En Zed - New Zealand Pils

Brewed at Maryland Homebrew during their Big Brew for National Homebrew Day. Having to clean all of the equipment, prep ingredients, and pack everything into the car the night before then drive to a location before brewing made this one of the most difficult brews I’ve done. On the other hand it was one of the smoothest brewdays since I had already prepped and measured out everything, including milling the grains, having each hop addition weighed out and separated into bags with addition times listed, and having the carboy, airlock, and transfer tube sanitized and ready to go.

The New Zealand Pilsner recipe I created is also fairly straightforward with 10 pounds of malt (90% Weyermann Pilsner and 10% Weyermann Carafoam) and 3 hop additions, each split equally between Nelson Sauvin and Southern Cross. The Nelson hops gave an interesting aroma of white wine fruitiness but also more dank and musty aroma than I'm used to while the Southern Cross gave more classic new world hop aromas of citrus and pine. I haven’t used Southern Cross before so it will be interesting to see what this blend gives in the beer. I used filtered water off of MDHB’s hose, hopefully that gives similar results to using my campden treated tap water. I did acidify both the mash and sparge, with 20 mL of 10% phosphoric acid in the mash and 5mL in the sparge.

Early in the Big Brew day at Maryland Homebrew

For the most part brewday went off without a hitch and I was able to enjoy some nice homebrews and craft beers while chatting with others at the event. I finished with 5.5 gallons of wort at ~1.046 (I forgot to take a final gravity reading but about halfway through the boil it was around 6 gallons at 1.042), just a touch under my intended gravity but it should work well enough in this style.

After the boil the beer was chilled to 175 and the last hop addition was added. After about 20 minutes the temp had fallen to 160 and I started the chiller again to bring it down the rest of the way. Once the wort reached ~75F I transferred to a 6 gallon better bottle and placed it in the car.

After finishing cleanup (and trying a few more beers) I headed home and placed the carboy in the chest freezer at 50F and attached the temperature probe to the carboy. Checking on it late that night it had reached 52F so I pitched the yeast cake of Imperial Yeast Harvest from my Malt Harvest Pilsner.

Tasting:
Smell: moderate citrus, grass, and pine from the hops mingle with moderately-low bready malt.

Appearance: pale gold, just a touch darker than straw. Moderate white head shows moderate retention as it lasts throughout and leaves great lacing.

Taste: Hoppiness leads with grapefruit, pine, white grape, and herbs, middle is lightly sweet and bready with a hard to describe harshness and slickness that then transitions to a very lightly fruity finish with moderately high bitterness that lingers with a citrus rind character.

Mouthfeel: the beer is mostly clean and crisp but seems to have some light astringency and maybe a slight diacetyl slickness in the middle, though neither are offputting or entirely out of style for a pilsner. Drier than expected/intended but well carbonated.

Overall: after a week in the Balkans drinking lots of pale lagers this beer is both similar and very different to European Pilsners. The fruitiness and bitterness are both nowhere near IPA levels but much higher than a standard pils, but the malt character and even some of the roughness in the middle are very similar to continental pale lagers, especially a few Croatian and Slovenian Pilsners I had last week. Part of me wants this to be a cleaner, less fruity beer and another part wishes I had used fruitier hops and dry hopped it. I’m not sure if the beer is to style or not as I don’t remember having a New Zealand Pilsner when I visited New Zealand but it certainly seems to fall within the right range and it’s a perfectly drinkable beer but it doesn’t quite pop as being “New Zealand”-y or “Pilsner”-y to me. Were I to brew this style again I would likely use less boil hops, more post-boil hops (including some dry hops) and replace the more American seeming Southern Cross with a more tropical or white wine like hop (e.g. Motueka, Galaxy, or just more Nelson).

5/7/23: bubbling away nicely with a large dense white krausen. Hoping to turn this one around in about two weeks so I’ll need to do a quick lager method and get this one to the point of a diacetyl rest by next weekend.

