J to L

As mentioned in the previous post, I had prepared a chocolate porter for the first time in my brewing history. I was very pleased with the results and will definitely be using chocolate in future batches and in different combinations. After a success one tends to try and keep going on that path. The past two weeks have seen three different batches brewed using first time ingredients largely from the produce and herbal sections at Organic Planet.

As owner/brewmaster of Dogfishhead Brewery Sam Calagione would say, 'why brew normal beer?' Although he is both older and wiser in the craft, sometimes you also want to make sure you are brewing what people generally refer to as beer, so that you can be reminded that when it comes down to it, you can make a style as intended. So this latest activity in the brewery has produced one creative weizen, one daring schwarzbier and one good old fashion brown ale.

These homebrew concoctions were labeled in the J to L spectrum of the alphabet so in keeping with problematizing linear progression, lets start with L:

Lowbush Vice
- Creative
Made as a hopeful attempt at an untroubled segue from winter to spring; this weiss batch utilized a couple tubs of wheat malt that had been kicking around the brewery for far too long. Lowbush berries - referring to the height of the organic blueberry shrub - were added after a standard boil and allowed to steep for 30 minutes. The longer the steeping lasts the more aromatics the blueberries will produce. Weiss style guidelines call for slight fruity characters in the nose and estery notes in the aroma.

When using fruit such as this in your beer, it is important to prevent the skins from breaking and keeping all amounts of pectin out of the wort. Mind you, the inside of the blueberry is where the flavor is, but if making a mead or fruit wine you would then need to uncomplicate the yeast's job by chemically stabilizing the amount of acids present, and that is far too much chemistry work for this first shot at blueberry beer.

I'm not sure if the originator of this recipe (which I tweaked from homebrew favorites) threw out the blueberries after steeping or not, but it would be ridiculous if they did. These are freakin good blueberries still...having said that I now have a couple bags of frozen blueberries that smell like syrup and are covered in hops so choose wisely how you reuse these.

All in all, this Vice has received good reviews from those who have tried it in the tap room. The remaining 2 gallons are bottle conditioning till that beckoning sunny spring day.

Licorice Lager
-Daring
Unfortunately there are no pictures of this foray into schwarzbier other than one of the secret ingredient in question = Licorice Root.

This batch sums up the creative nature of homebrewing for me. I found a recipe for a dark lager, added licorice root shavings in the last 12 minutes of the boil and an additional can of expired pre-hopped malt extract for a pilsner (I got it in the discount bin at Brewers Direct - which I don't recommend doing unless you are experimenting). Before I go any further, I want to mention that licorice has many great medicinal qualities...it also is used as a laxative. Drink under advisement.

Schwarzbier is a German black lager, meaning it has an srm (standard reference method) count near the porter end of the spectrum but the body of a lager. With any lager, there are particular conditions the brewer has to pay attention to. The biggest problem for me was keeping the lagering temperatures constant. I placed the carboy out into the walkway of my fire-escape when it was still -10C outside. However, the days grew warmer and the nights grew shorter, and the lager was not conditioning as it likes. Anytime you end up with temperature fluctuation you will get your yeast to react poorly. Generally, they release diacetyl which has a buttery taste to it, this batch produced more like a septic tank smell. The flavor is fantastic and made for a very quaffable beer, but the aroma was ungodly. After about 20 minutes of sitting in the glass the odor dissipated. I'm hoping this secondary fermentation stage at room temp will help expel some of that nastiness.

Just a note, lager yeast will ferment at ale temperatures, but the proof of lager yeast is their ability to produce good clearing beer at the near 0 C temp range. Right now, it's a wait and see policy.

Jupiter
-Old Fashion
This all-grain brown ale was inspired by the awesomeness that is the greatest planet (besides our own) in the solar system. Its fantastic and perceptible trip in the night sky during the months of February and March (in conjunction with that of Venus) has been both thought provoking as well as a silent companion on night marches. As seen at left, the brew produced a violent storm as if evoking the gas giant within my kitchen.

My best beers have been variations on Papazian's all-grain recipes from his seminal text, The Joy of Homebrewing. This little gem is no different. Still an issue with all-grain brewing in the apartment, but this time, it was slightly easier as my two brewpots are large enough to contain just over 5 gallons of wort, as opposed to three smaller pots just under.

