I'm tired of hazy and juicy; NEPA; NEIPA; imperial; and adjuncts. I want to go back to basics, like traditional American pale ales and west coast IPAs; bitters; and European lagers. This of course has been a theme of this blog for quite some time. So I really took to Resilience IPA. It was one of my favorite beers of late 2018 and early 2019. I think I bought three six packs. It's a great beer for a great cause and it also tasted great. It was on my mind again recently when I made the APA. So I decided to make Resilience my next beer. Thanks to Sierra Nevada for making the recipe available. I brewed it about a month ago and it's been in the keg for several weeks.
Appearance: Deep golden, amber. Some chill haze that fades as the beer warms. No gelatin in this beer yet. It has cleared with time, but still has a slight chill haze.
Aroma: I think I'm getting something from the yeast, and it is not very pleasant. Gross description, I know, but a burp sort of has a yeasty taste that follows the aroma. This happened with the pale ale too and I have decided I won't be using BRY-97 anymore. It was free so I thought I'd give it a try, but next time I think I'll just use US-05, which has never let me down. Anyway, the aroma is almost rubbery. Some research indicates a rubbery or plastic flavor can be due to infections or chloramine in tap water. I've been brewing with my tap water for years without any issues like that. Infections have been a problem at various times over the years and the lagers I made this year were off (with the exception of the IPL). I think it could be the yeast. Update: I wrote this draft a few weeks ago. Since then the plastic-like aroma has sort of diminished, but the yeast aroma hangs around.
Flavor: Follows the aroma. A touch of that off flavor/aroma, followed by centennial and Cascade hops. Citrusy, maybe a little piney, but maybe that's just because that's a typical flavor descriptor for these types of hops.
Overall: It's an okay beer to drink. It's way better than some of the worst I've made over the years, but it's still disappointing. I imagined this would taste like the resilience I had last year, and it sort of resembles it, but the yeasty flavor really detracts from the finished product.
A note on canning. I canned this and the pale ale, about three six packs each. It was fun, but at 50 cents a can, I probably won't be doing it again soon. I thought for sure friends and relatives would be more impressed by the cans, but they didn't remark on them too much. I do like how they're easy to fill and seam and cleaning the work space and the device is pretty quick. I like how they eliminate oxygen and clear up keg space, since beer is in the cans and not in the kegs, which in theory would allow me to brew and keg more often. It's also very cool to have cans of my own beer. But the expense of the cans limits the viability of doing this on a larger scale. The only way to get cans at a reasonable price would be to buy a whole palate, but I certainly don't want to commit to so many cans and I don't have space for that many. I doubt the club wants to store so many cans either. So, for now I anticipate using the canner only occasionally.
