At the beginning of the brewery tour at the Samuel Adams brewery in Boston, guests walk through in improvised tunnel into the brewhouse. The tunnel is actually an old fermention tank cut open on either side. The outside is white fiberglass, but the inside is actual glass. In a lot of ways glass is the best material to store or ferment beer in.

While some homebrewers invest in expensive stainless steel fermenters, the vast majority of us use glass or plastic fermenters. I prefer glass because it isn’t as prone to scratching as plastic, it doesn’t stain, and it doesn’t absorb odor. Glass does carry a few obvious negatives. The most obvious is its susceptibility to shattering.

Every homebrewer’s nightmare. Imagine cleaning that up!

A glass carboy in and of itself is awkward to pick up or carry. Carboys are even more cumbersome when filled with five gallons of beer, or are wet after being cleaned. I can’t imagine dropping a carboy full of beer. Firstly, if that happened I would be very fortunate to escape injury. If I were lucky enough not to gash myself, I would then have to clean up five gallons of beer and huge shards of glass.

A long time ago I made the decision to purchase handles for every carboy I own. I won’t buy a new carboy without buying a handle of some kind to go with it. For my five gallon carboys I use a coated metal handle that attaches to the neck. These work very well when trying to tilt or drag a carboy, as well as carrying empty carboys. The only issue with these types of handles is that they are not recommended for carrying the weight full carboys. The weight of a full carboy could make the nipple along the neck of the carboy snap. When my five gallon carboys are full, I will use the handle to tilt them up, reach under with my other hand and use that hand along the bottom to bear most of the weight.

All of my 5 gallon carboys have one of these handles.

The Brew Hauler can carry the weight of a full carboy

.

Mike Lowell could walk into the 2017 Red Sox lineup.

That is how I carboy safely, but that certainly isn’t the only way to protect your carboys. One method I have seen used is to carry carboys in milk crates. This would seem to guard against glass-on-glass contact and would enable the brewer to carry the full weight of the carboy by grabbing the handles on the crate.

This handsome greyhound approves of his owner’s safe carboy practices.

There are specialized carboy bags or carriers online and on places like Etsy that are designed to block light and to be able to carry the weight of a full carboy. Some brewers will make their own, or have a family member make their own carrier for their carboys

This homemade cover/carrier looks cozy enough to sleep in.

If imagining cleaning up five gallons of beer and shards of glass isn’t enough to make you want to protect your carboy I don’t know what to tell you. It reminds me of some of the insurance customers I talk to who think carrying the bare minimum coverage limits is sufficient because they “have never had an accident”. Not protecting your carboy is irresponsible and unsafe. That is to say noting about potentially losing a batch to a shattered carboy. It is a stupid risk to take.

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Two years ago Jennie and I went on an epic road trip full of beer and baseball. In addition to passing through Atlanta, North Carolina, and Delaware we spent a night in Asheville. Out of all the places we hit in the area, Wicked Weed was my favorite. I brought back a couple of bottles to save for a special occasion. About a year later Wicked Weed started distributing to Massachusetts.

Last Tuesday night we were sorting entries for our club’s upcoming competition. As we sorted all of the entries we received we shared several bottles of Wicked Weed. Wednesday morning Wicked Weed announced that they had been acquired by The High End, AB InBev’s craft division.

I have been more ambivalent than most in regards to these type of acquisitions. However I have found when it comes time to buy a beer I have a hard time pulling the trigger on purchasing beer from brands that have “sold out”. Last September I was at Fenway Park I was all set to buy a Goose IPA until I saw cans of Harpoon IPA in a case.

Likewise I haven’t purchased anything from Northern Brewer since their acquisition.  I’ve received numerous discount emails offering 10%, 15%, and even 20% off of my purchase, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to spend my money there.

Working at Modern Homebrew Emporium every week mitigates the convenience of buying supplies online. When I do spend money on ingredients and supplies there is something to be said for spending it at a place that finds it in their heart to pay me! If there is something I couldn’t get at the shop I think I would still prefer to support another vendor that isn’t associated with AB InBev.

I can’t blame anyone who creates something and then decides to sell it when offered an inordinate amount of money. I still unapologetically enjoy Leinenkugel’s, and will probably buy Bourbon County on Black Friday. Still, I find that when I dig into my wallet more often than not I choose to support independent businesses, especially local ones.

