Two things I want to share with you today… how to add black color to your beers without the roastiness of dark malts and how to krausen your beer…
I decided to brew a Schwarzbier as my example beer…
The easiest way to get the dark, almost jet black color is to sprinkle a debittered black malt or carafa special at the end of the mash… in other words, you would brew as normal and when you are ready to drain your wort and rinse off your grains, then you sprinkle your malts into your mash…
Couple things to consider here… make sure you use a debittered dark grain… regular carafa has a more pronounced roasty flavor than carafa special, so you want to go for carafa special if you want to restrain the roasty flavors….
Also, these grains should be stored and crused separate from the main mash… your roasted black barley should be grinded to a coffee like consistency so you can get as much color out of them as you can.
As long as the grains are soaked for more than 20 minutes, you’ll be fine…
Now, krausening a beer….
Krausen refers to the thick foamy head that forms in beeer when it’s first fermenting…
Krausening a beer is adding a beer which is just starting to ferment to a beer that’s almost done fermenting….
It’s almost like adding a yeast starter to a beer that’s almost done fermenting… what makes it hard to do this techniques is timing your fermentation just right so you can add the krausen beer
The idea behind Krausening a beer is to prime beers or to reduce esters and diacetyl …
You should have 90% of your wort (about 4.5 gallons) in the main fermentor and 10% of your wort for your krausen beer…
You can simply add the krausen beer to a bottling bucket and use that as your priming, but bottle conditioning a beer like that may leave some unpleasant flavors in your beer … Instead what I opted to do was to transfer my beer to a keg to use as a secondary and in 2 more weeks I’ll probably prime and bottle these beers…
Check out the video above with examples of these two techniques… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_9CPynQgNg
Cheers!
