Triple cherry smoked fruit beer / My cherry trees

The grain bill (see recipe below).

I have a bit of malt left over from my first major brewing project, and I've been playing around with an online calculator to decide what to do with it.

I've also been enjoying a great blog on the subject of brewing unusual beers (and other food subjects), which inspired me to be a bit more adventurous - although there is something to be said about starting with simple recipes and working your way up, I tend to make what sounds interesting, even if that steepens the learning curve.

I have a thing for smoked beers - at least in theory. I have only tried one, on one occasion (the classic Schlenkerla Rauchbier, at my favourite Mancunian bar, Font). It sure was smoky, which isn't something you'd want in every drink, but it was interesting and not unpleasant. The way smoked beers are made is by smoking some of the malt, often over beech - although any wood you use for smoking food could work. You can buy ready-smoked malt, but since this recipe is made from leftovers, I'm going to smoke my own, using some of the many wood chips I bought last year for barbecues and smoking homemade bacon and suchlike.

I also love fruit beers, especially the two classics, kriek (cherry) and framboise (raspberry). I grow both in my garden - last year I got a single cherry and more than seven kilos of raspberries, but I wasn't brewing, so I used them in other things. I veer towards kriek partly because cherries seem much more luxurious, and partly because those I've had tend to be a little more sophisticated than other fruit beers. It happens that I have a bag of cherry wood chips, so I thought - why not combine the two? I came up with:

Triple cherry smoked fruit beer
for 4.5 litres (one demijohn)
grains and sugars
690g Maris Otter
280g English crystal
150g Amber, smoked over cherry wood chips
100g unrefined cane sugar
70g rolled oats
hops
2g Warrior (18.2% AA)
yeast
Hefeweizen (an unfiltered German beer, I poured some into a jug, added water and sugar, and let the yeast grow)/Wyeast Ringwood*
extras
toasted cherry wood chips
cherries

method
I'll mash the grains in the same way as for my first beer - namely by putting them into a big pan with water (I set my variable kettle to 80ºC, which comes down to the right range, 60-65ºC when mixed with the cold malt), then put that in the oven at a little under 70ºC for an hour. I'll boil with the hops for just half an hour - to extract the level of bitterness I've calculated, which should be pretty low, as what I've read suggests high hop levels and fruit don't combine well. I'll ferment in a glass demijohn with an airlock, and when it's done, I'll transfer to another demijohn, and add the wood chips. When the cherries are ripe, around midsummer, I'll transfer again, adding the fruit and probably removing the wood, depending on how woody it's become. The beer will sit on the fruit until autumn sometime, then I'll bottle it. The total time will be at least 9 months.

I really hope that I can use homegrown cherries in this - my schedule is based roughly around when they're ready. I can't count on having enough, or even any - as I'll explain below. In any case, that gives it five months or so on the wood chips - although I'll check to make sure it doesn't become unpleasant-tasting. Otherwise, I'll buy some fresh cherries around midsummer, and add those. As for quantities, I have no idea - but probably 20-30g of wood chips, and 0.5-1kg fruit.

What it ends up tasting like is unknown - I've never had anything like this, and it's rather experimental. But I'm using stuff I already have, so it's not costing me anything. If it's good, I'll have created something really exciting. If not - I now know you can blend beers, so maybe it won't have to be poured away.

*The Hefeweizen showed no signs of activity after a few days, so I added a little of my previous batch of beer, which is fermenting with Ringwood. Hopefully it'll take off soon. Update 25/1 - it's taken off now, bubbling contentedly (but not violently).

Update: 3rd February 2012
Fermentation has finished after ten days. The beer has been transferred to a fresh sterilised demijohn, and 35g toasted cherry wood chips will be added. Gravity measured at 1.015, giving a current abv of over 6% (the accuracy of a hydrometer is not really good enough to give fractions of a percent). Almost no sediment was transferred - a clean racking. Tasting of 80ml used for measuring the gravity: thick body, very little carbonation left. Copper-orange, good taste - I've had many worse beers in the pub. But there's no detectable smoke taste.

My cherry trees
I love fruit trees. They are amongst the most ornamental plants, with gorgeous (often scented) blossom announcing spring, summer verdancy and swelling fruits, edible baubles at harvest time, then bright autumn foliage. They don't need to take up much space - either get a dwarfing variety, or prune them into step-overs, cordons, fans, etc.

