FOOLCiRCLE

Well, I transferred the American Brown Ales over to secondaries and decided I was going to twist one of the five gallon carboys.

With the ABA we brewed and fermented everything identically. So as to not have ten gallons of the same beer (without knowing what it was going to be like) I decided to twist half of the batch in the secondary fermenter. I added fresh peaches, now that’s a twist! I thought a darker brew with the bright sweetness of peaches sounded good to me, I hope I am right.

Originally I had planned on cutting and grilling the peaches to kill any bacteria and acquire all that lovely melanoidin grilled flavor and the syrupy goodness that would have came from the peaches. But at the last moment I remembered something about heat setting the pectins in fruit, or something like that, so that in homebrew the beer won’t fall clear. Not my biggest concern, but no one wants to drink a cloudy beer that is supposed to be clear.  So instead I decided on freezing the peaches in hopes of killing any bacteria and to help burst the cell walls of the fruit hopefully releasing even more fruity goodness.

So the original transfer date was to be Saturday, that fell through. Then Sunday, fell through too. Then Monday, instead was the day the peaches went into the freezer. So Tuesday morning the peaches came out of the freezer and into the fridge to thaw during the day. Tuesday night it was time to cube the peaches. They started as three pounds and ended as two and half after pitting them. After they were cubed I decided to take it one step further and pureed the peaches to hopefully have maximum peach exposure in the beer.

The peaches temped out very cold still, 34F to be exact, and I was going to wait to add the beer to them but I was already ready to go. So first I added the peaches to the carboy then racked the ABA on top of the peaches. I gave the carboy a quick stir twice while filling to try and keep the peaches in suspension. I then placed the airlock and have since walked away. I was expecting to see a noticeable secondary fermentation but have not seen much activity at all.

Hopefully this will turn out to be a good experiment. I have only had one real drain pour (Chocolate Covered Cherry Porter), one that kind of turned into a drain pour (The Enigma Stout), and a fifth of a batch that well . . . I saved some taste-buds by getting rid of that one (The Cocoa-Pebble Oatmeal Stout). Thinking back, it has been since 2002 since I made a beer with fruit in it with the Celebration Ale, WOW – 5 years ago!

So essentially over the last three days I prepared to bottle and bottled the Saturday IPA.

It was pretty uneventful per usual, which is always good with bottling. Saturday I put four cases of “clean” (read: no mold/funk) bottles in a PBW hot water solution to soak overnight to help with label removal and to help dissolve any organic material that may remain in the bottles that I didn’t notice.

Sunday came along and I sat in the basement for about three hours delabeling, rinsing, and sanitizing all 96 bottles. This part of brewing for me really is a labor of love, I can’t stand it sometimes. The work itself isn’t hard, I just always feel like I’m wasting my time or something, like I should be doing something more productive.

Monday (yesterday) was the actual bottling day. Karen offered to help me which always makes the time go by faster but also puts me more on edge. I’m not sure why because she knows what she is doing, I guess it’s more of a lack of total control during a delicate part of the process. The bottling went well though, I was filling Karen was capping. This was the 10 gallons of IPA that was fermented with two different yeast strains, then later 1oz. of bourbonized oak chips were added to one of them. After checking the FGs of each carboy (1.015 – OO1 yeast & 1.005 – dry yeast) and sampling each one side by side, I was surprised there really wasn’t too much of a difference. The one with the lower gravity was the one that had the chips added to it and I did not notice any flavor profile that suggested oak or bourbon, oh well. Hopefully we won’t see any problems with carbonation, which has been not 100% as of late.

That’s a picture of a quart of the 001 IPA that I was able to enjoy while bottling. I know the thought of warm uncarbonated realatively young beer to some of you is not appetizing, but I quite enjoyed it.

On Sunday Garret and I whipped up another 20 gallon batch, this time of an American Brown Ale. Hopefully something less hoppy than a brown Pale Ale and less chocolate-roasty than a Porter. Much like the color gray (at least all of the good grays) an ABA is easy to make yet difficult to nail.

Things got started on Saturday bright and early after a mentally foggy and late night before. My plan was to get to Garret’s around 7:30AM, but it was probably closer to 8:00AM by the time I got there and definitely by the time I unloaded the car. This time I brought down some extra stuff with me. Besides the normal carboys I also brought down my burner and propane to contribute to the experiment and the keg of Hazelnut Brown I had since the Scavenger Hunt.

