Two weeks ago I went to Glenwood Springs with Robin, my girlfriend. It was a weekend for us to get away from everything, and just relax for a weekend. They have this great deal where you book a night at either the Hotel Denver or the AmericInn and you get 2 adult passes to Sunlight Mountain Resort and 2 adult passes to the Glenwood Hot Springs. It's a pretty sweet deal. I booked two nights at the Hotel Denver, being the obvious choice. The reason I say "obvious choice" is because the Hotel Denver's in-house restaurant is Glenwood Canyon Brewery. Ulterior motives? Maybe. Do both Robin and I like beer? A lot? Yes.
I've had their beer before, and it's pretty decent. Some is better than others, but overall, the beer is good. There was one seasonal beer in particular that I was hoping they had, and it's by far my favorite from them. A few years ago I went up there, and they had Hot Pot Barleywine on tap, and it was absolutely delicious. Lucky for me, I picked the right time of year to visit Glenwood Springs again, because they had it on tap! I went through the motions, getting a couple samples of their other beer, before I indulged in a pint of their delicious barleywine. Like I mentioned before, I hadn't had it in a couple years, so it was almost like tasting it for the first time again. At first sip, it started out sweet, then finished with a lingering bitterness, but after my palate acclimated to it, it became a complex, delicious combination of malty, almost toffee-like sweetness and lingering, balancing hop bitterness. After talking to the bartender for a little bit about beer, he told me that he had successfully kept a growler of Hot Pot in his refrigerator unopened for a year, and it was still good when he opened it. I decided that I wanted to give it my best shot, and bought myself a growler of barleywine before we left Glenwood.
The trip to Glenwood was actually bookended by beer. On our way up, at the recommendation of my buddy Josh, we dropped by Backcountry Brewing in Frisco to sample some of their beers. It made for a great mid-trip pit-stop. I had an IPA, and Robin had their Porter, being that their winter seasonal was a pale ale and not a stout, and Robin gravitates towards the darkest beer a brewery has on tap. She did raise a good question, though: Why on Earth would breweries not have a stout on tap all winter long? It's the style of beer that was practically borne of the coldest, most punishing season of the year, with the sole purpose of making one forget what perils lay outside the (then modest) comforts of one's home (or, in Rasputin's case, a castle). Speaking of Rasputin, I should mention the other bookend of the weekend: bottling my Russian Imperial Stout.
After we arrived home on Sunday, I commenced preparations for bottling my stout. The recipe I used was an Old Rasputin (brewed by North Coast) clone, which means that the beer should be bitter, dark, and angry. It certainly looks the part, hopefully it will taste it as well. I had been scheming for something to try with this stout, even though it was only the third beer I've brewed. I decided I wanted to add coffee to it. However, I didn't want to add coffee to all of the beer, as I would like to enjoy some of it unadulterated to see how it turned out.
Before we left for Glenwood, I had cold-brewed about 3 cups of coffee. After tinkering with some numbers and doing a little math, an extremely convenient and favorable scenario appeared. I made all my calculations assuming that I would be bottling a total of 5 gallons of beer. It turned out that if I added 2 cups of coffee when there was 2.5 gallons of beer left, then the last cup of coffee when there was 1 gallon left, I would end up with half a batch of pure unaltered stout, 1.5 gallons of beer with 5% coffee (by volume) added, and 1 gallon of beer with 10% coffee added. What a convenient circumstance! Not only would I get to try the beer by itself, but I would get to try it with varying degrees of coffee, so that I could get a better sense of how much a given amount of coffee affects the final flavor of the beer.
Up to the point that I bottled the beer, I had not actually named it. I had
Rasputin's Apprentice - straight Russian Imperial Stout. I, the apprentice, had brewed an Old Rasputin clone.
Rasputin's Brunch - Robin came up with this name, and it signifies the 5% coffee content stout.
Rasputin's Breakfast - Based on the "brunch" theme, the name easily hints at a stronger (10%) coffee content.
It worked out beautifully, too. I ended up with 14 x 22oz bottles of Rasputin's Apprentice, 6 x 12oz and 6 x 22oz of Rasputin's Brunch, and 7 x 12oz and 1 x 22oz of Rasputin's Breakfast. After all that, there was just enough beer left over in the bottom of the bucket for me to take a final gravity reading. The reading came out exactly where it was supposed to be, too. The beer started at about 1.090, and finished at 1.020-1.022 (10% added for the coffee volume), meaning it's sitting at about 9% abv. After taking the gravity reading, I did what any sane homebrewer would do, and poured it into a glass. I took a couple sips; it was absolutely delicious, even warm and flat! I put the rest into the refrigerator to cool for a while, but couldn't help myself and drank it before it cooled off very much. There was no noticeable alcohol heat, it had a great coffee flavor, and was a very good looking dark brown. Not quite black like Old Rasputin, but hey, I'm the apprentice, so it's cool. It still looks like a stout, that's for sure. I can't wait to see what the stout tastes like by itself. I'm doing my best to fight my urges to open a bottle this coming weekend and let it sit for three full weeks before I taste it. Wish me luck.
Perhaps I will be able to fight the urge if I brew another beer. Yes, that's what I'll do. Well, that, and buy a bomber of the freshly released batch of Avery's Maharaja Imperial IPA. I've been drinking a lot of my 2nd batch of homebrew, which the box kit recipe said was an "IPA," but really has no noticeable hop flavor or aroma. It's definitely a very well balanced and great looking light amber ale, but by no means is it even close to a Pale Ale in terms of hop character. It goes down easy though, and I have a lot of it, so its purpose is fulfilled. Of course, the side effect of all of this is that I have a nasty, almost insatiable craving for a beer loaded with enamel-stripping levels of hops. I had a Dale's Pale Ale this past Saturday, the first hoppy beer I'd had after a week of drinking my "Pale Ale," and I felt as though it was the first time I had drank it, as if my palate had been completely reset. The hop flavor was amazing, and the aroma smelled as if I had just opened a fresh package of hops. That only fueled my craving for a hop-heavy beer, which shall be quenched tomorrow!
Speaking of brewing another beer, I have gone back and forth with how I want to approach my next few batches of beer. I've toyed with the idea of making another clone. I've thought about making several batches of the most basic recipes (limited to malt extract, one grain, and one hop strain) for the purpose of thoroughly learning what effect each ingredient has on the flavor. I've also fancied just thinking of what I want my beer to taste like, and after some basic calculations for IBUs and gravity, just wandering the homebrew supply store and grabbing whatever ingredients I think will be suited to my recipe. I think I'm going to go with the final one. I truly want to learn what flavors each individual ingredient adds to the finished beer, but by God, I want to have some fun doing it. I want to learn by discovery, I want to make some truly bizarre tasting beer, and I want to make some truly amazing tasting beer. I want to do it by following my instinct, whether it leads me astray or not. That's how I learned how to cook; followed a few recipes, inevitably tired of that, then started throwing ingredients and spices into a pot or skillet until I had made enough good food and enough strange food that I learned making consistently yummy food by instinct and feel.
Obviously there needs to be a little more structure in brewing than in cooking. I fully intend to lay out an extremely basic recipe to get an idea of where I want the OG, FG, abv, and IBUs to be, and I'll need to select hops beforehand according to what I want the beer to be, but otherwise, I'm just going to pick out grains as I go, and see where it takes me. Wish me luck! I'll report back with what I find next week. Until then, beer on, and beer often!
Cheers!
(P.S. - as a bit of self-indulgence, my blog stats tell me that 70% of my readers are using something other than Internet Explorer. Keep up the good work!)
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