Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale

Tom’s Spiced Winter Ale – Slap the Bag (ouch)

I tried it out the other night and dug it.

It poured out black with occasional mahogany highlights.  My first thought was it was too dark, as I was expecting an Old Ale style.  Not a problem at all for me, because I don't care about color, but I was a little surprised.

A little roastiness in the aroma, but not much of a spice smell.

I tasted a little roast and a touch of caramel.  But those were hard to find because of the spice (which is how it should be.)  The spices that I mostly caught where nutmeg and cinnamon.  The spicing of this beer was just about perfect.  I’ve, personally, put in too much and too little and I often miscalculate the spices in relation to the gravity of the beer.  This was near perfect. 

The only two suggestions I’d give you, in the future, are to maybe “dry hop” a little spice to see if you could get the spices into the aroma, too, and maybe make a slightly bigger starter for the yeast.  The beer had a little bit of sweetness to it that seemed wrong, and maybe a larger starter and few more days in primary would tweak those out.

Overall, a nice, festive beer. Great job.

Jamey

Good suggestions, thank you.  I too think it was too dark.  I modified Jamil Z.'s recipe for this one, but his was a much bigger beer.  I simply scaled back the base malt until it was something my mash tun could handle (it maxes out at about 14 lbs).  I think I should have scaled everything back to keep it in proportion.  There ended up being too much black patent, which impacted the color.

Fermentation was a bit sluggish on this one.  A starter will certainly help, and more oxygen.  I sort of ran out of time on this one and we did not aerate it very heavily.  I hope to get a air-stone set up for Christmas to help get my wort fermenting faster and cleaner.

Thanks for the review, Jamey.

Update on this beer, now that I think we drank the last bottle.  This beer was my first infected beer in a while.  All of the bottles that we drank after a couple of months had a slight aftertaste and you could hear the head "sparkle" as you poured it.  Further, if you did not server it cold, very cold, it would gush.  The wild yeast must have gotten in there prior to bottling, due to the pervasive nature of the infection.  I think it was because I did not cool the wort fast enough to pitch quickly and I did not aerate enough, so my beer yeast got a really slow start.

To clarify what infection means if you are not familiar with it in a brewing sense, wild strains of yeast or other microbes get into your beer.  Because beer is acidic and alcoholic, no pathogens (stuff that can really hurty you) live in beer.  However, infections usually have off flavors that can make the beer almost undrinkable.  They also ferment sugars that normal beer yeast cannot, which super carbonates the beer and makes it gush.  This makes a mess and can lead to "bottle bombs."  In the case of the spiced winter ale, the off-flavor was minimal, but you could taste it.  The real issue was the gushing nature of it.