|BACKGROUND|

This is one of those beers that falls into a category I described in an older post about how you can get caught up in an idea and design a beer around it.

Although, to be fair, the idea of a carrot juice beer isn’t entirely my own.

My homebrew club has a semi-annual event now of doing a summer solstice party where members generally focus on brewing beers that have more of a natural and harvest-y kinda theme, specifically pushing for unusual ingredients. For 2017’s bash, one of the other members ended up making a super orange, 2.4% carrot ale. Even then, he brought the last 1/2 the keg to the other annual event we have, which is the Homebrew Hang at a local gastropub, where we do samples and demos of homebrewing for anyone who donates like $5 for a ticket to come out on the patio and shoot the shit. Pretty solid deal, as it can run the whole gamut of what people bring, from oaked RIS’s to NEIPAs. But I digress, and digression is bad.

So, homebrew buddy made a super low ABV carrot ale with dried oak leaves. Between the owner of the bar and me, I’m pretty sure we crushed out most of his keg leftover from the event. However, brewfriend was willing to share his recipe with me, since I saw much more potential than what he’d done with it. I set out to make the most blinged out golden beer possible.

At the time, Bruno Mars had also just released his newest album, so driving even harder into the concept of a theme beer, I knew I had to go vahn deepah. My initial thought was that there were multiple bags of frozen golden raspberries at my dad’s, plus some gold flakes a la Goldschlager style and boom – gold beer.

Now, given some more time to percolate on the idea, the rabbit whole only went deeper. Could I use gold malts? What about gold hops? The answer to both those questions is yes. So I made a recipe.

Cue the fact that I pushed the beer back further and further on my brew schedule until last month. I saw a post from Hello Giggle’s site about glitter beer. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place. Luster powder, not gold flakes. Despite my adversity for the herpes of the art world, it was exactly what I had wanted my beer to look like. But, now I had to brew ASAP, get in early enough to ride the wave without getting completely lumped in like someone who was riding a bandwagon to be cool.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5 gallons

Mash Temp: 151 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 68(ish)%

Original Gravity: 1.066 // 16.1 P

Final Gravity: 1.020 // 5.1 P

Estimated ABV: 6.0%

IBUs: 72

Color: 14.5 EBC // 7.3 SRM

Recipe

Malts

10# Golden Promise | 80%

2# Golden Naked Oats | 16%

.5# Honey Malt | 4%

Hops

.5 oz. Nugget @ 60 min | 26 IBU

1 oz. Idaho 007 @ 20 min. | 27 IBU

1 oz. Idaho 007 @ 1 min. | 2 IBU

1 oz. Idaho 007 @ 170F Hop Steep, 10 minutes | 0 IBU

1 oz. Idaho 007 @ Dryhop (3 days contact) | 0 IBU

Yeast

Safale US-04, fermented @ 70F

Spices and Stuff

1 tablet Whirlfloc @ 15 min.

32 oz. Organic Carrot Juice @ 15 min.

2.5 Cups Golden Raspberry Juice (from 2.5# of berries) @ 15 min.

8g Edible Luster Powder

Water Shit

4 mL 88% Lactic Acid

1 tsp CaCl

|BREW LOG|

They day started off with collecting my mash liquor for the brew. While heating the almost 4 gallons of water up to the 165F strike time, I weighed and milled the grist for the batch. Slightly lower by weight than usual, the mill made short work of the grains.

After tying the brewbag into the mash tun, the water in the kettle was pretty much at temp. I added in the lactic acid and the Calcium Chloride, making sure that they were well distributed into the water, and then started the mash.

The temp for the mash was a hair shy of the target, which is okay. I decided to shoot for a slightly higher temp than usual to have some slight sweetness left in the beer to compliment all the flavors that were going to be present. Clocking in at 151F meant that the beer would be slightly on the drier side than planned, but still well within what I’d call acceptable.

I set a timer for 60 minutes, which is the typical length of time I mash for, since I don’t do an iodine test for conversion. 15 minutes into the mash, I pulled a small sample to check the pH, see if there needed to be any further adjustments. Despite the mash temp being slightly on the cool side, it was refreshing that the mash pH was very nicely tucked into the sweet spot, a tight 5.33 reading.

