Stumbled across this as I was doing some more perusing. Nice history on British brewery practices of old . . .
Being the pragmatic type, let me answer this question with a question…have you ever had trouble getting a beer to attenuate after it has had a blowoff? I know I haven’t had any trouble that could be directly related to blowoff.
I gave the two batches, which I dedicated to this topic, a quick taste tonight. It is an Alt and still rather cloudy after 4 and 2 weeks at 4 C. But judging from samples under the microscope it seems to be chill haze. So I added gelatin to both.
But I tastes the hydrometer samples and I’m convinced that the batch where I allowed the Kraeusen to fall back in the beer has a harsher and more lingering finish than the batch where I skimmed the Kraeusen. The difference is not very prominent though.
Unfortunately the Alt did not come out as expected. Attenuation is rather poor due to the Munich malt I used. I used Franco Belges and this is likely the last time I use this malt. In addition to that I also used Hallertau Tradition since I have a lot of those and they must have lost quite a bit of alpha acid. But I don’t think that this will invalidate the experiment.
I’ll have a better idea once the beer is on tap.
Kai
Kai, did you do this as a blind tasting? I look forward to the results of that kind of test.
Denny . . I know you are pragmatic! ;) (Maybe I an too . .)
So, let me ask a question in response to your question . . Is it not possible to make an objective judgement of flavor without doing a blind test?
This seems like and odd statement from you. A single usage and you discount this at the issue?
I don’t have in my inventory who my base Munich malt is from, but I suspect it may be MFB and if so have never had an issue with it.
I did 3 sets of two and was able to get the first one right. On the second one I noticed that the lingering bitterness is not easily erased by the next beer which does make distinction on this characteristic difficult.
I also didn’t draw enough beer for large enough samples for more thorough tasting.
Kai
Maybe, but my experience is that as long as you know which beer is which, you will always have a bias on a subconscious level. For instance, in my FWH experiment, when I poured the 2 different beers for myself, I was sure that I could tell which was which and what the attributes were. When my wife poured 2 of one and one of the other, it took me 3 tries to pick out the different one, and even then I was wrong about which one it was!