Wherein I write about this beer belatedly, and with some distance. But with some distance (both temporal and geographic), it seems like I’d better write about this one for the sake of completeness, lest my trans-continental move-related homebrewing hiatus cause everyone to think I’ve disappeared. In any event, here’s a little story about the Mashers Scotch Ale that I pretty much just fermented a few gallons of.
Seventeen years in Vermont. My tasting notes don’t go back far enough to give me a beer for every year. But between my memories and the notes that I do have, there’s enough to work with to give it a 10 list.
Our original plan was never to stay. We came for Amy’s graduate school, with every expectation that we would be gone in four or five years so she could chase a post-doc and then a tenure-track role after that.
But that’s not how things shook out, and all the subsequent decisions — large and small — accreted into a 17 year stint that looked like it might keep us here for good.
But that’s not how things shook out either.
With spring’s warm weather on the way, I was looking forward to a crisp pale beer to enjoy after mowed lawns and spread mulch and balmy garage brew days. Last spring’s big hit was that cream ale Uncle Rico, but with three more years of brewing and about two years of judging under my belt, I felt like it was finally time to take another crack at a Kölsch. Thus, the triumphant return of Sorry Karl.
I went even bigger than last year — with 17 entries across beers, ciders, and meads in the 2019 Greg Noonan Memorial Homebrew Competition. Had an excellent showing overall, as well as the added privilege of getting to judge in two categories (i.e., Saison; Smoked and Wood-Aged Beer).
Oof — where to begin with this one? With the delicious end product and the against-all-odds happy ending? Or with the nothing-is-going-right process that got us there.
Either way, Expensive Chaos is a New England-style IPA with Belma, El Dorado, and Sabro:
An Altbier was on the list of styles to brew, but it wasn’t high on that list. But then a friend from the Mashers threw down the collaboration gauntlet for NHC. “What should we brew?” We settled on Altbier, each made a recipe, compared notes, mixed and matched, and… Alt, Jung, Es Ist Alles Gut was born.
Rolling out of Creighton’s Quip, it seemed a waste to just toss a perfectly good, healthy, and large yeast cake. What better to do with it than re-pitch onto an Irish Extra Stout — one that I’ll call “International House of Beverage”1 or I.H.O.B. for short:
This year, I thought that a good ol’ fashioned Irish Red Ale in time for St. Patrick’s Day seemed like just the thing to have on draft. Reading through the style guide, I thought that a dry and slightly grainy interpretation of the style would suit me. That’s what brings us to Creighton’s Quip:1
Yeast harvesting and re-pitching had kind of fallen by the wayside for me over the past year or so. In 2017 through the early part of 2018, I’d tried to do quite a bit of it. The petite fiasco with Prosody (Mosaic) turned me off on that aspect of homebrewing for a while.
That being said, if you’ve got a big healthy yeast cake from a just-racked lager, then it seems a shame not to re-pitch it. So that’s just what I did here — drew up a recipe for a Munich Dunkel and called it Urban Owl:
