It was a busy day at the 5th Street Bedroom Brewery, with 3.2 batches of beer being attended to in the course of the afternoon.
The primary project for the day was the Yellow-Billed Magpie Saison, the first of a series of saisons we’ll be making over the course of the summer. American and English yeast strains don’t perform well once the temperature gets into the mid-70s and higher, meaning they are more likely to produce undesirable off-flavors, but Belgian and French strains, particularly the saison strains known for making farmhouse ales work well at temperatures up into the 80s and 90s. This makes them better suited for the Brooklyn summer.
This saison should end up around 5.5% ABV, and is a partial mash batch made from Bohemian pilsner malt, pale wheat malt, biscuit malt, extra light dry malt extract, and clear candi syrup. I used Willamette whole leaf hops, which made the whole straining experience much, much easier. The plan is to repitch the yeast to make the next three or four batches, all of which will be variations on the same recipe. One will have ginger and possibly Szechuan peppercorn. Another will likely be a black saison. Fun times!
The second project was to bottle the Battle of Lee’s Mill double IPA, which ended up at a respectable 7.6% ABV and a mighty 98 IBUs. Not for those who don’t like a lot of hops. This started out as a 5.5 gallon batch, yet only 4 gallons or so made it into bottles due to liquid lost in the (rather extensive) dry-hopping process. We filled two 6 liter party wombats and 4 22oz bottles. When filling the party wombats, I threw an extra quarter-ounce of whole-leaf Delta hops in each one just because I could.
The third project was racking our Walpurgisnachtbier, which is an American blonde ale brewed with honey, peat-smoked malt, heather and pink peppercorns. It is incredibly pale straw yellow, and it attenuated down much further than expected. The smoked malt is definitely noticeable, but it doesn’t completely overwhelm the flavor. I had read a lot of stories of homebrewers having peat-smoked malt turn otherwise good beers into charcoal in a glass. Thankfully, we seem to have avoided that. It’s definitely an interesting beer — a bit sweet, with the smoke and spices creating an initial impression of sourness similar to something like a gose. Martha says this will be one to serve as 12 oz pours.
Finally, I added a second dose of dry hops to the Baldy Smith triple IPA, which is sure to send the non-hop-lovers running. That gets bottled this coming weekend. I’m expecting half of the original 1 gallon batch to actually make it into bottled form.