|BACKGROUND|

In the necessity of experimentation, sometimes I want to test drive things without committing to a whole 5-6 gallon batch of beer.

The pitfalls of this end up being that I don’t usually brew at my home apartment, rather at my father’s house, meaning that all the fancy, “real” equipment is typically not in immediate access.

But, in the words of Bear Grylls: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. And so is the inaugural post of the “One-Shot” series – whatever nonsense experiments that are even too weird or theoretical to commit for a full batch, rather for a jerry-rigged one gallon trial run using pretty much what I have available in the kitchen. Essentially, this “series” is full blown experimentation with as little accountability and documentation as possible.

Just so we’re clear, this is about as by the seat of the pants that I’m willing to admit. This isn’t actually the first attempt I’ve done at a 1 gallon batch, though. I *did* do a test run of seeing the application of using cacao juice for my buddy, Steve, before committing 100% to doing a batch using it. Before I had even considered making Oricha, he wanted something viable to be able to shop around to breweries as the brand ambassador. That’s where I came in. For that, I actually did two beer: one was a cacao juice French saison and the other was a cacao juice NE pale ale with El Dorado & Galaxy hops. Both were quite successful, despite my trials and tribulations of the entire process.

While I had intended to make posts about them on the blog, I never really got around to it, mainly due to trying to not 100% broadcast what was going on, but also because it was… well, a miracle that they turned out well. But, it did the job for both of us. So, having set the bar fairly low for myself, I knew that I could at least pilot batch some beers and would only hate myself somewhat. And that leads up to this brew.

The actual inspiration for this beer, however, is much simpler to explain.

One of the more popular and long running channels on YouTube is Good Mythical Morning, a quirky morning show that’s hosted by Rhett & Link, two guys who are also known for their guerrilla-style TV show Commercial Kings (which is the origin of that sweet, vintage “Nope, Chuck Testa” meme). Through a foray of strange games and talking points, many of which are at their own expense, the guys have managed to run their show for over 7 years and 15 seasons.

Despite their brand of humor leaning towards the wholesome and family friendly side, with the addition of UBC contributor and podcast host Jordan Morris to the crew came the invention of my favorite character on the show: Cotton Candy Randy.

In stark contrast to the typical tune, CCR is a dark, depraved, and off-color character, essentially a foil to the status quo. So much so, in fact, that some fans of the show actually revile him. Personally, I think he’s fucking amazing.

Much like all sorts of odd and bizarre things that intrigue and inspire me, it would only be appropriate to make a CCR beer.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 1 gallon

Mash Temp: 154 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: Trash (like 40%)

Original Gravity: 1.064 // 15.7 P

Final Gravity: 0.999 // – 0.26 P

Estimated ABV: 8.5%

IBUs: 38 IBU

Color: Blue

Recipe

Malts

1# Floor-Malted Pilsner | 66%

.25# White Wheat | 17%

.25# Malted Oats | 17%

Hops

1 oz. Hallertau Mittlefruh (2.4% AA) @ 30 min. | 28 IBU

Yeast

1x packet of US-04 English Ale

Spices and Stuff

3/4# Great Western Cotton Candy Mix (Sucrose + color + flavor)

1 pack Charms Fluffy Stuff Cotton Candy

8 oz. Strawberries

|BREW LOG|

To start with, I essentially have a two gallon pot as a brew kettle and no other equipment. By default, this means that I’m going to be employing a pretty janky BIAB method.

I also have absolutely 0 idea what my water profile is, let alone any way to check pH, and my thermometer is an old school analog one. Combine that with my heat source being whatever low BTU rating that my poor old gas stove can put out and you can already feel the awkwardness and shame coming on.

I really only had to go to two shops for my ingredients: one being my LHBS and the other being the Restaurant Store, where I managed to snag a 3 pound carton of unspun blue raspberry cotton candy sugar. Because if you’re making some nightmare fuel based off of a cotton candy demon, you better have cotton candy in the beer.

