So here’s where we’re at…
The season’s winding down, and we’re building a nice selection of summer beers. We just kegged a Honey Wheat and Bart’s Smoked Porter, and have got a Mild Peach Ale, Matt’s Kolsch, and the Berry Wheat Tea patiently waiting in secondary for kegs. On tap there’s a new IPA, and the 12ish! percent Bourbon Porter is slowly draining down. There’s also the Maple Nut Brown, which is just starting to come around. If only we weren’t out of CO2!
Obviously on one has been putting their pints down long enough to update this thing. So here it goes again. The nut brown has been on tap a few weeks but is still going fairly strong. Holliday cheer finally got tapped and has been quickly emptying - the mead yeast esperiment was a success. Tonight the first glasses of Cherry Oatmeal stout was just poured…and it’s very tasty.
The amber is in the keg but there are some concerns over it…they could work themselves out over time or they could get worse. Just keeping our fingers crossed.
Also tonight we finally racked the second Mead and it was VERY tasty…can’t wait to bottle that one and eventually give it a real taste.
Last week J brewed a grand cru and tasting it as it went into secondary today it’s definately going to be a special brew. Two weeks ago Nick picked a winter warmer…and due to lack of keg space it’s doing a second week in secondary right now. Tonight Matt picked a bock and it’s boiling happily away.
Will we update more frequently and with more data next? Maybe…or maybe we’ll just keep enjoying the beer and forget to update again 
We’ve been lazy or forgetfull or just plain busy…but the season started as predicted and has been rocking. We had last week off due to a late shipment of ingredients but the brewing this year has been pretty good.
Off the top of my head I know I started things off with a Nut brown which is just coming on tap now as we finished off the last of the J’ale at Thanksgiving and J’s giant all grain batch of many names is nearly gone as well. I believe all of the other previous season brews are gone as well.
Rich sponsored a batch of Holliday Cheer which we’re all looking forward to drinking in celebration of his and Pam’s new son who was born last week! Steff stepped up for a Cherry Stout, which J stepped up to an oatmeal cherry stout resulting in an unexpected partial-mash for us a few weeks ago. And then a second oversight the following week resulted in Bryant ordering up an all grain batch of American Amber for us to tackle just before thanksgiving. So it’s been a busy brew season…and that’s just the highlights off the top of my head.
Last week we finally had a week off due to a late shipment of ingredients. I expect a double order to be coming up soon so we won’t have to face that eventuality again due to the holidays and increased chance of a late shipment!
We may or may not go back and fill in the missing brews. Depends on whether anyone puts down their pint and picks up the keyboard one of these wednesdays With an all extract bach on deck next week maybe we’ll have so little to do we’ll have to fill in the missing posts!
A new season is upon us! The winds have been blowing for several days now and temps are falling, it’s time to fire up the burner and start brewing!
An order has just been placed for the first batch of the season, a Nut Brown ale similar to Samuel Smith’s delicious offering by the same name. A new controller for the freezer was also ordered and we should soon have a shiny new freezer to use with it. Others are conspiring to get our CO2 tanks filled and try to fix the last few leaks in our delivery system.
One week from tonight, usual place and usual time we brew!
Found something interesting today that got me thinking about recipie ideas for next year. Similar to what we did with J’s all grain mixed with the honey inspiration from the J’ale. This sound like an interesting experiment:
http://www.nwlink.com/~badger/braggot.html
Think we’d have to do a 5gallon mash though. 20 gallons of final beer/mead would require some more fermenters if we did a 10gallon sized mash!
Off the grains to do a 10gallon batch of something like J’s brown we could create 4 separate 5 gallon batches each quite different from each other.
I need to do some more research on this and come up with a game plan for a brew weekend…
Another relaxing no brewing brew night was enjoyed by those who made it this week. With the season officially over for brewing at Matt’s house things are winding down for summer. We’ve still got one or two things in carboys that need to get into kegs but there’s no rush at this point.
This week was our tradional end of the season brew “J’ale”. It’s a mystery beer we make once a year with no set recipie. The goal is to use up as many left over ingredients as possible to create a special never to be duplicated beer which will be enjoyed at the begining of next season. Read the rest of this entry »
Whoops, we missed a few weeks. Consider this a stub until one of us gets a chance to put up a full writeup (Hopefully before we forgot the details!)
I believe this week was a Pale Ale. Standard Northern Brewer kit nothing too fancy. Someone correct me if I’m wrong please!
The twist was we also did our yearly (hopefully soon to be quarterly!) mead this week. The Colorado River honey Matt found was outstanding, as was the citrus honey. But we still had to add 5 additional lbs of unfiltered tucson desert honey to make up the must. It was tasting great even before fermentation! Oh and last years mead…..we tried two bottles - one sparkling one clear.
The clear mead was good, much better than a month or two ago when we last sampled it. But the sparkling was clearly the favorite with almost everyone. It’s not very carbonated - either there wasn’t enough priming sugar added or the yeast is just completely exhausted. But the extra sweetness of the unfermented priming sugar and the slight touch of carbonation made it very tasty indeed!
I’m not sure I really want to know what was going on in this one:
Whatever they were doing the rest of the photos are here.
J’s 10 lb Honey Nut Oatmeal Brown
Well, we’ve finished our first full grain, and we’re calling it the Ten Pound Brown. There was a lot to get done. We all recovered from Kazapalooza the night before and finally got into swing of things for round two of the Birthday festival around 3. Jason and Chuck did a quick equipment check to see what we still needed to get the Keg Kettles up and running then jetted to the Hardware store to get it taken care of. Matt got cranking on the Brats, and I started up a the Rasberry wheat kit as a warmup. With the newly completed (and ass kicking) kettles, we built up the three tiered tower of brew, got the counterflow chiller working, and were ready to go.
Things started off a bit rocky. It’s important to note that you need to heat the water up BEFORE you add it to the grains, but we expected mistakes the first time through, and it was an easy fix. We’ll need to stir the grains more often in the future. The brewmometer picks up pockets and won’t change, and we ran into a lot of uneven heating. I think it worked to our advantage, though, because the unevenness made up for a lot of me not having locked down temp control yet, and we ended up with sweet tasting wort that should turn into a damn fine beer. Check out the rest below… Read the rest of this entry »