Bitters abound

I'd say I'm way overdue to visit England.  While I'd love to see the pastoral countryside that Ralph Vaughan Williams depicted in music during the first half of the past century, I definitely need to spend some time down the pub with a few hand-pulled pints of ordinary, best, and/or extra special bitter.  While I've enjoyed British-styled pale ales in the States, especially on cask, I've never had the opportunity to revel in the "real thing."  Until I manage to finagle myself into the British Isles, I'll have to make due by brewing my own, five gallons at a time.

I enjoy the challenge of brewing session beers (below 4.5% ABV, as defined by some) in general, and it's one that I still strive to perfect.  British pale ales, particular the lowest gravity ordinary bitters, have been source of immense brewing pleasure for me over the years; finding the balance between malt, hops, and characterful yeast in a low-alcohol package has put me to the test and has at times yielded phenomenal beers.  With cooler weather approaching (and now upon us) this seemed a perfect style to keep me (and others) off the streets and indoors sipping pint after pint of beautifully balanced easy-drinking beer.

The wort was relatively straight ahead, mimicking some of my early successes in the style: neutral American base malt with a fair measure of crystal for residual sweetness, followed up by a bit of brown sugar to up fermentability.  This was a split batch; one half received a pretty traditional hop schedule of Kent Goldings

and Fuggles, the other half built on Willamettes and Styrian Goldings that worked so well in my early attempts with bitters, specifically in one I named S.O.B. (for "Standard/Ordinary Bitter").  Two different English yeasts added a bit more interest.  And with that, we were off.

The batch with the Willamettes and Styrians ended up a little higher in gravity than I intended, moving into the special bitter range, but everything else went pretty well according to plan.  These beers sat a bit longer in the fermenters than I would've preferred; while bitters can turn around in as little as a week and are often best as fresh as possible, these had to wait for about a month before I managed to bottle them.  I was worried when I sampled a couple early bottles; one batch had me concerned that the yeast had flocced out enough to make carbonation difficult, and the other that it had sat long enough to pick up a bit of acetobacter.  After an additional week and a half of sitting, though, everything seems to have pretty much come out all right.  The more tradition bitter is smooth and has a nice malty finish, while the S.O.B. has a bit more initial bite from the Styrians.  This has the makings of a fine early autumn, to be sure.

Double Batch Ordinary Bitter - Trad Bitter & S.O.B.
Batch size: 10 gallons
Projected OG: 1.043
Projected SRM: 7.1
Projected IBU: 33.8/35.0
Boil time: 70 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 89%

Grains/Fermentables
9 lb Malteurop 2-row
2 lb C 40
1 lb Carapils
1 lb Light brown sugar (8 oz per batch; 60 min)

Hops (Trad)
.5 oz Phoenix (10.2%) (60 min)
1 oz EKG (5.8%) (10 min)
1 oz Fuggle (4.2%) (10 min)

Hops (S.O.B.)
1 oz Willamette (4.7%) (60 min)
.7 oz Willamette (20 min)
1 oz Styrian Goldings (3.2%) (15 min)
1 oz Styrian Goldings (5 min)

Yeast
Trad - WY1968 London ESB
S.O.B. - WY1469 West Yorkshire Ale

Extras (per batch)
1 tsp Irish moss (10 min)
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)

Water additions
9 qts RO water (mash)
1 g Gypsum (mash)
1 g Salt (mash)
4 g Gypsum (2 g each boil)

Brewday: 2 September 2012

Mash: 154F for 4 hours
1st sparge: 22 qts @ 200F
2nd sparge: 23 qts @ 190F
Pre-boil volume: 14 gallons
Pre-boil gravity (w/o sugar): 7.1P (1.028)

Trad fermenter volume: 5.1 gallons
OG: 10.0P (1.040)

S.O.B. fermenter volume: 4.8
OG: 11.6P (1.046) - now a special bitter, apparently

Fermented in swamp coolers @ 62F ambient

Bottled: 29 September 2012
Trad FG: 1.006
ABV: 4.4%

S.O.B. FG: 1.007
ABV: 5.1%

Each bottled with 2 oz light brown sugar.

Tasting: Both batches ended up on the watery side, with a decent malt presence.  They share an off-flavour, though, that I can't quite place; at first I thought it might be acetobacter, but that hasn't developed.  Possibly oxidation?

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.

Summer hop picking

Coming off 6 weeks on the road this summer and pretty much jumping right into the busiest semester of doctoral study we've had so far has left me very short on time for keeping up to date here.  I've finally carved out a little time and plan to do a bit of catching up, starting with covering this season's hop harvest.