Step mashing method was used for the bulk 2-row pale malt, black patent malt, chocolate malt, and 120-lovibond crystal malt as the specialty grains. Fuggles for boil and Goldings for aroma make this classic brown ale as good as I have tasted. One new addition to this style which I seem to make better than any others - not saying a whole hell of a lot - was the 1tsp of gypsum to the mash. When making regional styles of beer, the brewer must account for contextual flavors that go beyond the flare notes, in this case its replicating the waters of Burton upon Trent, a historic brewing
region of England. The traditional brewing waters of England have a lower ph level than my tap water or even the Red River can produce. An addition such as this seems to emphasize the desire to meet a standard because not living in England or back in the early 1800s before brewing water was treated is to recognize that this type of beer is historical, and must adhere to historical factors.

And this fun picture is what was left over after the primary transfer. Mmmm...

Sláinte!

The past 6 months in the Brewery

Over the past 6 months, I managed to see a few things and brew a few things. Most brews were standard and uninspiring. When I look back and see the lack of photos taken, I am reminded that the everyday brewing processes were once so new that they required documentation at every turn. Now the process is just part of the everyday. I blame the kegging for this. You begin to fill the need to just fill the thing and have something on hand. Meanwhile the bottling process is greatly decreased (for the good) but the ratios of bottling sugars begin to vary due to the different amounts of young beer left from a 3gal keg.

The image above is not the result of beer (or at least i'm not ready to admit so), but the solution involved beer!

Winter brings cold, and when its cold, the brewer brings out the darkness to counter the white. Bock's are high powered lagers with dark characters but often more on the brown to red side. This batch to the left is the fixins for Mr. Spock, an ale version of a bock. After trying to cultivate a lager strain that died on me before it hit the yeast starter, I had to use what was on hand. After three different strains of yeast, it started to bubble. Rapidly, music to the ears.

Although using multiple types of yeast can start a small war in your fermenter, when you have nothing else to lose with a batch, just go for it. Indicators that other strains are dead will help cut down on this conflict which results in off flavors in the batch. Pointers such as no activity in the bubbler, sandy to muddy textured sediment at the bottom of the carboy, and a lack of colored layering in the sediment. White layers are healthy and chunky sediment is a good sign as well.

This is a concoction based loosely on a recipe in Papazian's Joy of Homebrewing. His Sparrow Hawk Porter was the adequate base for what I am calling Dark Port Hawk. Combining the darkness of Black Patent Malt, Dark LME, Unsweetened Bakers Chocolate and Mayordomo Vanilla Hot Chocolate Cubes from Oaxaca Mexico, I am expecting great things.



This is the first time for me using chocolate and after reading several suggestions to use cocoa powder, im assuming the chocolate will melt and dissolve and not stick to the pot. Heres to experimenting.









Update! As of May 26th, the Dark Port Hawk took 1st Place at the Do-It-Yourself Brew-It-Yourself Fest!

Hot Stuff! Chili Beer

I had heard of people making chili pepper beer before and thought it would be fun just to say I've done it and to grasp what that flavor would impart to beer. My local liquor stores are quite bad when it comes to getting a diverse range of craft brews, particularly those that are common place throughout the US. Only this summer did they receive Rogue's Chipotle Ale

However what I was going for was not just to impart the roasty quality of that particularly daring ale, but to also see what sort of firepower I could add. My recipe research said that Serrano peppers or small chili peppers would be best. However, as mentioned elsewhere - I will take what I can get - my local organic grocer only had Anaheim peppers. Honkin huge ones!

The brew itself was a recipe for an Extra Special Bitter as something about a good English hop with dry bitterness combined with a subtle heat seemed to make sense for my brain and palate. The peppers were added to the secondary fermentation after about 5 days of rigorous primary fermentation. As shown above, I took 5 large Anaheim peppers and removed the stems. I roasted them in the toaster oven for 12 minutes until the kitchen started to smell roasty. The skin was soft and starting to brown slightly. The purpose of the baking is to both kill any unwanted organism that could be on them as well as to impart that roasted flavor. Once cooled I cut them in half and dropped them into the carboy. Racking on top was the easy part, racking off after 9 days however was very hard as seeds and skin had come off and were sticking to the siphon.

As expected, I had to hold the carboy upside down while cleaning it and use a knife to try and spear the peppers individually to then pull them through the opening. It was...a lot of work.

