Tasting: Breech Baby Beer

When baby Elaine was still a month away from her expected arrival, Jill got brave and decided to brew a batch. She had been nauseated by the faintest smell of alcohol throughout the pregnancy, much to my chagrin, but had finally gotten past it. We agreed that we needed something summery to ring in the advent of parenthood, and we decided on a successful recipe from last summer. In the Papazian book, it's called "Who's in the Garden Grand Cru", allegedly a clone of the Hoegaarden Grand Cru. The beer itself is a spiced summer ale, a wit flavored with orange peel and coriander, much like Blue Moon. Jill modified it last year, using Belgian Ale yeast instead of the German Wheat beer yeast (wit=wheat), and that change undoubtedly added some much-needed character to this brew. Of course, we'll never know for sure, because I doubt that we'll ever make it any other way!

I put one in the fridge for about 30 minutes...wait, I'll go get it now...

So maybe I should have let it cool a bit more, because it gushed on me. We've taken to adding a bit of extra priming sugar, because our beers were ending up less lively than Jim and Sonja's, and that made a huge difference in the impression you got when tasting. There's only a few styles of beer where no head is desirable.

Still, having the beer less chilled allows the flavors to really emerge off the first sip. The beer poured orange-amber, much like Bell's Oberon, with moderate cloudiness. I smelled banana and orange with the hops hiding way in the back. Fruit aroma completely overpowered the light malt extract. On the sip, there was sugary sweetness with very little bitterness, and the strong orange flavor providing, I think, more bitterness than the hops. It was light to medium-bodied with light carbonation at 10 minutes (although quite a bit was used up in the initial gush). The aftertaste is where the coriander becomes evident, pleasantly mingling with the clean bitterness of the orange peel oils. The beer itself appears to be merely a vehicle for transporting these two flavors, to its possible detriment. Maybe next time, we'll back off of the adjuncts a bit, and let the malt play a slightly bigger role. Still, it's delicious, refreshing, very drinkable, and I could easily see spending an afternoon reaching for one after another of these.

Great job, honey!