Kvieking Bishop Brennan up the arse

I recently bought a packet of Omega Yeast’s Hornindal Kviek. Having read up on many of Lars Marius’ articles on Kviek I managed to meet him in person at the South East London & Kent Craft Homebrewing competition where he was doing a talk on the subject. Coming away with a bit more of an idea of how to use it, plus having bagged a free sample of the Lithuanian Simonaitis yeast from Lars I decided to shun the traditional route and try to highlight the fruity aspects of the yeast in a hoppy Pale (although I would love to have an oven, and oven gloves big enough, to bake the mash in to make some Keptinis).

I love the mystery surrounding the methods of making traditional Kviek beers. Why do you ferment so high? Answer: that’s how it has always been done.

I kept it simple with a SMaSH of Pilsner and El Dorado.

So 5kg pilsner, 5g El Dorado at 60 mins and 20g at 15 Mins in a 10L batch.

I cooled to 40oC and split into two adding the Hornindal in one and the Simonaitis in another.  Top tip from Wilder Wald on Twitter was to underpitch the Hornindal to bring out the fruit salad-esque flavours. Cheers!

They have started ripping through it quite quickly, I plan to dry hop after 2 days with some more El Dorado and then bottle at the end of the week.

Other goings on

Had a bit of a disaster yesterday when one of my 20L glass demijohns make a very loud cracking noise. Thankfully nothing in it and it is now in the bin. I was about to blend my Roeselare golden sour with the same beer that had been sitting in my herb liquor barrel into it. Turns out a 10l demijohn was a better fit anyway (evaporation much) I blended and added some orange blossom and sour orange peel.

My Petit Prince clone is a bit boring, I dry-hopped with Galaxy and it’s still boring. I’ve now added some elderflower to it.

My Funky Rye is stuck at 1.014 and has been for a number of months. I might try to blend it with something, it’ll be a shame to dump it as it has a lovely rich dark fruit flavour.

My apricot Omega All the Bretts beer has been bottled and is carbonated. It’s a lot more sour than I was expecting, pretty sure I only added 3% acid malt to the mash. The ph is at 3.4 which is too sour for my liking but other people seem to like it.

I also made a batch of bretted tripel as we love De Halve Maan’s Straffe Hendrik Wild and because everyone needs 20l of bretted tripel in their house.

I have also bottled a bretted version of my cubeb saison, now we wait.

 

 

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