I returned the sample to the mash, gave it a quick stir, and allowed everything to settle back down and finish doing the damn thing.

Now, since I had a decent amount of time left on my hands, it was time to process the other special ingredients for the beer: the gold raspberries.

Most people are pretty familiar with red raspberries, but not so much it’s cousin, the golden raspberry. Typically, they have a little more sweetness and a little less tartness, retaining the flavor of the reds but not having as much of a coloring ability or being quite as pungent. They’re a little mellow, but also well rounded, despite not being as vibrant. I took 2.5# of thawed gold raspberries (picked from the back yard) and ran them through some sort of old knock-off Victorio that my dad had picked up at a yardsale. It definitely did a nice job of juicing and my forearms felt a slight burn from the workout with the manual crank. All in all, I collected about 2.5 cups of gold raspberry juice, setting it aside until later.

After the timer went off, I vorlaufed for 5 minutes before collecting about 2 gallons of wort in the brew kettle. Using the batch sparge method, I added in 4.5 gallons of water (which was adjusted for later), stirred the grains thoroughly, and allowed for a 10 minute rest to let the grain bed reform. After the rest, another small round of vorlaufing to clarify and the brew kettle was topped up to almost 7 gallons of wort pre-boil.

Now, while this isn’t technically a SMaSH beer, it’s pretty close, so I decided to have a hop bill that would be proper for one. It might be considered cheating to some people, but honestly, it’s easier to bitter with something clean and cheap when making a SMaSH and then just let the hop do its thing for the rest. In this case, I used .5 oz Warrior hops to give the beer just a little push of bitterness at the start of the boil. With the amount of Idaho 007 I had decided to use, I wanted to stay below the typical IPA threshold, only using about 3 oz. in the boil, reserving one for dryhopping. The charges were staggered in somewhat of an old school method, having done the bittering addition at 60, then 20, 1, and a steep.

With 15 minutes left in the boil, I added my tab of whirlfloc as well as the carrot juice and the gold raspberry juice into the kettle. Now, it’s worth noting that 32 oz. isn’t a number I pulled out of nowhere, since it’s basically only 4 cups of juice. After doing a little bit of digging and a little bit of math, I figured out that 1.25 pounds of carrots yields 8 oz. of carrot juice. So, if there are about 5 carrots to a pound, by a rough estimate, you’d need about 24 carrots to hit 32 oz. Told you this rabbit hole went deep.

Considering that it was adding another quarter gallon of liquid, I had pulled out that 1/4 gallon from my sparge, not wanting to over dilute my wort. I will say, immediately, the color of the wort turned to a deep amber/orange color and the basement flooded with the scent of boiled carrots. I suppose these things should have been expected, but it was still good for a laugh.

After the boil had reached it’s time, I chilled the wort down to 170F for a quick hop steep with the final ounce of hops for the day (well, batch). After holding at temp for 10 minutes, I resumed chilling the wort down. I wasn’t 100% sure if it was maybe the carrot juice lowering the pH or a really good boil or the protein in the grains, but I got a stupid good cold break out of this brew. We’re talking the likes of which I’ve never really seen before. I’d say that, by the time the temp got down to around 90F, the first few inches in the kettle were clear. Really was happy to put as little shmutz into the fermenter as possible. Finished chilling down to 68F and set up to rack.

While racking into the carboy, I grabbed a quick sample of wort for a gravity reading, which ended up coming in at 1.066, slightly higher than what it would have been without the juices, but also leaving me without a hard idea on what I’d gotten as far as efficiency from my mash. I’m going to call it 68%, since that’s about the usual and carrot juice is really low in sugar.

Using my handy-dandy oxygenation rig, I hit the brew with 60 seconds of pure O2 before pitching a pack of US-04 that I had rehydrated. From there, the ale sat with a blowoff tube to do its thing. In the end, netted 5.25 gallons of wort in the tank.

After about 5 days of fermentation, the beer seemed to quiet down, mostly being finish fermenting. Luckily, I was able to have a bottling day lined up pretty quick, so with three days left until bottling, the dryhops went in with a sanitized hop sack.

