I bought myself a couple “on Lees” beers this week, both from Unibroue Brewery. Unibroue is famous for its “on Lees” or on yeast bottled beers. After I finished the first brew (Blanche de Chambly) on Wednesday night I took the last bit of beer and the yeast sediment from the bottle and added it to sanitized jar with one bottle of Malta (which is basically unfermented beer wort sold as a soft-drink… Its horrible tasting). I could see that it was starting to ferment in the jar by the end of Thursday evening.

Last night I had the second bottle (La Fin Du Monde, review is forthcoming) and added the yeast sediment from the bottom to the jar. This morning I found it was fermenting vigorously and there was much yeast sediment at the bottom of the jar. I will probably cold crash this tomorrow night (place it in the fridge) and then try to figure out a way to store the yeast. Most people seem to recommend small test tubes and freezing them to keep the yeast for a long time. I will see if I cannot get something like that from the dollar store.

How am I going to store it?

I save the plastic bottles for home brews I consider failures or unworthy of my swing-top bottles. I can already tell this one is going to be one of my worst home brews to date and I have not even tried a bottle. I really screwed up my mash and ended up with a wort that contained almost 100% unfermentable sugars. I decided to educate myself further in the science of brewing and learned why higher mash temperatures create ‘longer’ sugar chains which the yeast is unable to eat which I will explain in another post.

The final gravity was 1.010, which was down from yesterday which was 1.012. This gives it an ABV of around 1.0%. I don’t think the gravity going to get much lower then this, but for fear of “bottle bombs” I decided to not prime this ale. I put a bottle into the fridge for drinking tonight before dinner. I really hope its not awful.

I took a gravity reading tonight and found to my horror that there was no fermentation at all. This does not compute.

How could there be no fermentation at all? Was the yeast bad? No. Couldn’t be. What about the fermentation temperature? Maybe it was too low? No, its been very warm here recently and my basement has been toasty all week. Then what? Bad luck? No none of these. The reason this beer failed was me.

I did some more net-searching and found that mashing at temperatures above 170F drastically affect the amount of fermentable sugars you can get from the grain. Whats worse is that extended mashes at these higher temperatures, like I did, will only make it worse. The sugars I got from this batch are not going to be very fermentable at all. Too make things worse instead of resigning to my fate and pouring this gruit down to the toilet I boiled up 1 cup of dextrose and racked the gruit on top of it. This may cause the yeast to become active again, but even so there is no saying what I get will even be mildly drinkable. Either way I am committed to it now.

Come, sit, listen. Let me tell you a tale of times long forgotten. Of legendary heroes, terrible monsters and of course, beer. Long before men had learned of temperature control, water pH, hops or even measuring for that matter, beer was not beer at all. It was in fact Gruit!

‘What is Gruit?’ you ask. Shut up. I am telling you a story.

Gruit is ale made without hops. The modern definition of beer according to the German Beer Purity law Reinheitsgebot is ‘Water, Barely, Hops’.  600 or so years ago this definition was more along the line ‘Water, Barely, Miracles’. As hops were not available back in this age other local herbs were used in its place. These included Sweet Gale, Yarrow and Wormwood among many others. There is a very interesting history behind why hops won the battle of the herbs and gruits faded into obscurity. If you’re interested I recommend taking a trip over to GruitAle.com and reading some of its articles.

My next three batches of homebrew are going to be based on some Gruit recipes I have been researching the past month. I have used the internet as my main source of information, but have also relied on the book “Sacred & Herbal Healing Beers” which gives some history on ancient beers and the use of herbs in them.

I am using modern brewing techniques for these medieval inspired ales, though I did adjust a couple of my practices to fit with some of the older methods.

Weak Gruit Ale

Ingredients –

Grains

• 1.5lbs 2-Row Pale Malt
• 1.5lbs 2-Row Pale Malt, roasted for 45 minutes at 350F
• 0.5lbs of rolled oats, roasted for 45 minutes at 350F
• 0.5lbs Cara-Pils/Dextrine

Herbs

• 1oz Yarrow (60 minutes)
• 0.5oz Mugwort (60 minutes)
• 15 grams Juniper Berries, dried (60 minutes)
• 5 grams Juniper Berries, dried (15 minutes)

Other

• ½ tsp Irish Moss (15 minutes)
• 1tsp yeast nutrient (cold break)
• 11g Windsor Ale Yeast, rehydrated

Procedure —

1)      Place all the grain onto bake sheets and spread evenly. Bake in the oven for 45 minutes at 350F. Sift grain occasionally to prevent it from burning

2)      Bring 4 gallons of water to a boil for 10 minutes and kill the heat. All to cool to 170F.

3)      Add grain and let steep for 3 hours. This is a very long mash-in, based on some of the procedures documented in “Sacred & Herbal Healing Beers”

4)      Bring 2L of water to a boil in a kettle, and allow to cool to around 180F. Sparge the grain with this water

5)      Add all the wort together into your brew kettle.

**I added another 2L of boiling water to the wort, as I found my overall boil volume was too low.

6)      Bring wort to a boil and add the herbs at appropriate times. Allow to simmer and stir occasionally.

7)      At cold break add the yeast nutrient and using a sanitized sieve remove the lose herbs from the top. ** I re-added the some of the juniper berries after they cooled. Next time I may leave them all in to see how it effects the flavour of the Gruit

8)      Cool in a water bath until 27C **No ice bath this time. I just used cold tap water which I changed out around 7 times. I found that I was still able to get the temperature down in around 30-40 minutes

9)      Pitch yeast and close it up.

Original Gravity – 1.014!? That is really bad efficiency as far as my mashing was concerned. I probably barely broke 40%. I guess the extended mash-in and poor management of my temperatures really hurt my overall final efficiency. The best possible final gravity I could have is going to be around 2%.

Still I am not too concerned with the low OG or ABV as this could just become a weak ale, something that was very commonly drunk in the medieval times. I am more interested in the final taste of this brew.

Yarrow, Mugwort and Juniper Berries