Tag: All Grain

When Brew Free or Die announced a Dynamic Duo club competition I knew two things: that I was in, and I’d be brewing with my buddy Mike. What wasn’t immediately obvious was what we’d be brewing, but I did have a hunch. This fall Mike brewed a very tasty version of Mike McDole’s famous recipe, Janet’s Brown, A hoppy american brown ale. I have just brewed a not so tasty american brown ale (story for another day), and both of us agree the style is quite enjoyable. The club competition is named Dynamic duo. Brew a 1.040-1.050 beer, using only two hops, two malts, no adjuncts, no spices, etc. With that in mind, I tried to reworked the Janet’s Brown ale recipe down to just two malts, two hops, and bring the gravity down.

Brewing is a involved endeavor. To plan and pack all of my…

This is a review of my attempt to brew a traditional english mild using the brewing classic styles recipe. I’ve been all about session beers lately. It’s nice to be able to enjoy a pint, or two and not feel it in the morning. I feel like too many of the homebrewing recipes I come across start at 1065, and only go up from there. This beer started where many a homebrew stopped, 1.030, and…

This beer is the culmination of brain storming and contemplating seasonal brewing over the last few months. Back in July when the commercial pumpkin beers hit the shelves I was quite perturbed. They were invading my summer beer shelf space with sweet, overly spiced wheat beers way too early. I was still enjoying refreshing berliner weisses, hoppy pales and IPA’s. I made a personal resolution to avoid buying all pumpkin beers this year. I can’t sit idly by when they put the beer out so early that it’s old by the time fall sets in and I want to enjoy one. Since I wasn’t planning on purchasing any pumpkin beer, I figured I would need to make my own, when pumpkins and squash were in season.

I’ve taken a layoff from brewing and beer related activities which doesn’t make for a very exciting homebrewing blog. The good news is, for the first time in nearly two months, I brewed. While I did not really need beer, I’ve been feeling the pull. When I started planning I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I started eyeing recipes. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, I always have ideas, but nothing was screaming to me, brew me next. After having brewed a hoppy pale session beer, and a very hoppy double ipa, I wanted something malty, low gravity, and on the darker end of the spectrum.

I finally got to sample of Bow Bog Brewing’s version of the pales in comparison along side my version. The basic idea was for the two us to brew the same recipe, using similar ingredients. The two of us ‘designed’ recipe fairly arbitrarily. During an email exchange we agreed on a style, I picked the hop bill, and Mike picked the grain bill. I don’t think either of us has much in the way of experience making recipes, but this came together surprisingly well. We were both happy with the outcome, but I think we both have ideas on how we’d change it to fit our ideal local rye pale ale.

Here are the resulting details:

Brew Day Notes: http://thebottlefarm.com/ProjetsThoughts2/pales-in-comparision-collaboration-with-bow-bog-brewing/
Recipe: http://beersmithrecipes.com/viewrecipe/94338/pale-in-comparison
Untapped Page: https://untappd.com/beer/324085

I had to get this brewing session in as I was running out of time to brew my contribution to club night for the National Homebrewers Conference. While I won’t be there, I’m really excited to be sending this beer for my peers.This beer will be one of many being poured by my club members at the Brew Free or Die (BFD) booth, just look for the drinking old man of the mountain. This is my second try at this recipe. I brewed a Bitter American clone as my first all grain batch back in mid December. That first beer was all over the place, missed mash temps, stuck sparges, and extremely low volumes to and from kettle, pretty much what you expect for a first all grain brew day. The resulting beer was well received, I enjoyed it, and I figured if it was good when i screwed it up, it might be really good if I brewed it well.

Home brewing is a hobby you can start with a small investment in equipment ($150 or less) and make beer. At that point the biggest investment is the per batch cost. When brewing extract patches the fixed costs cost to brew are low, but the per batch cost is much higher.

It’s my season for saisons. Having brewed my first in mid march, I wanted to make another attempt since I had harvested the wyeast french saison (3711) from the first.. My plan was to brew something similar to to the Mad Fermentationist’s rye saison with brett. It’s a simple grain and hop bill, and leverages a long secondary w/ brett. I plan on deviating from Mike’s recipe a bit, first I added 1/2 lb of acid malt to improve my mash ph. Such a light grain bill, can result in a much higher ph which can slow enzymatic action in your mash. My other changes were to using Styrian Aurora, instead of Styrian Goldings, 3711 as primary yeast, and using the dregs of Oak Senex Torva for an extended secondary on some toasted oak. I do still need to source the oak (mike?). My goal is to have a funky beer to celebrate my third anniversary brewing, hopefully it will be something special.

This is another ‘collaboration’ beer, a friend from BFD brews a fair number of saisons, belgians, and sours. So we’ve emailed back and forth quite a bit discussing brewing a saison together, with the idea of splitting a 10g batch. I just haven been able to to sneak away for that large of a chunk of time. Instead of splitting a batch, I decide to brew solo, and will bring the results to a club meeting. Seem familiar?
I had most of the ingredients for the recipe, but as usual I was missing a few. I had to swap out candy sugar for some wild flower honey. The major diversion from the recipe is the aroma hop, the recipe called for dose of the noble hop Saaz. I swapped it out for bullion which is anything but noble. On an amusing note (to me at least) this is the first recipe I’ve come across with both Saaz and Citra, which are names of our two cats. Since I was missing Saaz, I decided to name it missing cat saison. So maybe next time I’ll stick to the recipe and call it two cat saison.