strawberry ale

The last week of June, with strawberries abound and more coming, I decided to try a go at making a strawberry wheatbeer. I started with a 2 gallon batch of wheat beer (in a 3 gallon carboy). It included: 1 pound Munton's light malted barley, 2 pounds Munton's wheat malt and a pound of unmalted wheat flakes. It is lightly hopped. I let it cool, overnight, protected by cheesecloth — hoping to excite and invite the various microflora of my neighborhood.

I've read that strawberry ales need to be enjoyed young, and that strawberries do poorly with fermentation — with all that activity and release of CO₂ the strawberryness escapes. So I brewed that for a week and then added maybe 4 pounds of strawberries — whole and crushed — for a second fermentation for two-and-a-half weeks.

It then spent a week in the bottle with some more light malt for a final fermentation/conditioning.

And it's wonderful. It has a nice berry tartness with a slight acetic tartness — nothing overwhelming, nowhere near a wild-fermented cider —, it's light and it has an aroma that really is of fresh strawberries. The carbonation is light and has the fine bubbles of a sparling wine. And the tartness with that is magnificent.

alemaking

I'm trying a go at beer making today. I made mead once and cider twice (almost, the 2nd batch of cider is still fermenting) with good, although maybe not predicable outcomes (all three of those were started with wild yeasts).

This time I'm trying an IPA style ale: the whole house smells like hops. I hadn't realized that the hop flower would smell exactly like you'd expect: it's exactly like the hop aroma you get in th finished beer. I'm using two hops -- Northern Brewer with Cascade for finishing -- as well as crystal and toasted malted barley. We'll see how it goes. It's from Papazian's Joy of Homebrewing (3rd ed.), which seems to be a good starting point save it's trite maxims and platitudes throughout.