Coastal Brew Day Blog

SOUR ALE  We've documented our failures. We've began anew. And now we make that actual beer. Making a Sour Ale is a little more delicate than normal beers. Because of the bacterial elements and lactic acid, certain parts of the beer have to be compromised.  There is a lot of prep work that has to be done before the actual brew day. We detailed the starter and its importance in the previous post, and that has to be nice and happy before adding it. As you wait your 5-7 days for the lactobacillus to reproduce, you should be monitoring it. If the flask is quiet, and you can't discern any activity, the bugs are in good shape and are ready to be added to your beer. If there is activity, and you can see action in the flask, something is wrong and you should take care of those issues before continuing on your path to Sour.  As for the beer itself, this observer is of the opinion that it should be relatively simple. Base malt, some flaked, and an adjunct or two that serve a specif...

 After figuring out what we did wrong, and there was a lot, we decided to give Sour Ales another chance. Not right away of course, we had to wait for that wound to heal. But now here we are, almost a full year later and wiser, ready to take another shot at it. We did a lot of research this time around. The Milk the Funk Wiki was especially helpful to understand to science side of things, as was relentlessly asking questions to our friends who sour. Through this reading and badgering, we found the first thing that we needed to change: the lactobacillus strain we used was the wrong one. So we got the right one. The other thing we didn't do, despite the strain, was start it. Making the starter, like you would with liquid yeast, will increase the volume of cells that you are going to incorporate into the beer. One of the myriad reason that our first attempt to sour took so long was that we didn't have enough bacterium to efficiently sour the beer. So we made a starter (procedure at...

 A little bit of history. Not about Sours, some variety of sour has been around forever. The Belgian Lambic style can be traced back almost 800 years, and wild fermentation was the only way to create any alcohol for centuries. Once the industrial revolution happened and into the modern era, the development of Sour Ales has become more refined and far safer than previous generations.  Using wild bacterium and yeast strains can be dangerous if not treated properly. Especially today, with the tighter regulations and more stringent health regulations, traditional souring has to be done in specific facilities, rather than wherever you want. Of course, people still do open ferments in their homes, but we don't suggest doing that around here (Southeastern Connecticut) due to all the nasties that live in our air.  There are a ton of resources about souring these days, and we suggest taking a deep dive into the Milk the Funk Wiki if you really want to get into the nuts and bolts o...

BOURBON MOLASSES PORTER   This isn't the first porter to be featured in this pages. In fact it's the third. Our standard Porter and our Holiday Ale each have entries that you can take a look at for more information on Porters. What makes this version of our Porter different is the addition of both molasses and bourbon.  The first thing that makes this beer different than the other Porters that we have made is the bourbon. Now, we've aged our Belgian Stout with bourbon soaked oak chips, but this is the only beer that we make that has bourbon as a direct ingredient. When we designed this beer, we wanted the bourbon flavor to be an accent on the overall profile of the beer, not dominate it or add any further alcohol content. To do this we came up with a new solution. Instead of simply pouring a bottle of bourbon into our beer at any point, we decided to make it an addition to the secondary fermentation. Before doing this addition, we had to find a way to eliminate any alcohol ...

  What’s Wrong With My Beer?   Sometimes bad things happen to good brews. Seemingly everything can go correctly on your brewday, but in the end, an element fouls up, or a mistake was made, and your beer has to go down the drain. The list below, organized into types of mistakes, identifies and solves some of the most common fouling of beers. Sometimes the fix is simple, like aging, or adding an element during secondary fermentation. Other times, it's more tragic and you have to pitch your entire batch due to infection. So if you have issues with your beer, use this as a resource to help you identify and fix the issue. Group 1 - Acetaldehyde (Green Apples): Not enough oxygenation when before pitching yeast, yeast needs more time to work.  Solution: Agitate beer in fermenter, repitch yeast, let beer age longer. - Diacety l (Buttery, Movie Popcorn, Butterscotch): Potentially infected batch. Caused by temperature fluctuation, improper sanitation, lack of nutrients and oxygena...

Tips and Tricks, Vol. 1  We're brewing another Belgian Stout this week, so if you want to learn more about that, see a recipe (a really good one) and get into that big beer world, check out the Bourbon Barrel Belgian Stout entry. So instead of repeating ourselves, we are going to help you out with some tips and tricks we've learned along the way. We've made pretty much every mistake you can possibly make, so we decided to help you not live like us.  - How to avoid bottle bombs : Bottle bombs, or when over-carbonation creates a foam volcano billowing out of the bottle, or even exploding due to the extra pressure. Exploding bottles can take out the neighboring bottles as well, a tragic event that does occasionally happen. To avoid this, and under-carbonation as well, a good practice is to stir your primed beer (beer with priming solution) well before your bottle. After every 4-6 bottles you fill, or 5 minutes if you take your time, stir the mixture again. This will ensure tha...