Summer Doldrums

Summer is here and I feel lazy. I have been making beer and have plans to make more but for the moment I have run out of steam. Probably because there is plenty of steam outside! Daytime temperatures are expected to be in the 90+F range for the next four or more days. 

I did manage to produce three beers by brewing on three consecutive Sundays. Something I haven't done in a long time. Sunday, June 30th I made a Kentucky Common. Sunday, July 7th another Cream Ale and on the 14th I made one of Ron Pattinson's recipes from history... the original Russian Imperial Stout made by Barclay Perkins in 1848. 

Maybe it's not lazy I'm feeling. Maybe it's exhaustion.

The Kentucky Common is interesting in that it was almost lost to history. A beer that was produced in Louisville Kentucky right around the turn of the 20th century but then lost a few short decades later when prohibition was enacted. It is often cited as being one of a handful of styles that are truly American in origin. It was craft and homebrewers who stumbled across references to Kentucky Common and through their research have been able to tease out the recipe. 

One of those homebrewers posted her findings and resulting recipe in the homebrewtalk.com forum and that discussion has been one of the most active threads on the site since 2011. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/kiss-yer-cousin-rye-kentucky-common-ale.290419/

The grain bill will seem a bit unique to modern homebrewers. In it's simplest form there is only 6-row malt and corn grits. Some recipes include a bit of rye. If you can't find 6-row feel free to substitute 2-row but expect a slightly different flavor profile. Using corn grits will require you to perform a cereal mash. If you don't want to go through the bother you can use flaked corn instead. The rye is up to you. Keep it under 10% if you use it.

Here is the recipe I used. It comes from a craft brewer in Long Beach California called Ten Mile Brewing. They are said to produce the absolute best commercial example of the style in the U.S.

Mine is currently carbonating in a 5 gallon corny keg and it should be ready to tap. And with the temperature topping out near 95F today that sounds like a grand idea!

Dirty Bastard Fail!

A while back I made my first attempt at cloning one of my favorite craft beers, Founders Dirty Bastard. It has been in the keg and ready to tap for a week now and the verdict is...

The only thing remotely close to Dirty Bastard might be the color but even that is hard to say for sure because the beer is so damned cloudy! The aroma is almost unpleasant. The flavor is nothing like Dirty Bastard or anything close to being rich an malty. The only thing it has going in its favor is that it isn't completely undrinkable. At around 8%ABV, if you can get through the first half pint then you don't notice the flaws any longer.

My first thought was that it was the recipe. And I'm still not convinced that it isn't a crap recipe. The major disappointment I had when searching for a clone is that there is basically only one recipe to be found on the interwebs.... and it can be found everywhere. I don't know where it originated but some of the earliest postings of this exact same recipe come from website forums dating back to 2005. There was even a homebrew store selling a Dirty Bastard Clone kit at about that time that used the exact same grain bill. My theory is that this single recipe went viral with brewers copying an pasting it in every website, forum and recipe discussion until, just like a virus, it eradicated every other version that my have existed. 

So I decided to start from scratch with a proven, historic recipe from Ron Pattinson's book, Scotland vol. 2. I have my eye set on one called Burns Ale from Edinburgh's Drybrough brewery. It is a classic strong Scotch Ale and the ABV is close to Founders Dirty Bastard.

Problem solved right? Blame it on a rubbish recipe....but, to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet, it may be my own damned fault.

The ingredients I used were just as written in the clone recipe. The mash wasn't so far off as to have affected the outcome. However the boil might not have been vigorous enough. I discovered, and may have even mentioned in the brew day video that the Blichmann Boil Coil seems to hold a boil even with the power setting turned down to 50 percent. That may be enough to keep the wort boiling but it might not be vigorous enough to achieve volatilization to help drive off any or enough DMS. 

The thing that flipped the switch was a completely random press of a button at the gym today. While on the treadmill I decided to listen to a podcast . The one I arbitrarily chose was from 2016 with Brad Smith of Beersmith podcasts talking with Dr. Charlie Bamforth on the topic of boiling home-brewed beer. And it hit me... the almost unpleasant aroma is somewhere between wet seaweed and creamed corn. 

So now I have two paths to take. Either start from scratch with the Burns Ale and begin tweaking it to achieve Dirty Bastard status. Or re-brew the clone recipe I've already used but take greater care during the boil. I may just take both paths.