Final Gravity

With the temperature in Oklahoma routinely topping 100 degrees, I figured a good summer beer would be a Blackberry Wheat. Sam Adams sells a Blackberry Wheat that I really like. Just a hint of fruit flavor and just perfect for a scorching day.

After some investigation I bought a kit from Northern Brewer for my first fruit beer. Well… I think this will be the last fruit beer “kit” I try for awhile. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an awful beer. The wheat part of the beer turned out great, but I screwed up on the blackberry part. I’ll explain.

When the kit arrived I noticed that I could smell the blackberry extract as soon as I opened the box. It was pretty strong. In fact the smell of the extract left a faint blackberry scent throughout the house for the first couple of days after it arrived. I apparently didn’t take this as a warning sign when adding it to my wheat beer.

The bottle said that it was the correct size for a 5-gallon batch, but it also mentioned that the extract should be used “to taste.” Therefore, I added the entire bottle. Stupid me.

I was a little worried that the beer would end up over-saturated with blackberry the moment I added it to the keg, but I hoped that the flavor would settle out after a couple of weeks.

Well, it hasn’t… really. Maybe a little, but not really.

Every time I draw a glass of the this beer the first thing I notice is the strong scent of the extract when I bring up the glass. The actual taste of the beer isn’t overtly fruity, but the strong scent overpowers the flavor before you get the chance to even take a sip.

I let my brother-in-law try a glass, and he didn’t really care for it. He finished it, but it wasn’t his favorite. For the next round I used his same glass for another beer. The exact scent lingered to the point of tainting the flavor of the next beer as well.

The moral of the story is that the next time I try a fruit beer I will use real fruit, and not an extract kit. The extract is just a little too potent for my taste.

Now I just need to finish the rest of this beer to clear out some keg space. I still can’t bring myself to dump it… so I’ll drink my mistake for the next couple of months.

Cheers.

I have been brewing beer from home for a little over a year now. I’ve probably brewed and bottled six or seven batches in that time. As most home-brewers find out sooner or later, bottling beer is a huge pain. Well… actually it’s not the bottling as much as the prep-work involved in bottling.

All of the 50 or so bottles for an average 5-gallon batch must be completely cleaned and sanitized before filling. Any slacking at this point can result in a “beer bomb.” I’ve already experienced one of these delightful surprises. In a batch last year I popped the top on a seemingly normal beer, only to have it explode all over the kitchen. It was actually kind of funny once I was over the initial shock.

The quick solution to this beer bomb problem is to keg your beer. Having this in mind, I purchased a mini-fridge, two 5-gallon cornelius kegs and a CO2 system on eBay. Now I only need to make sure that one keg is completely cleaned and sanitized, rather than 50 individual bottles. This all sounds so nice and easy, but there are other challenges involved with kegging beer.

There is a lot of info circulating around the web concerning kegging beer. It doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult, but my first go-round has proven to be a little tricky.

Kegging lesson number one: don’t use the “quick forced carbonation” method that involves turning up the psi on the CO2 and shaking the keg back and forth. I was a little impatient to try my Fat Tire clone, so I tried this method after watching a youtube video demonstration. My first glass of pure foam gave me an indication that something wasn’t right. It took me days to draw anything but foam.

To resolve the issue I shut the CO2 off completely and hit the release valve 5 or 6 times a day for a week. When I finally drew a nice glass with a decent head of foam I turned the CO2 back on at about 3 psi… just enough to push the beer out of the keg, but not add more carbonation to the beer. After a week at 3 psi I started drawing glasses with no foam at all. I pushed the pressure to 10 psi and the refrigerator is holding at about 38 degrees. That seems to be the right balance for now.

I added my next keg of ESB a week later, and kept the setting at 10 psi. I think I can set different pressure for the 2 kegs, but I’m not sure of how yet.

I didn’t do the quick method on the ESB, so it took awhile to carbonate. My biggest issue with the ESB so far is waiting for the hops to calm down a bit. The carbonation seems alright (albeit a little low), my problem with this batch is all about the taste. After 3 weeks in a keg I am still getting a nasty bitter funk to on end of the ESB. I’m hoping this will age out over the next few weeks.

The Fat Tire clone is great. Nice carbonation and nice flavor. Not sure how close it is to the original, but it’s a nice amber beer with a hoppy aroma and flavor. I’ll keep this one on regular rotation for a while.

Well, that’s my story about the first kegging attempt. I’m going to bottle my next batch because the kegs are currently occupied. It will be kind of nice to bottle a batch after all of this keg and forced CO2 business. Good ‘ole priming sugar to the rescue… although I am still glad to have the keg system set up. I can only go up from here.