Tasting Day: Kiwi's Apricot Saison

Today I officially tapped the New Zealand Apricot Saison.  I snuck in a small taster the other day before the "official" tasting and I was bit concerned.  Anyways here is real tasting notes on the official tasting day.

Appearance: 4/5.  Probably a bit too hazy for the style.  I love the color though.  It screams summer beer. The beer is a very cloudy light hay color.  Has a lemon cream pie kind of look going on.  Cant see through the beer at all (fruit pectin?) Big fluffy white head as it pours out of the tap as it settles out leaving a half inch to quarter inch head.  It leaves a small amount of lacing on the glass as you drink it.

Smell: 2/5.  Does not smell like a saison and I can barley smell any fruit (apricots).  It has a hint of fruit in nose. Mostly a white wine/grape juice smell with a heavy dose of grass-like hop smell.

Taste: 3/5.  Unique to say the least.  Not like any other saison I have had.  Grassy/Hay hop flavor dominates.  The wine and dry grape flavor are there too. A tiny bit of fruit comes in at the very beginning but is gone before you know it was really there.  If I did not tell you it was brewed with apricots you would probably never guess it.

Mouthfeel:  5/5.  For the style this is right on target.  Very light and refreshing once you get past the bitter grassy hops.  Very dry.  Beer ended up at 1.004!

Overall:  2.5/5.  I expected more from this beer.  To be fair this beer is still really, really young.  I much prefer a straight saision vs a super hoppy, fruited version like this one.  Hopefully with some time this beer ages into a more refined version of it self.  Maybe as the hop flavors die down you will get some more subtle flavors coming through.  I also don't know if you would say this is a saison if you had it without know what it was.  Little, to no funk going on.  This is my first time using White Labs French Saison.  Maybe their strain is not nearly as saison-like as the Wyeast version.

If I were to brew again I would not add the fruit.  The hops dominate.  Or, I would not dry hop this beer at all.  Let the 60 minute addition and the flame out hops be the only hops in the beer and then finish with the fruit.  I also would go back to Wyeast vs White Labs for the French Saison strain.  Maybe the hops are covering up the traditional saison flavors but right now I am a bit let down how "normal" and clean this beer tastes.

If I were to really rethink the recipe as a whole I would just rebrew my previous saison and add apricots to that beer as it was originally constructed.

I learned a lot about the New Zealand hops on this beer.  The packaging for Nelson Sauvigon said "White wine like flavors".  Boy oh boy are they right with that one!

If this beer ages into something different I will update the post.  Until then.  Get ready for my next fruited beer - Mango Trois IPA.  Should post about this in a week or so.

Oh yeah... the tap is working pretty well!


UPDATE:
Two weeks later and this beer has really smoothed out and started to come together. This just goes to show you that just because you can keg a beer and drink it two days after your fermentation schedule does not mean you should.  Time is still your friend for some of these beers.

The subtle fruit flavor is a bit more intense and the super grassy hop flavor has somewhat mellowed out as well.  Brings everything back into balance.

I would bump this up to a pretty solid beer and give the smell another quarter point to give it 2.25 (still zero saison smell).  Taste would get another half point for the balance it is showing but I am still bummed that no real saison character is showing. 3.5.

Overall would get another half point for everything outlined above.  Unless time will reveal some of that traditional saision character, this beer is probably going to max out here.  There is some "Brett" trois in this beer so there is still a chance it could turn it into something.  I just don't think the keg will last that long.

Brew Day: Three Blind Mice IPA (Formerly 100% Brett IPA)

Brett Trois (White Labs 644)  is not no longer Brett.  I have seen it called Wild Saccharomyces.  Saccharomyces Trois just doesnt roll off the tongue like Brett Trois.  The beer that this yeast makes is wonderful on the palate though - especially IPA.  My favorite IPA and close to my favorite beer I have ever brewed was the previously named 100% Brett Trois IPA.  Currently going to call this beer 3 Blind Mice keeping with my barn theme and of course a node to Trois.

Here is the description from White Labs:  This strain, used traditionally for wild yeast-like fermentations, produces a slightly tart beer with delicate characteristics of mango and pineapple. Can also be used to produce effervescence when bottle-conditioning.

Wild-yeast-like fermentation.  Key phrase.  This yeast certainly acted like a 100% Brett fermentation when I brewed it last.   So I made a starter this time around.  Last time the brew day crept up on me and I did not have time to make one.  This should help kick the fermentation off faster and produce and even better beer than last time. 

