What, what?! I’ve been wanting to brew up a few experimental things, and in theory at least summer is when I have time. But this experiment is not a lone, mad-scientist experiment… no, it’s a collaborative experiment within my brewing community. No, not forcing people to hop for fifteen minutes, but rather, adding hops to a beer only in the last fifteen minutes of the boil. (Normally, we add hops at earlier stages too, but the end of the boil means more flavor and aroma, and if you add a lot of hops you can maximize those and still get …

Another day, another brewday. This one has a backstory, though. A while back, I tried to make a RyePA, which if you don’t know the substyle is simply an IPA — often an American IPA, as far as I can tell — that has a significant amount of rye malt in the grist. I was mashing in my brewpot/MLT setup, and the sparge got stuck, and it was hell… but it tasted pretty good nonetheless. Later, when I was kegging a batch of Saison, I realized I had an extra gallon of the stuff, but nowhere to put it. Meanwhile, …

Yesterday was a big day for brewing stuff. Yesterday was the day to transfer Miss Jiwaku’s Old Ale to a keg to bulk age on cherries. That suggested that the optimal way to do it would be to rack the Old Ale onto however many Washington cherries I had on hand (which turned out to be the better part of 3 kilograms). I was faced with the question of what to do with the yeast cake from her Old Ale. While I realize that the Brett B. might have reproduced more, so that the blend is no longer at the …

A few weeks ago, my friend and former colleague did me a favor by picking up six gallons of apple juice from Costco, and finally I got the time to put it all into a carboy and dump the yeast in. The yeast, by the way, is Wyeast 4766, a common cider yeast. I call it the “Old Thin Man” because it’s not fortified, just apple juice and yeast. I don’t think that’s a mistake: I want to see what pure apple juice fermented tastes like. Well, as pure as commercial apple juice ever is, anyway. I don’t need it …

This morning was a fruitful one as far as racking various brews into kegs and such.