Competition Season is upon us!

The Brewers at Natsmile Ales will soon be working double-time to produce both quality and quantity amounts of beer for the upcoming festival season. NATALIPA will definitely be riding the circut as well as our HOPESB. Others will be sent off when they are available. The first competition is Raleigh in March. Hopefully we can claim a blue ribbon and then brag about it for a hundred years like that other famous blue-ribbon beer. Just kidding. We'll never be as tasty as an ice-cold Pabst Blue Ribbon. Mmmhhh, mmmhhh.

On a less sarcastic note, Head Brewer Ben Boven recently rediscovered true English IPA's and remembered how delicious they are, so we'll be attempting our first one real soon.

Oh, yeah. The UBU clone we attempted? We found out the recipe was way off (who would've thought you couldn't trust the first hit google gives you?) It turned out pretty good; kind of an Imperial ESB, but definitely not the right recipe, which we discovered later we had all along. Oh well, it's on tap now and tasty, if not hazy as all hell.

Cheers!

Update from the brewery

Whew. First, what beers are around?

Well, Our Chocolate Raspberry Stout is on tap right now, but running out fast!

Next up will be NataLIPA, which is of course a different blend of malts and hops every time until we get it just perfect, like our namesake. (shameless plug to score points with the wife)

Next weekend we will unveil our first clone in quite a while, UBU Strong Ale based on the Lake Placid Brewery's flagship beer. Ubu is a very hoppy red ale. We had to use substitute hops as two out of the original recipe's three varieties were unattainable due to the crisis. Should turn into beer, though, by our calculations. (The squirrel we hired from the temp agency to run across the keyboard while our promash program was running came highly recommended) This is a beer made for a friend of the brewery to see what will work at his wedding. (Yes, Natsmile Ales is a friend with benefits. Walk of shame totally included.)

We will be brewing a stout this weekend. It's a combination of a bunch of different flavorful American malts and classic English hops. Most recipes usually go with American malts and hops or English malts and hops, but we here at the brewery embrace all beer making countries. If we had a more eloquent marketing department we would come up with a catchy name, but we'll probably just call it Natsmile Stout.


p.s.- Seeking marketing intern. Please forward resume to bovenb@gmail.com

Experimental Success at the brewery!!

I was recently presented with three quarts of frozen persimmons, a fruit I had never heard of, and challenged to brew a beer with it. This fruit is not for the faint of heart, et me tell you.

Persimmons are only edible when they are ripe, which happens about thirty seconds before they fall off the tree and the deer eat them. When they are, they taste like a weak apricot. Naturally I thought of a wheat beer for this experiment.

These things have 4 huge seeds in the middle and a pulpy texture, making it impossible to cleanly de-seed them. I ended up with about three cups of tomato-paste like material which I flash-cooked to kill any undesirable bacteria and threw the goop in the secondary. I then went to Texas for a week.

When I came back I racked the beer into a keg and prayed. Two days later I poured myself a pint of beer that looked like cloudy grapefruit juice. All the yeasty, slightly sour characteristics of a wheat are there, along with a faint fruit flavor I would never be able to identify if I did not know what it was.

Bottom line, this turned into a great beer that I really hope to brew again some time. Even my wife, who historically has only liked our Apricot Wheat, voluntarily poured herself a pint stating "I like the fruity wheat beers". What else can I say?