Using some muslin sacks I got at the LHBS, I started my mash, attempting to hold the temperature somewhere around 152F. I’m sure that went over about as well as the Bay of Pigs, but at the time, it seemed like it was working. After 60 minutes, I pulled out the grains, gave the bags a good squeeze, and topped up the water in the pot with the math I was supposed to. Well, most of it, anyways. Taking a gravity reading pre-boil to see how things went, I was greeted with a laughable 1.010 – I didn’t even think that an extraction that bad was possible. So, in my best efforts, I just added in an extra 1/4# of cotton candy sugar to my already measured 1/2#, ensuring that this was mostly going to be a sugar water beer. C’est la vie.

Seeing as how low the gravity was, while I had initially planned just to do a 30 minute boil, I opted to shoot for a 60 minute boil in an attempt to concentrate the wort into some semblance of an acceptable gravity. At around the 45 minute mark, I decided it was business time and added in the 3/4# of blueified sugar. Much to my chagrin, the effects were what was expected – shit was blue. At least one aspect of the batch was coming up Milhouse.

In another 15 minutes, I dropped in the ounce of Hallertau hops, which ended up turning the beer from its lovely azure blue into a bit more of a dark teal. I mean, it makes sense, seeing as how there was all the green hop matter just rolling around, in lieu of having the handy dandy hop spider to keep anything contained. Just another point I was looking forward to dealing with in the near future. The boil finished and I swamped the beer in my kitchen since using the tried-and-true method of ye olde ice bath to chill my wort.

While the whole pot was taking a nice little dip in the sink, I started to prep the strawberries. In lieu of how I typically like to process them, for expedience and a lightened workload, I opted to just slice the frozen berries, make a quick compote of sorts on the stove, and then add that to the carboy. From there, I added in the bag of pre-spun cotton candy as well, which was a bit of a sticky situation. Turns out that the cotton candy does not go softly into the good gallon carboy and really just gummed up in the neck. However, I soldiered through and ended up getting it all in, minus a few pinches for “quality control”. After everything was in, I threw some plastic wrap on top and slapped it in the freezer to drop the berry/candy mixture to a cooler temp.

Eventually, the swamped pot of wort came down to a comfortable 70F, meaning it was time to get cracking. I removed the carboy from the freezer and, with a sanitized funnel, carefully poured the wort into the carboy, reserving a small amount for doing a gravity reading. Rough estimate, I got about 3/4 gallon after the entire boil, which means I had a pretty substantial boil, looking at the fact I started with about 2 gallons worth of liquid. Checking the gravity reading with my hydrometer, it came in at 1.072, which was also quite a bit higher than I had initially planned. Since I also wanted a higher yield on the batch, I added 1/4 gallon (4 cups) of filtered water from my Brita into the carboy, topping it up to a full gallon. By my math, this diluted the wort down to a respectable 1.064, which was perfectly fine in my book.

From there, I pitched the whole packet of US-04 into the carboy, which was slightly overkill, strapped in the air lock, and put the beer in my Harry Potter Hidey-Hole beside my fridge, since the temperature would be relatively constant and the beer would be completely shielded from sunlight. Checking on it the next morning, I could see a large amount of my turquoise death juice had settled out and the strawberries had risen to the top, as fruit is want to do. But, knowing that everything was chugging away happily, I left to go to work for like 12 hours. Upon my return, which is not pictured, I found what I could only describe as the aftermath of a Smurf snuff film gone wrong: The airlock had gotten clogged and forced its way off, despite the painter’s tape, with just blue krausen and berries all over the towel. Turns out the towel was a smart move. Not using a blowoff tube was not. I cleaned up as much as I could with a sanitized cloth, got the airlock cleaned out and refilled, and then used duct tape this time. With what seemed like the majority of the problem out of the way, I didn’t have any more explosions, but the fermentation definitely did fill the airlock with blue goo again before fermenting was done.

