Stressing Yeast, Dough Balls, & Remote Brewing
Q. I use dry yeast for my hefeweizens. I hear one should stress the yeast for more phenolics. If I have an 11-gram packet, should I only use part of it or increase the fermentation temperature to boost aromatics?Edward O’Neill
Saint Louis, Missouri
A. This is a great question that is perfect for a short answer. Contrary to my love of marching to my own beat, I do believe in following supplier suggestions. I would start out by doing what the yeast manufacturer suggests for weizen beer. The best place to find this information is usually on the supplier’s website. If you don’t get the desired results, there are two paths to follow. One is to choose a different yeast strain and the second is to start adjusting your mashing, pitching, and fermentation set points. Because I am a simple brewer, I would start with Door #1 if I were unhappy with my fermentation results; change yeast strains.
But if you want Door #2, there is a whole lot of stuff to consider. Adding a ferulic acid rest (see my column in the July-August 2024 issue for more information), decreasing pitch rate, decreasing wort aeration, adjusting temperature (up and down both have their merits), and adjusting your grist bill are all options. The challenge with Door #2 is that you have just entered the hall of mirrors and it can take a very, very long time to figure out the best path forward.
And then there is Door #3 — which is following my homebrew hefeweizen recipe. The grain bill is made up of 50% German pale malted wheat, 48% Pilsner malt (brewer’s choice), and 2% light crystal malt for a touch of color. Wort gravity should be 1.050 (12.5 °Plato) and the bitterness should be ~12 IBU using a single addition of a German noble hop variety. Mash in at 122 °F (50 °C) and hold for 20 minutes, then heat to 154 °F (68 °C) and hold for 30–45 minutes. Collect wort, add hops at the start of the 60-minute boil, cool to 64–68 °F (18–20 °C), pitch SafAle W-68 per the pitch rate for your batch size (printed on pack), and ferment at 68 °F (20 °C).
Being this specific with brewing suggestions is something I rarely do, but I am really loving having a dried source of Weihenstephan 68 for my weizen brewing. This strain is the classic weizen yeast for those fruity and clove aromatics found in quintessential Bavarian wheat beers. Prost!
Q. I brew 10-gallon (38-L) batches, so there is quite a bit of grain used in every batch. I find that as I slowly dump the crushed grains into the mash tun while gently stirring, occasionally the grain falls in as a larger clump and yields dough balls. These can be difficult to break up without splashing/adding oxygen to the mash. I’ve got a couple of questions related to this: Is there a better way to control the grain addition to the mash tun? Would a homemade grist hydrator prevent the dough balls? Also, would a grist hydrator introduce hot-side aeration (HSA)? Is HSA even an issue on such a small scale?
Neal Steward
Springville, New York
A. Dough balls are an undeniable nuisance to brewers of all sizes because the malt in the dough ball is not wetted and does us brewers no good.
Unless you are stirring with unrestrained vigor, hot-side aeration is not something to lose sleep over. A few things that may help you out include using a mash paddle that is designed to help minimize these pesky clumps, smashing the dough ball into the mash paddle with a spoon, blasting the dough ball with targeted and judiciously applied jets of water from your favorite hose nozzle, or sequentially adding a bit of water followed by a bit of malt to spread your additions out. Some of these methods double as stress relief for cranky brewers!
Grist hydrators are common in commercial breweries of nearly all sizes, but they are not inexpensive to purchase or easy to build without access to stainless welding. Unless you are a gearhead looking for a project, I don’t suggest the grist hydrator route. Thanks for the question, Neal, and hope you solve your dough ball woes with one of the low-cost, manual methods.
Q. On a recent scuba diving trip to Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean, I had several great conversations with Wilco Landzaat, Master Dive Instructor at Captain Don’s Habitat, about beer, diving, and brewing. Wilco is one of a small handful of brewers on Bonaire and has brewed for many years at home and, for a shorter period, for Bonaire Blonde, a nano that made the decision to focus on selling imports because of high production costs. I asked Wilco what his biggest challenges of island brewing are. His top three challenges are sourcing and storing malt and hops, obtaining liquid yeast, and fermentation temperature control. Although brewing with kveik strains works for him, he likes using other yeast strains that produce better beer in a controlled environment. For those readers who share Wilco’s challenges, what follows is for you!
