Black Dragons Tasting #1

Black Dragons is one of the 5 variations of the Here Be Dragons! Old ale/ Scotch ale hybrid attempt.  This variant was bottled with vanilla extract, coffee and a pinch of salt and pepper.

Appearance- This one explodes out of the bottle furiously and in the glass continues to have carbonation bubbles flying through it.  The body is a solid amber and is extremely cloudy with a large head that fades fairly quickly.  Looks pretty awful honestly.

Smell- Yeast, caramel, honey and a bit of an off medicinal phenol and vegetal character highlight the nose.  There's some good stuff going on here, but not all of it plays nice.

Taste- This one has improved in some ways since I first tried it a few months ago but has lost some of its spice.  The resulting beer is a caramel and honey taste with a bit of bitterness on the tail end and just a bit of peppery spice and alcohol.  The coffee, very strong when I first tried it, has faded to a background note barely noticeable in the complexity.  The off tasting phenol occasionally creeps into the mix but is not nearly as abrasive or present as when the beer was young.  That off flavor was also present in my attempt at a brown ale but has also largely faded from that beer as well.

Mouthfeel- After letting this sit for a couple minutes to let the mad carbonation relax some this one actually drinks fairly well.  The carbonation still seems a bit high with the mouthfeel a nice heavy syrupy character I was hoping for.

Overall/Drinkability- This beer is fairly strong in a lot of ways keeping down the drinkability to one or two.  The appearance and difficulty in pouring without spilling is also a big down note. On the taste side it has cleaned up pretty well but I miss the vanilla/coffee/pepper character that was there originally. While I hope to review the other HBD! beers this one probably came out the best and the others are all nearly identical (due to a strong malt bill to begin with, the over carbonation, that phenolic off taste and under spicing).

Chicago Beer Tour

A few months back I went on a month long business training trip to St. Charles Illinois.  While there is pretty much nothing in St. Charles itself (though the liquor store in-town that I took a 5 mile hike to had a very nice selection) it is only about an hour's train ride outside of Chicago.

I had never been to Chicago, or the Midwest for that matter, and didn't know what to expect.  While I won't get into all of my time spent in Illinois I must talk about the Chicago Beer Experience, a walking beer tour of the city.  While I was hesitant to shell out the money for it (my girlfriend Alyssa flew in for a weekend and suggested it due to it's great reviews) I gave in and sought out the chance to see Chicago with beer goggles.

The very nice Domaine du Page by Two Brothers at a very nice little bottle shop, one of the 4 stops on the tour

The tour is awesome and I highly recommend it.  Your tour guide/server for the trip is Bruce, a former lawyer turned food tour guide turned entrepreneur who was brilliant enough to start "the experience" himself.  While Bruce has his flaws (he isn't always the most knowledgeable source on beer) he is a really nice guy and great guide with a real love for beer and Chicago and he blends history, jokes, info on the brewing process, a wide range of beers, bacon, brewery facts and charm into an entertaining few hours.  I also enjoyed that the tour is in a less traveled part of Chicago giving a neighborhood experience that most might not experience otherwise.  If I had to recommend to someone how to spend a weekend in Chicago I would say to have a day doing touristy stuff (Willis Tower, magnificent mile, millennium park, etc...) and spend a nice chunk of the other with Bruce on his tour.

Irish Red - First all-grain

I decided to make an all grain Irish red to follow my Russian imperial stout. The idea was to get a moderately sweet and malty beer with a fairly low abv. I quite like Smithwicks and it's the type of beer that I can drink any time and have a few of or be content with just one.

