E_NinjA said:EastCoastMojo (Forum Supporter) said:One of my favorite beers of all time is Creme Brulee Imperial Milk Stout from Southern Tier, but being a seasonal beer I can hardly ever find it. Is there anything similar that I should try?
Give the Peanut Butter Milk Stout from Belching Beaver a try.
Where is that from? Off to the googles! That sounds delicious!
Beer Baron said:iansane said:IPA vs pale ale; just marketing?
Pretty much.
I swear, everything is an IPA now. Sierra Nevada Cellebration used to be a "holiday ale" now it's an "IPA".
Take the same hop-forward beer. Call it an IPA and it will sell about double.
Truth. Which is a bit annoying for me. I like some IPAs but really dislike others. I tend to like less hoppy IPAs (like the before mention hazy ones, New England IPAs) as well as pale ales. But if something is just labeled as an IPA I am a bit hesistant to spend my money on cause I don't want a mouth full of hops.
Are there any IPAs (either specific ones or types) I really should try?
mtn said:
- Is there a widely available NA or 3/2 beer available on the market that will scratch that itch? I frequently find myself with a Select 55 or Miller 64, only because of the low alcohol content. They're not good - they're not much of anything, it is basically beer flavored carbonated water - but I like drinking beer and the alcohol is the limiting factor for me.
Look at session beers next time you are somewhere with a large selection. Many of those tend to be lower alcohol.
What's in a name?
In reply to wvumtnbkr :
Belching beaver is out of Cali but I've seen it at my local total wine in tn.
Can you explain 'sour' beers?
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Beer Baron said:Except for pumpkin beers. berkeley pumpkin in beer. Pumpkin is perhaps the stupidest ingredient to put in beer.
I generally agree, although am forced to give a pass to The Great Pumpkin and Punkaccino from Elysian. Somehow they made not just one, but two pumpkin beers that I actually really like, from beer flavors I typically don't.
E_NinjA said:EastCoastMojo (Forum Supporter) said:One of my favorite beers of all time is Creme Brulee Imperial Milk Stout from Southern Tier, but being a seasonal beer I can hardly ever find it. Is there anything similar that I should try?
Give the Peanut Butter Milk Stout from Belching Beaver a try.
If you like that, try their ¡Viva La Beaver!
Driven5 said:Beer Baron said:Except for pumpkin beers. berkeley pumpkin in beer. Pumpkin is perhaps the stupidest ingredient to put in beer.
I generally agree, although am forced to give a pass to The Great Pumpkin and Punkaccino from Elysian. Somehow they made not just one, but two pumpkin beers that I actually really like, from beer flavors I typically don't.
E_NinjA said:EastCoastMojo (Forum Supporter) said:One of my favorite beers of all time is Creme Brulee Imperial Milk Stout from Southern Tier, but being a seasonal beer I can hardly ever find it. Is there anything similar that I should try?
Give the Peanut Butter Milk Stout from Belching Beaver a try.
If you like that, try their Viva La Beaver.
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So can you explain 'sour' beers?
You nailed it. Elysian makes awesome pumpkin beers.
Punkaccino is amazeballs.
Edit to add... warlock is pretty good from southern tier as well.
Homebreweing: Extract vs Grain?
Do you happen to know of anything on the mainland similar to Kona Brewing Company's Lemongrass Luau? It's about the only beer I've had that I can actually stand.
Are there any beer ingredients that you would like to be able to source locally but can't, or not enough of? I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my tillable acreage and want to do some "outside the box" thinking since I dont have enough ground to make corn and beans worthwhile.
I'm currently fermenting my 5th home brew. It's from a kit as I am still working out the process more than the flavor creativity. For people like me with very limited space it seems that temperature control is a huge issue. (No basement, no interior closets with available floor space, no room for a modified dorm fridge) I'm currently tying frozen shipping ice packs to my fermenter on the guest room shower and wrapping with a towel. Changing packs 2x a day. Are there better options out there?
and for carbonating I have been using bottles but I am not getting even carbonation across the batch. Even for bottles opened on the same evening. I am almost frustrated enough to try and keg the beer so I can force carbonate but then storage of the beer for cold dispensing becomes a space (and cost) issue.
any advice?
Grtechguy said:Teach me to make a Stout that tastes like an imperial, but can be session
Instead of thinking small imperial stout, find something complimentary to hybridize with that achieves the other points you're looking for. I'd hybridize an Imperial Stout with an English Ordinary Bitter.
It will also be a lot easier to do all grain than using extract.
Start with your Imperial mash bill. Keep the specialty grains mostly the same. Cut the roasted barley in half and sub a debittered black like carafa special 2. Cut the base malt down to hit your target ABV. Be sure to use a robust base malt - Irish stout malt, marris otter, golden promise, or at least continental pilsner. Do *not* use American domestic 2-row. It won't give enough body.
