Peach Melomel II

It took some time to get my brewing kit set up here, but this past weekend I finally snuck some wort into a couple fermentors. In the meantime, though, we came across the perfect excuses to engage in some gluten-free fermentation: ripe California peaches at the farmers market and a closeout on a brand of honey at the local Whole Foods.

Reno is host to a different farmers market just about every day of the week during the summer. Much of the selection comes from across the state border, and these markets are overflowing with tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, seafood, and more. DeAunn discovered freestone peaches from one of these vendors that were nearly as good as the ones we had in Alabama a couple summers ago. Recalling how well our first melomel turned out using those southern peaches--we enjoyed the final bottle to celebrate our move here, and it was excellent--it took little time to plan this followup. Finding a frankly fantastic deal on honey only made it come together more easily.

The recipe remained the same from the previous batch, though the ratio of fruit to honey was switched in favour of the honey, due to the weight of the peaches once we got them home and prepped. Our new place provided a more stable fermentation environment than the last batch had; that one toiled away on the rear floorboard of our car as we drove cross country in the middle of summer. Michael Tonsmiere raised an excellent point this spring on considering honey varietals (his first line puts it best: "If a beer recipe calls for 'honey' without specifying a varietal, it might as well call for 'malt' and 'hops' with similar imprecision."). I'd very much like to explore more fully the fermented outcomes of different types of honey available. For now, though, the general "wildflower" honey I've found works just fine, fermenting clean and leaving a fragrant white wine-like note.

As I prepared to transfer this melomel over the weekend, I was dismayed to open the fermentor and find two fruit flies floating on the surface. I've played it pretty fast and loose with mead; since we usually aim to make about 1.5 gallons per batch, I've done all of my primary fermentations in the two-gallon bucket we bought for that first batch of melomel. I left the lid, now quite warped, loose and covered the bucket with a clean t-shirt, relying on this setup to be enough to keep away any nasties. Obviously it wasn't enough this time, and the batch may suffer for it. The bucket has now gone for recycling; next time, we'll go with primary in glass.

The mead has now been racked to secondary on bentonite to clear, and a half gallon received newly-toasted oak cubes as well. It had fermented quite dry, and showed no signs of infection at that point. It's dropped pretty bright already, so we'll plan to bottle soon, keep it cold, and drink it quickly. Hopefully we'll be able to avoid the majority of possible bacterial off-flavours and fully enjoy this reminder of our first taste of our new home.

Peach Melomel II - Reno edition
Batch size: 1.75 gallons
Projected OG: 1.121

Fermentables
5 lb 12 oz Honey
3 lb Peaches - peeled, sliced, frozen

Yeast
Lalvin 71B-1122

Extras - SNA
1 tsp Yeast nutrient
.5 tsp Yeast energizer
   3/8 tsp after pitching
   3/8 tsp after 24 hours
   3/8 tsp after 48 hours
   3/8 tsp after 72 hours

Brewday: 1 September 2014
Fermented at 75F ambient.

Secondary: 28 September 2014
Added 1 tsp bentonite dissolved in 1 cup water, .5 oz newly-toasted oak to .5 gallon.
Found two fruit flies in the bucket. Apparently I didn’t keep the bucket covered well enough...

Local Cider '13

In the fall of 2012, DeAunn and I managed quite a haul from harvesting fruit, mostly apples along with some pears, and produced a few mini-batches of cider and perry.  The straight cider turned out decently; the other batches picked up infections and were dumped.  While we exerted a lot of energy grinding and pressing the fruit on our own for a very small yield, it was an experience that brought a connection to the ingredients that's hard to get otherwise.

This fall, a friend pointed me toward a different source from which to gather fruit straight from the trees.  They were all culinary apples, but in several varieties; the diversity was definitely welcome.  In addition, I was also able to gather some crabapples from the same plot.  After last year I did a little bit of cider homework, looking to enhance the flavour of what had turned out to be, after fermentation removed the simple sugars, a dry, somewhat bland beverage.  Adding crabapples to the mix seemed like a good way to introduce the acidic and tannic characters culinary apples lack.  Before getting down to juicing, the apples were also allowed to sit for the better part of three weeks to "sweat"; the natural yeast begins to ferment the fruit sugars, breaking down the cell structure and making the apples easier to process.

