BeerSmith™ Recipe Cloud

Taste Notes

Brewday: (13 December) -Very thick and syrupy, lots of sugar. Decent caramel and toffee flavors. We'll see what the yeast bring to the party. The wort itself is still very hazy and has lots of stuff floating in it. Brewday +1: -Wort is still very thick and syrupy. The aroma coming off this thing is amazing, lots of fruity esters which goes well with the light, caramel body. This is going to be a great beer (hopefully)! Brewday+6 (without raspberry): -The beer has lots of rich caramel and toffee flavors, a little breadiness from the yeast. The hops are still fairly fresh leaving a bit of a bitter aftertaste. There is still a bit of cloying sweetness, but there is also an intense alcohol flavor as well. Great base beer so far. Still incredibly thick. Brewday+6 (with raspberry): -Sharp, tart, but well balanced with sweetness. The beer could stand to dry out a bit, but its already pretty darn good. Lots of complex flavor already. Brewday +13 days -Rich, complex, heavily raspberry aroma. The flavor is lots of raspberry with some caramel, toffee, brown sugar. The beer is still a bit sweet, but it comes across as well balanced. It is reminicint of DFH Fort. There are hints of weird flavors, though it may be due to the suspension of yeast in the beer still and other particles as I have just completed transferring the final portion of beer into secondary.

Notes

Use the ABV calculator at brewsfriend.com. BeerSmith calculator uses a linear formula which is no accurate enough at higher ABVs. This is a partigyle style mash, first wort. The second wort is the Dark Wheat recipe. I had to guesstimate the expected efficiency of the mash for each. Brewday: -Upped the DME to 1.5 lb vs 1lb based on the gravity readings near the end of the boil. This brought the Brix up to 31 which was close enough for me. -Pitched yeast when the wort was just under 90 deg F. Placed the fermenter back into the kegerator to continue chilling. -High gravity yeast had a weird smell. I'm not sure if that is normal. In a way is smelled good, but it also had a bit of the rotten egg smell. I am expecting that to blow off during primary. -I plan on adding in the sugar and raspberries at the end of primary fermentation. Fermentation: -I've placed the fermenter in the kegerator for now. The temperature is set at 65 deg F and fermentation has taken off slowly. I pitched with both the High Gravity yeast and the Belgian Wheat ale yeast (reused) I pitched the dark wheat with the Wheat ale yeast as well. Brewday+6: -Gravity has reach 1.050...suggesting the beer is approximately 13.25% abv. The beer had been fermenting at a pretty good clip for several days, then slowed down when the beer hit about 12% ABV. I'm guessing the wheat ale yeast died out at that point. At this point, I added the raspberries which dropped the abv and gravity slightly. In the end, I used about 1.25lbs of raspberry puree. I wonder if I wasn't able to get enough meat off the seeds or this is just the way things are. Either way, the beer smells awesomely of raspberry, so the end goal has been achieved, if more raspberries are needed later, I do have them available. Brewday+7: -We are leaving to visit Jess' family, so I needed to make a call as to when to add the final sugar addition. I decided to go ahead and add it before leaving. I used 0.5 lbs based on calculations of what is needed to get the abv to 18%. Brewday+12: -Upon returning home for Christmas, I checked the new gravity. We currently sit at 1.024 and there is still a good krausen on top. I decided to let the beer go to see how much more gravity would drop overnight. Upon waking up the next morning and checking, the beer had dropped 3 more points in SG. I decided at this point to cold crash the beer to prevent the yeast from consuming all available sugars. Brewday +13 days -The beer has been transferred to secondary. The majority of the yeast cake has been separated, but there is still a good amount of sediment at the bottom. The fermenter is now out on the counter. I will check on it tomorrow morning to see if gravity continues to fall. If it does, I will move the fermenter to the garage fridge to complete conditioning and remove the remaining sediment prior to kegging.