Imperial Pils tasting

It’s soft, not crisp, a little too sweet. Way flavorful for a lager. It’s almost clear but has just a little chill haze. Excellent head retention, with some lacing.
I won’t follow that recipe again, but would like to do a other lager. Next winter maybe.

Imperial Irish Stout

• 2lb Roasted Barley
• 1/2lb Black Patent Malt
• 1/2lb Chocolate Malt
• 1/4lb Crystal 40L Malt
• 9lb 2-Row
• 6lb Light Malt Extract
• 2oz Centennial Hops (11.5% AA)
• 1oz Cascade Hops (5.6% AA)
• 60z Bushmill’s 10 year
• 4 Beano caplets

This one was a total CF. First attempt in my new kitchen and lots of problems throughout the day lead me to believe that there’s a good chance this one got contaminated.

I basically followed the recipe from my previous post, but added some errors.

First of all, that is A LOT of grain. A LOT. You can’t (or shouldn’t) make this with anything short of a 5gal boiling pot and you need 6-8 grain bags (big ones) for all that grain. I had to make it in two pots and change the grain 3 times to get it all in there. So that was big problem #1.

No.

That was big problem #2.

Big problem number one was staying out ’til 4:00 in the morning and getting totally wrecked. Note: Sweating alcohol while you’re trying to remember how to brew when you’re not physically or mentally on the ball leads to a fair amount of sloppiness.

So after I made wort from all that grain, I didn’t have any grain bags left for the hops. So I just put the hops in the pot loose. That works, technically, but it makes it WAY harder to get the beer into the carboy without contaminating it, ’cause you have to get all the hops back out somehow. So I had to pour the beer through a strainer, through a funnel, and into the carboy, reaching into the strainer to pull hops out every once in a while so that it didn’t just clog up. So that gave me several more opportunities to contaminate the beer, on top of making me splash the crap out of it and getting beer EVERYWHERE.

This is a really dark one, too, with a lot of sugars in it. So when I say I spilled it everywhere, I mean it looked like a bottle of thick soy sauce exploded in my kitchen.

Anyway, after lots of potential screw-ups, contamination, etc. I finally got all this black oil into the carboy and it’s fermenting in the back room now. I also threw some Beano caps into the fermenter to see what the effect of that is. Supposedly the enzymes that are in Beano break down complex sugars (starches) into fermentable sugars, reducing the amount of carbs in the beer and making it more alcoholic. Both desirable. We’ll see how that goes.

Actually, not really. Since I don’t know how this was supposed to turn out, and didn’t take an OG reading when I put it into the carboy, I don’t know how I’ll even tell how much alcohol is in there. I’m hoping 8-10%. And I’m hoping that this isn’t contaminated and tastes like it looks. This is some seriously dark beer.