Bottle Day: O.A.T. Ale

Another day - another batch of beer to bottle.  Today I bottled two batches of O.A.T.  This is the new name for the Oat And Tansy beer me and my friend Mike created.  There are two versions that were bottled.  One was with minimal hops (4 hop pellets) and a lot of tansy.  The other batch was regular hop dose with minimal tansy added during the aroma/flavor timing of the boil.

First up if the OAT with Burton ale yeast and minimal hops:
This is the beer that I have not been too fond of from the first tasting while transferring over to the secondary.  It had a weird taste then and it still does.  One would assume this is the tansy and the fact that it lacks the regular hop flavor/bitterness you expect in a beer.  To make things even more discouraging is there was a very small pellicle.  When brewing a clean beer like this, it is a bad sign to see one of these guys.  I tasted the beer and it still tasted similar to what I tasted two weeks ago so I decided to go for it.  There may have been a small leak in the seal on the lid that let air into the bucket or the lack of hops could have left the beer susceptible to unwanted microorganisms that hops can usually fight off.  If anything this beer is becoming more and more "authentic" because most brews back in the day were probably "contaminated".

Next up was the OAT with American Farmhouse yeast.  This was the most promising batch of the two when we racked the secondary two weeks ago and that still holds true.  This batch also had a pellicle but there is brett in the American Farmhouse yeast.  So after some aging I would expect to see this.  The flavor on this one is pretty unique.  Fruity up front, funky and weird on the back end with some support from the tansy.  This should be a fun beer to try out.

Both batches should be ready in two weeks.  Hopefully whatever is going on in the Burton Ale yeast batch is OK and those beers are still good to drink when its time to taste them. Fingers crossed until then.

Don't forget that we still have a batch aging on Brett Brux.  I will let this go in the primary for one more week and then transfer over to the secondary.  I plan to put a small amount of oak in it to replicate "barrel aging".  I will let it sit for about two months and start checking the gravity to see if the Brett has more work to do or not.
Check back for updates on that as things progress.