Because this was designed to be a fairly small beer I felt it would be a good chance to do my first all grain recipe and came up with the recipe as follows: 

% LB OZ MALT OR FERMENTABLE PPG °L
60% 5 0 Warminster Floor-Malted Maris Otter 35 5
24% 2 0 Briess Ashburne Mild Malt 34 5
6% 0 8 Carared 35 20
6% 0 8 Simpsons Medium Crystal 34 55
2% 0 3 Roasted Barley 25 300
2% 0 2 Sugar, Table (Sucrose) 46 1
Batch size: 5.0 gallons

Hops

USE TIME OZ VARIETY FORM AA
boil 60 mins 1.0 Willamette pellet 4.9
boil 20 mins 0.5 Fuggles pellet 4.2
Boil: 4.0 avg gallons for 60 minutes

Yeast
Irish Ale Yeast

 Like my partial mashes I chose to do the brew in a bag method (BIAB).  Being my first all-grain it's not a big surprise that this one drastically missed efficiency expectations and my OG which should've been 1.044 (with 75% extraction) hit just 1.032 (an extraction below 55%).  This is probably due to a number of reasons including too little mash water, not sparging and inaccurate thermometer readings.

Despite having some malt extract on hand it was an easy decision for me to just stick with the original plan and see how this one turns out.  As is the results may actually be in the range of an ordinary bitter albeit there might be a bit too much roast and the Irish ale yeast would be non-traditional. On the plus side this one should be low calorie, super drinkable and the hops might shine through more in the low OG than they would have had I hit my target, giving me more fuggle character that I look forward to. At worst this was a learning experience and a check mark for one of my goals for the year (all-grain batch).

In the future I plan to buy a better thermometer, mash longer and actually sparge.  I had planned to sparge this batch but began to make a big mess and gave up on that idea.

About 8 lbs of grain and just 1.5 oz. hops.

Less than 12 hours later it's bubbling away
in front of the Imperial Assassin,
doesn't look like it will be as red as I hoped

Brew and Blog Schedule

I've found myself struggling to post as regularly as I would like to this blog for a number of reasons that range from too many ideas to too few. In the end I have decided that sticking to a semi-strict schedule and streamlining what types of posts I write should be the best way forward. The schedule which I have decided to use is:

• Every Monday: 1 post on my own homebrew. This may be:
•  A recipe
• A tasting
• A review of equipment/process
• Other goings on in my brew life (e.g. Competitions, meetings, experiments, etc...)

• One other day per week: 1 post on brewing in general. This may be:
• A discussion of styles
• An analysis of processes
• Commercial brewery reviews
• Brewery tour notes
• Beer magazine/book reviews
• Rants/complaints
• Any general ideas or observations that don't seem to fall into things I am actually brewing/have brewed but might relate to homebrewing, the brewing industry or this blog in general.
• Other Changes I hope to make include:
• More updates as I move the beer from grain to glass
• More links to find reviews from recipes and vice versa
• Including full recipes here in addition to Beercalculus

With this set schedule I will have a better way to give the types of posts I want to for both myself and others to learn from and should improve the focus towards the end goal: Good Beer!

Imperial Licorice Stout

To me the best Imperial Stouts have a noticeable, if not assertive, licorice quality.  This is very evident in Heavy Seas' Peg Leg which is one of my favorites of the style.  As a black licorice junky who not only gladly drinks straight Jagermeister but also eats the black jelly beans that no one else likes, I wanted to bring this flavor to the front of a brew.

For Imperial Assassin, my take on an imperial licorice stout, I planned to use licorice root in the boil to give a decent licorice flavor.  Near the end of the boil I noticed that the flavor of the root had not come through nearly as strongly as I was looking for and added in a stick of Brewer's Licorice in hopes of increasing the flavor.  I plan to leave the beer in primary for one month before secondarying on Jagermeister soaked oak.  If the flavor is still not where I want it at that point I plan to use fresh anise seed at bottling to bring a bit of the classic licorice candy flavor through.  It might be hard to hold off this long on this beer but I hope I'm rewarded for it.

