New Digs

Finally got around to making our first batch of beer in Tampa. It's been a busy month since we got here, and we are officially out of beer on tap. Seeing as though the kegerator was empty I came up with the idea to brew 10 gallons and use the kegerator as another fermentation fridge. I wanted to do a Pale Ale and Elise came up with the idea to split the batch and use 2 different yeasts. We haven't done a Belgian Pale Ale in forever, so we did 5 gallons with Belgian yeast and 5 gallons with American.

It was a relatively smooth brew day, some of the equipment was still in boxes, but other than that my table worked great and there weren't any hiccups in the garage. The ground water is a lot warmer in Tampa, so I will need to start getting more ice for the chilling phase, but that shouldn't be too big of an issue.

I will dry the American Pale with 2 oz of Citra hop which will be a new one for us. I am going to dry hop in primary, as opposed to the keg, as I think some of the off flavors were actually coming from the bags I was using to hold the hops in the kegs. We'll see. I'll be kegging on Thursday and hopefully we'll be able to drink some early samples on Saturday in time for the Final Four.

Recipe
18 lbs 2-row
1.7 lb CaraPils
1.3 lb C40
0.2 lb C60

1 oz CTZ at 60
2 oz Cascade at 20
1 oz Cascade at 10
2 oz Citra + 1 oz Cascade at 5 min

Dry Hop (American) 2 oz Citra