And so, one November weekend when DeAunn was out of town, I pulled a solo all-nighter preparing and juicing the apples...with our small consumer-grade juicer.  Yes, it took all night and into the early morning, but the juicer actually did a pretty good job.  My hands were a wreck by the end from being constantly wet for hours on end; gloves would've been a good move.  In the end, I had almost three gallons of cider ready for fermentation.  Since it had sat out in the open air all night, I gently heat pasteurized the batch before pitching.  After about three weeks in the fermenter, it was ready for bottling.

I cannot say enough nice things about how this cider turned out.  The crabapples were definitely a good idea; their acidity and tannins gave the cider real heft and character, and balanced well with the touch of residual sweetness left after fermentation.  While it was much more work than ciders I've made from store- (or orchard-) bought juice, the final quality was much greater, and my enmeshment in the process was much deeper.

As homebrewers, we have to really work to connect with our ingredients; while we can grow our own hops, isolating suitable yeast cultures on our own requires a substantial amount of work (which a number of folks admirably put in), and growing and malting enough of our own grain to sustain this as a year-round habit is pretty much out of the question for anyone living in an urban or suburban setting.  Working on the fruit for this cider allowed me to really get in on the ground level of the ingredients in a way that I probably will never be able to do with barley malt and saccharomyces.  It made the final product that much more enjoyable.  My next cider will undoubtedly come from store-bought juice, and I'd still encourage anyone looking to try cider making to go this route.  If one day the opportunity to pick your own apples and choose the balance of fruit going into the cider presents itself, though, go for it; it takes the "easy" out of making cider, but we're not really doing this because it's easy, are we?

NB: After making this cider, I came across a couple very recent resources that may interest those looking to take their own steps into fermenting pomme fruit.  The first is an article in the Nov/Dec issue of Zymurgy that covered a side-by-side comparison of different brewing yeasts for making cider.  The results suggested using British strains for suitable ester character and favourable residual sweetness; WLP002 or 004 may be what I try next.  The second resource is Drew Beechum's recent book, The Everything Hard Cider Book, about which I learned from an interview with the author on the Brewing Network's The Session podcast.  Drew's book focuses on how to make good cider with readily available juices and other materials, as well as how to use this type of cider as a basis for experimentation.  It's one I'm planning to pick up before too long.  Hope these help.

Local Cider ‘13 - From apples & crabapples picked in residential SLC

Batch size: 2.8 gallons
OG: 13.2P (1.052)

3 ½ buckets various varieties of apples & crabapples
WLP775 English Cider yeast

Brewday: 2 November 2013
Let apples sit for 2 ½ weeks after picking.
Processed apples with home juicer; VERY labour-intensive process.
Strained, pasteurized at 160F for ~10 minutes, chilled, pitched.
Fermented at ~65F ambient.

Bottled: 22 November 2013
FG: 1.005
ABV: 6.4%
Bottled with 2.7 oz table sugar and rehydrated champagne yeast.

GF Oatmeal Stout - Fail

In the continuing saga to provide the best in gluten-free fermented beverages for my bride, I'd long planned to try my hand at brewing her a beer with alternative grains; I still have the oats I toasted for that project, though they're probably getting stale at this point.  With an abundance of time, materials, and fermenter space this summer, though, it made for a perfect time to experiment with gluten-free brewing.

Given DeAunn's preference for roast over hops, an oatmeal stout was an excellent pilot brew.  Oats themselves are a gluten-free grain; my understanding, though, is that they're often processed on equipment that also handles grains with gluten, making them unsuitable for those with Celiac disease unless clearly marked as GF.  Since DeAunn just has a sensitivity to gluten and not full-blown Celiac, regular oats would probably be fine.  I roasted a pound of rolled oats the day before brewing; however I was unwilling to completely fill my parents' beautiful new home with smoke and the stench of burning grain, so they came out without quite as much colour as I would've liked ideally.  Normally I'd give the roasted grain a couple weeks to mellow before using them; in this case, I put the roasted oats in a bowl that I swirled and agitated often that day to get out as much of the overboard bitter flavours as possible.

