ESB tasting

I've been drinking this beer for about a week. It's evolved during that time. At first, it was a little sweet, cloudy. I think that was due to the yeast and proteins that had settled at the bottom of the keg. But as I've drunk more of it, and as the gelatin does its thing, it's changed. It's certainly more clear, but it seems thinner and drier too.

The more I drink it, though, the more I believe those aren't bad things. You don't want a flabby ESB. At least I don't. Admittedly, my experience with the style -- English beers in general -- is limited.

Anyhow, it's a tasty beer. And I'm pleased with it.

Flavor: Caramel. Fruity hops and esters. Almost a cherry flavor at times. Bready malt. Crust from a piece of toast. Low bitterness. Aftertaste is crackery.

Aroma: Malt. Clean. No hops. Bready.

Appearance varies from copper/amber to crimson, depending on how wide the glass is.

Update 1/1/18:

This was a really good beer. Flavor seemed evolve over time, from an intial hoppy, estery flavor to one that was more malty, cracker, and floral.  It cleared up over time as well.

Gelatin was very effective.

Brew day - ESB - 10/28/17

Clear wort. Beautiful copper color.

I've really cut back on brewing in the last year. That's because I decided to cut back drinking to weekends only (not always successful), I don't seem to have the same amount of interest I once had, and there are just so many different good commercial beers to buy.

But every once in awhile I get the itch to brew again. This time it came after thinking about Goose Island Honkers ale. I drank this beer years ago and recalled liking it. Maybe not as much as my favorite beer back then -- Boulevard pale ale -- but still a tasty beer. I stopped drinking it after I really got into craft beer four years ago. I'm not sure I specifically avoided it so much as I sort of forgot about it. I was so busy trying farmhouse ales and sours and the latest iterations of the IPAs that I just didn't ever buy it. And until recently I couldn't remember the last time I even saw it on the shelves.

It's still around, though, minus the elegant packaging, and sporting the new in-your-face, bold block-letter, hip (surely AB-designed) labels. I'd seen it in the last six months or so, but it was old, so I never bought it. However, recently I found some fairly fresh bottles -- bottled August 2, 2017 -- so I bought a single, followed by a six pack. I can't say for sure whether it's the same beer that I remember. Could it be because it's brewed by AB now? Could it be because I have more beer knowledge now, and whatever residual memory I have the beer back in 2010 is outstripped by the realization that the beer tastes like English hops? (I didn't even realize until very recently that the beer is an ESB). Is the beer actually the same? Either way, it's a solid beer and deserves more credit than it receives.

In the last year and a half, I've taken a strong interest in the original beer styles. There's a reason they've endured, and a reason why they've been assigned "styles." It's because they're good.

So Honkers Ale and English bitters in general were on my mind in advance of this particular brew day. I got a smack pack of Wyeast 1469 at my local shop and tried a beer that the owner had brewed with it. It was good. A guy in my homebrew club had brewed a tasty beer with it as well, and I had made a note of it. So I had my yeast. From there I constructed a recipe, actually based on an ESB recipe I had created in Brewtoad shortly after I started using that software nearly four years ago. I don't think I ever brewed the beer though. After modifying the recipe, it doesn't really resemble the original one.

I used 2-row, crystal 60 and crystal 80. The crystal malt is pretty old. Over three years old in fact. Same with the Fuggles and EKG hops. Admittedly not the best start to a great tasting beer, but I went with it anyway.

Brew day went smoothly. Beautiful copper, clear wort. OG around 1.052; volume around 5.25 gallons. I pitched a smack pack that swelled maybe 3/4 of the way. Pitching temp was in the upper 60s or so, but fermentation didn't really take off until the next day. Ambient temp in my house was around 60-62. Fermentation was well udnerway by the next afternoon.

I kegged the beer on November 10. I also bottled five beers, each with 1/4 tsp table sugar. FG was at 1.010.  Despite the relatively low temperature, the yeast produced a lot of fruity esters, which it is known to do. I'm impressed by the flavor, but it is nothing like Honkers Ale (not that I was necessarily trying to emulate that beer). At least the sample from the fermenter wasn't. Maybe after it's clear and carbonated it will more closely resemble it. It is hard to tell where the hops begin and the esters end, and vice versa. I don't have a lot of experience with these hops, particularly with an expressive yeast like West Yorkshire. Also, this yeast is not flocculent at all, despite what Wyeast has to say about that. The beer was very cloudy going into the keg. Which probably also explains the very small yeast cake. I had expected it to be much more substantial, given how vigorous the fermentation with this beer was. The krausen seemed to keep growing and growing. It even began to creep up into the airlock. A creamy krausen hung around for several days as fermentation completed.

Speaking of things not necessarily to Wyeast's specs. This yeast attenuated at 80%. That is well above what Wyeast indicates (67-71%). Therefore, the abv on this beer is around 5.5%. I had been aiming for 5% or under. This is something to keep in mind when designing recipes with this yeast.

