gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
indeed
The Coffee Thread
- Thread starter matthewr
- Start date
indeed
The Captain
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Hi KrisW, aha this chimes with me too then. I can't quite imagine what 'grassy' might be like (!?) but I never knew lighter roasts were, perhaps & this seems true from my pov too, not great with the espresso method.
I've just made the best cup yet, with Monmouth El Salvador medium beans.. & it's all caramelly, too fruity, urgh.. it just doesn't work. 'Posh bathwater' this one!
So it seems others concur that light roasts aren't their cuppa either. This is enough info for me to think only medium-dark, to dark roasts work then as a rule with the espresso process. Never knew this before/ news to me.
Thanks, Capt
Seeker_UK
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
May I recommend getting some medical advice?
gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
herbaceous without pungency - we used to describe it as a bit like parsley without the bitterness - think of a taste on your palate of freshly mown grass.
I used to do this flavour profile when I ran gin tastings.
matthewr
spɹɐʍʞɔɐq spɹoɔǝɹ ɹnoʎ sʎɐld
Grassy is vegetal, insipid, thin and sour like you brewed some grass clippings and is always a bad indicator. Make a weak under-extracted coffee and you will get grassy. Normally you fix it by some combination of adding more coffee and/or extracting more.
Good coffee flavour wheel tool here : https://www.baristahustle.com/app-archive-main/the-coffee-compass/
gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
not always
Is that really a beer though, or is it a beer to which something else has been added post-fermentation? Alcoholic drinks are given a lot of leeway when it comes to food labelling, and I have seen some of the smaller brewers abusing this to sell what is basically beer mixed with fruit juices while giving the impression that the fantastic notes of {whatever} are down to their brewing prowess...
gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
yes the raspberries are added in fermentation
I'd call all this sort of thing a beer based drink. No problem, any more than soft drinks manufacturer s selling "blue raspberry" flavour soda even though there's no such thing.
The Captain
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The Captain
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Hey that's a splendid ditty. Really nerdy. I can't find "bathwater" though.
Not that I have any choice tbh; nearing the last 1/2 of my 4th Monmouth bag, I'm looking fwd to my tesco 'italian style' cheapo beans again & my 1st decent cup for months.. these being only 'espresso suitable' beans I can afford.
El Salvador. Crikey this is probably the least heard of country in the world, possibly lovely laos coming in 2nd. I had to remind myself it was even a country!
I think you're right. I had to look it up, I was thinking "isn't that just the capital city of somewhere in South or central America, somewhere like Nicaragua?"
Yep. I call them “beer cocktails”. For me, anything that has flavours added at the end of fermentation can’t be called beer.
I don’t have a problem with brewers doing this (they are businesses after all), but I do have a problem when it’s not clearly highlighted on the packaging - it takes a lot more effort and better ingredients to get a particular flavour by brewing fermented grains and hops than it does from making a simple beer base and then flavouring it after the fact. Not highlighting the addition of ingredients encourages larger poorer-quality producers to leverage their volume to undermine companies who are doing things well. One specific problem arises with “grapefruit” beers: if these contain actual grapefruit juice they can interfere with a range of prescription medications, even those that are generally okay with alcohol.
There’s a similar problem in wines, with some supermarket wines being mixed with chocolate, vanilla and other flavours after maturation in order to create a “distinctive” taste from ordinary wine. EU food rules say these have to be labelled as “wine cocktails”, but there’s no rule on how visibile that definition has to be, so it’s usually on the back near the barcode.
gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
any specific examples of breweries you know are doing this?
If you buy a wine with added chocolate/vanilla etc cocktail you deserve any side affects they cause.
Lots of the Americans do it. If a beer is very “sweet and fruity”, that’s usually the first clue it has been post-flavoured. Those exotically-flavoured “Milkshake” IPAs are nearly all post-flavoured, and there’s a creeping trend, again American, of adding things like hazelnut or caramel to imperial stouts post-fermentation to give them a bigger sweet hit (the American palate seems to have an insatiable appetite for sweetness). The wording on the label can be vague, like “with the addition of X,Y and Z”, which blurs the exact time of addition, but some stuff like fruit juice or caramel is obviously added post-fermentation because it’s easily digested by yeast.
Lots of these trends start in the USA, then come East, and I’ve spotted a couple of Irish independent breweries dabbling in this kind of thing: Brú’s “Urban Jungle” range appears to be post-flavoured, and Rye River’s Grapefruit IPA is too, although it’s not very clearly stated (surprisingly bad form, given the medication implications of grapefruit juice). Both of these companies are well-established here and produce some very good beers, but I think things will get nasty if the trend catches on, because post-flavouring is an ideal way for large-scale industrial brewers to hide low ingredient costs. Small producer’s costs are dominated by capital and labour so they have little incentive to skimp on the bulk ingredients like grains and hops, but things like flavourings are relatively expensive for them, as the quantities needed are very small at their scale of production.
Not all sweet, fruity beers are post-flavoured: traditional fruit beers like the original Kriek lambic have the fruit added to the malt in the fermentation vessel, and older type of chocolate stout where the cocoa is added to the malt before mashing are true beers. But there are more recently introduced products that do the same trick of pumping up the product with fruit syrups or juices at the bottling stage.
@wacko - “cocktail” is the legal term. The amount of flavouring added is quite low, but it’s enough to provide a “strong note of...” to the final product. Legally, however, addition of flavours at bottling means it’s not wine anymore, so they have to say so. Regulations on beer are much less strict, because there’s a lot more diversity in beermaking traditions across Europe.
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I'm not sure that this is the case in UK food labelling law. I know that alcoholic beverages get an easier ride than most food, and I'm not an expert in brewing. I'm more standard food. Food labelling regs in the UK DO have to have the "name of the food" on the pack and this name has to describe the food in plain words. The "fancy name" doesn't count because until you have had one you don't know what a Lion Bar is. It doesn't have lions in it, after all. The name of the food is "chocolate coated wafer biscuit with caramel" or whatever it is. There are "field of view" requirements, in that the name of the food, pack size, storage and BB/UB date have to be in the same FOV. This does generally put them on the back label, so the product "CrunchyTreats" will have the fancy name on the front but the "name of the food" has to be "cheese flavour baked wheat flakes" or whatever they actually are. In the case of a beer that was brewed with (say) cocoa beans they would declare this but it's still a beer. If it was say a Buck's Fizz then the name would probably have to be "a blend of fruit juice and white wine" or a flavoured wine a "raspberry and kiwi flavour white wine". The regs are different for alcoholic beverages though, the rules have moved on since I was expert in them and I was never au fait with the alcohol bit anyway.
The “name of food” is where you’ll see whether beer is “wheat beer” or “wheat beer with added ...”, but on many beers that will be on the back label, or down the seam of the can print, where it’s not very noticeable.
Alcoholic beverages do appear to be exempt from at least some of these requirements - last time I cared to look, I saw that liqueurs did not have to list their ingredients in the way that other foods or drinks do, and until recently beer didn’t have to provide nutritional information. (Both may now have changed - I’m not in this business at all, so it was only something I noticed, then asked someone about). The ingredients list on beer has to follow the same rules as other drinks, but that won’t tell you whether something was added before or after the beer was brewed.
(I’m Irish, but our food labelling laws, like the UK’s, are mostly the result of five decades worth of European Directives, and before that they were always at least as strict as the UK’s, given that the UK is the largest market for Irish food and drink.)