There is more story to that last item (as well as more photos), so I’ll expound upon that one.

When we arrived, we were given special “tickets” that would be required to take the tour. The ticket was a label from a bottle of Samuel Adams Scotch Ale, as can be clearly seen from the pic.

We had a little time before the tour began, and they provide a small waiting area that has all sorts of junk on the walls: beer mugs of all sizes, shapes, and purposes; banners stating the various awards at GABF that have been taken home by Samuel Adams beers; maps of the Boston area, including pre-prohibition maps that showed the numerous breweries that used to exist there; and a display case full of bottles of all of the flavors Samuel Adams brews and has brewed.

There was also a large tunnel with flat screen televisions, all espousing things beer. The videos were educational - at least they would be to someone less familiar with beer and how its made - and at times verging on Boston Beer Company propaganda. But I guess they can do that since this is their house (and I don’t actually have anything against Boston Beer Company, so I didn’t really mind).

When our tour finally began, a thin, young, dark-haired guy called out to everyone to follow him. They had a keg where donations should go (the tour was free but they did ask for a $2 donation - optional, but strongly encouraged). We tossed in a Hamilton for the four of us (ain’t we generous?) and followed the guide and the rest of the crowd into a room that featured more Sam Adams memorabilia and another flat-screen television.

The guide spoke to us a bit and then played a video of Jim Koch, the founder, telling us about the history of Sam Adams and his commitment to quality beer and craft brewing:

After the video, we all walked back into a large room that was very obviously the home of the day-to-day brewing operations:

The guide did his best to educate people on the process of making beer - the usual spiel that if you’ve heard one then you’ve heard them all.

After that we got to the serious part of the tour: beer samples. Upon showing ID, you are given a complimentary, three-ounce tasting glass (which are fairly nice and are now in our cupboards here at home). Everyone then shuffles into a large room with a bar at one end and several large picnic-style tables running the length of the room in three aisles.

At this point, more talk about the beer. First they handed out pitchers of their flagship beer, Boston Lager. Everyone filled up his/her tasting glass and passed the pitcher on. Will was getting upset because he was thirsty, but nothing suitable around for him to drink. Luckily, they have root beer at the bar for the minors. Here you can see Will’s bottle of root beer and his piggy:

At this point, the guide talks a bit about Boston Lager and tries to educate everyone on the standard five-step process for tasting and evaluating beer (or any other drink for that matter, most notably wine).

To the left is the guide. If you are ever in Boston and see this guy (taking the tour at the Sam Adams Brewhouse or if you see him randomly on the street) be sure to give him a hard time about spilling beer on that poor girl!That poor girl happened to be none other than my wonderful spouse, Malin.

The next beer sampled was the Sam Adams Octoberfest. As the guide, sitting up on the bar talking to the crowd, was about to hand off a pitcher to our table, he accidentally tipped a little over, splashing it down Malin’s back.

He seemed pretty embarassed. I would have been, too.

The final sample provided to the thirsty crowd was of Sam Adams Summer Ale. This was by far the best in their short line-up. Before sipping our samples of free beer, we all clanged our glasses against one another’s to toast the occasion (nothing at all to do with the fact that the show “Cheers” was based on a bar in Boston):

Life has been good over the past month. It has been very busy, but has seen a decent bit of great beer…

I went on vacation to Boston in the earlier part of June. The notable beer-related highlight was our trip to Cambridge Brewing Company, within walking distance of where my brother lives (if I were him, I’d probably be spending way too much time there…). We also visited the Watch City Brewing Company, which had very decent ales (not as adventurous or interesting as Cambridge Brewing, but tasty nevertheless) and delicious fries. Watch City is in Waltham, also home to Brandeis University (a friend and coworker of mine has a son that is a student there). The other beer destination was in our obligatory trip to the Samuel Adams Brewery. This is a brewery operated by Boston Beer Company in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood not far from Boston proper. You might already know that the Sam Adams we all drink is brewed under contract by various brewers around the country. This brewery is their pilot brewery, where they develop recipes that will then be forwarded to their various contractors. The plain ol’ Boston Lager was okay - I think I’ve had better in the bottle as brewed by some of their contractors. Their Summer Ale, however, was fantastic - much better than I remembered it from the bottle… Unfortunately, we were not able to fit in a trip to the Harpoon Brewery (the schedule on which they open for tours did not mesh with ours).

