A Raging Disappointment

There are times when my brain builds something up so much that the actual event elicits little more than a, “Ho, hum. That is not what I expected.” Such an event happened last night during the Style of the Month portion of the Menomonie Homebrewers meeting.

Oktoberfest is one of my favorite beer styles, partly because every example I have tried has been enjoyable. A great malty flavor backed up with a firm bitterness and a dry finish leaving you wanting more. Oktoberfest was the first beer I liked.

Since our club is located in Wisconsin, we try to find a Wisconsin-based brewery when we purchase the style of the month for our meetings. I’d heard good things about Capital Brewery out of Madison, WI. I figured their Oktoberfest would live up to their reputation.

Don’t get me wrong, the beer was good, it just wasn’t what I expect from Oktoberfest. The only thing close to what I expected was the color. The color was a little lighter than most Oktoberfests I’ve had, leaning toward orange rather than the “fiery amber” touted in Capital’s marketing speak.

The aroma was filled with honey-like sweetness and hints of fresh-brewed iced tea. There were fruity esters and no hop aroma. The lack of hop aroma is appropriate for the style, the fruity esters . . . not so much.

The flavor was sweet up front, with a strong crystal sweetness backed up with a really firm, cloying sweetness that didn’t seem to end until I took a drink of something else. The expected dry finish never materialized.

I don’t know if Capital ferments this beer with an ale yeast rather than a lager yeast, which is possible if you control the fermentation or if they actually used a lager yeast but the temp got away from them.

The best description I heard of the beer that night was, “It tastes like a British bitter, but without the hops.”

As a first exposure to Capital’s Oktoberfest, I was disappointed and I cannot recommend this beer as an Oktoberfest. It’s a good beer, it just wasn’t what I want from this style.

If you’ve had this beer and it wasn’t what I described above, let me know in the comments. Did you have it from this year(2012) or a different year? If you’ve had it from multiple years, does it change every year? I’m excited to hear your thoughts!

Brewing in a New Location

Sometimes you just have to ignore what the experts tell you. When you’re brewing, or doing anything you want to improve, you need to control for as many variables as possible. Change only one thing at a time and learn how that affects the outcome.

In the case of brewing, you don’t want to go changing your process and your recipe and your water and your equipment all in one fell swoop. You won’t have any idea which change improved (or screwed up) your brew.

None of my equipment changed, but everything else did. I hope it turns out. Right now, I haven’t been brewing regularly enough to really nail down my process, but over-all I’m happy with how my brew day happened. I got up early and got my grain weighed and ready to crush, then ran some errands and truly started my brew day.

Once I got to the crushing stage, it was just after ten a.m. The beer was in the fermenter by 2:30, but it took just over an hour to clean everything else and get it drying or put away.

You can put off brewing until everything is perfectly arranged and planned and won’t interfere with the rest of your life. And then sometimes, you just have to brew.

Have you done anything “the experts” recommend against? Tell me about it in the comments.

What’s that Flavor?! Conclusion

Does the Package Matter?

When I started homebrewing, I didn’t anticipate all the weird questions that would come to my mind. Learning about beer in general, the different flavors possible, and the ways you can play with the process to affect the final beer is amazing. My wife and kids think I’m crazy that I actually get excited about all the little things you can do to change your beer.

This experiment was actually inspired by Andy Gibson, the president of the Menomonie Homebrewers. Many of the people in our club keg their beer and are all-grain brewers. He got me wondering if the act of bottle conditioning beer affected the flavor profile of the beer versus kegging. We decided to see if we could notice a difference.

I’m picking up a discussion from when I first started this blog. Feel free to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or just keep reading and I’ll outline what we did.

What We Did

On May 5, 2012, a friend and I each brewed a five gallon batch of Janet’s Brown Ale from Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew. We used the extract version of the recipe from the book. Brewing the beer was a great time, since it was part of our club’s Big Brew 2012 celebration. Both batches went into the same 15-gallon fermenter, fermented in a temperature-controlled freezer, dry hopped as one batch, and packaged the same day.

On packaging day, five gallons was run off into a keg which was force carbonated and the rest was bottled in 22 ounce bottles using pale golden light dry malt extract as priming sugar. Due to allergies of some people I share my beer with, I always use DME rather than corn sugar to prime my beer. The entire packaging process took about two hours.

The Tasting

Fast-forward to August 28. With all the crazy stuff that happened this summer, we never got the chance to do a side-by-side comparison until two days after my birthday. Andy and I got together at his house for the comparison.

Aroma

We noticed a difference in aroma right away. The kegged version had a subdued, yet firm hop aroma. It had dropped off quite a bit from where it had been earlier, but it was still present. However, in the bottle-conditioned version, there was basically no hop aroma. It had been replaced by a sweet, grainy malt aroma.

Clarity

It’s kind of hard to tell in the photo above, but the sample on the left is kegged version. The kegged version had small bits of hop debris present but was otherwise clear. Neither version had any haze present, but the bottled beer was brilliantly clear(thanks to a careful pour by me). There was quite a bit of sediment in the bottom of the bottle, due to the beer being agitated on packaging day, but it had settled out nicely.

Flavor

The difference in flavor was astounding. Like with the aroma, nearly all the hop character was gone in the bottle-conditioned version. There was a firm bitterness, but none of that delicious, citrusy flavor I remembered from earlier bottles of the beer. Malt and sweet grainy flavors dominated the flavor of the beer, fading into the bitterness.

The kegged version still had that citrus character missing from the bottled version. As a result, the malt and grain flavors played a more background role in the kegged version, making the flavor start out predominately citrusy, fading into sweetness then displaying the firm bitterness of this beer.

Conclusion

The packaging and carbonation technique used can dramatically impact the flavor of your beer. While there may have been differences in handling post-packaging, we seemed to find that kegging a beer can prolong the hop flavor and aroma of a beer when compared to bottle conditioning.

We waited nearly six months before doing the side-by-side comparison. In an ideal world, it would have been fun to do a comparison every month and monitor the changes as they happen. Maybe there was a point where the bottle-conditioned version had more hop flavor.

Have you tried a comparison like this? What were your results? Let me know in the comments and pass this article along to anyone you know who may have insight or curiosity about the topic.