The Wyeast Kolsch strain is a very poor flocculator, so the beer was still very yeasty and had a bit of krausen hanging around at bottling, but at 1.013 it appeared fermentation was over. With Pilsner malt as the base this was not exactly a classic recipe for an American pale ale, but it really wasn't that far off either.Īfter two weeks I bottled the beer and harvested the yeast to pitch into a Smoked Baltic Porter. The wort and yeast were stolen from a batch of kolsch, although I didn't dilute this half of the wort, so the gravity ended up at a more robust 1.060 instead of 1.050. I did the bittering addition with commercially dried hops so I could save all the fresh picked hops to add near the end of the boil. So I ended up throwing those out and harvesting another 10 oz of hops (equivalent to 2-2.5 oz of dried hops) while the beer was mashing. Sadly when I defrosted these on brew day they resembled wilted spinach. I was worried the damaged cell walls would impart a grassy-chlorophyll flavor to the beer. About half the hops were ready to harvest two weeks ago, but I didn't have time to brew so I vacuum-packed and froze them. So I was excited when I saw that the hop bines in my backyard produced so many cones during their first year. Wet hopped beer (brewed with hops that haven't been dried) is one of the only truly seasonal styles there is (if you even want to call it a style). The real "problem" is that the two main ingredients in beer (malt and hops) store so well that a beer brewed in December with "fresh" ingredients isn't noticeably better than one brewed at the end of the summer using the previous fall's harvest. During the summer I do take the opportunity to add fresh fruit to sour beers, but that always seems like adding a layer of flavor rather than an integral part of the composition. I'd like to do the same thing more often with my brewing, but the closest I can usually come is brewing beers that compliment the season (strong/dark beers for winter, crisp/refreshing beers for summer etc.). I love connecting what I am cooking to the season by using ingredients that are only available during a brief window. How much ready-to-drink homebrew do you have?.Hoppy Wheat Tasting (American Hopped Hefeweizen).
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