A dutiful friend kept the hops watered in my absence, and we returned to see them in fine form.  Following the trauma it endured last winter, the Goldings plant produced no cones this year; it was hard to tell at first, though, as the Centennial bines had grown over to the adjacent plot and set up shop there, producing .6 ounces dry all told.  The Willamettes took top honors as they have in the past, producing a bounty of sizable cones that came in at 1.6 ounces dry.

Ideally, I'd like to use these homegrown hops for a wet-hopped beer, but the timing simply didn't work out this time; it was getting late in the season when I finally picked them as it was.  Maybe next year I'll be able to plan out a brewday for when the hops are at their peak.

Speaking of wet hopping, I took part in a little communal hop picking for local brewpub Desert Edge in the latter part of August.  The brewers went out the day before to an undisclosed area of Parley's Canyon outside Salt Lake and cut garbage bags full of wild hop bines to use in an annual golden ale named Radius, for which all the ingredients are sourced within one hundred miles of the city.  Over the course of the day, the assembled civilian hop pickers harvested nineteen buckets of wet hops that went into this year's brew; I stayed on for about five hours, enjoying complimentary pours of house beers as we went.  It's not my favourite local brewpub, but as one finds in many situations, the beer's quality improved greatly when it became free.  In addition, the brewers held a pickers appreciation party about a month later, pouring complimentary Radius (and other house beers) for the assembled helpers and sending each one home with a hand-labeled bottle.  Apparently this year's batch wasn't as hop forward as it's been in the past, but it's certainly not an offensive brew; I still have my bottle, and have plans to crack it before it's sat for too long.  For anyone in the SLC area, I highly recommend taking part in this event next year; it's good fun with good people.

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.

The IPA that Would Be a Pale

The Utah Beehive Brewoff is coming up, and it will be the first homebrew competition I’ve entered.  Still making decisions on what I have that’s in shape to submit, I thought a small batch of IPA would keep me in hoppy beer into the fall, age well in primary while we’re out of town, and could potentially make for a good entry.  I’ll have just enough time to give it a short dry hop and carbonate it before submitting my bottles.

I made this the second half of my batch #100 brewday, just before we left Salt Lake; while that beer came out as planned, finishing that batch and the race to finish packing and prepping the house for our departure took its toll on the IPA.  I’d planned to do a 3-gallon batch, but inattention put me into normal-batch mode: I ended up sparging to 6 gallons pre-boil volume and ended up with just under 5 gallons of wort to ferment.  The extra volume meant a reduction in gravity and IBUs; I added a pound of sugar to compensate for the low gravity at knockout, but not wanting to add another hour of boiling to my late hops and lacking the time in my day to do so anyway, I had to leave it at that.

The wort that ended up in the fermenter fell squarely into the American pale ale category; not what I was trying to make, but definitely a better outcome than I should expect from paying so little attention on brewday.  We’ll see at that point if it’s worth submitting.

Dumb Luck Pale
Batch size: 4.8 gallons
Projected OG: 1.052
Projected SRM: 7.0
Projected IBU: 42.2
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 87%

Grains
53.3% - 4 lb Malteurop 2-row
20.0% - 1.5 lb Weyermann Organic Vienna
6.7% - 8 oz Crisp Amber
6.7% - 8 oz Briess C40
13.3% - 1 lb Table sugar (0 min)

Hops
.3 oz Columbus (16.7%) (FWH)
.3 oz Summit (17.6%) (60 min)
.3 oz Columbus (10 min)
.3 oz Summit (10 min)
.4 oz Columbus (Dry hop 3 days)
.4 oz Summit (Dry hop 3 days)

Yeast
WY1450/US-05 (slurry)

Extras
1 tsp Yeast energizer (10 min)

Water additions
7 qts RO water (mash)
1 g Gypsum (mash)
2 g Gypsum (boil)

Brewday: 18 June 2012
Mash: 151F for 60 min
Pre-boil volume: 6 gallons

Originally supposed to be a 3-gallon batch of IPA, but was too distracted to realize my sparge numbers were way too high
Ferment in swamp cooler at 62F ambient

Dry hops: 4 August 2012

Bottled: 8 August 2012
FG: 1.005
ABV: 6.1%

Bottled with 3.6 oz table sugar.

Tasting: Did not turn out.  Can’t remember if it was infected or simply poorly made, but dumped the whole batch.  Next time I’ll make the beer I intend to make.

