Brief recap: I had brewed a “British Golden Ale” called Shiny Lil Buddy as my fourth beer, a “Strong Fruited Lager” also known as the Woolies Two Can Pass Mash as my third beer, had also made Munton’s Sour Glass Raspberry Sour for Christmas as my fifth beer, and in the last blog post talked about how I made a Lotus hopped IPA to test how making my own creations would be. The Shiny Lil’ Buddy and Lotus IPA have informed me about how I need to change my brewing moving forward and I now enter another phase of my Brewer’s Thesis.

Expert Critical Appraisal: Shiny Lil’ Buddy and Peach Belly

So after talking to Brett from The Brewer’s Collective in Bendigo, he recommended I come to one of the Bendigo and District (BAD) Homebrewing club meetings and at the first meeting of the year they had a “kit and kilo” challenge which means using a malt extract kit along with a kilogram of fermentables, flavour enhancers and/or hops to make any style of beer. While I did want to brew and bring my idea of the Bubble-O-Bill beer (more on that later), my home stock was filled with the British Golden Ale, Strong Fruited Lager, Raspberry Sour, and the bottle conditioning Lotus Hopped IPA. Not wanting to miss out on the social event, Shiny Lil Buddy did qualify as being a kit and kilo so I thought I might show up with my modified version of the first beer I ever made. And being critiqued by people who have home brewed for years and with much better equipment did teach me a lot.

At the event, someone did the challenge using the Munton’s Peach To Their Own but made it exactly as the instructions said to, including using the kit yeast and stock 30g of Amarillo hops. While mine was made in the Cooper’s fermenter (not featuring an airlock), experienced temperature fluctuations, and had M66 Hophead yeast, the other guys was made in a stainless steel fermenter with airlock, temperature control, pressure transferred to keg, and then bottled from the keg for optimal freshness. And his beer was sublime! The clarity was amazing, the peach and fresh hoppiness was definitely expressed better, and the head wasn’t a dense foamy mess. The “perfect version” of Peach Belly went on to get third place at the challenge (with the top two being completely from scratch recipes using fresh fruit and steeping grains) so it shows that refining my technique will produce better beers which I anticipated in Part 6.

Shiny Lil’ Buddy was show mercy since it was my first appearance in the group and they found out it was only my fourth beer “that didn’t make them violently ill at the event or the next day” since apparently some of the judges made some awful batches during their first brews. I was praised for the beer resembling the style intended (even though Brewfather classified it for me), the thin white head being pleasant, and the body flavours being balanced. However the critical appraisal caught me on two main things that I knew deep down: not enough hop flavour and finished product refinement. When I told them what hops I added to the British Golden, they were a bit disappointed that none of the flavours really came across. With that assessment, I showed one of the judges my Brewfather recipe and they told me that I barely hopped it for the volume, and I have permission to use more hops. Luckily I had put in a lot more dry hops for the Lotus IPA, however once I take that beer in for a professional review it will be interesting to see if I am closer to being better. The other group of issues revolved around the finished beer product which was “hazy for a golden ale”, “some odd oxidation like taste” and “odd floaties” in one of the four bottles I served. Again, with the Lotus IPA I tried to crack down on anti-oxidation measures such as tighter bubbler airlock seal and steel capping the glass bottles tightly rather than the weaker PET bottles; and for beer clarity and floaties I used finings to remove unwanted haze and hop matter. Final score was on average 31/50, which is close to what my Untapped score is from my wife and I on tasting the same beer. Scott from Hop Supply didn’t mind Shiny Lil Buddy and found he could taste the orange/citrus flavours that Kviek imparts from than the hop flavours I mentioned I used. Strangely he preferred the Strong Fruited Lager which will also be brought to the next homebrew meeting to determine if I actually did the recipe justice?

Project Exige, Did It Work?

Absolutely it did and I think this is the happiest I have been with a beer in terms of taste, appearance, and how the brewing experience turned out in the end. While there have been mixed opinions as to “is it a true IPA”, I think I nailed my personal objectives with making a orange creamsicle IPA.

The greatest improvement is the clarity. By using a better airlock system along with dropping in the finings, the final bottle conditioned beer is much clearer without any haziness or hop matter, the head is a bit thick at times but it is pure white, and the effervescence of it in the glass is perfect. It honestly looks like a commercially made product from each of the bottles I have poured it from. While I was frustrated at the time of having to put the finings in 24 hours before bottling and my sweaty, nervous bottling run of some caps failing due to uneven pressure, in the end I haven’t had a dud bottle. But considering how I started out and the expectations I had for this beer, I think retrospectively it had to be the best quality beer I have made.

