Tasting Day: Amber Wheat IPA

Recipe and Brewday here.

After about 3 weeks of carbonation, I opened a bottle of the Amber Wheat IPA just before a London derby in the EPL. The London derby was fiery but I will stick to reviewing the beer in this post.

This IPA pours a proper thick head, much like a head every brewer dreams of for all his beers. The head sticks around all the way to the end of the glass and then some. The pour is a beautiful dark amber and it is slightly darker than what I expected. It seemed to me like I took a bottle from one of my extract batches.

This is a medium bodied beer with pines and resins on the nose. Surprisingly, the aroma is less citrus even though there was a fair amount of Cascade and Simcoe in the dry hop. Although this was fermented with WB-06, there are no clove or banana notes on the nose and it wasn’t intended either. It was intentionally fermented at a slightly higher temperature to avoid the lighter aromas that WB-06 would have in a wheat ale.

This is not a perfect IPA because the aroma is not as intense as I would like it to be, but it does fit other characteristics of an IPA fairly well. I do not have a tolerance towards highly bitter brews and this beer was brewed with just 40 IBUs and the 40 IBUs definitely show: it is a clean bitterness and does not overpower the beer at all. 

The beer finishes crisp on the palate, it is slightly sweet but very drinkable with no overpowering characteristic. If I brew this beer again, and there are very good chances I will, I will tweak it to have a more hoppy nose and a less amber color, and that’s about all the changes I would want in it.

Tasting Day: Summer Wheat Ale

Recipe and Brewday here.

The first thing I understood from this beer was that I screwed up the carbonation. Even after an aggressive pour, it just had a plain jane 2-3 mm thick head. It stuck around for some time and then receded to give way to a clear headless beer.

Baring that one glitch, this beer has a lot going for it. Without much effort on my part, it is a much clearer beer than most of my other light beers. It was fermented with WB-06 and has light banana notes on the nose. The low bitterness makes this an easy drinking beer; it is easily a lawn mower beer and can be paired with a burger or pizza.

This is a no-fuss, session beer with no overpowering notes or complex layers. Its not a beer that will start off a conversation about how it was brewed or what its grain bill was or what techniques were used. Since this was brewed along with the Cream Ale, I intended the end result to be a beer that ends up being sessionable like the Cream Ale for loads of afternoon or evening drinking.

And it seems this wheat beer serves its purpose pretty well.

Tasting Day: Watermelon Wheat

Recipe and Brewday here.

Quite easily, this isn’t one of the better beers I’ve brewed and tasted thus far!! From the image below, it is easy to think I’m joking, but I’m not.

The beer pours with a beautiful blonde color and a quick thick head. That head sticks around for some time and if observed closely, the lacing on the glass is good too. In fact, unlike some of my other low gravity beers, the head does stick around longer and even when it looks like its gone, the head is still around the edges of the glass.

On the nose, there is a fairly fresh, pronounced watermelon aroma and that almost instantly changes to a certain dank aroma. This unwanted dank, vegetal aroma is completely overwhelming and changes your perception of the beer almost instantly. I have figured out why this happened: I worked quickly with the watermelon and may have gotten some of the white pith in the puree and I may have left it longer than I wanted in the secondary.

This is a fairly light bodied beer where the wheat stands out and (unfortunately) the watermelon dankness stands out even more. This is a perfect beer to drink on a warm day and if I were to chug it down quickly enough, I wouldn’t notice any of the aromas at all. But being a brewer, I have to take a whiff of it and describe the aromas and when that happens, the look on my face is good enough to tell others a bit about the beer if we had a group tasting.

Per se, the beer isn’t bad. I’ve had worse beer so this wouldn’t be bad enough to give one an upset tummy but the beer wouldn’t be classified as good either.

Will I brew this beer again? Now that I have identified the reasons why that dank, vegetal aroma and flavor exists in the beer, I will brew it again and perhaps add watermelon to some of my other low gravity beers too.

All said and done, I wouldn’t think of sharing this beer with anyone unless they really, really want it.

Brew Day: Wannabe Wit

CAVEAT: If you’re looking for a traditional Wit recipe, please look elsewhere.

I have wanted to make a Wit for some time now, but I hesitated on most occasions only because I didn’t have the right grains. Wheat is equally important to a Wit as is the Pilsner or Pale Ale malt but I ran out of Wheat malt with my 3 wheat beers: Wheat Stout, Amber Wheat IPA and the Watermelon Wheat.

