I cracked opened a bottle of my latest homebrew this weekend, Northern Brewer’s La Petite Orange or as I like to call it the Little Orange:
First off, this has to be the most inconsistently bottle conditioned batch of beer that I have had the pleasure of drinking. Some bottles almost foam out the top upon opening. Other bottles barely have enough carbonation to produce a thing ring of head around the interior rim of the glass. I do not get what happened with this batch, but it is one more push toward force carbonating my beer with a keg system.
The estimates from iBrewmaster put the alcohol at 5.37% and the bitterness at 19. It’s a little hard to believe the estimate of the alcohol content because after a couple of these you start to feel things get soft around the edges.
One of my fears was that the yeast used—Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey—is known for producing banana esters at higher temps. Naturally, I decided to brew this recipe when we went through a period of three weeks where the temperature barely ticked below ninety degrees and commonly topped out closer to 100. We were fried and I was afraid my beer was going to come out like mofungo. Good news is that my fears were not realized and the beer does not taste of bananas. Whew!
Note to anyone using Wyeast 1214: it’s a slow start. However, once this batch got going it was explosive. I was afraid my blowoff preventer was not going to be able handle the volume of gas being belched out.
I really wanted to like this beer. It seemed, from the description of the recipe, that it would really hit the spot as a late summer/early fall beer to drink on those days when the temperatures drop as the sun sinks below the horizon. You know, something to bridge the season between the lawnmower beers of summer and the “heavier” beers of the cooler months. It just did not come together in a way that I found satisfying.
The real problem that I had with this beer was that it was too sweet without any accompanying bitterness or body. It sort of reminded me of the honey ales that friends have made where the sweetness of the honey added later in the brewing process overwhelms any other flavors. With only 1 ounce of Styrian Goldings hops to provide bitterness, you are not likely to get much balance against six pounds of malt extract and a pound of candi sugar.
If I were to brew this recipe again, I would opt for a more potent hop or more hops in general to provide some bitter balance to the sweetness of the malt and sugar in the wort.
Next up is a batch of American Amber Ale and a Chinook IPA. Stay tuned to see if I go the keg route and skip the horror that is two hours of my life spent bottling.
My Green Misadventure 