Glühbier

For reasons unknown, I decided to mull some beer earlier this week. I found a recipe that sounded tasty and I carefully adjusted it for fewer servings.

This inaugural attempt at mulling beer would be done with all New Glarus beers - Uff-da and Back 40 bocks. I had them at home already and figured a little variety might be interesting instead of going 100% Uff-da.

The recipe calls for cherry juice and I completely failed to find it in anything less than a quart. So I will have to use it to marinate meat as well as subsequent mulling attempts. I figured buckwheat honey would add a complementary earthy/grainy taste instead of something more floral. The bag of mulling spices was already open and I could not recall how long we'd had it.

Into the pot it all went. Also some lemon juice from one of those lemons in the background.

20 or so minutes later I sampled. A nice beer/malt taste and the mulling spices didn't seem overwhelming. The problem was it had a serious bitterness to it. I tripled or quadrupled the honey. A bit more cooking and I had a glass.

I could taste the grains of the beer and the honey provided some defense against the bitterness but it was still very much there. On the plus side, the spices tasted just right.

I'm not sure what the bitterness was. At least some of it was hops, surely. But, rather than strictly following the recipe's spice doses, I just took a pinch and threw it in. I am wondering if I added too much clove/mace in that pinch. The thing is, I didn't find their flavors to be very strong. Maybe an overdose goes into bitterness territory easily instead of an ever-increasing blast of that earthy-smoky taste.

While I finished the glass, I tossed the rest thinking about what to change for my next attempt.