Mixpack Review 1: La Rossa Doppelbock

Editor note: This is like an online meal recipe. Skip to the bottom.

With little going on, I ventured out to Friar Tuck to price check cherry juice, for the purpose of making a cherry wine. Why cherry wine? For cherry brandy.

I haven't been out in public much in the last two weeks, nor have I seen a friend in-person in a very long time. With that in mind, I had no idea what to expect when I went in. There were only two staff members in the whole place. The cherry juice was about 2 bucks more than what it costs online. I'll order it. I've got time.

Employee in the back of the store seemed nice and kept his distance as he attempted to help me find some sour beer. I settled on putting a sour beer into a mix pack and brought it up to the front.

The sour beer, a "Schlafly's from the Ibex Cellar: Sour Blonde Ale", was apparently shelved incorrectly and rang up as 6.99. Time to swap it out for something that can go in the mixpack. (Side note: What a name on that beer. I had to look it up just to get the order of the words correct.)

When I came back, I realized the only other customer in the store was waiting about 15 feet behind me. He was holding 6 bottles of wine and a large glass jar of orange juice and waiting for me. "Oh jesus, I am so sorry."

"It the fucking apocalypse. I wake up, I drink mimosas, I go for a walk, then I wait for tomorrow. You're not bothering me, I've got time. It's cool." Nice dude.

Get to the point, moron. I guess I'll review my mixpack in a series of posts. The rest of them won't be this needlessly long.

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Background:

Please consider that I am trying to calibrate the 100 scale to be similar to a school's grade breakdown. There are going to be some A's. There are also bound to be some Fs. Neither of the extremes are the expectation.

This is beer, so it takes a lot to alienate me fully. I'm not a drink snob, so I can see positives in a Keystone Light. Unless it's a lite beer with zero flavour that also did 9/11, I'm probably going to see a positive or two.

The way I review beer is admittedly dependent on how much I've had before I taste the beer. I did my part to not give a grumpy review and got 53% drunk before I poured this beer. Accordingly, it is possible that you, the reader, might believe I made an error in my judgments. Post a retort, you poopass.

Finally, I had my spouse or significant other pick the order for me to review the mixpack I purchased. This is an attempt to assure that my biases or assumed preferences won't have a chance to bloom.

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The scoring system:

- 10 points for the beauty of the pour. If this seems high, I don't know what to tell you. It's only 10% of the total. (Math!)

- 10 points for odor. Hard to lose many points here, but when they mess this up, they mess this up.

- 15 points for carbonation. The way it is canned or bottled matters. Disagree? Try Guinness from a can vs. Guinness from a bottle.

- 15 points for mouthfeel. Insert joke here. The totality of texture, which is dependent on density. Will also consider if it fits amongst the style it is supposed to be. I'm probably not the person to determine this but I'll try, I guess.

- 50 points for flavor. Listen, buddy: If it doesn't taste good for any reason, the beer isn't going to review well. Significant offenders: Yeastyness, sweetness, bitterness, and errors in brewing that cause undesirables like such as the pewp flavours (archaic chemistry term).

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Company: Birra Moretti
Name of beer: La Rossa Doppelbock
Origin: Italy
Founded by: Luigi Moretti
Bought out by: Heineken International, 1997

The review:

Beauty of Pour: 9 out of 10. It looks like the other doppelbocks I've had. Brown when held to the light, fairly dark when it's just sitting there. I ain't sexualizing it or nothin' but it looks pretty good.

Odor: 8 out of 10. It smells sweet, maybe a little too sweet. Like someone stirred sugar into the final product.

Carbonation: 10 out of 15. It's more flat than I expected. I dunno. Maybe that's the style and intentional? It is devoid of the reasonable effervescence of the doppelbocks I have had. It's not that it fully lacks carbonation (I mean look at the picture), it's just that it doesn't have carbonation throughout. The bubbles are all chilling up there on top and the rest if it is dead and flat.

Mouthfeel: 11 out of 15. Guys, I'm probably drunk. And I'm mildly offended by this beer's mouthfeel, but I cant articulate why I feel as such. It's oddly thin.

Flavor: 36 out of 50. Someone out there thinks this beer is great, I'm sure. It has all the things humans usually like: Alcohol, sweetness, and a distanced fondness for Italy. But it isn't my thing.

