Beer!

For those of you keeping score at home, back on August 25 I started fermenting a batch of beer. The liquid extract kit I used was Cooper's Dark Ale (which I'd never tried before--breaking away from my nut brown ale comfort zone some) and half of the added sugars were dark toasted malt. Once the overwhelming foaming fermentation settled down, I added enough honey to make up the balance of adjunct sugars. The beer settled down and went on fermenting steadily. And kept on. And kept on. Fermentation slowed down greatly, but absolutely, positively, would. Not. Stop.

Normally, in my experience with homebrew beer, the little yeasties exhaust all the sugars within two weeks. You then prime and bottle, and the resulting brew is drinkable in another week or so. This stuff kept on for more than six weeks! It actually stopped fermenting in the middle of last week, but it took until last night for me to find the time to bottle the stuff up.

I'm wondering if it really was the honey that turned the fermentation into such a long, drawn-out affair. Mead takes a while to ferment, yes, but that's pure honey in an environment that isn't all that hospitable to yeast. With the beer, the honey made up a relatively modest share of the fermentable sugars, so I'm not so sure. And I'm also somewhat concerned about the taste of the beer if it's not aged a long while, as mead has a nasty, medicinal flavor if drunk "early." This is all unexplored territory for me, folks. I'll pop open a bottle in a couple of weeks and let you know what I find.

In the meanwhile, who else has discovered the wonderful Shiner Black Lager? It's become my second favorite commercial beer behind New Belgian's 1554: Enlightenment Black Ale (fear not, the venerable Shiner Bock is still a reliable standby).

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