Barley Straw Wine: about beer Maderization...

Maderization is an oxidative process tipycal of some wines during aging. Wine loses some carachteristics, and aquire an amber color and a typical Madeira flavour. In wines like Porto, Madeira, Marsala, that is a part of aging process, so it's not negative for the product.

Like many tipical food, Madeira wine was born  randomly.
Im Madeira island, since 1600 a wine was produced for local consumption and export. In some area of the island, grapes didn't reach the rght amount of sugars, so, to lower the acidity of the wine, cane sugar or alcohol from cane sugar was added: they discovered that this wine, reinforced with sugar or alcohol, could keep hisflavours and get new ones. Part of the vinification process consist in aging in barrels for some months at 50°C.
Inspired by this, I decided to make a maderized Barley wine, a high gravity beer fermented with sherry yeast and left oxidising for 6 months at warm temperature after adding alcohol:

4kg pils
1kg munich
100g cane sugar
15 g willamette (90')
15 g amarillo (90')

I used the first 7 liters from sparging for the Barley wine, adding bittering hops at the boil, 100g cane sugar. After boiling I got 5 liters at OG 1100, those were inoculated with Wyeast 4021: champagne/sherry yeast (what a shame, one pack for just five liters!).

I did an easy APA with the rest of the filtration: it was summer and I needed something fresh to drink!

After 7 days of primary fermentation, I added 20cl alcohol and left the beer in a glass carboy for six months. Here is where the oxidativeprocess took place, from june to december. Then I bottled without priming.

I tasted the beer after one yeas (6 months maderization + 6 months bottle): it has typical aromas like Porto, Vin Santo or Marsala, a strong chestnut honey smell (for the lucky ones that ever tasted it), heavy body. Perfect after dinner or dessert pairing. If you ever tasted Xiaoyu from Baladin, that's really similar: at first seems like a straw wine, but when in your mouth you notice all the fruity flavours missing.

After this experiment, I tried to add maderized notes to a Belgian strong amber ale: the beer (9% Alc.) layed four months maderizing, then I primed, bottled and put in the cellar aging three months ago. Too young now, but stay tuned!

Brettanomyces

All homebrewers that like Orval, sooner or later will wonder how to reproduce it at home. Brettanomices are very hungry microrganisms, and very persistant: it's better to use dedicated tanks, and spend more time in the sanfication of bottles, fermentors etc after use.

Here my experience with recovery of Orval brettanomices:
After drinking the beer, I filled the Orval bottle with few centiliters of wort, after few days the foam started to form, so I checked yeast activity, then I transferred the bretta in half liter starter.
After three more days, brettanomices were sparkling and ready to be inoculated in wort.
First experiment was a total-Bretta fementation: two liters of easy E+G,  20 IBU, 1045 OG. Fermentation at 20-22°C with starter from a single Orval bottle: 7 days primary, 10 days lagering, bottling.
After twenty days I tried the beer. A strong solvent smell came out, fortunately vanishing quickly. The 'beer' has the tipical goût d'Orval, more stronger than the original one (at the Abbey they just use brettanomyces for secondary fermentation).

And it's using the Brett for the secondary fermentation that you can get very interesting beers: I did a bretted Tripel, OG 1079, fermented 5 giorni with T-58. Then I splitted the beer: then liter inoculated with Orval starter (see the procedure above), ten liter went on normalfermentation.
T-58 needed longer time to reach FG, that was higher than the FG reached by the Bretta: they are hungry and ferment all sugard in the wort.
After a couple of months the Tripel is really dry, and with the tipical goût d'Orval!

Few months later, I decided to CLONE the Orval:

OrvalClone, liters 20,5 (preboil 22,5)
efficiency  73%, 60 min. boiling
OG 1,055; IBU: 35,0; EBC: 20;
Malts (mash 65°C for70 minutes):
  4000 gr German 2-row Pils, 1,038;
  250 gr Crystal 105L, 1,033;
  400 gr Candi sugar (clear), 1,046;
  25 gr Chocolate Malt, 1,034;
Hops:
  32 gr Spalter, 5,9 %a.a., 60 min;
  28 gr Styrian Goldings, 4,7 %a.a., 25 min;
  17 gr hersbrucher, 3,7 %a.a., 5 min;
  6 gr spalter, 5,9 %a.a., 25 min;
  10 gr Saaz, 4,0 %a.a., 60 min;

Primary fermentation with Trappist high gravity (5gg) then secondary with Orval starter. Here the bottles:

in italiano

Labels

For years, I labeled my bottles putting some adhesive roll paper, writing the name and bottling date of the beer with a pen.
It was an easy and lazy solution, but one day I decoded I needed to have better looking bottles. So after many sketch, the Backdoor brewery logo was born. it's a hop flower with a banner, where I put the name/style of the beer. I used to print those labels on normal paper and then write all details of the beer. Attaching/detaching the labels on the bottle is really quick, using a brush and some milk.

Then I decided to print directly all data, to save more time.

  

Here are some variations: a special light and zesty beer created to be drinked during FIFA world cup matches, a Black IPA and a Norther brown ale, cloned from a famous beer...

P.S.: many thanks to my wife for the original sketch of the logo.

in italiano

Priming with sweet liquors

Why should you use just sugar to carbonate homemade beer?

In order to add new flavours to beer, I tried to prime a fruit ale with a sugar liquor (Cointreau).
First I measured the density of the liquor, and checked the amount of sugar (there’s a bar on densimeter): Cointreau has 105 grams of sugar per liter. As alcohol (40% in volume in the liquor) has lower density than water, I added a 10% of the amout of sugar, to estimate 115 effective grams of sugar per liter.
Then, to carbonate 5 liters of beer I needed 11 grams of sugar, so I added 100ml of liquor. It's easy, you don't need to sterilize priming, as alcohol kills every unwanted microrganism: just measure, add and bottle.
After a month, the priming was perfect, and Cointreau added some nice flavous to the beer (a light lager, in wich I also added mandarines to the worth after primary fermentation)

It was a nice experiment, and there are many more liquors that can be used to prime beer. I actually have a Brown ale primed with Amaretto (200 grams of sugar per liter, very sweet!!). More uptades in one month, just the time to let this Amaretto brown ale to be ready!

in italiano