There is some gray area as far as “selling out” goes. Brands like Redhook, Widmer, and Kona do not meet the Brewers Association’s criteria for craft beer because their parent company, the somewhat ironically-named Craft Brew Alliance, is 31% owned by AB. Brooklyn Brewery sold 24% of their company to Japanese macro-brewer Kirin. The Brewers Association has to draw the line somewhere, but should that 7% difference make a huge difference to a consumer?

One of my favorite breweries Founders sold 30% ownership to Spanish macro Mahou San Miguel. As far as I know Mahou San Miguel doesn’t partake in some of AB’s more questionable business practices.

I have no particular animus toward any of these brands that have been acquired by AB or another macro-brewer. When I buy beer or buy brewing supplies I go with my gut. I don’t buy a lot of sour beer. Maybe I’ll pick up a bottle every couple of months. Next time I see Wicked Weed on the shelf I certainly won’t feel the same way I felt that night we walked into the Funkatorium.

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I held off on a brew day post for this brew as I brewed it specifically for Homebrew Talk. It was a post specifically about New England IPA. I shared my insights, tips, and brewed a sample batch. The recipe was loosely based on my previous Haze for Daze.. As there are several commercial beers named Haze for Daze. I came up with a new name for this brew. Oh, and somehow I ended up adding 43% more hops.

When a beer is dry hopped for too long, or too much dry hops are added the beer can take on a grassy flavor. There is a line where too much is too much. This beer was right on the edge. It was on the edge of the cliff. It’s tippy toes were just over the edge. It was looking down as tiny pebbles crumbled off the edge and fell into the abyss below.

The snow on the ground indicates it was bottled awhile ago.

The beer poured a hazy deep gold color. There was a thick, frothy white head with excellent retention and left a beautiful lacing on the glass.

Eamon, my manager at Modern Homebrew Emporium examines my Queue Juice.

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Keeping up with trends will be a monthly look at trends in the craft beer scene and how it relates back to homebrewing. Published for Homebrew Talk. See the original story here. 

Whether “New England Style” (NE style) pale ales and IPAs are in fact new styles is a matter of some debate. While there are breweries outside of New England and even the northeast, the style is most prevalent in New England.  What isn’t debatable is the impact these beers are having on the marketplace as large national and regional craft brewers are losing market share to smaller brewers. Wachusett, a venerable regional craft brewer with roots going back to 1994 is getting into the game releaseing their own NE style IPA called Wally.

An open-fermented NE IPA I brewed with 1187. It was amazing until the batch got infected. Perils of open fermentation…

Even more than any other IPA, freshness is key with NE IPAs. The hop aroma and flavor the style is known for can fade quickly. This gives smaller NE IPA producers have a huge advantage over larger brewers. Tree House and Trillium typically sell their beer the same day, or no more than a few days after it is canned. Customers line up, and more often than not that day’s allotment of cans sells out. Producers of the style who distribute like Maine Beer Company are judicious in their allotments to retailers to ensure the beer doesn’t sit for too long.

In contrast, Founders tells retailers that All Day IPA is fresh up to 120 days from packaging date. The beer is in cans, and if stored cold the beer probably is perfectly fine. However if a discerning buyer checks the date of All Day IPA or another national brand, and then checks the date of a smaller local producer, which one will the customer choose?

As homebrewers we enjoy a similar advantage when it comes to freshness. If you are the type of brewer that will brew a five gallon batch, and keep it on tap for several months as you slowly drink it, NE IPA might not be the best style for you to brew. When I brew NE pale ales and IPAs I usually brew smaller batches, or I’ll brew it for a special event where I know the beer will be kicked.

If you are bottle conditioning a NE IPA, add even more dry hops to the beer to compensate for the hop character you will lose while the beer conditions. Kegging is preferable to bottling if you can keg. Some brewers will dry hop in a keg, and use CO2 to push the beer to a separate purged serving keg to avoid exposing the beer to oxygen.

