Cascade and amber light early tastings

I took a 6-pk of the cascade home last Friday and threw 3 in the fridge. Numbers 4 and 5 were thrown in on Monday. This would correspond to 5 and 8 days in the bottle respectively. I knew they were young, but I was looking forward to sharing my first partial mash with family. Wellllll, they needed another few days (3 actually). Keep in mind, this beer was dry-hopped on an oz of untreated Cascade cones for 4 weeks. The aroma was ridiculous. That was the biggest problem with the young beers. Carb was light but present, flavors were as to be expected, but you had to hold your breath to get to the beer in your glass. The aroma was good, but just too much there.

Ok, well, Sean said he was cracking a bottle tonight so I threw number 6 in the freezer when I got home from Peoples (hey, it's thursday). Just 3 more days at room temp has tempered this beer into its true potential. The aroma is present in the perfect amount, and is still excellent. The flavor is balanced and light. If I did this beer again, I'd actually get more aggressive on the malt side and leave the hop bill alone (yes, you read that right...and no, I haven't gone insane). The malts just don't have any complexity. They just stand up and say "hey, I'm a beer!" then subside into the Cascade-y goodness. Yes, it's meant to be a beer that highlights the varied flavors/aromas of Cascade hops (3 additions plus dry-hop), but I'd still prefer a little more beer-ness to it.

That being said, I really want to mail a current bottle back to MI with a note attached saying "This is what I was supposed to taste like." I think one more week and this beer will be in its prime.

Now, the amber light. When I got the original gravity reading I was devastated. This was the first time I'd tried something brewing and had it go wrong. This was the first not-kit beer I've ever brewed. The first beers from the pigs didn't help my self esteem either. Sweet sweet sweet. And that awful finish...gross. Well, got back to Lafayette yesterday, which would mean the pig's been chillin for 10ish days. Poured a pint and threw it back. OH MY GOOD LORD. It's aged into a good beer! Yeah, it's still 3% but whatever. Beer is not about just getting drunk, that's just an occasional happy consequence. Beer is history, variety, skill and experimentation. The malt flavors are significantly more complex...not just sweet. The finish did eventually dry out, without being overly hoppy, which is exactly what I aimed for.

I think my next beer is going to be a Rye-IPA. It's unfortunate that I'm doing this so soon after Peoples came out with a Rye-APA, but it's been rattling around my head for a while. I need to actually sit down and come up with a plan for this brewing experiment I'm doing. On one hand, I enjoy the challenge of brewing to a style, but twisting it just a touch. On the other hand, there are a lot of styles where I don't like the average commercial examples. If I don't like the commercial examples, I'm not exactly dying to try my homebrew attempts. The beer drinker in me is just fine doing umpteen million batches of McLuckey Ale and developing a partial mash equivalent to SeaWard...but the experimentalist in me would get bored really fast.

-J

Figured it out

So, had a couple surprises with the tire change that kept me in town an extra day. Decided to brew.

Boil is coming on as I type, but I took a pre-boil gravity...1.048!! Right on target for the amber. Finally figured out my issues...my thermometer reads way low in the mash...like 8-10 deg low. I just let this one do what it wanted, pretty much like the cascade, which turned out well. Got it to "160" in the cool parts and just turned the heat off and put the lid on. Think I finally got this partial mash figured out.

Boom baby.

I have consumed a legend.

Yesterday I drank a legend. A small sample of Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout. It is a revision of their famous coffee stout (Breakfast Stout), emphasizing chocolate notes along with the big robust coffee flavor. It is then aged in barrels that were used once to age bourbon, then found a second life aging maple syrup. The final beer was 10.4% and sold in 750 ml bottles which were impossible to find. The STATE of Indiana got 40 cases, with Tippecanoe county getting 2 (case of 750's is only 12). Midland county got 2...BOTTLES. These beers are listing and selling on eBay for $90-120 a bottle...and Sean paid retail for his.

$200 for 2 here!

There were a few novice beer drinkers at the Peoples bar, who were very confused as to what was happening (and really loved my growler). Sean hands me the bottle and the first thing I do is post a picture of it on facebook. When he hands me my snifter I cradled it like a Faberge egg. I spent several minutes just holding it and smelling the glorious black concoction from Grand Rapids...allowing it to warm up closer to room temperature.

