“I want a beer that makes me hear Sleigh Ride when you crack it open.”
That’s what I said when the boyfriend was looking for suggestions for the next beer he was going to make. I wasn’t sure whether he’d take the suggestion, he likes to read Zymurgy and other beer-related materials and is often inspired by what he finds there and decides to Frankenstein together.
But, alas, a holiday beer is in the works.
This beer started from a kit he bought at the brew store called Holiday Cheer. This beer has a brown ale base and flavored by ginger, cinnamon and orange peel. I’m excited about this one, though if you asked me the flavors of the holidays, I would add clove to the mix. There’s just something about cloves that basically make me hear sleigh bells and feel a gust of cold wind made tolerable chiefly by the presence of festive lights visible in almost any direction.
Bottling day requires sanitizing beer bottles, adding the priming sugar to the beer which is what fuels the carbonation process, then the bottles are filled and capped.
Capping the bottles is where I fit in. That and writing things on the bottle caps because why not? Why not be clever on the tops? Clever might just mean ‘why not write things that are funny to you?’ on the top. Also, while in charge of the marker, why not encode the beers. So, if I see something happening in the process that is against what I think is proper bottling procedure, I mark the beer. That way, when I’m taking beers back to my place, I stand the best chance (in my mind) of avoiding one that might cause a fountain-like eruption upon being opened.
This is the part where I wonder if I just exposed practical thinking, or something a little unseemly.
Bottling day is also the day when we do a preliminary taste test. This is the part where I hope, in the case that I have been the one to suggest the beer, that it is tasty. Who wants to be the reason for having 40 plus nasty beers? Not I! If I were the primary brewer, that wouldn’t bother me so much because I would be able to tell myself that I had learned from the experience. As the lowly assistant (helpmeet?), I don’t really learn anything, so I’d just feel bad and feel like I have to drink beer that I don’t like.
But at the end of the bottling process, we tasted the beer. If you’re tasting at this point, you have to be okay with 1) having room temperature beer and 2) the lack of carbonation. That, and you need to have imagination, the ability to taste potential, what the beer might be if you’re lucky.
Based on the taste test, I think that Holiday Cheer was a good choice.
