Modern Homebrew Recipes (22 page)

Formulation notes:
It’s hard to make a bitter beer that has strong caramel and hop flavors since crystal malts tend to clash with American hop varieties. I prefer to go with the more fruity-tasting Belgian and German crystal malts and pair them with fruity-tasting New World hops. I add the crystal and darker malts during
vorlauf
to reduce harshness, and I use first wort hopping, hop bursting, and a hop stand to increase the
hop character without the associated harshness. The hop stand gives it a higher bitterness than estimated.

Variations:
You can turn this beer into a brown ale by adding some chocolate malt (not the pale chocolate malt), steeped along with the crystal. I’d use a good UK chocolate like Thomas Fawcett. Eliminating the crystal and darker malts and mashing lower would make a strong pale ale. Scaling the recipe up to around 7% would make an American strong ale, or if you keep going, a rich barleywine. If the crystal malts are too high for your taste, you can use less; I wouldn’t try this much crystal malt with a more conventionally-hopped beer.

ATYPICAL ALTBIER

This recipe has an unusual story. In the 1990s, we couldn’t get Zum Uerige or other German altbiers in the US, so we had to rely on descriptions we’d read about the style. One homebrewer visited the brewery and claimed to have talked to the brewmaster and gotten the recipe. He described a beer with 90% dark Munich and 10% Aromatic malt, which isn’t anywhere close to the actual recipe. It does however make for a very unusual beer. I wouldn’t enter this in a competition necessarily, but I love the intense flavors. The malt is like a black hole for hop bitterness; it doesn’t seem anywhere near as bitter as calculated.

Style:
Altbier (Classic BJCP Style)

Description:
Supremely malty with a huge bitterness that is somewhat masked by the intense malt character.

Ingredients:

Water treatment:

RO water treated with ¼ tsp 10% phosphoric acid per 5 gallons

2 tsp CaCl
₂
in mash

Mash technique:

Step Infusion, mashout

Mash rests:

131°F (55°C) 15 minutes

145°F (63°C) 60 minutes

155°F (68°C) 20 minutes

168°F (76°C) 10 minutes

Kettle volume:

13 gallons (49 L)

Boil Length:

90 minutes

Final Volume:

10.5 gallons (40 L)

Fermentation temp:

Start at 58°F (14°C), allowing to rise to 68°F (20°C) to finish and drop bright. Lager at 40°F (4°C) for 4 weeks, then 32°F (4°C) for 3–4 weeks.

Sensory Description:
Very clean fermentation character. Extremely malty, with a richly bread crust flavor that dominates the palate. Apparent IBUs seem lower than calculated. Not necessarily a great
altbier
but an unusual beer with a ton of flavor.

Formulation notes:
The malt and hops were very specific in the original recipe, but were eventually debunked when Zum Uerige became available in the US and the label specified the actual ingredients. Spalt hops are very traditional. If you’re looking for a modern, authentic
altbier,
try the next recipe. This one is strictly an experimental beer, but it tastes so unusual that it’s worth trying. Note that several maltsters make dark Munich malt, but flavors can vary widely. You don’t want a
very
dark one, since that will have a much different flavor. I’d stick with the Weyermann Munich II.

Variations:
Try scaling it up to make a
doppelsticke
-like beer, which is like a German barleywine. Try for something at about 8.5% ABV with a similar OG and IBU balance.

CLASSIC ALTBIER

I owe the makeup of this recipe to my good friend Keith Kost, a great brewer and fierce competitor who brews a terrific alt. This recipe has won awards at a number of competitions, and Keith often names it, “In Third Place with an Altbier is Keith Kost” to be confusing when awards are announced. I judged this beer for a BJCP exam in Pittsburgh, and I wondered how they managed to get a fresh example of Zum Uerige. Really, it’s that good.

Style:
Altbier (Classic BJCP Style)

Description:
Rich, grainy, bready malt with strong bitterness and clean lager smoothness. The intensity of the malt allows for a high level of bitterness without seeming like an aggressively bitter beer. The dryness and malty flavors make it quite drinkable, which sets it apart from aggressive malty/hoppy beers like American Strong Ales that may appear superficially similar. That’s the German secret; well-attenuated, smooth beers are highly drinkable.

