The Recession Kitchen

Brewing with Strawberries

When brewing I strive to make the best use of seasonal ingredients. This means brewing potent IPAs when the hop harvest makes its way to my local home brew shop or internet suppliers, mid-summer is the time to crank out a full-bodied cherry stout for the holidays, and early autumn it is time to make pumpkin ale. So, when I noticed a sign at the farmers market informing me that it was the last week when Michigan strawberries would be available, I knew it was time to take the plunge into making a strawberry brew.

My goal was simple, I wanted a light colored ale with a hint of the sweetness of strawberries. But the challenge I faced was greater than I'd anticipated. First, cooking with fresh, unpasteurized fruit comes with the risk of introducing troublesome things like wild yeast, bacteria, and mold spores into your concoction. Clearly, I wanted to avoid this. My approach was two-fold. First, I would pasteurize my pureed fruit at the end of the brewing. After reducing the temperature of my wort to the vicinity of 165 degrees following the boil, I'd introduce the fruit and steep it at that temperature for 20 minutes. Secondly, I would make this a very potent beer, something with an alcohol content that would assist in the brew's preservation.

I already had six pounds of extra light malt extract, but I wanted to go a little further. I decided to use a Belgian Ale yeast from Wyeast, since I was going to have a lot of fermentable sugars. Deciding to go with the Belgian theme, I bought a pound of light candi sugar. Then to finish things off, I bought a 3.3 pound can of wheat liquid malt extract. I did this because most light fruit brews I've tasted were in part wheat beers. Wheat beers are also great summer bears.

So, to review, that was 6 pounds of dried malt extract, 3.3 pounds of liquid malt extract, 1 pound of candi sugar, and 2 pounds of strawberries. Doing the math, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 pounds of sugars for a 5 gallon batch of beer. Now, one would think that I'd need to go a little crazy with the hops to balance out all of these sugars, but I went with a different tact. I decided I wanted this beer to be a little sweet, and I'm counting on the yeast to add some fruit flavors as well, so I didn't want to over-power that with hop oils. So, I went with a rather mild addition of 1.5 ounces of Glacier hops, added in .5, .5, .5 additions. Finally, to assist in head retention and to give the beer a bit more of a golden hue, I began my wort by steeping a half pound of crystal malt, 10L, which is a very light malt.

Figuring I had everything settled, I began to brew. Everything started off fantastic. My steeped grains gave the wort the inner glow I was seeking. But that's where everything I'd expected ended. Upon bringing the wort to a boil and adding my wheat extract, I was shocked to see how dark the wort became. The fact is that liquid malt extracts always darken beer a bit more than the brewer may want, but we're talking definite Dunkelweizen here. The wort went from golden glow to a nut brown almost instantly. I added my first bit of hops and let things ride for about forty minutes before adding the rest of my malt and the candi sugar -- which I dissolved in bowl of hot wort that I laded out of my brew pot. By the time I was done adding my sugars, the beer had a strange dark glow, something close to the sheen of a carp's belly.

When I came time to cool the wort for the strawberry addition, I had another challenge. You see, a liquid with the density made by 12 pounds of sugar dissolved into 5 gallons of water tends to hold heat rather well. Reducing the temperature from a boil at 212 degrees to a hot bath of 165 degrees would require some thinking. I decided to plop my brew pot into a cold bath in the kitchen sink. It took a half-hour, but it worked. I returned the pot to the stove, added the strawberries and something magical happened.

There is something invigorating about making beer out of tap water and a stack of ingredients. It is an experience that truly relies on all five senses, and one that gains access to all five channels of your sensory memory, that part of your memory stoked by a smell, sight, sound, taste or tactile stimulus.

For me the addition of strawberries to the heavy malted wort transported back to my grandfather's spare room, where, as a child, I'd watch the creation of wine. It was there that I learned that almost anything in the garden could be turned into wine, and he was willing to make it so. He made wine from crab apples and onions, from peaches and parsley, and from blueberries, gooseberries, and plums and pears. But the one I remember most is the strawberry. Because there are two tastes of strawberries. There is the heavy sugary strawberry taste of shortcake, the one that's mimicked by Quick strawberry milk and strawberry gum. It's that strawberry that we think of strawberry, but that is really something else, something far more sweet. But then, there is the taste of a strawberry just picked and sliced and gobbled down. It's a taste of two parts, there's sweet and tart. It's a natural berry taste. And it's smell is nothing like the sweet strawberry that gives its name to most things strawberry from ice cream to, well, to strawberry ale.
But my strawberry ale has that other strawberry smell, that true spring strawberry.

Now, I don't know what my beer will taste like. And it may well be some time until I do. You see when you have a truckload of fermentables in a beer, you have to give your yeast ample time to work their magic. So, it's possible that I may not even bottle this batch for nine months. It may even be a year. In fact, I may very well get my first taste of my strawberry ale, at about the same time next year that a sign goes up at the farmer's market, warning that time is running out: "Last Week for Michigan Strawberries."

And if it does, well, that timing will be perfect, because it will be just in time to brew another batch.

