Fifty Two Brews

Mead is one of those things that everyone knows about but only a few have tried.  The local homebrew club has an award winning mead maker who brings his good stuff to some of our functions.  Tasting his a couple of times completes the catalog of my mead experience (not including a bad experience with Ethiopian Honey Wine).  At the club holiday party my friend and I tasted a sweet mead that was really enjoyable and we figured why not give it a try. If this mead turns out well we will go through it quickly and if its bad we can probably dose our tea with it (3 gallons of mead would dose quite a bit of tea!).  Without doing much research I went and bought some honey, 6 lbs of the orange blossom variety.  The man at the farmers market told me that most mead makers are using his orange blossom or his avocado honey, but orange blossom sounded safer. After taking the honey home I conducted some research and realized that my local homebrew shops don't  carry an...

This Christmas was the first in a awhile where I didn't receive any gifts that were beer or homebrew related but like any good homebrewer I made something from nothing.  My wife thought it would be fun to get me a giant tub of Tapioca Maltodextrin so I could play around with making different powders at dinner time.  This sparked an idea, what if I added one of these powders to beer?  There's already some good ways of adding chocolate and peanut butter so I figured that I'd try adding some olive oil.  It's fruity and bitter and at least it would help with oxygenation of the wort if all else fails.  Adding oil to beer is disgusting and has many negative effects such as poor head retention and increased rate of spoilage but maybe the maltodextrin will help in some way.  For this recipe I wanted to create something toasty for the olive oil to complement.  Using some biscuit malt for a some light toasty biscuit flavor, a fair amount of wheat to he...

The first batch of beer I decided to brew in 2014 is Randy Mosher's Crabapple Lambicky Ale.  Mosher's book Radical Brewing  blew my mind when I read it so it seemed right to pay homage to him to start off the adventure.  His twelve beers of Christmas is also something that always seems to draw me in.  Since I'm brewing fifty two batches why not brew all twelve this year. The recipe for this brew is available here  on the AHA website.  There are a few things that seemed strange to me but I followed them anyways.  Mosher mashes this at 145 for two hours which seems really low for a beer that will have Roselare added to it.  I'm thinking it's because he wanted this beer ready quick and/or maybe the wheat provides more for the bugs to munch on than the O.G. shows. I made a couple ingredient substitutions since I'm trying to clear out my hop stash in the freezer.  I subbed out the Cascade at bittering for some Warrior and subbed out the Tettna...

Homebrewing is one of those hobbies that takes over your entire being.  It seems that when someone starts homebrewing they become completely obsessed and brew a as much as their life permits.  After the initial obsession dies down most of us either brew what we like to drink, brew to style or experiment as much as possible.  Some people, like myself, are a bit of all three. I'm not the most active at drinking beer so brewing what I like and brewing to style really clog up my homebrewing pipeline and limit my creativity since I don't want 5 gallons of an experiment gone wrong blocking one of my taps for half a year (or longer).  My solution to this was to brew 5 gallons of beers I like and use 1 gallon batches to brew things that I probably shouldn't. The goal for this year is to brew 52 batches of beer.  It won't be weekly but it will be constant.  I started off the 1st week with 3 batches, Randy Mosher's Crabapple Lambicky Ale, my first Semi-Sweet ...