Norrsken

Norrsken is Swedish for northern lights, and felt like a suitable name for my 2017 Christmas beer. It’s a recipe based on Bad Santa by John Zelazny. I adjusted it to fit the kinds of malts I could easily get my hands on, and used mulberries and cranberries instead of the cherries the original recipe calls for for similar reasons. Brewing was pretty straightforward, but it fermented way too hot. At the time I didn’t have any way to control fermentation temperature, and it peaked at around 30°C (7-8°C above room temperature).

This beer was the first I put nice lables on. It’s not really viable to order fancy lables for all my beers, but this one I wanted to give away to friends and family, and a label makes it a much nicer gift. Design student Love Rydstern helped me with both the label and the logo, and had a tremendous amount of patience with me. I’m super happy with the end result!

Tasting

The wort smelled like a fantastic cake when I opened the fermentation bucket for bottling, but there are only subtle hints of this in the flavor. Despite the high temperature the beer turned out fine. It’s a bit rough, but I think it would mature well. Although I replaced the cherries in the recipe with other berries, the beer has a strong cheery flavor. The high ABV means one bottle is enough, and that’s good, because I brewed way too little of this goodie.