Embercraft - Take 2

So I skipped all the play by play for this one so far. If you’re interested, you can see what I wrote on Instagram.

I am very excited about this try though. I’ve never had a batch spontaneously ferment on me before, so this is a whole new experience for me. I’m not sure what caused it, but I think it may have been the candy cap mushrooms. I made a tea with them to use as the water base and some wild yeast may have survived and thrived.

The initial ferment was good but it started to slow down over the last few days so I added in some DAP and that has done the trick. The foam is pretty bubbly and thin compared to a sake yeast, but it is getting some good fermentation action. I’ll be interested to see what it is like when I pull a sample on Saturday.

The odor fluctuates between heavy smoke and smokey maple which is interesting. I’m pretty sure I’ll add some more candy caps to the secondary ferment, but I’m not totally sure I’ll add some of the bourbon barrel wood chips in. I don’t know if I want any more smoke/char flavor in the mix. We’ll see though.

Oops All Koji - Pt2

Last addition to the Oops All Koji #sake. It is already sweeter smelling than any sake I’ve made so far.

Am starting to believe that this may be the sake equivalent to pastry stouts. Wasn’t brave enough to replace the last water addition with sake as was suggested by a friend, but I may add some in towards the end of the ferment if I can find something that I think will work. #emeraldmastodon #homebrewsake p

Oops All Koji - The Beginning

I’ve talked about this for years and am now giving it a go. I’ve tried to get a hold of the sake the Nambu Bijin makes, but haven’t tried it yet.

So here we go with an all koji sake batch. I know they’re supposed to be sweet and a little viscous, but that is about it. I’m going to try a standard #7 yeast, but have considered a combo with a champagne yeast.

Let’s go science!

Smokey Sake

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. I’ve had a few smoked beers over the last year and even a “smokey” sake from Proper recently, so I thought I’d give it a go on my own.

The idea originally started as a project for the Colorado Sake Social Club. I thought we might smoke some koji and see what happened, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it without damaging the koji spores.

I then started chatting with a baker friend and a bbq friend to see if they had any good ideas on how to make it work. Then I started to see that folks on the internet smoke rice to eat all the time. So I started messing around with their recipes a bit, called up my bbq friend and gave it a go.

I’m very sure this will need a lot of tweaking going forward, but for the first batch here’s how I started it.

1. I smoked 570g of uncooked, unwashed Calrose 60% at 250F for about an hour and fifteen minutes. It did color the rice a bit and there is some smoke odor, but it is lighter than I would have expected.

2. I also smoked 1061g of the same rice at the same time and temp, but I washed it first and did not completely dry it before smoking. There was some discoloration, but not much smoke smell to the batch. I’m hoping the wet grains sucked a bit of the smoke inside.

I’m thinking next time, and possibly the rice I have left for the final addition, might work if I wash and soak the rice, then use the smoker for a cold smoke steam cook. It might impart more smoke to the mix. I’m hesitant to do this initially as I don’t want to overpower the rest of the flavors with just smoke.

To this mix I’m planning on using some wild yeast from The Black Project brewery. I’m not sure what this will do exactly but the description is as follows:

This culture is a rare mix of microbes sourced from the Denver brewery’s coolship and wild yeast living on Colorado-grown Riesling grape skins used for beer production.

Flavor/Aroma Profile: Clean saison initial; Funky, sour with aging; varies batch-to-batch

So this may end up being a totally undrinkable sake, but it will be something interesting for sure.

New Emerald Mastodon Sake

It has been a bit for sure, but I’m still working on things.

I recently started another batch of the Emerald Mastodon Spruce Tip sake. I’m taking inspiration from Ben Franklin’s Spruce Tip beer recipe and I made a tea of spruce tips and lemon. I’m trying to pull some of the lemongrassy flavors out of the spruce. I’m hoping that along with the Oslo yeast from Bootleg Biology to bring out some more citrus qualities in the sake.

Sticking with Calrose for the rice base until Isabel Farms can take over for MN Rice in the homebrew world. I am looking forward to having access to some different rices though.

I also kept the brew at about 75-80F for the whole starter and just dropped the temp to 65F yesterday. I’m hoping the high temp will push the Olso to perform better. I’ll try and get it down to 55F next week, but I don’t think I’ll let it go much colder.

