Bottle Day and Tasting - Double Chocolate Oatmeal Stout & Electric Citrus Saison

After the trouble of a double brew day I was looking forward to tasting both of these beers.  My original plan for the Double Chocolate Oatmeal Stout was to let it sit over a couple vanilla beans for a week.  Between my work trip at the beginning of December and then travelling home to Canada for the Holidays, I didn’t have time to let it sit for only a week.  So in order to still get the vanilla flavour I planned, I decided to use vanilla sugar for bottling.  The specific sugar that I used had little pieces of vanilla bean in it.  I used 41g of the vanilla sugar, planning on the carbonation being very low.  Bottling was smooth and I was able to get 18 Full 0.5L bottles from the batch, though the beer was a little cloudy, I thought it might still clear in the bottles. Checking the gravity, the beer seems to be a whopping 7.8% alcohol, this could be dangerous.  The beer was also nowhere near as dark as I wanted for this stout, coming out maybe a little darker brown then the Ye Old Confused Brown Ale.

Three weeks later I decided to try my first Stout.  The top popped and when poured the carbonation was great, just enough to tickle the tongue a bit and bring out the aroma.  There was a little bit of a head formed, with big bubbles, but it didn’t last long and left no lacing on the glass.  It was still the dark brown but it hadn’t cleared at all from bottling, if anything it was cloudier with little bits of vanilla bean floating around.  The yeast cake on the bottom was about 3mm thick, though pretty stable.  The smell right off is clearly of hops, with a little hint of chocolate and nothing of vanilla.  The taste is bitter, almost harsh, with a long aftertaste almost of citrus.  There is a slight sweetness to compliment the bitterness and a good mouth-feel, thick but not really creamy.  Overall, this really isn’t a stout but I’m not sure what it could be classified as, maybe a brown American IPA??  About a month down the road, I’ve had a couple more of them, and it seems the harshness has mellowed.  It’s still bitter, with more of the hop flavour and chocolate come through.  Age is bringing out the positive qualities of this beer, maybe this will be a re-brew in the future, and I just need to figure out how to get it to clear.  Aww well, part of the fun is in the trial and error.

Continuing with the double trouble theme, I bottled the Electric Citrus Saison on the same day.  Since this was just a 4 litre trial, I’m not overly concerned.  I decided to continue with the honey additions and bottled with 37g of Acai Blossom Honey, giving the Saison a very high carbonation.  When pouring into the bottling bucket, the beer was crystal clear and very pale yellow.  This resulted in 8 full 0.5L bottles and a final alcohol by volume of 6%.

I popped one of these just after the first Double Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, and I was sorely disappointed in the carbonation.  It was almost flat, thought the smell was very nice and refreshingly citrus.  The beer was very clear with a really pale yellow.  Citrus and hops warred with each other as the prominent smell, the coriander and cardamom taking a back seat.  The taste was nice, tart and refreshing, though a little cloying without a good carbonation.  About a month later the carbonation is perfect, helping produce a beautiful white head when poured, which fell to about half a centimetre, lasting to about half way through the glass.  The citrus notes are there in the aroma, and in the flavour, though the honey hasn't come out that I can tell.  This will be a nice beer to enjoy in the summer and may require a full batch brew.

Enjoy!

Photos courtesy of Mrs. Thirsty

Bottle Day and Tasting – Ye Old Confused Brown Ale

With this Brown Ale being my first try at home brewing, I was a little like a new father.  Always looking in and checking it, at one point even sitting quietly and listening to the sound of the airlock bubbles popping.  It was oddly relaxing and enjoyable.  A week before I was planning on bottling, I was asked to travel for business for 3 weeks.  I was a little concerned but decided instead of bottling early or transferring to a bright tank, to just leave it alone in the primary fermenting carboy and let it go.  All in, the beer was primary fermenting for 5 weeks.  I put it in the refrigerator in the basement for 24 hours at about 5°C(41°F) in order to “Cold Crash” the beer and encourage the yeast and any other particle floating around in there to fall.  Once I finally made it home I got down to my first beer bottling.  I have never bottled beer before but have bottled wine with my mother (Mama Thirsty we shall call her) back a few years ago.  For a couple years Mama Thirsty and I split on batches of wine at one of the local “Make Your Own” shops.  These shops are fun in that you can have some of the experience of making your own wine without the expense of all the equipment and all the work associated with cleaning, sanitizing and testing.  You get to pour in the yeast and let someone else manage the fermenting and racking activities and then all you need to do is bottle the wine.  As I said we did this for a year or two until Papa Thirsty admitted that he really didn’t like the wine that much and he’d rather buy his favourite brands. 

After that extended tangent, I’ll get back to bottling the Brown Ale.  2 days before we were supposed to fly back to Canada to celebrate Christmas with our family, I decided I had enough free time to bottle.  I added 67g of corn sugar to a small sauce pan with a half litre of water and brought it to a boil.  While waiting for that to cool I pulled a sample of the Brown Ale to get a final gravity reading and found that after 5 weeks the gravity was 1.018.  This means the final beer should be around 7.7% alcohol by volume and may be on the sweet side.  The corn sugar solution was added to the bottling bucket and the Brown Ale was siphoned on top so that it mixed well.  From this 20 half litre bottles were filled and boxed up.

