|BACKGROUND|

Sometimes, brewing can be an exercise in masochism. This would be one of those situations.

It might sound odd, coming from someone who’s so inundated in the craft beer scene, but every once in a while, a can of Genessee Cream Ale really hits the spot.

A true staple of American history, cream ales are typically one of the oft overlooked styles of yesteryear, in the company of circa 1995’s greatest hits like the brown ale, the ~6% stout, and the Irish red ale. For most brewers, it served its purpose in previous decades and has been relegated to the “well, that’s boring” category. There’s really not a way to avoid opening this can of worms, but: in some other cases, it’s been so warped and twisted into something else entirely, like an India Cream Ale or an Imperial Cream Ale. It might sound odd for me to nitpick, as my whole goal with this blog is, well, brewing weird shit, but there comes a point where you just gotta call them what they are – an IPA is an IPA and an Imperial Golden Ale is a Imperial Golden Ale. Like I said, I know it sounds hypocritical coming from the dude who made a “Black Milkshake IPA” and a “Boilowine”, but I also don’t try to pretend things aren’t what the are. Usually. Much like trying to explain to people exactly what a saison is, beer taxonomy has become a real fucking mess, of late.

At its core, though, a cream ale is a super generic ale. It’s a basic enough beer that, if you start tweaking this and that, it honestly stops becoming a cream ale and just turns into another style. If you add a ton of hops to it, it becomes and IPA. If you raise the alcohol, it’s a golden ale. If you go full Simple Jack, it’s Not Your Father’s Mountain Ale. It might just be more accurate to call the style “American ale” and roll with it, because, aside from a historical context, it’s kinda… the most basic beer you can make without stooping to the level of slinging mud about who uses high-fructose corn syrup vs. rice syrup solids and pretending that aging a lager on beechwood really does a whole lot. In short: the cream ale would be like the Dave Matthews Band of beer styles – unoffensive, somewhat bland, and, despite its celebrated history, mostly irrelevant in today’s culture.

That being said – I still like the cream ale, provided it’s actually a cream ale. Hard pivot transition.

At the risk of sounding like a weaboo, I like Japanese stuff. I mean, in this day and age, sushi is everywhere, Nintendo’s still churning out Pokemon games, and watching anime doesn’t get you stuffed into a locker (it was a different time 15-20 years ago). But despite all the influences that are readily apparent in the US via Japan, from Godzilla and the Power Rangers to every 16-year old’s first car being a 10 year old Toyota Camry, the real spot that Japan seems to miss is beer.

Not that Japan doesn’t love their beer. That’d be an understatement. But the craft scene in Japan is on a slow roll. Sure, you’ve got Hitachino Nest (Kiuichi) and a few ex-pats Like Baird’s opening breweries to push a little, but for the most part, it’s a lot of rice lagers like Asahi. Not to discredit what’s going on in Japan, because there are definitely people pushing boundaries, but… it’s not quite on the scale of what the US has got going on right now.

So, for me, taking in a heavy Japanese influence while making beer is something I’m interested in because there isn’t much precedent for it. You’ve got a handful of breweries playing around with using some ingredients like matcha tea and sushi rice (*cough cough* Tired Hands), a small handful playing around with sake yeast, and you’ve got Japan exporting hops and beers, but I can only find a few breweries that are trying to really bring things into the fold, or at least more than just a face value kinda deal.

I’ve definitely pushed into the realm of playing with combining aspects of sake and beer before, and it’s hard to try and figure out how to incorporate things that are decidedly Japanese into a beer with that punk rock US attitude. I think that the sake/beer hybrid game does that (which, at the time of writing, I’m already looking forward with as well). Japanese flavors in general are just fun and creative and I want to use them and encourage others to use them as well.

The first big switch up, compared to what I’ve done before, was shaking up the ol’ “herp derp, make a rice ale” deal. For that, I ended up pushing further into the sake side of things with using koji. Now, koji itself refers to the fungus Aspergillus oryzae (which has a bunch of other variants as well), which is a type of mold that is used for making soy sauce, miso, and – you guessed it – sake. Rice, unlike barley, doesn’t have its own enzymes for diastatic conversion of starches into sugars, which means if you tried to mash in a beer with rice, you wouldn’t get too far. Using koji, sake breweries essentially mash in a pseudo-sauna and convert the starches in rice to fermentable sugars using the koji (this is an incredibly dumbed down version of what happens). So, in essence, buying koji rice, which is already inoculated with the koji mold, is kinda like buying pre-mashed rice with a nutty umami kick. Fun fact: the amyloglucosidase that people are using for making brut IPAs is sourced from Aspergillus niger, commonly known as black mold, which is a close relative to koji. The more you know. So, the first real angle for me was to swap out the corn that’s traditionally included in the cream ale base for the koji rice. It only seemed fair, adjunct for adjunct.