Compared to West Coast IPAs where all of the character in the beer is from the hops, NE IPAs can be a bit more broad and complex. There are certainly many commercial examples of NE IPA that use regular US 2-row malt and Chico yeast, but there are also examples that use more flavorful British base malts and estery yeasts. Any malt and yeast character should still be in the background, but there is room for interpretation. If you do a side-by-side tasting of  The Alchemist’s Heady Topper and Lawson’s Finest Liquids’ Sip of Sunshine, that will give you an idea of the breadth of the style.

As a hop forward style, crystal malts should not be used, or used in very small quantities. If you have a house IPA recipe and want to convert it to a NE IPA, replacing the crystal malt with flaked wheat, barley, or oats is a good start. The flaked grains will provide the body and head retention that crystal malt would have, but without a cloying sweetness. A small amount of Munich malt can also be used to add color and a bit of malt flavor.

If brewing a NE IPA with extract, I wouldn’t suggest using flaked grains unless you are going to do a partial-mash. A grist of 95% Golden Light extract and 5% corn sugar will approximate the body and mouthfeel of the style. Subbing out a can of light extract with wheat liquid extract wouldn’t be a bad idea either. If employing a partial boil, make sure to utilize a late extract addition  to ensure proper hop utilization and guard against kettle carmelization.

More than anything else the style is known for it’s hazy appearance. When John Kimmich designed Heady Topper he didn’t try to make a hazy beer. He wanted to make the best IPA he could, and it just happened to be hazy. Backlash brewed their Ricochet IPA with and without biofine, and brewer Helder Pimintel found he greatly perfected the hazier batch. When brewing a NE IPA at home hold off on the whirlfloc. Irish moss, biofine, gelatin, or isinglass.

For hop selection, the newer hops with more of a stone fruit-type flavor and aroma are excellent choices. In particular the new hop varieties coming out of the US and Australia like Mosaic, Equinox, Azacca, Nelson, and Vic Secret. That doesn’t mean a homebrewer you should be married to the latest and greatest hard to find hops. Last summer I brewed a wonderful NE IPA using only free hops I brought home from HomebrewCon: Pekko, Idaho 007, and Triple Perle.

Many of the prominent NE IPA producers started as exceedingly small operations. As such, they didn’t have the ability to contract for every hop they wanted. Noah Bissell designed Bissell Brothers’ flagship IPA The Substance specifically to use less sought-after hop varieties that he knew they could get. Noah emailed me the recipe in 2014, and I posted the recipe on the HBT recipe database.  Hop availabiliy is why commercial brewers use complex blends of hops. If one of seven hops used in a recipe isn’t available and needs to be substituted, the change in flavor should be far less noticeable. It is also  why brewers have rotating IPA series like Night Shift’s Morph.

More critical than hop selection is the timing of the hop additions. A very small bittering charge at 60 minutes or a first wort hop addition is all you need before flameout. The idea is to have just enough hop bitterness to supply balance without producing a bitter beer.. Commercial brewers will then add hops after flameout during the whirlpool stage. A homebrewer can use pumps to recirculate the wort to create a whirlpool. A stir with a spoon can also work. You will extract some bitterness from the whirlpool hops. BeerSmith gives you as good of an estimate as you can get of exactly how much bitterness you are getting from the whirlpool additions.

Dry hopping is everything in this style. In particular what Michael Tonsmeire describes as biotransformation. Contrary to previous orthodoxy, dry hopping during active fermentation is critical. The way the dry hops interact with the fermenting yeast gives the beer its “juicy” hop flavor. I advise everyone I talk to who is brewing the style to add 1/3 to 1/2 of their dry hops during active fermentation to obtain the haze and juicy hop flavor the beer is supposed to have. The rest of the dry hops can be added 5-10 days before packaging to punch up the hop aroma.

A NE Pale Ale brewed with 1084.

One of the mythical aspects of the style was the Alchemist’s “Conan” yeast strain. Before several small yeast labs propagated Conan, home brewers who made the trek up to northern Vermont would culture Conan from cans of Heady. Conan with it’s high attenuation leaves plenty of yeast in suspension. It also has a wonderful peach ester profile which compliments the hop flavor perfectly.

