Out of the Bottle: Kitchen Sink Barleywine

I feel like my Kitchen Sink Barleywine is finally ready to review. It's been a long wait, but I think the results were worth it.

Sink pours into my snifter with a deep chestnut brown hue that has decent clarity. A generous head provides nice retention and leaves a solid serving of lace behind. Pine, oak, orange marmalade, citrus and lightly toasted bread greet the nose. The hop aromas are way out front, but not overpowering. In the mouth, the 87 IBUs bring a forceful bitter bite that carries the pine and citrus from the nose, without being overly grapefruit happy. Malts are there with a toasted edge. There's not much sweetness to be found outside some of the hop flavors, but that's OK by me. The bitterness lingers long into the finish. The roughly 9.5% ABV adds a nice warmth going down, but the alcohol is otherwise well masked. Letting the beer warm to cellar temperature makes the experience even better.

The beer's body is substantial from the large grain-bill and oily from the hops. Its considerable heft creates a sipping drink that discourages you from imbibing too quickly. Soft carbonation that seems part and parcel with all my bottle-conditioned brews rounds things out.

Overall? I'm pretty happy with my mash-up of leftovers. Perhaps I'll clean the cupboard with another one of these in 2013.

Comments

Kitchen Brewing Part 3: Sparge and Boil

The mash emerges from the oven. Now that we're finished with Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it's time to Sparge. As you can see from the photo, the grains have absorbed a lot of liquid. In a traditional all-grain setup, your Mash Tun has a valve at the bottom to release the first running of Wort. The grains are then rinsed with the sparge water to extract any remaining sugars. My stove-top method doesn't afford such luxury, so a different method is called for. The grains have gained a little weight. There are a couple of choices at this point. One choice is to lift the grain bag out of Pot A and place it into the sparge water in Pot B to steep for 10-15 minutes or more. The other is to lift the grain bag up, put a colander under it and slowly pour the sparge water through the grains into the original pot. I prefer the former, because I get a better extraction rate from my grains. All that absorption means that the grains weigh a lot more than they did going i

Kitchen Brewing Part 2: The Mash

Always start your session with a beer. Now that the equipment is together from Part 1 , it's time to start brewing. I'll be brewing an English India Pale Ale for my demo batch. The beer's details will be out in a future blog. Ingredients ready to go. I'm lucky to have a homebrew shop with a grain mill, so I've crushed my grains at the store. The hops have also been measured out ahead of time to keep things simple. You don't have to do this, but I recommend it. My setup. My stove-top setup is pretty simple. Two kettles, a grain bag and a metal spatula are pretty much it. I also like using a hop bag (available for around $5.00), but it's completely optional. If you're doing all-grain brewing, canning pots work best for batches of 2.5 gallons or less. Anything larger and you'll be battling spill-overs. They also work well for partial-mash batches of up to 5 gallons, where you can top off your wort after the boil. We hav

Saving Money: Simple Yeast Culturing

A few members of the family I just finished racking my English IPA to a secondary fermentor. As part of the process, I saved some of the yeast in the primary for future use. Here then, is the start of a series of articles on yeast culturing. Back in the "good old days," homebrewers didn't have a ton of yeast choices. In some cases, brewers would even use bread yeast from the baking section of the grocery store. In practice, you hydrated the packet of dry yeast you got at the homebrew or grocery store and pitched it. The packets were cheap and worked, but there wasn't much variety to be had. Nowadays, there are several dozen strains available. While a few strains are still dry , most are liquids that come in pitchable tubes , or smack-packs . The liquid yeasts give consistent results and provide tremendous variety to finished beers, but are pricey. If you only use each pack, or tube once, you will quickly discover that yeast makes up 15%, or more of the cost

Colorado Kitchen Brew

Search This Blog