Sugar Experiment Beer Tasting Tomorrow
 

Mike T's(http://madfermentationist.blogspot.com/) hosting a small tasting tomorrow(sat.) to try his seciond round of sugar experiments:

http://madfermentationist.blogspot.com/2007/10/belgian-sugar-experiment-round-2_29.html

However, today I learned we would be tasting the original sugar experiment as well. These are the beers tasted/reviewed nearly one year ago on basicbrewingradio(Dec. 2006):

http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/bbr12-28-06.mp3

All the beers will be tasted 'double-blind' , in other words Mike won't even know which is which until he pulls off whatever is covering the bottle number. This years beers are going to be mixed in with the old ones( approaching ~1.5years old now) so it will be very interesting to see if we can pick which is which, and which ones we enjoy most in a completely objective way. I'm going to try to take some pictures, and will post my impressions/etc., and will post a new link to his blog so you can see his results/comments/etc. I'm not sure what other notes we're taking, but so far I know that he is asking each of us to write 3 words to sum up each beer. Should be a great time, and educational too.

Yes, Mike is THE man. :rockin:

Sweet! (pun intended)

Looking forward to the results.

Here are the results from the man himself:
http://madfermentationist.blogspot.com/2007/12/11-differnet-sugars-1-great-tasting.html
I correctly picked all the old batch and new batch beers out except for one. This may seem easy, but if you were there you would not have thought so.
It was difficult to pick a favorite b/c we could not go back and forth tasting one against another. This was no fault of Mikes, it would have been difficult to do this for a number of reasons, especially the fact that everyone would have needed 11 glasses of their own. Mike and I were both suprised that none of the sugars felt completely out of place in a Belgian style beer. He even had trouble picking out which beers were which, which was quite understandable. The changes in the beers from the different sugars was not as 'profound' as you might expect. I think everyone had a great time, and was very glad to be included in this great learning experience.

Good reading thanks.

Would you put them on the Wiki please?

Two things that I noticed:

-This time around, the sugars were not added before primary fermentation but used in a secondary fermentation. A comparison of primary and secondary additions would have been interesting.
-His candi syrup doesn't include any acid (and he mentions his reason). I would have been interested in the results of a comparison of the homemade invert with the plain sugar syrup.

Any further comments on the oxidation levels of the older batches?

Not that I can think of, I have a tough time describing oxidation. I can detect it when it's there very easily, but its seems tough to say "X" is what oxidation tastes like. It seems to vary so much in flavor/etc. from one beer/wine/etc. to another.
Bah Humbug, I will try to after Christmas.