The other popular yeast used in NE IPAs is Wyeast 1318 London Ale III. My first experiences with 1318 I brewed bitters, milds, and old ale and a milk stout. Used in traditional English styles 1318 leaves a beautifully clear beer. There is something about how the yeast interacts with dry hops that it stays in suspension and leaves a hazy NE IPA. Always known for it’s fruity esters, 1318 with it’s moderate attenuation leaves a nice soft mouthfeel that is another hallmark of the style. I work one day a week at a LHBS in Cambridge, Mass, and every week it is a struggle to keep 1318 in stock.

As with the hops, there isn’t a need to be married to these sought-after yeasts. Plenty of commercial brewers still use Chico to make NE IPAs. I have personally used Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale and 1187 Ringwood Ale and found that both worked really well.

In my experience the beer should finish with an FG of 1.010 to 1.015 to have the soft mouthfeel it needs. When selecting your yeast, you may need to adjust your mash temperature and  percentage of flaked adjuncts to finish in that range. The last time I used Conan in a regular-strength IPA, 25% of my grist was flaked adjuncts and I mashed at 152F. The recipe below is using Chico, so my grist is only 16.4% flaked wheat, and I am mashing a little bit lower.

The other contributor to the soft mouthfeel is water. Conventional wisdom is that sulfates in water accentuate hop character, while chlorides accentuate malt. When brewing a traditional IPA a 3:1 ratio of sulfates to chlorides was the rule of thumb. With a NE IPA, that orthodoxy is flipped on its head. I’ve played around with ratios of 2:1 and even 1:1. A friend in my homebrew club brewed the closest NE IPA to Tree House that I have ever tasted. He knows far more about water chemistry than I do, and in that beer he used a ratio of 1:3 sulfates to chlorides. Also when using this many pale malts monitoring the pH of your mash is also critical.

Luckily my municipal water is high in chlorides. I am going to try that 1:3 ratio here. This is a bit of a kitchen sink brew. Based on a previous recipe, I tweaked it to use up leftover ingredients from previous batches. I also grabbed a couple of hops from my LHBS’ “experimental” section. As a last minute brew day, Safale S05 from Fermentis should do the trick:

Queue Juice

American IPA (14 B)

Type: All Grain
Batch Size: 3.15 gal
Boil Size: 4.80 gal
Boil Time: 60 min
End of Boil Vol: 3.80 gal
Final Bottling Vol: 3.00 gal
Fermentation: Ale, Single Stage

Date: 20 Feb 2017
Brewer: Jason Chalifour
Equipment: 3 Gal BIAB (8g kettle)
Efficiency: 70.00 %

L-R: First wort hops, whirlpool hops, first dry hop, second dry hop which includes the hops still in the package

I will add the first dry hops two to three days after pitching my yeast. The second dry hops will be added five days before bottling.

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Before I finally broke down and purchased Amazon Prime, I would always have to buy one extra item to qualify for free shipping. One such item I bought was Brew Your Own Magazine’s 250 Classic Clone Recipes. My guess is this is an anthology of various recipes to appear in the magazine from over a period of many years. Some of the beers in there are no longer produced which in my opinion makes it cool that there are clones out there for a brewer who wants to recreate them. There are several in the book I would like to try.

One recipe that caught my eye was Sea Dog Brewing Company Blue Paw Wheat Ale. A beer alternately known as Sea Dog Blueberry Wheat Ale or Sea Dog Wild Blueberry Wheat Ale. As the Sea Dog brand is jointly owned by the owner’s of Shipyard, I suspect that Shipyard Summer Ale is the base beer for Sea Dog’s various fruit beers. The information on Shipyard’s website for Summer Ale, matches quite closely with Brew Your Own’s base beer.

I find Shipyard Summer Ale to be a light and refreshing. I have fond memories of bringing Shipyard Summer to a Labor Day cookout when that was the only summer beer left I could find. I could also easily brew a batch, split it after primary fermenation, leave half as it was to make a Shipyard Summer Ale clone, and add fruit of my choice to make a fruit beer.

I asked Jennie if she wanted to add blueberry and make another blueberry beer. She wasn’t overly enthused. I suggested any number of other fruits until I remembered that she really enjoys Sea Dog Sunfish, a fruit beer with peach and grapefruit. We had a winner.

I tweaked the recipe in the book to make it a six gallon, partial mash. The idea is to only have to do one boil, and end up with three gallons of each beer. I also adjusted the hops because I still had plenty of bulk Nugget and Cascade. The Cascade at 25 minutes in the boil should make the beer slightly more citrusy and less earthy than the commercial versions.

