homebrew/THE MILLENNIUM ALE PROJECT
What is this “Millennium Ale Project”?
THE PLAN For 2001, the beginning of the third millennium, brew 100 bottles of homebrew. Oliver will be the cutodian of the odd-numbered bottles, Geoff the evens. At the end of each year for the next 100 years we will get together and drink one bottle.
WHY? Why not?
BUT YOU'LL BE DEAD Yes, we do realised this, and it does not concern us (after all, science may save us). Geoff will bequeath his bottles in his will to Oliver, and vice versa. Whoever dies first takes the beer. When that person dies, the next of kin will be entrusted to carry on the drinking of one bottle at the end of each year.
WON'T IT GO OFF? The plan is to brew the beer to about 12 or 13 per cent alcohol. The alcohol and high hopping rate will act to preserve the beer. We have adapted a recipe for Eldridge Pope's Thomas Hardy's Ale from Brew Your Own Real Ale at Home
ARE YOU MAD? Possibly. We'll let you know in 2100.
Please tell us what you think of our Millennium Ale Project.
The recipe
Ingredients
| INGREDIENT | THOMAS HARDY'S ALE | MILLENNIUM ALE |
| Volume | 12 litres | 55 litres |
| Original Gravity | 1125 | 1125 |
| Final Gravity | 1030 | 1030 |
| Alcohol | 12.8% | 12.8% |
| Pale Malt | 6.8kg | 26kg light liquid malt |
| Amber Malt | 1.7kg | |
| Goldings hops (start of boil) | 55g cones (5.3%AA) | 175g pellets (6.1%AA) |
| Fuggles hops (start of boil) | 65g cones (4.5%AA) | 250g pellets (4.8%AA) |
| Styrian Goldings (last 15 mins) | 25g cones (7.9%AA) | 120g pellets (4%-4.1%AA) |
Method
- Boil ingredients for 1½ and preferably 2½ hours, reducing the volume to 55 litres.
- Cool the wort and adjust original gravity in fermentation vessel to 1125.
- Aerate the wort and pitch a high-quality English ale yeast.
- Monitor fermentation carefully and if fermentation gets stuck (i.e. stops before SG 1035) rack the beer into another fermenter and pitch a wine yeast.
- When the fermentation has abated, rack into a barrel, add a sachet of wine yeast, fit the lid and store for three months.
- Rack into a sterilised fermentation vessel with 230g sugar and a sachet of wine yeast. Mix well, ensuring a minimum of air is admitted.
- Bottle and cap. Leave for at least a year. Reputedly at its best after five years. (We're hoping it will still be great after 100 years.)
The reaction
When told of the proposed recipe, this was Geoff's reaction:
Where the Hell did you get this recipe? I struggle to come to terms with the immensity of it all. My predicament reminds me of one of Descartes' Meditations in which the philosopher addresses the question of the limitations of our imagination. R.D. points out that whilst we are capable of comprehending the idea of an object with one million sides, our minds are not able to picture what such an object would actually look like.
More information, please!!!
The Preparation
Oliver and Geoff have been contemplating brewing a millennium ale since 1999. Despite much talk, they never got around to it, but decided, at the dawn of the new millennium, that the time was right.
There was much planning involved, including obtaining 110 500ml bottles for the beer, buying a 60-litre fermenter, obtaining a boiler, making a cooling coil and designing and producing labels.
We need a boiler because of the large volume that we will be boiling. Beer is best boiled as close as possible to its final gravity to extract the hop bitterness and allow the hop flavor to develop. Fifty-five litres of liquid (we're making 110 bottles to cover in case of breakage) takes a long time to cool to a temperature where yeast can be pitched, so we need a cooling coil.
THE FERMENTER On February 23, 2001, Geoff bought a 60-litre plastic fermenter from Geelong Home Brewing. This was the first item obtained for the Millennium Ale Project.