Updates:

2.15.2012 - It's been one month to the day since I brewed and I finally checked the final gravity on this bad boy and it's down lower than I had expected at 1.017! That means that despite missing my OG it's still about 8.5% ABV.  More importantly it tastes amazing: raisins, chocolate, coffee, campfire, a mild tingly sweetness (I suspect the licorice root) and a bit of warming alcohol but not hot at all.  On the downside it does seem a bit thin and dry (probably due to the high attenuation shown by the FG) but hopefully with some carbonation it will come out creamy and delicious. I also received all my brewing supplies so I boiled the hungarian medium-plus toast oak cubes and added them to a jar with Jaegermeister in preparation for the secondary.  Those things smell HEAVENLY, they smell the way the best red wines taste (not surprising as most red wines are oaked). Despite this being my new favorite smell in the world I am hesitant to oak the entire batch and risk ruining the beer with two ingredients (oak and Jaeger) that I have not used before and, despite my plan, might not mend well with the other pieces.  I'm letting the oak sit in the Jaeger for a day or two while I decide but at the least half of the batch will be on the ounce of oak (if only 2.5 gallons are on the ounce there might be a stronger oak flavor for better or worse).

2.18.2012 - Bottled one half of the batch (one case worth) with .8 oz. Sugar. Other half was racked to secondary with oak and Jaegermeister.

1/17/2015 - Final Tasting.  A little too sweet and lacking in roast, but otherwise absolutely delicious.

5/11/2017 - Found a bottle of the 12b version that I didn't know existed. A little strange and unbalanced due to the licorice root unfermentable sugars showing a bit. Fortunately not oxidized and certainly not bad. Hard to tell if the beer has gotten worse after 5+ years or my tastes have just developed but it seemed 'meh' at best.

Birthday Witbier

For my great girlfriend (and sometimes brewing assistant) Alyssa I attempted to make a clone of her favorite beer: Allagash White.  To me Allagash has made the quintessential wit, orangey and peppery though not overly so with just the right amount of bitter orange, coriander, wheat and yeast characteristics.  In my attempt to copy this beer I followed a recipe in Extreme Brewing that comes from Allagash with the only changes being using only Tettnanger hops.  While I don't doubt Allagash's abilities I highly doubt the recipe as the resulting brew has almost no flavor of spice or orange.  When realizing this at bottling I decided to make a spice tea with bitter orange, sweet orange and coriander. The end result is an easily drinkable beer but still not nearly as strong in the flavor profile as Allagash. Next time I plan to use a full ounce of crushed coriander (rather than a quarter) and probably at least half an ounce of both sweet and bitter orange peel (or fresh).  The brew has gone over well enough with everyone who has tried it and inspired me to plan Drye Wit a wit style beer made with both wheat and rye.

Updates and 2012 plans

Been a long time since I've posted. A large part of that is that I haven't had a lot of time to dedicate to brewing between starting a new job, and having a month long business trip (another post on that to come soon).

As my schedule has started to become a little more steady I finally had a chance to brew my Belgian Strong recipe.  This one should turn out very similar to my Belgian Blonde/ Abbey Apricot beer (which taste great if not fully carbonated yet) but should be higher in alcohol.  The beer was brewed exactly to the recipe and brew day went very smoothly.

All I can do now is wait a month for it to finish up fermentation before I move onto a few other planned brews including my Licorice Imperial Stout that I am really looking forward to and a Wit that my girlfriend continues to request.

As for 2012 I've laid out an ambitious brewing schedule which includes:

• Brewing a sour
• Making a wine or mead and a cider
• Brewing at least 60 gallons of beer
• Brewing at least one of my very experimental beer ideas (smoked fruit beer, caraway spiced rye beer, herb beer, etc...)
• Brewing an all grain batch  ✓

Apricot Abbey Ale

After bottling my Here Be Dragons! series of winter warmers I moved back to a belgian beer, but again with some experimentation involved. In this brew I plan to rack to secondary (a first for me) on to apricot preserves. 

Adding jam/jelly/preserves is not a common way to make fruit beer, but in this case the apricot preserves were free and sound delicious to me. I plan to follow the instructions for making wine from jelly, namely boiling the jelly and adding pectic enzyme ahead of fermentation to break down the thick preserves. Only half the batch will be added to the 14 oz. of apricot preserves with the other half bottled straight.  The recipe is as follows.