Ingredients:

Water treatment:

RO water treated with ¼ tsp 10% phosphoric acid per 5 gallons

0.5 tsp CaCl
₂
and 0.5 tsp CaSO
₄
in mash

Mash technique:

Decoction, mashout, crystal/dark malts added at
vorlauf

Mash rests:

Mash in 144°F (62°C); hold for 20 minutes

Pull 1/3 thick decoction; boil decoction 15 minutes, continuing to hold main mash

Remix, hitting 154°F (68°C); hold for 45 minutes

Pull thin portion of mash; boil decoction 10 minutes, continuing to hold main mash

Remix, hitting 168°F (76°C); hold for 10 minutes

Kettle volume:

14.5 gallons (55 L)

Boil Length:

90 minutes

Final Volume:

11 gallons (42 L)

Fermentation temp:

62°F (17°C) 3 days

68°F (20°C) 10 days or until finished

32°F (0°C) lager for two months

Sensory Description:
The malt is bready, grainy, and rich, but the overall impression is smooth. The malt richness dries out in the finish and the flavor is clean. The bitterness is strong and noticeable, but the malt does a great job of balancing it. There is a light hop presence at the end that adds some character without being distracting. The color is a light copper, and the beer is very clear. The aftertaste goes on forever with the smooth, rich malt and hop bitterness lingering. Despite the stronger flavors, the attenuation and smoothness makes this very easy to drink. I visited Düsseldorf and tried the most famous examples to help update the BJCP Style Guidelines in 2008, and this beer easily fits in with those fresh examples.

Formulation notes:
This makes a double batch: 10 gallons of finished beer suitable for two kegs (you can halve the recipe for a single keg batch). The classic German ingredients are pretty important for the style. Decoction mashing helps bring out the maltiness and smoothness of the beer. Lagering is important for smoothing out the finished beer. One month is the minimum lagering time, but two to three months is better. There is some IBU loss over time, so the beer is a little more aggressive in bitterness knowing that it will be served with some age. The
Kölsch
yeast can produce a little sulfur, but lagering helps reduce that somewhat.

Variations:
If trying to mimic the water from Düsseldorf, add more CaSO
₄
to the mash and reduce the IBUs. Other neutral, attenuative yeast strains would likely work as well. This beer would work as a bottom-fermenting lager using any clean German strain. I think this version would also be a good basis for the stronger
Sticke
alt variant (the “secret” alt brewed stronger and hoppier on special occasions); in that case, I’d scale the recipe up so that the ABV is around 6% and double the late hops.

¹
For those lab geeks out there, ASBC manual isooctane extraction (bitterness unit method A) measured 38, and ABSC iso-alpha-acid by solvent extraction (method B) measured 27 according to Actual Brewing, Columbus, OH. Method A can pick up aroma hop additions as bitterness, so Method B is preferred for beers with a strong late-hop or dry-hop addition.

5. STRONG ALE RECIPES

“There is no strong beer. Only weak men.”

—Sign at the Anchor Brewing Company

Like some homebrewers, I developed an early interest in brewing strong beer. Good commercial options weren’t always easy to find, and when they were, they were prohibitively expensive. I thought it much better to brew my own and then cellar them to an age when I would enjoy them the most. This is a personal flavor preference, I think; I don’t like my strong beers to have a boozy aspect to them, I prefer them to have a velvety maturity like a fine red Bordeaux.

Strong beers present their own challenges. Higher gravity means a bigger mash tun, or using extract, sometimes of unknown composition or age. It also means that you have to understand the limits of fermentation, and the special challenges a higher gravity environment presents to yeast (remember, in higher quantities, alcohol is toxic to yeast just like it is to humans).

Most problems with strong beers can be overcome by mashing for fermentability, not overdoing specialty malt additions, using oxygen, and pitching plenty of healthy yeast. I often repitch yeast from a moderate strength beer for a strong ale, or get a large pitch from a craft brewery.

At home, I have a few kegs set aside for my keeping beers—those higher-gravity brews that I want to bulk age for several years. When the kegs get low, I sometimes will rack to smaller containers (or buy more kegs). If you have the space, bottle-conditioning strong beers is more traditional, and works well. I have more cool storage space for kegs than bottles, so I tend to use kegs.

Whatever storage method you devise, I recommend that you have some way of keeping these big beers around for a while. They almost always taste better with age, and I’d hate for storage considerations (such as lack of availability of kegs or storage space for cases of bottles) to force these beers to be consumed too young. Vintage dating your big beers and keeping them around for special occasions is also fun for you and your beer loving friends.

One final thought: if you know you are going to be aging a strong beer for years before consuming it (such as making a special batch to commemorate a birthday or anniversary), consider increasing the amount of hops used in the recipe (compared to a batch you intend to consume sooner). The bitterness and hop character tends to fade over time, so go a little higher so that you get the right balance as it ages. There is no magic formula for this, unfortunately, as it involves too many variables. Another approach for extending the lifetime of a beer is to take the gueuze approach and blend some of an older batch with a newer batch, which can produce qualities difficult to create in a single batch of beer.