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.
I participated in Saturday’s brewday, which was the Pale Ale brewday. I showed up with the foolish idea that I could talk people into making a less hoppy Pale Ale, so that other styles of Pale Ale (like English and Belgian) would be possible; but that thought quickly was abandoned, and I went with the flow.
The flow included Centennial hops for bittering, plus some Amarillo at 15 minutes, and at flameout. The grist was… well, it was mostly pilsner, with some Carapils and I think some Caramunich and (I think) some Rye malt thrown in.
As for the yeast, mine was a Saison. I was going to pitch some Belgian Trappist High-Gravity yeast, but another brewer seemed so excited at the prospect that I left him use it, and I pitched a small jar of French Saison yeast instead. I have no idea whether it is still viable, though the jar smelled of autolysis after I pitched it… I am thinking it should be okay, since the yeast sample was only from August, but if it isn’t, I have some other, more recently-harvested yeast to pitch, assuming I can get to the place before my portion of the batch goes freaky.
Which might happen sooner than I’d like; the top portion of my two-piece airlock actually fell into the beer when I removed the lid, which was a bit heartbreaking, but it had just been sanitized, so I’m going to hope it’s okay.
Anyway, it was great fun to meet a bunch of good people, including re-meeting the nice folks who run Magpie, besides Jason (whom I already knew, not that it wasn’t good to see him again too).