Wine Yeast Conditioned Saison

From left to right, k1-V1116, GRE,  and BM45 Brunello

Wine Yeast Saison Experiment

This was one of those experiments that at best would have achieved a moderately interesting outcome, had quite a few significant risks and uncertainties to overcome in order to achieve that moderately interesting outcome,  and in the end surpassed all expectations, resulting in the creation of several surprising and delicious beers.  The idea of using a wine yeast in a saison came  from a Brewing Network Interview with Shea Comfort where he discussed using wine yeasts and oak aging.  This is probably one of the most informative and thought provoking interviews I have ever listened to on beer.  The three main take away points from the interview are the following:

1. That wine yeast could produce very interesting flavors in beer (cherry, fruit salad).

2. Given that wine yeasts are primarily used to consuming the simple sugars of grape juice they will likely have difficulty attenuating a traditional wort, 

3. Many strains of wine yeast produce enzymes that kill off other strains of saccharomyces.  

So how does one achieve the flavor contribution of a wine yeast while still fully attenuating the beer? The following are either what Shea Comfort suggested or what I thought of:

1.Shea Comfort recommended using a enzyme to break down the wort into simpler sugars so that the wine yeast could ferment the beer out completely. 

2. A second possible method would be to add the wine yeast for bottle conditioning since table sugar could probably be easily consumed and one wouldn't be relying on the wine yeast for attenuation of the beer.  

3.A third potential method would be to take a saison with a grist of say 10% table sugar, and instead of adding the sugar to the boil, one would make a separate solution in a growler and add the wine yeast.  One would then ferment the rest of the beer with a normal beer yeast and then at bottling combine the sugar wash fermented with wine yeast with the regularly fermented beer.

4.  A fourth way would be to primarily ferment with a  "susceptible" wine strain which doesn't produce killer enzymes and then ferment the rest of the beer out with a regular beer strain.  Shea had only mentioned one strain  which was susceptible but it was a champagne yeast strain known for being very neutral.

5.  A fifth way way would be to primarily ferment with a wine strain then ferment the rest of the beer out with Brettanomyces or bacterial culture.  I didn't know at the time that Brettanomyces were unaffected by the killer enzymes.

For the experiment I chose to try my luck at bottle conditioning with the wine yeast since I could taste multiple wine strains by splitting one 5 gallon batch several ways at bottling, and at the same time see how much contribution a wine yeast strain would give at the most minimal level of involvement.   The risks of such an experiment was I had no idea how well wine yeast would carbonate a beer. One would expect that any sacch yeast would produce alcohol and CO2 when fermenting, but at the same time carbonation isn't a concern of wine makers. Another concern was that despite attempts to remove the primary beer yeast before adding the wine yeast for conditioning, I still could have ended up with a battle royal and off flavors as a result of all the carnage in the bottle. A final concern was that even if it did fully carbonate and there were no off flavors, bottle conditioning could have too minimal a growth phase to provide any meaningful flavor contributions from the wine yeast.

Recipe and Process

Me in Allagash's Barrel Room. Was there a week before
they unleashed their first coolship series beers.

90% Continental Pils

10% Malted Wheat

Mashed in @ 149.4 F for 60 Min.

60 Minute Boil

.625oz 7.2%aa  Amarillo       @ 60min

.5oz  5.6%aa    Glacier          @ 60min

.5oz  2.3%aa    Strisselspalt   @ 10min

.5oz  2.3%aa    Strisselspalt   @ 02min

OG:1.055

FG: 1.000

I fermented the beer at DC summer basement tempts (78-82 F), left the beer in primary for several weeks then transferred to secondary trying to leave as much yeast as trub as possible.  I had intended to use gelatin in the secondary in order to get as much yeast out as possible but ended up losing the gelatin packet so I went without. Bottled: July 21st, 2011. At bottling I primed the entire batch for 2.75 vol. CO2 in one bucket. the beer was divided into 3 equal parts by racking a 3rd at a time into a separate bucket where  the rehydrated wine yeast was added for bottle conditioning.  Its not in my notes but I used the standard amount of dry yeast used when bottle conditioning a beer that doesn't have enough yeast in suspension.  The Wine Yeasts I used were K1-V1116, GRE, and BM45-Brunello.

