Tea Party Porter & Witbier l’Orange

A very ambitious undertaking I thought, to brew two different beers in a single session in less than 12 hours.  Mission accomplished.  It wasn’t as hard as I thought since most of the time spent on a brew day is for cleaning up afterwards and putting everything away. 

This was a plan that had been conceived the week before and at the last minute, I decided to take the Friday before Memorial Day off to brew.  Nobody around to distract me, or come to my rescue if I did anything stupid. 

I’ve said this before, but since our county switched from well water to surface water, it has been terrible for brewing.  It has no mineral content other than Sodium.  That’s all we need is more Sodium in our diets and it tastes horrible to boot.  Knowing this, I brew with RO water and add minerals back in.  I have a spreadsheet that helps me calculate the additions of CaCO₃ (Chalk), CaSO4 (Gypsum), CaCl₂ (Calcium Chloride), MgSO₄ (Epsom Salt) and NaHCO₃ (Baking Soda).  All of these additions are in 1-5 grams for 5 gallons of water and they can change the flavor and mouth-feel of the water dramatically.  Without going into an entire treatise on water formulation, there are two factors I am concerned with; the Residual Alkalinity and the Chloride to Sulfate ratio.  The Residual Alkalinity is determined by what color of beer I want to brew (higher is better for darker beer) and can be raised by adding Carbonates (CO₃).  It has been described as “buffering potential”, but a simpler concept is that Carbonates (like Baking Soda) absorb acid and dark malts are acidic.  The more dark malt you use, the more buffering potential you need.  This is beyond the basic minerals needed for yeast health like Calcium.

The Chloride to Sulfate ratio affects the perception of hop bitterness or that of “malty-ness” and is adjusted by adding Sulfate to improve bitterness or Chloride to improve malty-ness.  I don’t know why I write this pseudo-science stuff, nobody’s going to read it… In the old days, people used to put salt in a beer to reduce the bitterness.  Same thing.

My wife thought I was kidding when I said I was getting up at 5am to start my brew day.  I had some coffee and breakfast and as soon as she pulled the car out of the garage I was heating the strike water for Tea Party Porter.  I received the yeast for the witbier (White Labs WLP 400) the day before, but had the WLP001 California Ale yeast from the batch of Amber Waves that I could re-pitch.  Both were in the Fermentation Chamber,  getting fed and acclimating to their new environment.

As I described in my Facebook post, the idea of heating the sparge water with the infusion heater just occurred to me and it helped a lot.  Given that it is “set and forget” computer controlled, I could set the sparge temperature of 168 and walk away.  Very convenient. I batch sparged this, meaning I drained the first runnings from the mash tun before closing the drain valve and filling the tun up with the sparge water.  Let that sit for 15 minutes and drain it again.  While that batch was set to boil, I emptied the mash tun and refilled it with the strike water for the witbier (mean white beer) and started that heating to the strike temperature.

The mash profile for the witbier is a little more complicated than the simple, single infusion, porter mash.  The witbier recipe has 4 mash rests at 102, 122, 152 and 168 (all in F.) so I would have to use the heat infusor to raise the mash temperature instead of heating the sparge water.  All of these temperature rests have specific time intervals and my system is not completely automated.  I can set the temperature and so long as the pump continues to move liquid through the infusion heater, the computer will control the temperature, but not the time interval.  So, while all this was going on, with the Tea Party Porter boiling, and the timer telling me to change the temperature of the mash, I was filtering the dry hop material out of the last batch of Amber Waves.  After it had been racked to keg and left to sit at 34F for a week it was ready to filter to another clean, sanitized keg.  A little CO₂ pressure and the beer gets pushed out of the old keg, through the plate filter and into the clean keg.  Once that was done, the keg was put back in the refrigerator and hooked up to more CO₂ to carbonate.  You can see the chill-line on the keg telling you how full it is.  The 3rd keg in the picture just has pressurized sanitizer in it for cleaning out the tubing.

I bought a 6 gallon plastic bottle for fermenting in and I keep running into the same problem with it.  Every time I use it I dump precious beer down the driveway.  If it was 6.5 gallons like my glass (breakable and heavy, see my last entry) carboys, I wouldn’t be so annoyed with them.  The Better Bottle brand does the same thing infuriatingly enough.  They make bottles in 3 gallon, 5 gallon, and 6 gallon.  Why not continue the progression and make a 3, 5 and 7 gallon!  I’m tired of dumping out beer.  I don’t mind spillage or waste, but to dump perfectly good beer out for the lack of space is very annoying.  So as you can see, there is very little air-space at the top of this “fermenter” and I know what is going to happen.  I’m going to waste perfectly good yeast by having it overflow into the blow off tank (it’s a 1 gallon cider bottle that has a couple of holes in the lid).  Sure there will be yeast left behind when I rack this beer off the trub, but the best fermenting guys are the ones that end up betting blown out the tube.  So, if I had more of the Tea Party Porter than I expected, why did I use this bottle instead of the 6.5 gallon?  Funny thing, the WLP400 witbier yeast needs even more headspace than the California Ale yeast.  Last time I used it I learned that lesson the hard way, with yeasty foam and beer goo all over the floor of my fermentation chiller and pouring out the front doors onto the garage floor.  What a mess that was.  This time I’m using the bigger 6.5 gallon bottle and a blow-off tube to catch the foamy mess.

This photo is from about 24 hours after pitching the yeast.  The “water” in the tank was clean water 24 hours ago and now there is a layer of foam and a ton of yeast blow-off that I kept from making a mess.

I’m not sure how these beers are going to turn out, it is in the high 90’s here this Memorial Day weekend and my chiller is set at 62 but the temperature indicators on the bottles say it’s 68.  That is a bit warm for both of these yeasts, but I can’t cool them down once they start.  Start cold and let warm, never the other way around.  It will be another week or so before the Amber Waves is ready due to the 1 week of dry hop and 1 week of settling before filtering and I’m 2 weeks behind on that batch. 

Good thing I don’t have any customers to disappoint