Cafetiere Beer II

Hi all,

 

Thanks for all the views you guys have been making, a couple of hundred over the past day or so! Did you all try your own version of Cafetiere Beer? I hope so! One of the viewers mentioned that i had made a good decarbonation device. This hadn't really registered as an issue as we have a culture in the UK of Non carbonated ales. The rest of the world likes a bit of gas in their brew.

 

In the search for further meaning and use of Cafetiere beer i tried the following.

 

The cafeteire has sat in this state in a fridge for approx 10 hours. Its flat Hop Synergy 44 beer with honking amounts of surpressed cold hop goodness.

 

 A quick press of the plunger and a bit of a head has popped up, not long to last i would think.

 

I decanted into a 2 pint jug and as you can see the head collapsed.

 

 

I then added a chilled Hop Synergy 44 on a bit of a waterfall pour.I had a nice jug of carbonated mega hopped IPA which was dutifully poured.

 

 

The head remained for 4/5ths of the wheat beer glass and i haven't been belching so its about where i like my carbonation to be. Aesthetically pleasing while not being a lager!

 

 

The hops used this time are the same from last night, i don't mean the same Genus i mean the same hops flowers! A much mellower hop aroma this time, very sweet, blackcurrant, and a touch of green. Again, its a simple way to get to that Hop Head well loved dry hopped flavour/texture into a beer. I'd be happy for anyone to try these bad boys, no risk of embarassment, these rock! :) Thanks for reading.

Cafetiere Beer

Hi all,

Newly returned from Azerbaijan, really starting to get into that place. Nice people, really nice people. On my return to home a brand new brewing book was waiting for me  Absolutely fantastic book and i can see it will have to be multiple read throughs before i absorb 1/4 of the ideas in there.
 

Here's a link to the book if you haven't read it yet. 

Stan Hieronymous- For The Love Of Hops

 

While reading the first couple of chapters an idea leapt fully formed and vigorous into my upper mind. 'Dry Hopping in a Cafetiere, why not?'. Must mean my subconcious is also a Hop Head! Once the sun went down the experiment commenced! :)

 As you can see, full experiment mode, lots of glass, scales, bag of Hops.

10 grmms of Columbus high aa hops & a one pint cafitere, a match made in nirvana i think?

A couple of bottles of nice Hop Synergy 44, one to clear the palate and fix a base line, the other for the cafetiere.

Love this photo, that's a proper beer!

Deployed cafetiere strainer, First infusion was for 10 minutes only but immediately i could taste the difference. Piney, sweet, viscous hop oil & pepper across the tongue. Really nice, a bigger bolder beer for seconds work!

 So nice i fact that i tried a second one with another few grammes (getting casual now) of Columbus on top of the initial 10 grmms. Applied another bottle of beer and let it soak for 1/2 an hour in the fridge before deploying strainer. WOW, hop bursts going off in my head. Absolutely full on resinous, piney, sweet layer of hop aroma/taste blazing across the malt layer. Beautiful beautiful beer!

Any of you out there who see themselves as a bit of a hop-head have GOT to try this. I'm claiming this one for Scotland, Universities, tyres, tv, tarmacadam, men wearing skirts, we invented the lot. Now Cafetiere Beer and you saw it here first, Scotland rocks, spread the news! Any feedback on how you get on with your own experiments much appreciated, i can only begin to imagine the possible combinations! Cheers :)

 

Hop Synergy 4.4 tasting & amplification!

Hi all,

Happy New year to you all and all the best to your families. I have just returned from Azerbaijhan, a mere 5 days ago. One of my priorities on return was the bottling of Hop Synergy 4.0. Hop Synergy 4.0 became 4.4 as the FG of the beer bottomed out at a lowish 1.006 giving me a final abv of 4.4%.

I had a couple of samples while bottling and it was tasting good

So good that i had to try a prescreening after 2 days carb'ing!

