The Windy City Draft

July 2010 was a big brewing month for me, and it started with this reciped for a quenching summer wheat ale.  For those who don’t know, my wife Sarah is expecting our first child in August (a boy who I fully intend to introduce to the joys of home brewing some day…a long time from now).  So I decided to plan a special batch in celebration, a big strong American barleywine in honor of a strong, healthy new addition to our family.  The reason I bring up the barleywine brew here is that in order to really ferment that beer fully and completely, I’m planning to pitching a big starter.  The barleywine is planned to have an OG of around 1.110 (!), and the recommended amount of yeast for that strong a beer is either an 8qt starter or about 1.5-2 cups of slurry from a very recent active fermentation  (check out Mr. Malty’s Yeast Pitching Calculator by Jamil Zainasheff, it’s a great reference tool). 

I figured just to be safe for the barleywine, I might as well make a whole batch of beer in advance with the same yeast (Wyeast 1056 American Ale) and use at least part of that beer’s yeast cake as the starter for the big beer.  From my research I’ve learned that a) most yeasts begin to become stressed when the alcohol in their environment goes much higher than 5%, and b) the higher the alpha acid content from bittering hops, the less viable the yeast because the alpha acids coat the individual cells and impede the transfer of nutrients, etc.  With those points in mind, the ideal beer to brew when planning to re-use the yeast cake is a beer with OG of ~1.050 or less without a lot of hop bitterness. 

Hence the (773) North Center Urban Wheat!  I threw this recipe (and name) together based roughly the other very popular wheat ale from Chicago, with  just a few slight changes based on my own preferences.  For those of you from out of town, I’m referring to Goose Island 312 Urban Wheat…312 is downtown Chicago’s area code, while we live on the north side in the North Center neighborhood, area code 773.  312 uses Liberty and Cascade hops, but I like a bit of Amarillo too for the extra citrusy grapefruit character (and I had some Centennial around too).  I also added a couple pounds of British Golden Promise malt, just because I tasted some at the brew shop and liked the slight grainy sweetness of it.  This beer is intended to be pretty light and refreshing with some wheat backbone and noticeable (but not overpowering or very bitter) citrusy American hop character.

Note: I’ll write up the brew day for the New Addition Barleywine when I have some time soon…but from what I gather about newborns that might be a while!

Brew Date: 7/11/2010
Style:  American Wheat (click to see the official description of the style)
Batch Size/Boil Volume/Boil Time: 5.5G /7.4G / 60 min
OG/FG/ABV: 1.053 / 1.012 / 5.3%
Color (SRM): 4.5 IBUs: 31 (Tinseth)

Planned Mash Temp: 153F (single infusion)
Bottle or Keg: Keg
Conditioning: 1-2 weeks primary fermenter, 2 weeks cold in keg
…Beer Should be Ready: Around August 10th

Yeast Starter: Making a 2 liter starter using light DME and yeast nutrient at ~1.045 OG. Pitched 1 package of yeast and let ferment for 2 days at 70F before chilling and decanting. Pitching approx. 2 cups of yeast slurry.

*New Technique*!  This is the first time I’ve tried whirlpooling after chilling the wort.  Specifically, after the wort has chilled, I’ll give it a good clockwise stir in the kettle (for about 30 seconds), then let it settle for about 20 minutes.  The idea is to get as much of the hop and protein material to settle kind of a cone shape in the middle of the pot (due to centrifugal force acting on the solids), allowing me to use the ball valve/spigot on my kettle to drain the wort into the fermenter without having to filter everything through a colander first.  The downside is that it adds time to the process (during which there’s a slight increase in the risk of contamination, so sanitation is important as always), but the possible upside is that I can really limit the amount of trub and sediment that makes its way into the fermenter.   This is especially preferable for this batch because I’m planning to re-use the yeast cake for the upcoming barleywine brew, and I’d like that yeast cake to be as close to 100% yeast as possible with minimal other “stuff”.

