Transfers

So between yesterday and today I got three transfers done thatneeded to get under way.

fruit-wheat-web

Back in April I believe I brewed a 20 gallon batch of American Wheat beer withGarrett. We split the batch and I left 5 gallons of my beer ‘plain’ and I added fruit to the other 5 gallons. I have just kegged the 5 gallons of fruited wheat beer, sheesh I’m a slacker. Two down sides to this scenario, (1) I would have rather of had this beer available in the summer, a fruit-wheat beer just screams summer-time, and (2) the beer has taken on a slight sour flavor. I am not alarmed, I do not think the beer is a drain pour or anything, there just appears to be a slight sour fruit flavor present that I don’t remember from when I transfered the beer to it’s third fermenter. I kind of like it, like a tart sour cherry, but there is no cherries in it, it was predominantly pomegranates and blueberries. We’ll have to see what cooling this beer down and adding carbonation to it does, but I think it could be a neat tart treat. I also transfered both ciders to secondaries today. I am trying to stay on top of these ciders and am planning on drinking them ‘young’ and having them ready for Thanksgiving. The cider fermented with the S33 finished at 0.0998 and the cider fermented with the US56 finished at 0.0996 – talk about some dry stuff. I think I am going to keep the S33 cider ‘traditional’ because it should have a little bit more complex flavor profile on its own, and I think I will try to back-sweeten and/or try to pump-up the appleness in the US56. I’m going to have to do a little research on the back-sweetening aspect, but I know others have done it so it shouldn’t really be a big deal. My plan is to keg and force-carbonate a good number of bottles to take around the circuit on Thanksgiving. Typically my beers are well received from the people that like craft beers, but I’m hoping the ciders will hit a larger palate range, but again the problem is that these are not you ‘normal’ ciders so it is still a sell, whatever, it’ll be Thanksgiving people will shove anything in their mouth 😆 .

cider-transfer-web

I also pulled off 6 bottles of the Plain Porter on tap right now. I am going to try and do this with every batch. I want to do this more to have a stock of beers for the annual Fool Circle beer tasting more than anything else, but I suppose if there is some competitions in between that could be useful too, like this one in two weeks, the Inaugural Stoney Creek Homebrewers Amateur Brewing Championship.

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