Vinegar

The X Ale from Saturday before last was fermented out by Tuesday and bottled on Thursday, and is fizzy already. It's not especially nice though. That's what I get for copying Tartan Special.

Perhaps I should recycle some unsuccessful beer as malt vinegar. The thing is, I don't really use that much vinegar, except for sushi and I'm not sure how well that would work with malt vinegar. I suspect it would be ... unique.

It's just occurred to me that I also meant to acquire some chilli seeds and grow a chilli plant. Then I could pickle the home-grown chillies in my home-made malt vinegar made from beer that I brewed myself. Triple autarky!

New brews

Last night a friend came round to drink beer and help me brew some more. I now have a load of empty bottles and a batch of K in the fermenter. I was about to post a picture, but to be honest it looks just like any other plastic carboy with beer in it.

Just now I'm bringing the wort up to boil for a batch of Pale Beer. Because I'm a manky bastard, and just to see the effect, I am re-using the hops from last night. There were a lot of late hops in last night's brew, so I'm hoping to get enough unused alpha acid out of them to bitter today's beer. It doesn't need too much bittering because it's a low-gravity brew and the addition of some Bramling Cross for aroma near the end should be all it needs. In fact, I've just tasted the wort, it's only just come to the boil and is already nicely bitter. The reason for a low-gravity one is that I'm hoping to be able to bottle this after Christmas and be drinking it at New Year, but this may be over-optimistic; it depends if it carbonates in time. I rather suspect it won't.

After Christmas, once these two are bottled, I'm now planning to brew an X, which will be a low-gravity ale with a bit of crystal malt and sugar, and a Brown Beer, which will basically be X with more hops.

Stale Ale

I've been busy today. I still have holidays to use up, so I took a day off today and, while I was intending to clean my flat, I seem to have made enough fresh mess to compensate. But never mind.

The X Ale that's been bottled for several weeks now? I opened a bottle today and, while it poured with an attractive head, it's still flat and is not going to develop any carbonation. It's also got quite sour in a winey sort of way. I could throw it away, but I'm too much of a tightwad for that. Instead I boiled up some malt extract to give any remaining yeast something to munch on, opened all the bottles, poured the contents into a bottling bucket and re-bottled the beer. A tedious job, but the contents may yet develop into something interesting.

I'm also going to re-classify it and label it Stale. Then at some point in the future I can have an eighteenth-century-style glass of mixed Mild and Stale.