This beer is quite good actually just as a beer. But like many of my beers that have an unusual theme to them, you wouldn't want to drink Hot Stuff back to back. It is a nice sipping ale that has an obvious burn to it on the way down, and for those who suffer from heartburn, I wouldn't greet pint after pint with anything other than milk of magnesia.

115th Dream Hopbursted

Eventually, my addiction to hops comes back around. I went with a more hop heavy kit than I have brewed before, 115th dream hopbursted IPA from Northern Brewer. The name for the kit comes from the amount of time to boil and the use of a technique that ensures extreme Flavor/Aroma presence from your hops, known as hopbursting. For a good little explanation of why hopbursting is an effective method to imbue this quality to the wort, see this fellows blog.

Pictured above is that addition of dextrose which came with the kit and was added after the boil was complete. The additions of soluble sugars for this recipe were intended to create and Imperial style which has higher alcohol levels as well as just more of everything. The 1 pound of hops should be the dead giveaway. My major complaint, as with most homebrew supply stores and their kits, they don't always give you all the ingredients so you don't really know what it is your tasting. In this case, the massive amount of hops for bursting were called "hop blend".

Yeast starter was applied as instructed, because of the massive amount of sugars which didn't dissolve properly due to the large blanket of boiled hops that laid on the surface of the wort. For this reason, my gravity was a bit under weight, but the yeast tore right through it all. Just take a look at that bunghole! Primary is oh so messy.

On the whole, the kit was just so-so. Very heavy hitting ingredients bill, but taste and aroma wise it could have been much simpler and more effective, as well as cost efficient. But we aren't in it for that, are we.

Lemon Coriander Weiss and Keg Time

I had been wanting to make a batch that was going to be refreshing and light in honor of summer's arrival. I also wanted something that would be quaff-able enough to put into my kegerator and have a picnic outside with. This was the beer I chose - a Lemon Coriander Weiss. The kit was from Midwest, and it offered a twist with the additions of coriander in the boil and lemon zest in the secondary. The boil went well, no surprises. After having 20+ batches u
nder my belt, my concerns are generally in the cold side of the brewing - yeast getting finicky is far more hazardous than boiling wort at 5 degrees higher than recommended.

When applying fruit or vegetables to the carboy, one should always try and keep as few outside contaminants from getting in. This includes anything from cat hair to drool to pesticides. Similar to the damages to your body, chemicals that are intended to kill bugs should not be included in your beer as they will kill your yeast. Always buy organic, or better yet, grow it yourself! Zesting far more lemon than called for the in the recipe, I wanted this beer to be as crisp and citrusy as possible. The other hazard in adding fruit, vegetables, hops, etc. to the secondary is the risk of clogging your siphon. Small particulate matter or large chunks of food can really be annoying when trying to get the beer into its next receptacle. That includes from bottle to glass and tap to glass. Many brewers have debated the strategies of dry-hopping their ales with as minimal interference to the segues as possible. The last thing you want is a dip-tube or keg-line clogged with a cluster of bitter hops, unless your into that sort of thing.


Primary Secondary Kegging

Once you enter the realm of gauges and explosive materials, lookout. Things seem much more complicated and impractical for something as simple as beer. But then the luxury of technology can do many things, including cutting down your bottle conditioning by about 2 weeks! Im in. Not to mention ridding yourself of the pain in the ass of washing, rinsing, sanitizing, storaging all those bottles. But theres also nothing quite like bringing a bottle of your own somewhere. My mini-keg lets me bottle about a third of the batch and rest goes to the keg. Because it was my first kegging experience, I rushed it. I wanted that beer to be ready sooner than it should have been. The sugars were not completely dissolved, and both the few bottles I stored and the kegged beer lacked overall carbonation. The sweetness was ever present and the beer was cloudier than I had hoped. The lemon and coriander were great, but not enough yeast knocked down and not enough time for the fermentation.

Dithyrambic

Brewed up a recipe from Papazian's manual which is described as being 'wild and boisterous.' He titled it as a Dithyrambic Roasted Brown Ale which is "A frenzied, impassioned choric hymn and dance of ancient Greece in honor of Dionysus." One can only hope, mmmkay. An extract kit with roasted barley and a touch of black patent malt. This recipe is an attempt at creating a brown ale similar to Newcastle brown but with much more happening body and nose wise. Nothing out of the ordinary with this kit, other than my new approach to yeast. I have started paying less attention to the strain called for by the recipe and much more attention towards keeping a healthy batch on hand. This not only promotes frequent brewing but also conserving a house batch that needs less preparation than a smack pack and is cutting down on ingredient costs.

