RACKING: Sarcastic Doorman (Juniper)

Wow.  That didn't work at all.

I don't mean the racking, that went very smoothly, except that I noticed some air in the line at one point.  Hopefully my beer isn't turning into vinegar right now.  There will be some pictures when I get the hardware needed to access my camera again.

The end results of all my changes on brew day, however, aren't too promising.  I think the biggest problem was the prolonged steep for the second boil, which extracted astringency and bitterness from my dark malts.  If I'm going to do any more batches of this size, I need to change my process to avoid that.

I don't think the change in hops was a good idea either; Fuggles wasn't really what I wanted to begin with, but it isn't working at all.  I really, really miss the citrus character of the Amarillo hops, even though it wasn't terribly pronounced in the original recipe.  The juniper berries were supposed to be a different take on that, but they aren't really coming through.  I decided not to dry hop with any more, because to be honest I don't feel like it would help what I tasted today, but I am hoping that what I did use will be a little more noticeable after carbonation.  I still want to do a batch with a notable juniper character, but I'll definitely be going back to exclusively Amarillo in the future, at least until I can find the hops I wanted originally (chiefly Pacific Gem).

In rejiggering the recipe to reduce/eliminate the dark DME, I used too much chocolate malt.  This may be an over-reaction to the extended steep this time, but I think I could actually eliminate it entirely and use more crystal instead.  A certain amount of pale malt to at least partially convert some starches from the pumpernickel wouldn't hurt either, although the beer does seem to be really lovely and clear.

I considered throwing some dark Hungarian oak chips in the secondaries, but it was last minute and I couldn't decide how best to sanitize them.  Since this wasn't exactly an unqualified success, I'll do another batch of something different soon, maybe just another modded Brewhaus kit as a palette cleanser, and use them with that.

Of course this batch will be a little different (hopefully better) once it's carbonated, cooled, and aged, but at this point I don't see the tannins and whatever else is making it so harsh getting better unless I kept it around at least six months to a year, and I only have so much space for storage.