Strawberry Rhubarb Strong Ale - Recipe from Brooklyn Brew Shop - Tips and Advice

[TasunkaWitko]

Strawberry Rhubarb Strong Ale - Recipe from Brooklyn Brew Shop - Tips and Advice

The next beer that I will be brewing is Strawberry Rhubarb Strong Ale, from Brooklyn Brew Shop’s book, MAKE SOME BEER. As with all of my "Tips and Advice" threads, this will be a running account of the experience and the things that I learn during the process.

This all-grain, 1-gallon recipe is for a strong ale that combines Belgian Pilsner and Belgian Biscuit malts, with an addition of the time-honoured team of strawberries and rhubarb to provide ambience. It is described by Brooklyn Brew Shop as “a high-alcohol taste of summer...with plumes of strawberry that fill your nose with every sip” and rhubarb “ to add balance and a little tartness.” The recipe also uses Belgian candi sugar to add to a bigger punch to the party. At 7.7% ABV, Brooklyn Brew Shop advises that you can enjoy this ale fresh, or you can “age it for a couple of extra months to mellow out the alcohol.”

This beer uses Challenger hops for bittering and Cluster hops for flavour and aroma. Both hops are described as having earthy, floral properties, with each lending its unique fruitiness to the beer, as well. In particular, I am eager to see how the cluster hops work with this beer; I’ve always had an historian’s interest in this oldest of hops grown in the US, but have never used them before and am hoping for good things.

Brooklyn Brew Shop recommends a Belgian yeast in general for this beer, and S-33 in particular, which is known for great flavours and good performance with high-alcohol beers. I am guessing that this yeast will allow the strawberries and rhubarb to shine quite well.

For those who are into stats, I plugged the recipe into Brewer’s Friend and came up with these numbers:

OG - 1.079
FG - 1.022
IBUs - 23.41 (corrected)
SRM - 5.74

All-in-all, I think that this will be a great summer beer, assuming that it is as advertised.

Here is the label that I came up with for this beer:

Since there are already a lot of strawberry-themed labels out there, I chose to put the spotlight on the rhubarb, allowing the long-familiar association with strawberries to be self-evident. This scene resonates with me very much, as I come from a long line of gardeners and gatherers and can easily imagine any one of my ancestors helping his mother pick rhubarb for pie, jam, juice, wine...or perhaps even beer. Indeed, my youngest son and I often go out and pick rhubarb, along with chokecherries, various berries, herbs, and other gifts from nature's bountiful womb.

I expect to brew this next week; however, if things go well, I might actually be able to brew it tonight. As always, I welcome any comments, suggestions or feedback on this - if anyone is interested, please feel free to chime in, or simply follow along. This recipe is in Brooklyn Brew Shop’s book (for 1 or 5 gallons), so if anyone would like to try it or learn more about it, please shoot me a PM.

More as it happens, etc. &c....

Ron

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Alrighty - as luck would have it, I am brewing this beer tonight. I am about 3/4 of the way through the mash, then will proceed with sparge, boil etc.

The only departure I am making from the recipe is in the amount of rhubarb and strawberries. For a 1-gallon batch, the recipe advises 120g of rhubarb and 16 strawberries; however, since fruit flavours and aroma always seem a bit too subtle "by the book," I am adding half again as much for each ingredient, 180g of rhubarb and 24 strawberries. I'm sure this will be just fine.

Anyway, that's where we are for now - more later....

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Well, this brewing session is in the books, and I think it's going to be an interesting one.

The brew went very well - mash, sparge, boil etc. were all fairly routine and successful, with no real problems. The only issues that I had (I hesitate to call them "glitches" - maybe "anomalies" would be the best word) were:

a) I ended up with just a little more than a gallon of wort (a couple of ounces); probably not surprising, considering the extra quart of water in the mash and the water in the strawberries and rhubarb.

b) The yeast, S-33, required a much greater amount of constant agitating to be "dissolved" into the wort. Normally, it only takes about 2 minutes; however, this time, the yeast was quite "clumpy" after that time. It took a little over 5 minutes to get the clumps broken up and to get full incorporation into the wort. No big deal - it's all good now.

