Hey, I'm William, here with the Northern Brewer.
I'm part of the New Product Team.
Just out enjoying my garden on a nice day and decided to take a break to sample a little
test batch that we did a couple of weeks ago.
We got our hands on some of the Phantasm Thiol Powder that's been pretty popular and hard
to get.
So excited to do a little split batch with that and some of Omega’s yeast, one of them
being their newer Cosmic Punch, which is meant to really take thiols, boost them up, and
just make really a tropical fruit juicy types of beers with that.
If you're not familiar with the Phantasm style powder, I definitely recommend checking it
out.
What it is, is it's a powdered form of Sauvignon Blanc grapes from the Marlborough region of
New Zealand.
They're selected to be the highest blocks of Sauvignon Blanc grapes, so they're making
the highest amount of thiols.
It’s a little brown powder.
It's been around for, you know, I think in the last year.
It's really gotten popular for a couple of years.
You see a lot of brewers using it, promoting it, and if there's an IPA with it in there,
you will definitely have it across the label, big and bold.
It’s been hard to get only until recently; only select breweries got it.
It's a pretty fun little ingredient to play with.
Before I break these beers down, if you like seeing new ingredients put to the test, subscribe
to our Northern Brewer YouTube channel and make sure you like this video as well.
For this, we did a 15-gallon batch.
I wanted to use the G40 and I had to use a technique called high gravity brewing, which
is where you make a concentrated wort in a stronger wort than you're normally going to
make.
Then once you transfer into the fermenter is you add more water to get to your volume
and also get it to the right gravity.
Very similar to like extract brewing when you do that concentrated boil and then add
water to the fermenter to get up to that five gallons.
So, for this batch I wanted to keep it pretty simple and I was referencing a lot of the
information you can find on our biotransformation with Cosmic Punch blog.
It was provided to us from Omega so it can get pretty in depth.
If you want to, you know, geek out a little bit more I highly recommend checking out that
blog.
Like I said, Pilsner malt or lightly kilned malts are often some of the best ones for
thiols.
Because malt itself has thiols, but the malting process can break down those thiols so they're
just not there.
So, the lighter kilned malt is better for thiols into the wort.
The other thing is hops, specifically Cryo Hops, because they have less vegetal matter.
That vegetal matter can inhibit the thiols later on.
So, it's recommended to use Cryo Hops if you're looking for that bigger boost, and they reference
Cascade as one of the hops that they really recommended.
I like that because that's a hop I think everybody is familiar with.
So, you know, like Cascade doesn't typically make Sauvignon Blanc or guava flavors.
If you get that in the end beer, you know, it's coming from the thiols and yeast.
So, I thought that was a good control.
We used a Weyermann heirloom Pilsner malt and then Cascade hops.
Part of that is also doing mash hops in which you add hops into the mash process.
I used the equivalent of one ounce of Cascade in a five-gallon batch for that.
For this 15 gallons, I did three ounces of Cascade Cryo Hops in the mash.
After that, after the mash is done -- I did just a single infusion mash with it for 60
minutes.
Sparge with as much water as I can fit into the G40, so I made sure that was pretty full.
Once that happened it was a kind of a boring 60-minute boil, no additions.
I did add three ounces of Cascade hops again into the whirlpool, so the equivalent of one
ounce in a five-gallon batch.
So we whirlpooled with that.
I also at the end, because it had boiled off roughly a gallon, I actually topped up that
kettle back up to 12 to 13 gallons, again, just to get more water volume in there.
And then once the whirlpool was done, I ran that off into the three fermenters.
I was pretty happy with it.
I got four gallons into each of the three fermenters.
I had picked up some store-bought spring water in gallons and put those in the fridge actually
to help me chill down the wort too, so that was kind of nice.
You could just use tap water as well.
That's totally fine.
So once the water was transferred over, I dumped in the gallon of spring water into
each of the fermenters.
And then we pitched the yeast in each one.
