Los Angeles Brewers

We brewed a Kolsch again. This time we did an all barley recipe. Half a pound of honey malt was used for color.

We did a two step infusion mash and hit our temperatures exactly. All was not perfect as we added all the hops at sixty minutes, including our 15 minute aroma addition. Whoops. We added another .75 ounces of cascade whole hops that were grown and frozen by us last year. The IBUs will be a touch out of style but will hopefully taste good.

We also washed the Mexican lager yeast from last brew. We hope to store it for a while in order to use it again.

Brad brewed up a batch of “craft” root beer too.

Did you know that sarsaparilla is considered a carcinogen by the FDA?

We have wanted to brew a Mexican lager for a while. We came up with a traditional Vienna Lager with some corn adjunct and pitched a Mexican lager yeast on 5 gallons and an American lager yeast on the other 5 gallons.

This mash had three rest temperatures so two decoctions were done. We used Beer Smith to calculate the volumes instead of doing it by hand and we overshot our targets both times. We added some cool sparge water and were able to quickly get to target. We will need to dial in the mash tun calculations in the Beer Smith program.

We also did a fly sparge and used our nifty manifold.

We got a few more points of gravity than we planned for, so we will need to dial in the Beer Smith program some more.

Today we brewed a pale ale.  A little acidulated and wheat, plus crystal 120 on 17 lbs of two row make the body of this beer.  Hops include Colombus, Cascade, Centennial, Citra and Simcoe. 

Pretty straightforward, but we will ferment it on the 001 & 002 yeast cakes from the “right to work Jack” we brewed last week.  We had Brad as an assistant brewer and a number of guests keeping us company.  This led to a very mellow brew day.

We decided, over many great Christmas beers, to brew a clone of Firestone Walker’s Union Jack.  We call ours Right to Work Jack.

No Citra boxed us out of an IPA like the ones I had during my visits to Russian River and Lagunitas the week before.  We both like the UJ a lot so it was a natural choice.

We did have a hard time getting Cascade so we used Ahtanum which we had in one of Boston Brewing’s single hop Latitude 48 beers.

We hit our numbers and all went well.  Looking forward to trying this hoppy beer.  I think we bought two pounds of hops for ten gallons of this one. We even decocted this one to have a two step mash.

We made a clone of Southern Tier’s imperial milk stout named creme brulee.  We had not tried the beer but it sounded pretty good.  Famous last words…

The beer involved an impossibly huge amount of grain.  Think barley wine quantities. 

We had to do a thicker mash than we wanted as our mash tun was too small for what I remember as 38lbs of grain.  Add some caramelized sugar and you have a lot of fermentables.  We missed our target OG by more than a few points. 
We made ten gallons of this, and given our poor efficiency, we also ran 5 gallons of second runnings for a party guile.

The Creme Brulee tasted pretty good while still, but should be very good when we get out gassed.

The party guile is an excellent deceivingly dark lawnmower beer.  Light hoped and light body.  Best part: it was free.

We tasted all twelve kegs we planed to bring to the Childrens Chain Oktoberfest Party.  All were really good. Several were excellent.  One our two were exceptional.  St. Juan Saison is awesome.