Red Ale Tested, Next Brew Rescheduled
First, we’re brewing the bitter this coming weekend - on Saturday, July 1st. The recipe will be written by Matt tomorrow. Matt generally writes all of the recipes. We occasionally haggle over minor details, but we haven’t made a beer so disgustingly bad that I have any reason to question Matt’s skills 
In fact, we both like all of our beers….. Including, I’m happy to say, the Red Ale.
The first bottle of Bamf “Sluttypants Irish Redhead” Ale was opened just a couple of hours ago for the first testing. Once we bottle the beer, it’s kept in my basement - not refrigerated. We’ve never used a yeast that required refrigeration, and my basement generally doesn’t ever get to 75F.
This batch yielded 26 22-ounce bottles from a batch that, after it was racked off to a secondary fermenter, was just barely over 5 gallons (it went all the way up the neck of a 5-gallon carboy). There was more spillage than normal during bottling, partly because it was the first bottling of the season, I was doing it alone, and I didn’t have any kind of shutoff valve - I siphoned straight from the carboy to the bottles without an intermediary. I was also kind of conservative and left a bit of beer in the carboy to avoid having a lot of trub wind up in the bottles. Common calculations say 5-gallons should yield 29 22-ounce bottles. We’re 3 bottles short, but they have almost no sediment on the bottom from what I’ve seen so far, and the beer is pretty clear.
It *is* clear. The clearest we’ve ever made. Of course, the beer, being in the bottle for only about a week, and being warm, was a little fizzy. However, once it calmed down, the head retention was excellent, the beer was crisp and tasty, and it had all the flavor I was hoping for.
More than all of this, though, what shocked me was the incredible, incredible mouth feel. I’m not a professional judge, but I want to go look at the beer judge websites just so I can describe the mouth feel. Matt didn’t think it was a big deal. I, for some reason, was floored.
The color was actually darker than I thought it would be, but was deep reddish-brown. I’ll mention again that I was thrilled with the clarity of the beer, being that we didn’t (and don’t, ever) use any kind of clarifying agents in the beer. All we do is filter it back through the grain bed.
This beer might be less impressive for someone who didn’t go through the process of brewing it. Regardless, I really like it a lot, and I’m going to have another one that’s been sitting in the fridge for about a half an hour now.
‘Til next time.