Tasting Notes

All of them had a moderate to low amount of saison yeast character, some definite vinous qualities, a citric flavor that didn't seem to be hop derived, and moderate amount of bitterness.  Mouthfeel was what one would expect out of a saison, moderate to high carbonation, all of them finished very dry. The K the differences between the three are  broke down as follows:

K1-V1116 

 Vinous/ chardonnay type flavors pear, peach, red berry notes, slight strawberry. Possibly slight diacetyl which I think actually rounds out the sharper flavors out quite nicely.

GRE

Has a slightly brighter more intense and shorter lived chardonnay/ berry flavor with no diacetyl or peachish flavors surrounding it.

BM45- Brunette

Has similar flavors to the gre except without as much berry and a slight silkily/ chalky/ creamy flavor that could be describe as an emptiness of flavor compared to the other two.

The following are my notes on how Shea Comfort described the flavors each yeast would contribute which I pulled up after taking the notes above.

"k1v1116 –white wine –very stone fruit peach quality –used as part of a wheat beer.

gre –red wine –fresh berry which is really really cool –sort of quoting his words

bm45 –red wine yeast – definitely nice beautiful cherry a lot of mouthfeel characteristics –known for tremendous mouthfeel"

In retrospect many of Shea Comfort's tasting notes, with the exception of the BM45, which didn't give off any cherry like flavors, matched my experience.  I didn't sense any mouthfeel difference between the yeasts.  What was also very interesting is that K1-V1116 a white wine strain, changed the color of the beer so dramatically.

Moving Forward

Don't have any good pictures so this
 is from a recent Ghostland Concert

I'm really excited to dive further into using yeasts traditional used in wine-making for the production of beer.  The difference in flavor and color I experienced just from bottle conditioning, which most brewers seem to think of as an after thought (often using champagne or lager yeast in order to guarantee consistent carbonation with a "neutral flavor"), was very surprising.  Yes, all of these beers were very similar, but that 7-10% of flavor fluctuation that occurred between these beers (not even addressing color) is enough of a difference in my opinion, to change up my entire brewing process.  My next steps will be to use the same wine yeasts I used in the above experiments only using the separate sugar wash fermentation and finishing out with Brettanomyces in order to get a bench mark for what contributions will result using these methods compared to strictly bottle conditioning.  Once I feel I've found the most expressive method I will start working through the other 30 or so commercially available dry wine yeasts, many of whose descriptions are far more interesting than those I conducted this experiment with.

Barrel Era

Cabernet Sauvignon Barrel From Pollack Vinyards

        So I finally took the plunge and bought a barrel.  I was going down to Charlottesville, VA for what turned out to be Midsummer's ( a weekend where a lot of UVA kids go back to Charlottesville between two summer school sessions) so I went on the Virginia Wine Exchange to see if any used barrels were being sold. I found an advertisement for clean neutral barrels from a winery just outside of Charlottesville at a decent price and decided it was a good a time as any to officially start barrel aging. The following Sunday Kelly (girlfriend) went out to Pollack Vineyards about 25 minutes west of Charlottesville to pick up the Cabernet Sauvignon barrel they had reserved for me.  The winery is beautiful and the staff was extremely helpful in discussing sanitation techniques and allowing me to look around and sniff the barrels available. I'm not very experienced with sniffing bungs but it smelled intensely of wine with no real vinegary or moldy scents.There was a hint of frustration/ disappointment from the staff that the barrel would eventually be inoculated with the very yeast and bacteria they worked so hard to keep out of the barrel during their stewardship. After loading the barrel into the car, Kelly and I did a  wine tasting, sat on the porch for a while just taking in the view, made a quick trip to Devil's Backbone for a flight and nachos, and then finally headed back to DC in the late afternoon.  I'll post my plan for the barrel once I've got it firmly established.

The Winery is in a valley surrounded by the
blue ridge mountains. This photo really doesn't give it justice

Back On The Bull

I've always wondered if anyone has ever tried riding a bull in the same sense that horses are ridden. Obviously there are serious limitations to the actual use of a bull as steed and companion and the amount of danger involved with training a bull would far outweigh the benefits, but humans have been far more stubborn, in achieving far less meaningful or cool things, so I should probably look into this more.

