Beer

So, updates:

Skittlebrau and Mayor of Chile Town turned out to be great. The former was sweet without being overly so, and the latter ended up with a delightful floral aroma with a hint of honey.

Pope of Chile Town ended up a mixed bag.  Flavor-wise, it's pretty wonderful - TONS of chile, with a good amount of spice.  The best part is that the chile blends quite well (in my opinion) with the big malty base.  The hops were kept intentionally low, relatively speaking, and it helps.  Now for the disappointment: carbonation is not good.  Not just not good, effectively missing.  Even with a very, very vigorous pour, whatever head there is (calling it head is pretty generous) dissipates within, oh, about 3 seconds.  Still, a good beer and one to revisit and improve on.

The next Kung Fu Bicycle brew is based on both my love for pumpkin ales and William's newfound love for barleywines.  The solution?  A pumpkin barleywine (duh).  But, of course, we won't stop there.  Just to make it interesting, we'll be throwing in a healthy amount of buckwheat to twist it up.  Brewing should happen within the next couple of weeks, with the beer hopefully ready for Thanksgiving.  Intended ABV is somewhere between 9 and 11%.

Some updates:

June Gloom (William says "Joon Gloom") has now conditioned for 2 weeks. It's pretty darn fantastic. Strong citrus and cloves, with a good alcohol warmth. I'm surprised by how absent the anise is. Maybe it's there and it's just blending with the other flavors so well. It has had about 10 weeks to mellow, after all.

Skittlebrau is about halfway through conditioning.  I jumped ahead and sampled a bottle after only a week, and although there was essentially no carbonation, the flavor is quite good.  The fruit is more present than I remember, possibly because the alcohol bite has come down a bit.  And let me say, there is quite a bit of alcohol, likely 9% or so.  The color is less intense than I wanted, but it's still quite nice.

Mayor of Chile Town has just gone into the bottle.  A quick tasting shows only a hint of chile spice, certainly less than I had hoped for.  Otherwise the flavor is very nice.  We'll see in a couple of weeks as the flavors blend if the spice comes through.

Pope of Chile Town is in the carboy.  This sucker should be good.  Fermentation started off slowly, but it's picked up in the last 12 hours or so and is now at a fever pitch.  I brewed this immediately after bottling MOCT (so I could pitch onto the remaining yeast), and so I decided to really, really overdo the chile content after not detecting much spice in the previous brew.  The final tally ended up being something like 10 guajillos, 4 anchos, 10 japoneses, and 5 fresh serranos.  You'd think that might impart some spice to 2 1/2 gallons of liquid, right?  Just to be safe, I'm going to add some more chiles to steep after primary fermentation has finished.  Well, after I add the honey in a week to help kick the ABV up a few points.  This one will likely be in the carboy for a month or so.

There are two recipes planned for later on the summer, once POCT is out of the carboy at least.  The first is a tamarind IPA (tentatively named 77X-42, in homage to Professor Frink's ultra sour sourball), using plenty of tamarind and a good amount of piloncillo to balance the tartness (and boost the ABV, natch).  The second is basically a hard ponche, using the principle of adding yeast to apple cider.  Instead, I'm hoping to make a big batch of ponche, then dump in the yeast.  I have no idea what will happen, but hey, who cares.  It'll be interesting at least.

The new KFB brew, named June Gloom, has been conditioning in the bottle for 8 days now. We'll do an early tasting on Sunday, just shy of 2 weeks. A quick taste from the hydrometer reading was promising - nicely malty, lightly hopped, strong cloves, good amount of citrus. ABV somewhere near 10%.

I just bottled my Skittlebrau today. Let's just say it's v1.0. I had added two containers of Welch's passion fruit concentrate, but that was apparently not quite enough to really lend a strong fruit flavor to the beer. It's there, but it's not strong. Again, the hydrometer tasting was positive. ABV somewhere near 8%.

In the next few days, I'll be bottling The Mayor of Chile Town, an amber with honey and guajillo chiles. At the same time, I'll brew The Pope of Chile Town. As the name might suggest, it's in the same theme but much stronger - ABV target is 12-13% - and it'll be loaded (LOADED) with chiles - guajillo, ancho, arbol, and serrano for that tip-of-the-tongue burn.

After the success of Excelsior! (and, let's be honest, it has been an unqualified success), Kung Fu Bicycle is now hard at work planning the next brew. The current plan is to create some kind of double or imperial pale ale, somewhere around 10-11% ABV, with a rather strong flavoring of citrus, cloves, and ginger. For the citrus, we're leaning toward both orange peel and kaffir lime leaves, though of course that could change. Perhaps some lemon zest as well? It'll be less hopped than our previous concoctions, though of course the high alcohol and presumable big malt character should be able to support a pretty good hoppiness along with the additional flavors. More to come...

Last night was the official birthday of Manbearpig (after two premature samplings), and the wise brewers of Kung-Fu Bicycle make the decision that the beer is much better suited to the name Excelsior! Here's why:

• A: The half-pound of peated malt really takes center stage in the flavor.  While unexpected, peat isn't exactly an offensive flavor.
• B: The decent amount of honey malt lends a really delicate sweetness underneath the peat. Again, not really offensive.
• 3: Despite having predicted 74 IBUs from 6 oz of hops, the bitterness is really not present at first taste. Don't get me wrong, this is a BITTER beer, but most of the bitterness comes at the end of the flavor, and really stays for a good amount of time. There are, however, some grassy and citrus-y (mostly lime) "notes" (I hate saying that) in the hops character, which strongly supports the peat flavor. This is probably the most pertinent time to say this: This beer is not as offensive, as foot-to-your-balls, as we were expecting.

So there you have it. We were planning for highly offensive beer, but because we decided to make the recipe up at the store, there was really no way to control the offensiveness. So, in the spirit of the Al Gore-themed original moniker, we've gone with Excelsior!, which we think is pretty funny anyway. Besides, this kinda sorta realigns us with one of the founding principles of Kung-Fu Bicycle Brewing: to name the beer at the time of brewing. Granted were a few weeks late on that, but better late than never, right?

It's official, Manbearpig has been bottled. FG was measured lower than expected, at 1.012. Using QBrew's estimaged OG, ABV is somewhere around 7.5-8.0%. Not bad. The beer is a light brown in the glass, already with a thick, wispy head (despite no carbonation). The malt profile, as expected, is puzzling. With 11 different grains, we figured this would happen. We'll see after conditioning how this develops. The hops are quite strong, very bitter but very pleasant on the nose. All in all, good stuff.

For our priming sugar, we added a bit of brown sugar on account of running out of corn sugar. It's very likely too little have any effect on the final product, but still worth noting.

Yield was higher than normal, at 30 bottles. This was likely because we didn't care about sediment this time around. Being too cautious quite possibly caused TnT to be on the flat side.

Tastings begin in 2 weeks.

Manbearpig was successfully brewed on Feb 16th. There were some changes to the initial plan: 8 lbs of malt extract instead of 9, and many of our steeping grains ended up being lighter than we had originally thought. The final recipe involves 11 different grains and 3 different hops: Cascade, Phoenix, and Goldings. Projected ABV% is 7.5%, with 74 projected IBUs.

After being in the carboy for a week, its color has stabilized somewhere between an amber and a brown, with a light caramel head.  The scent of hops is strong coming out of the airlock.

Bottling is projected for either next weekend (Mar. 1/2) or the weekend after (Mar. 8/9).

The next batch from Kung Fu Bicycle will be called Manbearpig, a blatant reference/ripoff to/of South Park. Manbearpig, like Al Gore's nemesis, will be violent, evil, half man, half bear, and half pig. High alcohol, insanely high IBUs. An homage, if you will, to Arrogant Bastard, a beer that has helped to put San Diego on the brewing map.

The brew is tentatively planned for Feb. 16th.