Umehana Beer: Second Lot!

It’s that time again, the hot summer sun, barbecues in the cooler afternoons… yup it’s…

BEER SEASON!

I mean it’s kinda beer season all year around for me, but summer is especially beer season. It’s all about eating outside in a bit of shade, having lunch or dinner with friends, and sharing a cold bottle of beer.

So to make that a reality, we are going to be making a second lot of the Plum Flower Yeast Beer that I made in March for the farmer’s market here!

We decided to make 3 types of beers again (if everything goes to plan lol):

1. Beets and Summer Orange IPA

2. Sansho Pepper, Rice Koji and Summer Orange Belgian White

3. Oak smoked Rauchbier

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IPA

I’m trying to improve on the IPA we made in the previous batch, which was nice and refreshing but lacked a little punch in the fragrance and bitterness area. Also the beer itself was extremely easy to drink because of how light the body was.

As a solution to some of these comments, I decided to make the beer more bitter and add some summer orange peels that are randomly growing around the town. I’m hoping that the added bitterness will give the beer a little more depth and the orange peels a nice bright fragrance. Together with the bright red color, the increased bitterness and the zesty fragrance I’m hoping that the beer will have more of an impact when people drink it.

Just yesterday, I went out to Suzuki-san’s garden and harvested the beets he’s been growing. The monkey’s in the mountains have been eyeing some of the larger beets and I would have literally lost it if one of those things yanked out the beets, so I harvested them a week earlier than usual. I’m telling you, here in the countrysides you never know when nature comes down and messes up your carefully laid out plans.

Beets have a wonderful color to them though, and even the stems are packed with color that can be used as food dye.

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Belgian White

Instead of a Saison this time around, I decided to make a Belgian White because we’re going to be using a lot of fragrant ingredients in the beer. I’m planning to put both sansho pepper corns as well as sansho leaves in the beer to get more of the sansho flavors out which was lacking a little in the last beer. The summer oranges will be reminiscent of Blue Moon and its classic orange wheel and I’m thinking it can even be served with a slice of orange! The rice koji was a bit of a curve ball for me at first, but apparently the brewer who makes our beer uses that ingredient all the time. I wanted to use the rice that we grew in front of our headquarters somehow, but at the same time did not want the beer to be super light like last time. So the brewer suggested using rice koji which would give that rice umami I wanted, but all the while not taking away from the body of the beer.

We’re going to be making rice koji ourselves next week by inoculating steamed rice with koji yeast and fermenting it under some electric carpets to maintain a constant I think 38 degrees Celsius. Hoping this goes well so fingers crossed guys.

As for the oranges, once again because of monkey paranoia, I decided to harvest the oranges a little earlier than planned. In all, I was able to get around 40 oranges which were super plump and dense. Oh also as a piece of advice, if you ever live in the Japanese countryside and find a random fruit tree, make sure you know or ask the person who owns the land if you could have some. Some of these trees are growing in the most random or abandoned looking places, but they are owned by somebody in the town. That was a quick Intro to Inaka Living in Japan 101.

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RAuchbier

So this one was the the wildcard of this batch. We decided that we wanted to replace the sour beer we made last time with something else. The reason being, the beer was a “sour beer” was because of the cherry blossom yeast, not because of our plum blossom yeast. I wanted to do something that was more kind of “made by Shun” if you get what I mean. So for some random reason, the brewer suggested that I try making a rauchbier which is a typed of smoked beer that is made in Germany. When he mentioned the smoked beer, I remembered that just recently, through work, I met some people who specialized in making furniture out of oak, and so I called them up wondering if they had some wood chips that I could use. If we had more time I would’ve wanted to cut a tree down from the local mountains here in Omori, but deadlines must be met… sometimes… most of the times.

Anyways so began my experimentation in front of the smoker for the last two days. I honestly did not know anything about smoking things other than just setting wood chips on a fire and letting the smoke hit whatever you wanted to get smoky. Wooo was I wrong. First of all its easy getting smoke flavors onto meats. The things with smoking wheat is that the damn things has no moisture in them, which means the smoke flavor does not attach to the grains as well as let’s say sausages. The trick here is to spray the wheat with some water every now and them because (according to the internet) the smoke flavor attaches well to water and or fat. Also temperature is very important where you have to keep it on the lower side, anywhere from 60 degrees Celsius to 80 degrees Celsius. I feel like you want a little roasting on the grains but not to the point of burning them. I made that mistake when I wanted to get more smoke so I kept burning a bunch of wood, but ended up just roasting the wheat instead of smoking them. That’s the thirdish thing that I learned is that there is a difference between smoking and burning. When you burn the wood, you get this weird acidic smell that can be a little unpleasant. Slow smoking wood gets this sweet toasty aroma which has this wonderful depth to it.

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I’m still gathering the ingredients for the beer at the moment, so currently all I have are red stained fingers that smell like oranges and clothes which smell like campfires. I’m hoping that the beer will be finished around the middle of July. Now thinking about it, it’s just the right being soon after the monsoon season of Japan. Not only will it be good barbecue and beach weather, but it also gives me something to look forward for while trying to survive the humid and wet monsoon season of Omori. I’ve heard rumors that bread molds the same day you buy it…

I’ll keep you guys updated throughout the process!

until then!