Black Raspberry Tart - Tasting

I brewed up this beer back in March using Raspberries that I picked myself in 2015.

My initial plan for this beer was to prevent fermentation of the sugars in the fruit to get a sweet final product.  It turned out that the fruit wasn't really all that sweet to begin with so the gravity wasn't really raised much once the fruit was added.  I believe the added liquid more or less offset the added sugar.  Based on this I opted to just let the cards fall as they may and allow the beer to ferment out.

It had a nice fruit presence after spending a couple months on the raspberries but was a little bit bland so I added 0.75 gal of lacto soured wort.  This had the desired effect of giving the beer a bit more pep.

I've been drinking this beer for the last month.  It's going quickly (drank about half the batch).  Better get in the review now before it's all gone.

Tasting Notes:

• Aroma:
• Strong aroma of black raspberry.  They're not quite like either red raspberry or black berry.  Interesting fruit that I hadn't tried prior to moving out here.  They smell very natural - not like a candy version of fruit at all.  No malt comes through.
• Appearance:
• Purple to dark red.  I usually pour in the dregs (as they improve the fruit character) so it's a little cloudy.  Pours with a 1 finger head that is a nice pink color.  Head doesn't last long and settles down to nothing.
• Flavor:
• Fruit flavor up front with a sour bite in the finish.  There is a slight incongruity to the flavor profile where the sourness has a character that is slightly different than the natural tartness from raspberries - more of a citrus maybe.  It certainly doesn't clash but I was hoping that the sourness would feel a bit more like an enhancement to the natural raspberry sourness rather than a separate sourness (not sure I'd pick this out if I didn't know there was lacto in the mix).  Very slight bready malt backbone to the flavor.
• Mouthfeel:
• Medium/light bodied with a slight sweetness.  Finishes with prickly sourness.  The sourness lingers on the tongue for some time.  Easy drinking beer that makes your mouth long for another sip.
• Overall:
• It's an interesting and really nicely flavored beer.  Not sure you'd guess it had 10 lbs of fruit but it's certainly very fruity.  It definitely provides the sour kick that I've grown to enjoy frequently.  I was a bit disappointed to not get the amount of sweetness that I'd expected from the fruit.  Also hard to disconnect the beer from the fact that I spent $40 for the right to pick and 4 hrs doing the picking in order to make it.  I didn't do that this year and I'm not sure I'd do it again.  The black raspberry flavor is nice but I think I may prefer the normal red raspberry to it.

Mozzarella Cheese - Take II

I enjoyed my first two forays into cheesemaking.  Enough so that I think I'm going to take the next step and work to setup a mini-fridge as a temperature & humidity controlled cheese cave.  This will allow me to make a wide variety of aged cheeses which really appeals to me.

We have decided to buy a house here in PA so I have put my efforts to setup a cheese cave on hold until we are settled in a few months.

In the mean time I decided to try out another simple cheese that doesn't require aging.  I'm not all that adventurous so I'm going to try to make Mozzarella again.  Last time, I made a soft mozzarella with rennet tablets and citric acid.  It turned out nicely but I didn't get to eat all that much of it as I made it at my mothers house and didn't think it would travel well.  It was so soft and sticky that it seemed like it would be ruined on a warm and bumpy trip.

For this attempt I'm going to use a culture and will shoot for a firmer cheese that can be sliced and grated easily.  I opted to use this recipe/procedure from cheesemaking.com.

This recipe was nice in that it really started to hammer home how decisions at various steps (temperature the cheese is ripened at or the size the curds are cut into) help contribute to the final product.  Making cheese is as complicated, and as interesting, as making beer I would say.

Finally, I found a local farm that sells unpasteurized raw cows milk (they also have goat's milk available).  It tastes very nice and has a rich body.  It's a bit more expensive than store bought milk but I figure if I'm going to spend hrs making a cheese it may be worth the cost to get a purer product (not that I think my palate is refined enough to tell the difference between raw and store bought milk).

Ingredients:

• 2 gal Raw Milk
• 1 packet of Thermophilic Culture C-201
• 1/2 tsp Liquid Animal Rennet
• 1/2 tsp Kosher Salt

Process/Notes:

• 8/27/16 - Cheesmaking Day - Took ~6 hrs
• Heated up 2 gal of milk in a 6 gal pot of the stove top.  Heated on low.  Stirred every 10 min or so to get even heating.  The milk started at 34 F.  Took about 1.5 hrs to get up to the target of 100 F.  Didn't have any issues with the cream settling to the top that I noticed.
• Added the culture.  Sprinkled on top of the milk and gave it a couple min to hydrate before stirring in.