That was also part of the split batch.
Cosmic Punch is a thiolized version of British V. So, for Omega that's OYL-011 for the base
strain.
These two have the base strain and then this one has the Cosmic Punch.
After about a day and a half at peak krausen, another big thing is to add the Phantasm powder
in active fermentation so that the yeast get at that and do their biotransformation.
At that time, I did another ounce of Cascade Cryo Hops into each fermenter.
So, this one I guess is kind of the control.
That's just Cascade Cryo Hops at dry hopping and British V. Then these other two got the
Phantasm Thiol Powder added to it.
Two and a half ounces is what I use for it, which is the kind of the low end of the recommendation:
two and a half to five ounces per five gallons.
So again, so this one was dry hopped with Cascade Cryo Hops and then it also got the
Phantasm and then it was the British V strain.
This one got these Same additions as this - Cascade Cryo Hops and Phantasm powder, but
this is the one with Cosmic Punch.
They all look fairly similar.
I thought it interesting the one without Phantasm is actually hazier, and Phantasm is mostly
used in New England style beers, really hazy style beers.
The other two definitely are clear.
To be fair, these are very plain beers.
It's just Pilsner and Cascade.
A lot of times when you see breweries doing that, they have Mosaics, Strata, like all
kinds of other stuff paired with it.
And they're making more of a New England IPA, or Double IPA really, jamming in all kinds
of different fruit characteristics in anywhere they can go.
This was designed to be a simple side by side to really see what the Phantasm powder would
do.
So, I thought it was interesting that visually there is some differences and indications.
I did say that this is the one with just dry hops.
I thought that was really interesting that it's visually the cloudiest one.
Flavor wise, they are all different, which was great because that was what this experiment
was for.
That first one, it's really, you know, it's malt-driven.
There is some of the classic citrusy Cascade hops in there, but it is much more malt-forward.
That heirloom malt is a stronger malt.
It's a little bit darker than most Pilsner malts, too.
So, you get more of that bready biscuit-y character in that one.
And then you move to the one with Phantasm powder.
That malt character is less for sure.
There's more fruity characters.
I don't know if I would say that they move into that super tropical fruit character.
I think it just brightens the Cascades and elevates it a little bit more.
You get more of the citrus character.
And then you go to the Cosmic Punch and this one is like a different beer altogether from
those.
And it's pretty crazy.
The second day after adding the dry hop and the Phantasm, I went and checked the fermenters
and I actually kind of giggled because this one smelled like Sauvignon Blanc grapes just
coming out of the fermenter, which was pretty crazy.
I've just never seen that type of a transformation overnight in a beer from just adding something
like that.
That one to me is a lot of guava in there.
Maybe almost a papaya or a mango, like a really ripe tropical fruit character in there.
Really not much malt character at all, and it's really just given away to that tropical
fruit character.
I think there's, you know, there's some grapefruit and citrus in there, but to me, it’s guava.
It's like just a guava beer.
Doing this and seeing it, I think that if you're going to be playing with the Phantasm
powder, I would definitely recommend trying it with Cosmic Punch.
They also have Star Party as another thiolized yeast and then Lunar Crush as well.
Those two I definitely recommend trying with it as well.
Those actually are supposed to increase the thiols even more than Cosmic Punch, so I'm
sure that this would just be almost like guava juice or maybe Sauvignon Blanc even more.
But it was pretty cool.
I also, you know, I gave it to my wife and didn't tell here which one was which one.
And she basically said the same thing as I did when she got to that Cosmic Punches, “I
got two different beers.
That's not the same wort or anything.”
You know, very different where these two you can see flavor wise they're very similar.
It's just, you know, one has a much higher malt character and less citrus-y fruit to
it.
It was definitely fun.
I would recommend it.
Again, check out that blog and then try that thiol powder with one of those thiol yeasts
from Omega.
I think that's we're going to get your best bang for your buck and really get that crazy
tropical fruit characteristic.