Hot, Quick and Thick

Just knocked off a magnum of brown ale tonight, tastes lovely with the chocolate starting to blend seamlessly with the crystal. Bitterness is still present but fading, I can see how American brown is such an easy style as a little more bitterness and some flavour would fit in so easily here.

After that was a quick sample of my american amber. Half-carbonated, but still far too early to drink. The flavours in this beer are incredible though. Consistent from secondary is no aroma, but hop flavour is definitely present, and even half carbonated I can feel the low gravity.

These were followed up with another of the Steam Exchange steam beers. Still tastes lovely, but after some fresh (and some underripe) beers I can taste some faint age detraction this time around.

Stocks are looking dire, lemonade and berry wheat are in ample supply, I have a couple bottles of porter and brown ale, plenty of barleywine that needs leavin’, amber that needs to condition, bock still in secondary, bitter and kit lager fermenting away.

[edit] And the wheat. There’s half a batch of wheat. First half of the batch as proved good at best, lacklustre at worst. So, I tend to forget it.

My lemonade is ready, oddly it tastes almost like a ginger ale. Failure as a lemonade, success as a refreshing beverage. Also gives me a base concept for a good ginger beer.

Shifted a few batches of beer from conditioning to the fridge. Finally my fridge is stocked again. Two pictures, sorry I can’t be bothered doing anything less complex than including them inline:

Fermentation fridge has been utilised for the overflow of what does not fit in the beer fridge. Beer fridge contains the following:

Door top shelf, yeast library. I particularly like the phial of wine yeast dangling.
Next shelf down, Lemonade, diet tonic water that nobody will drink, Baileys.
Third shelf; Bill’s apple passion cider (don’t ask), a couple white sherries, a bottle of chards and one of my aussie scottish ale.
Bottom shelf, the vault. Magnums of rye, brown, lager and apa.

Top shelf houses large bottles of aussie scottish, berry wheat, lemonade and maybe one or two of apa. There are two longnecks of porter and one of brown ale there too. Also the dregs of some soda water, and a lurking bottle of butterscotch schnapps.

Next shelf down has berry wheat, lemonade, some ales and the remnants of my German lager which seems to have dwindled to nothing.

Next down is similar but also houses my hop collection, around a kilo worth. No freezer room.

Next is lemonade in 250mL bottles and a couple chinook rhizomes still waiting to be planted. Somewhere there is also a 2L bucket of marinated goat’s feta too.

Bottom drawer holds more soda water, a 007 culture that is probably past it, a Ringwood culture that will go into a bitter very soon, some chinook flowers and a few cheese cultures. I also found a bottle of smoked chilli ale lurking in the bowels of this section, cracked it open and it was bloody horrible. It was a partial from sometime last year. Full of chlorophyll from the chilli, and I seem to remember that was an infected batch too. Not sad to see the last of it gone.

Wheat and barleywine are the only beers out of the fridge now, wheat will go in as soon as it loses the rough edges. Am going to drop through another couple quick turnaround beers soon so stocks don’t dwindle again.