brewing
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
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.
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.
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.
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: ??
I’m starting off the year with an experiment that I’m kind of excited about, new yeast Bootleg Biology got their hands on some Kakheti Wild Yeast. This is a rare strain used to produce wild ale in Georgia. In beer it creates delicate honey and white wine esters with a subtle white pepper profile. We’ll see how it works with omachi rice. I’m hoping that the earthiness of the rice with pair nicely with the yeast esters.
Read MorePressed 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.
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 😀 🍶🌸
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 😀
The Great American Beer Festival, or GABF, is always a crazy weekend here in Denver. Brewers and beer enthusiasts from all over the world pack downtown Denver and it’s breweies with thousands of people.
We were fortunate to meet Luis Enrique De La Reguera from Cerveza Cru Cru when he was in town about a month ago. He came by the brewery to learn about our sake and taste the beers at Grandma's. Luckily there was a new person working the bar that day and Matt was out thrift store shopping, so Marc got to show him around and chat with him. He was in town working with Epic Brewing on a new collaboration beer, a gose using crickets to add an earthy flavor and color to the beer. We're pretty excited to try it.
Well we also got to talking about sake and he mentioned that he knew the folks at Nami Sake, the only sake brewery in Mexico City...and I think the only one in Mexico. Of course we were very excited to learn more about it. Oh man were we excited to walk into the brewery this week and see this bottle just sitting on our desk.
Nami Junmai
Man it is good! If you can find it anywhere in the states or get lucky enough to have someone bring you back some, DO IT!!! You will not be disappointed. It is light, clean, and dry. It is a very refreshing drink. I am going to have to spend some time doing research on it to pull some of the more subtle flavor notes, but it is good.
So after a long process of internet searching, we finally got a hold of Luis (thank you Instagram) and got to meet up with him and his crew of brewery palls from Mexico and thank him properly for his great gift. We bounced around from Spangalang to OMF to Ratio and ended the night at Bierstadt Lagerhaus chatting about beer, sake, how to get Mexican beer better representation at GABF...all through his pretty good English and my really bad Spanish.
I can say that I've never been more excited to visit Mexico than I am now and I look forward to finding ways of getting their brews up north.
The only pic I got all night of the Mexican brewers. That's what you get for having too much fun.
