Brewsflash: Dog arses and make-believe citrus

Bottling time!

I've been too busy brewing and not busy enough bottling lately, leading to a production bottleneck (see what I did there?) in the shape of too few carboys.

Nothing makes my day like a confusing Google Image Search.

As I reported recently, I brewed a medlar saison a couple of months ago, and it was about time I got it bottled bottle lest it never get druk. Drank. Consumed. Whatever.

Medlars are a fascinating fruit. Related to the hawthorn, medlar trees grow golf-ball sized fruits, which are hard, tannic, and not very pleasant unless they're bletted.

That means rotten, only more poshly so.

I am endlessly fascinated by weird and slightly(*) yucky foods, and the medlar is a favourite of mine pricesely because (°) it is a rare example of a fruit which effectively has to spoil in order to be edible.

*) or very. Or very very. Or will you fuckin' stop already!

°) also because it gets charmingly nicknamed things like "open arse" and "dog butt". Good thing the Internet wasn't around when the medlar got its nick, or else I'd be gargling goatse(^) beer soon. 

^) Oh and for the love of god don't google goatse if your don't know what it is already. The internet should come with a warning sticker that says "Don't google goatse". The medlar's nick should be ample warning, but apparently it isn't.

Using about two dozen properly bletted medlars (courtesy of the amazing Marloes & Martijn), I made a syrup which I froze until I was ready to use it in a brew.

Early February, I brewed a basic(*) saison, and in a spontaneous act of generosity, I'm sharing the recipe with you, Constant Reader.

Or just because.

*) I promise to one day lay out my understanding of what a saison was, what it now is and what it should be, but for now, let's assume there actually exists such a thing as a basic saison.

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Technical stuff below; skip unless you like technical stuff, numbers and beergeekery

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Made a 5 gallon batch, comprising 36% Pilsner, 36% pale and 28% wheat malt. 
Mashed on the low end at 150°F, where it gradually petered down to about 140 (my mash tun needs an insulation coat). 
70' boil. 
0.5 ounces of Citra @ 70'         (26 IBU)
1.0 ounces of Citra @ 10'         (6 IBU)
1.5 ounces of Citra @ flameout (0 IBU)

5g of black pepper corns and zest of 1 lemon @10'.

Cooled to 68°F and pitched with French Saison (second generation 3711, kindly donated by Frankenbuddy). 
Fermented at 71°F, ramping to 77 over the course of a week; dropped from 1.063 to 1.002.

Racked to secondary and split in three batches. 

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Technical stuff all done now, resuming normalcy

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Three batches then, from a single brew. Not only did I not have enough medlar syrup to flavour an entire 5 gallon batch, I also wanted to be able to define the specifics of the medlars' contribution. 

It will end in tears one day.

1. basic version. Just the above recipe, no further shennanigans applied.
2. Cul de Chien: added syrup I made from about 2 dozen bletted medlars, half a lemon, and sugar.
3. basic + Orval dregs for Brett funk and rustic saison character.

Then I moved all three to the cellar and tried to forget about them for a few months.

Until yesterday.

Batch 1 and 2 were bottled by yours truly yesterday, which means I'll be able to taste them properly in a couple weeks' time. So far, the prognosis looks good. Solid saison profile, with Citra really doing its utmost to bring refeshing hoppy citrus notes and the yeast tying it all together. The Cul de Chien version had a bit of extra lemony zing to it (I may have overdone things lemon-wise when I made that syrup) and a certain je-ne-sais-quoi which probably the medlars. Even if the beer tatstes nothing like medlars at all, it's still going to be a great brew. 

Yeastie Boy is buzzing with anticipation.

Batch 3 will be bottled sometime soon. My understanding is that the Bretts will take a long time before they become noticeable, but will impart a bit of that rustic Old Orval vibe, which I think will add more complexity and authenticity.

Because all authentic saisons were brewed with citra and Dog's Arse.

More news when the brews are sampled.

Until then, I part with a fitting Chaucer quote:

We olde men, I drede, so fare we:

Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype;

May our bletting be long in the waiting.

Greetz

Jo

HoppySlosh gets a taste of ye olden dayes!

It's a funny world.

Well...maybe nog haha-funny, but still.
Pretty funny.

One day you're happily slurping beer and blabbing about it on some beergeek forum or other (*), and the next you're sipping a 50-year old beer with a complete unknown.