Long Winter Ale: a tale in taking one's time

My passion for homebrewing was sparked in 2006, when, after the passing of my grandfather, I found a journal he'd kept of his brewing between the 1970s and late 1980s. The discovery instantly invoked memories of my childhood, peaking into buckets of fermenting strawberries or cranberries that were being converted into wine by furiously ravenous yeast. Upon looking through the log, I realized that he'd also made beer.
There have been incredible advances in homebrewing since my grandfather made his last batch in 1986, something I learned when digging around homebrewing sites like Midwest Supplies and More Beer, where the brands of malt extract and yeast used by grandfather decades ago have been replaced by more specialized varieties that allow the homebrewer to make styles ranging from crisp Pilseners to oatmeal stouts. So, rather than start out making beer directly from my grandfather's recipe book, I started with kits and recipes I'd developed using these new products.
Over the holidays, however, I took another look at those old recipes and realized that many of them relied on ingredients, like corn sugar, that were less expensive than what I'd been using. I set out to create a recession-friendly winter ale, combining some of my grandfather's tricks with what I'd learned. I also decided to check out what was available at my local homebrew shop.
My first mistake came when I stepped into the shop and saw baggies of flaked rye. The availability was great. I'd recently become a huge fan of Goose Island's Mild Winter, which is a product that uses rye to give the beer a peppery finish. The mistake was that I had no idea how to incorporate flaked anything into my brewing. I could figure it out, I figured.
All in all I picked up 1 lb. flaked rye  (1/2 to be used), 1 lb. light crystal, 5 lbs. extra light dried malt extract, 3 lbs of corn sugar (1 1/2 to be used), 1 oz. of glacier hops, 1 oz. of Fuggle hops and a couple of packs of Munton's dry active brewing yeast.
Upon arriving home, I realized that to use flakes in brewing, I couldn't simply steep them like you do with grains. Doing so would turn them, basically into oatmeal, or in this case rye-meal. I'd need to do what is called a mini-mash.
A mini-mash is when a brewer uses some malt extract and derives the rest of the sugars for a beer by extracting those sugars from grains or flakes. To do this, you must heat the grains or flakes in water. This activates enzymes in the grains that convert starches to sugars. Then you pour some hotter water over those grains and flakes to both wash away the converted sugars (so they can be put in your brew pot) and denature the enzymes, which have a not so tasty taste.
Cut to "must-rush me." I steeped the flakes in a bag, then poured the resiny liquid into my brew pot. Oh, yeah, I also squeezed the bag, making sure all of those enzymes went right into my brew pot. And I never rinsed the flakes either, which means I probably got, oh, say, about 12% of the sugar from those flakes into my beer.
I then brewed as I normally would and waited for my yeast to get to work.
But rather than wait a week to let my yeast work, I got fidgety and checked my beer at 5 days (two days early). It appeared that my fermentation was done, but i figured it couldn't be, so I added another 6 grams of yeast (and another ounce of Fuggles hops) to the mixture. After adding this stuff, I figured I'd measure the level of conversion from sugar to alcohol, known as attenuation.
I realized that my yeast had in fact, done their job. Having added more yeast, however, I to let my beer sit for another six days. I then moved the batch to  a large glass carboy. In homebrewing, this step allows the yeast to fall out of the beer and gives you a clearer, more crisp, final product. My concoction of hyper-yeasted, enzyme filled, corn brew, however, looked a lot more like the Chicago River than an appetizing beverage.
Twenty-two days later it still looked as muddy as hippo in a heatwave, so I took drastic measures. I attempted to clarify my beer with gelatin. Gelatin, you see, has properties which allow it to pull yeast out of beer, making it clear. I added a packet of Knox that had been dissolved in a cup of hot water. From what I'd read, my beer should have looked as clear as sunshine three days later.
That didn't happen. In fact, four days later it got even muddier. I was beginning to fear that my recession ale was going to throw me into a depression.
Amazingly, 11 days later, my beer cleared up.
I bottled the equivalent of 50 12 oz. bottles of the stuff and will know in about two weeks how good it is.
The moral of the story here is that when it comes to cooking anything, don't rush. If you have questions, ask, if you're still unsure, read.
I've certainly learned my lesson, and can't wait to brew with rye again, but next time, my story will be shorter and much more clear, and will probably have quotes from other people I will have asked questions along the way.

You too can brew!

We are getting a miraculous thaw this weekend, so I won't be spending too much time indoors. I will, however, be taking a couple of hours to bottle the Irish Red Ale that I'm preparing for St. Patrick's Day. If I get it bottled today it will have more than a month to condition by parade day, which means it'll be sparkling and glorious to behold and ingest!
In honor of that day, I wanted to share an article I wrote last may, it's a primer on homebrewing. There's even a recipe that would be ready if you want to make something special for your own St. Patrick's celebration. If you have any questions just post them in the comment section. I'll address them there or in a future brewing post.
Enjoy, and if you can, get outside!

Brewtopia within reach!

originally appeared in the Pioneer Press.
By David Jakubiak

    Imagine delicious beer flowing from your kitchen tap with just a few additions.

The availability of inexpensive equipment and easy-to-use ingredients has a growing number of people concocting their own suds, all by adding a little malt, hops and yeast to their tap water.

“Homebrewers are people who like to cook and like to garden. They are people who get a lot of pleasure out of making something themselves,” said Mike Kolbuk of Wheeling.

Kolbuk took his first crack at brewing in the 1980s. He got hooked after taking a brewing class offered by the River Trails Park District in 1992, and he is now a member of Club Wort, a homebrewing group that meets monthly at Durty Nellie’s in Palatine.

Beer sales flat?

Valerie Parent of Reuters just dropped a story about beer sales stalling in the current market. I don't know if this is the same as consumption dropping, but more on that later. First the real scary news:
"In response to stalling demand, brewers may turn more to beer with lower malt content that is cheaper to produce and buy."
Less malt may mean more corn sugar in your beer, which is bad news to those of us who love taste. At very least, it means hungry yeast, which is a very unfortunate prospect.
My solution: Make your own.
More on that later. Here's a tease: