NoIguanaForZ
Well-Known Member
So I'm out here on the West Coast...ish. (Sacramento). Despite being, according to people overly familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area, Not A City, we are rather blessed in terms of beer culture and microbreweries. Unfortunately, being on the West Coast, we still get hit with the "HOPS! HOPS! HOPS! *pantpantpant* HOPS!" thing. Now, I don't think there's actually anything wrong with people who like hoppy beer, per se, but I have too many experiences of walking into a place that advertises "craft beer on tap" and finding they have 3 IPAs, 2 Double IPAs, a hoppy Red, a couple hoppy pale ales, a hoppy Amber, a Hefeweizen, and, if I'm lucky, one porter OR a stout that's not Guinness (and may, in fact be hoppy too) - in fact, I've been served an IPA-like *"BARLEYWINE"* at least once (is NOTHING sacred? D
I like malty medium to dark beers. Roast, toast, caramel, smoky, chocolate/coffee/vanilla notes.... My go-to "Favorite" was Ballast Point's Victory at Sea, for a while, largely because I refuse to let myself select as my "favorite" a one-off beer I'll never be able to get again. I don't expect to ever forgive The Bruery for discontinuing Smoking Wood.
I'd been thinking idly about homebrewing for a good couple of years, but I started researching pretty intensively last November, finding HomeBrewTalk among other sites, and "what do you want for Christmas?"ed into an extract-level starter kit last year. I brewed my first batch - an extract-and-specialty-grain American Stout - in January, bottle conditioned it until mid-to-late February, and found that between fermentation temperatures around 72 F or above and the three weeks I'd given it in primary, it'd taken on a noticeably "Belgian" character. I went through a few more extract-and-specialty grain batches, increasingly tweaking them, and upgraded to all-grain equipment over the summer. My eleventh batch (fifth all-grain) is in secondary now, and I have three more tweaked recipe kits planned out on the way to brewing an original (to my knowledge) recipe after Christmas to have ready for my birthday in April. I've noticed an off flavor here and there, but have yet to brew anything undrinkable or even entirely unpleasant (though the over-hop-utilization'ed, sulfate-and-sodium-y Briess-extract-based milk stout came close, when I first opened the bottle; it mellowed out over a couple months, thankfully).
Outside of beer, I enjoy cooking, gardening, puns, and a couple other hobbies... I graduated with a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Physics almost two years ago, and work for a small local firm dealing with air quality issues. I have an 11 year old who is often helpful with the brewing process, wants to be a conservation biologist, and has constructed a massive, elaborate anthropological and biological corpus on fairies, and a ridiculous cat who is generally unhelpful with the brewing process and whose interest in fairies, I am told, is purely gustatory.
So, um, yeah... *waves*
*...takes the Fourier transform*
I like malty medium to dark beers. Roast, toast, caramel, smoky, chocolate/coffee/vanilla notes.... My go-to "Favorite" was Ballast Point's Victory at Sea, for a while, largely because I refuse to let myself select as my "favorite" a one-off beer I'll never be able to get again. I don't expect to ever forgive The Bruery for discontinuing Smoking Wood.I'd been thinking idly about homebrewing for a good couple of years, but I started researching pretty intensively last November, finding HomeBrewTalk among other sites, and "what do you want for Christmas?"ed into an extract-level starter kit last year. I brewed my first batch - an extract-and-specialty-grain American Stout - in January, bottle conditioned it until mid-to-late February, and found that between fermentation temperatures around 72 F or above and the three weeks I'd given it in primary, it'd taken on a noticeably "Belgian" character. I went through a few more extract-and-specialty grain batches, increasingly tweaking them, and upgraded to all-grain equipment over the summer. My eleventh batch (fifth all-grain) is in secondary now, and I have three more tweaked recipe kits planned out on the way to brewing an original (to my knowledge) recipe after Christmas to have ready for my birthday in April. I've noticed an off flavor here and there, but have yet to brew anything undrinkable or even entirely unpleasant (though the over-hop-utilization'ed, sulfate-and-sodium-y Briess-extract-based milk stout came close, when I first opened the bottle; it mellowed out over a couple months, thankfully).
Outside of beer, I enjoy cooking, gardening, puns, and a couple other hobbies... I graduated with a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Physics almost two years ago, and work for a small local firm dealing with air quality issues. I have an 11 year old who is often helpful with the brewing process, wants to be a conservation biologist, and has constructed a massive, elaborate anthropological and biological corpus on fairies, and a ridiculous cat who is generally unhelpful with the brewing process and whose interest in fairies, I am told, is purely gustatory.
So, um, yeah... *waves*
*...takes the Fourier transform*
