Vital Statistics:
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Recipe: 20 lb 2-row pale malt 2.5 lb chocolate malt 1 lb crystal 60° 12 oz Cara-Pils 12 oz roasted barley 290g light dry malt extract 225g corn sugar 2.5 oz medium-toast American oak chips added to primary after 22 days of fermentation. 22 AAU (43g @ 14.2% AA) Citra @ 60 Wyeast 1084 - Irish Ale | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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General Notes: Used yeast cake from batch #47. Boiled 3 gallons of first runnings down to about 1 gallon for wort caramelization. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Tasting Notes: Tasing notes taken 23 April 2012, 230 days after kegging. I wanted this beer to have some maturity on it before officially tasting it. Poured from tap into a tulip. Appearance: entirely, completely, unremittingly black. No head, so to speak, just a very thin layer of brown foam. Carbonation was minimal on this one, but the color is great. A foamy lace is left on the glass when swished around. (4) Smell: very sweet aroma with notes of chocolate, oak and dark fruits. I feel it is well-composed and alluring, if a tad bit sweet. (4) Taste: sweet but with a big bite of bitterness at the end. Alcohol is definitely present as both a light fruitiness in the flavor and as a hearty burn on the back of the tongue. The oak is toward the forefront but not overpowering. There is a lot of flavor going on here; the beer is practically nuclear. I feel like it could be drier. As for the hops, I am very glad I went with Citra here because the bitterness is strong but there's not a whole lot of vegetal undertone and the bitterness is not rasping or anything. (4) Mouthfeel: because of pressurization problems in the kegerator, this beer is not highly carbonated. However, it can be appropriate for beers of this style to have low carbonation. There is an absolute wagonload of body in this beer, and what little carbonation there is adds to a nice, silky smoothness which I quite like. (4) Drinkability: here's where it all falls down. The beer is tasty and everything, but its huge flavors make it a sippin' beer which is not readily quaffable. Its colossal ABV also impedes drinkability. I don't want to fault the beer for its style, but I've had imperial stouts which were notably more drinkable than this guy. (3) Overall score 3.9 (B+). Very flavorful, though a bit on the sweet side. The giant alcohol here makes this beer marginally difficult to drink. Next time I do a beer this big, I might do a secondary fermentation with a yeast which can handle even bigger ABVs (like a big Belgian abbey yeast, for example). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hops Table
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