*) Another manifestation of the funniness of the world is that, if you can possibly conceive of an interest, however obscure or far-fetched, there'll be a forum (^) about it on the Yinterwebs, populated with people (°) with an encyclopedic knowledge about it. 

^) and porn. But I digress...

°) and trolls. Trolls are everywhere (%).

%) except under bridges. But I digress...

Anyway, following a post I made about my interest in old beer and a specific brew called Goudenband, I received a PM one day from a new member who seemed to've registered with the singular purpose of PM-ing me.

A PM made especially for me?
Why, thank you, Google!

For the elderly, the recently-returned-from-a-trip-around-Saturn, and the otherwise illiterate: a PM is a private message (hence the acronym) sent between members of an otherwise public messageing board.

No kittens were harmed in the process of writing this blog post.

Anyway.

A PM.

If I was interested in obtaining two bottles of very old Goudenband.
Very, in this case, meaning "dating back the first days of the country of Zaire.

Let me explain (°).

Belgium, like every civilised country in the world, got rich by ruthlessly exploiting her colonies. In Belgium's case, we're talking about Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

Collectively known as Belgian Congo.

More accurately, Congo was the private property of the king of Belgium. His back yard so to speak. Belgium, as a nation, started shopping (*) for colonies almost as soon as it became an indepent nation, and almost landed a deal on Hawai, Crete, Cuba, Chihuahua and fucking Fiji.

Behold, the Belgian Mastiff

*) yes. Literally shopping. As in "Honey, I'm going out for groceries, do we need any more colonies to keep up with the Joneses?"

With colonisation cames expatriation, which brought my generous new friend's ancestors to Africa.
Time passed, and by the mid-1950's, the local people had had enough of the white opressor. Decolonisation was accelerated by the (often not very voluntary) repatriation of the white Congolese populace, and by 1960, it became unfashionable to even call the country Congo any longer.

The rest, they say, is pop history.

Whatever she was doing here (and all jest aside, many people living in Congo around the 1960's quite simple just lived there and were only peripherally involved in its colonial nature), my generous new friend's grandmother found herself evicted to a strange and cold new country, called Belgium. Mercifully, someone decided she could use a pick-me-up and gave her a couple of fancy bottles. Two of them being, you guessed it, Goudenband.

°) Seriously, whenever I explain to people who make fun of my passion for beer that I've learned more about world history by studying beer than anything anyone ever taught me about anything at any one time, I need only mention that single bottle of Goudenband.

Which brings us back to the bottle.

Ye Olde Bottle

Back in the sixties (and until I get more conclusive data on this specific bottle I'm going to ballpark it

to back in the sixties), standardisation wasn't a big thing yet. We've long since mended our ways, which is why we have things like GPS and the metric system.

Oh.
Wait.

But back in the sixties, beer apparently came in oddball denominations, like this 80cl bottle, which, even back in the sixties, was uncommon enough to not even merit a name.

Let's call it a plus-qu'un-demi-Magnum then.

As long as we can tell, the Liefmans brewery (or its proprietors) have (hand-)wrapped the bottles of their Goudenband (*) and Kriek (^) in stencilled silk paper, and this bottle is no exception.

*) another historic clue is that the beer is already labeled as Goudenband instead of the older (and less noble name Ijzeren Band")

^) now called Cuvée Brut which is neither a cuvée, nor a brut. 

The bottle is stoppered with an actual (natural) cork, synthetic corks being very much science fiction back in the sixties. Liefmans started using champagne corks at some point but this is an ordinary wine cork, and it's supposedly stamped with the bottle date (or at least the vintage), but the one bottle we opened had a cork so brittle it disintegrated to the point of illegibility.

Final clue is the price tag, which puts this bottle down at 35 Belgian Franks (*).

These were notes when I was young.

A rough calculation involving inflation and Frank-to-Euro transition translates this to about 60 euros per bottle now, which makes these quite facy gifts back in their heyday.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the same holds true for beer. Only you drink it, because eating it would be stupid. And messy.

Apologies for the lack of actual pictures from the tasting soirée but my battery died on me.

Poor battery.
May you rest in aaaaaand he's back again.

When we got the cork out (which meant in pieces), we were able to pour a classic-looking Oud Bruin, minus the head. After more than 60 years, it should come as no big surprise the beer was utterly flat.

