Yet another beer post.  At least it’s something, right?

Pope of Chile Town is by far the riskiest beer I’ve done to date, and by and large it has failed.  The intent was to make a super strong beer (>10%), something like an imperial pale, and flavor it with TONS of chiles.  Serranos, japoneses, guajillos, and anchos.  I think it was… 30 chiles for the 2.5 gallon batch.

About 2 months after brewing (in summer 2008), it was terrible.  Most bottles had effectively zero carbonation, with others having somewhere between 5 and 10 bubbles total.  (Inconsistent carbonation has been a recurring issue for me, especially on smaller batches.  Still trying to pin down the cause.)  The flavor was primarily sweet, supported by the incredibly thick body, with a good amount of chile flavor and heat.  The worst part about it was the debris, which would never stay in the bottle.  It seemed almost… salty…  Maybe salty isn’t the right word, but it’s a bit more descriptive than disgusting.

Anyway, I just opened a bottle in the interest of dumping out the entire batch (in an effort to clean out the brewing closet).  Amazingly, there was a satisfying fssst, and so I had to pour a bit of it.  Bubbles!  Carbonation!  Then I had to taste it.  Chile!  Chile!  Chile!  And alcohol!  Still a tiny bit of that cloying sweetness, but verging on the maple syrup-ness like William and I experienced with our very old beers.  It was actually pretty damn satisfying, though slightly hampered by the almost overwhelming chile flavor.  That’s when I made my mistake: I poured the rest of the bottle.  All the debris poured out, ruining the beer with that bizarre salty grossness.

It seems pretty lame to have a beer where you can only pour out half the bottle before the flavor gets ruined.  I think I’m just going to dump the rest down the drain, and perhaps shed a little tear in the process.  Maybe I’ll take the bottles actually go fssst and pour half of them into a glass, then drink that and get really toasted.

Update: Only one other bottle had a fssst.  That means the batch had higher than a 90% failure rate (with carbonation being a major component of success).  Ouch.

This is my last brewing-related post for at least the next week.  Yesterday Clint and I brewed up a seasonal barleywine which we’re hoping will be ready in time for my end-of-quals celebration on Feb. 1.  If all goes to plan, it’ll be around 11-11.5% ABV.  We spruced it up with molasses, orange peel, apples, cloves, canela, and allspice.  It smelled pretty amazing during the boil!  It’ll sit for a bit over a week with plain old ale yeast, then we’ll sucker punch it with some champagne yeast at the end to really eat up a ton of sugar and hopefully lighten up the texture a bit.  We’re very excited about this one!