Green tastings

[samuelcollins]

Just finished this past Sunday brewing dogfish head 90 minute clone. Ended up with 6 gallons, instead of 5 1/2. I must have over estimated the amount Of water I would need slightly.

Today I thought I would take a gravity reading, even though it's early, and given a little bit of a taste since I had so much in there. Tell you what, the original gravity was 1.08. Current gravity is 1.018. That's over 8% ABV in only four days of fermentation. First few days the airlock was going like crazy. Now it bubbles every 30 seconds to a minute. I was going to leave this heavy beer in primary for two weeks, then rack over to secondary just to get the dry hopping to where it won't soak into the yeast bed. I guess I'm just really surprised by how quick primary fermentation took off and got down to that 1.018. I believe the target for this particular recipe is a final gravity of 1.016, for just about a 9% alcohol by volume.
Couldn't resist tasting the green beer, and I can tell you tasted very good even well in advance of the Dry hop. Yes, I know secondary fermentation in a separate vessel is not necessary at our level, but I just want want to do it. I think it makes it cleaner. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, anyone ever tasted a green beer of this heavy this soon and got these kind of results?
By the way, I pitched a double starter of wyeast 1099, two starters at 2 L. Actually the second starter was about 1.5 L.

 

[Cyclman]

It is funny, I try to taste my wort / beer at all the diferent stages, though I typically forget- some are wonderful, some taste like crap, but most come out just great in the end. I think the more complex, the more likely they taste bad early in the process. The more straightforward, the better they seem earlier.

 

[samuelcollins]

Yeah, there is really not too much to the dogfish clone. It's a pretty simple brew. Hardest part is the continuous hopping on the boil

 

[JohnSand]

I find that my brews don't taste green out of the fermenter. But they do taste green with insufficient time in bottle. I blame the sugar.

 

[samuelcollins]

Here she is