Celebration Ale Do-Over

If at first you don’t succeed, then brew, brew again.

When Jon realized that we had screwed up somewhere along the lines with the first batch of our Celebration Ale, we decided that we had best brew yet a third batch so that we’d have enough to get us through the holiday season.  Believe it or not, five gallons of beer can disappear pretty quickly when split in two and then spread around.

Before we started brewing the other night, we sampled the two previous batches just to be sure that the first wasn’t up to snuff. It really wasn’t.

While batch 2 had appropriate maltiness, a touch of bitterness and the spicing we were looking for (a lot of orange in the front end that mellowed out with the rest through the end), batch 1 had a tonne of orange at first and not much afterward.  Except a scratchy throat.  And parched cheeks.  And not parched like you get from sucking lemons, but more of a fuzzy parched.  If you’ve ever drank from an old bottle of coke, that had gone slightly mouldy, you might get a sense of what I’m after.

Since we never anticipate that anything will work particularly smoothly, we started this session around 8pm.  Most sessions last about 4 hours, so we knew we were in for a long night.  We did manage to finish shortly after midnight, but also cooked a roast, drank some beer, and put up with a few of Ben’s jokes (of the priest and rabbi variety).  As usual, I forgot what the hop bag was used for and added an ounce of pellets straight to the kettle, while wondering what the sack floating in the wort was doing there.  We also didn’t have any cinnamon, so that will hopefully end up in the secondary.  I’ve also since realized that we didn’t add enough yeast (which is not too late to be fixed).

Our OG on this batch is lower than batch 2 (1.056), so we’ll likely end up blending the two when it comes time to bottle, so that we end up with a more consistent product.  Or we’ll forget about consistency (it’s happened before) and end up with two similar – but different – beers.

Beers consumed:

Muskoka Harvest Ale

GLB Pumpkin Ale

Flying Monkeys Hoptical Illusion

Big Wheel Deluxe Lager

Heritage Premium Lager

Dinner:

A couple different Fifth Town and Back Forty cheeses

Inside round roast served with a garlicky tomato port sauce

Celebration Sweet Potatoes (sweet potatoes spiced with the same seasonings as our Celebration Ale!)