Los Angeles Brewers

We are brewing an IPA using home grown hops.  Lots of hops. 

Home grown Magnum, Chinook, Cascade, Mt Hood, and Perle are featured.  We are also using some commercial Columbus and Amarillo.

Yeast selections are Safale 005 for 5 gallons and WLP041 for the other 5.

Also getting its first workout is our Blichmann Hop Rocket.  We are going to use it as a “hop-back” to push our wort through between boil kettle and chiller. 

Couple of challenges:
1)  A leaking boil kettle valve that forced us to empty the nearly full BK into our HLT to fix. 
2)  Another boil-over. 

We also racked our Oktoberfest into secondary for some lagering at 40°…

One keg of our latest saison is going on the gas to get ready for the long weekend. 

Not bad for a Friday night.

We received a package with a pleasant surprise, a HUGE blue ribbon from our Dunkelweiss victory.

We also got a blue pint glass etched and gold painted “First Place” and logo on its face.

We want to win more!

Double batch day. 

Our Kolsch has a really strong chlorophenolic (band-aid) flavor.  This not only is disappointing, but put us behind in our Oktoberfest party promise.

We decided to seek both catch-up and redemption.  We will brew both an Oktoberfest and re-brew our failed Saison.

First through the brewery was the saiaon. We did not dial up the malt this time and we are using a crop of yeast from Jeremy at Eagle Rock Brewery.

We are adding a pound of wheat and a pound of candi sugar to our Oktoberfest as a whim.