Brown Again

I had a test on Monday, and another on Thursday, so I was off today and decided to brew our Brown ale again. After dropping the chocolate in half for the last batch I thought it was a pretty good beer. It was a little drier than I wanted and therefore lacked the malty-ness that I want in the brown. So today, same recipe, and we just mashed higher (154 instead of 151)so hopefully it isnt as dry as the previous batch. We normally dry hop, but this time I am going to dry hop for 7 days (we used to only do 3-4 days)to hopefully get more out of the dry hops and increase the aroma. This batch should only be slightly different from the previous batch, but hopefully the changes will make it better.

When we eventually do get a house we are going to start kegging our beer. We will probably end up with 6 taps at a time since we like such variety of beer. Because of this we are going to have several "house" beers in which there is usually always one on tap. I was thinking that there will be be about 4 house beers so that we have 2 taps that can be rotated out as seasonals, special occasion beers, etc. The 4 house beers that I am thinking of will probably be a brown ale, IPA, porter, and then either an American pale ale or the Belgian pale. We are going to brew these beers a lot between now and then so that we can perfect the recipes to our tastes. This is the 3rd batch of brown ale, and over Spring break I am going to brew the 2nd attempt at our IPA as well as the American Pale ale.


On another note, I racked the barley wine to secondary and while I think it will still ferment a few points more, we are currently at 11.5% alcohol. Less than last years 12.6%, but still high. The gravity sample also tasted very good, so hopefully next January this batch will be as good as the first one. It will sit in secondary to bulk age until the very end of April when we will bottle and wax dip it.