This post is a little late but Summer is coming to a close and we’ve been busy. Actually, I have been busy working out the kinks in my brew process and getting some brewing on… But all that’s a story for a different post and video. This weeek is a homebrew swap from Matthew in PA!!! He sent us two interestingly flavored beers. Check it out!

The first beer we tasted was an Orange flavored Kolsch. Now to be honest I love orange flavor in my wheat beers. I was a tad apprehensive about it in a Kolsch. This beer demonstrates that a great fermentation can break through most weird ideas and still be great. Drinkable beer wins all the time in my book. The light malt and hop character in this beer really balanced well with the orange flavoring. We really enjoyed it. The only detractor was that it wasn’t very Kolsch like. This is likely due to the lack of Koslch yeast in the ferment. But that doesn’t matter really. When a beer is great and easy to drink… its great regardless of the label on it.

The second beer was a chocolate cherry porter. Of course, I have commented that Porter is often the “toilet bowl” beer style. The one that no one can leave alone and just brew porter. If you are going to doctor up a Porter you can’t go wrong however but putting some chocolate in there. This beer had a noticable cocoa nose and flavor. John commented that the cocoa addition even had a hot cocoa like mouthfeel effect. Still dry and crisp like a beer, but the cocao powder was hitting the right receptors on his tongue to make him think of hot chocolate in the winter time. I would have liked this beer to be a bit bigger and bolder. The cherry didn’t really come through. Which is tough to do without getting a cough syrup thing going on. Overall it was a decent beer with a solid English Brown Porter background. It was certainly worthy of conversation.

Big thanks to Matthew for sending us his brews. We are thinking about the logistics of the next swap so stay tuned if you want to trade some beers again.

Cheers and BREW ON!