Raw Ale / No Boil

Alright so an update. I bottled this on Thursday. The good news is it tastes totally clean, smells amazing, and the body is great considering its only 3%. It looks like orange juice, which is cool. The bad news so far is that there is a really pronounced spicy quality to the mouthfeel, and it is very raw hop / grassy. It has the quality of that I have only experienced making hop tea. I've done a lot of no chill beers with that hopping approach with no issues, so that can be ruled out. So what I think is going on here so far is that the density of the beer is keeping a lot of hop material from the whirlpooland dry hops suspended or attached to proteins that would normally be clearing out or falling with flocculating yeast. I'm hoping this changes once it is carbed and cooled for a few days. If not, then it's a failure for unexpected reasons.

 

Ok so a couple weeks later and the spicy quality is gone, making it much more pleasant. The beer is def clean and free of infection, and now the mouthfeel is really great especially at 3% ABV. Best head retention I've ever seen, due to the proteins in it. The hop character is not good, but I'm blaming that on the no chill. So I can conclude that good (and clean) beer can be made without boiling. I will be doing another one this weekend, but doing a standard chill method to improve the hop character, and using us-05. Will update.

 

Gonna keep updating this topic on another Homebrewing site in case anyone finds this at a later date, there's a bit more dialog and experimentation over there.