BrewBrain Sports Investing

Another late night bottling beer.  This time, it was my latest attempt at a pale ale.

The tasting was interesting.  I may be too far out of balance with this one.  I put just over 40 IBU’s of Centennial hops into a very light malt grainbill with an SRM of 5.0.  For those not familiar with the color chart, 5.0 is about as light in color as you can go without being a budweiser.  The hops were fairly harsh at the tasting, but they’ll calm down some.  I do suspect it won’t have the malt backbone to handle the hops.  We’ll see.  The gears are already grinding on my next pale ale recipe.  I’ll get all the components figured out just right one of these days.

I’ve sampled the IPA the past several days and stuck the entire batch in the fridge last night.  It is carbonated and ready for cold conditioning for a week.  It is tasty and quite drinkable, but not what I want for my Quicksilver IPA.  It’s probably a bit too rich with caramel flavors and the hops are not really popping the way I’d like.  It is going to be good and very drinkable, but not “it”.

I took a carb check sample of the first stout yesterday.  It was carbonated more fully than I expected.  The flavors, as expected, were too light for a stout.  It needs more “stuff” in there.  The flavor that was there was pleasant enough, and it will be a keeper.  A good start with stouts actually.  It smelled awesome with chocolate and coffee notes.  I look forward to the next one.

Today I’ll rack my latest amber ale and oatmeal stout to secondary.  I’ll bottle them the week before leaving for vacation for a couple weeks.

I’ve decided not to brew any more full batches until I get further into my Grain School batches and am set for kegging.  I hate bottling so much I would rather run out of beer than bottle beyond what I’ve got now.  Of course, I’ve strategically made this decision at a point where I have plenty of beer coming on line to last a good long time.