The homebrew shop my dad frequents, Scotzin Bros. in Lemoyne, carries an impressive array of small-batch gluten-free malted grains, including millet, amaranth, teff, and more.  For this first GF outing, though, I tried to play it safe, basing the recipe around sorghum extract and brown rice syrup.  Having given many of the GF beers on the market a try in the last year, DeAunn and I had both decided the tang associated with using a

high percentage of sorghum was not really to our taste.  Unsure of how to best treat other grains for this beer, though, I went with the devil I knew, relying on the other ingredients, such as the roasted oats, dark candi syrup, coffee, and vanilla bean, to counterbalance the sorghum.

By the end of brewday, though, we were left with a carboy full of opaque, almost latte-coloured liquid that only fermented down to about 1.020 over the next couple weeks.  Having started at 1.062, that's pretty sweet.  The taste was very twangy, much as I'd expect of a sorghum-based beer.  In the end it seemed like it would be a waste of good coffee and vanilla to add them to this batch; the pound of D-180 hadn't really helped much to darken it or improve the flavour.  With heavy heart, this batch went down the drain, a failed first GF experiment.  Fortunately, a followup brew of a similar nature by my dad later in the summer turned out much better; it still has a distinct sorghum flavour to me, but DeAunn's really enjoying it.  It inspires me to continue exploring GF brewing.

GF Oatmeal Stout (extract w/ grains)

Batch size: 4.8 gallons
Projected OG: 1.062
Projected SRM:
Projected IBU: 23.0
Boil time: 30 minutes

Grains/Fermentables
36.7% - 3 lb 15 oz Brown Rice Syrup
30.7% - 3 lb 4.8 oz Sorghum Syrup
9.3% - 1 lb Rolled oats
9.3% - 1 lb Rolled oats, roasted to brown malt
9.3% - 1 lb D-180 Dark candi syrup (3 days into primary)
4.7% - 8 oz  Lactose

Hops
1 oz Centennial (8.7%) (30 min)

Yeast
1 pkg Nottingham

Extras
2-3 Vanilla beans, cut & scraped (end of fermentation)
Cold press coffee (bottling)

Brewday: 14 June 2013
Post-boil OG (w/o sugar): 1.056
Not very stout looking; very milky, yeast coloured.

21 June 2013
Added D-180 syrup
Active fermentation has slowed considerably

Ended very twangy, not really close to traditional beer, and not very tasty in general (to me).  Dumped.

Apple Pie Cyser

Since doing more studying and sampling research on them this summer, ciders and meads have really taken the front seat on my brewing calendar.  This batch combined these two strains: cyser is the love child of mead and cider, a beverage neither DeAunn nor I had tried, but which sounded damned delicious to both of us.  We picked up a couple gallons of fresh-pressed cider (and a couple of carving pumpkins) a couple weeks before Halloween from a local cider mill, and added a two pounds of local honey.  A vial of the White Labs English Cider yeast and we were off.

I kept the fermentation temp down, hoping to avoid a lot of hot alcohol presence; this was planned for this Christmas season, so aging needed to be kept to a minimum. The work paid off: after nearly a month in primary, it emerged semi-dry, with great apple and honey character, and just a touch of alcohol presence.  Moving to secondary for a month of further aging, I added Bentonite to help it drop clear.  Along with that I'm including a few pie spices of DeAunn's choosing: cassia bark (cinnamon), grated nutmeg, and clove.  For the spicing step, I split the cyser into two one-gallon batches, one of which received oak along with the spices.  I found the cassia at our old spice shop back in Chicago over the summer, and really like its sweet, spicy flavour; I added a couple pieces of it to each secondary.  My understanding is that a little bit of clove will go a long way, so I'll split a single clove in half, one part for each batch; trying to avoid overdoing the nutmeg, I'll add just a little of that as well.  To further reduce their impact, I'll give the cinnamon and oak a week or so head start before adding these more assertive spices.

The challenge now will be to make sure that the spices don't throw off the excellent flavour it had coming out of secondary.  Which means periodic sampling every few days; how sad.  As long as I'm careful to not expose it to an infection (and don't "sample" half of it before bottling) I can look forward to a nice seasonal drink for the Yuletide season.