Batch #100 - Imperial Raspberry (Blackberry) Vanilla Porter

It's a nice round number in the brew log, 100.  Kicking off the triple digits.  I considered for a good while what that century batch should be.  A barleywine, finally?  Another stab at an IIPA (with all Centennials, of course)?  So many options.  All of my previous quarter-century batches have been big, dark beers--always

cold-weather favourites with me--and in the end, I decided to carry on that tradition with an imperial porter.  To keep it from becoming too ordinary, though, this one's getting vanilla beans, probably oak, and definitely a bunch of raspberries.

Vienna base for malty warmth, a good helping of brown malt for its restrained roast, and some medium-dark crystal and pale chocolate to add a few more layers to this big, rich porter.  This also seemed like the perfect batch in which to use the D-180 syrup I've had lying in wait since last summer, bringing its dark fruit character and helping dry out this hefty beer.  Minimal hopping for balance, and a healthy slurry of neutral ale yeast to ferment.

The big fun will take place when I add the raspberries, vanilla beans, and oak.  Wanting these extra ingredients to make a big impact, there'll be a lot of each going into secondary; if they're too overwhelming, it'll be up to time and patience to bring them into balance.  I'm planning on giving them about a month of contact time,

though it'll be up to the beer to tell me when it's ready.  I may also add these ingredients in stages, particularly getting in the vanilla last so that the secondary fermentation of the raspberries doesn't blow off all the aromatics from the beans.

Wanting to give this beer the summer to ferment and age a bit but running out of time before our summer trip, it became the first half of another double-batch brewday the day before we left town.  Though there was a lot of frenzied activity throughout the house, the wort came out fine.  The real issue is whether or not the fermentation temperatures behaved themselves in my absence over the last couple weeks; activity was just getting started when we left the house, and the best I could do for it was to add some extra ice packs to the swamp cooler to get the initial temperature down.  This is the disadvantage of my low-fi temp regulation setup.  I'm sure it rose above where I'd normally try to keep it, but I have a feeling it won't have gone too far out of hand.  Now I just have to hope it didn't blow off the airlock...

Imperial Raspberry Vanilla Porter
Batch size: 4.6 gallons
Projected OG: 1.089
Projected SRM: 39.0
Projected IBU: 30.5
Boil time: 95 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 65%

Grains/Fermentables
75.4% - 13 lb Vienna
11.6% - 2 lb Brown malt
5.8% - 1 lb C 80
1.4% - 8 oz Pale Chocolate
5.8% - 1 lb D-180 Belgian candi syrup (10 min)

Hops
.7 oz Magnum (13.5%) (85 min)

Yeast
WY1450 Denny’s Favorite 50/US-05 (slurry)

Extras
1 tbsp Yeast nutrient (10 min)
7 lb Frozen raspberries (secondary)
3+ vanilla beans, split, scraped & chopped (secondary)
2 oz home-toasted oak, boiled (secondary)

Water additions (mash)
10 qts Distilled water
1 g Baking soda
1 g Chalk

Brewday: 18 June 2012
Mash: 21 qts @ 150F for 60 min
1st sparge: 6 qts @ 212F
2nd sparge: 9 qts @ 212F
Pre-boil volume: 6.5 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 15.4P (1.066)

Fermented in swamp cooler, started at 65F ambient

4 August 2012
SG: 1.024

Secondary: 10 August 2012
Added frozen blackberries (in place of original plan of raspberries); will add oak and vanilla beans after fermentation settles down again.
Very full; hopefully fruit fermentation won’t be too vigorous.
Revised est. OG: 1.091

Vanilla: 7 September 2012
Oak: 9 September 2012

Bottled: 8 December 2012
FG: 1.024
ABV: 8.8%
Bottled with 3.7 oz light brown sugar

Tasting: Sweet and winey, though not necessarily in a bad way. The blackberries are the big player here, with the roast really not making a dent in comparison.  The oak and vanilla really don't play a part, either.  This is a beer to enjoy slowly; I expect the batch to last well into next winter.

Flanders Red - Attempt #2

The second beer of my doctoral brewing/aging program is a Flanders red.  It's this style that really sent me down the path of sour beer; while I couldn't stand Duchesse, purportedly a great gateway sour, Rodenbach Grand Cru had me hooked from the first sip.  I've made one attempt at this style before, which, after a year of aging, unfortunately turned out a beer that had a light, pleasant pie-cherry aroma but a very bland taste (the extra gallon of wort fermented with raspberries and with a Ziploc bag in place of an airlock turned out to be far superior).

