Competition and brewdays
Posted by | Uncategorized | Posted on December 2nd, 2007
Been a while since I actually posted anything… heh.
At any rate, I have continued to brew even if I haven’t written anything about it. I have a new kegerator (bigger and easier to get stuff in and out of … can even get 3 kegs in it!) Clint found us a huge chest freezer that I bought a thermostat for, so now we can make lagers in addition to our ales … lots of cool stuff.
We even had a homebrew competition in Cookeville! Something I never thought I’d see… It was a fundraiser for the Rail with Trails project (a long hiking/biking/etc trail being built alongside a renovated rail line). There were 8 to 10 brewers that participated, with 15 different beers for people to vote on. My rye porter recipe came in second! All in all, it was an awesome day. I served beer to people for two hours and was completely surprised when they announced that our time was up… it just flew past. We entered 4 recipes: our pale ale (made with some homegrown cascade hops), the rye porter, an amber ale, and an ESB. (See? Told you we’d still been brewing…)
We brewed again yesterday, as a matter of fact. Ariel even brewed a batch! Clint and I brewed a batch of oatmeal stout which is supposed to be pretty close to Sam Smith’s Oatmeal Stout, and Ariel started a batch of a cranberry cream ale. I’m really looking forward to trying them both.
We also brewed a batch of Russian Imperial Stout back in August. I’ve snuck a couple of bottles since then, and I gotta say that it’s awfully good. It was brewed to be a Christmas present for some folks, so the plan has always been to age it. Our original gravity hit 1.125 (Which is HUGE) and finished up at 1.035 … pretty darned close to 12.5% abv! We had to make it as a 5 gallon batch since our mash tun (a fairly large cooler) wasn’t big enough to hold all of the grains needed for a 10 gallon batch… and we’ve made some pretty hefty beers in that cooler. Only problem is, it’s too strong for the yeast we used so it’s just baaaaaarely carbonated. Next time I’ll either use a champagne yeast to carbonate, or I’ll keg it and force carbonate before bottling.
Maybe I’ll even get better about posting!
Now on tap:
1. Holiday Ale (spiced brown ale)
2. ESB (competition entry)
mmmmmm beeerrr. yay for blogging! it looks like you are making some yummy beverage. keep up the blogage and the beerage.