Single mash at ~156 maybe ~158 if your mash tun tends to lose a lot of heat. The goal is to get a lot of unfermentable sugars.
Cut your bittering hops about in half. Use about 3/4 the called for aroma hops. Favor resinous American hops like nugget, centennial, or chinook or mix 50/50 with a nice British variety like Fuggles.
Ferment with a yeast good for an English bitter. Do not use an Irish stout yeast or a neutral American ale like Chico.
Do you make any hard ciders? If so, what's your favorite yeast for a dry cider?
wvumtnbkr said:Why is it that it seems the trend is to make the most bitter beer imaginable when it comes to pale ales?
Honestly, I attribute the big bitter trend to an overcorrection from the macro lagers that used to dominate. From there, it grew and grew.
It's a lot less work to take a style and make it MORE than to come up with something different.
Why would a musician learn a new genre of music to hyridize with what you've been doing, when you can just play louder and faster?
Second and 3rd question... is g uinness beer? Why is it soooo different than other stouts (even on nitro).
Definitely beer. Which other stouts?
I presume you're not calling it radically different from like... Murphy's and other Dry Irish Stouts, but to American stouts.
It's a dry Irish stout. It's much lower abv and a simpler malt bill than American stouts. It's meant to be more drinkable while still being flavorful, where a good American stout (and I include *my* Irish export stout) is designed to be as flavorful as possible while still being drinkable.
Guinness is also very lightly soured. Not enough that you'd notice unless you knew what to look for. But the slight acidity makes it more refreshing.
Jay_W said:So here's my slightly loaded question, what is it about a proper Scottish ale that makes it so distinctlively freaking awesome? I mean I've brewed a few, and know what goes into them but the result is different enough from other good dark beers that I've always wonder what sets them apart. So far I've left that one at "who cares, it's delicious and goes with steak rly rly well"
I freaking love a good Scottish ale. It is seriously the beer style that I wish this market realized it wants to drink, but drinkers won't give an honest chance.
So... what makes it awesome?
Subjectively, it's a rich but not overwhelming flavor profile that fits your pallette.
Objectively... it's like the flipside of a good pale ale that is hop forward, but with nice malt balance. They're very malt forward, but with enough hop character to stay balanced. They also use yeast strains that provide a very strong amount of character, but not enough to be overt like a Belgian or hefe. Scotland also has softer water than the rest of Brittain, so that makes the beer smoother. It's like if you took a good doppelbock, but turned up the yeast and hop character to balance all that malt.
There's also a lot of room for personal interpretation.
Driven5 said:Can you explain 'sour' beers?
There's what sour beer *should* be, and what most sour beers *are*.
A good sour beer is beautiful. They're not easy to do because the souring bacteria are much less predictable and the aging process is nowhere near as controllable.
The old European breweries making wonderful sours are set up where the stars all aligned perfectly for that spot to make great sour beer. They have long histories and massive catalogues of casks aging away. They make good sours by blending different barrels of different ages with different characters like a master spirits or wine blender. Basically no American breweries have that.
Without a deep catalogue to blend from, you're kind of relying on luck and you need to be willing to dump. In my experiments, I've done 6 casks of sour beer. 2 were (really) good strait, 2 were good after giving them time to age and picking fruit puree to compliment their character, and 2 got dumped.
Most of the American sours breweries are relying on rapid kettle souring. This produces an intense but one-note sour. In order to balance this, the only real option is to cut the otherwise undrinkable with a lot of fruit to add sweetness.
I generally agree, although am forced to give a pass to The Great Pumpkin and Punkaccino from Elysian. Somehow they made not just one, but two pumpkin beers that I actually really like, from beer flavors I typically don't.
There are good beers that are made with pumpkin, but they're good in spite of using pumpkin. The pumpkin itself is a stupid, pointless ingredient.
Driven5 said:Homebreweing: Extract vs Grain?
Depends what you're doing. Unless you have a really specialty purpose that requires specialty control of mash temperatures to achieve a specific body (e.g. the earlier post asking for a session stout that drinks like an Imperial) generally all grain is just extra work. You probably don't have good enough equipment to control and coax nuanced flavors out of it.
Graining out and cleaning mash out of a tun is a PITA. Being able to just pull a nylon sack out is so much easier.
When I homebrewed, I just did partial mash. That's what I would do if I tried to brew at home again.
Couple simple hacks: Paint strainer bags from the hardware store. Do your mash in your oven. "Warm" in most ovens will be about 150-170. Take advantage of that to hold the mash temp stable in an uninsulated pot.
wvumtnbkr said:Beer Baron said:Brett_Murphy said:Can you please make crappy IPAs less popular on a *national* scale?
I wish. Dear sweet baby jebus do I wish I could do that more than you do.
I really like sweet baby Jesus. Good porter!
