BrewHappens Update

As promised, here's an update of my latest adventure in homebrewing. If you remember, the plan was to make a summertime beer with a hint of citrus in it without abandoning barley malts for wheat.

On Sunday, I opened the lighter of the two recipes. It's a lightly hopped Kölsch with the juice from 3 decent sized limes added at the end of the boil. The result was better than I ever could have expected. I was worried it would come out too light but it came out a very pretty color. Most importantly, the lime, while understated, is definitely there and I think adds a nice extra dimension. A bunch of us kicked back and drank this BeerHappens original while barbequing in the backyard.

Last night, I open up the other citrus beer I worked on. This one was meant to be an amber ale, again lightly hopped, but this one included both lemon and lime in the boil.

This tasting was disappointing for two reasons:
(1) I must have screwed up the priming sugar because, this beer was way over carbonated. The first bottle fizzed up as soon as I opened it and made a giant mess. Very sad. Very big waste of beer.
(2) Once it settled down and I was able actually drink beer instead of foam, there was really no citrus flavor to be found. I used a good amount of lemon and lime juice in this one but I guess it wasn't enough so it all got masked by the amber malts.

Besides that, it's a good beer. To use Mark's favorite term, it's a Dog Show Beer. It tastes just like was an amber ale should taste like. Nothing too remarkable about it, just what you'd expect from an amber. It's a bit of a downer for me, though, especially after the Kölsch was such a success the night before. In the end, you just have to look on the bright side: it's still beer. Exploding beer, but still beer.

Of these two, the Kölsch is definitely the winner and it has earned the right to be called Zitrus.