Monday, October 15, 2012

Hazy beer. After all this time.

Now, here's a beer that's meant to be hazy.  If anything, it's meant to be a little more hazy than this, but this cask has been in store for 4 months and it's difficult to produce a completely stable haze. 

We keep the odd cask hanging around in our cold room (~10°C) so that we can do a bit of due diligence on shelf life / cask washing etc. 

Update: For the avoidance of doubt, this beer ("Wheat") is the only pale beer we make that's intended to look like this.  There's a stronger, more heavily spiced version on the drawing board. Later.

It's a wheat beer of course -  "one grain in three" being wheat.  Wheat malt, that is.   This leads to relatively high protein levels in the finished beer which helps us with the haze.  There's some oat malt in there too. It had a fairly short mash, the pH dropped with a touch of lactic acid, and a quite hot sparge.  We've found that this helps a bit also.  The boil was shortish and on the gentle side.  As well as (some) hops, it was boiled up with  Lemon Balm (stalks and all) so I think we picked up a fair dollop of tannins and other hazy plant stuff.  No kettle finings of course.

We used a yeast that isn't terribly flocculent (altho it does clear, given time)  and of course, there's no fish-guts or anything in there.

It looks good.   And (even after all this time) it tastes good. So, we're pretty pleased with ourselves.  All the effort we put in was worth it.

You can imagine how well I take it when someone complains that it's "not clear".