Late Spring Update

I'm home from my rotation in Sterling and did a few things beer-related this weekend. We bottled the Single Hop Pale Ales (Cascade and Centennial) and I was suprised how similar the fermentation was for both beers. They both finished at 1012 for 6.4% alcohol, and although I think that's a little too high for an American Pale Ale (I'd prefer something closer to 5.5%) the samples tasted pretty good. We poured the samples into tasting glasses so we could try to smell the difference between the two, and to no one's surprise, we eached preferred different beers. Elise like the Centennial the best (which she said reminded her of her probably favorite beer, Great Divide's Hercules Double IPA) and I liked the Cascade beer.

We racked the First Snow to secondary where it will sit for ~2 weeks at which time we'll bottle 3 gallons of it and then put the other 2 gallons on some medium toast American Oak spirals. I was worried a couple of weeks ago when I took a gravity sample from the beer and it was only at 1040, but the extra couple of weeks allowed th yeast to finish up. It finished at 1022 which is lower than we anticipated, and brings the alcohol to 10.1%! The sample tasted very smooth, so I'm looking foward to drinking them this winter.

Next week we'll brew a Belgian Dubbel, and like our Tripel, we are using Westmalle's yeast. Like their Dubbel, ours is going to be a bit "smaller" than what most people think Dubbels should be. We're going to shoot for ~6.75% alcohol, hopefully a little less. As this was the last of the Belgian yeast we had left from the Belgian Pale Ale we brewed in December, we'll use this yeast cake to get our stores up again.

After that we are going to brew a clone of Bell's Two Hearted Ale, which is technically an IPA. In the last post I was bashing our IPA, but since then it has cleared up a lot and gotten pretty tasty, so it's not as bad as advertised. Irregardless, I still want to do a couple of "other people's" IPAs before we start down the road of making our own again. The interesting thing about the Two Hearted Ale is that it is very low in alcohol for an IPA (~6%) and it is all Centennial hops. Even though we just did an all-Centennial beer, this beer is just too good to pass up.