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Taste Notes

TASTING (1/11/21) I found two bottles of what I think is the first batch of this beer at Jerry and Kim’s house. I drank one today and the texture and taste is unbelievably good. I should bottle condition the next years batch for 4 months. The head rentention is very long and the intial head is very large, but not too large. Although I did not siphon into a secondary fermentation bucket so there is a lot of trub and suspended yeast. I should use whirlfloc to increase clarity. I do not really taste any off flavors as explained in the Note added on 11/20/20. The pitch rate seems fine as is on the V3. I would however add some aroam hops, just a little. Because now that it has aged or “lagered” for a while the bready aroma that is characteristic of a Marzen has sort of dissipated, which sort of makes me want to increase the cara-pils/dextrine. I should increase both the cara-pils/dextrine and add a little bit of aroma hops. I sort of have a small headache in the very center of my forehead, but it is hard to tell if it is from the beer or not.

Notes

MISC. (11/20/20) I went to The Cleveland Brew Shop to pick up my order for the first batch of McTaggart’s Christmas Ale and Paul had mentioned that there are off flavors that are found in beer due to over pitching yeast quantities. I typically dont care about over pitching yeast because I never really found negative effects. Paul said some of these off flavors dont show up until the beer ages for longer than I usually keep my beer. But tasting my V2 Oktoberfest on 11/21/20 I sort of taste a ‘crisp’ apple flavor, maybe and definitely crisp if it is this apple flavor. It isnt like a cidar taste, but rather a crisp apple flavor. If I want to have a good quality aged Oktoberfest beer I need to pay attention to the quantity of the pitched yeast. BREWING DAY (9/25/20) Adjusted the grain bill quantities to actually show the purchased quantities. BATCHING (9/23/20) Changed the hop quantity from 0.88 oz to 0.8 oz to bring the IBU’s within the style range. The IBUs are still on the high end of the range but still in the green. Changed the Cara-pils from 6.6 oz to 10.4 oz to hopefully gain more head retention. BELOW WAS CARRIED OVER FROM V2 DRINKING V.2 (11/11/20) The overall flavor is soooo much better then after the initial bottle conditioning (maybe a week). The carbonation is consistantly bubbling from the bottom. The mouth feel is far superior. The flavor is so good. TASTING (9/22/20) I tasted the beer twice since bottling it, once on 9/19/20 after placing it in the fridge for more than approximately 18 hours and a second time on 9/22/20 after placing it in the fridge since on approximately 9/20/20. The first tasting wasnt a tasting, I opned the bottle with an “X” on it which was the last bottle. It had about 1.5” of yeast at the bottom of the bottle and when I went to open it the yeast was rather flowy. I opened it and after a few moments it started overflowing with foam. I attempted to pour it quickly in order to get the yeast away from the beer, which would slow and stop the foaming, but a god amount of yeat got into the cup and the yeast was violently active and was rolling from the bottom to the top to the bottom as it foamed. I did not drink it. The second bottle was from the full case, which was most likely near the middle of the batch and had the typical amount of yeast in it. There was almost no carbination in the bottle and the only foam that formed was from the way that I poured it. I notice a few bubles and thats it. This difference in carbination is most likely from inconsistant amounts of bottling sugar in each bottle. I did not mix the wort berfore bottling, because I did not want to aggitate the yeast that had come through. There was a lot of yeast that came through to the bottling bucket because a good amount of the wort had frozen during the cold crash stage, it froze from the bottom up therefore holding the yeast in the frozen chunks. Suggest not allowing the wort to freeze and ensuring that you stir the wort before bottling to ensure consistant bottling sugar in each bottle. Now for the taste, it was not bitter at all at the fridge temp (unknown temp) but as the beer sat in the glass it began to get more of a bitter taste as it warmed. It was hard to tell whether or not it was possibly from bacteria entering the wort when I was drastically changing the temperature with the bucket open for long periods of time or if the bitterness was from the increased amount of hops in batched at in order to balance out the expected higher than design finish gravity. The finish gravity was lower than design expected finsh