Bottling the Spiced Christmas Ale (Finally!)

So it has been some time since either of us made a post to the blog. Apologies all around but B Brewer has had finals and vacation time and A Brewer… Well I really have no excuse other than rampant laziness as of late.

In any case, we bottled the Christmas Spiced Ale/Holiday Spiced Ale last weekend (Dec 15th). Now if you are reading this blog reverently, which I imagine you are, then you would most likely notice that that was almost a month after we brewed the beer to begin with. If you are a brewer yourself you are probably thinking something like “Ah they must have been racking every week or so and just letting the beer condition in fresh new carboys to enhance all the flavors.” Or if you are not a brewer you might be thinking “I have no idea what this guy is talking about, he sounds lazy to me, and I just like reading bout beer.” Okay well truth be told the non-brewer is closer to the truth. We just never got around to racking. No, no, not even once. The beer sat on the lees for almost a whole month! Well nothing to be done about it now and in some cases beer is intentionally left on the les for extended periods of time. I would leave you with an example of such a brew from teh interwebs but I am actually on a plane right now flying home to Redmond, Washington so that’s out of the question.

So we bottled. And as always we took some hydrometer readings and through some complex calculations we determined that we had a potential alcohol of about 8%. This is what I was aiming for so I was very satisfied. If you read the post about when we brewed our goals were twofold for a seasonal winter holiday beer: Higher alcohol content than your standard ales, and a complex spiciness. More on both of these with the tasting notes later. We got slightly more than two cases worth of your standard beer bottles with 53 bottles. Oh and on the note of bottles, I can tell you that Saranac labels are still the bane of our bottling lives. I have never found a label more unwilling to come off of a bottle… ever. We use the most abrasive scrubbing pads we can find and after much scouring we can get the paper of the label off but are left with this gummy sticky residue from the glue that, try as we might, goes nowhere. (I try to give all those to either B brewer or someone else…)

Alright so bottling was finished, the caps were marked with a C for Spiced Christmas ale or something along those lines and the kitchen was cleaned. As usual we dumped the muck left on the bottom of the fermenter outside in the snow. So usually I have very little patience and I end up opening a bottle 4 to 5 days after bottling. I know, I know, its not enough time to let some of the more bitter flavors settle down and get that complexity that ends up shining through but I can’t help it. When you put so much blood, sweat and tears into a brew (where do you think the “complexity of flavor” comes from? Kidding) you can’t help but want to reap the fruits of your labor.

So I opened up a chilled bottle last night and poured myself a glass. The aroma was absolutely amazing. All of the spices were there. It was like no beer I had ever smelled and the color was dark on the level of a porter. Tasting. Delicious. I know I say that every time but it’s true. You can definitely get the flavor that you would expect from a darker beer with hints of maltiness and it was slightly thick, along the lines of skim milk. Thicker than water, lighter than cream. The cacophony of spices is amazing. I can’t say that I could pick out any one spice that really dominated over the rest. They all blended together into a symphony of flavor. The taste lived up to all of the expectations I had built up from the aroma. Then there is the alcohol content. I have definitely had beers that have high alcohol content that dominates the beer, something that to me is undesirable. It’s the whole idea of say painting a picture and using only one color. Sure you get yourself a painting but it isn’t particularly involved or exciting. So at 8% our beer is strong enough that it gives you a warm feeling as it goes down your throat, as it should for a winter beer, but it is not so strong that it overwhelms any of the other flavors and complexities. In a word, balance.

So there you have it. Those are my impressions of our first attempt at a spiced beer using a recipe exclusively of our own formulation. Perhaps B brewer will be by later to leave his thoughts. In any case now that you have slogged through my meandering thoughts you are likely parched. So go to the fridge and get yourself a homebrew!