Let's Get This Started

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 Mead, and a toasty Olive Oil Ale.

I have a huge list of brews that I have planned but it's always changing and I'm up for suggestions. I'm looking forward to busy year.

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Brew 8 & 9 - Big Brews: Barley Wine & Wee Heavy

Having little kids around can make it difficult to get to the local hombrew shop so I devised a plan to have my wife pick up ingredients for me while she runs errands. The first time I kept it simple and asked for some yeast, hops and an airlock and she succeeded. The second time I threw in a grain bill for my Export Stout and and a Witbier. When she arrived home I asked why she only had one small bag (remember these are 1 gallon batches) of grain, she said the other was to big to carry. This had me worried since it contained only slightly more than a pound of grain. When I went to the car there was a huge (five gallon batch size) bag of milled grain. I checked the receipt and found that she purchased 13 lbs of base malt instead of 13 oz for the Witbier. Since the goal for this year is to experiment I figured this was chance to brew some really big beers. The big sack of grain included: 13 lbs Two Row Malt 10 oz Flaked Wheat 7 oz ...

Brew #5: Meyer Lemon Berliner Weisse

My body craves whatever is not in season so it led me to a nice refreshing Berliner Weisse in the middle of winter. After a previous attempt I did some internet research and talked to some other homebrewers that have had success with the style. It seemed that the quickest way to get a nice balance of sour was to sour mash. The problem with sour mashing is that introducing oxygen into the mash can result in some unappetizing vomit flavors. I read that someone had great success mashing in a corny keg and purging with carbon dioxide but I didn't want to introduce any bacteria in my kegs (not yet at least!). It struck me one night while reading a cookbook that I should mash in a sous vide sort of way. After brainstorming I figured out that I could get a big ziploc bag (5 gallon) and put the wort in it at 110 degrees F with a handful of unmilled pilsner malt to introduce the Lactobacillus. I put the ziploc bag into an igloo cooler filled with 110F water (fille...

Brew #3: Semi-Sweet Mead

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...

Fifty Two Brews

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