• Moved the pot to a hot water bath at 100 F
• Let the cheese ripen for 60 min
• Measured out rennet and put it into a small glass of warm water
• Added the rennet and stirred into the milk for 30 s
• Let coagulate for 45 min - cheese fell to 98 F over this period without any heat
• Did a knife check at the end of 45 min and found that the curds had formed
• Cut the curds into a 1/2 in grid (suggestion was to do this to get a drier cheese)
• Let the cheese sit for 5 min while the whey seeped up through the cuts 
• Stirred to break up the curds - tried to get 1/2 in chunks.  The curds sunk to the bottom

• Moved the pot back to the burner and heated the cheese up to 106 F.  Over shot a bit and had it at ~109 F.  Turned off the heat at this point
• Let the curds cook for 1 hr.  I stirred every 5 min or so (also to help get a drier/firmer cheese)
• At the end of the hr I scooped out the curds with a slotted spoon and placed them in a stainless colander.  I was able to scoop out all of them rather than pour the contents into the colander.
• Dumped the whey
• Moved the colander back to the pot and placed it into a 100 F hot water bath.  The curds were 101 F at this point.
• Let the curds ripen for 2 hrs.  This allowed the cheese to acidify which is crucial for being able to stretch it

• Heated a gal of water up to 180 F for the stretch
• At the end of the 2 hrs I cut off a piece of curd and put it into some hot water to check the stretch.  Found that it was breaking after a short stretch so I decided to give the cheese another 20 min to develop more acidity.
• Cut the curd mass into 1 in cubes and moved half of them to a bowl
• Poured hot water into the bowl and pressed the cunks of curd to the side to get them to soften and melt.
• Consolidated all the curds into one mass.  Pulled the mass with the spoon to smooth it out.  The mass never got all that smooth unfortunately - it was very firm.

• Pulled the mass out once it had cooled a bit and stretched it by hand.  It stretched but not anywhere near was well as with the first batch.  I returned it to the water bath for a reattempt but no joy.  It probably stretched 6 inches or so as opposed to the 18 in that the other batch stretched.
• Poured about 1/4 tsp of salt onto the cheese during the stretch.
• Formed it into one big ball.  Ended up slipping out of my hands and onto the floor at one point and picked up some cat hair.  Washed this off in the sink.  Put a bit more salt on the outside and then put it into the freezer to cool
• Repeated the steps for the second ball (minus the drop on the floor part).  This one didn't stretch well either.
• Moved both cheeses to plastic ziplock bags and put them into the fridge.

Impressions:

• It tastes like Mozzarella cheese which I'm counting as a major victory.  The salt level is very nice
• It's a bit chewy and stringy - like a string cheese in texture.  You can even pull pieces off like with string cheese

• I melted a piece in the microwave - it melted well and was nice and stretchy and gooey when put onto chips

• Shreds very nicely - we plan on using quite a bit of this cheese on lasagna tonight
• Cheese was still good a week and a half later when we used it on Pizza.  All gone now.

Lessons Learned:

1. I think the curd may not have been cut into small enough chunks to get even heating for the stretch.  I cut them into 1 in chunks.  These should have been much smaller.  The difficulty stretching may have been partly due to this (although the overall firmness of the cheese was probably the main contributor)

Dark English Mild - Take II - Tasting

I brewed up a Dark English Mild as my first all grain recipe and really enjoyed it.  It's a nice style as it's very flavorful but also really easy drinking with a low ABV.  Also quite cheap to brew with low hop rates.  It's been over two years since that one so I decided to try another.

I used a recipe by Charlie Papazian which was a bit higher in alcohol and had a much more significant level of hopping than I wanted so I cut these back significantly - brought this beer in at 3.28% ABV with only bittering hops.  The recipe leverages a new variety of malt - Double Roasted Crystal 120L which sounded compelling to me.  This beer, as light as it is, will be a showcase for that malt.

Been drinking these for the last month or so and am about half way through the batch.  It was good young and it's continued to be tasty.

Tasting Notes:

• Aroma:
• Sweet graham cracker and caramel malt.  A little roasty and slightly chocolaty.  Also sort of reminds me of burnt marshmallow.  Pleasant aroma.  No hops and no yeast character come through.
• Appearance:
• Very deep amber color.  Good clarity.  Pours with 0.5 finger head which settles down to a thin layer and lingers.  Leaves some lacing on the glass.
• Flavor:
• Malt flavor dominates with a light bitterness rounding out the finish.  Malt is slightly roasty with biscuit/cracker and caramel flavors.  No hop flavor.  It has a nice, malt slanted, balance.  The flavor dissipates very quickly on this one.
• Mouthfeel:
• Medium bodied with a bit of sweetness on the backend.  Smooth and easy drinking with no astringency.
• Overall:
• I think this is a nice easy drinking beer with plenty of flavor.  Really aren't sacrificing any flavor with this being such a light beer.  It's very nice to mix these in on weeknights as I can have 2 or 3 and, at 3% ABV, there's really no effect.  The late hopping the original recipe called for would have been nice but the beer really doesn't need them.  It's a nicely complex malt flavor that stands up well on it's own.  I think the double roasted crystal is a nice product that I wish I could get more easily - it definitely brings a bit more flavor to the table than normal Crystal 120L.