Apple Pie Cyser

Projected OG: 1.085
Volume: 2 gallons

Fermentables
2 gallons Farnsworth Farms Cider
2 lb Cox Honeyland Honey

Yeast
WLP775 English Cider

Extras
1 tsp Pectic enzyme
1 tsp Yeast nutrient
1 tsp Yeast energizer

Brewday: 20 October 2012
Fermented in swamp cooler in low 60s F ambient

Secondary: 17 November 2012
SG: 1.010
Great semi-sweet finish with just a little alcohol harshness; will have to monitor in secondary to make sure the spices don’t get too overwhelming
Split into two 1-gallon batches for aging - initial spices added

Spicing:
.2 oz Saigon cassia cinnamon - both batches
1.1 oz Medium-dark toast oak, bourbon soaked - Batch B

Spicing, part 2: 28 November 2012
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg - both batches
½ clove - both batches

Bottled: 30 December 2012
FG: 1.005
ABV: 10.5%
Bottled still.

Tasting: Sharp with lots of apple snap.  The cinnamon came through like a champ, even adding a bit of a tongue-numbing quality; will plan to increase the amounts of the other spices next time to keep up with it.  As of today (3 March 2013) the oaked version is still aging; don't tell DeAunn, she'll tear through it like a chainsaw.

Home toasting malt: Gluten-free edition

Here in Salt Lake we had our first big snow of the season last weekend; in about a day and a half we had more accumulation than we had all of last winter.  For me, of course, this ushers in thoughts of beers on the darker, richer, and heavier end of the scale.  I've never brewed an oatmeal stout, but have contemplated finally doing so; the slick, smooth oat character balancing the stout roast struck me as a proper aim for this more tempestuous season.  Just adding oats to a standard stout recipe wouldn't be enough, though; it seemed only proper to give this adjunct a bit of toasting to tease out a bit more character.

Running parallel with my desire to enhance the flavour of a cold-weather classic was my ongoing desire to produce alcoholic beverages for my gluten-sensitve spouse.  During the summer, DeAunn's tastes tended toward cider and perry, with the occasional semi-sweet melomel added to this sweeter, effervescent mix.  Now that the seasons have changed, though, her tongue has headed back for a more malt-based alternative; the local GF beer option, Epic Brewing's Glutenator, has really hit her fancy.  I haven't experimented very much at all yet with GF malted grains, but since I know how much she loves dark beers, an oatmeal stout with an oat malt base seemed like a great GF winter offering.

On to the grain prep.  It started with a pound and a half of organic flaked "quick" oats from Whole Foods.  The web and homebrew forums (and perennial favourite text Radical Brewing) offer plenty of information on giving grains a light toasting; a slightly deeper colour and mouth-watering, nutty, "oatmeal cookie" smell was pretty easy to achieve.  But what about the roasted-grain colour and character for the GF version?  For this, I set out to roast a small amount of quick oats to that chocolate or roasted barley level required for the right look and taste for a stout.  The oat-based beer was going to be a 2-gallon test batch as it was, so just a half pound of roasted oats struck me as plenty for this outing.  I found instructions on home roasting barley to chocolate malt or roasted barley levels; given the thickness of the oats I toned down the temps at first, but in the end moved into the suggested range, which yielded the proper results (along with smoke starting to billow from the oven, as the instructions promised).  The roasted oats ended up a bit lighter in colour than I'd hoped, but definitely have the right acrid, coffee-ish aroma.  I'm confident that they'll also give me my desired SRM; if it ends up on the brown side, though, I'll add a bit of coffee to enhance all aspects of this stout.  Both sets of toasted/roasted grains were given a minimum of two weeks to mellow before they were allowed anywhere near a beer; the "young" charred flavours and aromas of these grains can easily overwhelm a batch, so they require proper time to come into balance.

I'm looking forward to brewing the "regular" oatmeal stout later today.  I miscalculated on my LHBS's supplies for the GF version, though; it seems they don't stock oat malt, so the test batch will have to wait for now.  If this works out, I may have a great way to keep my wife in beverages of her choice during the coming months of dark and cold.


Toasted oats
-Thick layer (1.5 lbs) @ 350F for ~2 hours
-Turned every 15 min
-Wt reduced by .7 oz by the end
-Deep golden colour, "oatmeal cookie" aroma while toasting

"Roasted" oats
-Thinner layer (8 oz)
-350F for 2.5 hours, 450F for 40 minutes
-Turned every 15-20 minutes
-Wt reduced by .5 oz by the end
-Chocolate colour, similar to Cocoa Pebbles, honestly; burnt, acrid odour by the end, accompanied by smoke

Both batches left to air out for 2+ weeks

Home-pressed ciders

Following our travels this summer, DeAunn has really embraced both mead and cider (particularly perry), so when we discovered quite a bit of available fruit open for the picking on the mean streets of SLC's 9th & 9th neighbourhood, we got right down to it.  Collecting a five-gallon bucket of apples on our first tentative venture, we juiced the apples in our home juicer, yielding a little under a gallon of juice by the time it made it to secondary.  It was a fun, if time-consuming, experience, and goaded us on to further renegade picking adventures.

