Every two years the best brewers are invited to come together and compete in the worlds most prestigious beer competition known as the World Beer Cup. With 54 countries entering almost a thousand more beers than 2010, this year's competition was bigger and badder than anything that we've seen before, and truly reflected the last two years' craft beer boom.
Next week is the Craft Brewers Conference here in San Diego. With over 2,600 brewing professionals in attendance, CBC12 is the ultimate in professional conferences. There will be lectures, demonstrations and roundtable mentoring sessions to chose from and I have had quite the difficult time trying to figure out which ones were of greater importance to me.
We've been very busy here on the home front at FugglyBrew.com, the latest project being BeerMixology.com! My dear friend the Beer Wench has been busting her rump to organize some of the top beer experts and mixology gurus nation wide to come together and share recipes and mixing tips with all of our awesome readers and beer fans!
I was just up at my parents ranch in Northern California and on my way back down my father and I spent the night at a little house they just bought about three blocks away from Russian River Brewing Company. Since we were there and there's honestly nothing there but a table and a bunch of construction equipment we decided to bring the little Al-Alembic pot still my dad got me for Christmas and test the little bugger out!
So last weekend I racked my beer to secondary and I added a tincture that I had set off to the side that consisted of the following:
0.5oz Orange Peel (without the white)
1oz Hazelnuts chopped
1 Vanilla Bean
2oz Jack Daniel's Single Barrel to decontaminate and leach essences!
So far so good I think, I am bottling this weekend and honestly can't wait to see how it has come along.
Im doing my best to keep it cooler than the first two weeks, so it's been at or around 65-70 degrees for the past week or so thanks to the amazingly cool weather we've been having. I hope it keeps up!
Last week I discovered the Beer Review Dude and he made a video of how to keg your own home brew in a Coor's home draft system (Finally Coor's has done something useful!) I've attached that video below. However, I am hoping to explore it's usefulness as a carboy for a potential lagering project soon to come. Enjoy the vid and do make sure to visit The Beer Review Dude at his amazing blog: http://beerreviewdude.com
I am so excited to share this with everyone, last weekend I did my first all grain brew! I sat down with my father and made a Mash Tun as described by Jelson98 from YouTube on this video.
We ended up crimping the end of the stainless steel mesh at the end, and the only issue we came across was finding a hose that used stainless steel instead of plastic (which was strange).
I mashed:
12lbs of Maris Otter
1lb of Munich Malt
2oz of Chocolate Malt (sorry for the random conversion or lack there of)
3.7oz of Roasted Barley
8oz of Victory Malt
8oz of Carapils
8oz of German Wheat
I mashed it at 153 F for 60 minutes and sparged till clear. I was left with a little too much wort so I set about a gallon aside, adding it later to the boil.
I am using a turkey fryer for my wort boiler which is pretty neat and keeps things easy to pick up. Once the wort started to boil I added:
(Tip: I was on a forum the other day and saw that a lot of people are over boiling their wort, since you can't take out the hops after 60 minutes you need to make sure that everything is being boiled within that time frame and I'll explain why. You have the Chinook Hops in for 60 minutes that means at the end of the 60 minutes you are going to turn off the heat so 40 minutes in you need to be adding the Fuggles, then 5 minutes till the end of the boil you add the last bit of Fuggles. This is very important because the amount of time while boiling influences the different hop attributes. Bitterness gently curves up and peaks at about 60 minutes and continues with a very small incline after that. Flavor peaks at about 20 minutes then decreases. Aroma peaks at about 8 minutes however people like to dry hop to get even more of the aroma attributes that you don't normally get or would be boiled off instantly (like taking a whiff of Pliney or Sculpin.))
At 60 minutes we shut off the burner, removed the wort and used my cooling coil to bring the temperature down to about 85 F poured it into my wort bucket and cooled it down another 10 before siphoning it into the carboy. I then pitched my London Ale Yeast at 75 F.
The whole night the little yeasties were dancing and doing their thing but the next day as the house started to warm up a little I started to see much more activity till I looked up and heart fizzing and the fermenter cap went flying sending my dog I.P.A. into a fit and scaring the crap out of myself. This is the first time this has ever happened to me. So I picked up the cap sterilized it and set it aside and I put a towel over the top of the carboy. I figured if the yeast were that active nothing was going to harm my beer at this point so I left it with open air till later that night when foam wasn't gushing out the top :-/ I'm crossing my fingers hoping that wont be an issue later down the road.
Today my beer is 10 days old and on Saturday I will be racking it to second where I will update you all on how my little beer is coming along! I hope you enjoyed it and if you have any comments, or tips please leave them in the comment section below!
