Beach Brew

I bottled my Bock today. Was tasting pretty good at bottling. Had a nice strong Munich taste which is what I was looking for. I don’t know if it is intense as I had hoped. Will give it a couple of weeks in the bottle before passing judgement though. Seemed a little cloudier than I had hoped it would be considering it has had a month of lagering. I can only lager at 4C but that normally gets the job done. Once again time will tell and it is a reasonably dark beer.

Next couple of beers are going to be an APA, American Brown and a Steam Beer. All good styles for summer. I hope to get one or two down next weekend. I have to work around an upcoming overseas trip too. I think I may the Steam beer last and do an Alt Beer at the same time as they have similar fermentation schedules.

Will have the second tasting of the Kolsch later today. It has now been in the bottle for two weeks. It was tasting good but too young last time I tasted it a week ago and I don’t expect much too have changed. Hopefully the carbonation has come up a little. It has to be in by next Friday if it is to go into the paddle so I have to make my mind up about that soon.

I judged in the 07 SABSOSA competition today. First time I have judged for a while. It was a little strange getting into the mode again. It didn’t even take the whole first beer for me to get my head back into it. It was good to be judging again. We just don’t have many competitions so don’t get the chance to do it that often.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to judge many good beers today. One class didn’t even have one beer that reached 30 points. A little disappointing that standards were that low. I compared the score to the score for the same categories from last year nd the scores were really down. I only got to judge two beers that I would consider good. That said other people had some really good ones and I tasted a few great beers from other categories after the judging was over.

Next up in a couple of weeks time is ANAWBS. Hope fully I get some good ones there. I will hopefully have a beer or two entered at ANAWBS too. Just depends on my Kolsch being ready in time.

I bottled my kolsch today. It has been lagering for a few weeks and has come out very clear for 2565 yest. It is incredibly pale too. This is due to the fact that it was made with just pilsener malt. It is tasting pretty good at the moment but I think it is going to be too young for ANAWBS which is coming up in about a month. Particularly with a beer like this it is a balance between it being fresh enough and matured enough. On tasting to day I think I should have brewed and bottled this beer sooner. Only a couple of weeks of bottle conditioning will tell for sure.

The tasting today had all the classic kolsch flavours that you can only get from a real kolsch yeast. However, the flavour is just a little young and rough for want of a better description. It really does need some time to mature and smooth out. Hope fully it will be at a point where I can enter it in time.

All that said it will be tasting great by the time summer starts to hit so I can look forward to drinking it then.