How to: Eisbock

After having seen numerous posts on both Facebook and on other blogs about eisbocking, I decided to give it a try!

But before I start rambling on about my own attempt at eisbocking, ill give you guys a short summary about what eisbocking is. 

Eisbock is actually one of the rarer beer styles out there, whilst not brewed it is made by using existing beer as a base. Due to the fact that it really takes quite a lot of beer to create a relatively small amount of eisbock, not many breweries craft it, which is a shame. 

Enjoying Aventinus Eisbock

Ive only come across a few of them over the last couple of years, including the awesome tasting brew displayed above. 

Funnily enough, the process for creating eisbock (ice-bock) is really quite simple. The whole process revolves around freezing strong beer and then fractionally melting it, so that the concentrate is removed from the water. This results, if done well, in a version of the original beer which is up to two times as strong, and has accentuated flavours! 

So I gave this a try, and I was very happy with the results!

Rochefort 10 as the base beer

It takes around three bottles of base beer to create one bottle of eisbock. I decided to use rochefort 10 as my base beer, as this is a very robust quadruple with great complexity and flavours (something which I was eager to see accentuated). Moreover, with its 11.5% ABV, it would create a hell of a strong beer.

Step 1: pour three 33cl bottles into a 1.5l plastic bottle

The first step is to pour all three beers into a clean 1.5l plastic bottle, this might take a while as some beers will have a tendency foam. (if you use less bottles, a smaller bottle also works, just make sure to leave some space)

Letting the foam settle a bit

After filling the bottle with the base beer, put the cap back on the bottle and store it in a freezer.

Ice ice baby

After about 24 hours (more or less, depending on your freezer), the bottle will be sufficiently frozen, whilst the alcohol will still be liquid (as that freezes only at around -100 degrees celsius). The next step is the most complicated in this very simple process: 

Drip Drip

Remove the cap, and place the bottle upside down into something which can collect the concentrate dripping out, i used half of a different plastic bottle to achieve this, it created an air tight reservoir and provided enough stability for the bottle to stay upright (with a little help from my kitchen wall). 

Eisbocking in action!

At this point in the process, the environment in which it takes place is very important. Temperature influences how much eisbocked beer you can get out of the bottle. The best place for conducting this step would be to place the bottle and reservoir in the fridge, but if like me there really isn't much space there, the kitchen counter makes for a good replacement. 

You should never extract more than 33cl from the plastic bottle, in order to prevent too much water from diluting the eisbock. I eisbocked my beer on a particularly warm day, and as such i could only extract around 20cl, as the water in the bottle started melting quite quickly, so stop process if you start seeing clear water droplets. 

The result!

After extracting the concentrate, refill one of the (cleaned) original bottles, place the cap back on, and refrigerate. After all this work i was off course very eager to try my own eisbock!

Delicious!

Sweet, sirupy, bitter, spiced, and damn strong! Thats how I would describe the taste of the rochefort 10 eisbock, and with around 20% alcohol, it really gives a kick!

I was surprised at how easy the process was, and how awesome the result! I will definitely do some more eisbocking in the future, and experiment with different base beers and with the adding of additional ingredients.

Thanks for reading, and until next time!

Cheers!

-UPDATES-

I have since made the following Eisbocks:

(13/10/16) 2x Chimay Bleue, 1x Kasteel Rouge Eisbock Blend (Cherries, sweet, syrup, alc), I liked this one better than the Rochefort eisbock.

(15/11/16) 3x Piraat Strong Belgian Pale Ale Eisbock. Didnt know what to expect with this one, I felt like some experimentation. The sweetness became more pronounced, and the bitterness was accentuated, an oke Eisbock but nothing special

(06/02/17) 3x Brand Dubbelbock and Red Pepper Eisbock. This was the first time I added extra ingredients to the eisbock blend, and I was pleasantly surprised at how it turned out. The sweetness of the Bock was greatly accentuated and the spicyness of the red pepper really came to the fore, a fun little addition and something I will be using again sometime in the future.

(17/03/17) 3x Bulldog IPA Eisbock. My first foray into eisbocking IPA. Transformation into a strong, syrupy, thick imperial IPA monster. Sweetness and bitterness definitely more pronounced. Since I have about 15 bottles left of this brew, im most likely going to experiment some more with additional ingredients.