As experienced brewers might guess from the title of this post, I had a little crisis with my yeast, in both halves of the batch of wheat beer I brewed up this week. I figured I would try and brew up a wheat beer and serve it very fresh–like, probably stupidly fresh–for the wedding, for those people who aren’t used to sour or rich dark beers. (Most of what I’ll have on hand is one or the other.)

The other day, our friend Soyoung came up the hill to brew with me.

She’s had the idea in mind to brew up an apple-pie-like beer for a while, so we talked it over, considered her options, and working out a kind of recipe. But I also have to get some brewing done in the next few weeks, so I did a little calculating and figured out that we could probably brew a double-batch, together, which could then be split not in half, but three ways.

Well, kind of.

I’ve had the makings for a Wit beer around for a good long time — some torrefied wheat, some raw wheat, and some beautiful whole chamomile flowers I picked up in Fukuoka. However, I haven’t had a chance to get my Wit on… until yesterday.

Earlier this week, I procured a sample of Wyeast Belgian Wit yeast from a brewer friend in Seoul, Bryan; this is supposedly the classic Wit yeast, in other words a version of the strain used by Hoegaarden. The last Wit I made, I used the other Hoegaarden strain, which is known as Forbidden Fruit; though that beer took a long, long time to come into its own — probably because of the huge amount of raw wheat I used. (50% of the grist was raw wheat; the other 50% air-dried, unkilned, home-malted barley from another local brewer, Garrett.)

This is the second brew of a parti-gyle brewing session. I discussed the first part of that session, and the naming of the brews, here.

I decided to experiment with making a lighter, milder, but still-intensely hoppy IPA-ish brew after reading a bit about experiments towards that style by The Mad Fermentationist, and discussions among a few brewers here in Korea regarding the brewing of a hoppy session ale. I figured I would try making a hoppy, low-ABV beer with some of my favorite hops — Citra and Sorachi Ace — to see whether I could pull it off. Since I was already planning to make an IPA, it made sense

I want to name today’s brews — a partigyle double batch, both in the AIPA-ish style — simply “IPA” but I want to write it in the other IPA — the International Phonetic Alphabet. Apparently, that looks like this:

aɪ pʰiː eɪ?

If I planned on bottling it, I’d probably have fun doing up a label, but I’ll almost certainly be kegging these two batches.

For the last couple of weekends, The Magpie Brewing Company (with the support of Homebrew Korea and the inimitable Bill Miller) has hosted some 80L brewdays. The idea is: you take four homebrewers, get them together, and host a brewday at their brewing space, which has the equipment for you to brew up to 80L (or more?) of beer at one time. Since there’s four brewers, you can split the wort 4 ways, have them each pitch their own yeast into the beer, and then you end up (after four such brewdays) with 320L of beer, split into 16 different varieties.