Beer Brewing

Spend the day at home, making a batch of American IPA.  I have been obsessed with American Pale Ales made with Chinook, Cascade and Centennial hops.  The Chinook goes in as the straight bittering hop, and the Cascade/Centennial additions are added continuously at 10 minute intervals.  Today I used more Centennial because I only had a little Cascade left. 

Check out the comparison to the BJCP Style, the hop IBU's topped the charts!  Yeah, can you say hoppy?

This is the third beer in the Summer of the Single American 1056 yeast pack.  I racked this beer over the yeast cake from the Spring APA. 

There are some obvious advantages to this - like an instantaneous fermentation, and a massive starter for your batch of beer.  The downside is that you pass a lot of trub from batch to batch.  AND if you get bugs, you will have them 6-fold on the next batch. 

This is batch 2 in the Summer of the Single American 1056 Yeast Packet. 

I bought all the ingredients for a brown ale with the intention of using the sap from my tapped maple as a replacement for the water in the beer.  Instead of doing an all-grain bactch, I used an extract recipe and bought another set of ingredients.  This left me with a brown ale to make.  The only catch is that this recipe is for an ENGLISH brown ale rather than an AMERICAN brown ale.  So this beer suffers from a split personality - a mix of english hops and malt and a crisp american ale yeast profile. 

Welcome to the Summer of the Single American 1056 Yeast Packet!  My intention is to use a single yeast packet for almost of my beer brewing this summer.  How?  Easy, just reuse the yeast cakes from previous batches and replicate new batches from small samples of the existing batches. 

For this year's Big Brew, Chip Wlaton and I collaborated on a Saison.  We added some stuff to personalize this beer, and the results were amazing! 

Watch out for this yeast, it's super stubborn!  I had mine on a heating pad on low for 8 weeks to keep the temperature at 85 degrees.  It was worth it, this came out very dry - tangy and citrusy!  Yummy!

Here's the big idea - tap the neighbor's massive maple tree and harvest the sap.  Then use the sap INSTEAD of water to make beer.  The beer needs to be a slight thing to get some of the maple character to come through.  Soooo how about a cream ale?  I used Pearle hops and an all-grain recipe with all malt rather than using corn or rice adjuncts. 

When you make beer with maple sap, you don't get pancake maple syrup, instead you get a slightly woody spicy character.  So this beer was a success and failure.  We did get some extra alcohol from the maple sap, but the taste was not what people expected. 

This beer is the third barrel project from the Barrell Fellowship II.  The first two barrel beers were a hit and a miss.