Sunday, December 20, 2009

The Haka & Dubbel Whammy 1 week taste test


Both of these beers have been conditioning for the last week and were put in the fridge last night. Dubbel Whammy pours a lightish brown with a large head and plenty of yeast. The aroma was chocolate, yeast and toffee. On tasting it I found it started off slightly sweet with caramel standing out and then a slight sourness comes through as well as a spicy pepper thing going on. It feels quite milky in the mouth too. Interesting after only 1 week.
One thing I should point out is that the OG and FG of this beer were a lot lower than expected for some reason. OG: 1.062 and FG 1.030 making this beer only 4.3%. I am not sure why the gravity did not meet expectations but the result is a good beer that can might work as a session beer.



The Haka turned out about as expected. It pours a standard amber colour, there is currently little head but that will change from the keg and with more conditioning. On the nose there are the obvious Tropical fruits such as mango. The taste starts out tropical fruits and then peppery moving on to a nice bitterness that is not too harsh. Quite a mild finish.
I think this turned out to be nicely balanced. Perhaps not the most exciting beer I have ever made but a good session beer I think.

The recipe for both can be found in this post.

So time will tell how these beers turn out with age. It will be late January now by the time they are submitted for critique to the other ICB members at our monthly meeting.
Posted by TaleOfAle at 6:25 PM
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6 comments:

  1. You want your Dubbel to finish a lot drier than that. I usually shoot for 1.010-1.014.
    Did you pitch a nice big yeast starter?
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  2. Yeah I know and I was surprised it did not. It was a liquid yeast vial and there was a starter but it was only started about an hour or so before pitching. Well that is how I normally do it, it is possible I forgot to make the starter come to think of it and just pitched the yeast.

    That should not have made any difference to the finishing should it? I did leave it for a few weeks fermenting.
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  3. So what I do with any beer of substantial gravity (>1.040 OG) is the following:

    About 1-2 days before brew day, mix up 1 to 1.5 L of water with 100-150g of dried malt extract. Bring to a boil, cool down, and add to a growler. Make sure it's under 80 degrees and add your yeast. Put an airlock on it, or a sanitized piece of aluminum foil. You want this to be well aerated so every time you walk by it, give it a good swirl. THis is your starter. In about 12 hours you will see signs of fermentation and after about 24 hours you will have significantly increased your number of yeast. Now on brew day, pitch the whole thing into your wort. (There are other ways to make starters but this is the simplest). You will be shocked at the difference in your beer, especially as it relates to lag time and speed of fermentation.

    Pitching sufficient numbers of healthy yeast can affect your FG. It is possible that your yeast quit on your beer only attenuating 53%. Especially with adding sugar to your beer, there is no reason with that recipe, you should have ended up with 70% or higher attenuation.

    Oh. Here's another good one. When you are finished with a beer and you have the leftover yeast on the bottom of your fermenter, that is perfect to pitch into your next beer, without even making a starter. I will save it in a sanitzed jar/lid, and use within a few days. If I wait longer than that, I do make a starter. It is best to save yeast from a low OG fermentation, as the yeast are less stressed.
    -Shamas
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  4. ^^ There is no reason you *shouldn't* have ended up with 70% or higher attenuation. Oops.
    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks Shamas. While I know how to make a proper starter, I have never needed to before other than an hour or so before pitching because I have never gone for a beer as big as this, though I did a 6.6% Chocolate stout a while back.
    ReplyDelete
  6. There is a great calculator at mrmalty.com to figure out how much yeast you need to pitch for a given gravity/volume of ale or lager.
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