We did more than just beer stuff in Boston. We did some tourist stuff, visited the MIT Museum (among other things), and ate good food. You know - the usual :)

Other beer news since last month: I have tasted some absolutely phenomenal beers. Allagash Hugh Malone and Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weisse absolutely blew me away. They were both fantastic: sublime, decadent, complex, hoppy, and drinkable all at the same time. And then I tried Allagash Interlude. Whoah! Complex, wine-like, intoxicating, alluring, mysterious, and untouchable. Words to describe it escape me. An amazing blend of fruit and sourness that still retains a distinct grain (i.e. beer) quality but is dangerously refined. Wine, watch out!

We’ve had quite the adventure on the homebrew front around here, too. For one, Hump’s Itsy Bitsy Bitter - my first all-grain batch - is already gone. It wins no awards in this department: it lasted 3 ¹/₂ weeks in the keg, and it is only gone because I dispensed about a gallon of it into bottles tonight (for sharing with friends and family, and a four-pack of label-less 12-ounce bottles, possibly destined for a competition). The record is a scant three weeks from kegging to completion. That honor went to Hump’s American Schwarzbier - my first kegged batch of homebrew (which was quite tasty, by the way). The last glass of bitter (fresh in my mind from earlier this night) was really good - remarkably flavorful for such a light beer (only 3.8%abv): bready and malty but without much sweetness and with a very pleasant, well-balanced hop bitterness that was earthy with a light touch of bitter citrus. I was happy enough with it to save some for a competition…

Other homebrews have been happening, too:

• Hump’s Brain Bludgeoner has turned out great. It is one of the best-looking beers I’ve made. It is bright with a deep orange/copper color and immense, long-lasting, egg-white-like, light-tan foam. The aroma is intense - not nearly as hoppy as I’d hoped, but intense nevertheless with all kinds of fruity esters and complex malt aromatics. The flavor is also remarkably well-balanced. Not as hoppy as I’d hoped (you’d never guess that there was nearly a half-pound of high-alpha hops in there), but quite pleasing. The malt profile is complex with some caramel and toffee sweetness along with some roasted grain character and a light graininess from the base grain: American 2-row barley. The fermentation-derived esters and hops play nicely together giving the beer a fantastic array of complex yet tasty flavors. It did, luckily, continue to ferment. After two weeks of fermentation it had only attenuated down to a specific gravity of 1.028. Luckily it made it down below 1.020 before kegging. It still isn’t as dry (or hoppy) as I had intended, but - as so often is the case - it turned out delicious despite its variations from my original objective.
• Hump’s Bosbessenbier (which is Dutch for Blueberry Beer) was cooked up and is now re-fermenting alongside 4.5 pounds of blueberries. I’m hoping that isn’t too much fruit - the beer is quite purple in color, like red wine, and smells strongly of blueberry wine. The beer before adding the fruit was fantastic - a delicious Belgian golden ale (a modest gravity pale ale with low hopping and fermented with a strain that is reputably sourced from Brouwerij Achouffe (a maker of delicious Belgian ales).
• Hump’s German Hefeweizen hit the keg tonight (it filled the void left by the absence of Itsy Bitsy Bitter - literally). Uncarbonated, the beer tastes great. It has a nice, palpable level of wheat malt with typical fermentation characteristics of Bavarian wheat beers - esters and phenols. Unlike the last Hefeweizen I brewed (a Pumpkin Hefeweizen that I made for my sister’s wedding), this beer has a perfect balance of esters and phenols (the pumpkin brew tasted distinctly of bananas, thanks to the esters produced by the weizen yeast).

Finally, we have some news on the hop front: our Mount Hood hop plant bit the dust this week. It started off quite slowly and then, amazingly, took off in growth, catching up with our other plant, the Chinook. But only a week or two after writing up my last post about them, the Mount Hood seemed to stop growing while the Chinook plant really took off. The Chinook hops are now up to my chest, and if I were to unwind the vine from around the poles it is growing up, it would probably measure about 6 feet in length. So it has grown substantially since my last set of photos, and continues to grow everyday. If I can get six ounces of hops out of the Chinook plant (which I think is highly likely) then it will have proved economical in the long run. I’m actually quite excited about the prospect of brewing a pale ale this fall with fresh, “wet”, homegrown Chinook hops.

I know the labels I create are hokey, and most of the labels I make are ho-hum and formulaic:

• Change the color of the dog’s fur and nose to resemble the color of the homebrew
• Slap the beer’s name on it
• Adjust background color and the color of the “Hump’s” logo to some scheme that seems reasonable, looks decent, and hasn’t been used by a previous beer label (with the exception of the Holiday Ales)

But I do enjoy adding subtle changes, every now and then, as it fits a particular beer - whether it be fitting to the beer itself or just to its name. Examples include the addition of pictures of fresh fruit for the labels of fruit beer, adding “devilish” decoration to the dog for Hump’s Hellishly Hopped Ale, adding the Santa Claus hat and snow flakes for Hump’s Holiday Ale, etc…

I think I outdid myself this time:

Is that killer or what?!

