Red Rock Brewing company is another brew pub in SLC. I think they are the less famous of the 2. Their food was really good but this isn't a food blog (Note to self: Make a food blog) so let's get down to the business at hand, beer. We actually went to Red Rock twice. The first time I got an Oatmeal Stout and then saw a special edition Belgian beer aged in oak in cork finished bomber bottles. It was $15 so I did what anyone would do, I didn't order the one I wanted and ended up spending $10 on beer I didn't really want and obsessed about the Belgian for 2 days until I went back and got it. But we'll get there. First the oatmeal stout. It was good, the problem with that assessment is I don't know why. It wasn't complex, there was no coffee or toasty malts, no cocoa or burnt flavors. What it did have was a nice full oatmeal mouthfeel and some residual malt sweetness. It was very "drinkable" to borrow a phrase from beer commercials. I could easily put away a 6 pack of this stout and might go buy it if it were available around here.
The second beer I got was an Irish red ale. I wasn't expecting much but what I got was a really well balanced malty ale with a good amount of floral hop aroma and resinous and floral hop flavor. I really liked this beer too and would pay money for it again.
So why did I say I was going to be mean? Like I said I obsessed about the oak aged Belgian: Reve they called it, French for dream. More like Utah-ian for crap.
They wanted to make a high alcohol beer fine, but there are several factors you must be mindful of when doing so: 1) You need to use malt, you can't just pour in a crap-ton of corn sugar to boost your alcohol or it will become cidery, 2) If you use a yeast that leaves a ton of sugar behind you need hops or something to cut the sweetness 3) If you're going to use Belgian yeast, pick the right one. They failed at every one of these. This beer was a mess. Aroma was hard cider. Taste was so sweet that even my non-beer drinking friends that tried it remarked on how sweet it was. It also tasted like cider with Belgian yeast it in. The cloying sweetness paired with the thickness made it so I couldn't even finish the bottle (that and I had a flight to catch). They needed to use more malt or just make the alcohol content lower, pick a Belgian yeast with a higher attenuation, add less corn sugar and maybe add some more hops or some kind of spices to increase the complexity of this beer also if you're going to age it in an oak cask maybe age it long enough so I can taste some hit of oak. I got nothing from this, maybe the sugar burned out my palate early or maybe it wasn't there. But if you are going to hand number each bottle of a beer take your time aging it and do it right.
Part 3 will conclude this series and cover odds and ends I had in bottles.
No comments:
Post a Comment