A Wine Drinker's Beerfest

I got a call from Dr. Tom requesting help drinking his first shipment from a beer of the month gift he got for Christmas. Obviously I cannot turn my back on a friend who needs help, so I picked up some beer and we had a mini beerfest. The other participant in the tasting, Abby (Mrs. Dr. Tom) is a big wine fan and not so much into beer. I wrote down some of her reactions so we could get the wine drinkers perspective on the beer.

On to the beer...

Saranac black and tan: The smell of this beer immediately reminded me of Guinness. With the beer of the month package, Tom got tasting notes on each of the beers. Normally I don't pick up on a lot of the flavors described, but Tom and I both immediately agreed on a strange one: apple peel.
Abby: " I am having trouble taking this seriously"

Choc Beer Miner Mishap: This is a black lager, a style that I rarely drink. Also I had never heard of the brewery before and I was quite impressed. It had a coffee and chocolate in the nose. The taste had the type of bitterness you expect from a pilsner and a smoke quality in the after taste.
Abby:"It smells burnt." "I just burped up the other beer, it tasted good." She preferred the black lager to the black and tan.

Choc Beer Basement Batch: This is choc beer's pale ale. Each of us had a different take on the nose.
Me: orange citrus, Tom: pine and citrus, Abby: lemon cleaner
The flavor is less intense than the aroma, but was pleasant and not very harsh or bitter. Tasted a little like grapefruit. Abby disagreed about the bitterness and kept sticking out her tongue trying to rid it of the bitterness or something.

Harpoon UFO Pale Ale: This is an unfiltered beer and it is crazy cloudy. It smelled kind of like honey and according to Tom, a little bit of cinnamon.
Abby:" It smells sweet." (I of course told her that sweet is not a smell, and we may have gotten into an argument...)

At this point we were playing a card game and didn't really review the next two beers, Saranac IPA and Sly Fox 113 IPA. Abby did describe the Sly Fox as smelling exactly like a Cannu Chenin Blanc (a wine). Crazy.

Winter Break Beerfest

My friends and I were able to gather some beer from all over the place over break, so we decided to have a world tour beerfest. We had beer from India, Costa Rica, Germany, Belgium and USA (I bet you can guess which ones we were most excited about). Here is a quick list of the beers we had:

Imperial (Costa Rica)
Kingfisher (India)
Gaffel Kolsch (Germany)
Landbier Reigel er Bier (Germany)
Rothaus Pils (Germany)
Becks Dark (Germany)
Hacker Pschor (Germany)
Anchor Steam (USA)
Bluegrass Brewing's Nut Brown (USA)
Lagunitas Pale Ale (USA)
Straffe Hendrick (Belgium)
Corsendonk Tripel (Belgium)
Grimbergen Blonde (Belgium)
Victory 12 (USA)
Abbey Affligen Noel (Belgium)

I doubt anyone wants to read reviews of all those beers (I also doubt I took good enough notes to supply reviews) so I will just give some thoughts/quotes from the evening.

Upon tasting the Imperial: "Booo!" -Greg

My favorite of the Germans was the hacker Pshor (a dark wisse beer). Nice apples and caramel/molasses. Greg reminds everyone that he doesn't like wheat beers.

The coolest beer of the night was the Bluegrass Brewing Nut Brown. I normally don't like browns but this one was really good. Smelled like cocoa and tasted like peanuts at first, then more chocolaty towards the end. I will seek out more brews from Bluegrass.
http://www.bbcbrew.com/

Crowd favorite: Abbey Affligen Noel. Again, another style that doesnt get me excited but the beer was good. Dubbed the "best brun in belgium" by greg. The spices jumped out when I opened the bottle but kind of dissapeared while drinking. I enjoyed the fact that the spices didnt overpower the beer, since beers like that just taste weird.

Overall, a great night of beer (with some monopoly there at the end). I highly recommend this style of beer tastings: just have people bring some random beer, drink and discuss (monopoly is optional).

Cheers!

