So How Did We Make ‘Let’s Try Apple Pie’?
Welcome to the first blog post from Mad Dog
Brewing Co. We hope that you get to enjoy some of the upcoming posts as much as
we enjoy writing them.
As ever, if you have any questions about this article, or if you have any recommendations
for topics that you’d like to see covered in future editions, then please feel
free to contact us.
For the first article, I thought that I’d
speak about our recent beer ‘Let’s Try Apple Pie’ – after all, it’s one which
seems to have prompted the most questions and sparked a lot of interest since first
being announced. We appreciate that it may not be a beer which everyone likes,
but it certainly seems to be one which everyone wants to try at least
once. We’ve lost count of the number of times that someone has said “I don’t normally like Sour beers...” or
“I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it
at first...” only for them to order a second glass, or ask for bottles to
take home.
The idea for ‘Let's Try Apple Pie’ came after
several discussions between Al and me, about making a sour beer. It would be
the first one produced on the current 6BBL equipment so we felt that it needed
to be something memorable. We couldn’t decide what kind of fruit to use, or
whether to use fruit at all!?! Though, in keeping with many of our other
one-off beers we knew that we had to source any ‘special’ ingredients locally,
and the beer had to be a bit different.
Each time we named a type of fruit, we came up with a different beer style
which we thought it would be better suited to. Or that a recipe idea just
wasn’t different enough.
The initial concept came from a comment of “I wonder if we could make an Apple
flavoured beer?” (In all honesty, it was after a couple of Ciders and the
thought was actually “I wonder if we
could make a Cider flavoured beer...?”). We must have had the
thought of sour beers in mind, because we quickly linked the ideas of ‘Cider
flavoured’ and soured beers.
Now that we’d decided that the first sour
beer would be Apple flavoured, we had to decide how to achieve the desired
sourness and fruit flavours. We quickly ruled out fruit concentrates or
additives as we aim to use only whole fruits and other natural ingredients in
our beers. This led us to think about using cider yeast during production of
the beer!
Thanks to our friends at Palmers Uplands
Cider (located in Risca), we’d got a sample of their spent yeast so that we
could run some tests. pH of the sample was 3.8, which happened to be the target
pH we had in mind for the eventual beer. Microscope analysis showed some VERY
active wild yeast, but most importantly for us lots of healthy Gram-positive Lactobacillus bacteria were also present.
We got straight to work designing a recipe which would provide plenty of sweet
malt and biscuit flavours ... the finished beer which we now had in mind would
resemble an apple pie or apple crumble with a slightly sharp finish!
We’d decided to use a ‘kettle souring’ process during the production of the
beer. This meant using the spent yeast from Palmers Upland Cider to do the
initial fermentation. The ‘kettle souring’ step meant that we could monitor the
pH of the wort until the target of 3.8 was achieved. It’s then boiled for a
second time to stop all wild yeast and Lactobacillus
activity. A compromise of having the wild yeast present at this stage was that
some of the sugars present in the wort were converted to alcohol (woohoo I
might hear you say), but boiling for a second time meant that this alcohol was
lost to evaporation, booooo! The finished beer is 3.6% abv, but if this alcohol
hadn’t been lost during the boil step then the beer would have been around 4.2%.
To our surprise, the kettle souring step
took only 18 hours to reach the target pH – that was some bloody active cider
yeast!! When it came to boiling the now soured wort, there were some of the
worst smells coming off a beer which Alex and I had ever experienced during a
brew day... a mix of sour milk, cider vinegar and wet horse blankets (aka
‘Barnyard funk’ as some readers may have heard when describing beers with wild
yeasts). For a short while, we looked at each other thinking that the batch
might have to go down the drain, but fortunately those awful smells didn’t last
long! Soon we had the caramel, apple and biscuit aromas which we were aiming
for, backed up with a little spiciness and citrus from the UK Cascade hops
added during the 30 minute boil... yum!
As soon as the boil was complete, the rest
of the brewing process started to resemble a normal brew day; chill to 24°C, transfer to the
fermenter and pitch a normal strain of brewers yeast to finish off the
fermentation. We found though that fermentation took a little longer to get
started than normal. We put this down to the acidity of the wort slowing the
yeast from doing its thing – normal beers would have a pH around 5 at this
stage, so the ale yeast wasn’t in its optimal environment.
During the fermentation and conditioning of
this beer (8 weeks in all) we’d take fairly regular samples from the tank to
see how the flavours were coming along. Initially, the beer tasted like a rough
scrumpy cider with a small hint of beer / malt flavours in the background.
Again, we had a small fear that this batch might be heading down the drain if
the flavours didn’t change, but change they did! The impression of strong
scrumpy faded by week 3, and the malts were becoming much more balanced with
the fruit. The previously harsh sourness had mellowed out as well, but we
couldn’t help but feel that there was still something lacking from that ‘Apple
crumble’ or ‘Apple pie’ which we had in mind when designing the recipe. So, the
thinking caps went on again, and we started to look at other flavours which
could be introduced to the beer. Using small samples from the tank, we trialled
some other fruits; blackcurrants, rhubarb and blackberries – all fruits that we
thought would make a great apple crumble. None of those flavours seemed to work
in this beer though so we started trying various spices too; nutmeg, all-spice
and cinnamon.
Cinnamon... that was the one which had
enough of a punch to balance the tart apples, it was also the one which best
resembled the ‘Apple pie’ we were aiming for.
To the 500 litre batch of beer, we’d added 200g of cinnamon sticks to
get the desired amount of spice flavour. It’s a very strong spice, so didn’t
want it to overpower the other flavours. By adding only 200g, we could let the
flavours develop slowly, and when they were at the correct level we’d package
the beer into 330ml bottles and 30L Ecokegs. The cinnamon sticks were soaked in
3 litres of boiled water to sanitise them, and to help extract their flavours. The
mix was allowed to cool to room temperature over night before being added to
the fermenter.
The finished beer we feel is has a balanced
flavour of apples, spice and sweet biscuit which we’d been aiming for from the
start – all backed up with an underlying sourness which we hope doesn’t
distract from the intended ‘Apple Pie beer. I hope that this article demonstrates
some of the process involved with the design and development of a new beer. For
those of you who have tried ‘Lets Try Apple Pie’ we’d love to hear from you to
get your thoughts.
Stu
Head Brewer
