Nut-brown bottled

I’ve never “cellared” a beer after fermentation, but that’s what this nut-brown recipe called for, so I did it. Usually, fall is a great time to stick a carboy of beer in the garage for a 55-degree cellaring treatment. Of course, not this year! No, it’s been between 65-72 in Portland for the last two weeks, which is freakishly warm for October. The beer ended up cellaring at 58-62, which I hope is good enough. My biggest concern is that any remaining yeast won’t have the strength to consume the corn sugar and carbonate the beer in the bottles. But we’ll see!

It’s also interesting how different a beer smells on first siphoning it from the carboy to the bottling bucket – very yeasty and almost musky – from how it smells after you add the corn sugar and the beer gets a little air. After adding sugar, the nut-brown started to have nutty aromas that didn’t exist before. Wacky!

Now I wait a couple of weeks for the beer to condition and carbonate, then I’m ready to drink it! Here’s hoping it’s a toast to Change and not to Mavericks…