Even in my tiny garden, I've squeezed two cherry trees (and a quince). The cherries were from Tesco of all places, and bought on a whim - but I've always hankered after an orchard, so it wasn't unprecedented (I also bought a plum, but it didn't survive). I put one against the fence at the back of the garden - a position in full sun year-round, which gets very warm in spring and summer; the other went in on the other side of the terrace, about twenty feet away, and was left freestanding. I pruned the fence tree into a fan shape, which was held in place with canes. Perhaps because it has been constrained, the branches have grown much longer than the other tree - or perhaps it's the position, or variety.

Freshly-planted in spring 2009, the future fan-trained cherry had just three or four flowers - but put on strong growth through the summer.

In the second year, I added a framework of canes to train the branches into a fan shape. Plenty of blossom, but no fruit.

At the start of its third year, the fan shape was well established - it measured around 7 feet tall by 8 feet wide.

There was plenty of blossom in the spring of 2011, but just a single fruit ripened - most dropped, and the rest were probably eaten by birds (this year I'll put up a net).

At the end of last autumn, the leaves showed off some lovely colours - peach, orange, and gold.

2012 is a make-or-break year for these trees - I expect a harvest, even if it's only a couple of cups. If not, I will assume something is wrong, and try to fix it.

Brewing my first all-grain beer

Crushed Maris Otter malt.

I made my first beer in November. I initially toyed with the idea last spring, reading about the process, and drawing up a list of preferred styles. But then I ordered my camera, and decided I couldn't afford both. I started with a kit instead, albeit a good-quality one, and was pleased with the results. I didn't quite follow the standard practice, in fact - I performed both fermentations in the same container, a pressure barrel, since I didn't want to pay for a separate fermenter at the time. I transferred the beer into sanitised buckets, before returning it to the barrel for the second fermentation after I'd cleaned it. The result, from Woodforde's Norfolk Wherry kit, was good - red-brown, fruity, smoothly carbonated, and very drinkable. Whether it was strong I can't say - I didn't measure the relative densities, but I didn't get particularly drunk even after several pints, so maybe it didn't ferment all the way. Nonetheless, it was a good enough experience to persuade me to revive my original plans, so once Christmas was out of the way, I set to finding a recipe, and giving it a name.

There are thousands of recipes online, and for a beginner it is very hard to determine which is best, and what the differences are. I found one that sounded interesting, then tried to obtain the ingredients. Since it was an American recipe, I had to make one or two substitutions, which means this will be effectively unique, and so I feel I can give it my own name.

The original recipe can be found here. It's an unusual hybrid that combines "the color of an American Brown, the caramel notes of a Scotch Ale, and the hopping regiment of an India Pale Ale", according to the brewer. I had particular difficulty sourcing the hops, and decided to reduce the bitterness a little, as I prefer a slightly sweeter brew.

Here's the recipe. It's converted to metric, which will be easier for me to measure with the equipment I have:

Old Margery's Winter Ale
20.8 litres (a little over 36.5 UK pints)
grain bill
5.443kg Maris Otter malt
340g amber malt
227g English crystal malt
227g chocolate malt
155g light brown sugar*
72g white sugar*
57g roasted unmalted barley
hops
28g Warrior (a very high alpha acid US hop)
14+28g Admiral (a substitution for the Vanguard that was unavailable)
yeast
Wyeast Ringwood Ale (1187)

*I needed dark brown sugar, but couldn't get any wherever I looked in my town - so I used what I had.

Crushed amber malt.

method: in theory
The Warrior and 14g Admiral hops will be boiled for 60 and 20 minutes respectively, the remainder being added to the hot wort post-boil. The method I'm going to use for mashing is intended to require as little specialist equipment as possible, so might sound rather unorthodox, but I'm hoping it won't ruin the finished beer. I'll use my stock pot, which I'll pop into the new oven, which can hold a good temperature, between 60 and 70 C (I'll see if I can fine-tune it further). I'll strain it using a chinois and muslin, which seems more manageable than the usual homebrew techniques, especially given my lack of a second large container. If I need to cool the wort, I'll just plunge the pan into a sink of iced water - again, I'm not investing in anything more fancy until I am better acquainted with the process.

