Weedy's Update and Brett IPA Brewday

I've been having people asking me a lot of questions about how the new Weedy's recipe is coming along. I think we are close to having a recipe in place and we should be brewing it at some point in March. There are a lot of things we will be doing with it that will be pretty unique.

In my last blog post, I talked a lot about yeast and how we will be evolving a strain to get more of the peach esters. That is working out well so far. The first 5 gallon test batch has a lot of intense aromas from the yeast and it has the juiciness that I was hoping for. However, the yeast strain has the ability to take certain hop compounds and transfigure them into other flavor compounds... So basically, every hop that I am used to tasting one way could come out tasting completely different than what I think of them tasting like. In this case, I got a lot of mint flavor from Chinook hops and the Cascade gave a little bit of orange rind and earthiness. The end result is a very interesting, complex beer, but not what I would want to brew regularly. The second batch is just done fermenting and will be dry hopped differently. I have high hopes for it.

That said, the first batch showed a lot of promise as we re-formulate our recipe. It is very intensely hoppy, but the perceived bitterness is so low that I was actually worried that we wouldn't be able to scale the recipe up to our brewhouse because our hop utilization is pretty high. That has led us to buying a hopback to start using for this beer. A hopback is a small vessel where you can place hops to run wort through them right before chilling the wort and pitching yeast. The hops are in contact with the hot wort for such a small amount of time that you don't extract bitterness, but you do get all the hop aroma and flavor. That also will mean that we can use whole hops instead of pellets and have even better aroma.

While a hopback is fairly uncommon to see these days, that is far from the most unique thing this beer will feature. The thing that I'm most excited about is we will be doing open fermentation in horizontal fermenters. Utilizing the open fermenters, we will have more ester production from the yeast and the beer will clear slightly better (although, this will be a cloudy DIPA as it won't have any fining agents or be filtered). With open fermentation, we will be able to ferment the beer for the normal 3-4 days and then we will transfer the beer to a separate aging vessel where it will be dry hopped with whole leaf hops and naturally carbonated.

The beer will be cloudy. As I said in the last post about yeast, we want all the hop oils and resins that coat the yeast cells to remain in suspension. We won't be fining, filtering, or centrifuging because we want the flavors that are attached to the yeast cells. In addition to removing hop oils and resins, fining agents strip polyphenols ( an essential part of hop flavor), filtering introduces oxygen, and centrifuging puts excessive amounts of sheer force on the yeast, all of which can negatively effect hoppy flavor and aromas.

The natural carbonation is the last piece of the puzzle for this beer. It is pretty rare to see modern breweries "spund" fermenters. The basic idea with spunding is that you close off the fermenter right before the beer reaches its final gravity and let pressure build. This means we will be dry hopping under pressure and getting more aroma from the hops, but more importantly, the bubbles that form from natural carbonation are smaller than force carbonation. That means it will exhibit better head retention and release more aroma from the glass. The reason most breweries don't do that is because it increases the likelihood of sulfur compounds and diacetyl. However, since we will be fermenting in shallow fermenters, the risk of diacetyl is significantly lessened and sulfur production will not be a concern. With all the steps we are taking to increase flavor and aroma while decreasing bitterness, I think we will be seeing a very intense, unique DIPA.

Also, now that we got our Brett Pinstripe out of the fermenter (bottles should be shipping next week for those keeping an eye out for them), we are able to brew our next Brett beer. This time, we are brewing a Brett IPA with whole leaf Amarillo, Mandarina Bavaria, and Citra. I requested a custom Brettanomyces blend for this one which will give us a lot of stone fruit flavors as well as a subtle pineapple flavor. While the common school of thought with hoppy beers is always to drink fresh, this is one that I think will be great fresh and as it ages it will be fun to see how it changes. I expect a dry, subtly funky, moderately fruity, and very citrusy IPA to come out of this when it is fresh and as it ages, the stone fruit character will come out more and the funkiness will increase as it ages. As is the case with all of our hoppy beers, the Brett IPA is hop bursted and since Brett typically masks bitterness in IPA's, the perceived bitterness level will be very low. Be on the lookout for it sometime in April!