Yesterday I talked about my inability to brew gruit, Turns out I may have spoken too soon.
Today’s post is late, but that could be a good thing. Instead of updating my blog before meeting up with Dan I decided to swing by Homebrew Heaven and the library. The reason why I was heading out to the beer shop wasn’t to get my ingredients for the Reese’s Stout. Instead I went bringing beer. I brought Dug a bottle of Rose Red, and Witches Brew Gruit. I plan on entering my Rose Red in a homebrew competition in April and needed help understanding the categories.
Even though it wasn’t even noon Doug and I opened the gruit and he poured two glasses while I discussed the problems I was having with it. Turns out the gruit may not be a “bad” beer
per say. As I tried to explain how horrible it was to him he just nodded and sipped. Then he proceeded to explain that although he had no experience with gruits that the problem might lie in my particular beer being extremely susceptible to infection, so there goes my oxidation theory. I guess I was hoping for a magic answer that was an easy fix. Also he said that the sour flavor wasn’t a bad thing. Turns out Doug likes sour beers like lambics, and from a sour beer stance this beer is different, but drinkable.
This idea intrigued me, so I started sipping on my glass. Turns out that if you sip on it, instead of drinking it, it really isn’t too bad. Don’t get me wrong, I still think my gruit failed. It doesn’t taste even close to how I wanted it. But I’m no longer looking at this beer as a complete failure. Even though I’m not a lambic fan (and this actually isn’t a real lambic), and I won’t brew this in the same way again, I don’t think I’ll dump all this now.
Only one thing remains. Anyone brave enough to try it?
My gruit finished carbonating last week, and it looks like I have five more gallons of meat marinade. I skipped putting it in my small carboy to clear and just siphoned right off the yeast cake in the six gallon carboy, and straight into the bottling bucket. I also pulled a glass for sampling and testing the final gravity. The FG came out just around 1.01, and the sample tasted awesome. Thinking everything was gravy I added the priming sugar and bottled. I even went as far as to sanitize my caps, something I don’t usually do. Needless to say I was excited to have this batch turn out.