Thursday, October 4, 2007

the wedding beer saga continues...

two batches of wedding beer have now been bottled, with two more to follow early next week. so far the oktoberfest and organic IPA are bottled, the organic porter is in the secondary, and the honey wheat is waiting to be transfered.

the test batch of oktoberfest turned out really well. the dry hop with saaz and tettnanger gave it a really deep hoppy quality that reminded me of the scheider-brooklyner hopfenweiss (not to be confused with the brooklyner-schneider hopfenweiss, which i'll hopefully get a chance to try this weekend). i'm assuming it's because both were dry hopped with german hops . i took a couple of growlers along this weekend for post-bachelor party consumption, and they seemed to go over pretty well.

the 2nd batch of the oktoberfest (the one for the wedding) was dry-hopped with saaz and saphir and has a brighter and livelier hop character. it'll be interesting to see how it tastes after a few weeks in the bottle.

the organic ipa spent some time getting to know some organic goldings (pellet) and cascade (whole leaf, grown by matt) hops in the secondary. it's lost a little of the 'fresh-hop' flavor that it had when we transfered it and the bitterness has kicked up a bit. still very tasty.

we're probably going to end up with around 160 bottles for the wedding, and i'm hoping we'll have some left over. i might see if someone wants to take a couple of bottles along to the bootleggers bliss in my stead, since we'll be getting back from the honeymoon that day.

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