Fermenting: 24/10/2005 Bottled: 07/11/2005
Another can from Eastern Suburbs Brewmakers. This one had an amazing smell out of the can – smoked hickory/beer. Should be a complex flavour, completely different to anything we’ve tried before.
The perfect beer for a BBQ, with the added fragrance of the campfire.
ESB website
That campfire quote seems like a load of rubbish, but if you can tell the difference between a smoked cheese and a normal one, or smoked ham, or a dark smoky single malt scotch as opposed to a blend or Speyside one, I think you might be on the right track to enjoying this beer.
Other people might just see it as beer with some BBQ sauce tipped in.
Bottling notes: Incredibly thick and creamy head, requiring a 50mL top up of each bottle once it had subsided. Taste is hard to describe – most definately not sweet, and would accompany food well, I think.
Tasting notes: Not the most popular beer I’ve ever made. Strong smoky taste is a distraction, but does go well with certain foods. Hardly a session beer, but good for an alternative. 5/10
Was it much thicker than the kilkenny? Have you ever had a head before bottling before?
Reasonably comparable to the kilkenny in terms of thickness of the head. Better than the stouts on bottling.
Head is formed by either being too rough with the liquid, or just by the final gravity being so high that merely exiting the bottling wand gets it so agitated it froths up.
In this case it is merely the thickness and body of the beer that caused the head.
I’m on a diet and off beer-tasting for a while (again), Dan. Much wailing and nashing of teeth.
H.L. Mencken