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Category Archives: Brewing

Hefeweizen

We brewed our final batch for the Oktoberfest party.

It was a very simple brew, no decoction, single hop addition, ale yeast.

We are using two different yeasts: WLP 300 Hefeweizen and WLP 400 Belgian Wit. Should be fun to compare the two.

Kolsch

We are brewing a Kolsch. We have wanted to do one for a long time. We had a great unfiltered example at Gordon Biersch in San Diego and it felt like the right time to finally get it going.

Lots of new stuff being used for the first time:
1) Temperature controlled yeast starter.
2) Grain mill (Monster Mill 3 roller)
3) Oxygen stone.
4) 5.2 pH stabilizer

Add the above to our first decoction (this one is a double decoction but we missed temp on the second so call it a 2.5 decoction) and we really have our hands full.

We also purchased six new kegs. Four are 5 gallon and two are 3 gallon size. The guy at the shop told us that they belonged to Emilio Estavez but he had too many and sold these back to the store. We just want to party with his brother.

In six weeks, or so, we shall know if we took on too many changes to get this beer right.

California Common

Inspired by Sierra Nevada Brewing’s Beer Camp #8 California Common, we decided to brew a similar beer.

There was no recipe to be found so we worked off what we could find. We started with an Anchor clone recipe (from an ancient BYO magazine). We knew the ABV of the camp beer was 6.5% so we upped the grain bill by 4.5 pounds and the hops by a half ounce (30 min) to balance.

Should be a fun beer to drink.

Sad Saisons

Our Saisons are not finishing. We are stuck at 10 brix. We pitched some champagne yeast and have put the fermenters in the chamber at 25C to try to get the beer finished.

Hopefully the new yeast does its job. Even if we don’t get our desired super dry finish, it still tastes pretty good so we will keg and gas it and drink away.

AHA National Homebrew Competition Scores

We received the pictured certificates today from the AHA.
Bohemian Pilsner: 26 – Bronze
Dunkelweizen 33 – Silver
Fruit Beer 24 – no prize
German Pils 30.5 – Silver
American Brown 30 -Silver

Unfortunately, no score sheets enclosed. Perhaps they are coming under separate cover.

Rack & Dry-Hop

We racked the IPA into a secondary fermenter.

Unfortunately, our 5th and 6th carboys are only 5 gallons. The primaries are 6 gallons. We were forced to dump a good amount of beer in the transfer.

We added our dry hop (Amarillo) to the secondary and racked on top of it.

Our Saison was not fermenting as fast as we would like so we moved it to the fermenting chamber (freezer) and turned it up to 23C (75F) which should be more friendly to the specific yeast we are using.

The little snake tank heater should get a workout.

Special Saison

Our Special Saison follows our Citra IPA by only a couple of hours. It is “Special” not because it rides the short bus to school, but because it has a little more alcohol than your pedestrian Saison.

The Saison is a Belgian/French ale that was, by law, an entitlement for farm workers in the region. It was safer to drink than local water and was allotted at 4 liters per worker.

We are adding some brewers sugar and some Belgian clear candi sugar (a pound each) to the beer near the end of the boil to raise the alcohol level and let it ferment into a drier flavor profile.

We also bid adeu to our hot liquor tank, as it gets replaced with one of our recently acquired pretty kegs. It will be nice to have a HLT that does not wobble on the burner.

Citra IPA

We are in the middle of our IPA brew now. Weather is perfect.

We have the filter in action (also added a campden tablet). Using the p

We overshot our mash temp by 8 degrees, so we cycled the water to cool it before we mashed in. Managed to hit our temp perfectly when we finally mashed. We accidentally pumped a bit of mash water back into the HLT. Caught it right away, cleaned it up, no harm.

90 minutes later we began a 20 minute recirculation (Vorlof) then sparged into a 90 minute boil. Lots of hops in this one, including 3.5oz of the namesake Citra.

While we wait for the boil, we preheat water for our next beer, the Saison.

Robust & Mocha Porter

On April 10th we brewed a robust porter. It was started by one of us while the other had to work until the mash was almost done. That is why we have no photos. 😦

Mash strike temp was hit perfectly. The whole process was pretty smooth.

The next week we racked one half of the batch onto a half pound of cocoa nibs and kegged the other half.

The week after we kegged the cocoa porter and added a half a pint of strong cold press coffee and quarter pound of lactose dissolved in a quarter pint of water. These proportions were gauged by tasting a sample as we slowly added tiny amounts of the adjuncts. These quantities were then scaled up to 4.5 gallon size. This was then gassed.

We plan on another brew day this weekend. We will taste the gassed beers then. One will be sent to the Longshot brewing contest at Boston Brewing.

Recipes: 04.10.2011 Robust Porter 04.10.2011 Mocha Porter