Buzz Beer

If I've got one worry about the 2JB project, it's that we're potentially veering into the same thing that brought the housing market and finance industry to their knees: the idea that it will just keep getting better and better, with no end in sight. I mean, here we are on our fourth batch of beer (fifth, if you count the two half-batches of Gimmel's black & tans as separate brews) and it's the best yet.

Just like the last one was. And the one before that. It's almost like we know what we're doing.

But pride cometh before the proverbial fall, right? So to try and sidestep too much bragging: the Batch Dalet coffee stout seems on course to be pretty damn good. We uncapped the final bottle of pumpkin ale and set to work bottling the latest concoction.



First up was a specific gravity reading: 1.020, which according to my little chart means we're going to have about 4.5% alcohol. Just right.


The next, and maybe even more important, step was sampling the pre-carbonated brew. Oh. My. Goodness. This stuff was delicious. The coffee is definitely in there, but it ends up working with the stout to form a kind of chocolate cast to the overall flavor. (Nahum pointed out that coffee and chocolate were both the results of roasted beans, so they're related flavors.) We each drank a small glass of warm, flat stout and could barely figure out how many ways to express how much we dug what we were tasting.



Back to the practical matters. 4 oz. of priming sugar was boiled into 1.5 cups of water, and into the brew it went. We then turned to the bucket o' bottles that Nahum had been soaking for a few hours, scraping the labels off as best we could. (There have been a lot of commercial bottle donations as we've quickly outgrown the original order of virgin bottles.)


38 bottles got filled, capped and stored, and hopefully we'll find the strength to wait 2 weeks to try these out. I have very high hopes for the Dalet bottles, and look forward to seeing how the buzzy coffee and smooth stout come together in the final product.


[Side Note: Monty tells me that he's just brewed a batch of his coffee stout, too. Given that we'll have used slightly different ingredients and approaches, I think a side-by-side tasting may be in order!]