The lights are playing tricks with the camera, the beer is nowhere near that dark.
That pilsener I brewed a few months back, you remember the one? Yeah? Ok. Well somebody’s had it in the lagering keg in the fridge for a month, and somebody has been taking far too frequent samples. Somebody should write a short impartial review on their own beer wouldn’t your say?
2014 Pilsner
It comes out of the keg fairly bright and a little pale despite the decoctions. Carbonation has been allowed to be higher than I usually pursue, but it works well with a pilsener. The whole thing is capped be a merengue-ish lofting head that demands to be allowed a minute to settle before it lets you top off your pint.
Aroma, this is the interesting bit. When rackiing into the keg I noticed it had a banana bread type aroma. Not the typical yeasty isoamyl acetate banana type thing, but a grandma’s kitchen banana bread…. er….. type thing. I think it is attributed to the floor malted pilsener malt and the pacific hallertau hops…. er… maybe. Anyhow those aromas have faded a little in the lagering phase, but I doubt they will dissapear.
Taste, as with most pilseners, follows the aroma pretty closely. Doughy, bready (little banana), grainy malt. It starts with a tinge of sweetness, then has the rush of continental malt, and finishes with an unusual hop character thats spicy, earthy, and has hints of lime-like tang (or at least thats how I get it, if I didnt read that as a descriptor of the hops than I doubt I would have come up with that). The mouthfeel is light, crisp and spritzy with the medium-highish level of carbonation, but it does have a small hint of fullness in the finish with a whisper of sweetness.
If I brew this again next year I think I’ll change the hopping rates for one, and give it a nice long vigorous boil in the decoction to drive those rich malliard reactions and give it a touch more color and malt complexity.
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