Apart from a waft of cork (again no surprise there), we got a good whiff of oak and mild lactic sourness. No cardboard, no wet paper, just wholesome, if somewhat corky Old Bruin.

Remarkably, the beer tasted about as fresh as a well-conserved younger bottle would: the vinous character of the beer apparently is very forgiving on Father Time, and while it wasn't a stellar pour, the beer was still quite enjoyable, if perhaps a bit worn out. If it weren't for the complete loss of carbonation and the notable presence of cork both in the nose and on the palate, you would not have been able to guess or even approximate the age of this bottle. 

Which, I guess, is a bit underwhelming, perhaps. I mean, don't get me wrong here, I'm happy the beer was still drinkable at all, and hadn't turned to horrid cardboard-infused goop as the decades went by, but perhaps I'd expected it to have gained much more complexity. Then again, I really need to find out more about the brewing and bottling process of Goudenband. I've heard tell that it was (and still is) bottle-conditioned (*) which may partly explain how it has kept so well throughout the years. 

*) for the uninitiated: bottle-conditioned means the beer has undergone a (limited but important) final fermentation in the bottle, where the remaining yeast in suspension converts what little sugars it can find to CO2, thus carbonating the beer. An alterntative would be force carbonation, where a (typically pasteurised) beer is saturated with CO2 during the bottling process. The presence of live yeast in bottle conditioned beer is reportedly beneficial to its preservative qualities. 

There's more(°) to this beer, and I assure you all that one day, you'll read more about that final bottle on these very pages.

°) Cor blimey! I haven't even properly walked y'all through the utterly riveting history of the Liefmans brewery, or of the beer nor even of the glorious and almost-extinct beer style we call Oud Bruin and how utterly incomparable it is what the Dutch claim an Oud Bruin should be, but that'll have to wait until another time.

Until then

Greetz,

Jo

PS: a warm and beery hug of gratitude to Stefaan for getting in touch and for sharing this treasure with me. May good things happen to you, wherever you go!

HoppySlosh is Lazy: Brewing Backlog

Almost May already, and a long overdue update on what's brewing.

That Gose I recently talked about...it's going to remain undisclosed for quite some time. My last sample showed fermentation hasn't progressed noticably , other than in a further development of...flavours.

Hey, it's a flavour, even if not a particalarly beery one.

It's an ongoing pet project of mine, although it's taking on an ever increasing Frankensteinian undertone. I'll need to chain it to a wall if it doesn't settle down eventually.

Cheesy beer, cheesy movie.
At least it has a name now.

I wanted to brew a porter, and found myself inspired by the first porter I ever tasted: Fuller's London Porter. Not being satisfied with simply brewing a clone, I played with the malt bill and the hops and decided to add some spices to boot: black pepper, fenugreek and a pinch of Sichuan-pepper. A splash of smoked malt to boost the grittiness of it all and finally some cocoa nibs in bourbon to smoothe things over.

Because gritty always means better.

It's being carbonated as we speak, taking its own sweet time, like a porter should. First reports are favourable, and I'm sure this one needs to sit in the bottle for some time ere it reveal its true colour(*).

Mine are slightly smaller.

*) Black. Duh.

Another beer that's been sitting patiently in my cellar is Quincey!, a quince saison, courtesy of a generously donated box of September quinces.

The illegitimate love-child of apples and conkers.

I let the beer (a basic saison, fermented with Belle Saison yeast) sit on boiled-and-spiced quinces for six months and then racked onto a membrillo paste I'd made with the quinces I had left over back in September. The result is a fruity, perfumed beer, which I think could use a bit of tartness.
I was planning on pitching a sourdough starter I'd concocted earlier this week, but upon inspection, it smelled...off.

Way, way off.

So I dumped it and decided to pitch with the dregs of a Sour Mélange culture I had on hands by the time I finish my latest brewing day at that time (more on that a bit further down).

More saison: I received another fruity donation from Marloes & Martijn in the form of a case of medlars in late October. Once properly bletted, I cooked a syrup from them, which I put in the freezer for later usage.

Bletting basically means the same as rotting only sophisticatedly.

Mid-January, I brewed a saison using Citra hops, French saison yeast (another generous donation, this time from one of my Frankenbuddies) and, you guessed it, the medlar syrup. Should be ready for bottling by the end of the May and ready to drink by the time summer arrives. Which means I'm all set for the Harvest Season, unless I drink it all before then.

