Brewing Sahti (first attempt)

Brewing Sahti using Grainfather (1'st attempt)

So we purchased a Grainfather beer mashing cattle. My firs thought of course was to brew Sahti, the traditional Finnish beer. I could not follow all the right steps in the process, but I think it's the ingredients that make the most of it's flavour and aroma. Basically the only missing step was filtering the mash through juniper twigs, so that will affect the taste.

Grainfather

Grainfather is a small brewing system that is easy to use. Pump is circulating the wort so the temperature stays even from the bottom to the surface, and mash is well wetted all the time. The cooling water hose can be attached thos shower tap using a quick connect adapter.

Good recipe is available on Brewtoad, allthough, none really is like the traditional ones. These recipes work well with Grainfather.

Sahti Malts

I used 5kg of Viking Malt - Sahti Malt and 400g of very dark TUOPPI Rye Malt, ~60g Saaz and 100g Juniper beries while the batch was 19 litres. The Rye Malt is available world-wide from Suomikauppa. Yeast is a baking/bread yeast, that produces banana flavour. The Finnish Rye Malt is an excellent addition to many other dark beers as well.
Sahti must have much more malts used in it than a beer. Average beer has about 160g/l but Sahti has 400g/l malts in it.

I used only little less mals than Sahti requires. The wort in fermentation looked like this.

The results

Allready in the second day the fermentation produced banana flavour sent. My mistake was to add too much yeast in it, and it had a negative effect on the taste. OG was about 1.066 and FG 1.016 after a one week, so that gives it about 6.6% alcohol content by volume. Another mistake was not to use the required 400g/l malts, and the result was just a bad beer, not Sahti.