Taste has split some of the camps in terms of “is this really an IPA?” I gave some bottles to some of my bike mechanics with one of them being a purist IPA drinker who prioritises resin, pine and alpha-acid like hoppiness to his beers, while one of the others just likes an easy drinking beverage as long as it doesn’t give him a massive hang over. The purist said it wasn’t his cup of tea, and prefers much higher hopped IPAs like I would find with West Coast styles or double IPAs, but the quality of the beer was appreciated. The other mechanic said they were balanced and didn’t strip the enamel off his teeth, so he happily drank the other beers the first didn’t. Scott and the homebrew club are yet to taste and give thoughts.

For myself and my wife, I am quite happy with how it tastes since it does have slightly hoppy notes but definitely capitalises on orange, vanilla, citrus, and creamy tasting notes along with being a smooth palate overall. It’s not over or under-carbonated, and it doesn’t have the funky taste I previously didn’t realise in my first two beers. Leaving it for 3 weeks made it okay, but the longer it has bottle conditioned the more smooth and well rounded the entire flavour experience is. Is it a good Lotus hopped beer? I would like to think so. Is it a good IPA? Probably not, it does lack some of the high hop flavours and resin tastes I would expect in an IPA, not sure what the official classification would be, but “ice cream IPA” does seem to fit reasonably well. My wife is not sure how she feels about this beer when compared to the peach IPA and raspberry sour, but then again she has been drinking more sours like Bridge Road’s Pass-O-Guava and 3 Raven’s Quandong Acid Sour which are expectational.

So I hope by taking this Lotus IPA, the strong fruited lager and my other side project the Mangrove Jack’s Pina CoLager to the homebrew club; any criticism about how my skills and techniques have improved in the last 2 months will be noted. But after leaving the last meeting, a few of the guys heard from Brett why I wanted to join the club and what I intended on submitting for the competition. For Beer 8, the Bubble-O-Bill beer is being piloted!

Howdy Boy! It’s Brown Ale Time!

So this is version 1 of what I hope to be a “stunt” beer of my own creation. I’m not saying this will be the definitive version of my Bubble-O-Bill beer, but with some resources I got for Christmas along with some advice from the meeting, I have gone ahead with making one of my goal brews.

Editor’s Aside: “Stunt Beers” are what my wife and I consider to be over flavoured beers which verge outside of traditional flavour stylings and go for more like for like tastes. These include the Woody and Cola Brown Ale from Bendigo on the Hop 2017, Wayward’s Sour Ades, Toobarac’s Give Me S’Mores brown ale, and Bridge Road’s Raspberry Cheesecake stout from Bendigo on the Hop 2018. Since the aim is to convert a brown ale into something that tastes like a Bubble-O-Bill, it will be more of a stunt beer than say Big Shed Brewing’s Golden Stout Time since that Golden Gaytime icecream stout still resembles a stout across the flavour profile.

This first version utilises Mangrove Jack’s products, being the Tyneside Brown Ale malt extract tin, their liquid malt extract, and the standard premium ale yeast (all official Mangrove Jack products which can be procured from the vouchers in the fermenter starter kit that Shiny Lil’ Buddy was made from), but also 500 grams of lactose, 500 grams of frozen strawberries, and bubblegum essence I made myself. So what is the reasoning and science of how I chucked all these things into the fermenter?

Tyneside Brown Ale is regarded as a beautifully chocolate/toffee flavoured brown ale kit that works well stock standard with the ingredients that Mangrove Jack’s sells. Sandhurst Homebrew Supplies said if I went with the standard recipe it makes a balanced chocolate/toffee brown ale that most would be happy if it came out of a can or tap from a commercial brewer. When I asked how creamy and ice cream like it would be, they said it isn’t that creamy and full, so that’s when I stepped in with the lactose.

As discussed in previous posts, lactose is a complex disaccharide which needs special enzymes to help break it into galactose and glucose. But since yeasts don’t have that ability, in a fermenter it will remain in suspension and instead give the beer more body, a creamy head and ultimately contribute to a “ice cream like” taste. I didn’t want to overpower the other flavours with lactose, so 500g seemed safe for a 21L batch. Once Mike was interested about why I was adding lactose, the conversation then turned to giving it a strawberry note.

