Drinking It All: #3 Sam Adams Cherry Wheat
Drinking It All is a document of my attempt to try every beer in circulation. It's a Herculean and tragic attempt at best. But it's the means, not the end that counts here.
--
cherry coke for adults
Between end-of-the-semester grading, painting and installing moulding and baseboards in a living room, and getting a Xmas tree and decorating, I'm trying to squeeze in this humble post this week so I don't fall completely off my 12 readers' radars. Like I've said before, I'm not much for fruity beers and can't think off the top of my head of one that I really, really like. But while Steve and I were making our holiday cherry stout this past weekend, we had some of Sam Adams' Cherry Wheat.
And I'm drinking the last one right now. That's correct. Beer review in real time. Get one and drink along. Let's get interactive.
When they made this Cherry Wheat, nobody told the man with the cherries no. The label says the brewers combined cherries with a generous portion of wheat malt, but, for me, they could have been much more generous. At first, the beer tastes almost exactly like cherry coke. Or at least what I remember cherry coke tasting like from when I was a kid. There's little about the taste or smell that says "beer." And that little is only noticable at the very end--actually, I could be imagining it altogether. The aftertaste is of beer.
None of this is to say that the beer is necessarily bad. Steve, an accomplished beer drinker, is a fan of the beer (he bought it), so I imagine there are plenty of other people who'd tell me I'm missing something or just being a dumbass. (I want to hear from you people.)
Thumbs up or thumbs down? Down (The 1st). It just doesn't seem much like beer. Cherries or no. (It probably doesn't help that I'm listening to Neil Young's Arc, which my friend Scooter lent me and called the "listenable equivalent of Metal Machine Music." Arc and Cherry Wheat do not mix. Don't try at home.)
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Brewed Slowly: #2 Cherry Stout
I'm not a fan of fruity beers (or negative construction introductions), but today Steve and I made a Cherry Stout. We have our reasons. It's a holiday beer of sorts. Steve brought some Sam Adams Cherry Wheat for the occasion.
(I got no pictures because our digital camera (my other camera's an old-school film kind) killed the batteries as soon as I turned it on to take some pictures of the process. Imagine pots and brown/black liquid. Smiling faces on two medium handsome men.)
This might be the darkest beer yet. Like dark as in black hole with chocolate milk froth as the event horizon dark. You can't even see this beer--it's that dark. Also, we listened to Maiden's The Number of the Beast record and a Replacements' B-side record while it was cooking (what's more atmospheric music for making beer than the Replacements and Maiden?). We'll say that helped. Here's how we did it:
The software:
0.5 lbs. dark crystal (grain)
0.5 lbs. roasted barley (grain)
0.5 lbs. black malt (grain)
3 lbs dry dark malt extract
6.3 lbs liquid dark extract
1 oz. Perle hop pellets
Safbrew S-33 dry yeast
We steeped the grains at about 150 F for half an hour. Then we took out the grains--toss 'em in the compost--and added the Perle hops, dry extract, and half of the liquid extract. Boiled it for an hour. Smelled good (seriously, if you haven't tried making your own beer yet, you should--in addition to all the other benefits, it'll make your house smell fucking good (and not like beer, surprisingly)). Flipped over the Maiden record. (Also, we watched some Sunny in Philadelphia on DVR. There's a lot of waiting in beer making.) Around 45 minutes into the boil, we added the other 3.15 lbs of liquid extract to the boil. Fifteen minutes later, we put the pot in an ice bath to cool it down--I've got to get some kind of wort chiller to shorten this process--, and when the temp. got down down to 80 F, I pitched the yeast. Simple, easy,--beer is made.
Our starting gravity is a tree-trunk sturdy 1.080. I'll let you guys know how the fermentation goes.
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