This weekend, the first two of the Phalanx all-grain batches will finish their bottle conditioning. About a month ago, we spent an entire day brewing two separate 5 gallon batches. One batch is a clone of Bell’s Two Hearted and the other is a Hefeweizen. I am excited to crack open a bottle of each of them to determine if our switch from extract brewing has paid off.

I suppose I will start off tasting the clone beer and I have a confession already: I opened a bottle and tried it a week ago, it was still very sweet as the sugar added to carbonate the beer had not yet been fully consumed by the yeast. Another confession: we totally forgot that the recipe called for dry hopping. Final confession: We ran out of our home grown centennial hops and hat to use .5 an ounce of fresh cascade. It turns out that of the 11.75 ounces of centennial hops harvested, we ended up with only 2.5 ounces of dried cones.

All of that being said, I am quite pleased with how it turned out. The color was almost a copper color probably in the neighborhood of 11 degrees Lovibond. The flavor would definitely be improved by the addition of the dry hop, but the sweetness that existed one week prior was gone. The yeast had been hard at work eating those final sugars added during the bottling phase. I tasted this beer at 11° C, perhaps a bit warmer than some might recommend. The aroma of the beer was mildly hoppy with some citrus notes. The flavor continued the citrus theme with a grapefruit flavor leading into a slight lingering bitterness.

The Hefeweizen was pretty characteristic of other Hefeweizens I have tasted in the past. The color was very, very pale. It appeared to be around 1.5 degrees Lovibond and given the mash bill that would make sense. The bill consisted of 5.5 lbs of wheat malt and 4 lbs of German Pilsner malt and both of these malts would yield a light color. This beer was chilled to 7° C before it was served. The smell of this beer was very heavy in the banana department with perhaps a slight smell of a fresh white bread. The taste was also very banana forward and ended with a slight lemony tart flavor.

All in all, both of the beers turned out well enough to encourage us that we are on the right path switching to all grain brewing. We still have the German Alt style beer in the fermenter ready to be bottled in one week. If this beer turns out as well as the other two, it might be time to invest in some equipment to begin to test recipes on a smaller scale and creating our own recipes.

-AJS