While we were heating the foundation water for the mash I got a crash course in counter pressure filling bottles from a keg. Garret had recently put about a half keg of the Gnarleywine on tap and had decided to CPF the remaining gallon or so into bottles. I have never CPF yet have thought about the possibilities of how useful this technique would be for high alcohol beers that have problems bottle-conditioning (think Double Dubbel and Gnarleywine). It actually wasn’t difficult and made a lot of sense after I say it in motion. Essentially you pressurize an empty bottle so that you add beer at the same pressure that the beer is in the keg, after you pressurize you lay a cushion of CO2 in the bottle as not to oxidize the beer, then add the beer from the keg, and finally quickly cap the bottle. I was quite surprised with the force that the CP filler pushed back with. I think we got 15 or 16 bottles out of what was left.

For the ABA batch we were going to do our first 20 gallon batch in one mash tun, this was the grand experiment. Garret is fortunate to have a lot of stainless steel vessels to try and come up with different configurations on how to make this work. Here is basically what we had and how we did it. We had (2) 28 gallon kettles A & B, (1) 25 gallon kettle, and (1) 14 gallon kettle, two 75,000btu burners #1 & #2 and two March pumps to move liquid around. In the picture at the top the top most kettle is the 28 gallon kettle B, the one below that is the 28 gallon A, and the one below that is the 25 gallon kettle. The one by itself on the right of the picture is the 14 gallon kettle. OK, here we go:

• Essentially after we heated the foundation water (while we were CPFing) we pumped that water from the 25 gallon kettle to the 28 gallon kettle A. We mashed in our grains and at that point had about an hour to heat approximately 26 gallons of water to between approximately 180-212 degrees.

• We used burner #1 to heat 20 gallons of water in the 25 gallon kettle to 180 degrees and burner #2 to heat 6 gallons of water in the 14 gallon kettle to 212 degrees. Both burners brought the water to the desired temperature in the time frame we were looking for.
• We then manually scooped the 6 gallons of boiling water (3 quarts per scoop) into the 28 gallon kettle A with the grains. This was our mash-out water which denatures the enzymes in the grains by raising the temperature thus locking in your fermentation profile, plus making the mash less viscous so it will run off better. The mash then sits for another 10 minutes.
• We then pumped the 20 gallons of 180 degree water from the 25 gallon kettle to the 28 gallon kettle B. The 25 gallon kettle was then removed from the burner and placed below the 28 gallon kettle A with the grains in it. So now we essentially have a heavy duty 20 gallon gravity fed brew set-up, well set up.
• At this point we recirculated the mash until it ran clear and then let it run off into the 25 gallon kettle which we were using more as a collection vessel/grant than anything else because both the kettles that were large enough to actually boil the wort were now occupied.
• This is the first time we had used one of the boil false bottoms in the stainless kettles as a mash tun false bottom. Typically for this size batch we would use (2) 10 gallon coolers. The main benifit to the coolers in the insulation factor, so we wrapped the stainless mash tun up in two sleeping bags to help retain heat which worked perfectly. Definitely better to use one vessel (ease and clean-up) but we were concerned with the differences in the false bottoms. The mash began to slow about 20 minutes into the run-off and threatened to get stuck, so we chose to cut it off, remix the grain, let it re-set-up, re-recirculate and start again.
• I forgot to mention, Garret has been looking for a better/easier way to mix this huge amount of grains and water together and has adopted and bettered an idea from one of the guys in his brew club. He now uses a paint stirrer called a Squirrel Mixer that just does one hell of a job mixing the grains and water, I was amazed by its efficiency.
• This time, the rest of the run-off ran just fine. We could only collect about 24 gallons in the 25 gallon kettle and we needed more like 26. So once the wort got up to the 24 gallon level we switched the run-off into two plastic 1 gallon pitchers we have. Now we had all the wort collected, but we needed it in one kettle.
• We quickly emptied and cleaned the mash tun (which is the 28 gallon kettle A), set it back up as the boil kettle and pumped the wort from the 25 gallon kettle up to the 28 gallon boil kettle now up on burner #1 and dumped in the extra 2 gallons from the pitchers.
• At this point everything was essentially ready to go it was just all a matter of doing the right thing in the time sequence. We did happen to run out of propane about half way through the boil, but like any good homebrewer Garret had at least one back-up.