Rice: Calrose

Yeast: Oslo Norwegian Farmhouse

Additions: Rocky Mountain Spruce Tips, Whole Lemon

ABV: ??

Wind of Seven stars

This will be the last update on this project for a while…not that my updates were plentiful as of late. I’ve taken a brewing position helping Colorado Sake out with their Social Club special releases. It will be pretty exciting. We’ll be trying out some new yeasts, brewing techniques, chemistry experiments, and local flavors. I’m really looking forward to the next few months. If you’re interested in getting any of the releases, you can join up here.

As for this batch, it turned out quite well. The last batch I did with only Kakheti yeast soured in the very end, and I lost most of it while pasteurizing, so I decided to try again. This time I blended the Kakheti with sake yeast ant it turned out really well. I used about a 70/30 split of Yamada and Omachi and lightly filtered it. It has a nice notes of melon and honey with a little green apple and some soft butter on the finish. I’m really proud of this one. It turned out better than I expected. I’m looking forward to trying the Kakheti yeast again in the future if I can obtain more.

Cave of the WInds pt 2 cont.

Pressed the latest batch yesterday with the help of a new friend. This was probably the best quickest pressing I’ve done in a long while. It also spurred an interest in exploring different ways to brew and press more efficiently. I may try a brew-in-bag approach for the next batch, just to see how that works. I have to believe it has been tried before somewhere by someone and that there is a reason you don’t do it that way currently.

I’ll let this batch sit with the cherry blossoms for another day or two and let the sediment settle, then straight into the bottle.

I’m excited to taste it in a week or so. It kept a good peach/floral nose and has some good acidity to it.

Cave of the Winds - Take 2

Starting a new batch of #sake this evening. Reworking one of my first experiments, #cherryblossom tea sake. I’m going to combine pickled, salted cherry blossoms with the mystery yeast I picked up last year (which has a strong peach nose). If all goes well, it should produce a savory, fruity sake. We’ll see how it goes 😀 🍶🌸

2021 & Things

Well I did a pretty bad job of keeping up with the notes for this project…I’ll try and do better this year.

The final batch of the year, Frozen Dead Guy, turned out ok. I didn’t get as much spruce out of it as I would have liked, but it may have been that the spruce tips were older than I would have liked. I’ll try again with some fresher ones.

So it’s the new year and I’m thinking about new ideas to try. I’m starting off with an old idea again, the cherry blossom tea sake. It uses salted, pickled cherry blossoms. It gives the sake a definite savory flavor. It is a good cold weather brew for sure. Not much cherry flavor in the mix, but I’m looking to play with the Kaze no Mori yeast I procured and see if it adds more of that fruit quality.

I’m also going to try and do the squid jerky bottle and cups sometime this year. We got a convection oven that has a dehydrator function. The idea had always intrigued me.

I “dry hopped” the Frozen Dead Guy batch while pressing. It didn’t do much, but it was a neat idea 😀

Frozen Dead Guy

Started a new batch of #sake a couple of weeks ago, pressed today and forgot to post some pics.
I thought I’d try a new take on the spruce tip sake I made last year. This time I took inspiration from Colorado’s frozen dead guy, Grandpa Bredo, and put some Norwegian twist on it. I used a combo of #kveik and number 901 yeasts, Rocky Mountain spruce tips and juniper berries in the rice steaming, water from Twin Springs in Manitou Springs,, and some local aspen wood staves that I lightly toasted.

So far it is going really well so far. it smells a lot sweeter than I expected and I’ll add in a tea bag of spruce tips and juniper berries in a bit.
🍶🇳🇴🏔💀🌲

Black is Beautiful pt 8

Well it was a good idea that needs a lot of work. There is a lot of flavor going on and it is an interesting failure. I’ll be interested in seeing how it matures with aging.

Was hoping to get these out by #sakeday but the labels weren’t done. So here they are ready to go. 1. Old Mose single pasteurized and filtered 2. DB not pasteurized and lightly filtered 3.SCFD single pasteurized and heavy squid ink test batch.

Black is Beautiful pt 7

So the squid ink isn’t working like I thought. I’m really wondering how much carbon is in squid ink, as it seems to have clarified the liquid and bonded to the solids coloring them.