5/11/23: gravity down to 1.024. Tastes pretty good though it has a fairly high sulfur smell, likely from the lager yeast though the Nelson's mustiness might also be adding to it. Very hazy at this point but it is still fermenting. Moved out of keezer and onto basement floor with ambient temperature measuring around 64F. Will leave here for a diacetyl rest until fermentation completes.

5/15/23: gravity reading shows 1.009, a few points lower than expected FG, even after taking into account the lower OG. Less hazy though still far from clear. Flavor and taste are largely unchanged, still somewhat sulfury with a moderate fruity and bitter hop character. I'm a little worried that what I've been thinking of as sulfury is potentially light-struck/skunked character due to the carboy sitting out in the sun for a while before packing up and taking it home. There seems to be disagreement over whether wort can be light-struck but either way there's nothing to be done about it now but wait and see. Will likely move to the chest freezer for a cold crash in the next day or two and keg by this weekend. The planned dry hop addition will likely be added to the keg, if at all. I also might split some of this batch off onto vegan ice cream powder for a club competition.

5/21/23: kegged and placed in chest freezer at 30PSI and 32F. Plan to decrease CO2 and increase temperature over next few days.

Ube Ice Cream version

5/22/23: CO2 lowered to 12PSI yesterday and temperature increased to 40F. Carbonation is a little low but getting close and I don't want to overcarbonate.

Blended 4 oz. Shivery Shack vegan ice cream powder, 1 tsp. ube extract, and a quarter campden tablet with 1 pint of water in a blender, poured it into a keg, then racked two gallons of this beer into the keg. I'm calling the result a Pacific Island Purple Ice-Cream Pilsner. Flavor is interesting, with more of the base pils showing through than expected but still lots of fruit, vanilla, and sweetness from the adjuncts. Appearance is fairly absurd and mostly reminiscent of a blueberry smoothie. The beer tied for second in a club competition of beers made with vegan ice cream powder.

5/23/23: Base beer appears to be just about carbonated now. Aroma and flavor are fruity with some grapefruit, grass, pine, and white grape, but the character has started to fade. There is also some sulfur character still lingering and the bitterness is a touch harsher than I would like but both seem to have rounded out some with the carbonation.

6/6/23: tasting notes of the base beer above.

6/10/23: decided to finally add the dry hop addition to the keg

6/15/23: hops seem to have caused some hop creep and diacetyl so I’ve pulled this from the chest freezer to hopefully clean it up.

6/19/23: moved back to chest freezer. Still light diacetyl but back into a similar range it was previously in.

6/24/23: this one kicked as I filled a growler for a homebrew club meeting. Pretty well received, I saw a few people go back for seconds.

Ube Wit

Ube is a type of yam that has a very bright purple color that is often used as a sort of natural coloring, in addition to being used for its flavor, mainly in the Philippines but also in other South East Asian countries and increasingly around the world. It is typically eaten as a dessert in ice cream (including the sundae type dessert halo-halo), halaya (a sort of jam), and many types of pastries including cakes, rolls, cookies, and polvoron (shortbread). The best description I can give for ube is a nuttier, earthier, coconut. In addition to coconut, other descriptors I've seen are pistachio, white chocolate, and sweet potato.

Last spring I was at a party and tried ube ice cream for the first time. I'm typically not a big dessert person and have disliked seemingly savory foods that are used in desserts in the past (taro and red bean come to mind) so I had always passed on ube dishes but decided to give the ice cream a try. After a small scoop I wanted to eat the entire container because the flavor was so delicious, new, and interesting. Since that day I've consumed ube in just about every format I can find and taking my honeymoon in the Philippines and Bali meant there were a lot of opportunities!

Since the first time I tried ube I've wondered if the flavors would come through in a beer. While I've seen a few examples of ube beers they certainly aren't very common and I haven't found a recipe. I decided to make up my own using a Belgian Witbier as the base style due to it's dessert like creaminess and citrus characters that should meld well with the ube's flavors. 

