Hey all, I have been busy the past two weeks as I have been working on upgrading the biggest piece of my brewing equipment...my home. Hitting the limits in how much I can do in a condo, timing couldn't have been better for me to move up to a full house. Beyond trying to handle cleaning and organizing, I have also been brewing for multiple competitions as well as the barrel project which I will be posting details on along with a short blerb for each in this post.

Gingerbread Milk Stout

One beer for three competitions, though only one with awards, seems like a good bit of efficiency to me. I had two 'holiday/winter' beer competitions as well as one 'dark beer' competition. Combining them together I went on to modify my Milk Stout recipe to something less common than Pumpkin or Apple Pie. So I came up with the idea of Gingerbread as it seemed the spices would go well with the roast and malt flavors. This is done fermenting so the post will be up sooner than later.

Citrus IPA

Part of the Reddit competition I am doing two beers for, the first one is an American IPA. While having access to a stupid amount of both amazing and terrible IPA's from living in San Diego, I wanted to try my hand at it in order to learn more about hops and other yeasts I haven't touched. This is my second go at an IPA, the first was a Ballast Point Big Eye clone that didn't quite reach what I wanted. Now modified to try an interesting citrus IPA and once more using Vermont Ale yeast, we will see how this turns out. Currently dry hopping and should be ready soon!

Open Ferment Dunkelweizen Continued

I believed the results of my first open fermentation experiment was hindered by the complex (but good) mix of my two yeasts. As I was intending to enter this beer into the Reddit competition, I went back to traditional with the single WLP300 addition. This still has another weekish to finish fermentation before kegging so I hopefully will have notes of this up in a few weeks.

QUAFF Barrel Project

I posted before about this project where a group of us got a hold of some Bourbon Barrels that were used to age maple syrup. I helped brew and Old Ale that used Molasses and that has finished and quite tasty. I can't wait to get a hold of the barrel aged version as it's going to be quite awesome. Unfortunately due to timing with my work and getting my condo ready for sale I wasn't there for the brewing of the Breakfast Stout that uses coffee, vanilla and cocoa nubs. But that too should be done fermenting soon enough to get an initial tasting. Then it's just trying to wait for the aged beers to finish.

Other Stuff

So all in all, I have managed to make/get a record (for me) 35 gallons in two months and still another ten gallons aging in the barrels after that. I am actually running out of kegs even after ordering two more and I have already emptied two kegs. I plan to take a break from brewing till I get my stock of beer down quite a bit more. So we will see how things turn out in the future. There are plenty of other topics that can be covered in the meantime!

Steven, otherwise known as zVulture on reddit or in games, is a homebrewer with two years and counting under the belt. Ambitious enough to think he can work his way up to opening his own brewery but knows he has a lot to learn. Beyond having fun doing experimental homebrewing to such an end, he enjoys learning and using old techniques, useful or not, to make beer. "[We] are only concerned with giving homebrewers accurate information based on our own experience in the hope that they will find the information useful and employ it to make their own homebrewing hobby more fun and rewarding. Because that’s what it’s all about– fun. If you’re stressing over homebrewing, you’re doing something wrong." - Denny Conn



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Tags for this post: Dunkelweizen, Barrel, IPA, Milk Stout, Holiday