Dried Warrior hops. They're flattened because they were vacuum-packed; when rehydrated, they look similar to fresh hop cones. They smell wonderful - the closest I can think of is juniper berries.

method: what happened
So it took much longer than I was expecting, precisely because the capacity of my pan was much less than I thought. I mean, I knew what it was, but the grain swells up, and you sparge (rinse) it with lots more water than I realised, so I ended up doing a continuous multi-batch process, with one smaller pan in the oven (which held the correct temperature well), and the larger stockpot boiling the wort with the hops. It took from 5pm to 1am the first day, which was about half the total, then I restarted 1pm the next day, finishing mid-evening. Luckily, I found it enjoyable, not too stressful, although it did make the most awful mess of anything I've ever done in the kitchen (think sticky brown liquid spilled on the floors, hob, worktops, and lots of washing up). Sadly I broke the new hydrometer I bought, by dropping a mortar on it (I was using the granite mortar to weigh down the grain and extract as much liquid as possible). I've tried weighing the wort to see what the gravity is (in order to work out how much sugar was extracted, and how alcoholic the finished beer will be), but it will be inaccurate. Incidentally, I didn't bother with muslin - it wasn't necessary.

Freshly-boiled wort, before straining into the fermentation vessel.

Using the excellent brew calculator at Beer Calculus, I've determined it should be 6.4% abv, with a bitterness of 47.6 IBU (so fairly bitter), and dark brown to black in colour: a good hearty brew for winter. I've saved a lot of beer bottles, because I don't want it hanging around in the keg for too long, since I may want to do another batch of something fairly soon, and hopefully it will keep longer in bottles.

Update: fermentation
I was worried that the yeast was dead. It comes in a large sachet, that you strike to break an internal pack, and then it's meant to swell up. Well, mine didn't, not even by the next day. So I poured it into a sterilised jug, with some boiled wort and a little sugar. The following day (when I was ready to add it to the main batch, there was still no sign of life. I added it anyway, but contacted the shop who'd sold it to me. They didn't seem concerned, but were very helpful.

The following day, there was a hiss on opening the barrel lid - something was happening. The day after, it had taken off. Indeed, it was such a violent fermentation that I couldn't fully unscrew the lid for a whole day. I researched the yeast online, and found it was often slow to start, but also that it needed high oxygen levels - and that professional brewers use open fermentation vessels to provide that. Once the pressure died down, I left the lid on, but unscrewed, and regularly swilled the liquid around, to reoxygenate it, and prevent too much carbon dioxide buildup.

After around ten days, the fermentation has died down, and I'll set to bottling it in the next week (this yeast produces a lot of diacetyl, a chemical that smells of butter, so it is recommended to rest the beer after fermentation, to allow that to dissipate - buttery notes may be welcome in certain white wines, but apparently hardly ever in beer).

Update 1st February 2012:
I haven't got round to bottling the beer yet, for the simple reason I can't afford to buy a bottle capper yet. It should come to no harm in the sealed fermentation vessel - and some of the buttery notes the yeast has produced will die down. I measured the final gravity as 1.010, which means the alcohol by volume is around 6.7% - slightly stronger than originally predicted. It's rich, complex, bittersweet, and not terribly drinkable just yet.

Mulled cider (and juice)

While I remember, the cider I made from my friend's apples turned out to be utterly delicious - with a little help.

I didn't add anything to the juice - no sugar, honey, stabilisers - except, of course, yeast (I didn't trust "wild yeasts" to do the job). This meant the resulting cider was as pure an expression of the apples as I could make it, but it was tooth-meltingly sour once the fermentation was done. Not a pleasant drink at all - until I mulled it (I'd expected to have to do this anyway, in case the cider wasn't very nice; it *was* clean and clear, but unsweetened). Simply adding sugar to the cider returned the balance that had been in the juice - and the wonderful taste those apples had had revealed it was still there in the finished product. It occurred to me, too, that I'd need not worry about bottles exploding from unwanted secondary fermentation if there was no residual sugar.

Anyway, December being much colder than normal, mulling the cider was the perfect way to re-sweeten it in a seasonal way. I'd been mulling fresh apple juice for a few weeks in order to satisfy my craving for something warm without getting drunk every night (and using up my surfeit of homemade apple juice). I was experimenting with unusual spices, too.