This shot above is something that I hadn't noticed before about the wonder of yeast, but, basically they get finicky by the temperatures they interact with, and in this instance the top of the wort was too warm for them whereas the bottom was more suitable so they flocked down there and created a layer to fortify themselves in until the temperature evened out. Curious little fellers. Pitching the yeast into too warm of wort may not kill the yeast, but they can often excrete some off flavors in disgust at your hasty actions, be careful.

The yeast strain began as a London Ale III yeast from wyeast. On brewday, if keeping up with a 5-7 day primary fermentation cycle, the young batch is racked off its sediment and a few jars worth of the sludge is saved. The jars not used on the day were kept in the fridge to be reactivated and used for a later batch. Keeping a jar full at room temperature during the brewing of the new batch, the yeast is still viable and ready to pitch as soon as the wort has been cooled. A few considerations to keep in mind when tasting the finished beer: the sediment brought over from batch to batch not only includes the yeast but also hops and grain sediment. The small amount of these things should not overpower any characteristics of the new batch but may become what would be called a 'house character' to the beer. IF all these beers end up tasting the same, I will make some changes to how i separate the sediment from the yeast, but until then, healthy yeast is always preferred to a smack pack that has been carried over distances and possibly out dated. One of the great qualities of doing this yeast method is the amazingly rapid activation. Within 3 hours bubbles start to occur in the blow-off bucket as compared to the 10-12 hours from a half cup of yeast in the smack pack. More yeast means more activity means better sugar conversion. Some of the downsides is that cleanup is far more intensive as the blow-off hose is definitely required with this much yeast going in. Eruptions and purging as can be seen in that bucket! Also when racking the beer, alot more sediment comes over in the siphon, however this is not a bad thing as the occasional batch is under-yeasted if anything by the time it gets to the bottle. Cheers to boisterousness.

*UPDATE* Boisterous indeed, this beer garnered 1st prize at the BIY-Fest in June of 2011.

An Attempt At Brilliance

*TASTERS UPDATE*
This is the best IPA I've made and its only a week in the bottle. Could be the best beer I have made. The hop aroma is sweet and citrusy with plenty of pine to bulk it up. The taste is a bit sweet in the nose and the middle needs more time but the rear has that mouth pocket tingle from the bitterness. Well done midwest and Surly, just about nailed the original recipe. I will definitely replicate this for years to come.

I was brought one of the newest kits on the market from Midwest after the holidays from my dad. Which is currently out of stock, Thanks Dad! Sitting on it patiently, waiting to get a shot at brewing this clone kit of what is the standard for me of American IPA, Surly Brewing Company's Furious. If you are wondering why the above picture is called Ferocious and not Furious, rights rights rights. Surly worked with Midwest to produce this recipe, but as a marketable product, they cannot lend the same name of the beer to what is sold as a kit of ingredients, enter property interests. Deciding to brew this special batch in my apartment ended up being less of a headache than expected. Primary note of importance is to make the place clean and free of dirty dishes. Cause if you have seen my kitchen, its a crawl space which cannot be cohabitated by both brewers and dish piles. I took the risk of using Winnipeg tap water, though run through the Brita filter. I figure if Half Pints can do it, why cant I? Also, after seeing two batches made by friends turn out the right way, I have no cause to fear. This kit was an extract kit with very few grains included. The bulk of the kit (which is the priciest on the shelf last time I checked) was invested in two different jugs of LME and a total of 6 bags hops! Warrior hops, 'I think I love ya'. The boil level was high due to my lack of estimate on just how much the 9.9lbs of LME would raise the water. But no boil overs to my relief. Warrior hops were employed for the full 60 minutes as bittering, and a regiment of 5 servings of a mixture of Simcoe/Amarillo hops every 5 minutes for the last 20 of the boil to add aroma. The brewhouse was smelling hot and heavy.

