Nice looking head, and color, but thin grool. Its a very good looking stout, almost a cartoon stout, like-- "Look, I have a stout!", with low in ABV, if you're trying to keep it lite.
But basically an epic Meh: it's aroma is sour, the bad kind, and an almost comically watery mouth feel, with a list of flavors it lacks that may be longer than the list of good names for a beer. Not sure. Could be cream corned, but not worth further study either. I don't think it's the taps or drafting process.
Just not a stout to write ... anything about. No need to get mean about it-- back to the white board fellas.
You know, Duncan Donuts will pitch a full batch of coffee and make a new batch when it's not fresh and right.
Making Cherry flavored Kombucha with sprouted Cherry Seeds is an easy hack once you have fermented your tea for the required amount of time to product bubbles along with the sour flavor, bordering on vinegar.
Generally, I'm finding that Kombucha takes about 15 to 20 days to reach the level of carbonation enough to transfer to the fridge with some flavoring and adjuncts, such as chia seeds, wheatgrass juice or powder, or other things, such as vitamin C.
After all, part of the aim is to make a little more health promoting to drink than say, a high gravity ale or dessert wine, yes?
In this case, Tart Cherry juice is added on bottling with chia seeds, which tend to sprout fast in the Kombucha, as you can see here, in the bottle that was made about 2 days ago. The sugars in the Cherry juice will add fuel to Scoby's fire, producing more carbonation, so it's important to monitor the drink to avoid trouble.
When they are ready to drink, Chia seeds get more slimy than when they are in dry form and taste like hard, nearly microscopic pellets.
As I understand it, the type of tea you use doesn't make a very big difference, but I'm having a lot of success with this bulk Oolang I got at Fairway.
When your making Kombucha, it's important to check your symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast, or "Scoby", which floats around at the top, or bottom.
As long as it looks alive, it's generally doing it's job, eating the sugars and turning your chosen variety of tea into a highly probiotic, mildly acidic, carbonated drink.
When it's time to drain off some Kombucha, it's also time to add back more ingredients to replace what's displaced, which is to say just boiled, cooled water and some form of sugar (honey is my preferred form for fermenting because it's basically sterile and does not require boiling to remove impurities that could harm the Scoby).
This IPA went down too fast to take notes on. Overall, more very good stuff.
I think the jet glass cleaner makes a huge difference too.
Another sample of Peekskill Brewery's new beers, as opposed to the stuff that came out of the old system in the other building, which was more often than not, suspect, to be kind.
Skill Pils is awesome too. Nice bitter aroma, frothy, light, creamy, bitter hoppy flavor. Overall excellent flavor, well balanced body to hops. Nicely done.
Peekskill Brewery's World's End, golden ale-- sour, fragrant, and hoppy, not too thin... outstanding!
Nice, if quickly attenuating froth, albeit in the bottle given the job site setting; strong chocolate aroma, mild bitter hops well balanced to the sweet coffee under toads.
Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate is what I kept thinking as I gluttonously drank 3/4th the bottle before stopping to paint a blog on it.
That twisted #Portlandia reference notwithstanding, this beer makes me want to stout from the roofhops!
Is it just me or do some of Victory's beers makes you feel like you're standing there with Butch and Sundance Kid at the end of the movie, on the cliff asking: "who are those guys?"
Fleeting froth, clear light golden color, delightful banana clove aromas with a thin mouth feel, yet a abiding hoppy flavor that beats back the malt like a red headed lap dancer (what?!). Exactly.
This is a great beer. I'll be taking a growler of this one home, unlike that red headed lap dancer.
ABV, 6.9%, nice head, more or less clear, light color, not much aroma, wicked hops to the taste.
I apparently enjoyed this IPA. It may require a repeated sampling to fill out these tasting notes.
Nice head, carmel aroma to match its brown color. Mild hops, but well balance with the creamy malt, a little sweet... it's a little like a spicy root beer.
