Yuma Brewers

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.

• First 5 gallons - straight brown ale.  Exactly what you were aiming for.
• Second 5 gallons - specialty ale.  Same brown - but different hops, spices, fruit, yeast.
• Third 5 gallons - Mild ale.  Runnings should get thinner around here making for a lighter bodied ale.
• Fourth 5 gallons - Braggot - Runnings are getting thin so honey is added to make up the fermentables.

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.

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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. (more…)

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.