After everything was boiled and chilled and transferred we tried a couple of beers. We had already had a few of Garret’s Titless Wits which were quite tasty. We also tried a Unibroue Ephemere apple beer which was pretty good, like a cross between an effervescent hard cider and a lager. Then we tapped the Hazelnut Brown which was nice also. I wish I had remembered to bring a bottle of Rogue’s Hazelnut Nectar with me (which this beer was modeled after) so we could do a comparison tasting, but I did enjoy it none the less. And we wrapped up the beer tasting with a Stone Ruination ale which a wonder-fuckin-ful beer that I was overly impressed with. Those Stone bastards have mastered the hops my friends, oh yes they have. After that we pretty much wrapped things up, I think both of us exhausted and happy with the results. Looking forward to doing another 20 gallon batch as soon as the weather cools down!

So I transfered the Saturday IPA last weekend (I’m a little behind on posts) into secondaries – man does this beer already smell goo-oo-ood! Let me state once more for the record: OVER a pound and a half total whole leaf hops in this beer – nice!

With this beer we added a 1/2 ounce each Columbus & Simcoe hops to the secondaries, it should be a way hoppy IPA. If you look, at the thumbnail you can see there is a little black spot in the hops today. That lovely black spot is 1oz. of bourbon (Wild Turkey 101) soaked oak chips. These chips have probably been soaking for a good 6 months+ so it should be nice. So that’s 5 gallons of bangin’ American IPA and 5 gallons of bourbon oaked American IPA – SWEET!

Saturday IPA, well at least what it has been dubbed for now. This was a joint venture between myself and Garrett (mostly Garrett ;-)) brewing up a 20 gallon batch of a super Columbus-Simcoe IPA!! It looks and smells great!!

What is all that green goodness you may ask? That my friends is a pound and a half of equal parts Columbus and Simcoe whole leaf hops. Man, did it feel good and sticky playing with all those lovely green nuggets, it felt a little naughty too. This beer was my first time brewing with this much whole leaf hops and brewing 20 gallons (4 times what I typically brew) of beer. The day takes a little bit longer to brew that volume of beer, basically just because there is so much more water and wort to boil and chill. Otherwise the process is essentially the same as when I brew a 5 gallon batch of beer.

We started around 8AM which came very early after the night before (see the short post on the Kinda Blue Band below) and not falling asleep until almost 2AM. Initially everything seemed like it was going to go OK, we had coffee brewing, water heating, equipment pulled out of the basement, and everything basically set-up. Oh, did I forget to mention that Garrett did all of that before I even got there. From there on we really only ran into one problem, though it was a problem that extended the brew day by a good hour plus. While grinding the grains that morning, Garrett had forgotten that he had his mill set to grind wheat (a tighter setting = smaller pieces), and had ground half of the grain bill at the wheat setting. So, we anticipated we may have trouble with one of the two mash tuns and possibly getting a stuck mash. At first it was just laboriously slow to run off, then it did stick. We wound up working on it a little bit and things got going again. Really the only true hang-up of the day. The rest of the day was pretty good: ran out and bought propane in the middle of the boil that we never needed (lucky us), had a quick and sticky boil-over (oops), and had a hell of a time getting four pounds of Turbinado sugar to melt gently yet quickly. Plus we got to play with all of those lushy hops! The IPA will be plenty bitter especially since both those hops are pretty high in alpha acids, but we REALLY front loaded the recipe with a whole pound going in with less than 10 minutes left in the boil – two 4oz. additions, one at 10 minutes and one at flame-out. The brew day finally wrapped up around 5PM and we enjoyed one last pint before I had to run off to go camping.

The set-up Garrett has to work with works really well – he has pumps to move all the massive amount of liquids, and false bottoms that in conjunction with the whole leaf hops do a crazy good job of presenting really clean wort, and really has his techniques down on his system so the whole day feels very smooth. The “worst” part is that he uses two separate mash tuns which are both really too small for the beers that he brews. Not only did it limit our grain bill some (not that I am complaining with the bill we created), but it really is a pain-in-the-ass and takes twice the amount of time to sparge two separate tuns. I addressed this on Saturday and not surprising he feels the same way and already has a plan to correct this, it’s just a matter of time, timing, and of course everyone’s favorite money. But the plan for him is to build a sick 20 gallon stainless steel brew sculpture that I am sure will be the shit!  Anyway, as of now there are two 5 gallon carboys sitting in the basement blowing off some of the best smelling hops-infused CO2 I have ever smelt, and can smell from probably about 20 feet away – delicious!