After a week and a half, were most everything settled out and I had the chance to acquire and autosiphon and bottling bucket, I decided it was time to see where this abomination was at. The beer had cleared significantly, and lost a surprising amount of its beep blue color, but the reading was hilarious. Despite my attempts to have a not super dry beer, it had absolutely fermented past my goal FG and settled comfortably at about .998, meaning the batch was about 8.5% alcohol (My notes somehow say I got a reading of 1.010, but I have absolutely no records of this).

So, since the beer was obviously finished fermenting, I racked it entirely over into the bottling bucket, ending up with about 3/4 gallon once more, since I lost a surprising amount to trub, yeast, and strawberry remnants, and made a priming solution with .4 oz of , you guessed it, the blue sugar. Pretty much, I was aiming for the 1.9 vol/CO2 for a typical English pale ale. This was also partly to try and imbue more blue color back into the beer, as well as flavor, since it tasted, well… like a fruity English pale ale and I wanted this to be borderline offensively blue tasting. This still wasn’t quite blue enough for me. Against my better judgement, and most of my ethos in brewing, I added in a few drops of blue food coloring. I mean, with using the CC sugar already, in for a penny, in for a pound. That absolutely got the job done – maybe a little too well – as it ended up a little bit darker than I had actually wanted. We live and we learn.

I bottled the beer and then continued on the process. Per usual, I had made some labels for the batch, with the intention of “if this doesn’t turn out to be complete dogshit, I’m sending this in for internet fame” as a motivation. I mimicked the label mostly after an old Pyramid label, and was lucky enough to find a caricature from a fellow mythical beast named Ben on Instagram. He was cool enough to let me use it for the label. From there, I decided that only true opulence was acceptable, so I not only waxed the bottles, I double-dipped them with both pink and blue wax – only appropriate for a cotton candy beer. Thus, it was only a matter of time to see if I had managed to make something drinkable.

|TASTING NOTES|

Pouring it out of the bottle, an unknowing person would most likely be shocked and possibly appalled. It pour a deep azure out of the bottle, with a light seafoam colored head. Beyond that, there’s isn’t a whole lot going on. The head retention is exactly the greatest, but I’m not going to be picky about this.

Sticking your nose in, the beer lulls you into a false sense of security – it’s not unpleasant. Mostly fruity, which is no surprise, but there’s some malt hanging out and a little bit of spice and a bit of an English pale ale hint. I expected “blue” and “candy”, which there’s definitely some candy sneaking in there, but it’s not offensive.

However, the moment of truth was tasting it and… it’s not horrible. For what it is, dare I say, it’s actually pretty decent. True to form, it tastes like cotton candy, so blue and strawberry, which is to be expected. It has a decent mouthfeel and sweetness, despite that it should be bone dry, and the Hallertau gave it a nice beer-y backbone to keep it in check. I’m not saying I want a pint of it, but I’d probably be okay drinking like 8-10 oz. comfortably.

Even with the mouthfeel, despite being a sub-1.000 fermentation, it doesn’t feel overly thin. The carbonation level was pretty subdued as well, which might have a part to play in that, but it’s pleasant. I’m guessing the oats managed to do a little something, at least.

I opened a bottle of this at my employee holiday party at work and most of us were pretty intrigued that this managed to turn out as well as it did. It’s pretty much exactly what I set out to make, barring a few hiccups here and there. I’m not going to pretend like this is a great beer, because it’s not. It’s fine, but it’s more a fun concept than an actual awesome batch. This is mostly novelty, like Pepsi Blue. Since it did turn out to be pretty drinkable, along with being a fun novelty, I ended up sending some bottles to Rhett & Link over at GMM. At this moment, I have no official tasting notes, but I have 100% proof that they did, in fact, get it and seem genuinely cool with the idea. Hopefully it’ll still make it onto the show and I’ll finally have someone else to talk about the beers I brew on here, aside from just myself, but that still remains to be seen. All I have for now is confirmation that there are two bottles in their possession.

And, as always, the actual label.