|BACKGROUND|

In the ever continuing struggle of continuing to find more and more weird shit to make, my quest eventually led to the idea of brewing a kvass. The typically Eastern European beverage has been lightly explored by a few breweries, most notably to me, in the form of a collaboration between The Mad Fermentationist and East End Brewing.

Many commercial version of this strange drink exist in Europe. Part refreshing drink, part struggle food, the kvass traditionally is a fermented, low alcohol liquid made from water and rye bread, and often stale at that. With naturally occurring lactic fermentations and minimal sugars for the yeasts to eat, the majority of kvass don’t even crest over 3% abv. This means little, since, culturally, Russians don’t even consider anything less than Vodka actually alcoholic.

However, there is a slightly less common iteration of kvass – beet kvass. Combing the lower alcohol properties of traditional kvass with also inexpensive and available ingredients, beet kvass has become a healthy “cleanse” tonic, much like kombucha. Unlike rye, beets are much less common an ingredient in beers, with only a handful coming to my mind even to rattle them off.

The initial part of my brewing was also that there were a lot of berries to get rid of in my dad’s freezer. A healthy amount of red raspberries from the vines in the backyard and a collection of wild wineberries, a seasonal treat collected from a local camp that we used to attend every summer.

Mix it all up and you get a beer deserving of a reference to Karl Marx and potable throwback to the struggle of the proletariat.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 154F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 30 min.

Batch Efficiency: 68%

Original Gravity: 1.048 // 12.0 P

Final Gravity: 1.006 // 2.6 P

Estimated ABV: 5.8%

IBUs: 6.5

Color: 9.8 EBC // 19.4 SRM (without fruit and beet powder)

Recipe

Malts

5# Pearl | 53%

2# Malted Rye | 21%

1# CaraRed | 11%

1# Oak Smoked Wheat |11%

.38# Crystal 120| 4%

Hops

1 oz. Saaz @ 15 min.

Yeast

Bootleg Biology Sour Weapon P (Fermented @ 90F for 3 days)

Bootleg Biology Saison Parfait (Fermented @ 78F)

Red Star Bread Yeast (Fermented @ 78F)

Spices and Stuff

1 tablet Whirlfloc @ 15 min

1 Loaf Rye Bread (roughly 1.25#, added in mash)

8 tsp Beet Powder (added in boil)

1 tsp Pectic Enzyme (Pectinase)

.75# Red Raspberries (puree in primary)

1.25# Wineberries (puree in primary)

|BREW LOG|

One of the three legs of the Thanksgiving brew-a-thon of 3 batches in 24 hours, this beer was the final of the three, due to the expediency of its execution. Luckily, with the sun up, Thanksgiving day was not cold as a witch’s tit, unlike the previous night’s brewing endeavor.

While the first beer of the day (second overall) was mashing and boiling, I prepped the majority of the ingredients. The grains had been milled the night before, alleviating most of the hustle of weighing and grinding, allowing me to focus on the tasks at hand.

The two key ingredients that needed to be prepped first were the bread and the berries.

The bread was the easiest. Granted, it’s not a fancy artisanal loaf and I didn’t make it myself, but I’ll be damned if Pepperidge Farm doesn’t make a tasty loaf of rye bread and have it ready on the shelf for me. However, the challenge was how to stale up the bread for use in the mash. As tasty as the bread was, I didn’t want just soggy bread to sop up all the wart – I wanted some caraway flavored croutons to mimic the staleness of yore.

My first attempt was to cut the bread the night before and allow it to dry-age like a fine piece of meat. This did not go as planned. Since time was not on my side, I scooped up the bread, slapped those jawns on a baking sheet, and proceeded to dry them out in the oven for a few minutes. About 30 minutes on a low to medium heat, with some minimal turning, and I ended up with what I was looking for.

The second part was to take the berries, which were frozen in handy-dandy ziploc bags and bring them to a simmer on the stove to pasteurize, thaw, and break them down into a slightly more usable form. I ended up with a nice tart and fruity sauce, of sorts, probably about a quart’s worth of puree.

At this point, both ingredients were set aside until it was time to move onto the next beer of the day. I brought up the mash water to temp and mixed in the grains and the bread, kicking up all sorts of pumpernickel and grape nuts aromas. The idea of trying to figure out how much extra water to add to the mash was a bit challenging, since I didn’t know what exactly the grain absorption rate is of stale ass bread, so I pretty much just plugged it in as an extra pound of grains into a calculator. Ended up perfectly hitting the target mash temp of 154F and had a surprisingly good pH of 5.28 for the mash as well.

After a 60 minute mash, I collected the first runnings in the kettle and batch sparged with 168F strike water, giving the mash a good stir and allowing it to set for 10 minutes before draining the second runnings into the kettle, netting about 6 gallons of wort.