THE BOILER On March 2, Oliver bought an old 50-litre stainless-steel keg from a scrap metal merchant in Melbourne. Armed with instructions from Brew Ware, he ventured to a metal fabrication firm on March 15 and had them plasma cut a 275 millimetre-diameter hole in the top. (It was decided that plasma cutting was the way to go, as it is quicker (and therefore cheaper) and more accurate than using an angle-grinder.) The result was perfect; a hole that is nearly perfectly round and the bit that was removed can be used as a lid, once some lugs are fitted to prevent it falling into the keg. A file then a bit of wet-and-dry paper had any rough edges smooth in no time.
Oliver also bought a 3/8” stainless-steel ball valve (brass is cheaper, but contains small amounts of lead, which is not good to ingest) and some other stainless-steel fittings so the valve can be attached to the keg. A bit of drilling will be required so that the valve can be attached, then the boiler will be ready.
Stainless steel is much tougher than Oliver imagined. It took about three hours to drill through the 2mm keg with a 3mm drill bit, going slowly and using oil the extend the life of the drill bit. But once the first hole was through, it was fairly easy to progress one drill bit size at a time until it got to the five-eighth bit bought especially for the job. The hole still wasn't quite big enough, so a bit of filing did the trick. Perfect. A bit of wet-and-dry and we'll be set.
WORT-COOLING COIL Armed with some drawings produced by Oliver, Geoff boarded a plane at Melbourne Airport bound for Mildura, in northern Victoria, his destination the nearby town of Red Cliffs. Geoff planned to discuss the idea of an immersion cooler constructed of copper pipe with a local plumber, Patrick Hunt, or “Rico” as he is known to some. Rico and his brother Newton are the third generation of plumbers in the family business, H.S. Hunt & Sons, a name which has been synonymous with plumbing, roofing, tank building and the like in the district longer than living memory.
Rico studied the drawings closely for a couple of minutes and then promptly announced, “No worries, we'll knock that up in the morning.” As it transpired, Rico had some experience in this type of job: producing copper coils for local Italian immigrants for use in their grappa stills.
The job was completed in less than three hours on March 12, 2001, in the workshop of H.S. Hunt & Sons. First Rico had to make a template of suitable diameter around which to wind the 1/2-inch copper pipe. That done, the tube was wound and bent into shape. Finally, it was welded and supporting lugs were attached to enable the cooler to hang from the top of the brew pot. The finished result - a bloody work of art.
The wort cooler was carried back to Melbourne as hand luggage on the plane, much to the consternation of fellow passengers, crew and airport security.
See the pictures of the wort chiller construction.
BOTTLES We have decided on using 500ml bottles, for the simple reason that using bottles any larger would require such an immense quantity of beer that it would almost put the Millennium Ale Project out of the realms of homebrewing and into micro-brew territory. We set our hearts on bottles from the Czech beers Radegast and Kozel, so Oliver set out to obtain them. The bottles are sturdy, made of brown glass and have a crown seal, as a real beer bottle should.
Oliver knew that the Czechoslovak Sokol National House (aka the Czech Club) in North Melbourne served Radegast and Kozel because he had drunk those beers there before. After a couple of phone calls, he got on to the very helpful bar manager, Paul, who told him to drop some boxes in on March 17 because there was going to be a big function. He did so, and the following Friday, picked up five boxes containing about 80 bottles. Three boxes remained at the Czech Club. The bottles were rinsed thoroughly with the bottle rinser and packed back into boxes.
Oliver's fears that the label glue would not be water-soluble (imagine the horror of getting the bottles clean!) proved ill-founded, and after a test soaking of three bottles the labels slipped straight off.
Two boxes, containing about 31 bottles, were collected the following Friday night, cleaned and packed up. We now have 112 bottles for the Millennium Ale. All that is left now is for us to soak them in a bath overnight and scrub them clean. Considering the Millennium Ale takes about 14 weeks from boiling to bottling, this is not considered a priority.
As mentioned, we plan to make 110 bottles of Millennium Ale, to cover us in the event of breakage.
GAS BOTTLE Geoff has one of these.
BURNER On July 11, 2001, Geoff went to his local outdoor centre that was having a 22½ per cent off sale and purchased a three-ring burner.