Complete score: 74 out of 100. I wouldn't buy it again, but it didn't make me puke. If you like doppelbocks, it might be worth your time. You got something else going on?

Skeeter Pee Round 1: Final Post

I am going ahead and just making a new post instead of continuing the updates on the original Skeeter Pee post.

So here is the run down on what happened.  I got a little....adventurous. Being the first time doing this recipe I was content with following the directions explicitly.  Well I did...but then I didn't, and the results are amazingly, smooth, balanced, fruity, and delicious.

I waited until my hydrometer read 0.096 and racked into TWO 3 gallon carboys.  One was going to follow the directions from the website, and the other was getting dry hopped. At first I was worried because I didn't have enough liquid to reach the neck of the carboys when separated, but after doing some research online it seemed not to be an issue with this wine due to its high acidity levels.  I am going to have to look into the chemistry of that sediment a bit more later, but I will admit that the wine does not taste in any way like it get oxygenated.  I had also bought a degaser wand and hooked that up to my drill.  I am thinking that helped to release a lot of carbon dioxide to create a blanket over the liquid.  I put a bung on right after degassing.

The degassing was done AFTER I stabilized the wine by adding potassium metabisulfate, which also works to remove oxygen from the wine, and potassium sorbate to halt any further fermentation when back sweetening. Since I knew that this wine was going to be served immediately once bottled and not last the summer or fall, I was okay with putting a shelf life on this wine by using the sorbate.  To top it all off, going for clarity, I added sparkolloid.

Ok, so I let that all sit for two more weeks.  The dry hopping was just done with 0.65g of Glacier hops that I got from Irish Rover, and those were added at the same time the Kmeta and Ksorbate were added.

Dry hopped batch.

Original recipe batch. Clear.

I got ready for bottling and went with a combination of glass and plastic screw top bottles from a Mr. Beer kit that a friend no longer wanted.  The intention of the plastic bottles was for my wife to take some of this on a float trip where glass was not allowed.

I just don't have time to remove the labels from all of my bottles...I am getting there.

All bottles were sanitized using Starsan, as well as the equipment.  Prior cleaning using an alkaline wash was done to remove any gunk from a previous batch.  PSA: Always check your spigots, and from time to time take them off and give them a GOOD cleaning.  Mine needed it, and got it.

Next came the tricky part of back sweetening.  I say tricky, because I was dealing with two factors.

1. The SP website gives sugar amounts for one 5 gallon batch.  I have two batches now, and they are not equal amounts, nor were they of the same taste with one being dry hopped.
2. The wife needed to approve.

So back sweetening with regular cane sugar, a cup to half a cup at a time, with taste testing between the wife and I was how I accomplished this task.  She likes it more sweet, I like it more tart...we met in the middle at a fantastic taste.

Original in all the brown bottles, SP caps were original, and SPH caps were the hopped ones.

I cannot say enough good things about this wine.  Everyone that has tried has really liked it.  My wife's friends on the float trip would agree, too.  The hopped version seems to be the overall winner.  It is not bitter hopped, it is a bit fruitier and the aroma has a bit of added citrus as well.  I am going to have to make 10 gallons of the next time(Round 2).  FINE BY ME!  Most likely I will split the batch at the secondary again, and do a 5gal hopped, 2.5gal with strawberries, and another 2.5 gal with grapefruit or cherries(cherry limeade anyone?).

Matuz

Skeeter Pee Round 1

I really do not like brewing during the summer time.  Well, not so much the actual brewing part, but the fermenting aspect.  Liquid in my basement will hover around 70F on its own.  Throw the metabolic reactions of the yeast cells and you have a recipe to overshoot your fermentation temperatures and receive off flavors.  Now there are some beers and wines that will do just fine with a 70F to 78F temperature  range, but I have an 8 week old, a two year old, finishing up my 2nd to last semester of graduate classes, along with work, so my time availability was limited.  I needed to scratch the itch, but I didn't have 4-6 hours of spare time.

Skeeter Pee ingredients minus the yeast energizer and tannin.