No major surpises with this batch thus far. The only moment worth noting was when I woke up at 5am to the sound of bubbles from the blow-off hose reverberating throughout the room as the glass it was submerged in was on the musical wood floor. Think Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, could neither sleep through it nor blame it for what it is. Normally this is a joyous sound, but it surprisingly kept me awake, so scurrying about in the dark to both not lift the hose out of the water and also attempt to not spill the full glass was a bit stressful. 12 hours later, bubbling away and hop resins crawling to the upper walls of the carboy. In 5-7 days, will transfer to the secondary and dry hop the bejesus out of it with the remaining 3ozs of hops. American IPA, All The Way!

After bottling this sweet smelling bitter, labels of course had to be made. As much as I would have loved to just print off a surly label. it just wouldn't have been right. The bottling produced fewer bottles than I would have hoped, 34 in total. Because of the dry hopping, attempting to leave out as much of the hops in the secondary is key but often you lose about a quarter of a gallon. That's a bear, for the record.

Vagabond Gingered Ale

After having a bad result with Spruce some eight batches ago, i thought it was time to get back to the weird stuff. Also, after having brewed several pale and brown ales, i needed a dark companion for my Oatmeal Stout that could be opted for by the time winter rolls around. Ginger was the decided ingredient and Dried Malt Extract was the selected coloring agent. At this point I hadn't tasted any of my previous batches that had been either all-grain or brewed with the well water, so i went back to an extract batch and culligan distilled water. Shaved two average size ginger roots, more or less, and hoped for the best.

Not being a huge ginger root fan, I tried to be as conservative as i could in the boil by adding the hops at the appropriate schedule so that hops would temper the harsh taste of ginger. I allowed the American Ale yeast packet to fully swell before pitching it as I have had mixed fermentation results with the culligan water (definitely doesn't have the kick that the well water does). However as can be seen at the right a very nice kreusen line can be seen in the carboy. Foamy goodness on top of a yeasty-frappe that will hopefully smack you in the mouth when it passes your lips.

Everything went swell with this batch, from the brew day, to the pitching of the yeast, to the fermentation, to the... Bottling. This was the only monumentally foreseeable problem which was completely avoidable had proper planning been carried out. But no, things have to be done precariously by the seat-of-my-pants. So I needed bottles in a hurry in order to prepare my first 8-pack sampler for the fam. This arriving at the tail end of two previous weekends in which bottling was undergone both times. Leaving me with brew and nothing to secure it in for transnational migration. 24-grolsch were purchased (because the price of buying empties through EZ cap was way more expensive). I enlisted the help of a fellow beer drinker, we had three days to get through them and whatever else we could find to come close to a grand total of 36 swing-top bottles. Over the course of a beautiful weekend with full sunshine, barbecuing, soccer golf, and magic the gathering: we endured and came out victorious. The final product is this take no prisoners wanderlust oddity, now you taste it, now you don't.

Fat'n Tire'd

What to say about this hot mess? The original recipe was to be a clone of a favorite beer of mine brewed in Fort Collins, Colorado at the New Belgium Brewery called Fat Tire. A remarkable display of what an Amber Ale should be, and thus my hopes to re-create such a Belgian beer. However, something about me and this recipe just didn't jive. Try as I might, this brew day was as near a nightmare as i have had. Above is a photo of me milling my grain, a tasty chocolate malt is currently pouring out the bottom of the mill. Suffice it to say, I had gathered all the proper ingredients and things were going well until the hops hit the boiling wort, MASSIVE BOIL OVER. I have learned from that experience (and a few times in the past, but nothing that stuck with me like this), I now know to add the hops after i have turned the heat down or taken the brew pot right off the element. At the right hand image, you can see the resin of the hops around the rim which overflowed. When this happens, you take the risk of allowing the wort to cool down while taking the mess to task, which could provide ample time for bacterial contamination. However, there was still about 50 minutes of boil time left, which nullifies any unwanted critters to survive in the molten sweetness. Still makes ya paranoid! I lost about a quart of precious wort. Second problem was that I added the Willamette hops as the boiling hops (60 minute) rather than the more bitter Northern Brewer hops. This means that the flavors are all mixed up because less bitter but more aromatic hops were used earlier therefore losing a large majority of their unique character. Big sigh at this point. So I marched on, but I didn't take the time to photograph anything else from the disastrous brew day.
A more appealing side to this addition of the basement ber brewery is that I found a gnarly label maker online that allows you to make up a seal and then save the image in fairly high quality for free. Changing the aspect ratio to fit about 40 on a sheet of paper is a bit trickier. The above image was the label I had made in anticipation of the possibilities of a great clone, but after all was said and done, it did not reflect the full context of the situation.
Since I fully concede to a d'oh moment, Homer got the nod from the bench to take the heat. Thus the name was altered to Fat'n Tire'd because all i could do was wallow spinelessly and try and shut the world out. This batch was bottled after 6 weeks in various stages of fermentation. Will be ready to surprise me in a few more.