Las Cervesas de Costa Rica

Just got back from a trip down to Costa Rica for my friend's wedding. I got to see some monkeys, I learned to surf and .... I drank BEER! I didn't know much about Costa Rican beer other than there is beer brewed in Costa Rica, and the most popular one is Imperial. As long as I knew there would be beer, I was happy.Beers that I tried:

• Imperial
• Bavaria Dark
• Bavaria Gold
• Pilsen
• Bavaria 1460
• Mystery beer at wedding (maybe a bavaria beer? Can anyone tell from the picture?)

Unless the beer at the wedding was Bavaria Light, this is the only one I know of that I did not drink.


My first beer was Imperial. It had been a long travel day, it was hot and humid and I needed a beer. Fortunately, Imperial did not disappoint in its refreshment. I expected the same stale flavors that you get with mass produced beer at home, but there were none. Unfortunately, there was not much else for me to get excited about with this beer. By the end of the beer, I had no real desire to have another one.

The next day, at the bar by the pool, I found some variety. There were the Bavaria beers (Dark, Light and Gold) as well as the Pilsen. They all tasted a little different but there were no flavors that really stood out. The Gold did have a nice sweetness to it (Carolyn said it tasted like honey) but by the time I finished, I didn't feel the need to order another one. The Dark was nice, Carolyn and Mom seemed to like this one the best. Nothing exciting about it, but I would drink it over a Yuengling if I had the choice. The pilsen just tasted bad, nothing more to say about it.

Overall, there was nothing exciting about the beer. However, most of it tasted fine and were decent go to beers for the trip. I stuck with the Imperial and the Bavaria Dark. Of course the other option is to just drink pina coladas made with the incredibly ripe pineapples they have down there. I mean, thats what I have been told...there is no evidence that I would partake in that non-beer beverage...

Imperial Stout Update

I haven't posted in a while so I figured I should give some kind of status update on the stout. A week or two of fermentation got the gravity down from 1.075 to 1.032 and most visible activity had stopped. We left it over thanksgiving break to finish up but it just stayed at 1.032! I expect the stuck fermentation was caused by:

(1) Not enough oxygenation before pitching the yeast; we didn't shake it or anything

(2) Too low yeast pitch rate; only pitched 1 packet of dry yeast and maybe should have added another

Since I had an extra packet of yeast (for a future brewing of an all cascade IPA), we transfered to secondary and threw in more yeast. The gravity samples have all tasted fine although they were very sweet.

Its been just over a week since we repitched and Greg checked the gravity last night...

1.012!...he thinks...Apparently he is not too confident with his hydrometer checking skills. At first he sent a text saying "1.025" but then called and said 1.010 or 1.012. At any rate, it looks like we will be bottling next week.

Russian Imperial Honey Stout

Saturday was a very exciting brew day with the debut of my first mash tun!

This 5 gallon beverage cooler is the beginning of moving away from extract syrup and towards all grain brewing.

I’ll keep using the syrup for the bulk of my fermentable sugars since I only got about 50% efficiency on this first mash. But that’s ok because we added a pound and a half of honey to make up for it. I doubt the honey flavor will come through the dark malts and all the hops in this recipe, but it will up the alcohol a bit. This is my biggest beer yet, so I have no idea how long it will take before its drinkable (hopefully it takes less than 6 months to condition).

Mash:

5 lb British mild ale/stout malt (2.5^o L)

1 lb Crystal (90^o L)

0.5 lb Vienna malt

1 lb Chocolate malt (British)

1 lb oat flakes

0.5 roasted barley

I added in 4 gallons (half bottled water, half tap water) of water (165^o F?) and the mixture stabilized at 151^o F. After an hour, I added a half gallon of boiling water to thin out the mash and up the temperature a bit, and then started draining into the brew pot. I did a batch sparge with 165^o F water (forgot to write down the volume, 2 gallons?) to make sure I got as much sugar out as possible. The gravity of this was around 1.026.

Boil Schedule:

Bittering hops (60 minutes): 1 oz Chinook plugs @14% alpha acid

Flavoring hops (30 minutes): 2 oz Northern Brewer pellets @ 6% alpha acid

For the last 15 minutes of the boil, I added 4 lbs Alexanders Pale Extract (liquid), 1.5 lbs of Greg’s honey (Doylestown wild flower?) and about 2 tsp of yeast nutrients.