My LHBS rents apple grinders and presses by the day, so I reserved them for the following weekend and we headed out to harvest more fruit.  We ended up bringing in two buckets each of pears and apples; the pears we ground and pressed on their own for a bit under two gallons of perry, and the apples yielded right around two gallons of cider when combined with four pounds of frozen blueberries.  While fun, the grinding and pressing were a lot of work and took literally all night, leaving us exhausted by the end.  I've done some online research and am already ruminating on constructing a grinder and press for our future cider adventures.

For yeast, I used White Labs' English Cider for the first batch, then repitched it into the blueberry cider.  As DeAunn wanted to ensure a predictable fermentation for the perry, I went with the Lalvin Narbonne yeast, which I've used for both the meads we've made so far and should purportedly leave a fruitiness in the end product.  While I added no extras to the first small batch of cider, I did go ahead and add a bit of yeast nutrient and energizer to the perry and blueberry cider at the start to help along fermentation.

I've been pretty cavalier about taking gravity readings for these ciders; especially when it comes to adding fruit to the primary, it seems difficult to really get a handle on the OG when I'm going ahead and pitching yeast before the sugars are really evenly distributed.  If/when I move to more full-sized batches I'll take more care wth the measurements.  Unfortunately, I fear that I may have waited too long to move the latter two batches; while the first cider seems to be sitting pretty in a glass secondary, the perry and blueberry cider have been sitting in thin plastic fermenters for better than a month now.  Finally checking them just a little while ago, their odor indicates likely acetobacter infections in both.  All that work may have been for naught, just because I haven't had time to mess with these little batches.  I'll plan to give them closer consideration over the weekend, but I'm not hopeful.  At least we should have that first batch left for quaffing.

Local Cider

Batch size: 3 qts
OG: 1.038

Fermentables
~45 lb Found, hand-picked apples

Yeast
WLP775 English Cider

Brewday: 4 September 2012
Quartered & cored each apple, then put in water bath to keep from oxidizing immediately.  Juiced in home juicer.  Whole process took several hours; looking forward to using an actual cider press on larger batches of apples (and pears?) soon.

Secondary: 9 September 2012

Bottled: 27 October 2012
FG: 1.004
ABV: 4.4%

Bottled with .9 oz light brown sugar.
=====

9th & 9th Perry and Blueberry Cider - from fruit hand-harvested from neighbourhood trees

Perry
OG: 1.048
Volume: 1.7 gallons
Lalvin 71B-1122

Blueberry Cider
OG: unmeasured
Volume: 2 gallons
4 lb Blueberries, frozen
WLP775 English Cider - yeast cake from Local Cider

Extras (each batch)
1 tsp Pectic enzyme
1 tsp Yeast nutrient
1 tsp Yeast energizer

Brewday: 9 September 2012
Ground and crushed all fruit on equipment rented from LHBS; very labour- and time intensive

Fermentation started at ambient 70F, then after 9 hours moved to water bath at 65F ambient

Perry picked up an acetobacter infection; dumped.

Tasting: Local Cider finished very dry, but retained a very perfumey apple blossom nose (thanks, WLP 775!).  Flavour was of a dry white wine with the suggestion of apples.  As of today (3 March 2013) the blueberry cider is still sitting in primary.  The berries have formed a barrier that keeps any acetobacter growth in the fermenter (which is undoubtedly there, given the thin plastic and the number of times I've moved it) from directly contacting the liquid.  The only reason it hasn't been bottled is my incredible laziness.

Two Meads

After an unexplained illness and a bit of research back in June, DeAunn thought she might have a gluten allergy.  She decided to go off gluten for a while and see how it went.  Good news: her health improved almost immediately and she still remarks how much better she feels the longer she goes without it.  Bad news: now she can't partake in the beer I make.  I've looked into some options for gluten-free brewing and may explore that more down the road, provided I can come up with something better than New Grist (not my speed).  Neither of us care for wine, and DeAunn is allergic to sulfites (though the sulfited drinks we've had this summer don't seem to have bothered her, interestingly), so I'm not planning to get into making it right now.