816 Redditt Weizen

At last, the impending step towards self-sufficiency: using well water. At Rina's farm, drinking water is brought in by the bottle from the town's municipal taps. They have a fully functioning well, but as the taste goes, the majority prefer not to drink it. My goal was to move closer towards a sustainable brewing process whereby the resources I would draw upon would be both local and cost efficient. Beer being over 90% H20, it seemed the logical step to utilize what was available in spades.

Aplty named after the location of this foray into well brewing, 816 Redditt Weizen is my first attempt at a wheat beer. The image at left is more a demonstration of what crazy colors come out of different strains of hops, but the purple coming from the boiling of the Saaz hops was a new experience to say the least. Note, these hops are green in color before mixing into the boiling wort, so I don't really know if there's a chemical reaction happening to cause this or if they just turn purple when diluted. This was another all-grain batch, utilizing my mash tun which is working like a champ. The only other notable occurance during the brewing of this batch was the extreeeeme amount of activity happening in the primary carboy about 10 hours after pitching the yeast. The yeast was going absolute bonkers inside the primary, quite amazing to watch as there was no external anything stirring the batch, and yet it looked like it could power a turbine just by the amount of self-propelled mixing going on. Just below, is a picture of the blow off hose I had attached, and obviously the fermentation was strong enough to need it.

This batch was bottled last weekend, and yielded slightly less than an average 5 gallon batch: 29 Grolsch bottles and 1 3litre Rossi jug. I purposely made less because I wanted to utilize the "new" 20litre green carboys that I had picked up off of kijiji along side a whole lot of retired fermentation gear for a very reasonable price. The woman I bought the stuff from had made wine for 20 or so years and decided she was moving to Okanagan Valley, British Columbia (thats wine country folks) so she wouldn't be needing her rigs. After bottling, the taste in the gravity test tube was so-so. Had an acquired taste, but if the riddle of fermentation is good beer, I think I'm in for a surprise!

The Old Firm Derby

A match-up of legendary football proportions, Glasgow Rangers versus Glasgow Celtic. Well worthy of a Scottish Ale named after it. After brewing the all-grain IPA batch the previous weekend, I decided to go back to a liquid malt extract recipe in case i needed a beer to cry into if the IPA didn't work out. However, I did select the grains to use in this batch rather than purchasing a pre-measured and milled variety (at left are two different types of malted barley divided into three jars: Crystal Malt and Toasted Cara-pils Barley).

The title of the beer is The Old Firm Scottish 70 Shilling. There are three or more different types of Scottish ales, each denoted by their alcohol strength in shillings (abbreviated with a forward slash /): Light 60/ (3.5%), Heavy 70/ (3.5-4%), Export 80/(4-5.5%) and Wee heavy 90/(6% and up). This being my first foray into the category of English ales, which any self-respecting Scot would have a problem with its inclusion into that category I'm sure, I decided to use the malt extract and the medium choice of the 70/. This batch was a return to the regular schedule of brewing, uncomplicated and straight forward. You can see the nice brown color it produced, largely due to the light malt extract used. As suggested by the style, the alcohol content was not strong.

At right is the primary fermenter with a blow-off hose attached, which is submerged in a jar with water. In an effort to always improve my condition as DIY as possible, i built a carboy shuttle which is essentially a milk crate that has a busted out bottom, destined for the dump, with a board cut to size to fit the measurements of the crate, and four office chair wheels bolted into the bottom. One of the wheels only goes forward and backwards whereas the other three have swiveling brackets, so its not 100%, but it does the job of sparing my back and avoiding dropping the whole thing on the basement floor. It also helps keep sediment in place when im moving it from the cellar to the brewery just before racking.
This Scottish 70/ came out with a cider'ish flavor. Very tasty and sweet, we drank a glassful of the young beer right out of the secondary fermenter, just needed carbonation. The batch yielded 29 Grolsch bottles and 1 5 litre cider jug. Waiting in anticipation to taste The Old Firm.