St. Patty's Beer

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

So my Irish Red turned out a little more red than I thought (that's it on the left). It also tasted a little different from what I thought it would as well. Don't get me wrong - it tastes great just different. It was rather light but smooth with an almost sweet flavor. As I haven't made this style before it's hard to assess how my little additions affected the recipe, but here's a go:

1) The toasted malt. This beer had a little something extra to it. The flavor was nice and round so I'm going to say the added specialty grains helped out.
2) The added hops. I'm not sure about this one. I think the extra hops might have pushed it slightly out of balance. I noticed this more on the fresher beer, so maybe it's ok now. Still it's no copper ale so further thought is needed.

3) The food coloring. Total success! The beer had a nice dark green color with green foam (middle picture). Next time it might be worth trying 1 drop of blue food coloring to get it a little lighter.

We had a fun St. Patty's party! Saturday we had people down for green beer, kegged stout, faux ruebens, shots of whiskey (thanks to tito) and irish cream, and other snacks and what not that Noel put together. Plus we finally got to break in our new bar stools and outdoor fireplace.

Last night we were pretty low key. Had ruebens again and watched Darby O'Gill and the Little People. I tried mixing the irish red and stout to make a black and tan (top right pic), which didn't look great but tasted awesome. Noel cracked into the wine Jason and Corrie brought over saturday that we, as crappy hosts, forgot to open.