Since the hops are different I feel comfortable renaming the base beer and passing it off as my own creation. I’m calling the base beer Transistor Radio. It’s a beer designed to be enjoyed on the back deck, by the pool, or on the beach while baseball is playing on the radio.

For Summer of Jennie I bought a can of peach puree and fresh grapefruit. I am going to rack the beer on top of the puree, grapefruit peel, and grapefruit flesh. The Dawson’s Kriek kit used two cans of cherry puree for a five gallon batch. From that experience, I think one can for a three gallon batch will be sufficient. I also added the fresh peel of one grapefruit and threw in the flesh just because. Even though the beer is inspired by Sunfish, the hops are different and I am not trying to perfectly replicate the balance of fruit flavors, I don’t consider it a clone.

Ideally I would have racked this beer already, but I’ve been under the weather with a nasty cough. I have one last summer brew I need to get in, then I have a lot of racking and bottling to do.

See the full recipe here

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There is quite a bit of overlap between homebrewers and craft beer lovers. Many craft beer drinkers see macro beer as an existential threat. Personally, I am more ambivalent. I wrote a post about how I would restore Budweiser to relevence a week before AB InBev aired the “Brewed The Hard Way” commercial during the Super Bowl.


After that Super Bowl ad aired last year a coworker jokingly suggested that I should brew a beer “The Hard Way”.  I considered brew attempt to brewing a Budweiser-like beer complete with krausening, beech wood (or whatever tasteless wood I could find) aging, and truly brew it the “hard way”.  In the end that beer ended up as a would-be brew.

I love lagers and my lack of equipment to control my fermentation temperature is the only reason I don’t brew more of them. I still managed to win an award with a lager fermented at room temperature. When I saw my friend from HomebrewCon Marshall’s exBEERiment showing a lager brewed with Saflager Lager (W-34/70) that fermented at ale temperatures had no discernable difference between a beer brewed at lager temperatures, that got my wheels spinning. 


As I thought about what I could brew to see what kind of warm-fermented lagers I could make, I wanted to make something more flavorful than Budweiser or another Standard American Lager. The first lager I ever attempted was a beer called Pesky’s Pole Pilsner. Under the 2008 BJCP Guidelines it was a Classic American Pilsner, and under the updated 2015 guidelines it would have been a Pre-Prohibition Lager. I attempted this beer only a few short months after I started brewing. I made numerous rookie mistakes and made five gallons of undrinkable beer. This is a style I have wanted to take another crack at!


In almost all of my cream ales or historic American brews, corn had been my adjunct of choice as I really like the flavor contribution it brings. Eamon, my manager at Modern Homebrew Emporium attributes health issues he has experienced to GMO corn and will not drink a beer with corn in it. He does not have that issue with the other American adjunct grain of choice, rice. I wanted to brew something I could share with Eamon, while also using an ingredient I haven’t used in several years. I look forward to comparing this beer with some of my other beers I have brewed with corn. 


Compared to corn which adds a noticable sweet flavor, almost like cream corn, at high levels, rice will dry out a beer. If you have ever drank Asahi at a sushi restaurant, the rice used in that beer contributes to the dry finish. In America AB and Coors use vast amounts of rice, while Miller uses corn. 


Now, I could have brewed a beer “the hard way”, but some of my recent brew days have been hard enough. I wanted an easy brew! I never brewed the “hard way” lager because I have more beers I want to brew than I have time to brew them. By brewing this beer with extract my brew day is easier and it frees up time to brew other beers I want to brew.


At the shop we sell rice syrup solids,  an extract powder derived from rice. It lightens a beer without contributing color or flavor just like if this was an all-grain batch and I added flaked rice to the mash. I know of one award-wining brewery in Central Mass that uses rice syrup in their Cream Ale. In the spirit of an easy brew, rice syrup solids do not need to be mashed like flaked rice. Rice that isn’t pre-gelatatinized like flaked rice require an added step called a cereal mash. 


This recipe is so easy there isn’t even any specialty grains I need to steep. I could steep some Carapils if I wanted to give the beer a fresh malt flavor, but the shop turns over a lot of extract and I am confident that the extract I bought is sufficiently fresh. 