Given the spectacular failure of that first batch, a few alterations were in order.  The recipe changed, but more significant for this beer, the mash temperature was increased to leave more dextrins for the souring bugs to slowly devour over the next couple years.  Instead of using an oak peg, this batch will get cubes, which should be much more manageable for long term storage.  Avoiding a boneheaded move from last time, I'll also remember to toast the oak before it goes in the beer.  Out of necessity, the primary ferment will last a bit longer; we're on the road for a while, so this batch will have been sitting for about six weeks before being transferred off the the cake to age.  Primary is also happening in a bucket instead of a carboy; though this time will be relatively short in the life of the beer, it might be enough to allow for some extra oxygen pickup through the more permeable (than glass) plastic and encourage some extra acetic souring action.

There was no shortage of yeast that went into this batch.  Since different strains of yeast and bacteria grow at very different rates (with good ol' Saccharomyces usually coming out as the speed demon), making a starter of a yeast blend--in this case Wyeast 3763 Roeselare, originally from Rodenbach--can throw off the delicate balance of bugs and yeast in the packet.  Instead of a starter, two full smack packs went into primary.  As if that weren't enough, though--and it should have been--I also dosed it with the full Brett L yeast cake from my session sour.  Brettanomyces usually grows very slowly, but when used in place of Saccharomyces in primary it ferments much more quickly and cleanly.  In this beer it may hang back and let the Sacch from the Roeselare do the primary fermentation, then join in the funk-imparting process later...or it might do battle for dominance.

Evidence of the latter (or at least that there's just a whole mess of yeast in this batch) came in the form of kraeusen sputtering out the airlock, then the hole in the bucket lid as it filled the one and a half gallons of headspace in the primary with yeasty activity.  Before we left--on day four of primary--it had settled down a bit, and I replaced the stopped-up airlock with a fresh one.  By now, it's probably either blown off the second airlock or has settled down enough that it's out of that danger zone.  The fun will be not knowing until I get back in a few weeks.  This certainly won't be an uninteresting batch, though.

DMA Flanders Red
Batch size: 5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.066
Projected SRM: 14.8
Projected IBU: 13.8
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 88%

Grains
77.2% - 8 lb Malteurop 2-row
9.6% - 1 lb Weyermann Pale Wheat
9.6% - 1 lb Dingemans Cara 45
3.6% - 6 oz Special B

Hops
1 oz Hallertauer (4.3%) (60 min)

Yeast
2 pkgs WY3763 Roeselare Blend (no starter)
WY5526 Brett L (slurry)

Extras
1 tsp Yeast energizer (10 min)
Medium toast oak cubes, home toasted (secondary)

Water additions (mash)
10 qts RO water
1 g Epsom salts
1 g CaCl

Brewday: 15 June 2012
Mash: 158F for 60 minutes
Pre-boil volume: 6.5 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 12.8P (1.052)

Ferment in swamp cooler at 65F ambient
Strong activity by next morning

Update: 3 March 2013
Brewed right before leaving town for six weeks during the hottest part of the summer, we returned to find that this one hadn't stayed sealed, and had managed to develop a solid acetobacter infection.  I've left it alone in its fermenting bucket to see how it would develop.  Tried a sample a couple months ago; despite the infection, it's still just a pretty bland, non-funky, underhopped beer, much like my first Flanders was.  It's going to keep sitting around for now, and may stay in that bucket until graduation.  Maybe by then it will funk up and get interesting.

Secondary: 21 September 2013
Samples drawn over the past year haven’t been very impressive.  Needed the fermenter back for bottling, so transferred to several gallon jugs.  One jug got 1 oz bourbon-soaked second-use oak cubes, another got .5 oz, the rest were straight.  Will give it a few more months and see if anything positive develops from it.

Bottled: 12 April 2014
FG: 1.008
ABV: 7.6%
Bottled 4.3 gallons with 3.9 oz table sugar and rehydrated champagne yeast.

Tasting: 8 May 2014
Given this beer’s inauspicious start–fermenting at least semi-open for its first three months–it has really developed well beyond my expectations. Nice sharp sourness at the start, vinegar note that’s not overpowering, strong cherry later, and malty, bready finish. A bit thin and watery for a moment in the middle, but I don’t foresee any lack of enjoyment from drinking this beer. Definitely a testament to giving the bugs proper time to develop their signature flavours.