Brewing Scottish Ale AND My Favorite Way To Package Beer

i'm brewing an epic scottish ale my epic i'll i'll come to that in a moment and i want to show you a packaging solution that has become one of my absolute favorite ways of packaging beer and it's something i've been using for a little while in the far corner of my basement here i have twisty cans one box small ones and uh some bigger ones and what is a twisty can well it's these things it's basically an aluminum can or aluminium the thing that makes these particularly cool is these caps it just goes on and then a tiny little turn it's on so what is that like a quarter turn maybe and it creates a really really tight seal i've got a 12 ounce can here and then a 32 ounce the other thing is in these caps they have a little bit of a an oxygen absorbing top so the idea is that you can fill this all up put your bearing cap it and with that quarter turn it's basically sealed and i've done a little a little experiment of my own and this experiment has been three months in the making you see i have a i have a problem when it comes to packaging my bearing cans i have a can seamer and when it works it is a beauty to behold i have my blonde ale in here this is rock hard it's really keeping the beer fresh very much under pressure but for every one of these uh i also have one of these squishy ones and it's completely my fault but i don't think i've quite got the hang of the can seemer yet and in fact this is sticky because there's just a little amount of the beer coming out you can see it right on the bottom there this however is pretty much foolproof even for me so i filled this with seltzer water three months ago and uh the question is is it still fizzy um and it most certainly is now i've got some ideas on how best to get bit into these things but how about we we brew a beer first i wasn't always the biggest fan of scottish ales but i've actually grown to really appreciate them i think there's sometimes a concern that they can be a little bit cloy-y a little bit too sweet you do need to sort of balance the caramel malt to avoid that but here's what i really like about scottish ales that is the richness of flavor you get despite the fact that it has a really low abv this one is about 3.7 percent uh this is by no means a light beer we're approaching 20 for the srm which you can really get the impression of here wonderful color and the base malt for this is maris otter that makes up 84 of the grist to that i have crystal malt yes there is some crystal in here this is crystal 80 and that makes up eight percent of the grist and then seven percent is pale chocolate malt and one percent roasted barley and i really like that combination of crystal 80 and pale chocolate malt to give the beer that characteristic maltiness without being too sweet now i'm going to mash this at 152 fahrenheit or 67 celsius and give them the low abv this shouldn't take long [Music] now what makes this one epic well i'm collaborating with epic beer trips on this one to brew our own version of a scottish ale and then we're going to get together and talk about our recipes and try finished beer now the end of every beer tasting when norm comes over we end up filling one or two of the big crawler-sized twisty cans and takes those home i just fill those from the tap but because i'm gonna take some beer and store it for a little while i want to find an easy way to fill that and sort of minimize the oxygen transfer here's what i've come up with i always have on hand a keg of star sat and because it's distilled water this thing keeps for a long time the other thing i'm using is some co2 and i have this tap cooler i actually use this for canning you can use it for filling bottles as well and i'm just going to use this as my sort of my counterflow chiller i'm going to take my twisty cans and sanitize them all right that'll do everything should be sanitized now thank you for your service starstone keg replacing that with a cake of actual beer that i want to can this is a little bit pressurized so just take it straight out of my keyser so i'll connect this and i'm going to connect the co2 to the other side of this tap cooler now whenever i press this button on the top [Music] that's the co2 coming out so i'm going to take one of my cans give it a quick flush and add the beer and that's really all there is to it three canned beers foggle is my bittering hop actually the only hop i'm going to add about 21 grams of fungal into this three gallon batch and i'm boiling for 30 minutes and this will go in right at the start look it's a scottish bear and it's not going to be hoppy this is really just primarily for bittering although if any of those sort of earthy notes of the fuggle end up coming through into the beer i won't be that upset so the word is currently 71.72 fahrenheit or 2122 celsius i'm gonna get it lower than that before i add in my yeast this is my yeast i'm using scottish ale this is white east 1728 now this has a very very wide range of accepted fermentation temperatures from 55 fahrenheit up to 75 fahrenheit and it's a very good clean house strain at the lower end but can generate some esses at the higher end i'm not really looking for a lot of ester production for this beer so i'm gonna pick the middle of the range so 65 fahrenheit or 18 celsius so i will chill this using my glycol chilling coil and once i'm down to 18 celsius and i'll catch the yeast hello this is brian and martin this is a great surprise it's well done we might today excellent thank you for doing this yeah thank you did you know you're going to be brewing drinking scottish uh scottish ale this morning i had no idea so i've canned these beers this morning go ahead and give it a report yeah please all right let's do so we're at drum trout brewing company in are we still in wilmington we're in wilmington so we've been open just over a month uh so i've been working here since then i see a little brew house behind us and then pretty pretty interesting selection of different beer types there yeah exactly yeah we've um so far there's an apricot blonde that has been especially popular and then a maiden voyage brown ale a few different styles of ipas there's a west coast a hazy and a session ipa so let's see what what what do we think about the color on this guy yes i do like i do like the color you definitely get a really nice like brownish caramel to it there's like a little hint i see kind of like a red yeah especially like when you get it just in the light in the right way kind of comes through like like a nice dark ruby it's got quite quite an aroma it does it does yeah yeah the malt really does shine through those as one would expect and there is that that note of sweetness as well okay so let's give this a try then okay we think okay here we go cheers that malt really comes out in the finish i really like that it's got a really nice roasty character at the end you get the sweetness but it's it's not it's not like punch you in the face dessert sweet yes and that was um that was intentional for me because that's the part of scottish beers i don't really like is sometimes the cleanest right the the sweetness right very malt food isn't it yeah oh it really is yeah and what's nice about it too is it has that like it's a good medium body and you don't feel like you're just drinking a syrupy well yes well thank you very much for doing this yes thank you thank you appreciate it pleasure to meet you yes to drum tower like you're not even looking for business yet so this is cool to come in here exactly yeah so we'll be be back open today well cheers cheers thanks a lot thanks martin that's the wrap yeah yeah awesome thank you i enjoyed that thank you so much

Channel: The Homebrew Challenge

Views: 17,640

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Id: HV0pznvPwQM

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022