Barlow Brewing

So, I swore off brewing pumpkin beers a few years ago.

It’s a perfectly fine beer to brew, but I’ve brewed them twice over the last few years (once with real pumpkin and spices, and once with just the spices) and that was enough.  But weird ideas and challenges change everything.  Like brewing with sweet potatoes.

Well, the original plan was to brew with yams, but it was difficult to find yams locally, so I grabbed some North Carolina sweet potatoes.  (BTW – Yams and sweet potatoes are not even distantly related.  Good. To. Know. But that didn’t stop me from naming it “Bad Yama Jama”.) 

As far as pumpkin beers go, what’s really important are the spices.  The pumpkin doesn’t really add any flavor to the beer and only a small amount of fermentables.  As long as you brew a good beer and then throw allspice into it, TA-DA you will have a pumpkin beer.  The idea, this time, was to use something unusual in the mash and put a twist on pumpkin ales. 

There isn’t much information out there about brewing with sweet potatoes, so I just made it up as I went along.  First, I bought four pounds of NC ‘taters and I cooked them in the oven for 90 minutes at 350 degrees. 

Once they were nice, soft, and juicy, I skinned them and crushed them up for the mash.

I was assuming that the smashed up sweet potatoes would give me the nastiest stuck mash ever, but they were relatively easy to use.  I put the 4 pounds of sweet potatoes in 10 pounds of grain, and I really don’t think the whole thing would have become messy unless I had used about 10 pounds of potatoes.   I held the whole thing at 152 degrees for 90 minutes in the hope that that would be long enough to convert some of the spuds into something fermentable.

The boil was straight forward, and I added some of the spice in at flame out.  It is really easy to go over the top with spices and it is impossible to take them back out.  So, I just used a ¼ of a teaspoon of nutmeg, allspice and ginger and one cinnamon stick.  That won’t be enough, but the tweaking of the spices happens after fermentation when I make a tea of the spices and add them to taste.

The key to this kind of beer still lies, in my opinion, in the spicing.  The sweet potatoes didn’t add that much in the way of fermentables that I can uncover as my efficiency rates were not much higher than I would have expected without the potatoes.  Perhaps, at tasting, I will find an improvement in mouthfeel.  And, if I do, it could just be psychological.   

I haven’t bottled this one yet, but I probably will within the next week.  It was a fun and creative experiment, but I need to double the amount of sweet potato to make this one stretch my brewing skills.   And I doubt I’ll do that again soon.  Well, until I get another absurd idea.

For giggles, here was the recipe.  (The mish-mash of hops was because I was using leftovers.)

Bad Yama Jama – (Spiced Sweet Potato Ale)

Starting Gravity: 1.050 (9/7/09) Days @ 68º F
Final Gravity: 1.010 (9/23/09)
5.23% alcohol (by volume)
Apparent Attenuation: 79.31
Real Attenuation: 64.36

Mash (@152º 90 min)
11 lb Maris Otter
0.5 lb Crystal 40
0.5 lb Crystal 105
0.25 Special B Malt
0.25 Melanoidin Malt
4 lbs NC Sweet Potatoes (Baked for 90 minutes at 350 degrees, peeled and mashed)

Boil (60 minute boil)
0.25 Hallertauer Pellets (3.7 AA) (60 min)
0.20 EK Goldings Pellets (4.75 AA) (60 min)
0.33 Horizon Pellets (10.9 AA) (60 min)
0.25 Nugget Leaves (Homegrown) (12.0 AA) (60 min)

Spices at flame out:
1 Cinnamon Stick
1/8 tsp Nutmeg (ground)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (Boil – 15 min.)
½ tsp Brewer’s Choice Wyeast Nutrient Blend (Boil – 10 min.)

Primary (68º F)

Safale S-04 English Ale

Spices made in tea and added to Primary after fermentation:
1/2 tsp Allspice (ground)
1/8 tsp Ginger (ground)
1/8 tsp Nutmeg (ground)

I like to occasionally brew beers with usual ingredients.  I’ve done ancho pepper ambers, chai milk stouts and I’ve done an oyster stout, with raw oysters added during the last 10 minutes of the boil, to name a few.  They’ve all been interesting and one batch away from being tweaked into something very good.  Even with that track record, I think I scared a few people when I announced that I was going to make a Coconut Curry Hefeweizen. 

In my defense, it wasn’t my original idea.  Charlie Papazain had a recipe for this in The Homebrewer’s Companion, which I bought back in 1997.  I saw that recipe, with those absurd ingredients, and it has been isomerizing in the back of my head for 12 years.  Finally, I was crazy enough to try to make it, and the ingredients came together in a way that made it feel like a beer of destiny.  I had friend in Thailand who sent me Kaffir leaves, and I hit up the Indian supermarket for the stranger spices.  The recipe was scaled down from a 5 gallon to a 3 gallon batch, and I divided the spice into a quarter of what it should have been.  (If there is anything I’ve learned from spiced beers, divide what you think you need in half and then only use half of that.  You are better off with ¼ of what you think you need and then making a spiced tea at bottling than having a beer that tastes like potpourri.)