So, here's a template for mulling dry cider (don't make the mistake I did once, and waste your money on sparkling stuff - it will obviously lose its bubbles when heated), apple juice, wine, grape juice and whatever else you can think of. It's very loose, because the tartness of the base ingredient, and the availability of spices will vary so much.

Ingredients
Liquid (e.g. cider)
Sweetener (I don't mean artificial sweeteners; white sugar is the least interesting option - try unrefined, brown, or honey)
Whole spices, roughly crushed (cinnamon sticks, allspice berries, cassia, green cardamom - these are great, if standard; try black pepper, nutmeg (freshly grated), black cardamom, grains of paradise, or anything similar).
Fruit (optional; orange slices are good in mulled wine, apple slices and sultanas are excellent in cider; finely-pared lemon peel can be interesting)

Method

• Fill a pan 1/2-2/3 full with the liquid. Place over the lowest heat on your hob.

• Add enough sweetener to balance the flavour - and remember, when it's hot, it may taste stronger, so you may want to marginally over-sweeten it. Ideally, start out with too little sugar, and keep adding and tasting until you reach the perfect level.

• The best way to add the spices is in a muslin bag, tied up, or a mesh infuser - I have one especially designed for spices, but you can use metal "tea bags", the sort to allow brewing of loose tea without any mess. This just stops people having to pick bits of spice out of their mouths as they drink.

• Add any fruit, if using.

• Stir until the sugar has completely dissolved.

• Heat until just hot - do not boil, as this drives off the alcohol (although not as quickly as you may think). If it cools down between servings, reheat - but never boil.
• Serve in heat-proof glasses or cups.
  

My favourite part is eating the swollen, apple-infused sultanas at the bottom of the glass.

The (Latest) Device

It occurred to me tonight that I haven't mentioned my latest kitchen gadget. Actually, "gadget" implies something gimmicky, which is unfair - this is something found in many homes and businesses: a juicer.

I had a juicer years ago - a combined centrifugal machine/blender. It was okay, and I learned the basics with it (like, I love carrot and apple juice). It was what you'd expect for a few tens of pounds - pretty basic, but reasonably reliable, if a bit messy. It died a while ago, and although I've not yet disposed of it, I think it can't be resurrected.

Back in 2005, I was into (apologies in advance) Gillian McK*ith (asterisk to prevent her coming up in searches - she's hopelessly litigious). I enjoyed her early shows, which seemed to preach the virtues of fruit and veg, fish and lean proteins, as opposed to processed sugars, starches, and excess fat. And her diet programmes seemed to work - the people (admittedly obese) lost a lot of weight. Someone in my family (I suspect my mother) bought the accompanying book, and I took it to university after the Easter holiday.

It was dire. The first day was a "detox", which involved such delights as hot water with lemon juice, hot water with flax seeds, and the most amazing of all - various root vegetables (turnip, mostly) boiled; you didn't eat them, you drank the water they'd been cooked in: wasteful.

Anyhow, the only thing I took away from that, ahem, experience, was that there are two kinds of juicer (in fact there are at least three), and the best is something called a "masticating juicer" (again, not strictly true). I knew that if I ever got another machine, that would be the one for me.

I came into some money recently - a combination of inheritance and tax rebate. It coincided with my first home cider making, thanks to a tree in my friend's garden. The house her partner inherited from his grandmother has the remnants of a small orchard, with plums, apples, pears and blackcurrants. This year only the apples produced much (or at least, we missed the blackcurrants), but there was a large tree laden with fruit. No idea what variety, or even if it was a cooker or an eater (her boyfriend thought the former). We picked, at my behest, as she would otherwise have left them for lack of inspiration. I said I'd make cider, and give her some when it was done.

Anyway, trying to juice 13.5kg of apples with a blender and a sheet of muslin is not fun by any means. After the first few kilos, I decided to put some of my spare cash to good use and get a juicer to speed up the process. I read into the subject for over a week, weighed up all the options, and plumped for the best masticating/augur machine I could get for the budget (I paid just over £200).

