Beach Brew

Tasted my two current brews today and made some measurements. They have both finished fermenting now which is good as the brown ale type beer had been a little slow. The stout was tasting great today and th brown sugar seems to have given just the right type and amount of flavour that I was looking for. It may be a little thin but it’s hard to tell with no carbonation. It will only get a little carbonation so I doubt that will change much. May carbonate with the dark brown sugar to see how that affects flavour.

The brown aleish beer is tasting a little ordinary. Nothing wrong with it just nothing exciting. I was hoping to get some strong Munich malt flavour from it but on today’s tasting that has not been achieved. I think it will be a well balanced and easy drinking beer but nothing great. I’m just happy it seems to have finished fermenting now.

I decided not to rack these two beers to secondary to see if that affected them. Main tells on that will be in appearance and yeast flavours in the final product. Next weekend these two will be bottled. I am not going to give them any cold conditioning time and hope to be drinking them a week later.

Next brew is my Kolsch for ANAWBS and a dopplebock.

Have not blogged for a while. Just haven’t been bothered after being on a computer all day at work. Comes with the territory I guess.

Since the last two brews I have brewed another two. The last two are still drinking well. The APA is a really great beer. I seem to have got it pretty much right with that one. The bottles of esb have been a bit hit and miss. Some have been a bit over carbonated. In general it has been pretty ordinary. Not terrible but ertainly not great like it was tasting during fermentation. I think it was mashed a bit low as it doesn’t really have the body I was looking for.

I have brewed a stout and a beer that is similar to a bock in recipe but I am fermenting it with an English Ale yeast at Ale temperatures. Thought the bock ale thing would be interesting. I guess time will tell on that. The stout is fairly typical of the Australian interpretation of a Foreign Extra Stout. Something in the vicinity of a Cooper’s or Southwark stout hopefully. I think the recipe, yeast and conditioning should get me that style of beer. I normally don’t like to use sugar in my brews. However, with this one I used some dark brown sugar to hopefully get the dark sugar flavours into the beer. They have been fermenting for just under a week. On the weekend they will be racked into another fermenter then left to condition for about three weeks. Maybe a weeks cold conditioning after that.