INGREDIENTS On July 18, 2001, Oliver ventured to Southern home Brewing in Maidstone, Melbourne, to purchase the ingredients, mainly because the store sells Cooper's malt in 29 kilogram pails, supplies Wyeast liquid yeast (it was agreed that a liquid yeast was the way to go because of the extraordinarily high original gravity. Anything else may not have fermented out well) and could offer Styrian Golding hops, which are fairly hard to come by.
John, the guy at the homebrew shop, seemed bemused at our plan but nonetheless was supportive. He even had a full bottle of Eldridge Pope's Thomas Hardy's Ale (that the Millennium Ale recipe is based on) that he showed me.
There was a concern that not enough time would elapse before brewing to culture up a yeast starter, so John gave us two for the price of one Wyeast Scotch Ale liquid yeast packs. Wyeast packs are a sachet containing yeast that floats inside a yeast nutrient. To start the yeast, you pop the inside sachet, releasing the yeast into the nutrient so it can start to multiply. As this happens, the pack swells. Ours took a while (three days) to show any real sign of swelling and so we didn't have time to make a yeast starter. One of the reasons for it taking so long was that Oliver had a hard time keeping it at the recommended 24 degrees. Eventually, he filled a fermenter with water, adjusted it to 24C and dropped in the sachets. This did the trick and the packs started to swell.
The Brewing
Millennium Ale Moments
Saturday, July 21, 2001
See the pictures
3pm Preparations begin.
Tap fitted to the boiler.
Wort chiller hangars trimmed slightly so that it hangs lower in the boiler.
Built brick base and stand for boiler.
Opened first bottle of homebrew to quench mighty thirst and donned lab coats.
Added water to boiler with two litres of white vinegar to clean out boiler.
Brought to the boil, which took two hours!
Put wort chiller in to give it a bit of a boil and clean. Came up a treat and wonderfully shiny (the vinegar did its work).
6.45 Rang Rico, the man behind the magnificent wort chiller, to tell him that his construction works a treat.
Filled up fermenter with cold water and brought to the boil.
8.20 Water boiling.
Added salt and calcium sulphate.
Left at a rolling boil while we took a curry break.
9pm Turned off heat and allowed precipitate to settle out.
Added wort chiller to sterilise.
9.30pm
Started flow through wort chiller.
10pm Added magnesium sulphate.
Began transfer to fermenters to allow precipitate to be discarded.
10.25
Half filled fermenter and turned back on burner.
11.16
Boiling, so took off heat and added two-thirds of the malt.
12.17 Boiling again. Added Fuggles and Goldings hops.
Geoff suggested the bubbling mess looked like a New Zealand mud bath. “Rotabrua,” Trace suggested.
“It's a long way to the top if you wanna rolling boil,” Geoff quipped, adding “We are mightily hammered now!.” As always, he spoke the truth.
Drinking Oliver's homebrew No.32.
Geoff: “It's a nice looking boil isn't it: rolling and pitching, pitching and rolling. This is what I call aromatherapy.”
“You are witnessing alchemy - turning beer into stainless steel.” What Geoff meant, who knows!
2.05am
Added Irish moss, Styrian Goldings and cooling coil (to sterilise) and covered with aluminium foil.
2.20am Small overflow.
Turned off heat and started flow to the wort chiller.
2.30 Trace had gone to bed and Oliver and Geoff partook in a secondary curry while the wort chiller worked its magic.
By this stage the lab coats had proved to be invaluable. Oliver and Geoff were filthy, covered in malt and soot. They looked like a couple of Welsh miners emerging from the pit at the end of a shift.
3am
Still cooling
3.30am Took out wort chiller and brought the keg inside to begin transferring the cooled wort to the fermenter.
Added extra water and left overnight to settle and cool a bit more as it was 32 degrees at 4am.
The boiler is a bloody mess of hops and malt on the inside and hops, malt and soot on the outside.
4.10am Geoff brought in the aluminium foil that had been covering the boiler during the last 15 minutes (and that took the full brunt of the overflow). It was covered in hops and looked like a dirty nappy! So that's where all the hops went!
