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