Equinox Pale Ale (@Beer-Lord, you may wanna read)

[Beer-lord]

Thanks for the update and detailed tasting.

[mashani]

So... I'm going to be stupid and brew another batch of this, but as a 3 gallon batch with 4oz of honey malt instead of 2, and 2oz of cold steeped roasted barley to make it a "black ipa", and 5# of Northern Brewer Super Structure extract which is a bit more malty to stand up to 4oz of the hops, so I'm going to end up more like 1.065 or so... Probably just 1oz @10 and all the rest @flameout + lid on hopstand which will give me a lot of extra AAU utilization. At nearly 17%AA it will be plenty bitter after that. Maybe I'll add enough sugar to bring it up to 1.070.

Because roasted peppers are good? Maybe.

If it's like before I will hate it when it comes out of the fermenter, but then start to like it a hella lot around 6-8 weeks in the bottle. The pepper did really mellow a lot over time in the last batch and it turned quite delicious. So I figure it will again, but I'm pushing the levels to really see... because, I won't know until I try.

Then I will know if I want to go with 4oz of it and 4oz of other hops in a bigger 5 gallon IPA later.

EDIT: I made this. Didn't add sugar, it was 1.066. I can always feed it some candi syrup later if I want but I probably will not bother. Wort tasted nice.

[Beer-lord]

Interesting.......I look forward to your final opinion on it.
Still don't have another Equinox brew planned though I do have a good bit of it that I won't waste.

[mashani]

So I bottled the iPA version of this mentioned a few posts above, and I actually liked how it tasted coming out of the fermenter. I don't know if it's because of the more malty maris otter / crystal mix from the super structure extract, and/or the extra honey malt and/or the little bit of roasted malt, but the "GREEN PEPPER IN MY FACE!" was more like "I think maybe there green pepper here?". Or maybe this batch of equinox was just different. It was very tropical fruity / fruity salad like.

It did once again stain my fermenter with an oily film of yellow/orange color, until I scrubbed it out good.

[Beer-lord]

That's what I want out of Equinox......tropical fruity. I think I'll only use these as steeping and dry hopping.

[mashani]

Yeah, your maybe on the right track - that's something else that was different here... in the pale it was 50% @10, 50% @flameout, this was 25% @10, 75% @flameout. So that might be why it's different too.

[mashani]

So this is interesting... this latest batch of Equinox beer with some age is still nice and tropical and such, but it has developed an underlying background flavor that I would not describe as green pepper, but more like celery. It doesn't make me dislike the beer, it's mostly in the background, but it is there. And yeah, it's celery.

[Beer-lord]

Interesting. I'm still trying to decide how I want to use the rest of my Equinox (or whatever they call it now). Probably just as a dry hop I'm thinking.

[Kealia]

The only time I tasted celery in a beer was in a batch of One Evil Pilsner that I bought on sale from MrB. Im convinced that something was wrong with that batch of HME.
I couldn't get over that taste and dumped the batch.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[BigPapaG]

As a point of reference, I grabbed this off of bjcp.org...


Vegetal:

Cooked, canned or rotten vegetables (cabbage, celery, onion, asparagus, parsnip)

Encourage a fast, vigorous fermentation (use a healthy, active starter to reduce lag time; this is often due to bacterial contamination of wort before yeast becomes established). Check sanitation. Check for aged, stale, or old ingredients (especially old liquid malt extract). Avoid oversparging at low temperatures.

[mashani]

FWIW, I don't have any other reason to think my batch got infected by anything. The yeast was pitched at a substantial pitch rate, and I never use old canned extract. I pretty much never get bacterial infections, the only beer that had one in recent memory came from unpasturized honey I added as a late addition (too late for it to pasteurize the lacto, which can live at 170 for a while it seems). I only get airborne yeast (Brett) in the summer.

Considering how weird these hops are, and how much my previous beer I made with them changed over time as various hop flavors/aromas faded and others did not, I do think the flavor I am getting is actually from the hops.

[BigPapaG]

Mmmm, Celery Hops... Yum!

[mashani]

Mmmm, Celery Hops... Yum!

Yeah.

Hey, @Kealia, out of curiosity, was the celery you got "fresh" or "cooked" or what?

What I tasted the other night was very fresh celery tasting like I was crunching on a celery stick between sips (or bites of hot wings LOL) and a little bit of the flavor stuck around while I was sipping or eating as such... or perhaps maybe like celery seed - but most certainly not "cooked" or "rotten" or "canned". It didn't taste bad with all the tropical fruit going on, and not any more strange then the "green pepper" this hop is supposed to give. It was just odd that's all. Maybe it is what they describe as the green pepper, but since I used twice as much hops as before and all late addition this time I'm perceiving it differently.

[Beer-lord]

So if I just want to get the tropical flavors and little or no green pepper, when should these hops be used?
I have to say that even though I wasn't crazy about the green pepper, it wasn't bad though I did keg hop the rest of my beer to cover up the flavors and it worked out well.

[Kealia]

In my batch it was fresh celery, too. Keep in mind that the batch I did used Nelson Sauvin in the HME. I have no reason to believe it was infected either. I just chalked it up to the Beer Gods needing a sacrifice. Since it was a quick 2.5G HME batch it wasn't a big loss either.
Never had an issue before, and haven't had one since.

But yeah, fresh celery.