stquinto

A bit of fish for a change, bouillabaisse

I was a bit three sheets to the wind after the Scotch (alright, Japanese…), but I just about managed to knock up some grub. Octopus on a white bean puree and a bone-in sirloin.

Looks wonderful Phil, TTROTDO

Holy cow, I’m not used to Scotch on the rocks before dinner, but Blimey, I don’t want to offend anyone

I’m in the South of France, crappy weather, but a decent “apéritif”

No, they came n the post from a Mexican deli. It made about a litre of enchilada sauce which I froze

Getting to the end of a 10l keg of Return of the Red IPA. Lovely brew, great colour too

Mexican for dinner. I also got hold of some tomatillos to make a green enchilada sauce.

Abbey de Rochefort number 6 (7.5%, dunno where the 6 comes from) Not half bad… that’s the extent of my tasting notes go, it’s past Cinderella’s bed time

I've not had a Coopers Sparkling in ages, I can only source COPA here. I tend to make brews at least 5%, it's the inner p*ss-head coming out in me... Either way, it's a lovely drop

One other point: last time I mistakenly ground up the oats and it kept clogging the circulation arm. I had to hover around the Grainfather during the entire mash (quite a long one, 2 and a quarter hours), blowing into the circulation pipe. Doh ! Yesterday I put them in whole, much better idea. Here's the recipe if you like. Guinness double batch - less roasted malt.pdf

I put in 4ml lactic acid for a cornie, and have also done the souring of the wort. Both work well IMHO. For the souring, I put aside about a pint of the wort before pitching. Over the course of the fermentation (I left it two weeks) the set-aside portion grew a fur coat and it had gone sweet. I binned that, and drew off a pint and left it to sour over the course of about three days. I then boiled it up to sterilise it and added it to the cornie. If I have a double batch I tend to do one cornie using each method to experiment. Since both are good, I reckon the lactic acid is less of a faff, and I have a litre of the stuff to use up... https://shop.theelectricbrewery.com/pages/dry-irish-stout#:~:text=A simpler solution is to,per 5 gallons of beer. After primary fermentation, put 3% (2.4 cups per 5 gallons) of the beer into a separate jug and pitch bacteria meant for producing sour beers such as Wyeast 5335 Lactobacillus or White Labs WLP677 Lactobacillus Delbrueckii. This will develop the sourness, but can take time (sometimes months). You can also simply leave the 3% of beer out on the counter and let it go sour for a few weeks from whatever bacteria it picks up in the air. (Make sure to boil for 10 minutes before adding back in). This natural method of souring is likely what Guinness used to do traditionally. A similar option that some may find easier is to purchase commercial Guinness a few weeks ahead of the brew day, sour it by leaving it out in a bowl, and then freeze it. Thaw it the night before brew day and add to the boil 10 minutes from the end. A simpler solution is to add 88% lactic acid to the beer after fermentation is done, before kegging. This is said to be what Guinness does today because it's cheaper, easier, and more efficient than relying on bacteria. All is takes is around 3-4 ml of acid per 5 gallons of beer. Go sparingly adding 0.5 ml at a time with a syringe (without needle) until the taste is to your liking. You can also use this method to do a trial run to see if you like the results: Once the beer is kegged and on tap, add one to two drops with an eye dropper to a 16 oz glass of beer and see what you think. One drop per 16 oz is equivalent to 2 ml in 5 gallons. Careful not to overdo it! The last option is to replace 3% of the base malt (the Maris Otter (2.5-4L) and flaked barley (1.4-1.5L)) with acidulated (sour) malt (1.7-2.8L). This will of course affect your mash pH as well so careful to not have it go too low.

I knocked up the Guinness clone yesterday. I put 200g less roasted malt. I panicked as it seemed more brown than nearly black, so I threw in some black malt powder. For some reason my OG readings were really off, I don’t think the samples were thoroughly mixed. I boiled it for 90 minutes, and ended up adding 7 litres of water to get it to 1.048 That’ll be two cornies full . It seems a perfect beer for the second outing of my kegmenter, as it won’t fit in any fridge, although at a pinch I could fit it in the keezer if I had to. I got a new floating dip tube for it, and the evoline to upgrade my beer lines

First taste of a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Undercarbed, but got potential. Not harsh from the hops at all

It’s cherry beer so has a fairly sweet (cherry) taste. It is a lambic beer which makes it a bit sour, but in a pleasant way. Very refreshing, you wouldn’t want more than one or two at a time.