No, Duclaw is terrible stuff with their syrup based adjuncts.
itsarebuild said:I'm currently fermenting my 5th home brew. It's from a kit as I am still working out the process more than the flavor creativity. For people like me with very limited space it seems that temperature control is a huge issue. (No basement, no interior closets with available floor space, no room for a modified dorm fridge) I'm currently tying frozen shipping ice packs to my fermenter on the guest room shower and wrapping with a towel. Changing packs 2x a day. Are there better options out there?
Ale yeast could work at room temperture, but would limit what styles you can brew.
I'm guessing the carbonation on bottle conditioning may be a different side of the same coin; what temperature are the bottles stored at after bottling?
Hopefully Beer Baron will have some better ideas.
itsarebuild said:I'm currently fermenting my 5th home brew. It's from a kit as I am still working out the process more than the flavor creativity. For people like me with very limited space it seems that temperature control is a huge issue. (No basement, no interior closets with available floor space, no room for a modified dorm fridge) I'm currently tying frozen shipping ice packs to my fermenter on the guest room shower and wrapping with a towel. Changing packs 2x a day. Are there better options out there?
For the mash, do your mash rest in the oven. "Warm" on most ovens is usually around 150-170. Use that to maintain temperature. If it's too warm, get it up to temp, then cut the heat to just hold a good temp.
Getting wort down to pitching them, I used bag ice. Pick a nice looking bag from the freezer. Chances are you have to dilute your wort anyway.
I got around the fermentation temperature issue heavily by changing up what I homebrewed based on the season. Belgian and hefe yeasts do better with heat. Some saison strains LOVE heat. Then you just need to keep the temperature relatively constant.
A good trick for that is a big plastic tub, fill the base with some water. Slide a cotton undershirt over the carboy so the bottom is in the water. It can wick water up to evaporate. This will provide a minor cooling effect, and more importantly will give more stable fermentation temperatures to keep the yeast from being stressed by huge fluctuations.
and for carbonating I have been using bottles but I am not getting even carbonation across the batch. Even for bottles opened on the same evening. I am almost frustrated enough to try and keg the beer so I can force carbonate but then storage of the beer for cold dispensing becomes a space (and cost) issue.
How are you dosing your carbonation?
I mix your sugar syrup into the whole batch instead of using tabs.
thatsnowinnebago said:Do you make any hard ciders? If so, what's your favorite yeast for a dry cider?
Nope. We have a great relationship with a wonderful local cidery.
They use champagne yeast. Then add sulfites to suppress refermentation and back-sweeten to target.
If you don't want to back-sweeten, use a yeast that's going to have low attenuation. Probably something English.
EastCoastMojo (Forum Supporter) said:One of my favorite beers of all time is Creme Brulee Imperial Milk Stout from Southern Tier, but being a seasonal beer I can hardly ever find it. Is there anything similar that I should try?
Had a couple come to mind:
Left Hand has a milk stout. New Holland Dragon's Milk. They probably won't have the full effect you love, but get in the ballpark.
If you ever come across Kasteel Donker or Kasteel Rouge, try them. They won't become a daily drinker, but they will be a special treat that you'll really enjoy. They're like... a beautiful lovechild of beer and port.
In reply to Beer Baron :
I like Brown Ales.
Newcastle is no longer imported from England. Instead, it's now brewed in California and seems to taste completely different from the old stuff that came in the clear bottles. Is this just a side effect of the venue change or might there have been some tweeks to the formula?
Are brown ales difficult to brew, or just not big sellers? There aren't that many good ones out there.
Beer Baron said:...the only real option is to cut the otherwise undrinkable with a lot of fruit to add sweetness.
In that case, I don't think they're adding enough fruit... Perhaps American sours are going through an equivalent to the hop wars?
Kettle souring vs souring bacteria?
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Beer Baron said:Graining out and cleaning mash out of a tun is a PITA. Being able to just pull a nylon sack out is so much easier.
When I homebrewed, I just did partial mash. That's what I would do if I tried to brew at home again.
So from an equipment and overall effort perspective, is partial mash appreciably closer to extract than all grain?
gearheadmb said:Are there any beer ingredients that you would like to be able to source locally but can't, or not enough of? I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my tillable acreage and want to do some "outside the box" thinking since I dont have enough ground to make corn and beans worthwhile.
Maybe spelt.
I'm not as big into the "locally sourced" as many brewers. From a practical standpoint, the raw ingredients of beer benefit a lot from growing in ideal regions and then are fairly easy and economical to transport once they've been properly processed. You're hardly shipping any water weight.
Local hops can be fun, but I treat it as kind of a fun thing to do once a year to brew with fresh local hops. Hops are easy to grow, but they suck to harvest.
Spelt is an outlier because it grows really well in America, having been used as a legacy grain, and has a unique character that can lend a lot to a beer.
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