6 lbs. Northern Brewer Gold LME

1 lb. Briess Pilsen DME

1 lb. Belgian Candi Sugar (the weight is approximate as this was just the remainder of candi sugar from my previous batch)

.4 oz. Nugget hops (60 minute bittering)

.1 oz. Nugget hops (15 minute flavoring)

.25 oz. Sweet Orange Peel (for a bit of citrus)

Wyeast Belgian Abbey II yeast (1 quart starter)

I forgot to add irish moss to this recipe so I expect it to be a bit less clear but should otherwise come out tasty.

Honey Brown First Tasting

I brewed a brown ale with a small amount (less than half a pound) of honey on May 28th and here, fully 2.5 months later, (1.5 months after bottling) I am doing a recorded tasting.

Let me start by noting that this beer does not really fit the category of brown ales, instead it is really a sweeter lighter porter.  That being said this one seems to have come out pretty disappointing but I felt I should at least record my thoughts to have as a reminder.

Aroma- Dark brown with light tan and ruby highlights.  Extremely small head fades immediately into light carbonation bubbles on the surface.  Not too impressive looking.

Smell- A lot comes off here but nothing too good.  Slight waxiness (maybe the honey?), light fruitiness (too high ferment temp?) some astringent roast and a bit of sweetness.  Not what I was going for but the nose can be deceptive sometimes.

Taste- A bit of astringency and a flat, one-dimensional sweetness with a bit of a thin alcohol bite at the finish.  This is nothing like a brown ale with no part really coming together the way I would like.

Mouthfeel- Thin with just a small carbonation prick, much thinner than I would have liked.

Drinkability- This beer is light years from what I had hoped.  I fear the one month in primary may have been a touch too long for a beer this small and a bit of autolysis has touched this. Additionally the honey seems to have only worked to thin this beer out more than I had hoped.  While this is not a terrible beer (it is drinkable without forcing it down) it is not very good and definitely not something I would pay for.  All in all I feel that this beer could have used a drop in the chocolate malt and some serious increases in lighter caramels to give it a more rounded character.

Session Belgian IPA

I brewed this beer in honor of my father's birthday and styled it largely after one of his favorites: Flying Dog's Raging Bitch.  As my father is (quite) a lightweight but also enjoys to have a few beers regardless of strength I wanted to knock down the ABV on this from the normal belgian IPA strength and, due to the decrease in OG, also knocked down the BU's somewhat.

Appearance - A very clear amber with a bit of a reddish tint that almost appears violet.  A small head of about one finger fades quickly into a thin white film. Pretty good in terms of looks, wasn't going for anything in particular in this category but it seems to be my clearest beer so far.

Smell - Wow, right up front there is a ton of fruit. Some is yeast derived ( cherries, plums, apricots) and a lot is from the American hops (orange) with a bit of sweet candy malt also present.  When I first tasted this prior to carbonation I feared the dry hopping and overall hop presence may have entirely outshined the yeast, the aroma now seems to favor more towards the Belgian side than the hops.

Taste- Like the aroma the hop taste seems to have faded very quickly.  Part of the problem is the under attenuation and residual sugars which I blame likely being due to the extract.  This puts the beer far from the level of bitterness desired and adds sugars which detract from the hoppiness all around.  That said the belgian yeast components do come through with a bit of fruit and spice and the hops make their presence with the nugget definitely apparent.  A bit of bitterness at the very end alludes to the 40 IBU's estimated.

Mouthfeel - Fairly full bodied, again likely due to underattenuation, but also highly carbonated.  The carbonation does allow the bitterness and hops to coat the mouth somewhat but again the residual sugars shine a bit more than I would have hoped for.

Drinkability/Overall - This beer met some expectations (my dad does seem to enjoy it) but it did not work quite right. I blame the low attenuation (about 72%) on low fermenting temperatures (around 68) and extract which is generally not mashed at low temps.  While I do enjoy this beer quite a bit and love where the aroma is I think more flavor hop additions should have been used, and with this high amount of residual sugars a bit more bittering as well.  One of the most important things about this beer to me is how much better it got as it warmed, I pulled it straight from the fridge and everything was much stronger and simply better by the end.  I'm not a huge hophead but this is definitely one I will make again.