Brewing up Trouble

Brewing up Trouble, it's not only a catchy blog title, but also a catchy team name. Thats right...a team name. James and I will be competing in the Atlanta City Chase under that team name and we are going to win. If you don't know what that is (I didn't know what it was 3 days ago) then google it. It happens May 17th and like I said, we're going to win.

Anyways, that is all completely beside the point. The main point of this post is to tell everyone how awesome we are. Today we brewed our first 10 gallon batch with the help of Kellie C (if it sucks its her fault). The recipe we tried is supposed to be an IPA...but it actually didn't call for dry hopping, so I'm not sure how they can call it an IPA at all, but whatever. It might not even taste like an IPA at all since we changed almost every ingredient called for in the recipe. We didn't have the bittering hops the recipe called for, so we made a substitution. I was so proud of myself for figuring out the math (turned out that it wasn't that hard actually) to figure out the equivalent AAUs (Alpha Acidic Units) for the new hops that I completely forgot to double the hops since the recipe was for 5 gallons and we were brewing 10 gallons. Not entirely my fault, James didn't catch it either.

Well, we realized about 30 minutes into the boil that we (I) messed up, so we made the addition then. Shouldn't mess things up too badly...it probably just won't be very bitter at all and will taste extra sweet. We also decided to use Cascade hops as our finishing hops rather than the England Kent Goldings the recipe called for. So at the end of the day we had completely changed the recipe which means that we actually made our own recipe. Fingers crossed that it turns out delicious.

In other brewing news our second batch tastes much better than our first batch. We also have sort of figured out how to carbonate the beer correctly...we think.

This time brewing went much smoother than all the other times. I was ready to quit brewing already after the last time I brewed, but thankfully that was just due to the flu/being hung over. I think we all enjoyed ourselves today.

Finally!

I was finally able to try our beer today. Petra was nice enough to bring me a bottle back from Atlanta. I'll admit that I was a little nervous about tasting it, but really its not bad. Not bad at all. Yeah, it was almost completely flat (James hasn't quite figured out the carbonation yet), but if I ordered it in a bar I honestly wouldn't be disappointed (except for the whole lack of carbonation thing). Hell, I'd pay 3 dollars for it, easy.

Hopefully we can get the CO2 stuff figured out. I think that with the right amount of carbonation it would have been a damned tasty beer.

Four weeks ago I would have never believed that we could have made a beer from scratch that actually tasted like beer. We did it though...go us.

Tastings and New Assistant Brewer

This has been a somewhat eventful week of brewing. I am living at the "Brewery" (aka my parent's house) while my folks are on vacation and decided it was time for more beer.

On Wednesday, I took another trip to Atlanta Brewing Company with Steve and Blakely to get some expert opinions on our first batch and received good reviews from Chris. Our friends from last time weren't there, so I left a bottle for them to try. We will see...

Also, I made another trip to "Brew Depot" to get some new ingredients and to hear Mike and Bob's opinion on our ale. They both agreed that it came out well and had good flavor but was defiantly not an American Pale Ale, but more like a Red Ale. At least it tasted like beer!

I decided to try a brown ale next and was assisted by Kellie G., as Ben was busy drinking at a lake house... Mike wrote me a recipe using the hops we already had, but I didn't realize that the hops I planned on using had turned brown and were probably were not good. So, I improvised and substituted some other hops we had on the prayer that they will work well with the style and not suck. Again, I changed the configuration of our brewery and think everything went very well. For the first time, we used the grain mill and crushed our own grain. Next, we hit our mash temps perfectly and barely any grain came out of the mash tun. Even the sparging went great. As chaotic everything probably seemed to Kellie, it actually went well. We even tried a great new cask aged brown ale from Dogfish head: Palo Santo Marron It was excellent.

Serving: Beer (Its the first batch, I won't try to categorize it)
Carbonating: American Pale Ale
In the Fermenter: Brown Ale
Next up: Any Suggestions???


BTW: Ben still hasn't tried the first batch and it's been kegged for 2 weeks. Where is the dedication?