Yesterday was a double bottling day, four cases of beer, very tedious boring work (did I ever mention how much I dislike bottling?). Fortunately I had my lil’ helper Karen there to keep me company. As the title says, we bottled the Pastime Pale Ale and the Saison.

Once again, impatience  proved to be not be an attribute of the qualities found in a good homebrewer. The PPA was brewed 15 days prior to bottling. For what its original gravity was and what its final gravity was this should have been plenty of time for everything to be ‘all good’. Instead what I was dealing with was a rather hazy/cloudy pale ale that had a slight sulfur flavor to it, I was getting pissy. And instead of racking it to a secondary and giving it another two weeks to help fall clear, I went ahead and bottled it anyway – very amateurish. I’m not overly concerned with the sulfury off flavor, I’ve had that before and it has gone away (though now that I’ve said that . . .), and I’m not overly concerned with the haze as long as it tastes fine, though this may still fall clear. What I AM concerned with is that most likely there will be a considerable amount of sediment in the bottom of the bottles, and this has and will always bother me. The Saison on the other hand was bottled with no problems, looked a lovely color, fell mostly clear, and had a wonderful peppery Belgian flavor – aahhh the difference some patience makes.

I also got my regulator back from being repaired! While I was on my short lived kegging kick earlier in the year I accidentally knocked over my tank and regulator and crushed the gauge that tells you how much gas is left in the tank. The good part about this was I was able to still us the regulator to carbonate my beer and push it through the draft box, the bad part was I had no idea how much gas I had or had left and was pushing the limits each time I tried it. Unbeknown to me that gauge was more of a pain in the butt to get replaced than I had anticipated. The first place I went to told me minimum 1 week turn around. Unfortunately I didn’t have time. Second place was a friend who offered to do it through her work. This, I think, may have been one of those thimes where she wished she would have kept her mouth shut. She had it for about a month with several attempts made to repair it, only to repeatedly be stymied because of a backward threading on the gauge. Sorry about the inconvenience, Heather, but thank you all the same! Now that I know how much gas is left in my tank, guess what, it’s time for a fill. I wonder how much a tank of gas costs . . .

(Working Name) – Anyway, I just finished brewing another Pale Ale about an hour ago. The day went really well without any major problems. This should be a pretty easy-drinking Pale Ale thus the ability to be able to drink it during your favorite past time, like Cornhole!

One of the problems with brewing Pale Ales is that Karen doesn’t really dig the bitter factor of Pales Ales. So, this time around I tried to brew a less bitter but still just as hoppy Pale Ale. I used a very simple malt bill and a hodge-podge of hops, some Willamette, some Cascade, some Perle and I’m going to use some Magnum to dry hop with. Firstly, more as an experiment, I decided to flip the order I’d use the hops in. Typically people use high alpha acid (AA) hops toward the beginning of the boil and low AA hops toward the end, so instead I did the opposite. Plus, I also didn’t add ANY early addition hops, I waited until there was 30 minutes left in the boil to add any hops and then hopped accordingly from there. I’ll take credit for the AA flip may it be a good, bad, or fun idea, but the holding off on hop additions isn’t my own.

I’ve read a few threads on line recently that talk about how on the West Coast there is a movement right now (at least in the homebrewing community) to get more of the bitterness from late addition hops which is supposed to be a smoother bitterness versus the sharp bitterness some early addition hops can give you. They have been using this technique a lot with Double IPAs mostly. Another technique I have been reading about, that even some breweries are using, is a mash time of half of what we’ve been told to use, 30 minutes. And that appears to almost be more of a habit than not with one brewery claiming they can convert their grains in about 10 minutes! Wild.

Also, today I got to transfer the Saison to a secondary fermenter. That thing was a monster of a fermenter so I am going to give it a little extra time. Plus, though the SG right now is low, I’d like it lower. I want it dry and crisp and refreshing low. I want it low enough that it makes you thirsty for another one while your drinking the one in your hand. Anyway, the OG was 1.074 and today it was at 1.014, I’d like to see 1.010 honestly. Also, it was still a little cloudy so hopefully it’ll fall more clear. I wound up saving the yeast from this batch too. Maybe I’ll plan on something Belgian sometime soon; Tripel, Dubbel, Specialty, “Dirty-Dirty Scarry Farmhouse Crazy” – dunno. I need to buy/order more ingredients anyway some time soon.