Opting for the shorter boil that I like to do with my sours, I only had one hop addition for a little bit of that earthy, herbal flavor, doubling down with some Saaz, hoping that it would actually impede the BB Pedio a bit, since I didn’t want an enamel-peelingly tart beer on this round, just more of a light tartness. After the hops, I added the 8 tsp of beet powder, which I had rehydrated with some wort from the kettle. Straight up, it looked like slasher B-movie blood and smelled like a handful of dirt. I had hoped initially to just use straight up beet juice, but my local organic co-op down the street let me down hard on that front and I had to compromise. Beet powder it was.

Initially after I added the bloody earth sauce, the beer had a slightly magenta hue to it, which faded within minutes of the boil. I was slightly disheartened by that, as I really wanted this fucker to be red.

I chilled the wort down to about 80F, as I was going to push into the 90F primary fermentation with the pedio and I wasn’t super worried about getting a great cold crash with this beer since clarity wasn’t a top priority. I racked onto the berry puree, pitched the culture, and hooked the carboy up to the heat wrap/temp controller combo to let it rip. Gravity was looking pretty good, coming out roughly 1.048, well within my range of expectation, although I’m still not sure how I should have adjusted for that loaf of bread.

By this point, I was frustrated with all three beers. 7 C’s of Rye was red, and it wasn’t supposed to be, the other beer had come in a little low, and this beer that was supposed to be red, well… wasn’t. I was at a loss, confused and slightly miffed, which was lightly remedied by my post-turkey food coma.

After 3 days of fermenting at 90F, the heat was lowered to 78F, allowed to cool, and then co-pitched with BB Saison Parfait yeast alongside 2 tsp of dry Red Star bread yeast, hoping that they’d co-mingle into a bready, dry, and flavorful beer.

I had initially intended to throw in some red wine oak staves for this batch, but I completely let that slip my mind and it never happened.

After another week or so, I had a planned bottling day, which was two batches of bottling and putting another into a whiskey barrel. After three different versions of critter running amok in the beer, I ended up with a final gravity of 1.006. Adding in what little sugars I could have gotten from the berries, I was looking at roughly a 5.8% abv beer, which is slightly higher than traditional for a kvass, but pretty much in line with my targets for the beer. Bottling, labeling, and waxing ensued, and a week and a half later, the beer was finally ready for consumption.

|TASTING NOTES|

The reaction to this beer has been pretty polarizing, to say the least.

I, personally, really like how it turned out. For all the moving parts, it actually hit pretty close to what I wanted flavor wise. I get the light tartness, the fruity tones from the berries, the earthiness of the beets, and a nice, bready malt quality to round out at the back. It’s light, it’s drinkable, and it is refreshing.

On the other hand, I brought it with me to a homebrew club meeting, which was oddly enough a sour competition (which ended with my having enough salt to make multiple batches of gose), to which a large amount of the reactions were “holy fuck, this is beet-y”.

Now, I’m going to admit that, despite being nestled into the heart of Amish country, where the picked beet eggs flow like a deformed Quatto wine, I generally do not fuck with beets. Half the reason I even did this was because I had a Beet de Garde brewed by a local brewery that put my over the moon and was blood red.

This beer is now quite red, but more akin to that of a solid Irish red ale. Maybe closer to the Soviet color of red that I based the theme of the beer around, which I’m fine with. I didn’t really want two cases of Mauve Avenger tearing around.

The beer is also crystal clear. As noted in the 7 C’s post, I’m 95% sure my dad added the gelatin fining to the wrong beer. Either that, or bread yeast is highly flocculant and brewers should start piddling around it for some weird yet brilliantly clear beers.

It’s got a slightly off-white head with medium retention, mid-to-high carb, and decent lacing.

The aroma is… well, berries, bread, and wet earth, with a flavor that follows. It has a distinctly light yet supple mouthfeel, which partnered with the mild tartness ends up having a nice balance. The beet sandwiches itself between a light hint of smoke and rye at the back of the palate, with the tartness upfront leaving behind a slightly jammy berry tart vibe in the middle. The finish is certainly on the drier side, despite mashing a little higher to prevent that, but I’ll take what I can get. I had perhaps envisioned more of a Flanders red style beer, like Rodenbach Grand Cru, but with no balsamic vibe to it.

In the end, I’m happy with how this turned out. The majority of the responses outside of homebrew club were generally pretty positive, and for having an idea of how I wanted it to turn out with all the myriad of how it could have turned out, I’m cool with it. I don’t think this is particularly a style that I’m going to revisit, but it was certainly a different one to make. And, as would only be appropriate, Na Zdorovie!