I spent most of the day today at home recovering from the effects of a $275 bar tab we rang up last night watching the NCAA basketball championship at Busby’s. This was between three people. I won’t be going out drinking for a while I think. Although I spent most of the day in bed, I did get a chance to take gravity readings for a pale ale and lychee fruit beer I have going. They’ve pretty much fermented out all the way and will be ready for California Hombrewers Festival in early May.

The pale ale tastes good although there’s a hint of a solvent-like aroma to the beer. I’ve had the same problem with the last few beers I’ve made, but I attributed it to the high fermentation temperature that I put the Belgian yeast through. I used WLP001 CA Ale yeast at normal ale fermentation temps for the pale ale so if this solvent off-flavor persists I’ll know it’s not the fermentation temperature but maybe an infection. And if it IS an infection I have a pretty good idea where it’s from. I’ve gotten a little lazy about thoroughly cleaning my siphoning equipment and I think it might be from the vinyl tubing. This is the second time I’ve made the lychee beer. The first time I took the lychee straight from the can, blended it and poured it into the fermenter. It had a great lychee aroma but the syrup the canned lychee is in raised the gravity of the beer too much and made it cloyingly sweet. This time around I washed the lychee beforehand and didn’t blend it into a pulp but into chunks. I managed to keep the beer from getting too sweet but I didn’t get any lychee aroma. Leave it as it is or add more lychee? Do I have enough time for the beer to ferment out? I’ll have to decide soon.