Getting "Wild" In Cyprus

Hello all!

With one week down already, our project here in Kissonerga, Cyprus, has made some big strides! Every day we've been able to add two new levels to the wall of our experimental kiln. Now, on day nine, we're nearly ready to add on the roof. Big stuff! With any luck, we'll get a chance to fire it up (no pun intended) before we run out of time here.

More importantly (to our craft beer loving crowd, of course), we've begun brewing this week! My team (shout-out to Team Two!) kicked things off on Monday by brewing our project's control beer. It was an experience, to say the least. With no way to bring brewing equipment to the island except by hand, we were left with the most rudimentary of homebrewing gear, kitchen pots and pans, an electric tea kettle (yes. We used a teakettle to mash in), and one very untrustworthy electric stove. Nevertheless, and despite the widespread use of the metric system, we were able to MacGyver ourselves one unhopped pale ale. Relying on nothing but tasting on the fly, we managed to put together something that should finish out around 6%, and from the taste of the wort, won't be half bad (despite being unhopped. Hopheads forgive me).

The second group to brew, Team Three, started the experimental part of the brewing, by preparing the wort we used for wild fermentation. Fermentation kicked off faster than I could have imagined, but unfortunately, it wasn't exactly what we might have wanted. Ancient brewers would never have brewed during such high temperatures, opting instead to brew in the fall, or as winter fades into spring. The cooler temperatures are ideal for flavoring the inoculation of wort with wild yeasts, and for slowing the growth of souring bacteria so that they won't take over until after brettanomyces and other yeasts have done their thing. Unfortunately, the high heat of summer saturates the air with lactobacillus bacteria, and that became very evident in our beer. The wort exploded with bacterial cultures after only one night!

While it smelled amazing and did form a nice pellicle, it wasn't from wild yeast. After another four days of fermenting, it seems that brettanomyces has started to work some magic (the beer has some nice funk going), but also has something else...

Black mold.

Unfortunately, it seems like this batch is going to have to be ditched, due to the mold growth. On the plus side though, from what I could smell, Cypriot wild yeast gives some really nice, complex, funky flavors. Maybe I'll have to make a trip back in the spring...

The final beer brewed this week was the closest we've come to ancient brewing, so far. The idea for this beer was to use local grapes to make a yeast starter, then pitch the grape mush into the wort directly to inoculate it. Team One took on this project and ran into some early difficulties (that subsequently added to authenticity, so it wasn't all bad). Part of the way through the mash, they lost electricity, leaving them with no modern conveniences. Unable to boil the wort, they went straight from mashing to cooling the wort, and then to pitching the mushy grape starter. The ancients would have been proud. The beer is being fermented in a clay pot, and after three days has a great wild yeast smell coming off of it and krausen appearing on the surface. So far it's a success, but we'll see what time will bring us!

Over the next week, we'll be taking on a few more brewing projects. Project leader Ian and I discussed a few options, and I'm most excited about the possibility of using hand-dug hot-coal fire pits heat our mash, then fermenting the beer by pitching in a fruit mush (possibly figs!) yeast starter. Hey, if we're going to make some ancient beer, we might as well do it right!

We also spent some time working on our malt this week. Our two clay options did well, and we were able to get them washed and out in the sun. Without a kiln to work with, we have to rely on the sun to "kiln" our malt. It sounds like a bad option...but there's no shortage of strong sun here, and it's working (albeit slowly!).

Our third method of making malt (water immersion) actually started fermenting before it finished malting. Nevertheless, we're going to give it a rinse and see what we can get out of it. Perhaps we'll be able to pull off brewing up a mouth-puckering sour!

There'll be a lot going on over the next week, so stay tuned to keep up with our "wild" project!

Until next time,

Owen