Its a bit cloudy, a bit new but it does have stonking amounts of toffee(thanks to kettle first running caramelisation) and tropical fruit in large amounts matched by a big bitterness. I felt as if i knew this beer and had been here before (Realised at the second sample bottle that it reminds me of Deuchars IPA). Quite palatable and it will only improve with time. :)

 

Do any of you guys know Randy Moshers Radical Brewing book? In the fruit beer section he says that its pretty pointless to try a peach beer as it gives very little to the beer. I like a challenge and i was growing bored with bottling 4.4 so i decided to boost up a 5 gallon glass with peaches and plain old nasty sucrose thus negating the bottling process for a while!

 

I liquidised eight tins of peaches and a kilo of sugar and had a really cool colour result.

Which only improved once i started the beer transfer.

Final cool layer shots

 

 

 

I have kept the Burton & US-05 yeast kicking out at 22 degrees(rising on day three to 24) and they have been very active indeed. Blow off tube required and much frothing. I look forward to trying this beer as it may only be a fast and rough conversion of a 4.4% quaffable beer to a 7.3% headbanger BUT it has a damn good chance of being gorgeous what with its heavy hop base, caramelised toffee background and stressed yeast side flavours, oh aye and the peaches. See you Randy Mosher? Cheers :)

Update

After three days of frantic fermentation i came down this morning (26th Jan) to a settling beer with most of the peaches on the bottom of the FV and a very restrained finishing gas release. I transfered the beer off of the peach remains into a 4 gallon container and binned the remains. Fruity and cidery(from the table sugar i think) with a hint of sulphur is the smell at the moment. I added 3/4 ounce or so of Columbus Dry hops in a weighted bag and it will stay there for the two weeks i am in Turkey doing diy at the apartment. I really love taking a portion of the main batch and messing with it, i learn and diversify nicely. Cheers :)

 

Hop Squeezing

Hi All,

 

Very last post of 2012! While thinking about how i wished HopSynergy 4.0 to develop i had intended to leave the beer until the end of January to bottle. Subsequently the rate of fermentation has been faster than i expected, with this in mind and combined with my work schedule slipping i should be able to bottle Synergy before departing for Azerbaijan on the 3rd January. I had not expected to be dry hopping this brew so during initial prepwork i did not sterilise HopThang. :(

As you can hopefully see from the photo above i DID dryhop but in a low tech way! The hops of choice for this were 1.5oz of Styrian Goldings and 3.5 oz of Chinook. The muslin bags are weighted with glass marbles and miscellaneous stainless steel fittings (all sterilised of course).

 

 

The beer is coming along nicely so it was just a case of fitting a sterilised string and then dunking into the beer to beat the yeast layer back into the beer.

 

 

I then decided to try a new technique (to me). Each morning and evening i have sterilised my hands and then pulled the hopbags out of the beer. I have given them both a good strong squeeze. They both run green with hop solution when squeezed. I then dunk them into the beer to allow the hops to absorb beer again and repeat twice.

 

Presqueeze and Dunk with nice yeast shape

 

 

Post squeeze and Dunk with yeast desolation all around!

 

 

I read a beer book a few years ago which wrote of the handling/& rubbing of hops preboil to break open the lupin sacks and increase the hops effectiveness in the brew. This is a truly oldschool technique(1800's). I liked the tactile idea of that, very basic and satisfying i thought. The same thing occurs here with a wet hands on approach to dry hopping. Possible downsides are risk of infection and massive additions of bitterness (especially with 16.5% aa Chinook hops). The upside is of course the huge hop aroma that i am ensuring is making its way into the beer and also gaining insight into a new wrinkle in brewing

 

. I did the hop squeezing for 3 days, today the 4th day is the final day as there is a marked drop off in aroma when squeezing so i would say i have got all that is worthwhile out of these hops. During days 1 & 2 the aroma coming off of the hops when i squeezed them was fantastic, worth the experiment just for the olfactory benefit in those minutes. Time will tell as to how bitter this beer will be, it should have been a 60 IBU beer but if the bittering extractions are large using this method then i could have an 80 or 100 IBU on my hands. I drew a sample from the bottom of the conical and allowed it to ferment out indoors in a trial jar. It achieved a FG of 1.006! The yeast to beer ratio was insane probably 80:1 so hopefully the big batch will stall out sooner than that. See you in the New Year for the trial of the batch. Cheers, :).