Giant head, light pils color, ever so slight rubbing alcohol aromas, thin and trim mouth feel, and that trademark corny Schaefer flavor, just like it was after cutting the lawn with uncle Frank when I was 8.
It's a great beer, hipster renovation or not.
However, I'm thinking they hipped up the recipe, if you will, on this classic canned classic like many other brands (PBR) in the late 20th century American portfolio... you know, the stuff Americans drank with missiles pointed at them during the cold war.
Great taste, less filling? How about less Sovietz! Boom!
Simple Sour is basically a Saison style light wheat, corn deal, and seems like a barrel of Pils met a mad Beligan farmer who laid a wild yeast on it. This beer is so clean, mildly hopped, and consistently flavored (mildly sour) that I'm thinking it's done with extracts.
The PB's new brewing equipment (the tags read Portland), have taken every beer I've sampled there up several levels in terms of quality compared to the old location, where getting served a flat beer, with off flavors was an every 3rd draft event. Nonetheless, we remained faithful to the spot, like a dutiful husband to a bi-polar wife.
All that's changed. PB has turned it all around with the new tanks and lines, which must stay clean as a whistle to produce this quality suds.
PB's Simple Sour is an outstanding beer-- I'll be buying it in growlers.
Fast froth, chocolate aroma notes, deep dark color... Pumperknickle flavs.... this one;s a good one. You can see by my steady hand, this was a late sampled Ale.
I added a bunch of fruit juices to a basic Italian Dandelion must, that included the flowers of that greenhouse grown dandelion-chicory that grew over last winter, including plain cane sugar, cherry juice, hibiscus, raisins, orange.
I also included the herbs lemon balm and rose hips.
It started off very high gravity at 13%, according to my hydrometer, and fermented it using EC-1118, which has turned out to be a mighty yeast for Niagara and other white wines, as per the expert at Cornell recommendation.
And now, at tasting time, after months and months since the yeast began in May, 2012, this wine's ended up with a highly clean, bright, crisp flavor, and beautiful aroma like a good quality Pinot Grigio.... no grapes required. Very odd, surprising and delightful result.
These are my notes while drinking Peekskill Brewery's ("PB") Shotgun Willie IPA last night, an IPA made of Rye and Hops imported from New Zealand, where perhaps Peekskill has a long lost or recently found sister-city: "Clean, bright, toasted, hoppie awesome."
The beer is balanced and outstanding, just like PB's "Simple Sour" I slurped down before it.
I can't say enough good things about the quality of the beer in this brewery since it's moved across from the bakery, from the small Nano space up the road. I think maybe upgraded equipment has made a world of difference.
Fermentables. I make awesome krauts by the gallon, using a wide array of vegetables. But just recently, I've discovered adding fresh horseradish root puts it to the upper decks. The stuff is awesome for pork chops, hot dogs, brats, sausages, and any version of BBQ that you'd like to go on about. It's also perfect for pairings with beer as well as roasted beasts.
But some beers are even better than others with it, such as this Belgian style concoction I made in the spirit of "Radical Brewing," just before New Year's: "Dark Honey Pumpkin Cran Apple Cider-Ale, with kraut (cabbage with fresh ground horseradish), for which I used dark Malt, Clover honey, Pumpkin mash, and Cran Apple cider. And of course there were various spices in the mash.
I've been trying to think of a shorthand name to distinguish the ale, but I'm not repeating the recipe just yet, so there's no rush... maybe Hudson Valley Saison Cider-Ale v.01.
I was going for a French-Belgian ish-esque sour Farmhouse, Saison flavor, and it worked pretty well, if a little sweet for my taste at this point. Perhaps a few more weeks in the growler would have helped bring that sweetness down a bit. However, when paired with these highly sour krauts I'm kicking out, you've got a no hitter (yes, that's baseball metaphor number 2).
The Cider-Ale had a thin but sweet finish, after a giant frothy head, and a very mild hoppy aroma. I can't recall 100% the hops I used, but pretty sure it was the Chinook, which retained nice aroma and flavor in spite of all these errant flavor profiles form various forms of sugar.
When used to wash down this fermented cabbage-horseradish sauerkraut mixture, this Belgian Farmhouse on-the-Hudson style Ale is something worth writing home about.... and maybe Indonesia too via Blogger.
Massive froth, mild aromas, nice color, true to form, balanced, flavorful and basically amazing-delish as you might expect if you're forking over the big bucks for 64 ozs of it at the craft beer grocery store, which also sells Citra hops and cask finishing yeasts.
Peak washed down the Superbowl pizza in an unparalleled fashion.
I'd get it again.
This imported Kolsch is turning up in more and more places as a nice light alternative to some of these heavy craft beers that dominate beer menus in Craft beer bars.
Gaffell's Kolsch, at 4.8% ABV is light, odor free, nice froth, and pretty popular on a chalk board of Craft beers that average about 7% alcohol. I'd say 4 of us were drinking it to punctuate the high gravity beers.
And it's nice, if you don't want to end up yelling at the flat panels because Kentucky is losing to Texas.
I'm not sure if it was correlation or causation, but there were a lot of cocktails being poured (even a woman ordering Shirley Temples with Vodka, which was kind of cute), and I also did hear two people drop glasses to the floor. So I'm thinking maybe a light Kolsch can't do any harm at Harlem Public.
Awesome bottle conditioned, light, mildly sour, full bodied home made cider made light work of Turkey sausages in mushroom and asparagus. It went down fast too, like being chased by 40 men.
This is a story inside of a story of Sausage and Cider, as good, if not better than anything the mayor and all his friends have waiting for you down at the Lido.
But I'll tell you something; this cider was made with higher acid, higher sugar, heirloom apples (the kind from trees that were senselessly slaughtered during senselessly ineffective prohibition), and lots of honey, and fresh roasted pumpkin, which stands out most for a much fuller, thicker, maybe tannic mouth feel that I can only surmise came from the roasted pumpkin part. I've made a lot of cider, some with honey, and most end up thin on their own, when made without some other fruit to fill them out. Not this sausage slayer. Sure it's made it a little more cloudy than and average batch of cider without, but it's a small price to pay to balance out that thin cider mouth feel.
This bottle of Honey Pumpkin Ale was bottled as a baseline scenario, the starting point without adjuncts, additives, odd elements (those bottled with Kelp) and experimental flavaz, the ordinary least squares, lowest aggregate, the path of least resistance, and most regression.
This was the head cornerstone of this batch, made with fresh pumpkin, cored, carved, peeled, roasted and fermented right along with the malts, as if it were grown in the next field over.
It turned out well and suggests good things for the whole batch and any of the odd, offbeat, racy, radical permutations, starting with a nice, if loose froth, and mildly hoppy aromas lingering about the nose, like a summer hobo, outside the pub, soaked in whiskey, next to the single ladies in their perfumes, emitting smoke along with his borrowed cigarette, giving you that heads up that sparks a very slight adrenal spike before you walk in: "who knows, this could be a dangerous place".
But once your in the glass, and this ale floods your mouth and gums you're fine, you're going to be fine, and you know it because it has balanced, full malty mouth feel to complement the dark brown hue, like the light bouncing off the wood paneling or well worked and worn out wood fixtures on the bar top and rail. It's fine, full bodied, familiar and flavorful.
Makes me seriously think, if and probs nothing else, the fresh roasted pumpkin may impart a tannic quality that enriches the mouth feel beyond the grains and any Belgian candy canes. And it makes me glad I added the extra honey.
Here's my prediction-- this Baseline Honey Pumpkin Ale Scenario it a winner, and the variations that I've bottled from it will be one BLITZ after another, stunt after stunt, sack after sack of grain in a Super BOIL a fermented out just in time Superbowl. That's what my little cabron bubbles have been doing while your little digital guys with the big hearts have been running their routes with Flacco, king of the angry birds.
Nice looking head, and color, but thin grool. Its a very good looking stout, almost a cartoon stout, like-- "Look, I have a stout!", with low in ABV, if you're trying to keep it lite. 