Brew day was pretty simple.  I did replace the hop extract with regular old Centennial hops.  I just added enough to the beginning of the boil to reach my target IBU.  I got a gravity reading of 1.066.  Two points shy of where I wanted to be but still really good.  This beer really dried out.  I expect it to go below 1.010.  Beersmith says 1.007 is the estimated final gravity.  We will see how low it goes.

The only thing I am going to do this year is add a bit of 100% Mango juice.  I want to push the beer one step further towards that tropical fruity flavor that the hops and yeast were giving the beer last time.  It also continues my experiment with wine and fruit juices in beer.  I will post some notes as they happen.

Brewery Update

Beatrice my trusty cat helper on the floor next to the bottle capper.

Half way through the year already.  I feel like I am not getting nearly enough done.  Good news is that work has finally slowed down (enough that I'm not working weekends - currently) and I have some brew days lined up in the very near future.  In the meantime I needed to take a full day and just have a maintenance day in my "brewery",

Because I am not 100% up to speed on my sour production I am still brewing a lot of beers for blending mixing with the barrel - or after the barrel - to get the right taste on these first batches.  I have three five-gallon barrels.  They push out a lot of oak.  It's going to take time and more importantly, more batches, to ease out that oak flavor.  After more than two years I am just now drinking my sour stout.  This one didnt have to go through the barrel because I did not have it ready yet.  But the next batch will go on oak.  This weekend I finished cleaning and preparing my new barrel.  To celebrate that accomplishment I put 5 gallons of a Blackberry Pinot Noir into the barrel.  Its going to sit for about 3 months and then the next wave of sour stout will go in.  This first batch in the barrel will most likely be filled with too much oak flavor so I will then have to blend and mix that batch.  So on, and so on.  Until of course the barrel stop giving off the heavy oak flavors.

Another accomplishment of the weekend was bottling my sour red that came out of the barrel.  This is the second generation out of the barrel.  The first batch was way too much oak flavor.  I took that batch and blended it back into clean beer and back into the barrel it went.  After it came out I blended yet again with clean beer.  This batch is much more tolerable, but it currently still has a heavy oak and full of tannin-like flavors.  I recently had a pint of Bells Brewery "The Wild One".  My beer has similar flavors.  Its a complex beer.  It has a bit of harshness mixed with some funky fruit flavors from the Brett.  You can kind of get the tart cherry pie aroma when you smell it - reminiscent of a Rodenbach.  But it has a punch that Rodenbach does not.  I would love to have my beers skew more towards the sharp acidic bite with fruity notes that Rodenbach has vs my beer which I would describe as a beer that smells like a Rodenbach but then punches you in the face with an almost abrasive funk/acid bite.  Here's to hoping that the carbonation will add some brightness to the beer and liven it up some.  I will check the first bottle in two months.

Sour cherries sit on the bottom of the carboy as I siphon
sour red beer on top. A Kriek is a brewing!

While bottling the sour red I also blended two batches from that base beer.  I took two gallons and put them on 4lbs and canned sour cherry fruit with all of the juices.  This should play well with the aroma I described above.  The fruit may even soften some of that flavor.  We wont know on this one for another 4 months.  It will sit on the fruit for two months.  If it's ready to bottle at that time it will then sit for another 2 months before I taste one of the bottles.

The final batch I mixed up was with black currants and dark raisins.  The dried fruit was added to a small one-gallon test batch.  Ill be curious to see how this one turns out.  I expect this version to push more towards the wine flavor present in the red sour from the barrel.  The strong Cabernet Sauvignon flavors may come out more with grapes and currants in the mix.  Don't really know what to expect on this one.

On top of mixing and bottling the three beers outlined above I cleaned a lot of carboys and bottles.  Since I felt like the Brett was getting out of control I have been cleaning a lot more.  For instance I didn't even need to clean some carboys but did anyways.  Just cleaning the gear if it has been sitting too long without beer in it.

All and all it was a very productive day.  Coming up this weekend though is two brew days.  Me and Mike make our second collaborative oat beer.  This one wont be as tricky since we are not using any witch weed to brew with.  We are making an oat beer with with lemon, ginger and honey.  Should be a real summer quencher if it turns out.  I will also be brewing my 100% Brett IPA again.  Although it probably should be call IPA since they recently found out Brett Trois is really a "Wild Saccharomyces".  I will be making one small tweak to the recipe this year by adding just a touch of mango juice to the secondary to really push the tropical flavors.

I should have a tasting note for my La Fin Du Maz shortly as well.  It's the first beer I put into a keg and it should be ready to sample tomorrow.

Finally, I will be putting my saision on tap soon.  This is my New Zealand Apricot Saison.