4.20am
Looking back, the mess is not nearly as bad as we had imagined it would be when we set out on this epic project.
4.40am
Went to bed.
Noon Sunday
SG reading: 1110. Boiled most of the rest of the malt and added it, which brought the level up to 55 litres (At some stage the previous night we'd worked out, somehow, where the 55-litre mark was). Another SG taken: 1145!!! Whoops! Added some cooled, boiled water to bring the SG back to about 1137 or so. It was above the 1125 in the recipe, but we figured that the champagne yeast would take care of any problems (i.e. fermentation) that the ale yeast couldn't handle.
1pm Pitched the yeast, which was well puffed up by now.
WE HAVE LID ON!
Opened a bottle of Oliver's stout.
The Fermentation
Initial fermentation was vigorous, with a small amount of frothing from the air lock (and the loss, on to white carpet, of some liquid due to a leaking tap). After a couple of weeks, it was apparent that the SG had become stuck about 1094. On August 11, The beer was racked into two smaller fermenters and a sachet of champagne yeast added to each fermenter. Fermentation began again.
On November 23, 2001, it had dropped to 1090. We added 10 litres of water, which brought it to 1072, then added a 1-litre yeast starter.
By December 30, 2001, it was 1068. On February 24, 2002, it had dropped to 1050. At this point we added more yeast and yeast nutrient. The final SG was 1035.
The Bottling
Completing the Millennium Ale
Sunday, August 25, 2002
See the pictures
We grossly underestimated the time it would take to bottled the Millennium Ale.
When Oliver arrived at Geoff and Lisa's in Jan Juc, two hours from Melbourne, on Saturday, Oliver was hoping the bottling could be completed that day. Geoff had already soaked about 50 bottles and removed their labels, and had a bathful of bottles soaking when the cityslickers arrived. A production line was set up, on which Geoff would remove the labels and Oliver would scrub them to remove the glue. The remaining bottles were then placed in the bath in two layers and the labels were scraped off and the glue scrubbed off.
The next morning, after a breakfast that went until 12.30pm, we tackled the cleaning of the inside of the bottles. The idea was to rinse the bottles in a caustic solution and scrub the insides with a bottlebrush. But the bottlebrush wouldn't fit into the neck of the bottle (bloody Czech bottles!), so Oliver, working in the laundry, half-filled each bottle with the solution and gave it a good shake. Goeff then took crates of boxes into the kitchen and rinsed them inside and out with fresh water. Due to interruptions by an Australian rules football game between Adelaide (Oliver's team) and Richmond (Geoff's), this process took about three hours. After an inspection of each bottle by holding them up to the light, 26 bottles were rejected because they still had a bit of, or a lot of, grime in them.
The bottles weren't primed, as we figure that it wouldn't be necessary considering they will need to last for 100 years. There's plenty of time for the buggers to carbonate themselves with the residual sugar.
Then it was on to bottling. This was the easiest part of the whole Millennium Ale Project. No pouring tonnes of liquid malt into a keg full of boiling water. No stuck fermentation. No leaking fermenters. No trying to take SG readings. No racking. Just bottling the bugger.
We ended up with 105 bottles of Millennium Ale, which strangely was the number of clean bottles we had. So there was no cleaning of any of the othe 26 bottles required.
See the pictures of us completing the Millennium Ale.
ASIDE: The weekend of the bottling of the Millennium Ale was also a singles weekend. Oliver and Geoff had many bottles of homebrew that were the last of a particular batch and decided to drink them all this weekend. It was not, as our respective girlfiends initially thought and chucked a hissy fit at, a weekend where the girls and boys spent time separately!
The Millennium Ale is the color of dark chocolate; a deep brown with a tinge of burgundy.
The beer is thick and syrupy, but the bitterness balances the sweetness well. It will be even better when the syrupiness and sugariness mellow. It is extremely bitter, but not harshly so.
It's got a good, if slightly sparse, head.
Geoff: “It's much better than I'd anticipated. It's well balanced and it's only going to get better.”
