The one thing that bothered me about this beer was part of the description: Ale brewed with apple juice, coriander, orange peel and with natural flavor added. Natural flavor? Why exactly Unibroue? That feels too much like adding caramel coloring to certain beers. Don't. Just don't.
After our first tripel had been aging in secondary for 3 weeks (with a week in primary before that) we bottled it today. This will now have to bottle condition for at least 1 month and preferably longer (as long as I can keep my hands off it). We tried some of the green beer that was left in the bottling bucket and it was pretty tasty, but the alcohol was definitely upfront. Right now though, it was a tad too sweet from the added orange blossom honey, but that will dissipate over time as the bottles carbonate. The longer the bottles will sit, the more the alcoholic taste (this beer is 10% ABV) will mellow out. I'm truly looking forward to November when we can taste this! A couple nights ago, we tried a bottle of Éphémère Apple from Unibroue (5.5% ABV). Grany Smith dominates, with perhaps a light yeast flavor. To be honest, if I didn't know this was a beer I would have described it as a cider, but there's some hoppiness to it. The pillow-like head dissipates quite quickly, leaving behind a speckled, lacy layer. The one thing that bothered me about this beer was part of the description: Ale brewed with apple juice, coriander, orange peel and with natural flavor added. Natural flavor? Why exactly Unibroue? That feels too much like adding caramel coloring to certain beers. Don't. Just don't.
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We don't do things half-arsed in Belgium. Okay, that's debatable as I can bring up many examples that would contradict this statement (*cough* roads *cough*). Let's be more specific: we don't do things half-arsed when beer's involved. I first noticed this article on engadget: Belgian brewery to reduce truck use with underground beer pipeline. In order to cut down on the number of trucks it puts on the streets, Brouwerij De Halve Maan is working with the city of Bruges to construct an underground beer pipeline. While the brewing still happens at its original site, filtration, bottling and shipping operations were moved outside of town in 2010. To get the tasty beverages from point A to point B, dozens of trucks go back and forth each day, but not for much longer. Folks familiar with the Cleveland, Ohio-based Great Lakes Brewing Company may recall that it uses an underground system to send its suds from a production facility to a taproom/pub across the street. The effort in Belgium will be much more elaborate though, replacing the 3-mile tanker route with 1.8 miles of polyethylene pipe, and cutting transit time to between 15 and 20 minutes. De Halve Maan claims the system can send out 6,000 liters per hour -- on top of cutting traffic and reducing emissions. What's more, the brewery (er, brouwerij) will foot the bill for installation and road repairs, reducing the financial burden on the city. That's neat in itself of course, but then I went to the source that they posted, an article from Het Nieuwsblad (the link is in Dutch): There's of course one large problem: the pipeline still has to be constructed and they will need to break apart the driveways of several inhabitants along the line. As a compensation, they'll receive a beer tap in their houses. Also in the news, Haacht Brewery Tongerlo Blond just won the World's Best Beer 2014 award, both in its category (pale beers) and overall. Brew Day arrived and it was jam-packed with prepping, brewing and ye olde faithful, cleaning. As mentioned yesterday I had 2 beers planned: a Pumpkin Dubbel and a Chocolate Maple Porter. I decided to start with the porter, given that I had to roast the pie pumpkin in the oven for 1 hour. While the porter malted in my spunky 10-gallon cooler, I prepped the pumpkin. If you would also like to make a pumpkin beer, may I advise you to not cut your finger. My hatred for cutting up pumpkin is reciprocal to how much I like eating pumpkin-flavored food. My finger is still very much attached, but it could have been nasty had I not hit my nail with the knife. I still got 2 gashes (if you've ever tried to make a stone skip on water, then picture a knife doing that on your finger). One hour later, the porter's mash was done (i.e. steeping the grains in hot water) and it was time to take a gravity reading to see if I was on target. The specific gravity of a liquid, or relative density, is largely dependent on and thus an indication of the amount of sugars. Based on the grains and other ingredients used one can estimate what the gravity should be under ideal circumstances. There are many factors influencing this, such as the milling of the grains, temperature, mashing times, etc... I always compare my pre-boil gravity (wort coming out of the mash tun), the original gravity (OG) after the boil and before adding the yeast and then what is known as the final gravity (FG; when the sugar content is no longer dropping - it stabilizes). The difference between FG and OG gives us the alcohol contents by volume. Anyway, using my refractometer the pre-boil gravity measured around 1.029, which I then compared to the theoretical value as calculated by BeerSmith. According to the sheet I printed it was 1.056. Taking a closer look I noticed that the final gravity was something like ... 1.225. Most high gravity beers such as trappists and rye wines for instance don't go much higher than 1.11. The final ABV of this porter would have been more than 25% if 1.225 was correct! I think not. I'm still not sure what BeerSmith did, but a quick reset of the program brought everything back to normal and the estimated gravity was now also 1.029. Spot on! The color is absolutely fantastic: a thick coffee-like liquid. The boil went smoothly and thanks to (very) vigorous stirring during the cooling phase, I was able to get the temperature down to 73 F in 4 minutes (faster is better!). After cleanup and lunch it was time to tackle the pumpkin dubbel. While it was mashing I bottled the ginger beer for the kiddies. I once again hit all the right numbers and about 2.5 hours later it was final clean up time. Now we're going to have to wait 1 month before we can actually taste any of it, but the pumpkin ale made the house smell wonderfully! The tradition amongst homebrewers is to have a homebrew while brewing, but I don't particularly like drinking beer at 8:00 in the morning, so I waited until dinner. My wife made an excellent Mexican dish, which you can see here being accompanied by a Jalapeño Saison. I love autumn in Michigan. Aside from the usual suspects (colors, cooler temperatures), it's also the time for cider and ... pumpkins, in both food and drinks! Homemade pumpkin syrup for our cold-brewed coffees, pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, ... One of the seasonal beers I always look forward to is pumpkin ale. So we noticed a 6-pack of New Holland's Ichabod Ale. Having liked other beers by New Holland and seeing how this one has a pretty decent score on Beer Advocate, we decided to try it out last night. What do you pour a pumpkin ale in? The answer, of course, is a glass. There's no consensus on what goes best with this style (tulip, pint, ...), so I went for one of my pseudo-Hoegaarden glasses. Here it's posing next to what I hoped would be a prominent feature in the taste! The head was about a finger thick and disappeared pretty quickly. The lacing was fair, about to be expected for such a beer. The color was a nice orange tint, hinting at the pumpkin in it. I took a sip and the pumpkin flavor just jumped out to me and ... Oh wait, that's what I wanted to taste. I believe Ichabod must have dropped his head before they mashed him and the grains. New Holland, where's my pumpkin flavor? This tastes more like a brown ale than the seasonal I was looking for. Color me not impressed. It's not a bad beer, but definitely not what I was expecting. It's fine, I'll make one myself this coming weekend. At least I know I still have a lot to learn, but I do expect more from an established brewery. But the labels are! On the right (green label) is the beer that was sitting in the primary fermenter only, while the left (blue) bottles were racked into the secondary vessel. These were formerly known as Jalapeño Saison 1 and 2. And here are the actual labels, which I've "glued" on with ... milk. Let me dispel a few myths here: brewing beer doesn't necessarily smell up the house (making the apple crisp ale made the house smell like apples (imagine that...) and using milk to adhere the labels won't make it stink either. It's a tried and trusted method and it beats using actual glue time and again: easy to peel them back off and there's no residue! Also, no cows were harmed in the making of these labels. |
The Alchemist
A Belgian living in Michigan interested in all things fermenting (and food in general). Brewing
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