Anyone want to join in on a brew project? My good friend Jamie picked up a full size Bourbon barrel. Now the plan is to fill it with Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Ale (clone) and let it oak age for a year. If you haven’t tried Rasputin, you really should – it’s a smooth, delicious [...]

I plan to brew a very high gravity beer in the near future – which will require a big yeast count. To get there, we need to brew a few lower gravity beers. This, along with the Wil Wheat should provide enough pacman cells for the big batch. Another Cream Ale? You bet. This stuff [...]

I was not expecting to brew this weekend… Then Jamie started talking about the yeast he purchased to brew 24 gallons of “Snowfall Pale Ale” (his house beer). We quickly realized that he would need at least 1 Trillion yeast cells – he only had 2 vials of WLP005 (200 Billion total). He also wouldn’t [...]

As a child of the 80′s, I grew up watching Wil Wheaton on TV (Star Trek, Stand by Me). When I recently found out that he is also a home brewer – well, I knew that a beer needed to made in his honor. Yesterday, I noticed that FH Steinbarts (my LHBS) is going to [...]

I have been brewing for several years and feel pretty confident with most ale recipes. However, this will be the first lager attempt. It’s not that I don’t like lagers – rather, I have avoided them in the past due to the fermentation temperatures. My home stays between 60-70°F, which is optimal for ales. Lagers [...]

Having already brewed 24 gallons: of stout and strong scotch – we decided to use all the grain to make a small beer. Sparging more hot water over the grain yielded 12 gallons of wort with a potential for a 2% beer. We raised the gravity to 1.032 with 2 extra pounds of sugar. This [...]

This is a “retooling” of the Gibbous recipe which everyone was calling Gebbeth, anyway…  The most radical change was to decrease the percentage of dark malts. The new recipe conforms with the BJCP style for a strong scotch ale. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, a Gebbeth is: “a person who has been consumed and [...]

This is the third batch (in 3 weeks) to be dumped on the same yeast. First we had the Cream Ale, then an Evil Red. Ranger Recipe This awesome IPA is one of the few New Belgium beers that I really like. It is crisp and clean and very hoppy. Here is the original recipe. [...]

Last week, we brewed up the Cream Ale and used a some yeast culture (WLP 001)  that had been sitting in my fridge for over a year. Regardless of the age, fermentation started out strong and smelled clean. So to reward these awesome yeasties, I decided to dump on another batch of beer once the [...]

With the move and everything else keeping us busy, there has not been a lot of time to brew. This was our first opportunity in several months. The recipe chosen is actually a modified version of my first all grain batch – a super heavy scotch that we named “Perigee” based on the phase of [...]