El Corte Ingles, the big Spanish department store, has an excellent range of bottled beers and so, last week, we  spent a night on our terrace in Malaga tasting a few and watching the world go by.

As Mahou is one of our least favourite beers, we hadn’t bothered with their Negra, assuming it would be overly sweet and fizzy. However, as Beer Nut had tried it and liked it, we gave it a go. It’s got a promising aroma of coffee and pours with a decent head. It’s also got a good stout-like body which was a pleasant surprise. It tastes pleasant enough, not particularly challenging but a nice surprise from the Madrid brewery.

All the Spanish breweries seem to be pushing premium and reserve brands at the moment and Selecta is San Miguel’s effort. I thought that The only real flavour was alcohol – at 6.2% it didn’t seem worth the units. However, Bailey liked it, detecting toffee and fruity flavours. All in all, a bit like a festbier from a dull regional german brewery.

We had more hopes from two offerings from the Zaragozana brewery, who produce Ambar.  Export is 7%, and the label bangs on about multiple types of malt and ‘double fermentation’. It’s OK, with a malty biscuit flavour and comforting goopy body, but there’s not a lot else going on. It’s like a dull Belgian. Better than the San Miguel effort but again I require a bit more flavour from a 7% beer.  Maybe a bit of a tramps’ brew, all told?

Their Ceasar Augusta* is a different story, though, and a runaway success. It’s a bottle-conditioned wheat beer in the Belgian style and tastes like a maltier, slightly sweeter version of hoegaarden. We’ve been saying for a while that Belgian wit would be a good style for Spanish breweries to experiment with — it goes with the food, can be drunk cold and there’s an obvious link to Spanish flavours in the use of orange peel — and Zaragozana have done really well with this one.

*Zaragoza is a corruption of “Caesar Augusta”, the original Roman name of the settlement. There are references to the Romans all over the bottle including Latin labelling. Classy.

Boak

Our wit sitting in the sun

When we wrote about our blackberry beer a week or so back, we mentioned that we made it using a witbier base. We thought we’d also share how we made the witbier.

We owe most of the recipe to Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing — a truly inspirational homebrewing book, although not really one for beginners as it is rather erratically laid out at times. But we’re constantly using it for new ideas and it has been worth every penny.

We’ve had a couple of goes at this, refining the second recipe to make a beer that’s a little tarter and more to our tastes. We’re extremely pleased with the final result, which as you can see from the picture looks reasonably authentic. It’s very refreshing and drinkable, and wonderfully weak too — our second version was a mere 3.5% (more by accident than design).

You will need:

• 6lb of pilsner malt (you can use pale ale, but it will come out golden rather than yellow-white)
• 3lb unmalted wheat (we used reddish-brown wheat flakes from a hippy shop, ground into smaller lumps)
• 1 lb oats
• Wyeast 3944 (Belgian Wit) — you’ll need to start this a couple of days before. We do think it’s worth using this, as it’s a key contributor to that wit flavour. We’ve used it in other, totally different beers, and the underlying yeast flavour still comes through.

Hops & spices schedule

• 60 minutes: Saaz (2.7% AAU), 1.6oz
• 20 minutes: Saaz 1oz
• 5 minutes: Saaz 1oz, plus 25g orange peel, 10g lemon peel (both from unwaxed fruit), 0.5oz crushed coriander seeds and 7g chamomile flowers (from hippy shop).

(Basically, use a whole 100g foil pack of weak but noble hops. I’ve written before about my constant mixing of metric and imperial measures.)

Water and other equipment for the adjunct mash:

This procedure calls for an adjunct mash, which is not too much hassle providing you have a huge saucepan and the means to heat it at the same time as keeping a normal mash going. Your saucepan (or alternative vessel) needs to be big enough to cope with 3lb of wheat malt, 2lb of pilsner malt, 1lb of oats and 8.5 litres of water — probably about 15 litres capacity in total to avoid spillages — and you need to be able to heat it in stages.

You also need 3.5litres of water for the rest of the mash, and a further 20 litres for sparging. We filtered the water but didn’t treat it in any other way.

Target volume and gravity:

This should make 19-20 litres. Our original gravity the first time we made this was 1046, whereas we only got 1041 the second time. Final gravity in both cases was 1015. Please bear in mind that we are generally pretty inefficient, and only hit around 70% on normal brews, so you’re likely to end up with something stronger.

Instructions

1. Heat up the mash water (3.5l + 8.5l = 12l) to 60 deg C, then split as follows:
   • for the “main mash” combine 4lb of pilsener malt and 3.5litres of water. Your mash temperature target is 50 deg C — get it there and leave it
   • Put the remaining water with the remaining grain into your adjunct mash vessel. Target here is also 50 degrees. Keep it there for 15 minutes.
2. Raise the adjunct mash to 65 degrees, and hold it for 15 minutes.
3. Then boil it for 15 minutes.
4. You then bring both parts of the mash together. Your target temperature is about 68 degrees (i.e. a hot mash). NB, you will not need to add all of the boiled mash, as this will make the mash temperature way too high.
5. Mash for 45 minutes, then add the rest of your boiled mash and “mash out” at 75 degrees for about 15-20 minutes.
6. The amount of sparge water specified should give you a pre-boil volume of around 23 litres.
7. 1 hour boil, with hop / spice additions as specified above. Don’t add any Irish moss or other finings, as you want the final product to be a bit hazy.
8. Primary fermentation will take about 2-3 weeks. We didn’t bother with a secondary, on the grounds that the yeast flavour is a vitally important part of this beer.
9. For bottling, you want medium carbonation, a little more than an ale but not as much as a lager. We added around 90g sugar to the 15 litres we had left (once we’d taken off 5 litres to make the blackberry version) — this worked well.