The next time I saw the beer was two week to the day after brewing it for bottling. Opening the lid of the carboy, it was a super delicious smell – a combination of apricots, yeast, and a hint of carrot, which is pretty much what I wanted.

Since I had made a smart choice on measuring and labeling the sides of the fermenters during the brewday, it was easy to estimate the yield of the batch for priming. After discounting the trub, I ended up racking a neat 5 gallons into the bottling bucking, mxing into a syrup made with 3.6 oz. (1/2 cup) of sugar in a solution, aiming for 2.3 vol/CO2 for carb. Taking a sample in the middle of the flow into the bucket, a hydrometer reading ended up at 1.020, which was slightly higher than I had planned, but only by a bit.

But wait, there’s more! Instead of simply just stirring to make sure that the sugar was evenly distributed throughout the batch, I also had to add in the final ingredient, the piece de resistance – the luster powder. Now, I’m completely aware how divisive this is. Some people are all for it. Others, very vocally against. In my opinion, if you aren’t having fun brewing, then what the fuck are you doing? After a small misunderstanding about volumes and weights and how much powder I had ordered, I ended up with 8 oz. of luster powder for the batch. Taking the advice of another redditor who had recently made a glitter beer (with one of the recipes from this blog to boot!), he suggested adding it in an ounce at a time to not “over glitter”, which is probably pretty easy to do. I might not have measured carefully, but after adding in small increments and not being as glittery as I wanted, I just cocked off and added in the entire second container I had gotten. After stirring in everything gently with a sanitized whisk, this was my reward:

It was exactly as I dreamed it’d be. From there, the day went by pretty fast. Bottling was a breeze and all that was left was to bide my time before unleashing a potable art project onto the world.

|TASTING NOTES|

I’m gonna be honest, the appearance of the beer is going to be the most impressive thing about it. Not that it’s a lackluster beer, but goddamn. It’s pretty. A literal golden ale, fit for King Midas himself. The base beer still has that nice orange/golden color, which is both lightened and amplified by the molten swirls of the gold luster. It pours with a nice 2 fingers of rocky white head that laces the glass on the way down. Given time, the luster settles out slowly, leaving just a slightly hazy beer with maybe a millimeter or two of clear-ish beer on top. Easily remedied with a quick swirl of the glass.

The nose is where the beer falls surprisingly, well, flat. There’s that English ale yeast note, which is a little bready and a little berry, and I get the faintest whiff of the hops, but it’s not an overwhelmingly pungent brew. Granted, I’m trying to do this with like 1/3 of a pint glass, so the aromas may be a little more dispersed, but this isn’t a beer where you open the bottle and the aromas assail your nostrils. It’s lowkey, trying to slide into the DM rather than sit at the bar and constantly neg you. Which I’m okay with. Like I said, I didn’t want this to be an IPA.

The taste is very reminiscent of the batch my friend in club made. It doesn’t quite have as much grassy/earthy tones, since I didn’t use the oak leaves, instead opting for a bit more fruity with the hops and raspberry high hat, while still retaining the English malt bass beat and the carrot snares. Pretty much this is a nice little drumkit bopping out a 4/4 rock beat. Everything is balanced, but nothing is amazing or mindblowing. There’s a hint of crisp bitterness at the back of the palate, but it’s closer to a light, juicy, NE-PA that you can tell your friends is healthy enough for a juice cleanse and you’re not an alcoholic for drinking at 7:30 am. It’s got a little bit of apricot and berry jam, with just a hint of earthiness from the carrot. There’s a mild sweetness that compliments the fruity tones of the beer, but stops shy of being syrup or cloying. Very balanced.

The mouthfeel is pretty spot on. It comes at a slightly lower carb, since I kinda wanted the English ale level, but it’s got a nice fullness to it. Not that it’s motor oil thick like a stout, but decidedly not thin. Supple, dare I say. Any more than a mouthful is wasteful.

While the beer is nice to drink, I think that it ultimately shines the most as a complete concept and in its appearance. It certainly has impact effect and, despite not being a super robust or overwhelmingly flavorful beer, it looks damned gorgeous, which was honestly like 85% of the goal with this one. I’m looking forward to the meeting next week and hearing how HBB feels about my bastardization of his idea.

Okay, just one more glamour shot. Because this beer is head to toe, so player.