Aroma hops (10 minutes): 1 oz Cascade plugs @ 8.7% alpha acid

O.G. 1.075

The boil may have lasted longer than 60 minutes, so this may be a pretty bitter brew. We're at the upper end of the bitter scale with about 100 IBUs and at the low end of the gravity scale. Should be an interesting beer.

Waiting for good results

I finally tried the red ale turned amber ale that I brewed in early October. I brewed on the 3rd and did not taste until the 30th. In this case, waiting longer to drink the beer turned out the be a good idea. Nick and Greg actually kegged the beer a week or so after brewing and panicked when they tasted it. The descriptions I got included "tastes wine-like," "over extracted grains," and "kind of funky." I was kind of bummed that it looked like a failed brew, but I thought if we waited a bit longer, the beer would figure itself out and get to tasting right. Fortunately that turned out to be the case, and from looking around on the internet and re-reading some of my old brewing notes, it seems to be the trend. The longer you let the beer sit, the better. As Alton Brown always says: Your patience will be rewarded. As far as I can tell, the more stuff you throw into a beer during brewing, the longer it takes for all the flavors to get sorted out and settle into a palatable beverage.

Anyway, I tasted the beer on Friday without making any tasting notes but here is my memory of the beer:

It poured kind of a murky brown, probably because I forgot to add the irish moss and no one wanted to experiment with using egg whites as a fining agent. Oh well. Now we know officially that it is an amber ale and not a red ale. The head was pretty creamy with small bubbles. The retention was good but not great. The smell was not very strong, I think the keggerator is a bit too cold for this dark of a beer. The taste was mostly the toasted malts and it finished with a nice bitterness. The bitterness was a cross from what you would expect from the hops plus the burnt grains. I liked it. There was not a great hop presence, but every now and then I could taste the hop pellets. The only strange thing was the smell as I drank the beer. Once the glass was about half empty, I could really get my nose in there. The smell was weird. There was a weird fruit (cherry maybe?) and a little bit of funk. Maybe this will disappear, maybe not.

Over all, I am pleased with the way it turned out. I just need to keep in mind the impatient people brewing with me. Either I need to find beers that are quick from grain to glass, or convince them to wait for the beer to be ready before drinking.

New Brewery Location

I found a place to brew in State College. My apartment is not really conducive to brewing, so I head over to my friend Greg's place. He has a keggerator and a nice flat concrete area outside for the turkey fryer. We have brewed two beers there: the first was a clone beer from a kit bought by another guy, Nick, and the second was a new take on my Mac's Irish Red recipe. The clone beer turned out well, even though Greg's house was ridiculously hot and the fermenter went a little crazy. The new irish red (which may turn out to be an amber) is fermenting now. The wort tasted great so I am pretty excited.

Nick, Greg and I funneling the beer into the carboy. Nick seems to approve.

Amber Ale/Irish Red mystery beer:
Grains Steeped @ ~165 F for about 30 minutes

• 1 lb Caramel Malt
• 1 lb US Breiss Aromatic 21 L mildly kilned (strong malt aroma +deep color)
• 1/4 lb chocolate malt
• 1/4 lb vienna malt

Malt Extract:

• 5.4 lb (a 4lb can and a 1.4 lb pound can) of Alexanders Pale Extract
• The lid from the small can (Greg was hung over and dropped it in...oops)

I also tried cold steeping about 1/4 lb of the chocolate malt in a gallon of water because someone told me it would give a nice red color. It didn't turn red, but I added this water anyway.

Hops:

• Bittering (60 minutes): 1 oz Perle (Gr) 8.3% alpha acid
• 30 minutes: 1 oz Santium (US) 6.1% alpha acid
• Aromatic (5 minutes): 1 oz Tettnang (Gr) 5.1% alpha acid

Yeast: Safale S-04 dry ale yeast (it was in a blue packet)
O.G. 1.048

I didn't add any irish moss or other fining agent, this will be a murky beer.