Saturday was the 5th Annual Fool Circle Beer Tasting. Per usual it was blast. This year all of the Inner Circle were able to attend, so in attendance was myself, Karen, Dave, Richard, Todd, and Robert. These have pretty much been the people with the strongest connection to Fool Circle since the beginning, thus at some point along the way during one of the tastings they were dubbed the Fool Circle Inner Circle. Dave also made “backstage passes” for us all this year which turned out to be a hit, if you look through the pictures you can see the included graphics. Below is a slide show of the pictures from the night, but if you’d rather look at them individually you can see them here.

For the tasting I decided we would do the blind-side-by-side variant. In this way, all the bottles are marked before hand with what beer it is, then they are all placed in brown bags. The bags are all mixed up and each person has an opportunity to re-mix the bags too, in this way no one can no where any one beer is in the line up. This year we had 16 beers to taste with an additional 3 not making the cut, so it had the potential to be 19 beers, but that didn’t happen. The 3 that didn’t make the cut were the Pike Creek Pale Ale, the Angler Ale 2, and the Cocoa Pebble Oatmeal Stout. The first two didn’t make it because I forgot to save one of each for the tasting (oops!) and the last didn’t make it for it was a failed experiment that met its doom down the drain.

I had stated before the tasting that I was not going to be able to win this year. The first three years I had declared I was not allowed to win. Then last year I thought of doing it as a blind tasting (previously I poured each beer in a seperate room) and decided that I would allow myself to win if I guessed the most correct and everyone was OK with that. Last year I guessed 10 out of 12 correct and was happy I had won, but felt a little bit bad for I won by a large margin. So, this year to help keep things fair I decided I could not win. Richard brought up the point that if I got a perfect score (16 out of 16) that I should be able to win, and all agreed. 16 out of 16 would be unheard of, so I decided that was fine.

The pouring was great, it took a good 15 minutes or so to pour all the beer and you could feel the anticipation building for no one was allowed to taste until all were poured. Everyone was sniffing and commenting about the beers, but only spoke in reserved comments as not to elude to heavily to what any one beer was to not give someone else an advantage. Since I was pouring and not sniffing it was killing me to hear the comments, I really wanted to know what they all were. Once all the beer was poured the tasting commenced and the whole feel of the room changed for a good 10 minutes or so, with everyone much more serious than before. I initially sniffed all 16 beers too prior to tasting and knew 7 of them just by smell, it was really neat. After that first 10 minute period though, things got good and goofy as expected. Each person gets about 2oz of 16 beers, so a little under three 12oz beers in about a 15-20 minute span, it makes it quite intersting fast. Overall the break-down went like this: Richard with a big 3 correct, Karen & Todd both with 8 correct, Dave with a big 10, Robert with a huge 12, and fortunetly (and unfortunetly) Brian (me) with an unbelievable 16 out of 16 correct!

It was great! Not counting Richard (who is really going to shark us all one year) any of the other scores could have been winning scores in the past, this was a HUGE scoring year. Part of that I think goes to the whole side-by-side factor so you can compare and contrast, versus in the past it was one-at-a-time and it was an all or nothing guess. Additionally it was crazy in the sense of there was like 4 different Pale Ales and 4 different Stouts that people had to figure out. No one really grumbled too much after I won since they all had agreed that if I got a perfect score I would win, but I did feel a little guilty. As others pointed out to me, I am the one who made all the beer, have drank multiples of each beer, and have a recognized BJCP palate. Oh well. As a major token of appreciation, not because I guessed them all right, everyone chipped in and bought me a $100 gift certificate to More Beer, my favorite homebrew resource – I was stoked and flattered.

After the tasting it was obvious everyone was starving, so Robert and Todd both had brought stuff for appatizers so we had a warm chili dip and grilled Old Bay BBQ shrimp – both were delicious. I don’t know if it were the appatizers, the beer, the Cornhole, or the medicine but somehow we didn’t eat dinner until about 9:45! Once again, everyone was starving. We had two differnt London Broils, some grilled Vidalia onions and Portobella mushrooms, au gratin potatoes, carrots, rice, and something else. We had tons of food and it was all delicious. Unfortunetly, since it had gotten later than anticipated, Todd was not able to stay for dinner for he needed to get home to his children.