“So you’re trying to make a Neapolitan ice cream beer?” That’s the query/comment I got when asking Brett and Mike about creating this beer and honestly it’s not too far from the truth. For the sake of the experiment, I will rack off a few of the bottles without bubblegum essence to see if I can make a Neapolitan brown ale/stout that could be transformed further with cherry essence or marshmallow to make a fudge sundae or wagon wheel desert beer. But when both professionals understood my brief, the discussion turned to do I add flavour by essence, frozen strawberries or use hops like Belma? First dismissal was using hops since while some essential oils can transfer into the finished product and give it a slightly fruity/beer flavour, the chances of the alpha acids interacting with the lactose and toffee flavours could be poor taste. Strawberry essence is practical where I would want that artificial strawberry flavour that the real ice cream does give while also being able to tune the flavour on bottling day, but adding frozen or pureed strawberries gives it more fermentable sugars to impact a sweeter flavour and the strawberry flavour can be more muted to coincide with the brown ale’s body. In the end, since this is version 1 I went with frozen strawberries since 500g in a 21L batch is well under the amount needed for “strong strawberry flavours” outlined in the Homebrewer’s Guide online. If I really wanted to crank the strawberry flavouring, I would need at least 60g of strawberries per litre of wort to make that much of an impact. So then the final question arose, what about the bubblegum nose?

“Does the bubblegum nose make the ice cream complete or is it a treat at the end?” Huh, philosophical questions of Australian ice cream huh? If we say it is just a treat at the end, then racking off some of the beer before adding the bubblegum essence means that is the true form of the Bubble-O-Bill beer. But what if we need to have that bubblegum flavour lingering in the brew to distinguish it as the Bubble-O-Bill? Then getting the bubblegum flavour into the beer was another point of discussion. Once again there is the options of adding an essence or adding in real bubblegum into the brew to ferment, but Brett advised me the essence would be the best way since I can tweak the flavour intensity as I see fit, and if I added anything bubblegum flavoured either traditional flavoured gum or a lolly that has that flavour, ultimately the fermentation might go wrong with all the preservatives and gum material in it. So I made an essence using bubblegum flavoured chew lollies from Life Savers in vodka, letting it soak for weeks, filtering the product, and then letting it infuse again with more lollies in order to get a syrup that can be added to the final beer.

The Bubble-O-Bill brown ale is still fermenting as of mid-March, so racking will happen soon with the two batches going head to head in April/May. I will be using finings in the beer to remove some of the haze that fermenting fruit can sometimes create, so hopefully what eventuates is something palatable and will give me a mark to continue on with this concept. Speaking of which, it seems like with all research you eventually work for a publication? I’m pretty happy to be enjoying this hobby for the sake of researching for someone.

Brick Road Testing and Publication

So initially I reached out to Brick Road product team in order to ask that they add their products to Brewfather so when I make my house beers like my Pacific Ale and Hazy IPA, I can plug in their exact products and get the original and final gravities I need, along with better styling the beers towards certain guideline expectations. John got in contact with me regarding what I had already done with the Lotus IPA, what I was intending on brewing with the Pacific Ale kit, and I am that impressed by the company’s enthusiasm to provide quality products to brewers like myself that moving forward I will try to base my recipes off their core range.

https://share.brewfather.app/kcfqGdnfz8wVwi

What this means is that after making my two Munton’s kits of Peach To Their Own and One in a Melon watermelon sour, my batches will comprise of Brick Road products to try and test their malt extract products and push them to become beers that I want. I will try to make a fruit salad IPA like Bright Brewery’s Fruit Salad American IPA that they had at Bendigo on the Hop in 2023, Bubble-O-Bill version 2 will be a stout or dark ale, and I am aiming towards brewing in smaller batches to reduce my turn over between brews and overall try to just make 10L batches that myself and wife want to drink in steady moderation.

Am I being sponsored? No, just like my bike review work I was never paid to review certain bikes but at the same time I always pushed boundaries and tried things with brands that I aligned with such as Trek and Surly. This is more or less the same thing where I want to align myself with someone that is trying to make an impact in the homebrewing community and present themselves as a welcoming option in Australia alongside Coopers and Mangrove Jacks. Coopers and Mangrove Jacks are great products (they are the two fermenters I started with after all), but I really am excited to make recipes and use Brick Road products to make the beers I dream of like the Necturine XPA, Fruit Salad IPA or Boozy Fruit clone NEIPA.

I think this is the most excited I have been about a hobby since mountain biking. I love mountain biking but at some point I won’t be reviewing any more new bikes and as much as I try to travel to ride new trails for myself, making Go-Pro guides as an amateur will dry up once I reach my skill ceiling and need to be careful as I head more towards middle age. Homebrewing will not be the last hobby I take on as I approach middle age, but at some point I need to do something that brings me joy along with being a husband and working in healthcare after the rough few years we had. I love reading about the biology and chemistry that goes into brewing, the experimentation like cooking except a world that I can actually grasp, and how a few of my work and riding friends are encouraging me to enjoy this hobby safely.

So next part of the Brewer’s Thesis will have final results from Project Exige, a short word on the Pina CoLager, results on Howdy Boy (the Bubble-O-Bill brown ale) and maybe some conclusions and findings that will guide the next phase of my research? Keep safe and stay awesome!