Joe brought me a beer from the northwest that he happened to find at Payless (Kroger in every other state). The Widmer Bros' brewing Spiced IPA. After pouring it into a glass I opened up their website to do some research.
First thing I noticed are a couple beers I thought were my idea :(. They have a raspberry Russian imperial stout, and a citra based light summer ale (similar in idea to McLuckey ale).
This beer is a pretty standard IPA brewed with some unusual spices. The list includes assam black tea, ginger, cinnamon, clove, star anise, black pepper, and cardamom. The hope profile does feature some Galaxy hops, leading to outstanding drinkability.
The odor is very confusing. I'm really not a fan of the smell. The tea, ginger and cinnamon kind of dominate, but don't mix well with the hoppy undertones. The start of the flavor is equally confused, but not bad, I kinda like the flavor. The finish of the beer is pretty damned good.
Overall, I enjoy this beer a lot, would I buy a case? Probs not, but it'd be nice to have a 6pack on hand for those times I'm feeling like I want something that isn't just out of the box, but laughs at the box the other beers rode in on. I would love a little more maltiness to better balance that first wallop of flavor.
-James
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Skill # 1 million: Yeast washing.
The Rye IPA is essentially gone. It was a great beer out of the pig...really couldn't believe how well it turned out. The bottles were a little hit or miss. The Redwine infection which I seem to always have really took a hit out of the hop profile. Considering the fact that the witch was only in the bottles I'm thinking that the problem was with the yeast, cleaning or sanitizing.
I brewed an Irish dry stout a couple weeks back. Missed again on my gravity which is really starting to piss me off. I'm going to take next month to upgrade my system and try a simple American Pale.
The low gravity gave me an opportunity to learn a skill I've been wanting to try....washing the yeast. This is a procedure where you harvest the yeast slurry from a batch of beer, wash out the used hops/residual grains (known as 'trub') and propagate the yeast to use in a future batch. Since the stout used only 1 oz of hops, and was low gravity, it was a perfect beer to harvest from. One rule of reusing yeast is to always pitch "up." This means, always pitch the yeast into a beer with a higher gravity than the beer they were harvested from. General rule of thumb is to only use around 3 generations of yeast, else you run the risk of rampant mutations and weird flavors.
I racked the stout into secondary, which left behind a beautiful slurry of Wyeast Irish Dry Ale yeast. I put in a little water, shook it up and poured into a sanitized, clear growler. I let it settle overnight and poured off the supernatent (liquid on top). Put in a little water and shook it real good again and let it settle. This time the supernatent was pretty light in color, so I went ahead and put in ~1/8 cup of sanitized water, shook it up and poured this into an erlenmeyer with ~1/4 cup of sugar/water/yeast nutrient. That was this morning. At this moment the erlenmeyer is fizzing along really well, with 1 bubble per 5 sec out of the airlock. Once growth levels off I'll freeze the slurry, wait a few days and see if the frozen yeast can be reincarnated. The only down side is that this means my next beer will have to be a british/irish style to fit the yeast profile.
-James
I brewed an Irish dry stout a couple weeks back. Missed again on my gravity which is really starting to piss me off. I'm going to take next month to upgrade my system and try a simple American Pale.
The low gravity gave me an opportunity to learn a skill I've been wanting to try....washing the yeast. This is a procedure where you harvest the yeast slurry from a batch of beer, wash out the used hops/residual grains (known as 'trub') and propagate the yeast to use in a future batch. Since the stout used only 1 oz of hops, and was low gravity, it was a perfect beer to harvest from. One rule of reusing yeast is to always pitch "up." This means, always pitch the yeast into a beer with a higher gravity than the beer they were harvested from. General rule of thumb is to only use around 3 generations of yeast, else you run the risk of rampant mutations and weird flavors.
I racked the stout into secondary, which left behind a beautiful slurry of Wyeast Irish Dry Ale yeast. I put in a little water, shook it up and poured into a sanitized, clear growler. I let it settle overnight and poured off the supernatent (liquid on top). Put in a little water and shook it real good again and let it settle. This time the supernatent was pretty light in color, so I went ahead and put in ~1/8 cup of sanitized water, shook it up and poured this into an erlenmeyer with ~1/4 cup of sugar/water/yeast nutrient. That was this morning. At this moment the erlenmeyer is fizzing along really well, with 1 bubble per 5 sec out of the airlock. Once growth levels off I'll freeze the slurry, wait a few days and see if the frozen yeast can be reincarnated. The only down side is that this means my next beer will have to be a british/irish style to fit the yeast profile.
-James
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