After the tasting and before dinner and after dinner and before we called it a night, the rest of the night was basically filled with playing Cornhole in the backyard. Cornhole is an addictively simple bean-bag toss style game that is too much fun to play, quite simple, and easy to play while drinking. We actually had two sets to play with for Dave finally acquired his promised set from the door prize from the Delaware Digital Scavenger Hunt. We basically only played with one set since we had either 5 or 6 players, not really enough to merit a second set. But we did try a varient on the game and played with three sets of bags so all could play at one time on oneset. The play went relatively smoothly, it was the scoring that was a little hairy. Fun to try, but not something I would suggest we try again. We pretty much played until past 1AM when we were “asked” to stop playing by some of Delaware’s finest, I appologize to the neighbors. After that things quickly rapped up. Robert hit the road and everyone else stumbled back to a bed to stay the night.

It was really a great time and I look forward to it each and every year. If you’d like to recap the past you can visit these posts here: 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. And in our usual style, there are a few colorful quotes that have made it through the tasting. Either we weren’t writing down as many, people weren’t as witty as usual, or I can’t read Dave’s handwriting, but here are the few we have:

• “I just drew on my face with permanant marker.”
• “You’re a cheesy-belly.”
• “Fuck the scoring – Whoever can get them down fastest is the Grand Pooh-Bah”
• “#14 – Smoked Shreaded Wheat?” (MacRae Scotch Ale ’05)
• “You should have seen her on that pole with her wheelchair.”
• “OK – What the fuck was THAT!?” (Gnarleywine)
• “Ugh – It makes me want to take a bite of bread.” (Gnarleywine)
• “We have enough food to choke two donkeys.”

Not too much to say except that it has been eight days since this beer was brewed and it is still fermenting like mad with a huge fluff kaursen. It is actually higher then in these pictures now, these were taken yesterday. It is a really dense but fluffy kaursen too. Hopefully this will translate into an incredible head on the actual beer.

Yesterday was the 14th Annual BUZZ Off Competition. This years competition was once again a qualifying event for the prestigious MCAB event, well prestigious in the homebrewing world. Also, it was hosted by both Iron Hill Brewery, the West Chester location, and the Brewers Unlimited Zany Zymurgists again.

Kind of last minute I decided I was going to go up and judge. I really like to judge, but it is always a very long day and difficult to judge the way you need to. There was about 270 entries this year which broke down to each judge judging about 25 beers per person. That’s 25 little 2oz samples that you are supposed to fairly and professionally judge as quickly as possible. I try to do the best I can, but in all honesty by the end it’d more like ‘this one was better or worse than that one’ and that’s about it. In the morning I judged Maibocks, Bocks, Eisbocks, Northern German Alts, and Dusseldorfs. I have never judged these categories nor brewed any of these styles but have tasted most of them, so it wasn’t an easy table for me to judge. In the long run, unfortunately, pretty much every beer we judged in the morning was OK to worse. In the afternoon I judged Robust Porters and Baltic Porters. Again, I have never judged these styles, but I had a much better idea of what I needed to judge. I would like to mention that for the morning and afternoon I did have a set of style guidelines with me so it wasn’t as if I were shooting blindly. The Porters ranged from a little less than OK to very nice. There was actually three of us judging in the afternoon so that was different. The one guy was a Grand Master level I so he knew his stuff, but was a little intimidating to contradict if you didn’t agree with what he said or he didn’t agree with what you said. Overall, good time judging, long day Saturday.

After it was all done and said I got to pick up my results. I was lucky and scored a third place with the SAW Pale Ale in the American Pale Ale category. The funny part is I felt as though this beer was way out of balance to the hops side and used non-traditional (though not inappropriate) hops for a Pale Ale. Here’s some more:

• SAW Pale Ale – American Pale Ale – 40/40 = 40 = 3rd Place. “Very enjoyable and drinkable.”, “Very good example of style.”
• Witbier – Witbier – 26/26 = 26. “A fairly easy drinking Wit that is refreshing, but lacks the expected flavors of the style.”, “Sweet malt flavor overpowers spices to some degree.”
• Hazelnut Brown – Specialty Beer – 32/35 = 33.5. “Hazelnut is a tad big for the body.”, “A nice drinkable specialty beer, overall a strong effort.”
• Oak Aged C-Hop Pale Ale – Wood Aged Beer – 32/34 = 33. “A nice Pale Ale, hops are distinctive.”, “Interesting, like a flower bed in my mouth.”