An important part of WIB since its inception has been our homebrewing community. We never cease to be amazed by the creativity, talent and sometimes utterly bizarre creations they come up with, using the ingredients from our shelves. We've often said we wish we could share the brews that make it to our monthly homebrew club with the rest of the world, so now we are!
The challenge for our homebrew club in October was Oktoberfest, as usual we had some great beers as part of the challenge and some great beers that weren’t we’ve included two of each below.
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Esther Arwert is back on the blog and this time she’s got two recipes – one for her apple cider and one for her delicious spent grain coconut and walnut cookies!
Apple cider
Last year I received a lot of apples (mainly bramley) and pears (conference), which I wanted to use to make some cider with as I recently had received a cider press as a leaving present (awesome leaving present!).
It was the first time I was making a cider/perry so after reading a bunch of recipes & suggestions online, I didn't follow any of them specifically, but used best judgement and incorporated the bits that I liked.
- quarter apples & pears (60%/40% for one batch, 100% apples in the other one)
- throw out bad bits of fruit
- use a beam/plank of clean wood to smash it into a pulp in a metal pot
- add pulp into cider press and slowly press to release the juice
- add "pressed pulp" back into smashing pot, add a bit of warm water, smash a bit more and re-press to get most of the juice from each batch.
- Use citric acid to lower the pH of the juice to around pH=3.5
- Because I'm paranoid of infection after all that hard work I flash-pasteurised the juice by heating up to 75C for a few minutes before cooling it down quickly
- add 1tsp of yeast nutrient + cider yeast when properly cooled down to RT.
- then...wait...wait...wait...around 4 weeks
- bottle with carbonation drops (sugar)
- leave for at least 2 weeks, but in my experience the cider is actually best after a few months to up to a year in the bottle before drinking it all :-)
- Home-made ciders are normally very dry (all the fruit sugars ferment out). So... don't expect strongbow...
ABV: 5.5 %
You can back-sweeten the cider afterwards, but in this batch I added a little of lactose to some of the bottles (5g per 500ml) to give a little more sweetness, but most people didn't really notice it and still said it was quite dry...next time I might try more... Or might try back-sweeten with one of the batches I'm making this year...Although...most people seemed to like it the way it was.
Spent grain coconut & walnut cookies
When you brew there's always spent grain...there's still quite a lot of sugar & protein left in these and it seems like a waste to just throw it all away. I often bake bread with it (sometimes using the left over brewer's yeast to go with it), this time around I decided to make something to share with the home brew group.
I'm not too good with recipes like this because when I cook I work based on consistencies and taste/smell more than exact volumes - so use your own judgement!...but here's an estimate:
- 75g of butter
- 150g fine dark sugar
- 1 large egg
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- 50-75g of flour (depends on how wet your grains are, I started with 50g and added more)
- pinch of salt
- 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon of ground ginger
- 1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves
- 1/5 teaspoon of ground mace
- 1/5 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
- around 2 cups (300g?) of wet spent grain
- 100g of coconut flakes
- 125g walnuts
You can play around with the spices.. I've used allspice or the Dutch "speculaas kruiden", and sometimes I add some white pepper or cayenne for heat....whatever you fancy.
- preheat the oven at 180C
- cream butter + sugar (I do it by hand and it takes forever so If you have have a mixer I'm sure that's more fun)
- add egg & vanilla
- in a separate bowl combine flour, salt, baking powder and spices
- add flour mix to the butter mix in a few additions, mixing well after each addition.
- add wet spent grain, coconut flakes and walnuts
- drop a spoonful of mix on cookie sheets and bake for 25min (or until they are brown and slightly crispy on the outside), be aware they'll expand significantly so leave a good gap between them on the sheet.
- cool down and eat up!
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Mark Woolard hides his beers under the floorboards, this was an amazing beer, which only improved with the floorboard aging system.
Baltic Porter
Munich Malt – 7kg
Amber Malt – 300g
Chocolate Malt – 300g
Carafa III – 280g
Biscuit Malt – 200g
Caramunich Malt – 100g
80g of Saaz & 11g of Challenger in the (60min) boil, with a further 20g of Saaz at flameout steeping for 15mins.
To cope with the volume & alcohol content a big starter was made from White Labs WLP838 (Southern German Lager) yeast.
OG was 1.082 and it fermented at 12.5degrees for a little over 3 weeks. FG was 1.018
This leaves the beer at a mouth warming 8.5%.
This beer was actually brewed back in February 2018, so it's now had over 18months in the bottle conditioning – only 2 left now sadly.
A beer to be re-brewed for sure!
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David Kezszi is back with an Oktoberfest/ dark Belgian beer hybrid.
Oktoberfest Dark/ Belgian brew
So this is a usual 1 gallon brew for me, not everything is typically German ingredients, rather what I have had at home.
The aim was a darker, maltier and fruitier, perhaps higher alcohol beer.
As I'm still only using the stove top, the efficiency is fairly low, I guess the ingredients can be reduced on a proper kit.
Mash 1 hour, temp kept between 63-68C°, hour boil and slow chill (sadly, as no equipment for that yet).
Grain:
-Bestmalz Vienna 700g base malt
-Weyermann Carahell 200g body, flavour and colour
-Weyermann Melanoidin 200g body, flavour and colour
-Weyermann Abbey 200g aromatic, body and colour
-Dingemans Aromatic 150g malt aroma
-Bestmalz Special X 150g roast and raisin, fruity flavours
-Flaked Oats 100g body and mouth feel
Hop: Mandarina Bavaria 10g at 50mins, 10g at 10mins left in boil. (using this mainly for orange and tangerine aroma)
Yeast: Mangrove Jack M47 Abbey - again, fruit driven yeast.
Ferment for 4 days, then transferred into secondary for a tad bit longer than two months! (not sure what happened there...)
Brewed in the end of March, bottled beginning of June.
Og:1060 Fg:1010 Abv.:6.6%
Bottled without any addition of honey (normally I do add) or sugar.
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Daniel Briant makes his debut on the recipe blog with a great Dunkelweisen recipe.
Dunkelweizen
Batch 15L
Efficiency 80%
Boil 90min
OG - - 1.055
FG - 1.016
Colour - 39.4
EBC Bitterness - 13.5
Grain Wheat Malt - 2.00 kg / 53% Pilsner - 1.20 kg / 32% Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L - 0.20 kg / 5% Munich Malt - 0.20 kg / 5% Chocolate - 0.19 kg / 5%
Hops Tettnanger - 25g - Pellet - Boil 60mins AA 3.8
Yeast Mangrove Jack's Bavarian Wheat M20
Mash 68 C / 60 min Mash Out 75 C / 10 min Fermented for 10 Days @ 20c