My vision is to have an easy-drinking beer where most of the flavor comes from the hops. As a historic beer I want to have some Cluster hop flavor. I don’t, but a lot of people think Cluster has a catty flavor. I want to balance the flavor and aroma with floral and spicy Liberty hops. There will also be a small dry hop to help hide any flaws and punch up the hop aroma. 

Color looks decent before pitching.

No starter needed. Used a lager pitching rate even fermenting at warm temperature.

I pitched two sachets of dry yeast when my wort was at 68F. A couple days later we had an unseasonably warm day and at the height of active fermentation, the fermenter did get up to 74F. Clearly that wasn’t ideal, but at this point I am just going to hope for the best.

It’s getting to be time to pump the brakes on brewing, and focus on bottling (and drinking)

Hey! That’s not your cat tree!!

I brewed this during a double brew day. Almost all of my fermenters are full. I am going to try to squeeze in two more brews before the weather is too warm to ferment with most American ale yeasts. After that I am going to take a bit of a break from brewing and focus on bottling everything up.

See the full recipe here

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As our club has been planning our homebrew competition, Jennie wanted to re-brew and enter her recipe Shareholder’s Saison. She designed, and I brewed the first batch of Shareholder’s Saison for 2015 Ales for ALS. We didn’t enter the beer in the competition, electing to enter our more tried and true Curly’s Milk Stout.

The base beer is a pale, standard strength saison. To spice things up, Jennie decided to add a blend of spices and use White Labs American Farmhouse Blend which contains brettanomyces or brett in addition to regular brewer’s yeast. For competition purposes a saison is not supposed to use brett, and examples that do belong in the Brett Beer category.

At the time we were very happy with how the beer turned out. The original batch was a five gallon partial mash. We kegged three gallons for the event, and bottled the other two gallons. In the ensuing year and a half we have opened bottles here and there on special occasions. Over time the hop character has faded, while the brettanomyces flavor has become more assertive.

Usually when I re-brew a batch, I find something to tweak to try and make it better. As this was Jennie’s recipe, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to change and she shrugged. So I brewed the batch as closely as I could to the original batch.

This time around I bottled the entire batch. On bottling day I poured some bottle dregs from the first batch into my bottling bucket and racked the new beer on top of it. I don’t expect that to impact the beer at all. I just liked the idea of having a piece of the original batch melded in with the new batch.

This isn’t an IPA where the hop flavor and aroma will fade and the beer will fall off after a couple of months. The brett flavor will change and evolve over time.  Since we plan to cellar the beer over a period of time I printed up some cool Green Bay Packer-themed bottles.

Even though we re-brewed the beer for our club’s competition, I am also entering the beer in a competition in Ohio called Saisonfest which is a competition only for various styles of saison. I am also planning to enter the beer in a competition in Green Bay.

See the full recipe here

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With the North Shore Brewers Competition less than a month away, I will be bottling my double IPA The Anti-Chris this weekend. I dry hopped the crap out of this beer. Not wanting any of the hop material to clog my siphon or make it into any of my bottles I used muslin bags for both of my dry hop additions.

I barely fit the first hop addition into my carboy. The hops kept bunching up inside the bag but I eventually made it work.

First dry hop addition 14 days.

My second dry hop addition

I managed to squeeze all of this in there.

Both bags are in the carboy.

The volume of the second dry hop addition displaced so much room inside the carboy that it pushed beer to almost the very top. Then the hops started to swell as they absorbed the beer. This pushed beer up through my airlock. I actually had to set up a blow-off tube to channel the beer away.

If beer is being pushed out of my carboy, I’d prefer it not be onto the floor.

Moving and lifting this thing on Sunday should be interesting. Not having to unclog my sipohon and bottling wand multiple times will make it worth it.

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I find yeast to be a particularly interesting topic in the world of brewing. Many brewers exclusively use a generic ale yeast like Chico be it Safale S05, Wyeast 1056, or White Labs 001, and do not give yeast a second thought. Many brewers just want the yeast to stay our of the way so the flavor from the malt and the hops can take the spotlight. Some brewers like Bell’s and Harpoon have house strains that they use. Bone Up Brewing opened in Everett in 2016; they brew American styles, but with a Belgian yeast.