As I said above, I think that this beer might be very interesting. The combination of malts, fruit and even the hops is giving an aroma that I would place quite close to a strawberry-rhubarb pie. I am guessing that the biscuit malt has a lot to do with this; in any case, it is very appealing. The wort at this stage seems quite sweet, which isn't surprising, considering the Belgian candi sugar and the strawberries. I am sure that it will all ferment out very well - after all, this is touted as a 7.7% beer.

One correction: after adjusting the hops according to their actual (rather than estimated) AAs, the IBUs are actually 23.41, rather than 27.39. I have edited the OP to reflect this.

That's it for now - we'll be out of town until Sunday, so I'll just go ahead and let the beer do its thing, and swap the blow-off tube for an air-lock when we get home.

More later -

Ron

 

[TasunkaWitko]

I took a peek this morning, and it's looking awesome. Fermentation is beginning right on schedule and I think everything is coming along just fine.

As mentioned above, we'll be out of town for a few days, so I'll check on it when we get back.

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Well, I took a look, and the beer was looking pretty darn good. Fermentation had slowed way down, but was continuing.

I'll fit the airlock tonight, and we'll let this beer finish up. My current plan is to try one about 3 weeks after bottling - maybe four - and then allow the beer to age in bottles for a couple-three months after that. I'll compare the two "versions" and note any major differences.

Ron

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Today marks 5 weeks after BrewDay; I assume that the malts, rhubarb and strawberries have given all they have to give, and that the beer is maturing well.

I'll check it when I get home from work and unless something looks drastically off with the beer, I'll cold-crash tonight and bottle sometime this weekend.

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Last night - 20 October 2016 - I bottled this beer. I got 9 bottles out of this 1-gallon batch, and used the Brewer's Best carbonation tablets that my son got for me; four tablets should give a "medium" carbonation. I was tempted to go for a high carbonation with this beer, so that the strawberry might really hit the nose, but elected not to; the reason for this is that I've not yet had the chance to sample any beers that are carbonated with these, and want to have a "baseline" for future use.

I had about 6 ounces left over for a small sample of this beer, and was certainly impressed. The beer remains fairly cloudy; I am assuming that pectin might have something to do with this, since it has fermented for 5 weeks and was cold-crashing for a week after that. I won't hold it against myself though, because the aroma and flavor most definitely make up for it.

The strawberry was definitely there, and the rhubarb was present as well, giving a subtle balance to the beer. The result was that the (un-carbonated and still quite young) beer was pleasantly tart, with the promise of fruit essence that I am guessing will come forward with aging. The malts were present as well, with the Biscuit lending a really nice compliment; once again, I was reminded (by the aroma and flavor) somewhat of strawberry-rhubarb pie, and it was a pretty nostalgic sensation. Being a higher-alcohol beer (at least 7.7% abv), there was some warmth to the beer; my understanding is that a person can enjoy the beer young with this warmth, or allow it to age a bit so that the alcohol can mellow out as the fruit comes forward.

So far, this is turning out to be an impressive beer. This beer will carbonate and condition for at least three weeks at room temperature and another week in the refrigerator before I even think of trying it, but from the small bottling sample that I've had, I am really liking it. I plan to go through this batch as slowly as possible, so that I can note the changes over time.

I'll try to post updates as they happen, and will see about getting a photo, sooner or later.

Ron

 

[redarmy990]

hi love reading the updates.
on a side note, how do you produce those label designs.
I am new to brewing 2nd batch ready for bottling next week.
I coach a girls soccer team and help a comp for them to design me a label, now i need to know how to get that design improved and onto labels.

Thanks

 

[TasunkaWitko]

hi love reading the updates.
on a side note, how do you produce those label designs.
I am new to brewing 2nd batch ready for bottling next week.
I coach a girls soccer team and help a comp for them to design me a label, now i need to know how to get that design improved and onto labels.

Thanks

Hi, @redarmy - sorry to take so long getting back to you.

The labels I make work well enough for my purpose, and they are very easy to make, as well. I owe the basic layout to Andy and his excellent label-generating website, which can be found here:

https://www.beerlabelizer.com/

A very awesome and friendly member here on the forum named JINKS (who was also a fellow Montanan) used to make the labels for me (and others), using this program as a base. My German ancestors originated in Bavaria and Alsace before migrating to Ukraine for a few generations. After that, they emigrated to the USA and settled in North Dakota. JINKS knew of my affinity for my heritage, and designed a "logo" for me (found in the lower-left corner of all of my labels); we also came up with a basic theme of using a painting that recalled images that would have been relevant to my "Germans-from-Russia" and North-Dakota/Montana background.

