We are making a 10 gallon starter for our upcoming barleywine in the form of an extra pale ale.
Extract was super efficient and we ended up adding a gallon and 3/4 and still 7 points over our target.
Our plan is to rack our barleywine over the XPA yeast cake.
We also enjoyed a few flights of our 6 beers on tap.
We bottled six beers for three competitions.
We bottled the Double IPA, Kolsch, Pilsner, English Black Mild, Dunkelweizen, and the Gose.
The upcoming competitions are the AHA’s National Homebrewers Competition , the Maltose Falcons’ Mayfaire Competition and the California State Fair’s Homebrew Competition.
Next task is to pack and ship our beers to San Diego for the NHC.
Win!
We were both able to take a day off from the real world and crank out two beers.
The first is a Gose. An historical style, we tried a bottle and decided to go for it. Brewed in Leipzig for a couple of centuries, it has coriander and salt added. The salt is to replicate the brewing waters of Golsar where the style originated. We used aciduated malt to sour the beer as well, as we want to enter it in the NHC at the end of the month.
The acidulated malt forced us to do a two stage mash. One hour without the acidulated and then 45 minutes with it. We had to decoct about two gallons to bring the temp back up after adding the acidulated malt. Very long brewing session.
We also used our new sparge arm for the first time on this batch.
Our second batch was a problem as we way undershot our gravity. It was a dunkelweiss that should have come in at 1.050 and barely hit 1.040. We lost a bit of our first runnings due to an inadvertently open boil kettle valve. We also may have missed our mash temp on the high side and sparged too quickly.
The recipe is very close to our blue ribbon winning dunkelweiss from last year’s California State Fair.
Both beers took off in the fermenters, with the dunkelweiss literally blowing its top, thanks to temperature in the 80’s.
Los Angeles Brewers 