After being in the kegerator about five hours, I opened the keg again and added gelatin (1 tsp of gelatin in a 1/4 cup of water heated to 150 degrees). I set the PSI around 30. This beer should be ready to drink pretty soon.

https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/esb-403.

July 1 Pale Ale

Aside from a failed English Bitter in March, I hadn't brewed since December, when I made my troublesome vanilla chocolate coffee stout. The keg with my 11-20-16 IPA had kicked a few weeks before (it stuck around for over six months; a record for me, I think) and I was down to less than half a keg of the stout.  So it was time to brew. I had temporarily lost interest in brewing, especially after the bitter didn't turn out. And I had also cut back on drinking, so I didn't need to brew as often. It was good to get back in the game.

I had a packet of US-05 sitting around for a long time; it expired in May 2017. Against my better judgment, I went ahead and used it. I figured there might be some risk, but I wasn't too far beyond the expiration date and the packet remained refrigerated the entire time. Nonetheless, I was worried, since I've had so many bad beers due to old yeast (usually just slurry sitting around in my fridge). It turns out that trying to save money on yeast a lot of times ends up costing you in time and ingredients.

Anyhow, I went forward with it. Thankfully, the beer turned out great. There are no off flavors. The beer is clearing up nicely and there's a strong fruity hop aroma and flavor. When I really think about it, this beer might suffer from a touch of harsh bitterness, just like the second beer. Occasionally, there's a slight odd flavor detectable in burps (blech), but I'm not sure if that's from the hop combination or a yeast issue. I can't detect the same flavor in the actual beer, though.

This beer is not what I had in mind when I decided to brew it. I had wanted to make something light, drinkable, somewhat malt-forward, maybe something with some crackery, biscuity, slightly toasty malt. An old school pale ale, kind of like Springfield Brewing Company's pale ale. To that end, I added a pound of two-year-old (!) victory malt. In the end, I think all it did was make the beer an orangish color. Maybe the hop flavor is too strong, but I just don't taste any victory malt. But I also veered away from old school by using a bunch of newish hops, including el dorado, galaxy, and equinox. So much for an old school pale ale!

But this is a solid beer and I would brew it again.

https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/pale-ale-july-1

Update 11-5-17:

The beer has cleared up nicely. Still hanging around. The keg feels nearly empty, but the beer keeps flowing. Maybe because the difference between a gallon or two in a keg versus five is so great. But yet a gallon or two of beer is still pretty substantial. And I keep buying commercial beer, so the homebrew hangs around longer.

July 11 Pale Ale

This was the second beer brewed from a packet of US-05 that expired in May 2017. No off flavors and the first beer started fermenting quickly. This beer fermented swiftly as well. I kegged the first beer on July 10, put the yeast cake into a jar, and brewed this beer the next day. Once again, the yeast took off right away and the beer was, at least visually, completely fermented within three to four days.

I kegged this beer on July 20. It's remarkably clear; the wort, when I racked it to the fermenter, was pretty cloudy, despite a dose of Irish moss, so I was anticipating a somewhat murky beer. Additionally, the malt is a hodgepodge -- Avangard pale ale, 2-row, Avangard pilsner, and vienna -- so I kind of wondered if that might contribute some cloudiness, but it didn't. Or the higher mash temp. I'm not sure how PH works with beer and mash temps, but I wondered if that caused the haze.

I added about half an ounce each of equinox and galaxy hops to the keg. As a result, the aroma is pretty strong, mostly of equinox hops in my estimation. Equinox seems to be one of those hops that dominates, even though it didn't make up any more of the hop bill than any other hops.

This beer is slightly thin, perhaps owing to the two 16 oz bottles of mineral water I added to the wort post-chill. The beer came in over my anticipated gravity and under volume, so I added the water. I think it has just enough body though to not taste watery. It also makes the beer very "crushable." That said, there is something about the hops that I sort of find unpleasant. Maybe some harsh bitterness. Maybe it needs some sweetness to balance out the hops. Not a bad beer by any means though.

https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/pale-ale-july-11

Chocolate Coffee Vanilla Stout

This beer is both a success and a bit of a letdown.

First the letdown. I intended to brew something along the lines of Stone Xocoveza. That's a really great beer, but it's expensive, and, plus, it's fun to try to homebrew a beer that rivals the real the thing. I started with the same base beer that I used for my chocolate coffee porter last year, though slightly modified. I considered all the ingredients I'd use and researched various clone recipes.

The biggest question, though, was how to get the chocolate flavor into the beer. In my porter, I added cacao nibs to the keg, but for some reason -- perhaps I didn't use enough, or maybe the coffee overwhelmed the flavor -- the chocolate just didn't come through in the resultant beer. So after reading some articles and watching a Northern Brewer video, I decided I'd try baker's chocolate. Research indicated that a long and vigorous boil would break down the fats in the chocolate. So I added eight ounces of baker's chocolate at the beginning of the oil. I can now report that the research is wrong.