All in all the bottling was really easy.  I fully expected to spill half of the beer on the counter or something to fall into the bucket.  This whole process has been too easy despite the mistake with the boil pot, so I’m fully expecting lightening to strike or something.  This is the very first time I’ve tried to do this, in a country where I’m not really confident with the language, with ingredients that are not usual. 

Showcasing GF Engineer's new label - Christmas gift from one of the best Brother in Law's around!

Tasting

Let’s move forward in time about 3 weeks or so.  We arrived home from out Christmas Holidays with the families and I had about 3 days at home before it was back to England for another work trip.  Saturday before I flew out I put a couple of the Brown Ales in the fridge and decided to give them a try. 

I popped the top and poured one into a glass.  A nice, frothy, white head formed as I poured the beer, about 3cm thick.  It didn’t last very long but left some nice lacing on the side of the glass.  The most surprising thing about the beer is how beautifully clear it looked.  It was a beautiful dark gold in colour and crystal clear.   I don’t think the colour is appropriate for brown ale but I’m more than happy with it.

The smell of the beer is sweet and nutty with a little bit of the hops coming through.  The first taste is sweet.  There isn’t enough hop bitterness to balance the sweetness.  I don’t think the grains come through much, but then I haven’t done a beer with only rice syrup to compare.  There is no hint of alcohol in the taste, which I fully expected.

Overall this beer is quaffable and more than a little dangerous.  If the calculated alcohol content is true, then it’s close to 8% and doesn’t taste like it.  I think this is going into the re-brew pile but with adjustments to the hop schedule to help balance it out.  I’m also going to put a few at the back of the shelf and see how it ages, maybe if I’m lucky the hops with make a reappearance.

This was a good way to start 2013.

Enjoy!

Photos courtesy of Mrs. Thirsty

Bottle Day and Tasting – Fuldauer Burnt Honey Winter Apple Cyser

So this was the first attempt at brewing and I’ve been letting it condition and age.  Way back at the end of November I transferred this to secondary.  The idea was to get the Cyser off the yeast and keep it from adding strange flavours.  The hydrometer couldn’t give me a reading, the scale only went to 0 Plato and the sample was off the chart.  Moving forward with the experiment, I took a quick taste of the hydrometer sample.  It was very tart and sour, so the only thing I could hope for is some friendly bacteria providing a Malolactic Fermentation.  Malolactic fermentation is a process by which the natural Malic Acid is converter to Lactic Acid.  Malic acid is a very tart, green apple tasting acid; on the other hand Lactic Acid is softer tasting, more of a rich, buttery flavour.  The more general information I’ve read says that the Malolactic fermentation will reduce the acid taste by about half.  When transferred to secondary, there was about 3L of Cyser left.

At the end of January, almost two months after transferring to secondary I decided to bottle the Cyser.  The main driver for this was I wanted to put something new in the carboy, but also, it would be nice to finish the job.  I had two 1L flip top bottles that one of the Hungry Brothers had brought for us from his favourite local brew pub in Berlin.  When he brought them they were full of apple wine, though it didn’t last long, so I thought it only fair that I refill them with Apple Cyser.  This only added to 2L so I cleaned out a couple 500ml flip top beer bottles, figuring I could put what was left in those.  Bottling was really simple, since this is a still Cyser, I don’t need to add any priming sugar, and I racked directly from the carboy into the bottles.  I filled the two big bottles and one full beer bottle but only about half of the second beer bottle, the rest was pulp and yeast lees sitting on the bottom of the carboy.  Basically, this left me with 2.75L of finished product.  I put the two big bottles back in the wine rack and stuck the small full bottle at the back of the liquor cabinet, the half full bottle went into the fridge.

A couple hours later I poured myself a glass of the Cyser from the fridge.  It was still a little cloudy, but a very pale yellow, almost white.  It smells awesome!!  Like fresh apple sauce or caramel apples.  The first taste is a crisp tartness with a finishing sweetness like caramel.  Malolactic Fermentation definitely happened, since it was nowhere near as sour as when it was first racked.  Even Mrs. Thirsty liked it, and she really prefers sweet sparkling cider over still.  We had our neighbour over for drinks the other day, so I put the small bottle in the fridge.  I wanted to get her opinion, since she was actively involved in getting me the apples.  A month on and it is still a little cloudy, but the wonderful apple aroma and taste are still there.  Our neighbour thought it was great and told me that there are more apples available if I want them.

All in all I’m going to chalk this up as a success.  I’ve two bottles of Cyser that I’m going to hang onto until the summer to enjoy when the heat comes.  Till then I think it’s time to try my hand at making Mead.

Enjoy!

Photos Courtesy of Mrs. Thirsty