Plinian Legacy Take 3

We had a brew day at my house for the first time in about a year.  We've brewed a few times at other group members houses in the past year but I've been a big slacker.

I decided, about 3 months ago, to buy the Plinian Legacy kit from Northern Brewer again because, quite frankly, it's a great beer.  Then the kit sat on my shelf for 3 months.  Like I said, I'm a slacker.

We did the brew-day last Saturday.  Initially it was going to be a low key thing of me brewing but it ended up being a brew day + build your own pizza party with a bunch of friends over.  I'm glad it changed.  I had a lot of fun hanging out with friends.  However, I was so busy with the pizzas and just various other things that happen when you're hosting I basically didn't participate in the brewing beyond carrying up the gear to start the day and putting it away the next morning.

Oh, and drinking.  We drank a lot




Even though we were making an IPA my plan had been for it to be a day to drink Belgians.  I brought a few "Westy's" home with me and wanted to share them with some folks - plus I had some St. Bernardus Abt12 on hand for comparison with The XII of Westvleteren.  The general consensus of my guests was that the Westy 12 was better.  I definitely liked the Westy 12 better than the Westy 8. 

Overall it was a good day filled with good people hanging out having a good time drinking some good beer.

Back in the Brew Game

Whew, it's been a long time since I brewed a batch of beer.   About a year ago we moved and it has taken me since then to get off my ass and get the brew gear back out and in action.  It also took my wife having a monumental birthday to motivate me.  I'm a real slacker.

For the event we brewed five gallons of blueberry beer.  It's a berry beer extract kit from More Beer that comes with raspberry but which I've replaced with blueberry flavor.  Sticking with my normal process of naming the beers with animals my wife picked "Bluebeary Beer"  I am hopeful my daughter will draw a cool label.

Here I am (in the beer shirt) slacking after the beer was done

As much as I tried to claim I found some motivation in the first paragraph the truth is I was barely involved in this brew day.  We were throwing a party simultaneously throughout the day and it seemed like I was always on the go and my brew team of Mike, Scott, Nick, Jason, and Brian did all the work.  I think I just carried the gear out and put the initial water in the kettle.  Then, when it was all done I carried the bucket down to the basement and cleaned up.

I owe a huge thanks to those guys for making sure the beer was made.

As usual we did run into one small problem.  Typically they are so minor that we just laugh about it.  This time we left out an ingredient - there was a 4 ounce bag of maltodexterin.  It is supposedly there to give the beer body, mouthfeel, and head retention.  The yeast will ignore it.  Well, so did we.

I am thinking about putting it in the bucket via a simple sugar solution just as I enter secondary this weekend.  I'm still debating that and looking for advice so if you know what you're about please let me know.

Double Brew Day Coming Up

This weekend is Hefewiezen weekend!  That's right Mike and I (and maybe Jason) will be brewing up some Hefe.  We are still doing extract kits (will we ever graduate?)  and this time we are doing a kit from Northern Brewer and a second kit from Midwest Supplies.

Wait? What's that - Northern Brewer and Midwest are the same company?  Well, I wish we had known that before we ordered a kit from both to see how different kits compare.  Surprisingly there is a small difference.  The Midwest kit comes with a small amount of grains for steeping where the Northern Brewer kit has no grains at all.  Other than that the kits are identical.  Same amount of extract (liquid and dry) and same hops.

It will be interesting to see if the kits end up tasting different at all due to the small amount of grain.  I suspect it will be a negligible difference.

Either way I have some Hefe coming and I'm stoked - Hefe is my favorite beer and I'm anxious to see how this stuff works out.  Hefeweizens' aren't very common here in West Virginia so if this kit is any good I might be making this one a regular in the rotation.

Building a Philospher

If you drink craft beer you've undoubtedly heard of Pliny the Elder.  It's a double IPA made by Russian River Brewing Company.  It's quite good.  I've had the opportunity to sample it twice and I was surprised that it had lived up to the hype.  Sadly, it isn't a beer we can get in West Virginia (or anywhere close).  Therefore I decided for this past brew day to make a clone.  Considering I barely know what I'm doing I ordered the Pliny clone extract kit from Northern Brewer - The Plinian Legacy.  I'd always heard that Pliny had a pretty intense hop schedule and, based on my prior experiences, I'd say the stories were true.

Jason adding the Hop Shot

Typically we get about two packs of hop pellets in whatever kit we've bought.  Three at the most.  I think we got close to twelve hop packets with this kit along with two "hop shots" which were syringes filled with hop extract.

We had our brew day this past Saturday and the very first step basically involves adding hops to the pot as we steeped our grains.  Throughout the boil we added more hops.  Once the boil was done but before we cooled the wort we added more hops.  There are still hops left for two more dry hop runs during the secondary fermentation stage.  This was a seriously hop happy recipe.