Donations kept coming, and a friendly beekeeper (beekeepster? beester? Help me out here, Magda!) supplied me with two jars of honey.

Bee Barf.

I brewed a malty Brown ale, spiked it with El Dorado hops and boosted the lot with the honey.

Bee Barf Brown.

So far, the El Dorado and the honey seem to be complementing each other nicely, giving something reminiscent of biscotti and almonds, oddly enough. The beer's been sitting in secondary since the end of February, and just as I was about to bottle it, I noticed I had some visitors when I wasn't looking.

Pellicle.

I've had similar uninvited guests before, and while certainly undesirable and unplanned, I'm not exactly worried. I'm keeping a close look on this one, but will leave it where it is until the pellicle subsides again. Pity, as it's more or less guaranteed to interfere with clarity, if not flavour as well.

More carboys, more cellar space, and more anxious waiting for brews to be finished: last on the list is another saison, this one with French saison yeast again, Centennial hops and hibiscus flowers at the end of the boil. The hibiscus is coming through nicely, and I boosted the whole sprit of it by adding fresh hibiscus tea when bottling, as well as some (welll...a lot of actually) fresh ginger juice.

Good Girl Ginger. 
Get it?

It's bottled already, but given the enormous amounts of sediment in the bottles after a mere two weeks, I think I may have to undetake a rescue mission with this one.

Despite grim warnings by most everyone (*) I tried my hand on another parti-gyle/batch sparge experiment, in which I'll extract not one but two worts from one malt grist.

*) Except for Menno. Whatever happens, if it's slightly odd or over the top, Menno will approve.

The first will become a peated-scottish-ale-gruit hybrid.

Which, if all goes well, will not turn out like bituminous fossilised shit

The second will become my first attempt at a proper Flemish Red sour, aged on (supplies permitting) cherries and oak chips soaked in pinoit noir.

Not a proper Flemish Red, what with it being from France.
I'm brewing beer, not cattle.

Pretty stoked about this project, but then again, I was pretty stoked about that Parmesanny Gose too so perhaps cautious optimism is more advisable for now.

Lastly (màààn I've been so busy), a pair of hoppy brews: I brewed a new incarnation of Liquid Black together with BeerBert. This is an "inspired-by" brew, intended to become something resembling Brew Dogs's Libertine Black: an all-Simcoe black IPA. Bubbling away in primary as we speak.
The other (yes, I got to the point where I can pull off two brews in one day and not get all panicky about it) was supposed to be a all-DrRudi lager, but since my Budvar2000 pack failed to bloat ànd to ferment, I kickstarted the brew by pitching with a sachet of S33. Not a lager then, but at least I'll have something to pour for any visiting Rudi's soon.

More updates when available!

Until then,

Greetz

Jo

HoppySlosh Tastes: Saison Surfine (Dubuisson)

A saison by Dubuisson. This I quite simply had to try.

The very concept of a saison is so far removed from the brewery's Flagship(*) that I was very curious as to what the people in Tourpes (°) consider to be a saison.

*) Bush beer in all its incarnations.

Named Scaldis in Murka because of other resident people and beers also called Bush

°) home of that other saison.

View from Dubuisson's driveway. (Not really though)
Also, note the absence of anything resembling the river Scaldis.
Just sayin' is all.

But by the beard of Saint Arnoldus, you'd think that a brewery of Dubuisson's scale would at least have their brewing process under control!

I am seriously not exaggerating here when I make the claim that this beer is an impossible pour.
Not "difficult".
Not "only with a steady hand and the patience of a brewer".
Just, you know, "not at all".

A careful attempt to extract the beer from its bottle by pouring it gently into the glass yielded (and I reiterate my utter lack of exaggeration here) a foot-high head, frothing atop a measly quarter-inch layer of golden beer.

Like so.
Ok, so I exaggerated about my lack of exaggeration.
But not much.

Further attempts to coax the beer into the glass in a civilised manner failed miserably and I was ultimately facing a Tantalos torture in a fancy glass: 2% of beer and the rest all foam.
What little actual beer remained was almost completely desaturated by its titanic efforts to produce such ample head. More's the pity, because that little bit I finally got to coat my lips with actually tasted pretty good: a refreshing, if flat, crisp and hoppy flat saison. Also: completely flat. Such a shame.

Regarding the rest op the presentation:

AAAAAAARGH!