Blackberry wit beer, on our aspirational garden table, next to an aspirational salad

Last year we brewed a lurid blackberry wheatbeer. It was actually pretty successful — it was refreshing, very fruity and very purple. There were no off flavours, but the problem was that it didn’t really taste of anything other than blackberry.

So when the blackberry season came round again, we were determined to try and make something a little more subtle. This time we used a Belgian wit beer as a base (perhaps more on how we made this another day), siphoning off around five litres into a carboy after three weeks of primary fermentation.

We prepared a blackberry concentrate by mashing up around half a pound of blackberries with a bit of water over some heat. We strained off the juice, and boiled this for 10 minutes to make sure it was sterile. This left us with about 50ml of thick juice. Once cooled, we added it to the witbier. We left it for a month in secondary, and then bottled it about three weeks ago.

We’ve just opened our first bottle, and it’s a triumph, though we do say so ourselves. You can definitely taste the underlying witbier, but it blends rather nicely with the fruity and slightly tart notes the blackberries lend. I’d be interested to try this on someone who didn’t know what was in it — I think they’d identify that it may have fruit in it, but they may not guess blackberry. That said, the peachy colour looks unusual. I think we’ve hit on the right proportion of blackberries to add an extra layer of flavouring without overpowering the base beer, and it would be interesting to try the same procedure with other types of beer.

It’s also very refreshing and drinkable. We don’t know exactly how strong it is, but the base witbier is about 3.7% so it’ll be a little over that, I guess. Anyone know how much sugar there is in half a pound of blackberries?

PIty we made so few bottles… but there are more blackberries in the freezer.

Boak

I didn’t have the benefit of Mr Oliver’s advice while I was choosing the beers, but I can consult in retrospect, as I bought Bailey a copy of The Brewmaster’s Table for Christmas. We may put up a book review when we’ve finished, but we’re enjoying it immensely at the moment.

1. Grapefruit appetiser + Blanche de Namur

Why selected: Grapefruit was always going to be a challenge, especially when grilled with spices. Spices and citrus suggested a Belgian Wit to me. I went for Blanche de Namur as it’s one of the more subtle (some may say bland) of the Wits I’ve tried.

Garrett Oliver says: citrusy flavours work well with Wits.

The verdict: This worked very nicely, although I might go for a less subtle Wit next time. Incidentally, this beer goes fantastically well with orange-flavoured dark chocolate.

2. Roast Chestnut soup + Meantime London Porter

Why selected: I thought a nice roast porter should work with roast chestnuts (stunningly original there, eh?) and went for Meantime mostly because it comes in nice snazzy bottles, but also I remember it as being bitter and smoky, which was what I wanted.

Garrett Oliver says: “British porters are rich, elegant beers that… are capable of matching many more dishes than one might imagine” and lists scallops, chargrilled meat, Shepherd’s pie and subtle chocolate deserts.

Verdict: This would have worked if I hadn’t added sherry to the soup. It made the soup taste wonderfully Christmassy, but clashed with the porter. That’s my fault, rather than the porter’s.

3. Turkey (plus trimmings!) + La Chouffe Golden Ale

Why selected: Wasn’t really sure, but I felt that a good-bodied blonde Belgian (fnah fnah) was what I needed for the main course. I went for La Chouffe Golden Ale as I didn’t want anything too extreme, and I remembered this as having an understated but satisfying flavour.

Garrett Oliver Says: With turkey, Biere De Garde, dunkel, dubbel, Oktoberfest Marzen, American Amber Lager, Belgian Pale Ale. He also mentions La Chouffe (as a Saison) and suggests it with Indian food (really?), barbeque, Thai, duck, cassoulet and rustic sausages.

The verdict: It’s a lovely beer, but not quite right with the turkey. I think you could go two ways with this — either go for something more extreme (a good trippel?) or perhaps go something lighter, like Palm.

4. Christmas Pudding + Delirium Christmas beer

Why selected: We had Delirium Christmas a few weeks back, and were impressed with its dark, spicy warmth, and thought that it would go well with spicy & sweet Christmas food. At 10%, it should round off the meal nicely.

What Garrett Oliver says: Haven’t found anything on Christmas pudding, and I’m not sure how he’d classify the beer. He recommends Delirium Tremens with a whole host of savoury stuff, but DT is pretty different from the Christmas beer.

Verdict: Didn’t work. For some reason, the beer tasted completely different when up against the pudding. There may have been some differences between bottles (yesterday I served from a large bottle, and there are some that maintain that Belgian beers taste different in large bottles to small bottles). Or it may be that it just couldn’t cope with the mighty pudding, which had been maturing for a year and a month. The pudding brought out the worst in the beer — the carbonation (too much!), the comparatively light body, and the sweetness — without delivering the warm spicy kick I’d hoped for.

I don’t know what would work with the pudding — maybe a heavier Belgian (St Bernardus 12?) Think I have a way to go with this food and beer matching business.

By the way – hope you all had a lovely Christmas.

Boak