White Dragons Tasting

Here Be Dragons! Was just the 7th batch of beer I brewed. A mix of a Winter Warmer/ Strong Ale and Scotch Ale the beer was split several ways at bottling. Today I found one of these, thought to be fully depleted brews, an decided to give it a try. Remembering it as having noticeable off flavors and being over carbonated even by my early, extract brewing standards, I didn't expect much.

A - as expected this one shot out of the bottle with some force giving a hazy chestnut brown beer with a yeasty, tan head.

S- this actually smells like a Scotch ale should: toffee, wood, lots of sweet bready malt and an ester/phenol profile I only detect in beers made with Scottish style yeast.

T- I don't pick up anything definitively orange or coriander (the spices added to the WD version). Taste is similar to nose, sweet, bready, estery. Finishes in an unpleasant jumble of phenols, dryness and sweet esters.  Likely fermented much too warm for this yeast. Starting to show some signs of age and oxidation but not overly so.

M- way over carbonated which seems to lead to the dryness in the finish despite relatively high body.

O- this beer is probably at least as good today as it was 2 years ago when first tasted. It's not a great beer by any means but my original tasting seemed to nail the defects and understand the parts which did work. I've not had luck with the Scottish ale blend but am wondering whether I just don't like the style, fermented too high or a combination of the two. I would like to try brewing a similar malty Strong Ale with a more neutral yeast as the malt body is very pleasant.

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).

So many updates...

So rather than actually make all the postings I would like to in this post I am just going to give a quick overview of the few to come soon.

1. My trip to Napa Valley and the northern California region.  Complete with wine tastings, beer tastings, transvestites, Madden and even a skunk.
2. My brown ale. It was bottled a little over a week ago, it has been a little disappointing but hopefully a few more weeks should mellow it out some. Much more on that to come.
3. My sessionable Belgian IPA. Just brewed and not even dryhopped yet.
4. Tastings: Re-Tasting one or more of my older homebrews to see how flavors have changed over half a year or so and maybe throwing in a few prime tastings of commercial beers I have particularly liked (e.g. my two new summer favorites: Anderson Valley Summer Solstice and Heavy Seas Summer Ale).
5. Probably lots of other things I haven't gotten to but hopefully good stories and a pic or two to make them worthy of this blog.

Additionally I will simply post here my next planned brew (following the finish of the Belgian IPA). It is titled Here Be Dragons! and is intended to have some characters of an Old Ale, Winter Warmer and a Strong Scotch Ale.  I am additionally contemplating on breaking off part of the batch to turn into other "Dragons". A few ideas so far have been.

• Here Be White Dragons: Bottled with a spice tea of coriander and bitter orange
• Here Be Red Dragons: Bottled with a spice tea of cinnamon and sweet orange
• Here Be Black Dragons: Bottled with coffee and/or black pepper
• Here Be Green Dragons: Bottled with herbs, likely heather tips.

These are all very preliminary ideas which I will be working on as the brew date, and bottling date, get closer though I plan on fermenting this for quite some time and expect to brew it in August to be done sometime next winter or early spring.

edits: After looking more into these ideas I am still very excited about them. I tried a mix of coffee, vanilla and pepper tonight and it worked surprisingly well (like Kahlua with a bit of a bite).  That coupled with the description of Belhaven Brewery's Wee Heavy as having "Gentle, fresh cracked pepper spiciness" by Draft magazine and alternatively Old Curmudgeon (an Old Ale) having this review: "The big bursting bubbles above this deep golden brew exude intense black pepper spice, cinnamon and cedarlike hops."  These sere to make Black Dragons much more tempting. Additionally the realization that Jacobite Ale is spiced with coriander makes the White Dragons seem much more appropriate. I'm thinking now that these 4 sets of ingredients will certainly be tried at bottling time, potentially with one or two additional variants.