Can we finally be done with (nay, outlaw outright as of now and for ever more) this vacuous and vain pseudo-mysterious kack about "3 malts and 3 hops and 3 yeasts"? Can we just have nothing meaningless on the label at all, if nothing meaningful can be found worth mentioning?

Like "Well water". Now thàt I want to know.

3 hops means nothing(*) and it is demonstrative of the abysmal quality of labels the world over that I'm already quite happy not to see inanities like "carefully selected hops" here.

(*) AKA Jack Shit.
Drawing by andie200

The label has that new-black retro vibe thing going, and the story goes that the brewer came across the old label (*) and was so charmed by it, he decided to resurrect (also*) the beer.

*) wellll...."resurrect"....Surfine was actually a Spéciale Belge in the 1930's, a beer style which conjuncture has demoted (°) to High School Unpopular Kid status so "resurrect" can quite literally be translated here to mean "shred the original recipe, brew saison instead and call it Surfine".

Authentic? Probably.
Only probably not the way you expected it to be.

°) do I really have to start my "Bolleke-becomes-APA" lamentation again or am I making myself clear already?

Surfine reminded me most of those chinese puzzle gizmo's.

"Can only be enjoyed by throwing it as far away as possible and having a hissy fit"

Frustrating, no fun, and ultimately ending up in the trash.
Except Surfine ended in the sink because I didn't want a foot-high head of foam on my trash.

Such a low down dirty shame.

Greetz

Jo

Brewsflash: Gose coming up!

A brewsflash! My first attempt at resurrecting an old German beer.

Ah, those wacky Germans.

If only they'd been more consistently wacky all the time...

Apart from the odd attempt at establishing various kinds of New World Order, they also managed to be responsible for the most oft-misrepresented beer law in the history of oft-misrepresented beer laws.

Die/Der/Das Reinheitsgebot.
Verdammt doch mahl!

In a nutshell, the Beer Purity Law was an attempt of the Duke of Bavaria to put a stop to various brewing malpractices, like competing with the bakers' Guilds for rye and wheat, and not paying hefty hops taxes.

Health concerns were not an issue.

Nutshelling things further, the law listed all(*) ingredients sactioned for use in beer:

Ganz besonders wollen wir, dass forthin allenthalben in unseren Städten, Märkten und auf dem Lande zu keinem Bier mehr Stücke als allein Gersten, Hopfen und Wasser verwendet und gebraucht werden sollen.

*) Three. Yes. Pasteur not having been born yet, yeast was not listed. Which is only one of many reason so many people still think German beer is not, actually, beer.

All debate and dispute about the current(*) state of the Reinheitsgebot aside, its instatement led directly to the extinction of a number of local beer styles, relying on anything but barley, hops and water.

*) Oh come on! What do you think a weizen is made of then? It's a Bavarian law; Germany didn't exist in 1487.

The very existence of the Reinheitsgebot has led to all kinds of preconceived misunderstandings about German beer, not even the least harmful being one of assumed (duh) purity. Teufel, unless you explicitly prohibit the adulteration of beer with additives, then surely it will be better, nein?

Nein.

History has taught us that, while adding arsenic, lead and strychnine might not have been the smartest move, there are hundreds of other additives which actually do add extra value to a brew.

Which brings us to the nearly extinct Leipziger Gose, which is flavoured with coriander and salt.

One would see why Gose's use of Salt has always been an exception
to the Reinheitsgebot's "Don't add things to beer" rule.

Coriander is hardly novel. Most tripels and the ubiquitous wit all use it as a dominant flavouring agent, but salt, now there's an ingredient few people associate with beer.

Unless it comes covered in pretzels.

The brewers of the town of Leipzig, however, have been using salt in their brewing process since the 16th century. Being compulsively intrigued by oddball beers, I decided to brew one myself.

Gose is traditionally a spontaneously fermented beer, meaning no yeast is pitched into it by the brewer Instead, the microbial fauna which is naturally present in the brew house is allowed to inoculate the brew. Sponteously. Hence the term. This will sour the beer, pretty much the way a lambic is soured.
My guess is that the salt was added to offset the acidity, which must have been quite fierce in historic versions. Also, Gose was allowed to ferment in the unstoppered bottle, with a natural plug of yeast eventually sealing the bottle's typical long neck.

History being in the past, current versions are properly sealed.

