My top ranked post from 2011 is from a few months ago and it is called Cherryland's Best - Cherries 2.5 ways. I had an opportunity to buy some fresh Door County cherries right in Milwaukee if I agreed to write a blog about them. We ended up making cherry pie, cherry clafouti on the campfire, and started a batch of Chocolate Milk Cherry Stout beer. Well, I never completely finished that entry because I wasn't able to review the beer until it was finished. The beer has been done since about October and we have been drinking it ever since. Luckily, there is one bottle left that I can use for my final review.
Chocolate Milk Cherry Stout
The beer turned out good but not great. The batch ended up very inconsistent; some bottles you could really taste the cherries and in other bottles you couldn't. We had dumped whole cherries into the carboy about two weeks before bottling. After talking to other, more experienced, home brewers we found out that it would have been better if we extracted the juice from the cherries instead of putting them in whole. The whole cherries ended up soaking up some of the flavor and alcohol of the beer which is one of the reasons it tasted inconsistent. Overall, for a basic box kit the beer turned out well but the cherry aspect didn't come out as expected.
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Well, that's it for me this year! I think it's been a pretty successful blogging year. Thank you very much to all of my readers, those who subscribe, and those who just past through. I hope you've enjoyed reading and have been inspired to try new things.
Happy New Year! ~ Steph Snack
That was a good beer. :)
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