Adam's Apple

Brewer's notes:

When I first got into homebrewing 15 years ago, my first brews were not traditional, "every day" beers. I wanted to make beers that I couldn't find in stores or bars. Those early beers were filled with spices, fruits, and even candy and soda. Most weren't great (a Pale Ale blended with Mountain Dew immediately springs to mind), but one rose above the others that first year - a beer where I decided to replace a good portion of the water with apple juice.

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My girlfriend at the time (now wife) actually liked it. She'd been putting up with my odd experiments, but wasn't a fan of anything I had made. She not only liked this beer, which I named "Adam's Apple", she loved it. Once it was gone, she tasked me with making it again - something I had yet to do with any of my recipes. As fate would have it, I wouldn't get to brew it again. One night, in a puff of smoke, the computer died, taking with it the recipe. I didn't have a backup and I could not recover the data. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. 

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So every instance of this recipe since then has been my attempt at resurrecting that recipe - yet none have matched that original. I like to think we're just mis-remembering the original through rose tinted glasses, and that subsequent iterations have actually been better, but alas, we'll never know. 

 

Speaking of the recipe, this is a traditional German Weissbier ala Cloudbridge, but with a few tweaks to push it out of the summer biergarten and into an autumn biergarten (bier orchard?). This beer is spritely enough to work fine in the waning dog days of summer, but also in chilly sweater weather. 

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Prosit!