Double Vision
A
couple months ago I upgraded my brewery. I got the equipment so that I can brew
two batches of beer at the same time. I like beer a lot, which means I need a
lot of beer!
I
started things off by brewing a raspberry wheat and an english brown ale.
Things were going great; I was excited about the fact that I would soon have a
boatload of beer… And then came an obstacle.
I
realized after racking the beer into the secondary fermenters that I had a
small problem; I never labeled the beers when I first started them and put them
into the fermenters. Duh! Normally you would think that these beers would have
a distinctively different color from each other, but that isn’t completely the
case. When you have about 5 gallons of beer in a big glass vessel the color is
pretty much just “dark.”
The
raspberry is put in during the bottling, which complicated things two fold.
First, there isn’t the obvious clue of the beer tasting or smelling like
raspberries. Secondly, it left the door open that I could very well end up with
a raspberry english brown ale and a plain wheat beer.
My
friend and I had to taste the flat beer, smell it, and examine it in a smaller
taster glass… And then we had to make our best guest. We racked what we thought
was the brown ale and bottled it and then racked what we thought was the
raspberry wheat, poured in the raspberry extract, and bottled that. Then the
long two week wait until we could find out if we guessed right started.
The
result? We guessed right! Whew! And they are both pretty good beers. Lesson
learned: LABEL YOUR BEERS!
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