Wit is also a style with a light enough color that (may) give the ube a chance to show up. Like many blue/purple colored fruits and vegetable ube gets its color from anthrocyanins. Unfortunately, anthrocyanins degrade with pH, which tends to cause beers with these fruits and vegetables to turn red or pink, not vibrant purple and blue.

The recipe was roughly an amalgamation of potato beer recipes I've found and some recipes I've seen for Allagash White. I used three pounds of pre-cooked frozen ube (I would have liked to have found fresh ube it seems to be hard to come by in the US) which seemed like a decent but not overwhelming amount. I also added a pound of basmati rice that I boiled prior to the mash. Other than that the beer was a pretty typical wit with half of the rest of the ingredients being malted wheat and the other half being 2-row. I went on the low end of hops and spices with just one ounce of saaz and a quarter ounce each of bitter orange peel and Indian coriander added at flameout.

1/23/18 Brewday

I had intended to brew this beer earlier but suddenly had to work over the weekend and postponed it to today. Mash had a slight purple hue but gave a beautiful medium purple color during runoff and after the boil the beer still showed a light violet tone. This was my first time using my new mantis chiller from Jaded Brewing and I was able to chill to pitching temps in about 15 minutes just using a kitchen sink for the water supply, so I'm very happy with it so far. OG measured at 1.043, about what I expected despite not knowing what to expect for the ube's gravity contribution. 

2/5/18

This beer has gone through a bit of a strange fermentation, with a quick and aggressive first krausen that quickly faded with the beer only down to 1.030. After a few days with slight fermentation it suddenly burst back to life, blowing off the blowoff tube on multiple occasions before slowing after another couple days. It's now down to 1.010 which is hopefully as far as it falls but I will give it a few more days given the previous resurgence. Taste is pretty good, citrusy and on the sweet side, but the ube is subtle and the color has faded to the point of being a red color in the carboy but just a pale magenta in the hydrometer tube.

3/3/18
I've been sitting on this one for a while, making slight alterations in hopes of bringing it to where I want but at this point I'm going to call it what it is: a fine beer but nothing special. After kegging the beer was a bit lacking in both ube and wit character. I made a few different extracts (trying both vodka based and hot water "teas") of coriander, orange peel, and ube powder. Despite adding what seemed to be large amounts of each of these extracts the beer only had very minor increases in perceived flavor and color. In the end, adding a little of a vodka based ube tincture to the glass seems to give the best combination of flavor and color.

3/11/18
Tasting:

Forgot to take a picture until halfway through the tasting. d'oh!

Appearance: Moderately hazy with the slightest of pink/orange hues that seems to come from the ube, though I might just be biased. The color, haziness, and a medium sized white head with good retention make for an appealing beer

Smell: There's an earthy and potato smell that leads the way, mixing with some more complex vegetable, herbal, and floral components to give the impression of a fresh tilled vegetable garden. That said, the smell is fairly soft and subtle and the classic wit citrus aromas don't stand out as intended.

Taste: Less earthy than the smell, the flavor leads off moderate sweet with some light dough and spice. The ube seems more hidden in the background with just a little earth and vanilla/coconut noticeable on the swallow. The finish is semi-sweet with just a light lingering bitterness and tough to describe herbal characters.

Mouthfeel: Fairly full bodied and creamy with low carbonation. These levels don't help the spice/yam characters pop but make the beer super easy drinking and go well with the subtle characteristics of the flavorings. The mouthfeel is probably the best part of this beer.

Overall: I haven't given up hope for an ube beer but this one doesn't quite do what I had hoped for. Using ube extract, adding vanilla, and/or moving the ube to a later addition than the mash all seem like possible ways to increase the flavor and potential of this unique ingredient and using fresher coriander and orange peel, and maybe adding some chamomile, should increase the wit character. I went fairly subtle in a lot of aspects of this beer thinking that I would be able to correct post-fermentation but that may not have been the case in this case. There's nothing bad about this beer but with a few other pale, subtle, moderately interesting beers on tap (kveik blondes and my latest maisonette) it doesn't do anything to call me to it.