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.