Now, knowing that koji could potentially leave me with a super dry beer, I wanted to reach out to someone who has gone where I was heading (to a degree) before I ventured out into the brew day. I ended up getting in contact with Will Meyers, the brewmaster at Cambridge Brewing Co. They make a beer called Banryu Ichi, a roughly 15% sake beer hybrid that utilizes koji to make a giant sake starter, a mash of barley, rice, and brown rice syrup, and then ferments low and slow with sake yeast after blending them together. Based on his advice, I decided that I definitely wasn’t going to make a sake starter for my batch, which requires even more stringent sanitation that traditional brewing does, opting to make the kojified rice a main component of my grist – well, as much as I could afford. Aside from buying the spores and doing it yourself, it can get pretty pricey, fast. With the koji in mind, I decided that I wanted something light, simple, and fun to play with for flavors, ending up on ye olde cream ale as being a fun way to unite traditional Japanese sake making with traditional American brewing. And now we’ve come full circle.

With the way that Sorachi Ace has been a super dill monster of late, I decided to nix the Japanese hops an keep that simple and just used Hallertau Mittlefruh hops. Not super duper American, but at least traditional to American style because I didn’t want to use Cluster hops again. So, to keep the balance going, I needed to swing back towards the Japanese side of things. Enter the idea of doing fruit and candy.

I initially got the idea because I was at the grocery store and saw they had yubari king melon ice cream, to which I thought that an ice cream cream ale could be interesting. However, it turns out that Japanese ice cream is pretty hard to find, seeing as none of my local Asian supermarkets had any. So, I went with the next best thing: Japanese candy. Sure, pocky is probably one of the more iconic snacks, as far as Japanese stuff goes, but as a kid I really liked this Japanese gummy candies – specifically the ones from Kasugai. The nice thing is that they’re pretty easy to come by too.

Naturally, I can’t make anything easy for myself, though. I decided that I wanted to do a “Rainbow” series – by which I mean splitting the batch five ways into five unique and different beers. And then, fuck it, might as well triple down at this point, why not just dryhop them all differently too. And so, the Niji (Rainbow, in Japanese) series was conceptualized.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 153 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 78%

Original Gravity: 1.054 // 13.3 P

Final Gravity: 1.020 // 5.1 P

Estimated ABV: 4.5%

IBUs: 14 IBU

Color: 2.9 SRM // 5.8 EBC

Recipe

Malts

8# Floor-malted Belgian Pilsner | 78%

1.3# (.6 kg) Miyako Koji Rice | 12%

1# Malted Naked Oats | 10%

Hops

1 oz. Hallertau Mittfruh (3.7% AA%) @ 60 min. | 14 IBU

1 oz. Galaxy (16.1 AA%) @ Dryhop | 3 days contact (Momo)

1 oz. Jarrylo (16.3 AA%) @ Dryhop | 3 days contact (Ringo)

1 oz. El Dorado (15.2 AA%) @ Dryhop | 3 days contact (Sakuranbo)

1 oz. Belma (9.5 AA%) @ Dryhop | 3 Days contact (Ichigo)

1 oz. Huell Melon (7.2 AA%) @ Dryhop | 3 days contact (Midori)

Yeast

1x packet of Wyeast 4134 Sake yeast (1L starter, split)

Spices and Stuff

135g Kasugai Gummy Candies x5 (Melon, Apple, Strawberry, Peach, and Lychee)

.5# Cherry, Peach, Apple, Honeydew, and Strawberry (fresh and/or frozen)

Water Shit

1 mL 88% Lactic Acid

1 tsp CaCl

|BREW LOG|

Before the brewday even started, I had to figure out the whole situation with the fruit and the candy. Since I’m not one to typically cut corners (well, maybe sand them down a bit), I wanted to use real fruit. To that note, I decided that I was going to go for five flavors: strawberry, melon, apple, peach, and cherry. Most of those are pretty common in Japanese cooking, sans cherry, which is a little more of a Western thing. However, sakura, cherry blossom, is a decidedly Japanese flavor. Call it a compromise. This did throw a slight wrench into things, as cherry wasn’t going to be readily available as a candy flavor. For my compromise, I decided to go with lychee, which I feel is kinda cherry-ish, but would at least work well with what I was shooting for.

