Brewer Spotlight: April 2013 – Saruman
Welcome to “Brewer Spotlight”. Every month I’ll be interviewing a member of the NHC, delving into their history as a homebrewer and craft beer consumer.
This month I’m talking to Saruman – a name familiar to many of you, I’m sure. Saruman is a longtime contributor to the Irish homebrewing forums and has been maintaining his own blog “The Tale of the Ale” since 2009.
He is also on Twitter as @TaleOfAle.
Saruman, welcome to “Brewer Spotlight”! How does it feel to be the guinea pig for this feature? Nervous? Excited?
Honoured would be a better word. I’m the first in what will hopefully be a successful feature so being picked first is nice. I suppose I should be nervous being the guinea pig but I suspect it will all turn out fine.
Let’s start off with something easy. How long have you been homebrewing and how did you get get started?
It’s one of those long stories with a quick answer but might need elaboration. I got interested in home brewing towards the end of 2008 and did my first brew in December 2008. It didn’t go well but not through any fault of my own. I believe I just had a bad kit with a non-functioning yeast. It was my one and only complete failure, though I have had others not turn out as well as I would like. What got me in to brewing was the complete lack of choice when it came to beer. Craft beer was starting to increase in Dublin but I was living in Westmeath which is a beer desert other than the big tasteless macros. There is a lot more to that story but the elaborated version would take a long time. If anyone wants to hear it, buy me a pint and I’ll tell the tale. It involves a Scottish man living in Prague, married to an American.
What beers styles do you brew regularly and why?
I brew anything and everything but my personal preference is always a good hoppy American pale ale or IPA and of course a good stout.
Do you have one beer that you have brewed over and over to perfect the recipe and/or process?
A few but the most obvious one is my award-winning stout.
Yes, you won a silver medal for your “Dark Stranger” stout in the inaugral National Brewing Championship. Tell us about your recipe.
The recipe is one I have been working on since I first starting brewing all-grain. It started off as “Cloaked Stranger” and then became “Dark Stranger”. The one that won the medal was Dark Stranger #3, so it’s the 4th version. This one was packed full of more dark malts than normal stouts. Dark malt, especially roasted barley is less fermentable so the resulting beer finishes sweeter than a dry stout and with a lot of body. It’s a beer I will continue to brew as it’s my “house” stout.
Which commercial beers inspired you to start brewing your own? Which commercial beers do you still buy regularly?
In Irish terms, it would have to be Galway Hooker and O’Hara’s stout. I still drink both of those beers but these days I have a much broader range of beers to drink in the pub. Metalman is a firm favourite but I never stick to one beer, I always mix it up.
What are your 5 favourite commercial beers?
It’s very difficult to answer that considering just how many different beers I drink. If restricted to just 5, I would go with (in no particular order): O’Hara’s Leann Folláin, Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA, Bells Two Hearted Ale, Cantillon Geuze & Great Divide Hercules DIPA.
What are your thoughts on the current state of the Irish craft beer industry?
Very positive and seems to be going from strength to strength. There are more breweries opening all the time with many more in the process of getting set up. I don’t see things changing for the worse any time soon, not unless the government do something stupid like revoke the duty break for micro breweries, which is the only thing that allows them to make a profit.
What pubs do you frequent regularly?
The usual suspects among Dublin beer aficionados: The Bull and Castle, W.J. Kavanagh, L.Mulligan Grocer, Porterhouse, Brewdock, Against the grain, Black Sheep etc.
Describe your current brewing equipment setup?
I have a 30 litre boiler (plastic) and a picnic cooler style mash tun. I mill my own grain using a corn mill which sits on a fold up work bench. A plastic ziploc bag provides the chute to guide the crushed grain down to the waiting container. I ferment in a single glass carboy before transferring to corny keg where I naturally condition my beer before putting the keg in the kegerator. I usually have 2 beers on tap at home. Any beer that does not make it in to the corny will go in to bottles to be naturally conditioned. These are usually used as test bottles to check the progress of the beer.
How often do you brew?
I don’t have a set schedule, I brew when I feel like it. I like to brew at least once a month, sometimes twice but I can go months without brewing.
Describe your typical brew day.
Brewday starts with me putting together a recipe in beer tools pro, which is a computer application for recipe formulation and keeps a note of what ingredients I have etc. It will either be a new recipe I put together or an old one that I tweak depending on what ingredients I have. I put on some music, start heating up my water and then mill my grain and weigh it all out. The volume of water will be about 12 litres depending on how much grain. Typically 2.5 times the grain in KG so 5kg of grain is 12.5 litres and so on.
