Brewing Activities (2020)

- Bottling gf Milk Stout with coffee, cacao, vanilla tincture.

- Dry hopping gf Amber with Centennial, Simcoe & Columbus

- Cleaning various items in the brewhouse

 

Brewing up a Munich lager that I will hopefully tap in the spring.
30% pils
70% Munich
Mashed at 152 single infusion no sparge.
2 ounces herbsbrucker at 60
1 oz at 15 minutes
Fermenting with mangrove jack bavarian lager yeast 2 packets.

 

Brewed a Chevalier malt saison, decided to keep it simple

Og 1.042
100% crisp chevalier malt
About 30 ibu hallertau mittelfruh 60mins
Step mash
Omega Blaugies yeast repitched.

 

Bottled my BBA Belgian golden strong that's been in the keezer for about 6 months. Just not drinking it fast enough to justify the keezer space. Put the remainder of the keg of my Black is Beautiful RIS in its place and will bottle that tomorrow, then will replace that with my Voss sticke alt, which has been lagering for about a month.

 

This sounds great.

Does anyone know of a way to get Chevalier malt in the United States? I checked the retailers I'm familiar with and none of them seems to stock it.

 

Packaged a beer specifically brewed to used up some ingredients, a red ale of sorts.

Also, needed something dry and hoppy to balance my current inventory, I did an overnight mash IPA With TF-Golden Promise, a little bit of crystal 40; and Palisade, Cascade, Ekuanot; Fermenting with Wyeast 1450. This is part of my overall strategy to find ways to shorten at least some brew days. Not sure how the hop combination will work, I don't do a lot of IPAs, but I gave it a whirl. I also wanted to see if the overnight will help the 1450 dry out a little bit more. So maybe two birds with one stone.

Hoping to squeeze at least 1 more in before the end of the year.

 

Find a LHBS or local brewery that has a BSG account (I'd wager that most do) and ask them to order a sack for you.

 

Kegged two stouts to force carb, then bottle them off:


3rd Anniversary Stout - 15% Wheated imperial stout with a touch of smoked malt with commercial grade Vermont maple syrup (the darkest), BLIS bourbon barrel aged maple syrup, and cognac soaked oak maple syrup aged on Eagle Rare soaked American oak and French oak soaked in cognac then maple syrup. My third anniversary of homebrewing is this month, so this is the beer I made for that. https://i.imgur.com/6DSaqva.png

Double Barrel Chaos Breaker - 13%, A blend of: Chaos Breaker batch 3 aged for 5 months in a Reservoir Bourbon barrel and Chaos Breaker batch 4 aged for 5 months in an Apple Brandy barrel. Chaos Breaker is a massive imperial stout that takes inspiration from old school roasty stouts and new school pastry stout. The goal here was something like Maman or Assassin. Barrel character is great, loads of chocolate from the base beer as well. https://i.imgur.com/5eQQ7TU.png

 

Didn't get to brew this weekend as expected, so just fired up the burners about 15 minutes ago and about to mash in shortly. Today, brewing a WC IPA with Comet, Nelson and Simcoe.

 

Sounds similar to my next planned brew: a WC DIPA with Comet, Calypso, and Centennial, 12 oz total. Tinseth-calculated 103 IBUs! My goal is anywhere between super hoppy and tongue shredding. It’s my personal reaction to all these namby-pamby NEIPAs, which have completely bastardized the concept of IPA. Cheers!

 

I've been doing light dry hops on a lot of my saisons for increased aromatics, usually about .30oz for a 1 Gallon batch. I feel like it accentuates the hops from the boil but doesn't overshadow the yeast.

 

Bottled the dry hopped BBA solera sour and the Black is Beautiful stout, put the sticke alt on to burst carb.

 

Dry hopped my hard apple cider. I usualy use Mead Yeasts M05 for fermentation.

 

Enjoying a Narwhal while letting the hops soak at KO. Doing an IPA with WC hops and grains with imperials juice yeast, as I had a slurry so figured why not.

94% 2 row
4% biscuit
2% honey malt

hops
40% Centennial
40% Cascade
20% CTZ

Abv 6.7%

 

Just cleaned a few kegs post-bottling.

Tomorrow I'll be brewing a Munich helles in the style of Bierstadt Lagerhaus:

92% German pils
8% Vienna
22 IBU of Hallertau Mittelfrueh (mostly early)
Augustiner lager yeast (Omega OYL-114)

Will ferment/spund/serve in the the same keg. Planning to take a dry January so it'll have plenty of time to lager.

 

That ended up being a bit of a shitshow, but I think I got there in the end.

First time doing a step mash + decoction for this type of beer and I way overshot my preboil gravity. (90% efficiency, lol.) Ended up adding a full gallon of top-up water to get it right, had to adjust my hops on the fly. Anyway, it's in the fermentation fridge on its way to 50F right now.

Looking at brewing a rye wine tomorrow:

50% Mecca Grade Rimrock (rye)
47% Mecca Grade Lamonta (2-row pale)
3% Bairds Dark Crystal
Magnum, Northern Brewer, and Hallertau Blanc to 60ish IBU
Voss kveik again
~10% ABV

 

Bottled the last beer of the year a hole hop ale.
Planning to brew a chocolate raspberry stout next week

 

I just purchased a brewers edge mash and boil. No more going outside in the winter for me.

 

Just kegged the brown ale I brewed the other day. Looks like a stout in this pic. Tried using the hard candy sugar instead of honey in this one to see which I prefer merry Christmas everyone