Ithaca Beer Surprises

On one of my frequent trips to Wegman’s I was perusing a beer section when something out of the ordinary caught my eye. There in the middle of all the six packs and single bottles was what looked to be a few wine bottles. I know that there is new legislation to get wine sold in grocery stores, but as far as I knew that bill hasn’t passed, so I went in for a closer look. Upon closer inspection, I came upon Ithaca Beer Company’s Excelsior White Gold:

Now this beer was attractively packaged and really caught my eye and got me interested. Then I read the label and was even more intrigued.

 

I liked that Ithaca Beer was being creative and using a range of different ingredients to produce small batches of quality beer. I also really liked that each bottle was labeled with the batch number, and they were allowed to bottled condition. When you bottled condition beer, you allow the beer to come to take on a life of its own. The yeast continue to produce flavors and the flavors that are already there change and evolve over time. It also means that every bottle is different, even though they were bottled from the same batch. That makes each beer its own little treasure, to be prized and hoarded.

I know, I know all of this and I haven’t even tasted the beer yet. Well here we go: I popped the top and I immediately knew I was in for some enjoyment. The beer started foaming over, like it was champagne. I quickly grabbed a glass and gently starting pouring it over and the results were:

  FOAMY!!!!

It finally settled down and I was able to pour the rest and this is what I got.

  It was a nice amber color, almost exactly the color of the amber jewelry you see at the summer arts festivals, and the clarity was very hazy. As the bottle said these beers are unfiltered and bottle conditioned, so I was expecting this haze.

AROMA: Very yeasty, you could smell the yeast themselves. If you have ever taken a brewery/winery tour and they take you back to the fermentation cellar, that’s exactly the smell. After the initial blast of yeast, there are some softer, fruitier notes that smell like slightly sour/tangy citrus. Probably oranges as Belgian Styles go well when paired with orange.

TASTE: Tons of CO2, which impart some bitterness but not enough to be objectionable. There is a soft mouth feel with some “slickness” that coats your tongue. It is very true to style for a Belgian White, notes of light wheat and orange and as I got closer to the bottom of the glass I actually had a few bits of orange in the beer, well at least I hope they were orange bits, but that’s what they tasted like to me. There were some other earthy notes, like fresh leaves, like fall but they were very very slight.

OVERALL: This was a very good beer. It is also a sipping beer at 8% alcohol, you can really enjoy each sip and taste all the flavors that are there. If you like Belgian White beers this is definitely worth buying and I would buy a couple of bottles. Drink one and cellar the others and try them at a later date. I think I might go out and buy a few and do that myself. I have always liked Ithaca Beer, but to me they were always like a good craft brewery on the edge of really breaking through into a great craft brewery. With this Excelsior line they have really broken through and put themselves on level with Stone Brewing and Dogfish Head in my opinion. Hands down just a great beer.

Coop’s Red Ale – Homebrew Review

I have a friend who is taking a real interest in homebrewing and recently just brewed up his first batch. So in our conversations, I had a few small gaskets that could make his life easier and  his wife happier (Leaky gaskets = sticky beer fermentation on the floor = angry wife) I learned this the hard way myself, when one of my first brews blew up all over the counter on down onto the floor, but anyway. So I stopped by to drop off the gaskets and was lucky enough to snag two bottles of his first brew. So after getting some permission, I figured I would give him some proper feedback and post this review. So here we go:

Here she is in all of her glory. From the picture alone you can tell that it poured with a generous head and it finally dissipated down to this. On with the review.

APPEARANCE: Nice full slightly off white head. Color is a nice copper, with slight red highlights when held up to the light. The clarity is pretty hazy almost like a wheat beer.

AROMA: Some fruity esters, I smell some orchard notes, maybe apple and some pear.

TASTE: It has good mouthfeel. It is very soft and light on the palate, but there is some sweetness that coats your tongue. Once the initial sweetness clears it gives way to some slight caramel and biscuit flavors from the malt and some bitterness from all of the CO2 that keeps bubbling through it.

OVERALL: This is a good beer, much better than my first attempt. It is very drinkable and light enough where I’m going to break into the second bottle after I’m done writing this. It does have some room to be improved to take it from a good intro beer to a great everyday drinking beer. These are just my opinions and suggestions, so take them for what they are worth. I think that the beer wasn’t completely done fermenting and that’s where a lot of the sweetness is coming from. That also accounts for a lot of the CO2 that it is still producing and the haziness. This would be my only suggestion, that instead of bottling it so soon, I would transfer it to a secondary fermenter for 4 – 6 days to make sure that the fermentation is completely finished, then bottle it. This extra time fermenting would give the yeast a little more time to eat up some of the sugar and make it a little less sweet and a better rounded beer. This extra time would also help with the clarity of the beer as more of the sediment would drop out and the beer would be clearer at the time of bottling. But even these things are very minor things and easy to fix, but even if they weren’t fixed this beer is still a damn good beer and I would drink it over a bunch of others that are commercially produced.