Unfortunately, JINKS passed away, leaving a heck of a big pair of shoes to fill. Since then, I've sort of taught myself how to continue in the same basic style that he used. The big challenge, for me, was the font. Keeping with the German thing, I needed a font that had that German look.

Luckily, I found a way to do this. Using the "labelizer" link above, and paying the very modest 5$ fee for the customizable labels that allow you to upload an image, I create a blank label, choosing a background colour and a painting that has some relevance to whatever beer I am making, then save it. Once that is done, I open it with a free photo-editing program that is very easy to use and versatile:

http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

This program allows me to first lay the "logo" onto the label; then, after saving the label, I open the label again and use the text tool to put all of the text on in the font that I prefer to use. I then save the label.

To print the labels, I simply open them up from a Windows desktop (other OS might work too, but Windows is the only one I've used for this), and choose PRINT. a screen comes on asking me what size, and I choose "wallet" size, which is the perfect size for the bottles. I tell it to print 9 labels and then (important) UN-CHECK the box that talks about fitting the picture onto the paper.

That's it - it spits them out on regular paper and I ask my wife nicely to cut them out before I glue-stick them on.

The resulting labels look good, do not run in water and come off easily. If it were any more complicated that this, I probably wouldn't do it! LOL

Hope this helps - it works for me, and is straight-forward enough to be fairly user-friendly. JINKS wrote and published an article here on HBT that goes into all of this in a little more detail, but once you do a couple, it is pretty easy.

 

[redarmy990]

Thanks I actually signed up to beerlabelizer and have produced my first ever label.
Got it printed out at staples and I think it looks great.

Love how you have decided to stay with the family heritage, with your label designs

Heres what i manged to produce.

 

[redarmy990]

And the finished product.

 

[TasunkaWitko]

I drank the last of this batch on New Year's Day; unfortunately, the photos I got were not great - this was the best I could get:

I promised myself that I'd stretch this beer out as long as possible, but after sampling, enjoying and sharing it around a little, it went faster than I'd hoped. I'm kind of ticked at myself for not providing any decent updates on this brew. It turned out very well, and had some interesting changes over time; in fact, my dad described it as the best one I've made so far, and my wife thought it was good enough to give one to a co-worker for Christmas. I'll try to describe it here, but I am sure that I will miss a few details.

Appearance - The beer never did clear up; I assume that pectin is the reason and that is no big deal. The colour started out as a weird grey-ish tan, but eventually became a pretty nice caramel colour, slightly nicer than the photo indicates. Once again, I am guessing that the fruits were a factor. There was a decent head with a small amount of lacing; I would have preferred it to be a bit creamier in texture, but I have no complaints about it.

Aroma - It smelled rally nice throughout the life of the batch; I've mentioned that it really did remind me of strawberry-rhubarb pie, and this was indeed the case, right up to the last bottle. There was a nice, malty quality to the aroma that fit in really nicely with the flavor profile, and the fruits were prominent in nice proportion. The hops served as a good compliment, with their earthy and floral aromas reminding me of picking rhubarb and strawberries in my back yard.

Flavour - The tartness was always there, from beginning to end; however, toward the end of the batch, the strawberries - which always had nice aroma - also started to come forward a little more in the flavor. This seemed to coincide with the backing off of the alcohol, which was prominent much more in the beginning than in the end. Even when the alcohol was prominent, it was a good-tasting beer, but time definitely improved the flavour, in my opinion. I'm not sure how big a roll the hops played in the taste, but the bitterness seemed to be present-yet-muted, which in my case is preferable. Carbonation was a very good medium-high when the beer was cold, but at room temperature the beer was somewhat over-carbed. The only "down-side" to the flavour was that the malt flavour seemed to be lacking; I would describe it as tasting a bit "scrubbed' where the maltiness is concerned, as if it could have and should have been more. Perhaps some added biscuit malt in the next batch is in order - any other suggestions?

Over-all, very nice; a truly good and unique beer. When posting about it on FaceBook, the feedback that I received was very enthusiastic, with many people wanting to try it. Between that, and my dad's enjoyment of it, I might need to be brewing a 5-gallon batch, soon.