A Year of Craft Beer, Vol. 4, Wiss Brau Mocha MaryAnne.

This may happen on occasion.  My vision may be too blurred Friday afternoon after getting home from work and being fairly "haggered and gruff" {-new beer name for Wiss Brau, I claim it-} and it being all too easy to have an awesome English style ale on tap at my convenience that I partake on a few of these fine beverages and am caught unawares at the lack of cold bottled beers in my mini-fridge for this endeavor of learning for me.  I'm not too distraught though as I find Mocha MaryAnne to be drinkable year round.  Really, I don't care about pilsners in summer.  I like dark beer! Although there are much more thirst quenching beers for those 60 degree F plus days where I have to don shorts!  For me, it's ale.  I do enjoy lagers and pils, but it's ale.  Mocha MaryAnne is ale.  She's dark, she's lively, and her booty is bountyful!

Here is my half drunk Mocha MaryAnne.  Just the way I like her!  :

 



This is where I parallel my critique with Weird Science:

I first created Mocha MaryAnne with a pair of tighty whities on my head... Nope, I didn't do that.  Actually this is my third attempt with this beer which represents, in some fashion, a chocolate stout.  One of my faves is Youngs Double choccy stout, but I haven't gotten it yet.  The correct formulation of the beer I mean.  I could try and google it and get a recipe, but... I dunno, I think it better to actually try on my own without someone telling me how.  I think they add a ton of lactose.

Anyway, this wound up being a ten gallon batch and it turned out that the beer recipe was sacrificed to learning how to do a ten gallon batch AND doing a second runnings Small bier with the grains.  That is how this one went.  Plus I started a new job with a new routine and time management was much different.  All in all, it's a good beer.  It's still young.  Tastes it.  And evenly more so in the keg as I don't think it conditioned long enough and taste a tiny hint of the priming sugar.  The bottles are older now and I am sure taste quite different.  I gave most of them away and might cellar the rest until this summer when I grow weary of humidity and dream of crisp clean COLD air from canada that has not been laiden with soot and chemicals from the lower half of the continent and desire a hearty dark brown ale.  Foulweather Press,  you know what I am talking about right?  Dirty black beer that will leave you sweaty, disoriented, and panting on your bed opposite of the headrest sprawled on your belly muttering something about "If there is a God..."  The dirty harlot wooed you with her sweet talk, and ruined you with an extensive session of euphoria and gets up and leaves you in the morning while you are sleeping!  Spawn of Satan Stout (gonna have to copyright that one too, sorry).  Shedevil Stout (yet once again, my drunken intellectual property Wuh ha ha ha!) 

So!  Mocha MaryAnne, other than being my (stealing from Donovan's intellectual property in which he confesses that "Brown Eye'd Girl" was actually "Brown Skinned'girl" -Westwood One Radio Show, circa 1990) ultimate fantasy, is really a Stout.  I may have tweaked the ingredients a little to make her a Russian Imperial Stout (she is a Goddess after all) and added a twist of ginger to her profile.

I'm sitting here trying to get a smell from her after the third beer and it's not happening.  I have kind of a weird relationship with beer in as I have a gluten intolerance or possibly mild celiacs and beer make me feel really good mentally, but physically she beats me up.  I'm not old or weak, just weird!
But alas, my nose sometimes shuts down.  Sinus Swelling.  MaryAnne smells like a stout!  Ginger was apparent in the first two batches, but only a little in this one.  I tried making ginger tea and adding at bottling.  It worked, and pretty good, but the amount I used was light.

Tell me what you think a porter or a stout should taste like.  Personally I think it is just a stronger version of a brown ale.  Not a different entity, but a version two or three steps darker and heavier than a brown.  Mocha MaryAnne is roasty foremost, in my mind, a mild english bitterness that begins well after the beer rolls over the tongue, with chocolate and coffee hints carried along with it like a mining car in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Part II  and ending with coffee laden Kent Goldings hops.

Out of the keg the carbonation is fine, I like a little bit more, just me, otherwise it's more than acceptable.  The bottle is more effervescent.  I think that I had a couple dirty bottles...wait, that was last run that I served at Barry's Homebrew Christmas party... they tasted like Chipotle of all things!  They were a freaking mistake and they tasted f@cking awesome!  OK Shedevil Stout is now a Imperial Russian Chipotle Stout and he who doth not like thine inspiration shall NOT drink with the Devil but can have boring old distilled water with the angels in LA LA LAND and look at pretty flowers while I'm surfing 150'F steaming hot barrels during the day and getting red hot pokers upon my jacksie at night!  You boring Feckers!  Sidetracked...sorry, that is what my brown skinned girl does to me.

Not much lacing.  She doesn't need lace to look good!  What froth there is is (two is's in a row and I meant it) ... what froth there is is a almost rosey brown and lasts half way through the kegged beer.  Bottle, IDK  I should have done a comparison, still can, but f@ck it, I'm happy!  That is all that really matters isn't it?  You should only be concerned to as what you think of a beer, not what other's think.  You won't be happy that way!  Drink what you like and pay what you think is fair for a beer that you like.  Most of all, Relax, Drink a Homebrew!  

-Fish