Date: 19 Dec 2006 17:46:16
From: carter11400
Subject: Cold conditioning an English bitter for 18 months.
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My brother and I brew together 2 or 3 times each year. We brew 10
gallon batches at my place and, after fermentation is done, I usually
keg his portion for him to take home and serve. He doesn't empty the
kegs as fast as I do (I brew several more 10 gallon batches by myself
each year), and imagine my surprise one night a couple of weeks ago
when we were kegging our latest batch of APA and he brought back a
"return keg" for the one I had sanitized for him and prepared for our
latest brew. It still contained four gallons from a batch of English
bitter that we had brewed in June of 2005! My brother had cut way back
on beer consumption for a few months after that, and the carbonation
had fallen off. Out of fear that the beer had spoiled, he just left
the keg in his downstairs fridge at (I'm guessing here) 5 to 6 lbs of
co2 pressure.. FOR WELL OVER A YEAR!
Being the great brother I am, I agreed to accept the corny full of
potentially rotten brew in exchange for the nice sanitzed empty keg I
provided him for kegging his half of our latest batch. After he left
with his new prize I force carb'ed the keg of (really) old bitter 10lbs
above serving pressure, put it in my converted chest freezer/kegerator
next to the keg of APA that was on tap, and left it for a week.
Last night after I noticed a significant weight loss in the APA keg, I
switched to the bitter. Oh my God! What a beer! No longer is this a
bitter. Most of the hop taste, and ALL of the hop aroma is long gone.
This is the clearest ale that I have ever poured. It's spritzy, almost
like a commercial light lager, and doesn't have a wide spectrum of
tatste, but It's actually good. I can taste different notes of the
malts used to brew it (all grain) but all are kind of suppressed.
This beer is not something I would try to re-create, but it's very neat
to taste. It's almost a lager. Definately a "lawnmower ale". You can
even taste the alcohol in it.. kind of a lingering "tequilla-like"
taste after you take a big gulp of it. This was a 1.041 OG and 1.003
FG bitter, so it's around 5% abv.
Anyway, not the best beer in the world, but interesting. It's really
neat to see the results of an ale cold conditioned this long.
Tim C
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