Beer Cartel sent an offer via email:


Quote:

Feel that chill in the air? That's how you know it's time to pull out the extra-fuzzy socks and stock the fridge with rich and delicious dark beers (seriously, best time of the year?)

That is conventional wisdom: in Adelaide at least Coopers had a billboard ad featuring a snowy landscape with two shining brass balls prominently in the foreground to promote their stout  ;D

However, by the time you get home from work in winter it will likely already be dark and you want a dark beer?

I do like a Coopers Stout on a cold day but black is not my favorite color.

Nice to mix stouts, a stout one day and a Belgian Tripel or a Golden Strong Ale, light in color with a glorious warm malty aroma the next occasion.

I think I will buy the parcel of stouts on offer—some very nice chocolate and vanilla stouts there.


Hmmm chocolate stout, made one of those once.

So brewed a stout as normal, at the last 15 minute stage of the boil I added a slurry I had made of a packet of (Dutch, of course, best there is) cocoa and cold water then added a bit of boiling hot wort. When I turned the heat off under the wort I added a bar of good quality chocolate to ‘fix’ the chocolate flavor. A vanilla bean or two might have been a nice compliment to the chocolate flavor.

(One yank brewer who thought he was a kickass brewer also made a chocolate stout—he just dumped the cocoa into the boiling wort and spent hours cleaning his kettle. With my stout just the normal washout with cold water was all it took. LOL!)

As well as sipping a stout or Tripel in winter you might like to buy some pale ales—expressing your faith that winter WILL end! Heheheh sympathetic magic, best kind.  ;D ;D ;D

A honey and lemon drink is my go-to for winter

Hot lemon—lemon juice, honey, boiling water—is my go to remedy for colds.

At the Saturday afternoon (for me, Friday night for the US contingent) meetings of the internet brew club I am part of I drink a couple of beers.

I will be drinking some of the stouts from that mixed pack I ended up buying. I do like stout.

I brewed a few strong stouts but eventually realised the recipe wasn’t right. I used all pale plus half a kilo roasted malt.

That wasn’t the beer Catherine the Great drank—it was a preindustrial beer, an English product Napoleon wanted kept out of Europe. One third each of pale, amber and brown malt made up the grist of a beer closer to that Imperial Russian Stout. Todays malts have the enzymes to convert the starch of twice the weight of roasted, non-enzymatic malt.

Get the beer to 12% with grain. Since I didn’t want it drinking like Golden Syrup I added 2Kg of Blue Gum honey at en d of the boil. just took the lid off and added the honey, bucket and all, to the dark wort in the kettle. Even so took a year in a stainless steel keg (postmix keg) to get the gravity (the free sugar) down to a level it was safe to bottle.

The beer kept for a long time but when I visited Lefty in Gladstone, Qld, it was 8 years old, the last two stubbies—completely tasteless, alas! 

Diluted apple cider vinegar is my cold & flu cure.