Out of the Bottle: Brown Sugar Dubbel

My final (well, not exactly) Candi Sugar experiment beer has finished conditioning and is ready to pour. Let's see how my experiment turned out.

My beer's color is right where I wanted it. The deep mahogany hue has nice clarity and is topped by a dense head that's a bit darker than expected. Head retention is pretty good and there's some lace to be had too.

Moving on to what we really care about, the beer has a prominent nose of dark fruits, plus a light, almost roasted edge that I had no idea would be there. That edge lingers through the beer's finish. While I like the sugar's dimension, it's just not quite what I was expecting. It needs to be cut with something else. The beer's bitterness is light and somewhat floral. You can definitely tell that it shares parts with its three siblings. A light body with about the right level of fizz rounds things out.

So, what do I think of the final result? I think this was my least favorite of the Candi Sugar beers. However, I liked what the brown sugar brought. There just wasn't enough complexity behind it. I feel that cutting this sugar with the other two sugars I've used may very well create a really great Trappist inspired beer. There's only one way to find out. Stay tuned.

Comments

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 ...

Kit Review: Northern Brewer La Petite Orange

Every once in awhile, a good deal on a beer kit hits my inbox. This time around, I received a nice offer from the folks at Northern Brewer for their La Petite Orange . It's described by them as a lighter take on the traditional Trappist Dubbel . What's the finished brew like? Let's find out. The kit is Malt Extract based, but also has a nice compliment of pre-crushed specialty grains in the box. In addition, there's a bag of Belgian Candi Sugar. Replacing part of the extract with Belgian Pils malt allowed me to perform a Mini-Mash with the kit's grains, rather than simply steep them. Other than that, I followed the instructions as written. Of the two recommended yeasts, I went with Wyeast's Trappist High Gravity (a.k.a Westmalle ) strain. Fist off, the beer has nice clarity and a copper hue that's paler than I expect from a Dubbel. The dense eggshell cap has decent staying power and leaves quite a bit of lace behind. Whether I approve of the colo...

Split-Batch Brewing: Adventures in Wood

It's high time a wrote some more brewing advice, so here's the start of a new series of blogs. This series is inspired by Brad Smith's "Multiplying Your Beer" blog on BeerSmith . In his blog, Brad talks about various ways to get multiple beers out of one brewing session. His work is long on details, but short on examples, so it seems fitting that I try his ideas out and see what happens. These articles are also an extension of a couple of previous experiments. One base beer resulted in three Abbey Beers back in the Spring. My Session Saison and Dark Saison sprang from the same base as well. The difference here, is that with Split-Batch brewing, you get different beers from a single brew day. The simplest form of batch splitting is to take finished wort, put it into multiple fermentors and then pitch different yeasts, or perhaps add differing additional ingredients into the fermentor of each beer. In this instance, I'm working with oak ag...

Colorado Kitchen Brew

Search This Blog