As is it has a light brine with a pineapple/guava/green apple. As it warms up though, it gets saltier and more floral.

Black is Beautiful pt 6

#science is hard! So the color isn’t anywhere near dark enough after pressing so looks like squid ink might have to come off the bench for the last few minutes in the game. I also prepped some #aspen staves with a little toasting to get some flavor and color. I’m testing a small bit of the #sake with the squid ink to see what happens before I commit to the whole thing as well. Success or failure, this was a fun experiment. #sakeadventure #homebrew 🍶🦑🍶✊🏿

Not quite the black I am looking for

Wood before

Wood after

Sake kasu with a lovely lavender color

Sake with squid ink test

Black is Beautiful pt5

So I got curious about the flavor of the #sake after the surprising smell and did a little taste test with the crew. 2-1 in favor of the current flavor. The two picked up some strawberry and “summer” wine flavors. The one thought it was on the sour side, like the wine had started to vinegar. A mixed bag, but interesting. So I pulled the red rice yeast, gin barrel chips, and ginger out as a precaution. No need to push those flavors to an undesirable place. I also started testing the #squidink as a backup to see what this particular ink tastes like. A little certainly goes a long way 🦑 #homebrew

The tasters

Red rice yeast, gin barrel chips, and a piece of ginger

The squid ink. 1 tsp in 3 cups of water

Black is Beautiful pt4

Added a few color elements to the brew - some red rice yeast, gin barrel chips, and a piece of ginger. It doesn’t show so well in the pic, but it is a nice rose pink hue. It also has an incredible summer white/rosé nose. It is progressing nicely and might be just about ready for pressing.

Black is Beautiful pt3

Well all the rice additions are in and this light lavender #sake is on its way. Gonna wait a few more days before adding any other color change elements. It is letting off a lovely champagne and berries nose which is a nice surprise.

Black is Beautiful pt 2

So I left the pea flower tea to steep overnight and the lovely pea fragrance dissipated and the flavor disappeared as well, leaving me with a dark blue, generic tea flavored liquid. As a bonus when pea flower tea comes in contact with an acid it turns a vibrant purple. I feel like this is a good start to the process.

Black is Beautiful

The labeling for the Black Is Beautiful Stout project

Earlier this year Weathered Souls initiated an idea, Black is Beautiful, to get breweries across the US to make stouts to support restorative justice projects. This made me think that other liquor could do this as well.

A few years back when I first thought of the idea for Old Mose, I wanted it to be black in color and I just couldn’t get it to go much past a blood red (which also works). So I’m trying out a new plan to get it there. So my Black Is Beautiful idea is the black sake. It will be a combo of a few things I’ve experienced and worked with over the last few years. The goals are: something that tastes good and only uses natural coloring.

For this batch I’ll be making a pretty standard ginjo sake using a sandan shikomi method to try and get some good flavor from the sake before adding in all the extra ingredients…which will be: pea flower tea to get a nice blue base, red rice yeast to bring in some earthiness and a good red color, some gin barrel wood chips for color and some botanicals, and if needed to take it that extra mile some squid ink powder. I’m hoping that the powdered version has less brine and more umami to it.

With all that said, this could go very, very wrong. There are quite a few really powerful earthy flavors in the mix that could overpower a lot of things very easily. So I think secret to making it work will be the timed addition of those extra components. Too much of anything will really kill it.

So this should be fun 😀

The pea flower tea at work

The extras waiting in the wings

Fun with science

One of my favorite things about fermentation is all the crazy things that happen when you change something or when you let things happen on their own.

The most recent batch was a wild ride of learning about yeast and how it functions in brewing. The yeast was riding a great sweet wave for a long time, then after pressing it took a sharp turn to the dry side.

Not what was expected, but an opportunity to try something out. I bought a nitro growler for my wife to make cold brew at home and I wanted to try nitro sake. So I took the batch, that wasn’t quite right, and pumped it full of nitrogen. It started off with a great pear nose and flavor on the front end and a mild grapefruit finish…and a lot dryer that’s I’d like it to be. After pumping the nitrogen in and letting it sit for a day it mellowed out the grapefruit and really pumped up the pear. It smoothed out the mouthfeel and gave it some effervescence.

It was a fun experiment. Something I’ll definitely play with again.