Primary: 1 week

Secondary: 1 week

Bottle conditioned: 11 days ( I know, its a bit short)

Tonight I had the first bottle of what I would consider a fully carbonated and almost conditioned Kiltlifting Scotch Ale.  Now, I know scotch ales should be allowed to mature a bit longer than 11 days, so I guess we will consider this a “Hows it coming along?” review.  Fair?  Good.

We’ll start with appearance.  One word, and that word is beautiful.  Nice dark, dark caramel color.  Almost pure brown, but with a hint of burnt orange.  The clarity of this beer struck me in a good way.  It is much clearer than I expected it to be.  Just a hint of cloudiness, but great for homebrew.  I’ll attribute it to the fact that we used a secondary fermentation vessel on this batch.  It has a nice little one finger head on it straight off the pour, but settled into a simple top coating.  A bit too carbonated out of the bottle.  Almost had a soft drink look to it.  It would have been nice to have a big fat snifter in the cupboard for this one, simply to show off the color and make the over-carbonation look presentable.

Next is scent.   It is slightly sweet smelling, with light, toasty chocolate notes.  There is a definite scotch aroma here, too.  The hop aroma is barely even recognizable, but I expected that.  I do sense a slight grassy, perhaps leafy aroma though.

The taste is more complex than I imagined it would be.  Biscuit flavor up front with a trailing chocolate and butter taste.  Very nice.  It does feel a little thin in the mouth though.  I’d imagine it will become more full with some more time in the bottle.  We’ll see.  Over-carbonation lends itself to a soda-pop feel here.

Overall this beer is quite enjoyable.  Very easy to drink, but with seemingly above average alcohol content, so be careful.  I do wish it was less carbonated, but that should subside in time.  If not,it should be an easy fix in the next batch.  I’ll definately have no problem going through 20 more bombers of this stuff, but will I make this exact recipe again?  I’m not sure yet.  I think I’ll have a better idea once I let it sit around in the bottle for another week or two before tasting it again.

On a scale of 1-10 I’m giving this scotch ale, in its current condition, a 7.5, though I expect it will be that much more impressive the next time I crack one.