There's a six pack in my homebrew basement with yellow caps, but no code. To get to the bottom of this mystery, I tossed one bottle in the fridge a day or two ago to let the yeast drop and the beer to cold condition a little.
As soon as I popped the cap off this evening I could smell the aroma of malts and thought, "This is my Canadian style ale that I made a few months ago (a prehopped Muntons kit to which I added Willamette and Cascade hops)." It looks like it, too. But there's another batch that I made recently that, due to sheer laziness, I waited a few days after bottling to finally label, and as a result, forgot where all the bottles were. Turns out, after the pour and taking a few sips, this is her: the English bitter.
The beer is orange-amber, and to my pleasant surprise, the diacetyl I noted in an earlier post has really died down. There's a little bit in the taste, but it's very subtle. I can taste the flinty mineralness that I attribute to the yeast, SafAle US-04, yet it's much more reserved than my last attempt at this style a few years ago. It's a balanced beer, sort of a light amber with a little honey in the aroma. The recipe is Charlie Papazian's Palace Bitter from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. It's worth noting I pitched the yeast high at around 80-81 degrees F (not recommended), but kept it in the basement in a beverage tub with cool water where it fermented at around 66 degrees F for 5 days. After that, I pulled it out of the tub for a dicaetyl rest at room temperature for about another week. The results aren't half bad.
