I've been working through quite the wave of travel, which has delayed some brews. If all goes well tomorrow though I might start the Holiday Ale now. I am thinking it will be good to give it a test run before the holidays so I can brew another batch if needed.
Even though we didn't brew lately, I have some updates on the last brew. I don't think our Banana Ale is going to turn out with much banana (again). This may end up being NSBA2 (Not So Banana Ale 2). I allowed this to sit in primary fermentation for two weeks at 72 degrees. This temp should be high enough to produce the banana esters. In addition I did not pitch the entire pack of yeast into these batches, which should have helped with the under pitching. I'm left scratching my head a little.
This is our third attempt at brewing a banana ale. Our first attempt had banana flavors, though they were more subtle than I wanted. We did this at 72 degrees, but it was a higher gravity brew. It had a lot of honey in the recipe which helped make it higher gravity, but it was a bit too heavy of a beer. The banana flavor was very strong in this beer when we transferred from primary to secondary. However at kegging it almost went completely away, but with a little aging it came back stronger after a few weeks.
The next batch we did as a simpler ale recipe without the honey. The gravity was much lower, and I ended up fermenting at 76 degrees in an attempt to get more banana flavor. However the end result had no banana flavor at all.
This batch I tried to get the best of all worlds. I used a wheat ale recipe which had a higher gravity (not as high as the first, but not far off), and fermented again at 72 degrees. As mentioned above I also tried to under pitch by not using all the yeast. I thought for sure this would work!
My results so far are after 2 weeks in primary I transferred to secondary. I did not keg yet as all my kegs are full. I put the secondaries into the fermentation chamber and cold crashed it to help clear the beer. That is where it is right now, been there almost a week. When smelling and tasting after transferring I got no scent or flavor of banana, however I might have picked up a hint of clove. This is odd because this yeast does produce clove flavors if fermented at cooler temps. My only hope is that banana flavor will surface after a few weeks of conditioning. If this doesn't work I'm going to go to another strand of yeast to try. There are a few that produce banana flavor, this just happens to be the most flocculant which results in a clearer beer.
I am also slowly carbonating several of the kegs and will post tasting notes shortly on those. Right now I'm sampling from batch#4 which is almost done carbonating. I also have one of batch#2 kegs carbonated now. I have also started carbonating the Saison we brewed over the summer, which is our last extract batch I have on hand. It tasted a little rough at kegging, so I let it condition for a couple of months.
Tasting notes to come shortly, and maybe a brew day tomorrow!
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