Lightly carbonated and almost no sediment, which is not surprising considering it was not primed and was racked twice.
It's like a botrytis wine; we couldn't drink a lot of it, but one glass is fantastic.
Venue: Geoff's chambers in Melbourne
A big beer. Huge. Remarkable for its size, if nothing else.
Geoff: “It's gonna last 100 years!”
Syrupy. Tastes like molasses meets black currants. Light carbonation and little to no head. It's strong; we could taste the high alcohol content.
Venue: Geoff's chambers in Melbourne
Getting better.
Looking and tasting like a more balanced beer.
Light carbonation. fine, long-lasting head.
F---ing huge beer, but well balanced.
Enormous beer.
Taste: Blackcurrants and more blackcurrants, then dried fruit. prunes?
Sweet, but not overly so. we noted: we only had a whole century to get organised.
A very nice beer.
A good after-dinner beer.
We were debating whether we should have hopped it more, but decided that we'd revisit that question in 10 years.
Outstanding.
Very syrupy.
After believing for almost two years that these tasting notes had been lost to mankind forever, they turned up in late 2007 in a pile of beer-related papers Oliver had filed away (and if you'd ever seen the amount of beer-related papers Oliver keeps, you'd understand how easily these tasting notes became lost and marvel at the fact they were ever rediscovered). Here's the story. We're not sure it was worth the wait, but here goes:
One of the ladies commented that “It smells like Promite and Vegemite mixed together. It tastes like Promite and Vegemite mixed together.”
The blokes said: The colour of dark chocolate and has no head. Smells like crushed currants and other dried fruit. Well balanced and syrupy. Lightly carbonated. Tasty.
Lisa's analysis was that “it's not a sessional drink”.
Venue: Oliver's house in West Melbourne
Only six months late!
Viscous. Tastes like malt (which is hardly surprising). Not overly bitter. Intense molasses/golden syrup taste.
Geoff: “Hints of Bockin' Good Beer about it.” (Familiarise yourself with Geoff's No.41 BGB here)
Oliver: “But in a good way!”
Negligible head, but that might be to do with the glasses, which were washed in a dishwasher. Lightly, but sufficiently, carbonated.
You couldn't drink much of this. One a year is probably about right. But that's not to say it's not an enjoyable, tasty beer.s
We had this before lunch, and it went straight to our heads.
Definitely a once-a-year beer.
Geoff: “Needs something to cut through the sweetness. Something like a beef tartare … a bowl of meat!”
It's becoming more rounded, in the sense that the flavours are becoming more rounded. However, more bitterness would be desirable, to counter the syrupy sweetness. We're hoping, and are confident, that the Millennium Ale will mature nicely and become less sweet some time over the next 95 or so years.
Venue: Geoff's house in Jan Juc
Geoff and Oliver have half the Millennium Ale each, and this was from Geoff's cellar. Unfortunately, the cap has started to rust due to the sea air. The first picture shows this rust. Any ideas about how to deal with this problem would be gratefully accepted. Is recapping then storing somewhere more appropriate the answer?
Anyway, on to the tasting …
Geoff: “Jesus f---ing Christ!”
It's dark brown with a hint of red, and more or less opaque. It smells of Pedro Ximinez black sherry and tastes warming (no doubt due to the high alcohol content) and like it's packed full of berries. It's rich and delicious and the closest thing to spirits or a liqueur we've tasted in a beer.
We reckon the Millennium Ale is starting to balance out, as this bottle is much smoother than we recall previous tastings being. It would be a perfect aperitif. Likewise, if you'd bought this at a bottleshop and it had been pitched as a dessert beer, our only criticism would be that the head retention is poor.
Overall, we're pretty happy.
The Tastings
2002 - bottle No.1 - 18.12.02
2003 - bottle No.2 - 29.12.03
2004 - bottle No.3 - 14.12.04
2005 - bottle No.4
2006 - bottle No.5 - 22.5.07
See the pictures
2007 - bottle No.6 - 24.12.07
See the pictures