Weekend at the Dogfish Brewery and Brewpub.
The Easternshore is a great drive when snow covered.

This speculation came up through attempting to explain why I haven't been blogging and how I'm going to get back on it.  Basically, I'm not getting back on a horse, getting kicked off is more explainable, the attempt of remounting more daunting (not really), and the purpose far more formidable.

In reality, I've been brewing a fair amount and writing a lot of notes that are thorough enough just to scattered and segmented to be blogged about. I've found just dumping everything in Evernote is a lot easier and realistic way of processing beer information.  The reason why I've decided to keep up this blog is as a reference point for friends so I don't break into 30 minute explanations of the beer I've been brewing.  In moving forward with this blog I'm going to drop an intensive recording of every brew, and go with more thematic posts and digging into certain beers that I learned a lot from and were particularly interesting.

To sum up what I should have posted:

I have tasting notes on Saison 1.0, Celleach Beta, Saison 2.0, and American Saison.  Saison 1.0 beat out some pretty impressive saisons in a blind tasting. also got a basic understanding of the differences between Wyeast 3724 and 3711.  Ceallach Beta also turned out well.  Saison 2.0 and American Saison were perfectly good.

Amarillo Wheat Ale was a spur of the moment brew which was very amarillo forward. perfectly drinkable but not exciting.

The Hopfen-Weisse Clone turned out extremely well.  Unfortunately, after the 4th month or so it became over carbonated.  no sign of infection though.

the Two Hearted Ale Clone was my first all-grain attempt.  ended up mashing 2-3 degrees low.  My attempt was pretty close a little drier and you could tell my yeast profile was a bit more expressive as well as different then Bell's proprietary strain.

The rest of the beers I will have more competent tasting notes on and will save for later. I also just organized all my recipes and brew day notes, and should be getting them up under the beers section over the next month or so.

All Grain Brewing

The most annoying thing about good blogs is when they fall into the posting doldrums. There are often two separate reasons that a blog fades.  The first is that the blogger loses interest in the subject of the blog making the blogs follower feel rather foolish for possessing more excitement and interest in the work then the actual creator  seems to hold (fuck you George R.R. Martin).  The second is that the blogger has been too engaged with the material of the blog that they haven't put the time in to write about it.  While this second reason is still very annoying there still lies hope that the blog will rise again.  In my case it has been the latter.  Instead of going through the much needed editing of many half  finished beer reviews I have spent my time upgrading to an all-grain system, devising a saison solera system the notes of which I will probably break up into several future blog posts, and scheming of beers to brew in the upcoming spring season.  when bumping up to all grain I went pretty big with a 15 gallon kettle, a 52 Qt. Cooler, KA4B Bayou Classic Banjo Cooker. Kelly Was also nice enough to lug back a 35 pound grain mill through the airport this past Labor day weekend. I bought the cooler and copper manifold  parts some time in late October and slowly started  to cut and hacksaw the piping into shape through November and December. I think it was around thanksgiving that I actually ended up buying the kettle and cooker.  Since all grain requires a lot more water I also went ahead and  bought a water filter so I could use tap water instead of deer park jugs.  I also bought Brew Pal on the Iphone for my brewing software.

The first All Grain Beer I brewed was a Bells Two Hearted Clone Kit by Northern Brewer.  Everything when pretty smoothly except that I mashed in a couple of degrees low.  I hit my intended original gravity right on the mark.  The second all grain beer was a dubbel I brewed for my Mom's Birthday.  This was the first time I actually ground my own grist which also worked pretty well.  I had a slight bit of a stuck sparge, but I hit my original gravity exactly again and was only a single degree below  in my mash temp.  I am assuming the drastic difference between the mash temp I am achieving and those I should be getting from the recommended strike temps is that I have been brewing in under 32 degree weather.  I still have to figure out what my efficiency is (seems to be around 75-80%) and how my process matches the assumptions made in my brewing software. So far I am getting the OG I am looking for and with a little bit more beer than I intended which isn't a bad thing.  I will be posting my tasting notes for many of my past beers as well as my upcoming brewing ideas and inspirations.

3 Hearted IPA