I then start the mash process once the water is the correct temp, usually about 66°C depending on the beer. During the mash I start heating up another 20 litres of water for 2 batch sparges. This is mainly just time for me to relax. I might watch some TV or a movie.
After the mash is done I extract the first 4 litres of liquid from the tap of the mash tun and pout it back on top of the grain bed. That acts as a filter so any particles will be left behind. I then empty all the liquid in to my boiler and pour the first 10 litres of 80°C sparge water in and leave it to mash again for 20 mins. I then repeat that process and end up with about 28 or 29 litres of wort in the boiler.
Once the boil is complete, I then need to cool down the beer using a wort chiller which is just a copper coil with cold water running through it. I usually use some of this water to fill a bucket and make sanitising solution. From now on, everything that touches the beer must be sanitised. I either use a commercial no rinse product like StarSan, or a cheap alternative is a mixture of 30ml of thin unperfumed bleach, white distilled vinegar and 20 litres of water. Add the bleach and vinegar to the water independently and NOT to each other. That’s very important or you will end up with deadly chlorine gas.
Once the wort has cooled to about 20°C you can transfer to your sanitised fermenter and pitch your yeast be it liquid or dry. You can make a yeast starter if you like but it’s not necessary when starting out unless making a big beer. Now you clean up and leave it alone for a couple of weeks.
What’s your favourite part of the brewing process? Least favourite?
Favourite part? Taking it as a whole, it has to be the drinking of the finished product. Of just brewing itself, I would say the smell of boiling wort. I love it! My least favourite should be obvious – cleaning up the mess!
Do you have any favourite malts or hop varieties?
I love American citrus hops like Cascade, but Nelson Sauvin is one of my favourites. I am also rather partial to Vienna malt, though I don’t brew nearly enough with it. Crystal is a firm favourite of mine.
Do you favour liquid or dry yeasts? Any favourite strains, or ones you use most often?
I tend to use dry yeast for most of my beers, unless I’m brewing something that specifically needs a liquid yeast as there is a larger range of liquid yeasts. Dry yeast is just more stable and lasts longer. What I don’t do is harvest my own yeast as some brewers do. I lack the space for that.
What has been your most ambitious or challenging homebrewing project to date?
Each year, my friend VelkyAl (www.fuggled.net) hosts an “International Homebrew” Project. A historical recipe is picked and participants try to recreate it as best they can and then write about the beer on the same day. It can be very hard hitting the numbers on these historical recipes, partly because of changes over time in malting but I would say also because a couple of hundred years ago, science was not as precise as today. Anyway, in 2011 we brewed a milk stout. This was a monster brew which took nearly 10 hours to complete. Involved making my own invert sugar#3 and my first use of lactose. The problem came at priming time. I put the lactose in the keg along with sugar for carbonation purposes. The lactose settled to the bottom of the keg and crusted over blocking the tubes etc. The beer was flat and did not come out of the keg at any more than a trickle. I transferred to another keg leaving a solid bottom of lactose and force carbonated the beer. It turned out beautiful but I learned a valuable lesson. The lactose should have been boiled in water before adding to the keg and even still, working with lactose can be problematic.
Do you have a favourite source for recipes?
My imagination. I don’t follow recipes, I make them myself. The only time I follow a recipe is for a historical brew for the International Homebrew Project. If I want to look for an idea for a recipe, I usually use beertools.com.
Any bad batches, or other brewing disasters to speak of?
Only bad batch was the first one which did not ferment. I did almost have a bad batch when I made a hoppy wheat beer. It came out very sour, almost lambic sour. I suspected an infection but I left it in the keg for a couple of weeks and the next time I tried it, the beer had balanced out and was one of the most refreshing beers I had ever made up to that point. There was some sourness but it was a feature rather than a flaw. I still don’t know if I got a secondary bacterial infection or not.
Do you have any big homebrewing projects planned for the future?
Nothing too big, I will enter some beers in upcoming homebrew competitions in May. I’m not 100% happy with them though. I moved to a small place in Dublin and I have no temperature control which can be bad for fermenting. It’s the price I pay for living 10 minutes from work now.
Any advice or tips you’d like to give other homebrewers?
If starting out, never blindly follow the instructions on a kit. They will have you believe the beer is finished fermenting before a week is up and that you can drink it a week later. Also, taking a cue from Douglas Adams – “Don’t Panic!”. Help is always available on National Homebrew Club, Beoir or Boards.ie.
Saruman, thanks for sharing your thoughts with the NHC today.
