Colorado Kitchen Brew

After a very long wait, the four Quads from my wood aging experiment are ready.  The base beer is quite nice all by itself. Dark cherry, plum and raisin flavors are out front. After that comes a light bitterness that is slightly minty. My beer finishes very dry, with a subtle burnt sugar edge. It also has a light body (perhaps a little too light, given the strength) and a mild alcohol warmth going down. Now it's time for my Bourbon aged variant. First off, it has a little more Bourbon action than I would've liked, but it's not overpowering. On top of the base beer is a slight vanilla and caraway edge. The caraway is most prevalent in the finish. This beer is not quite as dry as the base too. As the beer warms, there's a light roasted almond note that was a pleasant surprise. The first thought that crossed my mind when I tried the Rum beer was "now that's different." The Rum aged beer is extra sweet out front. In addition, the Rum added lots of whi...

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...