found drama

Homebrew #3 was with my friend Adam (“The Misled Brewing Co-op”) and we brewed up Oh Darwin, an Australian Sparkling Ale: ¹

Adam had picked out this kit from NorthernBrewer.com, mostly on the basis of its novelty. ² Brew day was November 8, and that all went more/less as you’d expect. Nothing especially noteworthy there — target gravity was 1.055 and we hit 1.054.

The interesting bit (for me at least) was that this was my first beer with liquid yeast. That in and of itself wasn’t all that remarkable, except for the part where the fermentation went nuts and pushed the krausen up into the airlock.

This was a snap to clean-up, and if anything, just made me feel confident that we pitched a healthy batch of yeast. Did about two weeks in the fermenter, then straight to bottles for conditioning.

And two weeks after that, we had a pretty damn good beer.

Oh Darwin has a bright, lively flavor and is pretty light bodied. We didn’t get the big foamy head we were expecting, but there’s some fantastic, effervescent carbonation happening that really opens up the flavor. ³ Final gravity was 1.016, giving us about 4.99% ABV. We also figured around 36.62 IBUs and 3.80 SRM.

Details

Oh Darwin, an Australian sparkling ale by Misled Brewing Co-op

1. On Untappd.[↩]
2. In his words: “I’ve never even heard of this style — should we try it? Let’s try it.”[↩]
3. My first impression suggested a bit of a sweet-and-sour flavor going on, but I think maybe I just wasn’t working with a fresh palate that night.[↩]

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