I figured that at some point I would forget about this blog and as can be seen by the lack of updates, it happened somewhere late last year. Even though I haven't written here in ages, the brewing never stopped!
What I've learned so far (in no particular order):
What I've learned so far (in no particular order):
- The gingerbread ale wasn't that impressive. It was a little too hoppy for me and there was a distinguishable lack of ... ginger. I'm not sure what the reason is, but it might have something to do with the candied ginger.
- My tripels need to age a lot longer before we "sample" them. The alcohol is still a little too hot. More time would mellow that out.
- The sage honey ale (a.k.a. The Bee's Knees) is great - it has that gruit-like quality to it, even though we brewed it with hops of course. Still, the herbal flavor of sage turns it upside down. We love it!
- I can't be bothered with labels anymore. Washable markers for the win!
- The best beers I've made so far have been the KBS-clone (Kentucky Breakfast Stout) and a Russian Imperial Stout. The latter one is aging in the basement for 4-6 months and waiting so long is hard... When we tasted the green beer, we could have gulped it all down even without carbonation. Just thinking about it makes me salivate!
- Adding ground coffee during the brewing can have strange results. While I used the same process in both the Death by Breakfast and KBS (adding ground coffee at the end of the brew, a. k. a. flameout), it gave the Death by Breakfast a smokey taste. One could argue that this could be good (there are smoked beers after all), but in this case it resulted in a burnt cigarette taste. I should have called it Death by Bonfire Afterbirth. Fortunately after letting it sit for another month or so, the ashy taste started to go mostly away.
- I won't bother with the Centennial Blonde again. We didn't like it one bit, thanks to getting the wrong grainbill (see one of the previous posts) and then not having the priming sugar (in this case honey) mixed in correctly. Some of it was super sweet and spectacularly disgusting - like drinking soda syrup.
- We've had a few misses, but overall we've been really happy with the majority of the brews. Besides, it's not all sunshine in commercial land either. We bought a Delerium Tremens from Costco a few weeks ago and it had the nastiest, metallic taste one can imagine - much like drinking liquid iron. The same happened with another beer we bought not too long ago. And once you've opened a bottle, it's not like you can take it back to the store...