A. From time to time, I take space in my column to write about something timely and exciting to share. Wilco’s dilemma is a challenge for me because there is a limit to reducing production costs when living on a small island where everything is a challenge due to the cost of shipping, energy, and warm average temperatures. Even if you aren’t living on an island, I think my advice may be of benefit to a number of readers in remote or hot locations, or who wish to cut the costs of their hobby.
I will start with the low-hanging fruit: Yeast. Liquid yeast is expensive, not just for those living outside of countries like the U.S. where specialty labs produce a diverse and exciting selection of strains, but for all homebrewers. Yes, homebrewing is a hobby, and the goals of hobbyists are not the same as commercial brewers, but there is a limit to how much folks are willing to sink into 5-gallon (19-L) batches of beer. I am proudly frugal and like to spend less on raw materials for a batch than buying commercially produced beer. In today’s world, that is somewhere around $100 per 5-gallon (19-L) batch, depending on where you live. Beer taxes are all over the place and are something to factor into this metric. Bottom line is that liquid yeast can eat up a big chunk of the raw material total when express-shipped to Bonaire. In fact, the “cheapest” FedEx envelope rate to Bonaire is $80!
Here are a few things to reduce the cost of yeast. I am skipping the details of how because we have covered this in many previous issues of BYO. For starters, find a friend who can be your courier to bring you yeast, general purpose micro media, a few test tubes, and dried malt extract (DME) when traveling to your remote/expensive location. This is gonna cost something, like a nice lunch or a few beers, but will save you big time!
Once you have yeast in hand, prepare some media slants for later use. When you do brew, which should be soon after your prized shipment has been delivered, use a microbiologist’s “loop” to transfer yeast from your ”empty” liquid package onto the surface of the slants, allow the surface to grow for a few days, cover with sterile mineral oil, close the test tube with a sterile cotton plug, and chuck the tubes in your refrigerator for future use. The DME will be used to make your own liquid pitches for future brews. If you want to have several strains on hand, ask your friend to bring whatever you want for the future.
Another cost-saving suggestion is to have your courier bring you a wide selection of dried yeasts and take advantage of the long shelf life and simplicity of using dried yeast. When brewing in expensive parts of the globe, you need to choose your brewing battles wisely and dried yeast these days is a terrific option.
Let’s move onto hops, another ingredient that is hard to find in places with a small homebrewing scene and with few established breweries. Although the weight of hops used in most beers represents a small weight, shipping can add to the cost. Again, having a friend make hop deliveries is an option. If relying on visitors to bring hops is not practical, consider using hop extracts for bittering purposes, augmenting pellet additions with hop aroma extracts, using lupulin enriched hop products like Cryo® hops, and focusing on styles that don’t require large aroma additions as a few ways to cut back on how much “stuff” you either need to import or have stuffed in your friend’s suitcase or carry-on.
Another hop option is to replace hops with locally available herbs, spices, and fruits. This strategy can work whether brewing “hoppy” styles with bold and fruity noses or dry, crisp, and spicy styles. Looking for a big, juicy, mango and pineapple hop aroma in your hazy IPA? Instead of seeking out those fruit aromas from hops, go straight to the source and add mangos and pineapple juice to your beer! Remember that pineapple contains the foam-destroying enzyme, bromelain, and to either somehow cook fresh pineapple before use or to use canned pineapple. How about a nice witbier after a hot day on the dive boat? Those wonderful spicy and fruity notes can be found at the local market. The sky really is the limit when it comes to hop replacements, because hops replaced herbs and spices commonly used by brewers when hops were just “wicked weeds” crawling about in the wild.