The smell was epic. Oak, coffee, chocolate, maple syrup and alcohol, all reporting front and center. The flavor did not disappoint. I think the most complex beer I'd ever had to this point was Bell's 10K...with all 100+ ingredients. CBS might have 10 ingredients and it put 10K to shame in terms of complexity. Every sip was different as I tried to focus on different parts of the flavor profile. Mouthfeel, carbonation, everything was as an Imperial Stout should be. I will definitely be more aggressive next time this beer comes out. That being said, I may be graduated before this beast shows again...at which point maybe I'll snag an eBay bottle.

So, my first growler brew was interesting. Got mediocre conversion, then had an adventure trying to boil down. My goal was 0.75 gallons post boil. I ran the numbers on my preboil and had like 1.5 gallons...crap. Gravity at this point was like 1.05 After about 45 mins of boiling I noticed it was getting low and threw the hops in. After 45 mins of the hop boil I noticed it was getting REALLY low. I grabbed a sample and took a gravity...1.15!!! Killed the hop boil and filtered some top up water to get me to 0.75ish gal...gravity fell to 1.08, which is lower than I wanted. Cooled and went to fill the growlers. Remembered about an hour into this process that I forgot to account for how much water was stuck in the grains. n00b mistake right there.

Well, found that a size 6 stopper does work in a growler, but with the hole drilled the walls are a bit flimsy. Tried to put the airlock into the stopper after putting it in the growler...shoved stopper into the growler. Dump wort back into (hopefully still sanitized) boil kettle, sani some pliers, retrieve stopper, sani stopper, dump the beer back into growler, put assembled airlock-stopper into growler. That was about 2 mins. Guess who won't be surprised to see that growler get infected? After that fiasco the second growler went much easier. Some signs of fermentation at the moment, and both are going the same rate, so maybe I got lucky. There's a couple pieces of equipment I need to get to make the growler setup go easier. All that said, a beer was successfully made, and it should be ~8%.

The Cascade pale ale was fantastic going into bottles. Once again, dry hopping on whole leaf is the way to go. So much so that as soon as I bottled that beer I grabbed two, drove down to Peoples and offered them to Sean in exchange for another oz of that whole leaf Cascade (in case I do brew the new Amber, I might do 1/2 and 1/2 5 min and dry). I may dry-hop every beer I make from here on out.

The Amber light turned out ok after cooling down and carbing in the pig. Not a great beer, but not a bad beer for sitting here on a Monday night writing this up and watchin' football.

-James

various updates

So, after cooking for two x-mas parties week before last, the kitchen wasn't ready for brewery duty last weekend. I did bottle the Amber light yesterday, bottling cascade today (just enough bottles), and brewing the RIS tonight.

I pulled the first couple oz of Amber light off of the pig...no carb yet. The flavor is all over the place. Very sweet initially, with a little hop character in the middle and a pretty gnarly finish. After a bit of conditioning hopefully the finish will mellow out. The body is like water, pretty much what I expect for 2.8%.

Yesterday was People's 2nd anniversary bash and they rolled out their 2nd AnniversaRYE pale ale. It's just that, a sessionable 4.9% Rye pale ale. It is very good, with the rye just adding a little spice to a good pale. Perfect body for 4.9% makes for a beer you can down pint after pint over good conversation.

Today Sean is going to break out his CBS at 3:30, expect details on that later.

-J

Seaward PDI pts

Seaward definitely picked up a couple PDI pts at the McLuck holiday get together last night. First of which was just awful timing. I had just won a very close Wii sports resort sword fighting match and threw a fist pump...just as Bossman was leaving the party. It literally was "YEAH, oh bye Scott." Yup...starting my unemployed career tomorrow morning I bet. Second PDI was telling Zach to bring Manhattan fixin's. I am not a smart human being. Now to recover my car.

Bottling today at some point. Also gonna brew, dunno if I'm going to do the Amber or my mini Russian Imperial Stout. Probably the RIS since the Amber light is what I'm bottling...straight from the primary. After bottling the Amber light I'll inventory the bottles and find a way to bottle the Cascade Pale (It's been dryhopping 3 weeks now).

Had my first bottle failure last night. Reusing bottles does run the risk of a top failure...and this one failed straight into my finger.
-J