Up in Portland, some of the older craft brewers like Geary’s are “Ringwood breweries” that exclusively use Ringwood Ale yeast. Geary’s in particular has never bought a fresh pitch of Ringwood. They have repitched the same yeast from batch to batch for over thirty years. In that time their yeast may have evolved and mutated. I always got a cleaner taste with less diacetyl from Geary’s beers as opposed to say Shipyard Export.

As a homebrewer, I enjoy experimenting with different yeast stains. Whenever I buy liquid yeast I try to harvest extra yeast from my starter. Last summer while I was busily brewing my US of IPA brews, and beers for Ales over ALS, I neglected to label a couple of my jars. The gars sat in the fridge for a period of months and Jennie was tired of looking at them.

Mystery yeast!

While I was trying to figure out what kind of beer I should brew with the second runnings of Wee Heavy I had an idea, why not just throw all of the yeast in a batch and see what happens? It felt crazy enough to work. These are all strains I’ve used before and loved. Why not use them together and try to make something unique? If it works I can keep using it like Geary’s has used the same yeast for as long as it has.

One of the jars was labeled 1187, that would be Ringwood likely harvested from my yeast starter for Age of Sail. One jar I am fairly certain was 1318 from my 2016 Summer Somewhere. The other jar could be 1272. The other possibility is that it is The Yeast Bay’s Vermont Ale. I froze some of the yeast back in 2014. When I tried to build it up last summer the fermentation wasn’t that active so I bought fresh yeast for my NE IPA Haze for Daze. I may have saved that slurry also. I also dug around and found an older jar that was labeled 1318. If nothing else I have learned my lesson about organization.

After conducting two boils for the Wee Heavy, I was anxious to get this over with. I ran the risk of tripping a circuit and boiled with two burners on the stove. I only added hops to the main kettle, while boiling the smaller pot just long enough to sterilize the wort. At the end of the main boil I blended the beer from the smaller pot back into the main kettle. The idea was to help cool the main wort while again sterilizing the wort from the smaller pot in the near-boiling kettle.

Given how old these jars were, I made a yeast starter and harvested a pint of my new blend. I decided to keep the recipe for my bonus beer fairly simple with one hop addition at 60 minuted and one at 10 minutes. After pitching my starter fermentation took off fairly quickly.

Beer is hazy, makes me think there’s some VT Ale yeast in there.

With a double brew day looming, I pulled a sample to see if I could get an idea what kind of flavor my mystery blend would bring. The first samples tasted bitter and almost phenolic. I didn’t trust it to pitch in another beer. I ended up buying new yeast for my double brew day. 

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March is supposed to be “In like a lion, and out like a lamb”. In Massachusetts in 2017 March weather was miserable from beginning to end. Snow was still on the ground on Red Sox Opening Day. Now we are in April, summer drinking season will be here before we know it. Summer is my favorite season and I probably enjoy summer beers more than any other season. I have to brew summer beers!

Not only is time against me in terms of having beer ready by Memorial Day, the weather is turning against me. It appears we will be measuring spring in terms of days instead of weeks or months. Tomorrow temperatures are going to be in the high 70s. In my third floor apartment it will be even warmer. When the weather is consistently that warm, I have trouble keeping my fermentation temperatures down.

To beat the calendar and Mother Nature I had a double brew day on Sunday, and am planning another double brew day next Sunday. On top of that I had to bottle a batch yesterday, and need to bottle Pasteinator and The Anti-Chris next week. In the meantime I am running out pf places for all of my fermenters. The only way I could fit all of my fermenters in a picutre was to take a panoramic photo. Even that didn’t include two carboys in the kitchen.

All seven of these vessels are full. The Ant-Chris and my cider are not pictured, they are in carboys in the corner of my kitchen.

I’ll be sure to fill you my loyal readers in with what I have been brewing and bottling. After these two double brew days I am going to pump the brakes for the summer. Boiling gallons of wort inside when it’s hot and humid is never pleasant. Running a stove for several hours and two air conditioners tests the limits of my apartment’s electrical system. The ground water is so warm, cooling wort is also a challenge.

I do look forward to having plenty of beet to last me through the summer. During the summer I’ll probably do a batch a month just to keep the carboys full and brew some Belgian styles.

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