Beer
08 Aug 2021Today’s prompt: “Drink a beer. Write about the taste.”
It’s a homebrewed IPA. The third IPA I’ve ever brewed. I’m still a novice brewer, so my beer can be a little hit and miss even bottle to bottle within the same batch, but this one was pretty good. Not a lot of sediment in it. It’s not very hoppy. I like a mild IPA. Never been really into those uber-hoppy beers that just destroy your taste buds. There’s a hint of sweetness to this one rounding out the bitter ones. I’ve been drinking it slowly, so it’s a tiny bit warm, but not unpleasant. I’m trying to remember what hops I put in this one. I think it was like three different types of hops, and I used up the last dregs from a couple of those tiny little bags of compressed hops that look like hamster pellets.
The first time I made IPAs, I made two about a week apart from each other, and I made the mistake of not labeling the fermenters. They were both pretty good, but I wasn’t sure which one was which. I told my brother, who takes home brewing much more seriously than I do, and he asked me which hops I had used. They were both single-hop IPAs. “Chinook for one,” I said. “Simcoe for the other.”
“If you taste them side by side, the Simcoe will be danker, and possibly ‘catty,’ and the Chinook will be more piney and possibly some grapefruit notes.”
Catty? I wondered. I wasn’t even sure what something catty would taste like. But damned if it wasn’t so. I tasted the pine flavors in the first one, and the dankness with a tiny hint of cat in the other.
I’m not good at picking out these flavors on my own. I just checked the recipe I used for IPA number 3. It’s also a single-hop recipe, calling for Cascade, but I remember running out of Cascade and googling substitutes for Cascade hops. I’m pretty sure I would have subbed in Centennial until I ran out of that too, and then some Amarillo. They’re all supposed to taste kind of citrusy. I can maybe taste a little of that, but honestly, it’s mostly just kind of a muddled bitter taste. I’m not sure whether to chalk it up to the recipe – it’s from a new book that I haven’t had much luck with – or just the fact that I’m still a mediocre home brewer. It’s not great, but still, it’s not bad. I’d much rather drink it than the beer you’ve been drinking, which has been spiked with arsenic.
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Sorry this one was a couple days late – I had another creative project with a Saturday deadline that I was finishing Friday and Saturday.