Recipe Advice Thread

[denimglen]

Thought it might be handy to have a thread for some of the more advanced brewers to give some advice on recipes.

Let's see how it goes eh...

[Tilt]

No, haven't heard of that - its worth a shot.  I'll be interested to know how it goes.  How do you reckon the egg white would affect stability/ longevity.  I'd imagine it wouldn't have much of a shelf life.

[Richard Jack]

Well, I suppose the theory is that you don't get the egg white into the keg / bottles,because like other finings it will settle out.

[Tilt]

From a quick search it looks like egg white works similarly to gelatin - just a bit more gently.  Polyclar could also be good - but I've never used it.  I think I'll give gelatin a bash this time as its what I usually use.  Migth be good to do a comparison if you're going to use egg.

[Richard Jack]

http://cru.cahe.wsu.edu/CEPublications/em016/em016.pdf this document has a good section on fining for astingency.

[Tilt]

Interesting - so egg and gelatin proteins work along the same lines - bonding charged tannins to proteins and dropping out.  Interesting also that the egg should be suspended in a salt water solution.  If my conversion is correct then 7g of eggwhite should be about right for a 20L brew (give or take as amounts of eggwhite protein aren't consistent). 

[Richard Jack]

The Saiwhat (teehehehe) has had a week at 4C with gelatin for a couple of days at the end, and then it was kegged. It's tamed down a lot. I ran out of time to do the egg white.

recipe for reference:

80% malteurop pils
10% spelt malt
5% munich
5% vienna

90 min boil

30 IBU Southern Cross @ 60
0.5 g/l Nelson Sauvin @ 10
0.5 g/l NZ Cascade @ 10
0.8 g/l Nelson Sauvin @ 0
0.8 g/l NZ Cascade @ 0

3rd gen French Saison

Racked to ~2.5kg of guavas inc skin for a week.

Crash cooled for a week, fined with gelatin.

 I think that post fining it's probably slipped back from "punishingly dry" to "pretty dry, eh".

I gave a bottle to Haish, and he was either polite or didn't find the tanin to be a problem. I'll drop some around next week Tilt.

[Tilt]

Thanks Richard - I'll do you a swap.  Mine's finished off at 1013 now. I'll throw in some gelatine and chill before bottling. I reckon it'll need a bit of time to all balance and settle down though.

[Tilt]

First taste tonight after fining and kegging.  The gelatin took out a bit of the harshness and its now got a real earthy fruity flavour with enough tannin to keep it tasting complex.  Its got so much more to it than the base wheat beer that I'm wondering if I should "keg fruit"the other half.   Cleared up OK too.

[Kelly Milligan]

Awesome colour dude! looks beautiful

[Tilt]

Yeah - surprised its even turned out looking vaguely drinkable really - the secondary sludge at the bottom of the fermentor wasn't a pretty sight.

[Scarrfie]

I am close to putting the Guava's into my experimental lager and an option I have is to put them through a centrifugal juicer, would you guys take that option to keep the skins (and tannins) out? Or is it better to have all the pulp in there as well? Perhaps if I split the two, adding the juice in first and then the pulp just for a few days before racking to secondary?

[Tilt]

My thoughts are purely theoretical as I haven't used a juicer...but don't the centrifugal juicers use a grating action to pulp the fruit and then fling the juice out. I'd imagine this would release the tannins from skin and seeds into the juice. If you then chucked this juice in the fermentor there wouldn't be any way to rack the beer off to limit tannin exposure (i.e no solids to rack off from).  I s'pose I think of the the pulp acting like a slow release medium which gives you some control over the amount tranferred across into the beer.   Having said that I'd probably bung a few berries thorugh the juicer and taste it to see if it has the flavour you want - if not then use pulp

If you end up just going with the pulp - next time I'd try 200g/litre pulp for 2-3 days.  The colour, fruit aroma and sourness are there in mine but its not as fruit intense as I'd like.