The fat does not "go away." It stays right there in your kettle. So, right before racking to the fermenter, I spent a decent amount of time skimming oil from the top of the wort. I never got it all. In fact, it more or less blended into the beer, disappointingly not settling to the bottom. After being in the fermenter for three months, a layer of fat remained floating on top of hte beer. This was alarming to say the least.

I tried the beer. It was moderately astringent, presumably due to the suspended cocoa oils or from the cocoa itself. I considered giving up on the beer altogether, but I stuck with it.

I kegged it and added gelatin. That seemed to help with removing the solid particles and it cleared the beer, but the astringency never went away.

By now, I had given up on making this a Xocoveza clone. Instead, I decided I'd just add coffee, and, for the heck of it, a vanilla bean, since Brown Derby, just down the street, had Madagascar vanilla beans for about $1.50 each.

That astringency really disheartened me, though, so I just kept putting off adding the coffee and vanilla. Finally, about three or four weeks after kegging, I decided I'd waited long enough.

I had trouble with bits of ground coffee in my porter last time. So this time, I decided I needed to figure out how to make it coarser. Crushing it in a plastic bag? Nope, didn't work; took too long. So I just got out my coffee grinder again.

I ground three ounces of Heroes Kenya coffee as coarsely as I could. I transferred it between two paint bags three or four times and shook the bag, which removed a lot of coffee dust.

Next, I split the vanilla bean down the middle. I added the coffee and vanilla bean to a paint bag and dropped in the beer. Voila, coffee vanilla stout.

The beer looks really nice, with a tan to brown head. Carbonation is slightly low, but seems to be in line with the style. Aroma is coffee and chocolate malt. Fairly clear, surprisingly. The head retention seems better this time around, since I was able to get rid of those small coffee bits. The vanilla is pretty intense, and so is the coffee for that matter. But the chocolate is really no where to be found. If I try using coffee again, I'll probably use nibs, but in the boil, not in the keg. I will not be using baker's chocolate again. The coffee and vanilla seem to have hidden the astringency, which is a relief.

All in all, not a bad beer; it's just not the one I aimed to make starting out. But that's ok, it's still pretty tasty.

11-20-16 IPA

I've cut back on drinking lately, so my beer hangs around longer. I brewed this beer on Nov. 20 and kegged it Dec. 11. The keg is mostly full, owing to drinking the veterans day ipa first, and to the fact that this one is a bit harsh.

I was going for the New England style. I'd say I nailed the appearance. It's certainly hazy, but not murky.

Low to medium-low aroma.

Flavor is generic fruit. Grapefruit. Orange juice. Where do these beer reviewers come up with all these specific terms? Mango, papaya, and what not. Most of the time they taste like some sort of unidentifiable fruit. Or grapefruit. As does this one.

Upfront this beer tastes fine. But the aftertaste is where it fails. As usual, I dry-hopped this beer in the keg, using a paint bag suspended with unflavored dental floss.

I had difficulty carbonating the beer. I set the PSI at 30 or 35 for a day or two and the beer simply would not carbonate. I have no idea why. Ultimately I decided to use the shake method. Unfortunately, when I did that, the hops leaked out of the bag. So now, the beer has bits of hops in it. And I think the hops are contributing the harsh character to the beer. Before I kegged it, I sampled it, and it was well balanced. Not overly bitter. Good fruity flavor. Nice maltiness. But now it's slightly harsh. I've never had this issue with harshness for prior keg-dry-hopped beers.

Anyhow, going forward, I'll be cautious about dry hopping.

https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/11-20-16-ipa

Veterans Day (Galaxy & Citra) IPA

Coming off about seven months of lagers, I was ready for an IPA again. I felt inspired after trying some IPAs at Narrow Gauge in Florissant, MO. I've read a lot about the northeast style ipa (NEIPA), but I had never tried a real one, and still have never had one from the actual northeast.

But, again, I've read a lot of the research, so I felt like I knew enough to brew one myself (and this actually wasn't my first attempt). 

For this beer, I went with Wyeast 1318, oats, wheat, and galaxy and citra hops. The result is certainly hazy.

The keg just kicked today, and for a three-month old beer, it has held up amazingly well. Perhaps because I dry-hop in the keg and don't remove the hops. Which might also be my downfall for this and the beer just after this one.

As I recall, I used the shake method to carbonate this keg at least once. I guess that wasn't enough, because I know I set the PSI at about 30-35 for 24 hours just before Thanksgiving, which got the carbonation to the level I wanted. But anyway, the shaking somehow allowed a lot of hop matter to get out of the mash paint bag I use to dry hop.

The result is a somewhat harsh beer, and a lot of tiny hop pieces visible in the beer.

It tastes pretty solid though, if a tough astringent from all those hops. Galaxy dominates; maybe citra just a tad in the background? 

Pretty strong aroma.

Low clarity, as seen in the above picture, but that was taken a week or two ago, and the beer had cleared up substantially as of today. 

Brewed: 11/11/2016

Kegged: 11/20/2016

https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/veterans-day-ipa-116ccc