Juniper Kveik Ale

Luke and I have both been pretty excited to get to the point with our beer making where we feel comfortable enough with the basics to start experimenting with ingredients that are a little outside the box. Both of us (but mostly Luke) got really into foraging last summer, and our first really successful beer was made with Lutra Kveik, so imagine our surprise to find a huge local juniper tree (Eastern Red Cedar or juniperus virginiana) in our parents’ backyard. 

The farmhouse ale traditions that cultivated and maintained kveik yeasts for generations before the wider beermaking world learned about it use juniper branches as a way of flavoring and filtering their beer, allegedly resulting in a unique flavor profile. We’ll find out when it finishes fermenting, but the hot liquor water had a lovely flavor, bitter and complex, that came through subtly but presently in the wort. I legitimately can’t wait to see what it tastes like finished.

This was a bit of an ad hoc, weekday brew, since I was leaving for Iceland for the next two weekends a few days later. We also brought just enough of our brewing gear up to our parents’ house to brew in relative comfort. 

Two important lessons can be drawn from our many mistakes here: 1) Set yourself up to brew in comfort. We’ve been brewing at a house that we are also renovating lately, and it makes the entire process uncomfortable, more prone to mistakes, and harder to properly clean. 2) Make a thorough plan for what you need before you move your entire rig. We did pretty well, but we still forgot to bring enough couplers to run our counterflow chiller properly, necessitating a little bit of MacGyvering, and all of our hops. Lucky that we were planning on bittering with juniper anyway, although we probably would have tossed in some pro forma bittering hops just to be on the safe side had we remembered them.

That said, things went relatively smoothly. I had made the juniper tea earlier in the day using branches I had cut that morning. I cut about 6-9 inches from the ends of branches with a lot of green shoots on them, removed any berries (which are still not ripe) and brown stems, washed them thoroughly, and boiled them for about an hour. The smell in the house was intensely piney and resinous. I weighed out the shoots (350g) before the boil and the tea after the boil (2567ml) so that I could calculate roughly how much juniper we were putting into our beer. We followed Michael Tonsmeire’s lead and added about 20g of juniper per gallon (and I think he was referencing the Homebrewer’s Almanac, which I am excited to read). 

In principle, we could have added the tea in at any stage, even post-fermentation, but I’ve read some speculation that it might interact with the grain in the mash or the wort during the boil, and it almost certainly interacts with the yeast during fermentation, so we figured the earlier the better. If we try this and think it could use even more juniper character next time, we would probably add some to the bottom of the mash tun, which follows the traditional method for a sahti and also helps with filtering the mash. 

After an hour mash in which I, shamefully, left the spigot open as I was filling and lost about a gallon (originally we planned a 5 gallon mash), and a pretty standard 20 minute batch sparge, we brought it up to a boil and held it there for just 20 minutes. This was in part because we weren’t adding any hops and in part because it was already getting pretty late. We figured that 20 minutes ought to be enough to kill any microbes coming over from the wort and to drive off any dimethyl sulfide, although sahtis are traditionally not boiled at all. The hot break froth was one of the largest and most persistent of any that I’ve ever seen - possibly the juniper is having some effect there! We also added two tablespoons of boiled bread yeast, which works as a pretty effective yeast nutrient in a pinch, and a teaspoon of irish moss.

Between a relatively spongey grain bed and whatever we lost from the boil (not to mention the gallon that I lost!), we ended up with just over four gallons of 1.07 gravity wort, which we diluted up to five gallons of 1.04 gravity wort. It tasted sweet with a nice backing of juniper flavor and bitterness and had a gorgeous pale, almost milky coloring with a bit of persistent froth on top.

We added a packed of dried Lutra Kveik and attached a heating jacket connected to an ink-bird to keep it at Lutra’s preferred 90 degrees fahrenheit. When I checked on it in the morning, maybe eight hours later, fermentation was going absolutely crazy and I had to add some rubber bands to make sure that the bung stayed in. Next time, I’ll probably opt for a blow-off tube just to be safe.

Stats:

Volume in Fermentor: 5 Gallons Starting Gravity: 1.04

Water:

• 4 Gallons Infusion Mash
• 3.5 Gallons Batch Sparge

Fermentables:

• 10 lbs Pilsen Malt
• 2.2 lbs White Wheat Malt
• 4 lbs Malted Oats
• 1 lb Flaked Oats
• 0.5 lbs Acidulated Malt*

Bittering/Flavoring Additions:

• 1,100ml of Juniper Tea made with 150g of juniper branches, boiled for 1 hour and added to the hot liquor tank before mash

Other:

• 0.9g Gypsum*
• 2.8g Calcium Chloride*
• 1.9g Epsom Salt*
• 1 tsp Irish Moss
• 2 tbsp boiled bread yeast**

Microbes:

• 1 pkt Lutra Kveik, dry (OYL 091)

Schedule:

• Mash for 1 hour at 150F
• Batch Sparge for 20 minutes at 170F
• Boil for 20 minutes
• Fermented for 7 days at 90F until primary fermentation finishes
• Packaged, primed with corn sugar and dry hopped with 50 grams of Citra and 120 grams of Cascade

Notes:

* These additions are specific to our DC-area water chemistry, calculated using EZ Water Calculator

** Substitute for yeast nutrients (Kveik likes some extra nutrients)