I love the smell of bread baking, and I love the smell of bottling beer. Tonight I had plenty of the latter. Two kegs, 4 gallons of beer in the making, yielding 14 quarts of premium brew. How do I know it’s premium? It says so on the box!
Tonight I opened the second to last bottle of porter - even better than I remember (Which also answered a question I pondered in my previous beer post… the unlabled beer was not the porter, but was it the apple? (ah, a new question to raise a glass to). I do hope that was the apple, for otherwiseI’ll have to cook with the several quarts remaining - is there anything beyond beer can chicken or brats? I’ve used 1/2 a can in a batch of crepes, but this would be enough crepes to turn off a Frenchman.
Time indeed is an essential ingredient - one not listed in the basic instructions with my kit. Two weeks from keg to bottle to glass indeed! Ok, two weeks is certainly possible, and still a better result than most of what I’d find in the supermarket. But with a little more patience… I may never order a beer at a restaurant again. Seriously.
There was one recipe I recall that called for 6 months of hanging out in the bottles before cracking them open… While I struggle with the patience to wait out my two latest creations (for a few weeks), my mind turns to the summer possibilites. There were some recipes I’d made a mental note to make, now to find those before I run out of summer to enjoy them.
