Moo Brew Excitement!!!...and other stuff

WooooooHooooo! Just received my first bottle of Moo Brew's Barrel Aged Vintage Imperial Stout. Big thanks to Jon and the rest of the Moo Brewers for sending this up for me. They even made note of my blogging by putting it on the parcel they sent up to me...I look forward to getting the rest of my allocation soon, and hopefully drinking it once my brother is back from overseas (as Blackboard would say on Mr Squiggle...Hurry Up!).

I also need to thank Damian from Purvis for setting aside a bottle of another imperial stout, this time the 8 Wired Batch 18, which looks pretty interesting. Both these beers, along with the left overs from my first Imperial Stout tasting for the Winter will go together well to make up the next one, which I hope to happen soon now my arsenal is large enough, and my limits of storing beer has been reached. I also need to get a taste of the Red Hill Imperial Stout on tap, so if someone knows where it is on, please let me know (I have never had it on tap before!!!!!!). Still, while I was a Purvis, the shipment of Brooklyn Brewery beers (no, not the Black Chocolate Stout, but the Lager and Local 1) came in, so look out for a tasting of those coming up.

While speaking of tasting, I should mention that I was on Little Creatures Pale over the weekend, while attending my Grandpa's 90th (official 'Happy Birthday' for yesterday!!!). I did not have time to bring some beer to the event, but luckily I had a beer angel in Pete to bring the Pale's along to give me some flavour of the beer type. It went down well, probably too well...

On the homebrew side of things, Stass, Brad and I had a taste of our attempt at a mulberry fruit beer, which came in a molasses form that Brad had found while living in Turkey. I have to say, there is some nice fruit tartness in it towards the back, and while our hop selection may not be bang on (even though it tasted alright at the wort stage), it has at least evened out the sweetness from the fruit that may have been a bit overpowering up front. I hope though that sourness does not come on too early, so it has enough time to carbonate and for us to drink before it goes bad. Come on hops, do your thing! I also need to hear from Team Harrod about our IPA taste off. We will need it soon before the hops start to die off, so bring it on!

We have some interesting thoughts starting to come in terms of brews to come, and now we have the second fermenter, we can keep on doing a bit of an experiment each time we do some brewing, which I am looking forward to.

On Monday I also had a visit to Josie Bones with my mate Cam. With the weather as it is, I recommended the Beard and Brau Black Milk Snout which went down so well for me the week before. The same creamy chocolate smell leaning towards a Baileys was still there, but in flavour coffee was coming out a lot more than I recall, and had thinned out in texture a bit. I went for the Brew Dog Citra IPA, which had a lovely sweet orange smell to it, and a nice amber malt backbone to display the citrus hop over. Was pretty fresh seeing they had only tapped the keg the day before, so enjoyed it quite a bit (well, as much as I can personally enjoy an IPA). Then showed Cam my namesake in the style of a burger (Bogan Burger) over a Holgate Temptress. Argh, it took me forever to get the cold out of it so there was not the chalky/alkaline-ness that so ruins this beer, still, managed to get there by the end, and with that massive burger to consume, we had time...

Cheers,

Beef