Since then I have juiced a good 40+ kinds of fruit and vegetable, and almost all of them have been great. Soft things don't go through any juicer so well, so figs, pears, and overripe guavas won't be tried again. Conversely, the hardest stuff juices best - think carrots, hard apples, beetroot. Some surprising combinations, especially apple with cabbage, and apple with yellow pepper, as well as many mixed beetroot and fruit juices, work very well. I'm yet to be convinced on sweet potato - the juice it yields is strangely creamy.

Anyway, I am currently experimenting with the next level of juicing - namely, clarified juices. I ran across perhaps the best food blog I've ever read (on which more soon), which introduced me to two techniques: agar clarification, and enzyme clarification. As I happened to have both dry agar and pectolase in my kitchen (the former from curiosity, the latter for the cidermaking project), I have tried both - and the results are very exciting. A few days ago I transformed apples into a cinnamon and apple syrup that was sensational with premium bourbon. Lime juice clarified with agar was even better, and has a bright future in my kitchen (please excuse the pun).

Much more on clarification in the near future, I hope...

In Praise of Pumpkins I

If one vegetable sums up how far I've come in my tastes, it's the pumpkin. The only thing I'd've done with one until quite recently is carve it - although since Hallowe'en was a fairly minor affair when and where I grew up, I don't remember even doing that, until my sister left home and started hosting spooky parties every year.

In fact, even now, most of my friends don't eat pumpkin, even if they bought it for carving; one or two of the more adventurous might make soup with the flesh of a Jack O'lantern. It's perhaps ironic that butternut squash, which does not grow reliably in the British climate, is much more pupular - but then imported butternuts are available all year round in supermakets here, and are quite cheap despite all those food miles. I like butternut squash, and it could be substituted into any of the recipes in part II, but probably not the 'beer' below. The same holds for other winter squashes - last autumn I got blue kabocha and adorable acorn squashes in Morrisons, and a reasonable variety are available in markets and ethnic shops in London (and doubtless eslewhere) when in season (in fact, there is a fabulous grocer in Penge - nominally Turkish, I believe - that sells the large, blue-green-skinned kabochas pretty much year-round). Inside, they are all similar, but I love the variety of shapes and colours - they are very decorative, and will keep well at room temperature, preferably cooler, for many weeks - a great seasonal alternative to flowers, in my opinion.

The one type that is not the same is the 'carving pumpkin', bright orange, ribbed, and usually larger than 'culinary' pumpkins, and ubiquitous for the last couple of weeks of October. The flesh is pale, far more watery, and quite fibrous. The other types, for eating, tend to have denser, smoother, more richly-coloured flesh with much more flavour. I didn't know this last year, but I bought a fair few from October onwards, and learned the difference. That's why I chose to make pumpkin 'ale', because the flesh of the larger carving pumpkins, while plentiful, didn't warrant any serious culinary use. I found an old Welsh recipe, whereby a pumpkin is opened and hollowed-out as if to carve, then filled with sugar, which dissolves the flesh, and topped-up when necessary. The sugar ferments, and produces a weak, sweet, probably quite bland alcoholic beverage. I didn't want to go to the trouble, and I suspect this recipe would make quite a mess as the skin goes soft, although my friend's sister, whose Hallowe'en party I attended last year, had followed a similar route in making spiced, sweetened pumpkin rum. I chose the easier, but still quite messy, method of cubing the flesh, puréeing it, and straining over white sugar. I added wine yeast, the juice of a lemon and an orange (as I originally intended to make wine, I wanted good acid balance), and instead of hops, the fragrant astrigency of bay leaves and juniper berries.

As an aside, the defining characteristic of a country beer, as opposed to a country wine, seems to be the speed of fermentation. [Although a further distinction is often the type of sugar used - brown, muscovado, or molasses, for beers, castor sugar for wines - this is not always the case, and either may be made from any kind of fruit, vegetable, or herb, with or without aromatic herbal additions.] I came to this conclusion after wading through a good couple of hundred recipes, looking for inspiration, and wondering about the prevailing nomenclature. A wine is fermented slowly, at a fairly low temperature, for weeks or months, until it has 'worked itself out' (i.e., the yeast has fermented as much sugar into ethanol as it can); a beer is fermented for a few days to a couple of weeks, and may thereby retain natural effervescence, and this is done at a higher temperature in order to attain low to moderate alcohol levels. Or at least, that's my interpretation - the logical conclusion is that there is a continuum of home-brews, and whether you call it a beer or a wine (or an ale, for that matter), is entirely up to you (I should point out that shop-bought drinks are usually much easier to define).

