Tea Beer Experiment Phase 3: Bottling

We return to the saga of the tea beer. After ten days in secondary, and a quick cold-crash, it was time to bottle the tea beer.  I didn't get much in the way of aroma from any of them, but as noted, they were very cold at the time, and while that did a great job of dropping the tea and other sediment out, it also suppressed any aromas. Bottling is a pain, but fortunately I had a friend over to help, which always makes the process less onerous. Bottling three one-gallon batches is especially annoying, given that you have to clean out the bottling bucket three times, sanitize three times, clean out and sanitize the lines and the bottling wand three times, mix priming sugar three times, and each time through the whole rigmarole only nets you ten bottles of beer. The one fun part is getting to taste the intermediate results, as there is always some lost overhead when bottling.

Earl Grey

Despite warnings from some commenters that the Earl Grey's characteristic Bergamot flavor would overwhelm everything, it was pleasantly subtle. This could be due to the age of the Earl Grey leaves I used, the cold extraction (as opposed to putting it in the boil), or the amount I used. Further experimentation would be necessary to determine which of these factors were at play. It was hard to tell how much the color was affected by the tea, so it can't have been particularly dramatic. As was true with all the other beers, the base beer flavor was definitely still very prominent. The sweetness from the honey malt and the citrusy Cascade hops were front and center, and that works particularly well here. After all, who doesn't like a little honey and lemon in their Earl Grey tea?

Jasmine Oolong

Of all these experimental batches, this one came with the most preconceived notions. For those of you fortunate enough to have access to Elysian Brewing's Avatar Jasmine IPA, you know the flavors work remarkably well together. That's actually the only IPA that my wife actively enjoys (there are a few others she will tolerate). As with when I make the tea on its own, the rehydrated tea leaves swelled up in the carboy. The taste was a big wallop of jasmine right up front, but the base beer flavor still ultimately comes through very nicely.

Thai Tea

The Thai tea beer was orange.
Some leaves also escaped at racking.

This batch represented the most "out there" of the experiments. Thai tea is usually enjoyed with sweetened condensed milk, and the tea leaves I used actually had some sweetness added already. I'm not sure whether this was fermentable or not, but I didn't perceive a major difference in flavor from that sweetness, so it was either too small to notice, or fermented out (or both). What I did notice, different from the other two batches, was the intense color imparted by the Thai tea. This beer is orange. They say you taste beer first with your eyes, and brewers employ myriad techniques to intentionally alter the appearance of a beer. So I'm actually kind of excited by this alone. The flavor was a bit muddled, though. The spices from the Thai tea were there, but not in a particularly distinct fashion. Some of the tea leaves managed to make it into the bottling bucket (unlike the other batches), so we'll have to see whether any ultimately make it into the glass. I guess that can just be chalked up to "authenticity" or something.

Overall Impressions

I'm excited about all three of these beers. I got ten bottles out of each batch, as expected, and primed them to carbonate up to about 2.5 volumes of CO₂. That's a reasonable amount for an American Pale Ale, which is the rough style I aimed for for the base beer. I'm really curious to see what carbonation will do to the flavor, and what the beers will look like in the glass. I think the Thai tea flavors may "pop" a lot more with carbonation, as it tends to do that in general. I also will get to see what the head retention looks like and whether there are any major differences between the various teas in that regard. Stay tuned for the fourth and final phase: an honest-to-goodness tasting.