Bockenale

I love coming up with names - whenever I'm writing something, I've usually come up with a lot of the names, and certainly the title, in advance.  Sometimes they change as it goes along, but that's where I start.  It's not even that I find names particularly meaningful, inherently - I don't subscribe to the idea that the etymology of your name is important, studies about people named "Baker" becoming bakers aside - but I generally find that if I know a character's, place's, or story's name, I'm ready to use it, and if I'm still not sure, it's half-baked.

I also love stupid, stupid puns.

So naming beers is fun, because it combines those things.  It's also a little frustrating because all the good ones are already taken.  There are at least two Coal Porters, for example.  In trying to come up with a name for my latest brew I've been through a couple, and I finally settled on what I thought must be peculiar enough to be unique - Bock'N'Ale (a classic pun, if you'll forgive me, in reference to the combination of yeasts) - but sure enough, there's at least one out there already.  So I modified the spelling a little.  Alternately, I've been working on something to do with Winan's Steam Gun, playing on Steam Beer.

Unfortunately, the reason I'm working on that second one is, rather than that I genuinely need a unique name, the fact that our cold snap ended and it's been warm and lovely and entirely inappropriate for lager yeast, so my beer is probably going to turn out all fruity and cloudy after all.

Vanilla-Tarragon Bock

Only not really very much so, apart from the vanilla part.

After doing a couple of kits straight-up, I decided to do one beer with modifications but without so much care or attention, just to get a bit of it out of my system before settling down to rigorous experimentation with stout recipes.  I found some vanilla beans fairly cheap at the German grocery, and just racked my "bock" (really just a Brewhouse Munich Dark Lager with half the added water) to secondary onto that and about a cup of strong tarragon "tea" - I don't know how noticeable the tarragon is going to be in the finished product that way, but I couldn't really think of a better method on short notice.  The beer itself has a slightly cider-y, apple-like quality right now, not desirable for the style but actually quite pleasant, and a nice red colour.

It's really cloudy, though.  I wound up using two different yeasts (the dry packet in the kit and an Activator of Bavarian Lager yeast from Wyeast) because it was a last minute decision to use less water, and they're flocculating very strangely.  Bits floating on the surface, lots of it still in suspension, fairly thin yeast cake.  Strangely, though I didn't really pitch enough yeast for the OG, it's actually over-attenuating slightly, down to 1.01 from 1.065 (for reference, that's probably around 7.3% ABV).  I'm going to give it a good few weeks in the secondary, and hopefully it'll clear some.  We have had a cold snap so my closet is actually down to a decent lagering temperature, at least, so it should definitely improve if things don't warm up too much in the next week or so.