Catching up with a few beers

Because I've been away a bit recently the brewing has been neglected, so yesterday I took advantage of the wet weather and spent an afternoon of beer-related fettling.

First off I bottled the 'Saison am' that's been sitting in secondaries completing it's fermentation for a few weeks. This just needs labelling and then I'll leave it to sit for a few weeks.

It's a sign of how keyboard-orientated I've become that writing less than 30 labels leaves my hand cramping 

Next I racked off the 'Saison Du Noir', which finished it's primary fermentation last week and has been patiently sitting in the fermentor. This was an experimental recipe with darker malts and as you can see it looks very different to my usual pale brews - in fact it's pretty much a porter (which was accidental) but brewed with Saison yeast (which was not).

Despite it's dark appearance it's also a lot weaker than my regular beers. Most of the time I brew using a 'partial mash' method where I extract sugars from grains (the 'mash') and then supplement this with the addition of pale malt extract, but for this one I reduced the amount of malt extracts. Unfortunately the mash didn't seem to be very efficient which will leave me with an understrength beer (about 3%). I thought long and hard about adding extra sugars in some form but eventually decided to leave it, and the result is fairly 'thin' tasting and doesn't match it's looks. We'll see how it turns out after a week or so in secondary and then a couple of weeks in the bottle.

That left me with an empty fermentor with a 'yeast cake' of Saison yeast in the bottom

Normally I'd either wash this away or scoop it out into sterile bottles and store it in the fridge. But the rain was unrelenting so I thought I'd make another beer and pitch it directly onto the yeast, which saves a lot of faffing around.

My initial ginger beer was almost gone and had been very refreshing in the heat, although it has been fermented to dryness which some people thought it a little 'thin' and sharp (don't worry Miff, Rach & Gordy -  I've still got bottles for your professional opinions). So I thought I'd expand on that recipe and combine two different summer beer styles. Initially I peeled 1.2kg of ginger, which because the ginger was superbly fresh gave me just over a kilo of clean root (missus).  

I blended this and added in 2 lemons, 2 limes, 6 cloves and some cinnamon bark. But this time instead of a kg of raw sugar I added 1/2 kg of pale malt extract and 1/2 kg of wheat malt extract (along with 1kg of brown sugar and 1/2 kg of lactose)

I boiled this up for 1 hr and added 2 chopped and partially deseeded birdseye chillies 10 minutes from the end. Then after cooling and straining I poured it directly onto the yeast cake. You could almost hear the yeast gnashing it's teeth and salivating in anticipation, and a few hours later the whole thing (wrapped up in a towel for warmth) was bubbling away nicely.

Bit of a one-dimensional photo - I'll leave you to add the once-every-five-seconds bubble of the fermentor and the all-pervading smell of ginger.