Here it is!
After a long, angsty wait, I finally busted out the clean and carbed beers and poured another triangle test. This time, I believe, there's a fair comparison to make: there was no acetaldehyde or any other sign of greenness in either. They are identical in appearance and both relatively clear (though with a bit of chill haze). In short, I'll keep tasting them over the next few weeks, but I suspect that what is true now will be just as true then.
The differences between the two are stark. But, to my surprise, one wasn't necessarily better than the other. I tend to prefer English beers and ultimately favored the regular ferment over the beads. My wife, on the other hand, goes more for West Coast IPAs and she chose the beads. Both were flavorful and drinkable, at least as far as would be expected by the very simple recipe.
The control batch was very English: grainy and a bit sweet with a distinct apple/pear follow-up.
The bead batch was clean and firmly bitter, but not at all flavorless. At risk of oversimplifying, it tasted like perfectly competent California Pale Ale (minus the late hop character).
I always knew intellectually that yeast played an important role in perceived bitterness, but I was really taken aback by how much of a difference shone through here. It's hard to be objective since I knew the recipe, but I would have guessed 15 IBUs versus 30 IBUs if I had to put a number to it.
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In short: I'm very pleased. The immobilization process had a very large effect on the beer's flavor, but it wasn't a
bad effect in any sense. Anyone hoping to simply reproduce their old favorite recipes this way will struggle, but I now believe that it might be possible to produce really good beer with alginate beads. I came into this very skeptical, and I'm much less skeptical now.
There is still a tremendous amount that's unknown. I don't know, for example, how this process will affect different yeast strains or different styles, nor do I know how things like temperature and pitching rate factor in. It's very hard to generalize much useful information from this single test, but the results here were good enough that I would now be willing to try this process out on a full batch.
I hope other people will too, and I hope they'll post their results. It might look complicated, but the process is actually very quick and very simple. The supplies are cheap, and there's really no special equipment necessary other than an eye dropper and a wire-mesh strainer.
So, have at it folks!
