Tonight (or tomorrow, depending on how packing for the ski trip goes) we’ll be bottling our next beer, Bittersweet.
Our idea for Bittersweet started while thinking about what to produce for a Valentine’s Day-ready brew. We thought it would be nice to create a fruit-flavored beer, but didn’t want to have that be the only flavor present, since it’s beer after all. We decided to ratchet up the bitterness of the beer in combination with the sweetness of the fruit, which is also how we arrived at the name, “Bittersweet”.
For the bitter component, we used First Gold 8%AA as our bittering hops. These were added at the start of the boil and are a bit higher in alpha acid than we usually use for our beers, since we’re not usually aiming for anything very bitter. Not having experience with making bitter beers, I’m hoping this is enough to get the flavor character where we want it without being too, too bitter.
Berta got a juicer for Christmas this year, so instead of simply throwing fruit into the secondary for flavoring, we decided to add fresh fruit juice from the juicer. Having decided that cherries would be the main “sweet” ingredient, I stopped at Acme to procure them.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed the stickers on the scales near the fruit that say something like “The official weight that will determine the price of your purchase will be determined by the scales at the register and these scales are just for estimation.” Well, there’s a reason for them. I weighed out 5 pounds of cherries on the scale in the produce section, and only noticed after we had pitted all the cherries and juiced them that the receipt said 10 pounds.
Whether we overpaid for 5 pounds or we added way more cherries than we expected, I can’t yet say, but the beer is smelling pretty sweet now. The cherries we juiced produced slightly over a half gallon of cherry juice, which we added directly to the secondary of our 5-gallon batch. Rapid fermentation began again, as expected.
We have a couple of ideas for the label, this being one of my favorite parts of the brewing process. The last few labels were well-received, and I think this one should be pretty good, too, if we’re able to successfully realize the design ideas we’ve been planning.
I’m excited to get the beer out of the secondary to have a preview taste. If we bottle tonight, there should be just enough time to put carbonation into the bottles before Valentine’s Day, and plenty of time to achieve a good carb before the homebrewer’s meet up later this month.
I probably shouldn’t have written this post here, but rather on the Black Box blog, but the site there isn’t quite ready yet, and I was excited to get this story into print. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up over there, with the complete recipe and label design, after we’ve got everything in bottles and drinkable.