gravity which caused it to be less sweet because less malt was in the finished beer and then the bitterness from the hops were more pronounced. I suggest decreasing the amount of hops to the design range and ensuring you pay attention to the attenuation throughout the fermintation process so you can start the next stages as soon as the attenuation hits. Also I suggest not opening the bucket for long periods of time. FINAL ANALYSIS (9/15/20) PURCHASE: iodine for iodine test, and something to measure pH Do this: MAKE A SPREADSHEET OF THE MASHING NOTES! Go through had written notes and attempt to make corrections to known loses and volumes throughout the brewing process. I compiled all of the data collected during the fermintation process and input into an excel spreadsheet. Refer to this document. There was a bitterness to the beer when tasted immediately prior to bottling. This could have been because of the idea that was put in my head because Mike tasted immediately before I did and said, “Oooh, wow! Thats bitter. Like IPA bitter. Like extra extra IPA bitter.” My first thoughts were that my diacytel rest was not at the righ temp. But diacytel tastes like butter not bitter. Also the taste might be different after bottle conditioning. After taking a look at the graph made from the collected data the temps had varied quite a bit but not nearly as badly as I had originally thought. The bitterness might have been invited in when I had opened the fermintation bucket in order to rapidly change the wort temperature. Native yeast and other bacteria could have gotten in and caused the bitterness. Also the bitterness might have been caused by accidentally freezing the wort at the end of the “cold crash” of the lagering process. Also, I had increased the overall IBU content and hops to conteract the anticipated high FG and therefore high dextrin content, my attempt at balancing it. It might be a good thing to rebatch a smaller quantity of the hops and IBU since the mashing and fermintaiton had worked quited well. Ideas for the future: use the graph developed to determine the fridge setting and track the temp in the spreadsheet as you go, periodically measure the SG to ensure that the diacytel rest occurs immediately after fermintation, attenuition and the FG had been reached, and for god’s sack do not freeze the wort! BOTLING NOTES (9/13/20) The FG was measured to be 1.012 at 53 degrees farhenheit, which results in a corrected value of 1.011 More Notes need to be added! (9/15/20) BREWING DAY (8/16/2020) Plenty of hand written notes taken, but most of it had already been put into the correct fields. Most of the notes pertained to the volumes. The Original Specific Gravity had come back lower than what Beersmith estimated, the measured OG was 1.049. Every decoction step I had waited until the end of the time and used extra time to decoct some wort and then heat it to the specified temperature. The only step I did not do this to was the Protein Rest. I instead pulled the specified quantity of liquid to decoct earlier than the end of the time for the Acid Rest in order to have it at the specified temperature at the completion of the Acid Rest step. I wonder if this had limited the amount of protein overall in the wort which then contributed to a lower OG since it had less protein to break down to malts or simplier sugars. Note: when bottling take note of the total volume of the beer in the fermenting bucket by measuring the level of the liquid and then subtracting out the lost at the bottom after siphoning. Input this data into the Vols tab in the “Bottling/Fermintation Loss” and “Batch Size”. They are at the end of the window, the trick is to resize the window and then scroll down to view these fields. BATCHING 8/15/2020 Original recipe was Oktoberfest V1 Changed equipment type from All Grain 5 gal to “My Equipment 4 gal kettle” and increased the quantities of hops and grain by 36% to compensate the larger batch. Decreased the time of the hops in the boil to bring the IBU closer to the range. According to a forum (https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/shorter-boil-or-less-hops.501370/) decreasing the time in the boil instead of the quantity of hops will decrease the bitterness while still keeping or increasing the flavor given by the hops. Bottling Day 10/19/2019 When trying to view the measured original gravity within the BeerSmith3 program, I had accidentally overwritten the file with 0 as the OG. I think it was lower than expected with a 1.034 OG. Measure Final Gravity = 1.012 Bottled 29 12oz bottles, slightly overfilled some of them, lost about .25 gallons of beer after siphoning and at the bottom of the bottling bucket