Thomas in Deep Thought

My tastings of Pliny the Elder revealed a very well balanced beer that while hoppy didn't hit you over the head with hop bitterness.  I hope the final product of this beer kit is just half as well balanced otherwise I fear the beer will be a punch in the face.

We tasted the various hops including the hop extract (a very tiny dab for each of us) and we had fun watching everyone's reaction to the extract.  The extract consistency was close to tar or wet gorilla glue.  It stuck to our teeth and tongues.  It lingered and extracted a toll from all of us who tried it.  Fortunately, Mike thought of crackers and we all quickly found respite from the lingering hop power of the extract.

Thomas Stirring the Mash

The whole brew day involved us doing something new.  Normally it is just myself, Jason, and Mike but for this event I invited all of my beer friends and a bunch of other people came over.  It was great having Derrick, Amanda, Jim, Simone, Thomas (our only experienced brewer present), Lindsay, and a variety of kids around.  As usual we also made some hand crafted pizza's to help balance out the heavy drinking. Plus Lisa cranked out some spent grain bread.  Overall it was a busy and full day that flew by.

Mike and Jim Drinking

Double Brewday Afternoon

This past saturday the Hops Alchemy gang got together for a double brew day!  We are still learning a lot so we are still using liquid malt extract (LME) kits.  This brew event featured a Red Ale by Brewers Best and a Brown Ale by Midwset.

The day started out in a pretty haphazard way.  I couldn't find the lid to my fermentation bucket.  I searched all over the garage but couldn't find it until I went to the basement to get my kettle and I saw the last batch we bottled patiently carbonating on the shelves.  We had potentially overfilled four bottles and I had put them in a second bucket with my fermentation lid on it just in case they blew.  The bottles were fine so I took them and the lid upstairs along with the kettle.

Once upstairs Mike and his cousin Jason showed up with the Brown Ale kit, some tools, and a case of assorted beer along with a collection of bottles from the Fat Tire clone (Flat Tire) we had recently made.  They did not, however, bring a kettle or their burner.  I noticed the missing burner so sent them back around the blocks to Mikes to get it.  I searched all over for my second kettle but couldn't find it so then they had to go back again to get their kettle.  At least I had a nice new full propane tank for them to use!

The next arrival was Derrick and his family along with some really high gravity beers for us to drink while we brewed.  Derrick is a biochemist and he has offered to measure our IBUs in the future.  I'm pretty stoked to discover this capability in the group!  Our final arrivals were Jason and his girlfriend Lindsay and we were ready to get to brewing.

We setup both boiling stations in the garage close to the door.  I normally would brew in my backyard when the weather is as nice as it was on Saturday but my patio (that I installed) isn't that level and I really only have on great place to put a boiler out there so we set up in the garage and just kept the door open through the day.

We started drinking right away which, honestly, wasn't the smartest plan.  We were sharing each bottle so we can each sample all of the beers we had brought or that I already had there.  By the end of the day we had each sampled just about 19 beers.  We tracked them all on untappd so if you're curious here is my profile.  This quick dive into drinking led us to not read the instructions.  We totally missed the fact that we were supposed to let the water get to roughly 160 and then maintain that temp after adding our grain.  We brought both kettles to boil.  We tossed the brown ale grain bag in the water and then realized what we had done.  We let the red ale water cool down to about 170 before adding that grain bag in.   According to the instructions letting the grains steep at the 200+ temp means we will leach more tannins into the beer so we've jokingly decided to call the Brown an Imperial Brown.

From there on everything went really well.  We put some of the Sloppy Lion King Belgian and some of the Knotty Octopus Alt Bier in the red ale during the boil.  We do this to carry some of all of the old batches forward through every new batch.  We had forgot to put the Alt into the Belgian's boil so we had to put a bit of each into this one so that none of the ancestry is lost.  I'm not a huge fan of how the Alt came out so I put a bit more of the Belgian in than I did the Alt.

Not only were we making beer but we also were making custom pizzas.  We like to make sure everyone gets plenty of food while over for brew time so we had the bread machine working overtime all morning cranking out pizza dough.  We then took turns rotating through the kitchen crafting our own custom pizzas with the smorgasbord of toppings everyone provided.  It was a great meal and it really went well with the copious amounts of beer we were drinking.

Eventually the brewing was done so we moved into the kitchen to transfer to the fermentation buckets.  After siphoning the red ale into it's bucket I quickly sealed it up and put the air lock on the top.  As I started to carry it away I was reminded that I still need to add enough water to reach the five gallon mark.  The brown ale was topped off and they were able to read their original gravity (OG) without a problem and it seemed to be right where it was supposed to be.  I had a ton of trouble reading the gauge on the red (too many bubbles in the brew) so I'm really not sure what the OG is on it.  Hopefully it was in the right range.  If not who knows what we will end up with?

Finally I carted the buckets down to the basement where they get to sit for a bit before they will move to secondary. The red will be moving this Thursday evening right before I attend a home brewers social at a local pizza joint.  That should be a fun and educational night.