So, I weighed out a half pound of each fruit – honeydew, pink lady apple, strawberries, peach, and a combination of tart and sweet red cherries. With the gummies, each package was 135g, roughly 1/3 of a pound. I took the 8 oz. of fruit and 3.5 oz. of gummy candy with the corresponding flavor and chopped them up before throwing them into a saute pan with just enough water to make sure that I wasn’t going to end up with a mess of burning sugar. This both served to dissolve the gummy candies and give a bit of a base for the fruit to break down in, yielding a sweet, candy-esque fruit jam. I put each of the flavors into individually labeled containers while they were fresh off the stove and slapped them into the freezer until they were needed for brewing with.

If ordering the koji rice off Amazon was the easiest part of acquiring ingredients, finding the sake yeast was the hardest. Seems that both Wyeast and White Labs only make it their pitches every once in a while, meaning that I ended up ordering it 3 different times before I got one that was actually in stock and, despite paying for expedited shipping, the yeast arrived late for the day I planned to actually brew this batch (Fuck USPS). However, once it arrived, the only thing left to do was prop up the pack into a 1 liter starter. Then, I was actually ready for the brewday, just a month behind schedule.

One of the points of discussion with Will was about how the koji would react with temperature in the mash. Much like how throwing your AMG into the mash by accident while brewing a brut IPA would denature your enzyme without doing anything, koji is in the same boat. Having decided I was less worried about have the most fermentable wort ever and more focused on getting flavor from the rice, alongside some fermentables. Just in case, I mashed slightly high to have some residual sugars too, since the rice wouldn’t contribute anything of that nature and to prevent the beer from getting too dry. Shooting for 154F, I ended up around 153F, which I let ride for 60 minutes. After collecting first runnings, I batch sparged the grains, allowing for a 10 minute rest to reset the grain bed before collecting second runnings and starting the boil. The preboil gravity came in at 1.046, which meant I was pretty on target, if not slightly above.

The boil itself was fairly straight forward, only the single addition of Hallertau for some slight bitterness, followed by the whirfloc @15 to help with clarity. Otherwise, not a whole lot going on in the batch.

The real fun of this batch started post-boil. Similarly to how I do with most fruit additions in beer, I decided to rack the wort on top of the fruit “compote” to ferment like usual, especially since there’d also be plenty of extra sugars for the yeasties to chew on from the candy. This meant that I had to get everything stuffed into 1 gallon glass carboys. Having used them before, they aren’t exactly my favorite choice of fermentation vessel. However, much like that sweet disco-infused track from the old animated Lord of the Rings cartoon, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Using a combination of a sanitized funnel, a chopstick, a spoon, and sheer fortitude, I managed to get everything into the carboys with minimal swearing or damage to the carboys.

Taking a gravity reading once the beer got down to 68F, the hydrometer showed that the batch was coming in at 1.054 for the original gravity, which was actually perfectly in line with my estimations. Well, as accurately as I can assume with subbing out flaked rice for the koji in my brewing software.

After cold crashing was complete, the wort was racked into the carboys, leaving enough room to pitch the yeast on top. Very scientifically measure, might I added. Despite hitting my target starting gravity almost on the nose, I had the better part of a gallon of wort left over from filling the carboys, which is somewhat wasteful to pour down the drain, but also a sign that I had a slightly higher efficiency that I had planned as well. You win some, you lose some. With it being winter and all, the basement where I typically ferment was hovering around 60-65F, which is pretty solid for the sake yeast, since it actually prefers closer to lager temps, usually. Either way, with all five of the airlocks strapped in with tape, just to make sure they weren’t ejected during fermentation, it was time to let the beer do its thing.

3 weeks later, it was bottling. One of the simpler parts to do before the actual labor of love was to dryhop each of the beers. Similar to how the fruits matched the candies, so to did the hops match both of initial additives:

Ichigo/Strawberry got 1 oz. of Belma

Ringo/Apple got 1 oz. of Jarrylo

Sakuranbo/Cherry got 1 oz. of El Dorado

Momo/Peach got 1 oz. of Galaxy

Midori/Melon got 1 oz. of Huell Melon

Some of the choices for hopping were a bit more obvious than others. I also chose to do the full oz. of hops because if I had half packs of all those hops, I knew I was probably never going to use them unless I ended up doing some sort of kitchen sink bullshit IPA, which I don’t think anyone has every really successfully done.

With 3 days of contact time, then came the true challenge of this batch – actually bottling.