I have been eye-balling Skeeter Pee for about 2 years now.  This was the perfect time.  I could throw it all together in under an hour after the kids go to sleep.  The variability of Skeeter Pee, plus the ease, is what really attracted me to it.  It is well known among the home-brewing forums so I knew it was tried and tested.  I decided to go with the standard recipe for the first time, and maybe next time I will throw in something different to change the flavoring(I have seen blueberry, pineapple, cherry, lime, etc.)  The one thing I did not have was a yeast slurry, and I didn't want to spend the time making one with some apple juice or fruit concentrate.  It wouldn't have been hard, I have the stir plate and flasks, etc, but I just did not want to have to deal with it, and I had two packages of Montrachet yeast laying around...I figured two will be just fine....we'll see.

You can use most any yeast, a lot of people recommend Champagne yeast, Cotes de Blancs, or similar, but I just used what I had and it will offer me an ABV of up 13%, plenty high enough for me.

I cleaned AND sanitized my equipment.  I will post later on the differences of cleaning and sanitizing, but using just PBW or OneStep is not enough.  (Those are cleaners, not sanitizers.  You need an acid sanitizer like Star San to finish the job, but again, more on that later.)  While my equipment was sitting in the cleaner, after being scrubbed, I readied my invert sugar(simple sugar syrup).  My 8qt pot was just big enough to handle it all. While I waited for my super saturated solution to come to completion I moved from my cleaning stage to sanitizing and my wife, with a baby boy in one arm, took the whisk in other hand continued to stir and watch my pot on the stove...what a sweetie.

Almost done...keep this solution from boiling!  Just stay right under boiling temps!

I added my 1/3 cup of lemon juice from a container in the fridge, therefore not taking it from my 3-32 oz bottles.  I then let the solution cool a bit and dumped it in my fermenter with 2-32 oz bottles of lemon juice and enough water(tap, distilled, and purified left over from last brew) to top it off to 5.5 gallons.

I added the yeast nutrient and energizer to mugs worth of volume of a strong brewed tea to get my tannins since I had no tannins from the home-brew shop.

Yeast Nutrient was added to this solution.

That all went into the fermenter as well.  I then vigorously stirred for about 5 minutes to oxygenate and covered with a clean dish towel for 48 hours.  I don't have a wine whip so I just used my standard plastic paddle. The addition of the tea really did not make too much of a difference to the color.

After adjusting for temperature, my OG was 1.070...right on target.  No need to add granulated sugar.

After 48 hours I uncovered the must, stirred again, and threw in the two packets of yeast and stirred some more!  I added the lid, put on an s-lock, which I would generally use for secondary, but my 3-piece airlocks were in use, and walked away.


5/19/15 UPDATE

I went ahead and opened my lid to check fermentation since I did not see any bubbles coming out of my air lock.  Sure enough some fermentation had begun by the noticeable onset of bubbles at the top of the must.  The temperature on the bucket is registering at around 70-72F.  I quickly closed the lid and walked away.  I'll check the gravity Thursday or Friday night.  Following the directions, once I get around 1.050, I'll throw some more yeast nutrient and energizer in the bucket.  Stay tuned!

5/22/15 UPDATE

I checked the gravity and it was 1.048.  The last bit yeast nutrient and energizer, along with the last 32oz bottle of lemon juice was added.  I went ahead and agitated the must once more and shut the lid.  The s-lock was replaced with a 3-piece lock that I picked up today...because who doesn't need more airlocks?

I also tasted what had been fermented so far....and all I have to say, even with it all being almost half-way fermented....this is going to be a refreshing, perfect drink for the summer.  I cannot wait, and I am already thinking of doing another batch, with the addition of a different fruit to go along.

5/25/15 UPDATE

I checked the gravity, and it read 1.016.  Bubbling had also slowed down from a constant bubbling to a steady "blub....blub...blub".  I went ahead and clean and sanitized my carboy and equipment and racked the Skeeter Pee.  I also tasted it.  Yeasty right now, but that it to be expected.  Tart, with a slight sweetness and definitely on its way to being dry.  I can tell this is going to be a good hot summer day refreshment.  Manzi tasted some as well.

NOTE:  Make sure your bung and neck of carboy are DRY before you fit them together.  I freaked because my bung kept pushing out, until I slowed down my thinking and got logical.

Not very much yeast at the bottom of bucket.

With the flash on.

Without the flash on.

-Matuz

Racking Updates

Buona giornata... Here's an update on the wine side of Two Things!

