Kiwi IPA

Well, folks, I've been out of this blogging business for a while now. But fear not! A new batch is a brewin'. I recently purchased an IPA at Bruisin' Ales in Asheville, NC from a cleverly named brewery in New Zealand, Yeastie Boys. The IPA was called Digital IPA and they have made the recipe available online here. So, I decided to give it a try.

Once I was able to convert the recipe from metric to US standard things went smoothly and the beer is happily bubbling away in the kitchen. O.G. = 1.080.

And I found a slick way to recycle my grains...


Note: This beer does not have kiwis in it, neither the people from New Zealand nor the fruit. I'm calling it Kiwi IPA because the majority of the hops involved are grown in New Zealand.

Moany the Elder - The Review

FG: 1.007!
ABV: 8%

We're coming up on 3 weeks since I bottled my clone of Pliny the Elder. I sampled one after two weeks in the bottle, but there was still a little aging needed. Today, I decided it had aged long enough already!

I'm no good at the fancy beer tasting reviews, but I can tell you that this has lived up to all expectations I may have had. It is a well-balanced and delicious hop bomb!

Behold...

Moany the Elder

Let it be known that today was brew day. A brew day much like any other except completely different. I recently purchased the Best of Brew Your Own - 250 Classic Clone Recipes and I was quickly able to choose my next brew...Pliny the Elder. Now, I have not had this beer before, but it is often listed as the best of the best in Imperial IPAs, so I figured it was worth a shot.

I ordered all the ingredients, including the nearly impossible to find Simcoe hop pellets (found them at Rebel Brewer in Tennessee), and planned my brew day. As I was getting the logistics sorted out, I took another look at the recipe and noticed it didn't list the boil volume. A quick internet search led me to believe the boil volume should be roughly 7.5 gallons. I had never done a full volume boil, nor do I own the equipment to do such things. After the initial panic subsided, I asked my co-worker and fellow homebrewer if I could borrow his 10 gallon boil kettle. He offered up the entire setup, 10 gallon kettle, 10 gallon mash tun, propane burner, wort chiller, and oxygen stone. Aside from the mash tun, I had never brewed using any of this equipment before. Here was the scene in the garage...


This brew calls for copious amounts of delicious hops and the whole garage smelled fantastic! Here's just a fraction of the total hops...these were added at flameout.


Here's the stats:

Batch Volume: 5 Gallons, All-grain
Predicted OG: 1.073 (at 65% Efficiency)
Actual OG: 1.068 (calculated efficiency = 63.8%)

Pitched 2 vials of White Labs California Ale yeast about an hour ago. Wish me luck!

AboMoanation IPA

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Things have been slow around TTBC lately. I bottled version 4 of the porter a little over a month ago and sampled one just the other day...still a little green.

Today, however, was bottling day for the 1st double IPA I've made in a good while. This thing had been sitting on 2 oz of Centennial hops for the last week and boy did it smell good. The OG was right near 1.075 and it finished out very close to 1.010, which puts it in the realm of about 8.5% ABV. My recipe was a clone of Stone Ruination IPA (Recipe published years ago in Brew your Own magazine and found here - See posting by Brewman82), with slight modifications.

It's looking like late January should be a tasty time around here!

Cheers!

A moment of silence

This week we lost a friend. Above, you see her in her heyday, so full of hope. She lagered the 2007 FGSA Grand Champion India Pale Lager as well as the 2008 version of same. She also lagered two separate Doppelbocks and poured countless pints in both North Carolina and Virginia. But alas, during her last few years, she had been resigned to merely holding craft cheeses and seeing nary the first drop of the sweet nectar for which she was intended.

Well folks, this week she moved on, to a good home that will bring her back to her former grandeur. All I have left now is my Rainier tap handle.

Good bye, old friend. We raise a pint to you.

We wish you a beery christmas...

Admittedly, it is entirely too early for a Christmas reference. However, I purchased this fantastic bottle tree today and it is red and green. What other reference could I make? What you see here are the freshly washed bottles for tomorrow's Bottling Day. Tomorrow, we crank up the Hangover Cafe and bottle some porter!

To hell with NC, I'm brewing anyway!

While the rest of the locations I associate with seem to be full swing into fall time, the North Carolina summer refuses to give up. The leaves are turning, the humidity is nil, but the temps keep hovering near 90. I say the hell with it! I'll just keep the air on, pretend its truly fall, and get a batch of beer bubblin'.

And so begins Moan Porter V4 (AKA Quaternary Porter). The all-grain Trifecta porter was recently reworked into a partial mash recipe to accommodate my brewing setup and the specialty grains adjusted slightly, resulting in the Quaternary Porter.

Brew day was last Monday, September 13th. After many weeks of far too many hours devoted to my job, I took Monday off for a little R & R. It seems I had been away from brewing too long. The brewing process was filled with catastrophe...The brewpot boiled over multiple times, the boiling wort bubbling out of the brewpot burned my wrist, and then the stainless steel spoon I was using to stir with fell into the brewpot and promptly sank.

Here it is near the end of the 75 minute boil.


After the boil, I cooled it in the sink and within a handful of hours I added the newly released Wyeast Northern Brewer Neobrittania yeast . The thing was bubblin' like mad by the next morning and weighed in at an OG of 1.075.

Here's my plan for the secondary...

Split the batch in two. Half (2.5 gallons) is aged properly and then bottled. The other half becomes an epic, kick-your-ass bourbon barrel porter. I started the oak chips soaking in 3/4 cup Eagle Rare bourbon (Thanks Brad) today and the whole lot goes into the secondary next weekend. Not sure it's a good idea to add bourbon to a beer that's already near 8% ABV, but I'm gonna do it anyhow!