Old Peculier Clone - One Year Later

It's fairly hard to believe that I've been brewing for over a year. I brewed my first solo batch in August of last year, the first week that Julia moved into our condo. It was actually the first thing I did here, we didn't even have any furniture yet. My first batch here was a clone of Old Peculier from Austin Homebrew Supply. With pretty much every batch I've done here, I've put a bottle aside to see how it stands up a year after it was made. This was the first batch for the time to run out on, and I was definitely anxious to see what had happened.

The initial smell of the beer was sweet and syrupy. It reminded me of the fact that it was made with a container of Lyle's Golden Syrup, a sugar from the UK. I also noted a bit of fruity smell and some phenolic quality, probably from a warm fermentation since this was before I had any sort of temperature control in place. I didn't detect any hop presence in the aroma.

The appearance of the beer was a reddish brown, very clear after a year of settling. It had about a half finger off white head. The head dissipated fairly quickly though, leaving only a dusting on top.

The taste initially had a caramel sweetness to it. Behind that I was immediately hit with some stale oxidation from sitting in the bottle so long. I guess I wasn't as careful as I could have been to keep post fermentation oxygen out of the beer. I thought I detected a little bit of chocolate flavor to it as well, but no real hop flavor. Despite that, there was still a fairly decent bitterness to the beer.

In the mouth the beer felt medium heavy, with a decent level of tingly carbonation. Since carbonation usually lowers over time, I suppose this means I probably overcarbonated it to start. I felt just a touch of warmth with the beer as well, even though it wasn't terribly strong to start with.

Overall, the flavor was fairly decent, but it didn't seem like it was as good as I remembered it being when it was fresh. Between some of the mistakes seem to have made while brewing it, the things that I have learned about brewing since, and the age of a beer that really wasn't that strong to begin with, I guess it was somewhat inevitable. I'll have to see how some of the other beers I've made since have held up, but I may decide that it's just not worth it to keep a bottle of normal gravity beer around for so long.

- Adam

Another random update

Every so often I get the urge to try and cellar something. It hasn't really worked out for me too well so far since I generally like to drink whatever new beers I have in my house. It's difficult to keep them around when I'm running low on new or interesting beers to drink. Now that I'm brewing pretty regularly I haven't run out of beer in a while, so I figured it might be easier. Last night I picked up a few things I'm hoping to keep for a while. To start, I got a bottle of Brewdog's Paradox Islay Batch 009. This beer is already aged a bit, from 2008 or so I believe. I found it collecting dust in State Line. I also picked up a few bottles of 08/09 Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout from Caps & Corks, since they had 2 bottles hidden in the back. Dan and I have decided to check around whatever liquor stores we can find to see if we stumble on anything rare or interesting. So far it hasn't been too intense, these 2 beers aren't particularly old or rare. Of course, they also weren't too expensive. At some point we'll have to check some other good shops so I can build up my collection.

Brewing seems to be going well still. I'm sipping an interesting brew I came up with, an attempt at a marshmallow stout. There's no actual marshmallow in it, just lactose and vanilla with a smoky stout base. It's not quite what I was hoping since there's not a lot of sweetness to it, but it does have a nice smooth & easy to drink quality. I could see myself making this again with a few tweaks. It didn't have much head, so upping the carbonation level and adding some carafoam would be a good start. I think it could probably use some more vanilla as well. I'm not even sure how much I ended up using, it was something in the realm of 1 tsp at 10 minutes in the boil and another 2/3 tbsp at bottling. Adding it earlier on was definitely a good idea since it was extremely strong tasting after bottling until it blended in a bit, then it practically disappeared. I'm not sure if more lactose would be a good idea or not. It may also be a bit too bitter on the back end. I could probably stand to take out the chocolate malt, but if I did I think some more special roast or smoked malt would need to take it's place. Well.. we'll see.

- Adam