I was anxious to mimic the sensation of a light beer with my improvisation here, so I added the bay and juniper as they share certain aromatic compounds with hops (myrcene, pinene); I also kept the sugar fairly low, to prevent the mixture being too sickly; I wanted it to be ready in a few days, so I could take some to the Hallowe'en party. I fermented it at a high temperature, probably around 25-30°C, leaving the demijohn by a fire, turning occasionally. The final experiment was with effervescence - a success, despite my reservations. I decanted the beer into stoneware bottles, stoppered with wired-down corks (normal glass bottles might have exploded). The result was a light gold, cloudy, fizzy, fragrant, somewhat astringent brew, refreshing if a little odd. I reckon I could get used to it. In any case, it demonstrated the versatility of the pumpkin - if there is a glut next autumn (I intend to grow my own this year), I will certainly revisit and refine the idea...

Fruit Wine Update

Yesterday I began siphoning my fruit wines into clean demijohns. I have two batches on the go at the moment - this is my first year of home winemaking, and I started small.

I have three demijohns, and I have been meaning to start a new batch of wine, beer, or maybe mead for some time. I realised, the most logical course of action would be to siphon batch one into the empty demijohn, batch two into the newly-empty (and cleaned) demijohn that contained the first batch, and start my new batch in the one that held batch two. So, yesterday I started the process, which isn't terribly complicated, but needs a little care.

I cleaned the empty demijohn by scrubbing with hot water and washing up liquid inside and out (I have a bottle brush for the interior), then filling with warm water into which are crumbled a few Campden tablets, which disinfect the glass. Then, this is siphoned off, and the wine is siphoned in.

Today, I did the second batch. The motivation, other than a feeling of achievement, is that you get to taste the wines as you siphon them into their new home.

Both batches are of blackberry wine. My back garden has gradually been overgrown with brambles over the past few years, despite periodic attempts at clearing. The upside is that a huge quantity of free fruit is produced each year. Last year I made a fruit liqueur with some of the blackberries, boiling the fruit with sugar, straining, and mixing with Armagnac (you could use any spirit). Unfortunately, due to excessive pectin, it took on the appearance of clotted blood - lumpy crimson goo. It was, however, delicious, and remained pleasurable to drink for almost a year.

This summer, my grandparents leant me a couple of home winemaking books. My grandad has made his own wines and liqueurs for decades, although he doesn't any more. I saw the blackberry wine recipe, and decided it would be an excellent way to use up a few kilos of bramble fruit.

He leant me his two demijohns, and I bought the rest (another demijohn, a siphon, Campden tablets and wine yeast, the bottle brush, and a hygrometer) from Wilkinson, which sells a wonderful range of home brewing equipment. I picked enough fruit, followed the recipe (which involves steeping the fruit with boiling water and sugar, sieving, and fermenting with yeast for several months).

The first batch was made from fruit harvested in early August. Some of it was a little under-ripe, so it is lighter in colour and lower in natural sugars. The second batch, harvested a week or two later, contained much riper fruit, indeed some which was probably already fermenting on the plant. It's darker, and in theory, richer.

The first batch tasted yesterday as it did a few weeks ago - balanced, quite rich, still quite sweet, effervescent, and yeasty. Surprisingly, the second batch, a glass of which I have in front of me, is much drier. The colour is a wonderful bright ruby, and the smell and taste are much more redolent of the fruit it is made from. I suppose it is a little jammy, it's certainly less yeasty (still slightly fizzy, though - it's still fermenting quite vigorously), but has a tannic edge that might put some people off. I'm actually glad they are different - I decided not to blend the two batches, but rather to bottle them separately, not long after I started them off, to see which style I preferred, and to demonstrate that fruit wine can be complex too.

So, the two batches, once siphoned, are topped-up with boiled water that has been allowed to cool (so as not to kill the yeast), and re-sealed with airlocks. I don't know if they will be ready in time for Christmas, which was my hope, but my new project should hopefully fill the gap in the meantime. And that is? Well, not a fruit wine, but a beer - pumpkin beer, to be precise. But more on that in my next entry.