It's been a while since we've brewed with grain, in part because the kitchen in our apartment makes brew day into a real pain in the ass in about six different ways. But I've been meaning to brew a sahti-inspired braggot for quite a while now, so I've put some juniper berries and honey into a basic IPA-with-a-little-rye-malt recipe. I also intended this brew to be a test of procedures intended to work around having a crappy stove—performing a partial-volume boil with increased hop usage, using a longer boil time—but the mash and cooling procedure was irregular enough that I don't want to draw any conclusions from it.

BeerXML for this recipe, generated by BrewTarget.

This is very loosely inspired by the sahti style, so I'm calling it Sahtish until a better name becomes apparent.

Ingredients

  • Denver tap water treated with a Campden tablet: 5 gallons for the initial boil, plus somewhere under 2 gallons for post-boil honey must addition; total fermentation volume of 4.5 gallons.
  • 11.5 lb. German Pilsner (2 Row) malt
  • 1 lb. Colorado Rye malt
  • 6 lb. Kirkland clover honey, post-boil addition
  • 2 oz. Valley Brewers Willamette hops (estimated 2.3% alpha acids after two years in freezer) at 90 min.
  • 1 oz. Valley Brewers Cascade hops (estimated 3.25% A.A. after two years in freezer) at 88 min.
  • 1 oz. Hop Union Mount Hood hops (estimated 2.7% A.A. after two years in freezer) at 87 min.
  • 1 oz. HomeBrewStuff Mount Hood hops (5.0% A.A.) at 87 min.
  • 3 oz. BSG Azacca hops (10.3% A.A.) at 60 min.
  • 3 oz. Colorado Hop Company Crystal hops (4.5% A.A.) at 20 min.
  • ⅓ cup juniper berries at 12 min.
  • 1 vial Inland Island INIS-441 Norwegian Farmhouse ale yeast.
  • 9 oz. Kirkland clover honey, added on 10 Sept.
  • 2 oz. BSG Nelson Sauvin hops (11.9% AA) and ⅓ c. (that's 1.5 oz.) dried juniper berries, cracked; both added in a hop bag on 7 October 2018.
  • ⅗ c. avocado honey from Bennett's Honey Farm, dissolved in a cup and a half of microwave-heated beer and mixed in as priming sugar at bottling.

Procedure

Mashed in to 156℉, pouring five gallons of water over the grain-filled brew bag in the BrewBuilt kettle. Attempted to mash for an hour, keeping the temperature at 156℉, but didn't manage to keep the temperature steady: there was too much heat on the bottom, so it rose to 178℉ over the first twenty minutes. Killed the heat, stirred vigorously, left the lid partially off the kettle, and allowed the temperature to fall back to 155℉ over the next forty minutes. The post-mash gravity of the remaining four gallons of wort was 1.078, but what this mash procedure did to the fermentability of the wort, I don't know. I guess we'll find out.

Boiled for ninety minutes, adding hops as indicated above, and tossing in a third of a cup of juniper berries with a bit over ten minutes to go. At flame-out, tried to use the new plate-style counterflow chiller, but it turns out to be impossible to do so with the faucet in our crappy kitchen sink; since we had not sanitized the immersion chiller in the boil, I simply poured the wort into a fermentation bucket over two gallons of honey must containing 6 pounds of clover honey, then covered the bucket and let it cool in a cold-water bath in the sink for several hours. This means, of course, that we never did get a good cold break, and that a lot of leftover hop material got into the fermenting vessel; I'll need to rack this at least one additional time to help it clarify. And I guess I can forget about clarity improvements. Sigh. I sure will be glad when I'm not brewing in this kitchen any more.

When the temperature had come down into an acceptable range, pitched the yeast and sealed the bucket lid with an airlock in it.

Brew day: 26 August 2018
Predicted original gravity: 1.105
Measured original gravity: 1.100 (but using an O.G. of 1.0976 for ABV calculations to account for the post-measurement honey must addition)
Estimated IBUs: 110.9
Predicted final gravity: 1.0278
Predicted ABV: 10.8%
Bottling day : 13 October 2018
Actual final gravity: 1.017
Actual ABV: about 11%

Yield:

  • 9 x 500mL beer bottles
  • 8 x 22 oz beer bottles
  • 2 x 12 oz beer bottles
  • 2 x 750mL beer bottles
  • approx. 6 oz leftover braggot in hydrometer tube

Total yield: approx. 409 fl. oz., or nearly 3.2 gallons.

Notes and observations

  • 2018-09-10: Racked the braggot into a new bucket, pouring the stream over a large strainer; once that had been exhausted, poured the remaining hop trub over the strainer, almost certainly oxygenating the bejeezus out of it. Washed and re-sanitized the original bucket, then racked the braggot back into it. Added some clover honey to encourage a bit more oxygen production. The procedure was also not particularly sanitary; let's hope that there's a high-enough ABV to protect the booze from this particular set of mistakes.
  • 2018-10-07T18:15: Added two ounces of hops and an ounce and a half of cracked dried juniper berries in a hop bag, intending to leave them in for five to seven days. Gravity is currently 1.012—that puts the current ABV around 11% to 12%.
  • 2018-10-13: Bottled, yielding about 3.2 gallons of delicious clear junipery IPA-style sahtish braggot at about 11% ABV.