Sunday, February 1, 2009

English Pale Ale & Maple Porter, Raspberry-Chocolate Stout Update

I bottled my raspberry-chocolate stout this morning, and everything went smoothly. Had to finish off one of my previous brews to have enough bottles, but that's life for ya. I say every post that I really need to start kegging, and I'll say it again - if for no other reason than I'm running out of bottles, and really don't want to buy more. I would still like to bottle some of each of my batches, so I can bring them over to friends' places and what not. Overall though, I want to keg - it's easier, and it's cool to have beers on tap at my house.

The raspberry chocolate stout looks like it's turning out pretty good. There wasn't much of a raspberry aroma, but it was definitely noticeable in the taste. It did overpower a little bit, so I'm hoping it mellows out in the bottles. I added a tablespoon or so of dark cocoa powder to the priming sugar, so I'm hoping that adds a little more chocolate flavor to the brew. For flat, warm beer, however, the sample I tasted did taste pretty good. I'll probably crack open the first bottle on Valentines Day, so that'll give it two weeks or so to condition.

So of course, now I'm thinking about my next batches. I think I want to brew an English Pale - I want something thats a good session beer, and easy to drink. I'm not a huge fan of American Pales, because to me, they for the most part taste like watered-down IPAs (And I love me a good IPA...). I'm going to look at the ingredients in the kit my friend brewed a few weeks ago, and tweak it a little bit.

For the batch after that, I plan on brewing a Maple Porter. Incidentally, this was the first beer I wanted to make when I started brewing, but I decided to start simple (and I'm glad I did). I think it'll be a good transition into Spring, when the weather's still kind of cold, so you get the heavyness of a winter brew with the maple syrup flavors of February/March. The chocolate porter I brewed taught me a good bit about how to better balance a beer, so hopefully I'll be able to carry that over into the maple porter.

I haven't checked in on the Nightshade Ale since I racked it to secondary, but there's not much I can do with it now. I'm out of bottles, and I don't have a keg, so until one of those problems is rectified it's going to continue to age in secondary. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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