Typically, bottling isn’t that much of a headache. Make the syrup, rack the wort into the bucket, spend a few minutes bottling, print some labels, and blammo, all done. This was different, though, since with each 1 gallon batch, I’d have to make a new batch of priming solution, disassemble and sanitize the bucket, rack a new beer (which was also full of hops and fruit, so yay), and then do that 4 more times. Suffice it to say, I’m not champing at the bit to do another split batch experiment like this again. But, overall, I’d call it quite the success. While it might seems slightly low, each batch yielded 7-8 bottles, which considering loss to fruit matter, trub/yeast, and dryhopping, is pretty significant.

With the yield per carboy being about .75 gallon, I primed the different flavors with .6 ounces of sugar per round, shooting for the typical 2.6 vol/CO2 for a cream ale.

The most interesting things to see were that a) the beers were pretty uniform in gravity across the board, which shouldn’t be too surprising, and b) that the cherry version picked up color and none of the others did. Not that I expected my melon beer to actually be green, but I didn’t expect the cherry to pick up so much color from the little amount of fruit I added to it. All the batches finished ~1.020, adjusted for temperature. Slightly high for what the style, but the ABV falls into line for what it was supposed to be as well.

It was definitely fun to taste how different all the beers were, despite the similarity of appearance, barring the cherry. If I had to rank them at bottling, I’d have put the peach up front, followed by the strawberry, tie the melon and apple at third, and cherry last, based of entirely of how much the flavors came through.

But, I suspended my full judgement until the beers were full carbed. I took one bottle of each to my homebrew club to get feedback. Luckily or unfortunately, due to weather, we had a smaller turnout, which meant that everyone actually got to try all the flavors together rather than being polite and tasting one or two for comparison.

|TASTING NOTES|

The beers are pretty much crystal clear. Aside from the cherry one, the other four are all a nice, pale, straw-gold in color, with the cherry (pictured up top) being a rosy/blush color. They pour with a nice, white cap of foam that stays frothy and laces slightly down the glass.

The smells from the beers are quite nice. Lots of fresh fruit and light hoppiness, little bit of cracker/biscuit, and some sweet candy tones. It’s really hard to elaborate when, yeah, each beer smells like the fruit it’s supposed to.

The taste is where things diverge slightly. While all the beers have some similar qualities, I ended up having to re-rank a bit from what I tasted at bottling. I ended up putting the melon (Midori) as my favorite from the batch. It really just had the flavor of a ripe, juicy honeydew with a light flair of the candy, all floating over this semi-pilsner kinda base. The second place I had to give to the apple (Ringo), which took on a slightly cidery kinda vibe to it. Third I’d give to the peach (Momo), because while it did express the peach flavor very well, it strayed just a bit too far into the peach gummy ring camp and it really overwhelmed most of the beer flavors. Fourth I’d give to the strawberry, which toed the line a little more finely than the peach did, but still suffered the same “candy-like” quality of tasting a bit more like “pink” than strawberry. Finally, in last place, was the cherry. Not that I didn’t like it, because it was the one that actually best expressed the qualities of the base beer, but because it, well, wasn’t very cherry in flavor, just in color. It was still tasty, just a bit less impressive by comparison to the other beers.

By the logic that the cherry was the least fruit-forward of the batch, it really did help give most of the impression on the base beer. It was spritzy, not overly dry, retained a nice malt backbone, and had a light, almost faint, herbal bitterness. There’s still a hint of the rice to it, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is some sort of massive umami bomb from the koji. There’s definitely something there, but it’s a subtle earthiness, this real light kinda salinity. If it wasn’t so expensive, I definitely would have wanted to use an even higher percentage of the koji rice in my grist.

The mouthfeel does strike a near perfect balancing act. While the light and medium-high level of carbonation help lift the beer off the palate, the malted oats help keep it on the fuller side. The combination of mashing higher with the rice helped prevent it from getting overly dry and the beer. Combined with the lower ABV%, it’s a super drinkable beer.

Ultimately, was this batch worth the pain? Eh… I mean, it’s a good beer. I’m all for the base beer itself. Would I do a 5-way split again? God no. But, I’m sure that, by condensing a “series” of beers into a single brew day, I’m sure that I came out ahead in saving time compared to brewing 5 individual batches of the same beer and doing the different fruit/candy/hops each time. The only real downfall of this little experiment is that I can’t get the same level of feedback I did at club through sharing, since everybody gets to really pick one flavor and that’s it. Still, some is better than none, I guess.