Also, traditional Gose is/was brewed with at least 50% of malted wheat. In case you've never brewed with wheat (which is hardly something to be ashamed of, all things considered): that's a lot of wheat.

My gose has 60%  malted wheat, 35%  of Belgian pilsner malt, and 5% of acidic malt. After mashing, the acidity was barely detectable, so I decided to sour wort my batch.

Let me explain.

Normally, you want to boil the wort together with hops and then either produce a clean beer (i.e. not a sour) or else you introduce a souring agent to it (Lactobacillus and/or Pediococcus). The risk of the latter option is that anything coming in contact with your wort/beer from there on downstreams can and will become "contaminated" by souring bacteria, making it hard to ever produce clean beers again.
Hence the cheat-skeet-approach of souring the wort prior to the boil, which will 1) give you more control over the souring process and just how far you want to take it and 2) kill off all the added bacteria during the eventuel boil and hence reduce the contamination risks

I soured my wort by inoculating it with the most readily available source of beer bacteria I could lay my hands on.

A vial of Lacto culture.

I'd used the technique in a prior batch of sour-saison-ish brew which came out quite nice, with an light apple-like tartness I'd not have achieved sans all those Cantillon critters.
Souring wort prior to the boil is a not-uncommon shortcut to producing sour beers. However, there are risks involved: the souring agents (bacteria of various genera present in the otherwise tasty geuze) can run rampant in the wort and produce off flavours.

Which, in the case of my unfortunate gose, they did. After 48 hours in the warm wort, the various geuze bugs had managed to produce a small amount of lactic acid (which is good), and quite a bit of butyric acid (which is slightly less than good).

Ladies and gentlem, butyric acid.
Butyric acid, meet the Internet.

Butyric acid is what makes rancid butter smell the way it does.
It is also the lingering flavour persisting in the oral cavity after a good bout of vomiting.
And, perhaps most telling, the Sea Shepherd Crew used to deploy Butyric Acid Stink Bombs to discourage Japanese whalers from collecting "scientific specimina".

Suffice to say: a chemical which can put the crew of a floating abattoir off their lunch is not something you want in your beer.
Even if it's a gose.

Regardless of this minor setback (*), I decided to stick to the plan and boil the wort, thereby killing all the bugs and arresting the souring process (I still refuse to call it spoiling).

*) BrewSpeak for Fridge-Kicking Disaster

Now I had boiled wort which no longer smelled like I threw up in it, and a house which reeked just like the wort did before I boiled all the stink out of it.

...even with all the windows open...
Sorry 'bout that, dear neighbours.

For the better part of the week, I'd encounter pockets of foul air throughout the house, as if I were traipsing through the dank corridors of an aeons-old Lovecraftian catacomb.

But hark! I now had beer which no longer ponged.

Much.

To my dismay, a week into primary fermentation with BRY97, the foul smell returned, and I was finally contemplating that maybe it was time to dump the batch. But call me foolhardy, or stubborn, or just plain stupid, but I just couldn't kill this baby just yet.

After doing some research, I found out that one of Brettanomyces' more peculiar metabolic properties is its ability to convert organic acids (like the foul-smelling butyric acid) to their ethanol esters (like the pineapple-scented ethylbutyrate). So, slighty desperate but in good scientific spirits, I pitched a pack of B. bruxellensis (Wyeast 5112) and tried to forget about the beer for the next couple of months.

But I couldn't.

Three months into this tertiary fermentation, the vomity smell of butyric acid started to disappear. In its place came new and tantalising scents...

...like Parmsean...

..and fragrances...

...like BandAid...

So yes, Brett was cleaning up my beer by getting rid of unwanted flavours, only by replacing them with other unwanted smells. Hardly the success I'd been hoping for.
Keeping in mind that Brett is a slow but versatile grazer, and that You Can't Hurry Beer, I kept the beer in the carboy, where it still resides to this day. The beer will be a year old in June, and is still developing, with the icky flavours gradually being replaced by more complex, and, really, more tasty ones.
Whether this Cellar Dwellar of mine will ever become something halfway potable remains to be seen, but it's been a fascinating adventure for me so far.

The Missus and the Kids call the beer Puke Beer. Myself, I'm still looking for a name befitting its technical heritage.
Gore Gose is still a running candidate.

I'll be sure to keep y'all update on any further developments.

Until then,

Greetz

Jo