As my Facebook status said Friday afternoon - "Summer Hours = Brewing Hours"
I'm a lucky enough guy this summer to have "summer hours" for the first time in my professional career, which means I'm out of the office at 12pm on Fridays, which also means I'm heating my mash water by 1pm Fridays and am done brewing right around 6pm for the day.
I plan on doing this with at least 2 of my Fridays per month while summer hours last (up to September). Which means I'm going to do the opposite of what most homebrewers do..I'm going to be brewing most during the hot summer months.
Not surprisingly I've done another British Bitter, an ESB. Primary reason for doing this was I could keg "Butchers Breakfast" and toss this ESB right onto that yeast cake. The nice thing about brewing lighter Bitters is that at a 3.9% ABV you're basically making a really big starter, so by the time you brew a "bigger" beer you've got a millions of healthy and active yeast just waiting to start eating some fermentable sugars.
This ESB is basically a magnified version of the Butchers Breakfast, with more base malt (Maris Otter), more specialty grains (Victory, and Special Roast), and a new addition of a bit of Chocolate malt.
Recently I was reading an article on perception of flavor of beer (big surprise right?) and found an interesting tidbit "our sense of smell can pick up on a wider range of flavors than our taste buds can". This came out of the magazine "Beer Northwest" which a friends dad had hooked me up with. So I decided to go HEAVY on the flavor and aroma hops (East Kent Goldings to stay true to style), while using some Simcoe as the bittering addition, which produces a fairly clean bittering flavor which will allow the EKG flavor to come through fairly well (plus using EKG's as a bittering hops can be a tall order when shooting for a 43 IBU...and that translates into a ton of hop pellets that will take up more of the beer when it comes to transferring to the fermentor, and ultimately the keg). So when it comes to using 2 ounces of EKG's, or .5 ounce of Simcoe..well it was a no brainer.
It's been a while since I've brewed an IPA but I do imagine I've used 1 ounce of hops for flavor and an additional 1 ounce for aroma in the past; but after brewing bitters for so long this seemed like a ton of hops to use for me. "Stone Garden" is sitting in the primary now, fermenting away (and quickly due to a slightly higher temperature and that healthy yeast cake) so I should be kegging it this following weekend, drinkable in 2 weeks I imagine.
Really looking forward to this one!
Cheers,
Brian
I'm a lucky enough guy this summer to have "summer hours" for the first time in my professional career, which means I'm out of the office at 12pm on Fridays, which also means I'm heating my mash water by 1pm Fridays and am done brewing right around 6pm for the day.
I plan on doing this with at least 2 of my Fridays per month while summer hours last (up to September). Which means I'm going to do the opposite of what most homebrewers do..I'm going to be brewing most during the hot summer months.
Not surprisingly I've done another British Bitter, an ESB. Primary reason for doing this was I could keg "Butchers Breakfast" and toss this ESB right onto that yeast cake. The nice thing about brewing lighter Bitters is that at a 3.9% ABV you're basically making a really big starter, so by the time you brew a "bigger" beer you've got a millions of healthy and active yeast just waiting to start eating some fermentable sugars.
This ESB is basically a magnified version of the Butchers Breakfast, with more base malt (Maris Otter), more specialty grains (Victory, and Special Roast), and a new addition of a bit of Chocolate malt.Recently I was reading an article on perception of flavor of beer (big surprise right?) and found an interesting tidbit "our sense of smell can pick up on a wider range of flavors than our taste buds can". This came out of the magazine "Beer Northwest" which a friends dad had hooked me up with. So I decided to go HEAVY on the flavor and aroma hops (East Kent Goldings to stay true to style), while using some Simcoe as the bittering addition, which produces a fairly clean bittering flavor which will allow the EKG flavor to come through fairly well (plus using EKG's as a bittering hops can be a tall order when shooting for a 43 IBU...and that translates into a ton of hop pellets that will take up more of the beer when it comes to transferring to the fermentor, and ultimately the keg). So when it comes to using 2 ounces of EKG's, or .5 ounce of Simcoe..well it was a no brainer.
It's been a while since I've brewed an IPA but I do imagine I've used 1 ounce of hops for flavor and an additional 1 ounce for aroma in the past; but after brewing bitters for so long this seemed like a ton of hops to use for me. "Stone Garden" is sitting in the primary now, fermenting away (and quickly due to a slightly higher temperature and that healthy yeast cake) so I should be kegging it this following weekend, drinkable in 2 weeks I imagine.
Really looking forward to this one!
Cheers,
Brian
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3 comments:
I seriously want the "Save the Ales" glass...where did you get it??
Memsissueli
appf
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