuming) OR! you can use a super expensive Anton Paar Alcolyzer and Density meter that will report all sorts of fun facts such as the alcohol %, but also calories, extract, degree of fermentation, and others!

This machine setup and automatically churn through up to 20+ samples in one go

Conductivity & pH
Finally the last tests run were conductivity and pH. pH is an obvious choice to measure, since pH really influences how a beer is fermented and of course its flavor (think sour beers and its lower pH). However! have you ever considered testing the beer's conductivity? The reason to do so is to check the salts present in the beer and compare that to your water chemistry used in the brew. Do they compare? Are you getting any off flavors that you think are due to too low or high salts? This test might help with that.

Overall Takeaway
Considering I am very early on in my school career for fermentation sciences, this has A) given me a heads up of what to expect. B) A possible career field within fermentation to pursue and C) more general knowledge of the field I am heading into.