Brew Day Notes:

Mash in:  Added 15 quarts strike water @170F, added 12lbs grain and 15g mash hops, initial temp is 153F.  Mash tun is approx. 1″ from full.  After 30 mins, temp is 153F and pH is 5.0.  No mash out infusion due to tun capacity. Volume roughly 2.3 gal.

Sparge 1: 2.4 gal @ 182F to achieve ~165F grain temp.  Stirred up the mash and let rest for 10 minutes to settle.  Meanwhile, I put the kettle on the stove to start heating the initial wort as much as possible.

After 12 mins, drained sparge 1 into the kettle and added sparge 2 to the mash tun, returned the kettle to the stove to keep heating towards a boil.

Sparge 2: 2.4 gal @ 168F.  Left some wort in the tun, prob. sparged with too much water.  Preboil wort:  7.4 gal @ 1.056 (actual reading was 1.034, adjusted for 159F temp).  Apparent mash efficiency into boil is 91.5%!  Took this reading twice to confirm.  It’s hard to believe my efficiency improved this much from predicted (expected 70~75% into the boil) – we’ll see if the reading might be offset by dissolved proteins, etc. when I take the final measurement after chilling.  Otherwise it could be due to the finer grind setting I used for the grain in this batch.

Brought the wort up to a boil for about 10 mins to generate as much hot break protein as possible before adding the first boil hop addition.

After boil, chilled wort using an immersion copper chiller and ice bath at the same time.  This time I moved around the chiller to speed up the cooling process – I’m not worried about mixing up hop matter and protein in the wort since I’ll be trying a whirlpool afterward.  Took about 20 minutes to drop from ~200F to ~70F.  Started the whirlpool, stirring at pretty steady rate (2 revs per second) in clockwise direction for 1 minutes, then waited 25 minutes for everything to settle.  Most of the hops and protein sediment, etc. moved toward the middle of the pot, and only the lightest cold break protein was still near the edge (see pic to the right), so the whirlpool worked!  I was able to slowly drain clear wort from the spigot while leaving the sediment behind, until I had about 4 gallons of fairly clear wort.  Unfortunately there was still a lot of sugar locked up in the remaining protein trub, so I decided to pour most of what was left into the fermenter through a mesh colander.  This allowed some more protein to get into the fermenter (so much for clear wort perfection), but I was able to get up to the 5 gallon mark before hitting the really thick stuff.  Took a gravity reading, and I had 5 gallons at 1.064, so I definitely wanted to dilute the batch a little to bring down the gravity toward the actual intended target.  Needless to say, my expected efficiency of 65% turned out to be very low for this batch.  With 5 gallons @ 1.064, my total efficiency is 70%, and I could’ve gotten it even higher if I had squeezed all the wort I could out of the remaining leaf hops.

I added 1 gallon of water to bring the total batch to 6 gallons @ 1.053.

Added oxygen with an oxygen stone, then added decanted yeast starter (~2 cups).  Temp at pitching was about 75F.  I used a blowoff tube to start, and placed the carboy in a keg bucket full of cool water so I could regulate the fermentation temp around 68F (adding ice every day or so when necessary).

Fermentation Notes:

7/22 – The ale fermented pretty vigorously for about 3 days (starting ~6 hours after I pitched the yeast).  It never bubbled up to the blowoff tube, mainly because I was able to keep it fairly cool and restrained and I had it in my large 6.5 gallon carboy so there was plenty of headroom.  I added ice to the surrounding water every morning and night, and the fermentation temp fluctuated between 66F and 70F or so.  After a week, I removed the carboy from the bucket and dumped the water.  A week later I took a final gravity reading of 1.012, and transferred as much as I could to a keg for cold storage.  There was about 0.5 gallon extra, which I moved to a small glass jug to store in the fridge until I’ve made some room for it in the keg.  I saved the entire yeast cake from the bottom of the fermenter (including some of the very last beer that was mixed in with it), and poured it into a sanitized half gallon glass jug with screw top.  This will be used (at least most of it) as the starter for the New Addition Barleywine in a couple days.  Until then I’m letting it stay at room temp, but if I was planning to wait much longer I would keep it cold.