Well. I know. It’s been quite a while since we brewed. I’m sorry. We had more than enough beer to keep us going deep into the summer. And we have not run dry yet.
But all slow times must come to an end, so we decided on a whim to fire up the brew rig and get brewing again. After many fine beers at the LA Beer Week Kick-Off party, we decided on a session beer with Moteka hops. We went on a hop buying binge earlier in the spring and had 4 oz of this and a few other hops in the freezer. On the shelf was 20 plus pounds of 2-row, some odd grains and some wheat. We sat down with our favorite software, BeerSmith, and wrote up a simple recipe with what we had on hand. It turned out to be 17 lbs of Western Malting 2-row and 1 lb of wheat. Simple. A nice starting point for what we believe will be an evolving recipe. We added the single hop, but with a twist. We had a bunch of hop extract left over from the Blind Pig Clone in June. That became the bittering 60 minute hop. In the Blind Pig Clone, the flavor was perfect. time to try it in a much lighter and lower IBU beer. We plugged in all of the hops and this is what we got… 13 IBU’s from the extract, and a few more from a super late charge at 10 min, 1 min and whirlpool. When we went to the shop to get a few more hops for the dry hop, the instinct was to go with 2 oz for the whole dry hop. The aroma is so good on this hops and the alcohol is so low, we decided to double that and go short on the contact time. We shall see how this works.
The brew day went super smooth. No issues at all and we ended up with 11.5 gallons at the end in which we used the new White Labs Clarity Ferm in the fermenter. This is the second time that we have used this product and we were super impressed with the last attempt. We only used it in one fermenter on our normal 10 gallon batch and there was almost no difference between the two as far as taste went. I can’t wait to use this a bit more and see if some of our gluten free friends like the beer.
We will probably keg the beer very soon and from the samples so far, it seems to be on the right track. We might add to the super simple grain bill, but only one grain at a time. Fermentation was quick and the beer now sits at 1.005 SG from a start of 1.042. Yeast was the hard working US-05 and the Dry 97.
Los Angeles Brewers 