On Sunday, the four of us (plus Kevin Sunway, a.k.a. The Ghost of Mason Rd) got together to make some beer at Jack Dords' home. This kind of reminded me that I needed to re-rack my wine before I had knee surgery this week: The Pineapple-Orange wine and the Watermelon wine haven't been re-racked in a while. I decided to re-rack them and take a quick peak at flavor and smell.

Pineapple-Orange Wine (henceforth referred to as POJ, until a name is picked)

- POJ wine was started April 23, 2010, so as of today it has aged 433 days (or 1 year, 2+ months) total.

[Sidenote: A few months ago, I siphoned out approximately one bottle, which has been fully consumed. The flavor from said bottle was extremely sweet, with a hint of whiskey flavor. Why whiskey, you ask? Probably because I did a crap job of cleaning the bottle I siphoned in to! A lesson learned, from now on, I will clean all former liquor bottles with vinegar water and rinse them several times before using them as wine bottles.]

- 3rd racking: This time, I siphoned the large carboy of POJ into two gallon jugs and one cleaned liquor bottle. I intend to share some of this small bottle with whomever is interested in sampling and let the two full gallon jugs age for as long as I feel like. I labelled and dated the outside of one of the gallon jugs with the original date and this most recent racking date.

- In the large carboy, siphoning left behind about one inch of murky wine in the bottom of the carboy. As it is my intention to get this wine as clear and pure as possible, this was all tossed immediately.

- There have been no major changes in the color or consistency of the POJ wine. There are very few 'floaties' left in this wine. As it came from fresh-squeezed fruit, I have been very willing to leave behind and dump the "floaties" to make it more pure and mellow in taste.

- The taste of the wine is still sweet compared to most commercial wine I've had, although I can say with certainty that I've never had a commercial POJ wine. The 'bite' of the wine is certainly retreating as time goes and mellowing the flavor with time and re-racks has been the biggest priority of this process.

Watermelon Wine (project name "Break Bottles Behind Wawa" or "Watermelon Crawl")

- Watermelon wine was started on August 11, 2010, so as of today it has aged 323 days (or 10+ months) total.

[Sidenote: This wine was a bit of a worry in its early days. Reading back on old emails/blogs with Matus, Dords, and Der Brauer, I saw that we discussed whether or not to toss it completely. Ultimately, the literature I read said to not taste for 15 or so months past fermentation, as Watermelon wine tends to retain a gross odor for a while, even when done right.]

- 2nd racking: Upon examining the carboy of Watermelon wine, the wine color is a pale yellow, and there is almost no odor whatsoever (a total surprise to me). There is an approximately 2-inch thick layer of pink-to-red pigment in the bottom.

- I was careful to not let the siphoning hose get anywhere near this layer as I siphoned it into another 4-gallon carboy. I moved approximately 3 gallons of wine into the new carboy and capped the new carboy with an airlock. Labelled and dated the outside of the carboy with original date and most recent racking date.

- It took several rinses of the old carboy to get the pigments and pieces out of the bottom. The pink and red pieces in the bottom had a strong odor- not like the original foul smell of the fermentation, but like watermelon normally smells, just strong enough to burn your nose.

- Although writers online have suggested that I not taste this wine for about 4.5 more months, the curiosity got the best of me, I took some from the hose and dribbled it into a glass for a quick taste... the first sip had a bite to it, almost like Sake (Japanese brewed rice wine)! It is also thin, like Sake.

- The taste quickly developed into that of a dry wine, with a very light hint of watermelon flavor. I have no doubt that this will end up being the first truly Dry Wine that Two Things: Beer & Wine makes. Patience (and going into this wine with zero expectation) seem to be paying off.

Miscellaneous

-As Matus recently mentioned, he and I recently obtained blackberry bushes from different sources. One of those sources was my wife's grandfather, whom I look up to as an inspiration for making wine. His health is slowly failing, so prayers for peace for himself and his loved ones are appreciated.

- From the same source, I also recently obtained a large bag of frozen Muscadine grapes. As soon as I have started physical therapy and I am able to drive myself, I will be retrieving those from a family member's deep freeze in South St. Louis County and making a batch of Muscadine wine. I will be following his recipe as close as I possibly can.

Drink your wine from a stein!

Antonio Manzi