Black IPA

Well, it finally happened. The Black IPA is no more. Went to take a pull from the kegerator tonight and it started spitting foam right away. The saddest thing about it is that we made a couple of beers (brown and Schwarz) in plenty of time where they would be ready to step in when needed, but now we have nothing to drink. I guess we'll have to speed up the steam beer a bit to hopefully get it going by his weekend.


...when I say 'nothing to drink' I mean nothing on tap. We still have plenty of bottles and the IPA and brown are tasting pretty good now. The rye saison is also finally carbonated and that is tasting pretty nice as well

Steam and Schwarz

We took samples from the Steam and the Schwarz beer's today. The steam tastes really good, nice and light, a bit of hoppiness. The schwarz doesnt taste as good this time around but I am also trying it about 3 weeks sooner into the process this time than last time. I put the steam into the fridge to cold crash today with plans to keg it on Wendesday or Thursday of next week. I am still undecided if this beer will benefit from a week of conditioning at room temp or if we should just put it into the kegerator and quick carbonate it so we have something to drink when the black IPA kicks (which will be any day now). The black lager wont be kegged for about another month, and it will spend a week or so cold crashing prior to that.

Double Pale Ale; Barleywine Bottling

On Saturday we successfully brewed 10 gallons of our Double Pale Ale (technically we should classify it as an IPA, but whatev) with our neighbor while he brewed 5 gallons of an Old Ruffian Barleywine clone on his system. We started early, and after 5 hours, he had 10 gallons of beer and I had 5, so it was a very productive use of our time. This is our fist time using Faloncer's Flight hops, which is a blend of 4-5 Pacific Northwest Hops. I think it's Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Sorachi Ace, and maybe something else. Either way, it will contain a nice citrus aspect commonly found in American Hops as well as some piney/spicy/dankness. Very excited to try this one in 6 weeks.



We also bottled our lastest vintage of barleywine. Elise and I did it after we put Cooper to bed, so it was nice to have some company while I bottled. We filled only 7 bombers this year, as opposed to last year where it was all bombers. We thought by filling more 12 oz bottles, we are more likely to actually drink it because we dont have to commit to as much strong beer in one sitting. After the 7 bombers we filled an additional 18-12 oz bottles and we are planning to wax dip them pretty soon. Last year they didnt get any wax until the Fall, but with the move coming up, we'll get them done much sooner this year.



With the flurry of brewing that has been going on the last 6 weeks, we've had to start labeling every batch to keep them straight. Before we bottled the barleywine, we had 4 different beers in primary and 2 differnt beers in secondary, so it was getting hard to keep everything straight. We only have 2 more brews planned, and by the middle/end of April we should have 3 beers on tap for a little variety.

First Snow

Today was racked the first snow to secondary. Since we had a little more than 5 gallons we put about 0.75 gallons into a jug and will add a Light French Oak wood spiral to the jub about 14 days prior to bottling. Last year's Oaked First Snow was a little too "intense oak flavor" for some, so we'll tone it down a bit this year and try to find a happy medium. The beer finished at 1022 (down from 1090) for 9% alcohol. Less than last year's 10.1%, but still respectable. For whatever reason, this year most of our repeat brews have been about 1-2% less alcohol than the previous years. Hopefully it is just a fluke in the 2 beers it has happened (Snow and BW) and we'll get back to normal next month when we brew the Imperial Stout.

We've also drank all but 2 of the First Snow's from last year. With rain in the forcast next week we are planning on finishing those as we have to say goodbye to Elky and pack him away until next winter.

Tomorrow is our Double Pale Ale with Falconer's Flight, followed the next weekend by our Belgian Pale Ale. Two weeks after that will likely be our last beer brewed in Colorado. With plans to move around the first or second week of June, we want to make sure everything is bottled before then. We might try to squeeze something of lower gravity in, but I doubt it.

Everything else is sitting nicely in the garage. We plan on bottling the Barleywine on Sunday, and hopefully this year we'll wax dip soon after that. We have 3 empty kegs waiting to be filled and hopefully by the 2nd week in April, they'll all be filled with the Steam Beer, Schwarz, and Brown Ale.

Tragedy At the Brewery

It's been a while since my last post and a lot has happened around the brewery. First, we brewed a California Common (aka Steam Beer) 2 weeks ago. It was a relatively straight-forward brewday and a very simple recipe. Only 9 lbs of 2-row and 0.9 lbs of crystal 60 along with a modest 2 oz's of northern brewer hops. This beer also used the California Lager yeast, and as of today, is out of the fridge (that was set at 55 degrees) and is resting in the garage (about 63-65 degrees) until we keg it on the 27th. Hopefully, it will be a nice, crisp, easy drinking beer for the spring time.

As for the tragedy: The people I bought our kegs from told me the kegs were "clean" and just needed to be sanitized prior to use. I sanitized and then filled with our schwarzbier and brown ale. The brown ale was sitting in our garage to condition/bulk age for about 1 week before I put it into the fridge and hooked up the gas. Being that I am not very patient and just want to taste a sample of everything, I took a sample of the brown ale on Friday night. Terrible. It tasted soapy; very soapy. I thought that was odd (seeing as I though the black ipa had a similar taste, though not as strong as the brown ale) so I took a sample from the black lager. Even worse. Undrinkable.

I went to the garage again and opened up the only empty keg to see if there was something inside that could be giving this off taste. When I smelled the inside, it smelled exactly like the off flavor we were tasting in the beers: a bit medicinally and very soapy. We came to the conclusion that whatever the kegs were "cleaned" with were not properly rinsed out and as a result, the flavor was now in our beers. We think that since the black IPA was so hoppy, that it masked the flavors to some extent which is why it wasnt as noticeable. However, in the brown, which is less hoppy, and the black lager which is barely hoppy, the flavors were much more pronounced and made the beers undrinkable. Since they were undrinkable, we had to dump them.

I think I died a little inside as I dumped 10 gallons of beer down the drain on Friday night. They were both really good before going into the kegs, especially the schwarzbier, and we had such high hopes for them. The black lager was the hardest to dump as we brewed it early enough to allow for it to actually lager for 6-8 weeks before drinking. The brown was to be the replacement for the black IPA as that keg is getting closer and closer to kicking.

As a result of the fallout, Elise let me make both the brown and the schwarz simultaneously on Sunday. Luckily, my neighbor now has his own mash tun and boil kettle and I was able to do side-by-side batches and get everything done in about 4.5 hours. There were a couple of mixups with hop additions, but nothing that would make much of a difference in the final beer. Now we have about 5 weeks before the brown ale will be ready to drink and hopefully we can drink the black lager in the middle of May.