I checked the bottles again to see how they were doing. Being the plastic PET bottles, you can tell when the bottle conditioning has progressed enough for drinking by how firm the bottle is. When you first start, the plastic is easily deformable, but as the yeast turns the priming sugars into CO2, the increasing gas pressure makes the bottle much harder to squeeze.
I picked out two bottles and put them in the fridge, with the hope of trying them out today or tomorrow. Today is the lucky day.
Lighting was bad, and I couldn't find the camera anyways, so pictures to follow from bottle #2.
The aroma is nice and coffee/chocolate, with a bit of a hop hint, but not much. See earlier notes about missing the instructions about how to best use the fermentables to allow for correct hop-utilization.
The taste is awesome. A nice dry stout, not too hoppy, not too malty. Very well balanced, with coffee notes, and a nice chocolately richness from all the dark malt extract. Great carbonation, with a thick light tan head that holds for awhile before suddenly falling back, leaving about a 1/2" of lacy bits on the glass.Added to the aroma notes from above, I would say that the overall character might have been improved by correct hop utilization leading to greater hoppy flavors, but with the coffee and chocolate flavors, its not like anything is missing. Just something else that could have been added.
Mouthfeel is a little light for my taste, most likely an artifact of using white table sugar as my priming sugar. Corn sugar or barley malt would have left more unfermentable sugars behind, thickening the mouthfeel, adding a bit more of that "syrupy" stout feel. That would have been awesome, and will be important to keep in mind for the next batch, but it's certainly not going to slow down my enjoyment of *this* batch.
Mmmm.... I LIKE this beer!
