Brewing Activities (2021)

2-5 gals each. 20gal in all

 

Brewing my second batch of Octoberfest. Just so happens some fresh Octoberfest just hit the shelves to give me some inspiration.

 

@wasatchback im excited for you and our prayers will be for your family’s success!!! I do t think I’ll ever be in Utah but just maybe I’ll be able to trade with someone on here to get a sample

 

Wow! Big news. The best of luck.

 

Sounds like a good time. Cool that some of you get to meet up.

Good luck!

 

Best of luck @wasatchback ! I’ve always found your advice/ posts to be very helpful over the last couple years. If I find myself in Utah someday, I’ll have to check the place out.

 

I'm sure you've done your research, but if you're talking about a steam jacketed tun, watch it like a hawk until you're comfortable with its behaviour. I've seen a setup where trying to bring the temp up resulted in the mash starting to boil around the edges of the tun before the center got up to temp. Effective mixing is key with these, I think.

Good on ya!

 

Haven't posted in eons but I ended up brewing a riff on a Belgian wit back in May.

50/50 Pils/Flaked wheat with Mosaic + Wai-Iti and fermented with WB-06.

OG 1.043, FG 1.006 - I think, anyway. I either lost or never actually saved the recipe I ended up making.

Half of the batch got bottled as soon as the gravity was stable and the other half got aged on a bunch of tamarind (both fruit and prepackaged pulp) for a good while. Just bottled it last week so hopefully it'll be ready to crack open in another week or so - the base beer turned out pretty solid and the tamarind version had a really interesting flavor at bottling. I also finally finished my ferm fridge before this brew and my god is it nice to have temp control.

Probably gonna brew an IPA soon (and for the first time) to clear out some of the hops in my freezer. I've done a Mosaic/Maris Otter SMaSH before and really liked it, so I'm thinking of building off of that base. Any thoughts on other grains/hops that would play well? I have:

Magnum, Wai-Iti, Hallertau Mittelfrueh (all >4oz) and a bunch of 2oz bags - Comet, Ahtanum, Idaho 7, Warrior, Azacca, Equanot, Tettnanger, and Cascade (1.1%AA).

I'm also hoping to build a keezer sometime in the next year but I'm also househunting and doing any more equipment purchases now would be putting the cart before the horse just a bit...

 

Brewing 2 NEIPA's today:

Beer 1 is a rebrew of a lost brew. Not sure what happened, but I was fermenting 4.5g in a 6.1g keg with a blow off. Things were looking good all along, and then on day 7 I found my keezer full of almost the entire contents of the keg. A big loss of beer and money and a pain to clean up. Perhaps a clogged poppet, a build up of pressure and BOOM?! I will be using FermCap from now on.

Biscuit Rice 4L
Oats
Quinoa
Dextrose
Ekuanot
Amarillo
Magnum
Verdant

Beer 2 is playing around with Pale Rice malt and going with the Trillium-esque hopping with all Columbus on the hotside, Vic Secret dry hop.

Pale Rice
Biscuit Rice
Quinoa
Oats
Turbinado
Columbus
Vic Secret
Verdant

 

Transferring my bourbon barrel aged porter into a keg with some ground and some whole coffee beans. Will taste daily until coffee flavor is where I want it.

 

Love the setup. Anything going back in the barrel?

 

Brewing a Golden Promise/Vic Secret SMaSH IPA this weekend. Have never used Vic, and it’s been 5-6 years since I used golden promise, so it’s time for a revisit

6% abv and 50 IBU. Doing my usual ‘split between two diff yeasts’. One will get us-05 and the other will be a Belgian IPA fermented with imperial Gnome.

 

Thanks! Nothing going in there yet. I honestly bought this with the only goal of turning this into a barrel for Saison/Sours but I am really impressed with the bourbon flavor I am getting out of it. I think it has at least 1 if not 2 more clean beers going in there before I try to convert it.

I have done a Barelywine and now this Porter in there, not sure what to do next. Maybe toss a lower abv beer in there like a Dark Mild and see what happens.

 

Last of the whole hop ipas brewed today.

old hops are past their prime.

tommorrow cleaning hop freezer and getting ready for harvest.

 

Brewed up some sort of IPA last night using Golden Promise and Pilsner malts. Idaho7 and Amarillo for late hop additions. Spilt batch: 1 got A38 Juice, the other got Lallemands Voss Kveik(first time using Kveik).

Also stole a sample of wort prior to running it through my chiller as a control. I grabbed a sample after it was chilled; using these for a wort stability test. Still trying to chase down some off flavors; want to see if I’m chasing in the right direction.

 

Got the results back this weekend. Most comments on my sheets were very good and helpful, a couple of the others not so much.
My barrel aged barleywine took 2nd in the smoked/wood aged beers category and my NEIPA took 3rd in a category specific to NEIPAs (this was the one with hop burn that I really am not a big fan of, I have done much better imo).

Brett Beer scored well enough but got dinged for not being funky. The Brett I used was more fruit forward.

Dark Mild got crushed, looks like it should be darker, judges noted too much roast in the flavor. I also suspect one of the bottles had an issue as one judged noted a very clean fermentation profile while the other noted yeast health issues. Going to go back to the drawing board here and look at how to make a 4% beer darker while avoiding overly roasty flavors (zero roasted barley was used). I also need to someway somehow try a true example of the style. I will try to brew one closer to what is described in the Barclay Perkins blog.

Table Saison did not do so hot. I enjoyed the beer a lot actually and was surprised at the comments about how it was not to style. I used Pilsner, Wheat, Vienna and Munich malts, Styrian Goldings hops to about 20 ibus and Bootleg Biology Saison Parfait. The beer was about 4%. I let it ferment around 78 to 80 degrees.

 

I have about 10lbs of apricots in my freezer from the harvest this summer and I need to find a way to get rid of them, so I brewed up a tripel on Sunday.

12.5lbs Pils, 2lbs Simplicity syrup, 1lb sugar.

1oz Hallertau Mittelfruh at both 60 and 45 + 1oz Sterling at 20 (LHBS was totally out of Saaz so I had to pivot to Sterling).

OG was a little lower than I had hoped because my efficiency still sucks with my Foundry - 1.075 instead of 1.082. Gonna try some rice hulls in the mash next time and see if that helps.

Pitched WLP530 at ~68 rising to mid 70s. It took about a day and a half to really get going and then yesterday it launched the top off of my fermenter. I had read that it was a pretty active yeast but I didn't think it would be quite so.. explosive. Definitely using a blowofff next time. Smells absolutely incredible though.

My initial plan was to age the whole batch on apricots, but since it smells so good, I might bottle a gallon or so of the base beer just to see how it turns out. I'm really excited for this one!

 

That is a pretty cool barrel transfer setup.
If you’re looking for another style to barrel age, consider an English IPA (BJCP 12C). I did one in a similar barrel a few years ago, turned out great.