Christmas Presence Bottled

Ever since I got my temperature controller for my fridge, I’ve had bottled CornucopIPA in there, and fermenting Christmas Presence, as well as the old mead and cider that may or may not end up viable.

Each day, I’ve been checking on the CornucopIPA bottles to see if they’re ready yet. By and large, they are ready, but I still only take one at a time, since I like to let them condition for two full weeks at a warm temperature before fridging them all. I have been noticing that Christmas Presence continues to bubble through the airlock.

Activity had stopped, I thought, before I put the beer in the warm temperature controlled fridge. It is set to 70, while the basement it sits in varies between 60 and 65 these days. I guess the stable temp re-invigorated the yeast in the fermenter. This US-05 is good stuff!
So bottling time anyway – I am sick of waiting for it, besides, it must be done by now. When I popped off the lid, sure enough, there were many little clusters of bubbles on the surface of the beer – signs of activity that I would tell a newbie to wait to be gone before bottling. But not me – I am boldly defying intelligence and bottling anyway.

I took a gravity reading, first, to be on the safe side, and it reads 1.013! In case you missed it, my OG was 1.080. This makes my beer 8.8% ABV! Wow! Plus the FG is so low, it MUST be done dropping – how much more fermentable sugar could be in there? So I bottled it. I think it will be fine. I will monitor the plastic bottle, and fridge it when it is time, and probably drink it all before the yeast gets a chance to wake back up and get back to work. So I am not worried.

Nervous due to past bad experiences getting beers 8.5% ABV and up to condition properly, I used the technique that I used last time with CornucopIPA, where I took a generous portion of the yeast from the bottom of the fermenter into my bottling bucket. Since CornucopIPA was drinkably carbonated in about two days, I think there might be something to this strategy. Time will tell if it worked as well for Presence.

So as I bottle, I always taste the hydrometer sample. This is great! It is a little harsh on the alcohol, which should mellow a bit with time, cold, and carbonation, but even if it doesn’t it is a winter warmer for sure! The flavor and aroma are burnt, almost smoky. As I labeled the bottles, all I could smell was something like milk chocolate. I am super excited to have this one ready to go.

Winter Ales

For the longest time, I was not much of a follower of seasonal releases. I was more the one who was disappointed when the season was up and the beer I had grown to love was gone. Magic Hat's Roxy Rolles was just that for me last year.

I think I am starting to get it now. For example, last night I had a Victory Pilsner, and it just seemed sort of out of place on a cold Connecticut night. It was still good, but I was wondering why I passed over a darker brew.

I just the other day picked up a sixer of Ipswich Winter Ale and one of Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale. OK maybe the DFH isn't exactly "seasonal" but hey it is dark and hearty. I posted complete tasting notes over at BeerAdvocate, but here's the rundown:

Ipswich is solid. It has a nice dark malt and fruit aroma, with a hint of chocolate and caramel. The flavor is right in line, with a nice dose of hops and even evident alcohol. It was a very enjoyable drink. The only thing that I would really change is the alcohol presence. It is only around 6.4%, but drank more like a 7%'er. But lucky for them I like the alcohol taste. To me it is sort of like the caffeine in coffee - without it, the drink is just lacking substance.

Dogfish Head is a thing of beauty. I nearly shed a tear as I took the last sip from the glass. It also has a nice dark malt and fruit aroma, but the chocolate and caramel are more pronounced. The flavor was in line, with extra help from hops and alcohol, but it was more intense, yet smooth and balanced. The only thing I wasn't impressed with was the head. I understand a brown ale should be lightly carbonated, but I still like to see some head, and have it last while I drink it.

Both are highly recommended, and both are cheaper (at least here at my local A&P liquor store) than Sam Adams. Maybe next I'll have to bite the bullet and try the Sam Adams Winter Ale (or is it a lager?) this year.

Pilgrims and Beer

Joe Six Pack, a contributor to Philly.com has written a well informed article on Pilgrims and Beer. In it, he has the famous clip of a journal entry basically saying "we have to land, we're out of beer" (the real quote appears twice in the original post, so why repeat it here?) The problem with that quote, which Joe points out is that the entry was from a month after they made landfall, so it is just generally taken out of context. And of course they were concerned with more essential items like food and shelter and not dying. I would just balance this with the fact (or at least the reported fact - I wasn't there) that they thought beer to be healthful food, so running out of beer would be akin to us running out of water. Nothing to ignore.

But Joe goes on to say that since the barley crop that year was unremarkable, they wouldn't have been drinking beer on Thanksgiving, but rather would have been drinking wine from wild grapes. While I won't deny that they could have had wild grape wine there, I will say that they probably also had their beer there. Since barley was hard to come by in the colonies, they made beer from other fermentables (such as pumpkin, molasses, and things - which Joe notes in the end of his article). To them, that was beer. Might sound questionable to us, but their beer was often made from things besides malted barley - they were English, not German. I think that to them beer was anything sort of brown and lower alcohol, or at least anything clearly not wine.

Furthermore, I would think that for a special occasion like Thanksgiving (assuming that all the folklore around the actual Thanksgiving holiday is correct), they would have had special beer for it. They were still part of the British Empire, and could import beer from England. They may have saved some of their fine British beer just for such an occasion. They must have had a beer geek or two with an extensive beer cellar just waiting to help out in just such a time of need. Perhaps they employed the currently still practiced activity of brewing special harvest beers. A whole field of barley - surely we can spare a few hundred pounds for a few barrels of real beer.

One final thought - to those who say "yuck" to the pumpkin, or molasses, or whatever in their beer: the pilgrims also had plenty of corn, which is commonly used today as a fermentable sugar in some of the most esteemed beers of the world. And who among us hasn't had a seasonal pumpking ale?

So when Thanksgiving comes next week, please drink beer. But only if you like beer. Drink wine if you want. Or even water. But since none of us were there, none of us can really tell what they would have all been drinking on that first Thanksgiving. So just drink what you like, not what you think you should like.