Now that the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, it’s time to venture on to the real challenges: Malt and refrigeration. Seasonal temperature fluctuations and the access to ice sources during the winter months relegated beer brewing to latitudes greater than about 40º until the advent of commercial refrigeration allowed brewers to ferment, age, store, and ship beers in hotter climates. Once the temperature problem was solved, barley, primarily grown in latitudes greater than 50º, was shipped to warmer climates for malting to serve the growth of breweries around the globe.
For those readers not familiar with Wilco’s island-home, Bonaire is situated 12º north of the equator and 68º west of the prime meridian. That’s about 1,925 miles (3,100 km), as the flamingo flies, south of 40º north latitude. While I could expand the definition of beer to include seltzer, like the tax-collecting office simply known as the TTB has done, and conclude with clarity, I’m going to press onwards with beer-flavored beer.
Malt is bulky and, outside of water, is the main ingredient in beer, both in terms of weight and functionality (sorry hop heads!). Malt brings us enzymes, a ready source of starch that is easily converted into fermentable sugar through mashing, nature’s own wort filter media, color, foam-stabilizing proteins, body-building biopolymers, and those wonderful malt aromas and tastes. To brew relatively normal beer, there is no way around dealing with this bulky ingredient. But don’t lose hope!
Lower-ABV beer styles, styles traditionally containing ~20–50% unmalted adjuncts, dry malt extracts, and brewing enzymes are a few of the things that can be used to lighten the malt bill when freight costs simply become too great to bear. Start by taking a trip to the local market and seeking out ingredients that can be used as adjuncts. Maize (corn), rice, sugars, flaked cereals, and locally produced grains like millet may cost less than malt. Brewers often assume that adjuncts are cheap, but when compared to malted barley and malted wheat, they are often more expensive and not as easy to use.
Brewing enzymes, like alpha amylase powder and liquid amyloglucosidase/glucoamylase, are very handy because of their power per weight and because they permit higher adjunct usage rates. If locally available adjuncts are indeed less costly than malt, enzymes can be a big help for just about all ingredients outside of sugars. Keep in mind that higher adjunct ratios dilute wort nutrients from malt; if brewing with more than about 25% adjunct, nutrient additions will help your yeast with fermentation and will also keep certain off-flavors in check.
The last hurdle to brewing in Bonaire and other hot climates is temperature control. Island brewing has the additional challenge of expensive electricity. The two easy solutions are to ferment hot using kveik strains or to bite the bullet and ferment in a refrigerator. Those ideas work, but Wilco told me that he wants more variety than offered by kveik strains and would like to do something that does not always require a refrigerated space.
One thing about modern living in hot climates is that most places have air conditioning, and one of the more popular types of cooling uses so-called “mini split” units where the evaporator, or cold side of a cooling system, is installed in the wall of a building with the compressor and condenser, or hot side of a cooling system, is located somewhere outside. These small window-style units separate the hot and cold portions of a cooling system, like larger units that use air ducting, hence the name “mini split.” These systems are handy because homes often have multiple mini splits. A single room in a home can be closed off and kept at below-average temperatures during active fermentation. Once active fermentation is complete, the room temperature can be returned to normal, and the doors open to other rooms.
Another idea is to use evaporative cooling to remove heat from fermentation via a DIY swamp cooler. All that is needed is a wet towel (I have used paper towels for this) partially submerged in a tub of water, a fan, and a temperature controller. The water wicks up the towel, the fan evaporates water, and the water vapor carries heat away from the surface of the fermenter. This only works with single wall fermenters and works best when the relative humidity is less than about 60%, making this perfect for use in a conditioned space or in a dry climate.
There are other ways to economize on cooling, like pumping water from a reservoir placed in a refrigerated space to a stainless fermenter immersion cooling coil, but most of these methods do require some sort of refrigeration system. For those hardcore project folks looking for something that does not require much electricity, check out vapor absorption refrigeration systems. The main energy input
can be supplied by a fuel source, like propane, solar heat, or waste heat energy coming from other sources. This type of refrigeration is used in some recreational vehicles to cool refrigerators.
If you are like Wilco and brew in a hot, remote place, hopefully you’ve picked up some helpful tidbits here. And if you don’t have these challenges and are just checking this out, you should feel lucky!
