Our honey IPA turned out to be one of the finest tasting ales we've created. It lacked clarity, but the head, texture, colour, and flavour were wonderful. We'll be making that recipe again, although next time we'll be sure to have some Irish moss on hand to clarify it.
The Oat Loaf Stout fermented down to a specific gravity of 1.012. It started at 1.054, so that tells us it is 5.56% alcohol by volume, which was right on target. Initial samples suggest it will be very heavy and incredibly chocolatey. Much more chocolatey than anything we've ever made. We bottled it today. Keizo was incredibly exited by the fact that we prepared the perfect number of bottles (88) and he capped all of the bottles without any mistakes. The perfect bottling.
For today's brew, we had just picked up a load of base malts from Gilbertson & Page in Fergus. We didn't, however, have much in the way of specialty malts other than peat smoked and chocolate. We didn't really feel like making a wheat beer today (summer is a long way off). Greg is not a fan of our heavily-peated beer that we call Exposed Peater. So, after much discussion, we elected to try a more subdued version of our Exposed Peater, which we have called Wee Peater. It contains about 1/5th of the peated malt and a little bit of caramunich and carared for flavour and colour. The base was entirely English pale malt.
The mash was done at the perfect temperature (66°C) and sparged without blockage. In fact, the entire brew was pretty uneventful. The initial gravity reading indicated 1.052, which implied a 68% mash efficiency, which is on the high end of our normal range. We finished clean-up by 6:30 pm (7 hours to bottle and brew). It was the perfect brew day and I assume we've made the perfect beer.
No comments:
Post a Comment