Los Angeles Brewers

We put together 5 beers to submit to the AHA Conference in San Diego.

Had to ship them to the Seattle regional as San Diego had filled up before we got our registration in.

The blonde ales were not ready 😦

In, yet another, brutal, rain-soaked brew day, we managed to make 10 gallons of blonde ale.

10 gallons are dosed with Safale US-05 and 10 are with our starter batch of WLP-550 Trappist yeast.

Despite the downpour, our process worked well. We overshot our temperatures by 5 degrees or so, as our losses were negligible in the cold weather. We broke a beautiful 6 gallon carboy (as it barely kissed another carboy during cleaning).

We got 70% efficiency and hit our beginning gravity on the spot.

The fermenters were going strong within 12 hours.

We are hoping to include both in our AHA competition entries (due in 9 days). Cutting it close.

Recipe: 03.20.2011 One Eight Blonde Ale v3

For the first time in many years: a boil over on the kitchen sink. These flasks are shaped in such a way that they can get into a boil over situation pretty quick. Beware.

We bought a 2 liter Erlenmeyer flask and a bag of DME along with our usual blonde ale ingredients.

We are going to do a split batch of 5 gallons each American Safale US-05 and White Labs WLP500 Trappist. There was only one vial of Trappist available so we needed to do a yeast starter.

While an overnight starter will not yield massive amounts of yeast cells, but we should get a good start.

The Yeast book by Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff suggests putting the flask on the burner with 2 liters of water and 200 grams of DME. This is exactly what was done.