Hot, Quick and Thick

The sparkling ale is still in the fridge, the banana is diminished and the emphasis has turned to a pear schnapps flavour with mild alcohol. Still trying to find the time to bottle.

Brown ale has languished in secondary waiting for fridge space. Still smoky/meaty but the underlying balance is good and it would be better cold. Room temperature at the moment is probably still over 25°C; new year resolutions of treating beer better aren’t doing so well.

Of four batches on the go, two in production and two in consumption:

Aussie sparkling ale

Cold-conditioning in the fridge, waiting for the haze to drop before I bottle. Estery with banana and pear, crossing over into detectable alcohol notes. Not ideal but I’m hoping mild enough to be acceptable with a little bottle age.

Brow Nail

Like the sparkling, also copped a warmer fermentation temp. The Nottingham has thrown up a lot of sulphur compounds, right now it’s around ten days in primary and has progressed from H2Sy to meaty. I’ll rack it this weekend.. if i get around to it.

Quiet Ale #1: Hazed and Confused

Cloudy and slightly undercarbonated. Hop aroma mild with a slight grassy/vegetative edge. Quaffable but not stellar, with the cloudiness and lack of head (yet fizzy enough on the palate) is not one to share. Underlying balance is almost right though, so will brew the same recipe again with better fermentation management.

Lackwit

The one that was low on gravity and high on fermentation temp (higher so than the brown and aussie ales). However, so far it’s supporting the notion that belgian yeasts handle higher temperatures well. This one cleared nicely and the carbonation is good, but the head is poor like the quiet ale. The aroma is not the typical coriander and curacao, but it’s definitely yeast driven (I currently have trouble with phenolic descriptors). The styrian and simcoe late additions (more importantly, the simcoe) are not dominating; if I didn’t tell me that I put big american hops in here then I would never have noticed. Verdict is very pleasing and worth a repeat, next time with better efficiency.

Anyway, I think today’s lesson is to keep a better handle on the fermentation temperatures for the non-belgian ales. I’m probably going to drop a saison and quiet ale #2 next, so at least I’ll only have to work on managing the latter.

Moved to a cube today. Veritable pea-souper at the moment, will throw it in to CC and take the american cream ale out in anticipation of bottling it soon.

Palate is not very appealing at the moment. Same as the aborted weizenbock I brewed with WB-06, I’m having trouble deciding whether it is sour and clovey or so clovey it tastes sour.