If I had to give this beer a grade I would easily give it B-. That is not bad at all for a first attempt. So you can only go up from here. Keep brewing. Awesome!

A couple of Russkies…. and some chicks

So a few things have been going on this week. First my 1 day old baby chicks showed up. Now I know, I know you think I’m crazy and what the hell do chickens have to do with beer. Well first lets take a look at a these little fuzzballs and then I’ll explain.

View Full Album

So some of Lauren’s hippie tree-hugging stink must be starting to rub off on me, here is how chickens tie to my beer. I am really digging this all natural, home grown, home brewed vibe, so I bought 10 hops rhizomes and I’m going to plant them soon. So I want to use my own hops in my beer, I know where they come from and what if any pesticides will be applied. So in that same vein, chickens are not only an excellent source of delicious drug free eggs, they also produce a ton of home grown fertilizer a.k.a chicken shit. So I will compost this into a healthy fertilizer and use it to fertilize my bines. (hops are grown on bines, where grapes on grown on vines). Also another benefit from my chickens is pest control. When I grew hops before they were ripped to shreds by Japanese beetles. So these five voracious, vicious little beaks will take care of that problem for me and I should get a better cone harvest. So their you have it, chickens make good beer. Now on to the Russians…….
Also this week, I have had the opportunity to try a couple of Russian beers. My Pop is an electrician and works for a contracting company. One of the guys he works with is straight off the boat Russian, Lenny (Insert incredibly hard to pronounce Russian name here). So Lenny is a big fan of beer, and my Pop is always bragging about my beer, so he took a few into Lenny to try, and Lenny being the upstanding guy he is made it an even trade and gave my Pop four Russian beers from Beers of the World. The first is:
   Now apparently Russian beers are all graded on a number scale. That’s what Lenny said, but somewhere in the translation, I lost what the numbers actually stood for. So here is Baltika 3 and it just says its a “Classic Beer” and it is 4.8% alc. Now the price tag and the #3 should have been a warning. When the price is $0.97 per bottle you know you are in for it, but what the hell it was free beer, right? It poured very clear and had a sparkling white head.

And then everything went bad. There was a slightly skunky aroma, but still I decided to taste it. The body was very light, but then the taste hit me. It tasted like Heineken and Busch Light had twins, then the twins inbred and had a baby that reproduced with a Keystone and that glorious love child is Baltika 3. The taste just wasn’t that pleasant. The more I drank, the more my mouth began to taste like it was sucking on a skunk’s ass. But that little voice in my head kept repeating “There’s no such thing as bad beer, there is only better beer.” and with that I powered it down and called it a night. Time to check the score: Russia 1 – Naps 0.
So I gathered up my courage the next night and decided to take on Russia for Round 2.
  Baltika #9 Extra Lager. It was 8% alc by volume, so that was a little more promising. I pulled out a nice clean glass and let it pour.
So it was a nice pale, crystal clear lager, with a nice full head comprised of tiny tiny bubbles. I poked my nose down into that head and assessed the aroma, and what I found was little to none. Well even that was a promising sign after smelling the skunky smell from Baltika #3. So I decide it can’t be that bad, and take a big sip and the instant picture in my head is a warm green glass beer bottle ala Heineken, Rolling Rock, Becks, etc. So its a little skunky. But not that bad, its still very drinkable and it settles into its own quite quickly. The skunkiness dissipates and the beer becomes much better the more of it goes down. So the score is now even  Russia 1 – Naps 1.
Overall, the Russian beers are nothing I would pay for and drink, but of the two the #9 was much better and I could drink it again if it was offered, but I would not be running to get another #3. But in the end, both of them were free, so they were both good because they were free.
If you are brave enough to take on Mother Russia, give these two a try and let me know what you think. Prost!!

I got Mad Hops, Yo…..

I’m not talking about my awesome white men can’t jump basketball skills, I’m talking about my two orders of Hop Rhizomes showing up. I was originally only going to order 5 rhizomes, but I ended up ordering 10, 5 of two varieties. So here they are and this is what they look like when they arrive.

Those are my Sterling Hops, which I have never tried before but they seem pretty adaptable to the northeast’s climate, so I figured I would give them a shot.

Then there are the Cascade Hops:

Its a little hard to see, but in the second picture there are a ton of white sprouts already starting to shoot up, so I’m going to have to get them in the ground pretty quick.

So now I just have to figure out how I am going to trellis them up. I have a good idea that I think will work, but we’ll see how that pans out. I’ll keep you updated as I start the install, but until then keep ‘em tippin’.