I had everything else: Pilsner malt, the hops, the orange (or citrus) peel, fresh coriander and the yeast. Just not the Wheat malt. But the urge to brew a Wit only increased ever since I started liking the smaller, simple beers after I tasted the Cream Ale.

But then what the heck: this may not be a perfect, to-the-point Wit, but it will certainly have the other elements that make a Wit. And with that in mind, I decided to brew a Pilsner-only Wit.

There are two elements of the Wit I had an issue with: the orange peels and the coriander, or the amount of each thereof. Most recipes I went through had additions of about a gram of coriander and a gram of orange peel per litre. Some of the recipes pushed those amounts higher. To be on the safe side and indeed enjoy what I drink, I decided to stick to just a gram of each per litre. Of course, I will gauge both these elements when I taste the beer and that should give me an idea of how accurate or inaccurate I am with the orange peel and coriander additions.

There was quite a bit of washed WB-06 from all the wheat ales that I brewed earlier and that was enough for this low gravity Wit. Bitterness was calculated to under 20 IBUs for easy drinking.

The more I explore Wits, the more I realize about the potential this beer presents the brewer with and the extent I can push it to. I will have a proper Wit recipe sometime in future and then work on additions to that recipe and see how they go.

For now, this is a Wannabe Wit.

Wannabe Wit

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: All Grain

IBU: 17

SRM: 4

OG: 1.048

Grains and Sugars

1.66 kg Pilsner Malt

Hops
3 grams Aurora @ 45 min.

Other Additions
Added 8 grams orange peels @ 5 min.
Added 8 grams freshly crushed coriander @ 5 min.

Yeast

Fermentis WB-06 Wheat Beer Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 66°C for 60 minutes

Batch sparged at 80°C for 30 minutes

Boiled for 45 minutes.

Notes
I took a whiff of the fermenter and the aroma of the orange peels stood out. The coriander, not so much but I'm hoping for everything to come together when I bottle it.

Tasting Day: Wheat Stout

Recipe and Brewday here.

The first time I had a stout was on a trip to Singapore in 2010. I didn’t know it was a stout; I referred to it as a black beer. And I did not like it at the time. It was a Guinness Stout with the roasty, malty, slight coffee-ish flavors and aromas. I didn’t like it because I was expecting it to be the same as very other lager with a change in the color. Of course, Arthur Guinness had other ideas when he brewed this stout. I only finished the beer because I paid 8 SGD for it and didn’t want to waste it. From those naïve days, I have moved over to craft beers and have come to appreciate stouts.

The reason I told you this story is because, to put it simply, this wheat stout largely reminds me of those very same roasted, malty, coffee-ish flavors and aromas that I hated but now love. The aromas and flavors are not exactly the same, but it reminds me more or less of the ‘black beer’. To most folks, it could sound a bit off since Guinness makes their stouts with barley and this stout has wheat in the grain bill, but each drinker has their own perspectives and conclusions of the beers they drink.

This stout pours with a black color but on closer inspection, the beer is really a very, very dark brown with hints of ruby close to the top of the glass. One thing this beer has is a lot of head. On the first pour, I slowed down and stopped pouring simply because the head formed too quickly. In time, I was able to pour a full glass of beer. The head is tan, thick and persistent. It takes a bit of time to settle into a half finger thick foam and then slowly form a bubbly rim around the glass.

On the nose, as I mentioned earlier, it does have a lot of those roasty, coffee aromas. The aromas are strong and continue to persist irrespective of the amount of beer in the glass. A sip of this beer brings all of those aromas and flavors in liquid form and it is good. This beer is strong but very drinkable.

One of things I set out to do when I brewed this stout was to have a lesser roasted characteristic than the Foreign Extra Stout and I seem to have achieved it. Black Malt wasn’t in the gain bill and it really shows in 2 ways: one, the less roasted characteristics help make this beer a more drinkable one; and two: the color of the beer, although it’s a stout, is actually a very, very dark brown. Maybe a bit of black malt may have helped the color but that’s a recipe for another day.

This stout is medium bodied and enjoyable. I will age a small batch of this stout for a few months till, say, winter when I expect the flavors to mellow down a bit and then I plan on having a parallel tasting with the Eis Stout.