The brew day went well, but the taste and aroma of the spices were overwhelming at the end of fermentation.  That left me with a decision: dump it or brew an unspiced batch and blend the two.   I did another 3 gallons of hefe and then blended the two.   A previous blog post covers the scheming up of the Coconut Curry Hefeweizen.

Well, how did it turn out?  I have to man up and take the good brews with the bad, right?

The head on the Coconut Curry Hefeweizen is big and airy.  Not dense or creamy at all, and it dissipates quickly.  The color is that of aged oranges with patches of brown in the deeper parts of the glass.  Despite the amount of floating junk that went into the wort (lime leaves, unsweetened coconut flakes, etc.), it remains as clear as a normal hefeweizen.  Perhaps a bit clearer, but that is faint praise.

The nose is a big fist of ginger and fenugreek.  The lime leaves creep into the background with gentle citrus and herbal notes, but they are completely overshadowed by the ginger.  The body is thin as a result of the honey I add to the boil.

The taste of this beer is pleasant.  At first.  There is an obvious curry flavor that is interesting, but not multi-dimensional.  There are earthy notes with a subdued maltiness and well-balanced bitterness.  But then the cayenne pepper kicks in and seizes around your neck with a slight burning.  That is where this one surprises and overwhelms you a little.  That heat greatly reduces the drinkability of the brew and doesn’t give you a reprieve if you are matching it with spicy foods.  The coconut, which you would think would balance this, is non-existant.

All and all, it is not as bad as I expected after brewing the first 3 gallons, but it still has some balance issues.  If I brewed this again, and I don’t have plans to do so anytime soon, I would greatly reduce the amount of fresh grated ginger and I might omit the cayenne completely.  I would use more coconut, too, and add it a little later in the boil. 

When I took this to a homebrew club meeting the other night, it faired pretty well.  There were a few brewers who hated it and thought it was undrinkable (which I completely get), but the majority thought it was not bad and really interesting.  But I think we homebrewers also award each other points for originality and ballsiness.  This one might have skated by on those alone.

The Coconut Curry Hefeweizen was a failed experiment, but not a bad beer.  If you have a question about the recipe, send me a note.  (I won’t post it to the site since, although I made some tweaks, it is still Charlie’s recipe and in one of his books.)  After tasing the final product, this one has been named “Bombay the Hard Way.”

What is the next weird beer?  I don’t know.  I’ve been threatening an Old Bay Lager, but that is just a joke among friends.

Or is it?

Here is yet another Founders review, because they just came to Virginia and I am like a kid in a candy shop. Well, a candy shop that only sells beer. And, of course, I’m not a kid and I’m old enough to drink. You know what I mean.

The Founders Cerise is a fruit beer flavored with cherries. That kind of statement usually sends beer drinkers in several directions. I’ll give you a moment. Ready? OK.

If you are the kind of drinker who cringes when you hear about fruit being added to beer, I feel you. I love fruit lambics, and I’ve brewed a few fruit beers in my time (mostly stouts and sour ales), but it is rare that I taste a fruit beer that I want to try again.

The story behind this brew is that they used to make a beer called Rubaeus, which was brewed with raspberries. That has been replaced with Cerise due to the rising cost of raspberries, and to support the farmers of their home state, since the majority of tart cherries sold in the U.S. are from Michigan.

This beer is 15 IBUs and 6.5% alcohol. The color of the Cerise is candy red, but not translucent. Like a dull Kool-Aid red that stains the lips of little kids. The head is thin and light pink in color.

The aroma is tart cherry. There is a back note of acidity, too.

The flavor? This beer has a liquor sweetness to it. It is almost as if someone cracked open a case of chocolate covered cherries and drained the contents into a glass and then threw away the chocolate. There is tons of cherry flavor and cherry skins. The cherries are supposedly added during five different times during fermentation, and there is isn’t a drop of this beer that isn’t riddled with red fruit.

This is a very well crafted beer. It has to be, because the sweetness of the fruit could have quickly over powered this one and turned it into a mosh pit of sweetness. But this has a backbone of light bitterness that keeps this one from becoming too cloying. I’m sure the multiple fruit additions are the secret behind this.

In the end, this one was hard to finish. It just isn’t my thing, but I might try it again with the right food pairing. It might be amazing with a dark, chocolate cake.

So the Founders lovefest ends here. It had to happen eventually, and I had a feeling this would be the dud for me.

It would be interesting to see Founders sour this one up. Dump with one in oak barrels with some brettanomyces, and I’ll be your Huckleberry.