Over the last few months we've sampled a variety of ciders and meads for further GF possibilities, with some great finds.  French perry was a particular hit, as was pretty much the full line of meads, melomels (honey & fruit), and metheglins (honey & herbs/spices) from Brothers Drake Meadery in Columbus, Ohio; their semi-dry varieties in particular really redefined mead for us as a beverage that didn't have to be sticky sweet.  If you find yourself in Columbus, do yourself a favour and stop in at the tasting room.

My eyes will be peeled over the next couple months for local cider to ferment, but honey is something that seems to be available more readily.  There are a few apiaries in the area, so fortunately using local honey is a viable option for us.  Without really planning on it, however, we got our mead making start on the road in July.  While visiting DeAunn's family in Alabama, we had the pleasure of eating peaches from a local farm that were the juiciest and best tasting that either of us had ever had.  With mead on my mind and some of champion mead maker (and BTV guest) Curt Stock's recipes and processes bookmarked, I devised a plan.  We bought a couple baskets of peaches before we left to take with us on our visit to Pennsylvania; there we procured some local honey and, after more searching than I'd anticipated, wine yeast.  Remove the pits and freeze the peaches, add in some yeast energizer, yeast nutrient, and water, and voilà, we were fermenting about a gallon of peach melomel in a bucket in the back

seat of the car as we traveled.  I transferred it to secondary once we got back home and added bentonite to flocc out the proteins and yeast; the sample at transfer was very promising.

It would've been enough to see how this batch turned out and then to move on to further experimenting, but last week a notice came over my Facebook feed about Mead Day on the 4th.  Since it's so easy to make, it took hardly any time at all to pick up all the ingredients for a couple gallons of blackberry melomel.  I'm interested to see how long these take to be drinkable; while conventional wisdom points to months (or years) of aging, Curt's staggered nutrient addition method purportedly turns out ready-to-drink batches in as little as six weeks.  The peach melomel definitely pointed in that direction, but Brothers Drake are turning out really excellent mead following a more traditional aging program.  Extended aging would also play well to experimenting with wood, dry hops, and other possibilities.  If you haven't tried making mead, I'd highly recommend just trying it out by getting together a pound or two of honey, a gallon jug, and a packet of Lalvin Narbonne 71B-1122; it can be a very rewarding addition to your brewing portfolio.

Pennsylbama Peach Melomel

Batch size: 1.25 gallons
Projected OG: 1.123 (estimated)

Fermentables
 4 lb Local PA honey
3.75 lb Local AL peaches - pitted, mashed, frozen

Yeast
Lalvin 71B-1122

Extras
Yeast nutrient
Yeast energizer

Staggered nutrient additions (SNA): added yeast, nutrient, and energizer at pitching time, 24 hours, and 48 hours into fermentation

Brewday: 14 July 2012

Secondary: 7 August 2012
Added .5 tsp Bentonite, dissolved
SG: 1.032

Bottled: 29 September 2012
FG: 1.029
ABV: 12.4%

Bottled still.
Great peach aroma, decent peach flavour, finish is sweet but satisfying.

==========

Mead Day 2012 Blackberry Melomel

Batch size: 2 gallons
Measured OG: 25.0P (1.107)

Fermentables
 5 lb Local UT honey
1.25 lb Organic blackberries, frozen

Yeast
 Lalvin 71B-1122

Extras
Yeast nutrient
Yeast energizer

Brewday: 4 August 2012
Fermented in swamp cooler at 71F
Nutrient and energizer added at pitching and 48 hours later

Secondary
Bentonite added, oak added to 1 gallon

Bottled: 27 October 2012
FG: 1.002
ABV: 13.8%
Bottled still.

Tasting: The peach melomel, finishing sweet, reinforced the delicate peach flavour.  Alcohol was present and maybe a little pushy, but just let you know this was a substantial libation.  The blackberry melomel, on the other hand, finished very dry.  The blackberries lent a fruity tartness, with the oaked portion also having an enjoyable tannic drying sensation on the back of the tongue.  Very different, but also very tasty.