One of them, me, is the founder and head brewer. The other has simply swiped my beer label as his profile picture.

NOTE: You have to be logged into FaceBook for those last two links to work. If you do not have a FaceBook profile, they are free to create. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We have noticed evidence of growth - as much as an inch or two just in one day. But that has only been very recently - since we put a thick bed of mulch around them and started watering them everyday.

With luck, the plants’ new treatment will cause stellar growth. I can’t say I’m holding my breath though.

Here are pictures of our two little plants:

Chinook

Mount Hood

My wife, Malin, documented parts of the day. In this pic you can see the “mash tun” (i.e. the 12 quart pot). Since the pot is metal (which is a poor insulator) and has no other form of insulation (like a thermal wrap or blanket, for instance), I keep it in the oven so that it doesn’t lose heat during the mash.

Since I don’t have adequate equipment, I can only mash about 5 or 6 pounds of grain. I usually mini-mash right at 5.5 pounds. For this all-grain batch, I max’ed my equipment: 6 pounds 2 ounces. Any all-grain brewers reading this might think to themselves, “That isn’t very much grain.” It isn’t. I formulated this batch to be an English Bitter, weak in alcohol, and thus low in starting gravity. Furthermore, I formulated it as a small batch - less than 4 gallons.

In this pic, you can see me pulling the mash tun out of the oven. The large pot in the foreground, upon which my arm appears to be resting, is the brew kettle (a 28 quart aluminum pot):

You can also see that I use a nylon mesh grain bag to hold the grains in the mash tun. This is because my sparge equipment includes a perforated pot whose holes are too large otherwise (the grain bits and hulls would slip right through). So I have to use the mesh bag to keep the grain from entering the final wort.

After Malin took these pictures, Will ran over and exclaimed that he wanted to see the pictures (i.e. he wanted to see the previews on the camera’s LCD screen). In case you are curious, the crud on his cheeks is peanut butter from a sandwich he was eating.

Speaking of eating sandwiches, while the grains were mashing (sitting in the oven for an hour, steeping at 156 deg. Fahrenheit), Malin made delicious steak sandwiches for lunch. She cooked up skirt steak to medium rare, caramelized some red onions, and pulled some fresh greens from the garden. This was all added to a Publix bakery hoagie (they make pretty damn good bread there) with some spicy brown mustard and some pepper-crusted goat cheese (Ile de Franc Petit Bûche). I opted for provolone instead of goat cheese and also tossed in a little creamy horseradish spread.

Here is a shot of Malin’s sandwich. Mmmm… isn’t it tempting you?

And here is another pic of Will, begging to look at the camera. In fact, it looks like he’s about to snatch the camera out of mommy’s hands:

In the recent past, my mash efficiency has varied from 60% to nearly 80%. I’m still working on getting that value more consistent. I knew I couldn’t really predict the efficiency this time because I was using a little bit more grain than usual and a little bit less sparge water (due to the smaller batch size) - two factors that would suggest a lower than average efficiency. I had figured on an efficiency of about 60% or just under, but instead I hit 74% efficiency. I had to change my recipe on the fly to include a little more hops in order to keep the balance of the recipe in tact, despite the greater level of sugars extracted from the grain. It was a good thing I had bought a little extra at the homebrew store on Wednesday.

The beer is percolating right along now, and hopefully the wort fermentability will be inline with my expectations. As long as the apparent attenuation is between 65% and 75%, I’ll be doing okay. The yeast I used, Wyeast 1187, is supposed to attenuate between 68% and 72%, so hitting an acceptable final gravity should be pretty easy.

While at the homebrew store, getting ingredients for this all-grain batch (which I’ve entitled Hump’s Itsy Bitsy Bitter), I also picked up ingredients for Hump’s Bosbessenbier. The name is dutch for Blueberry Beer. The beer is designed as a medium strength Belgian Golden Ale / Pale Ale, but with 4.5 pounds of blueberries added.

This week I also sampled Hump’s Brain Bludgeoner Double IPA. I wasn’t able to hit the level of attenuation I wanted, unfortunately. I think my starter wasn’t properly settled, and I discarded too much yeast that were in suspension. I probably would have been better off with no starter than with making a starter and screwing it up (doh!). On last check, the beer had attenuated down to 1.023. I was hoping for a finish of 1.018 or maybe even lower though. As it is, it is still 9% alcohol by volume, which is pretty intense. Luckily, the bitterness is decent enough to stand up to the residual sweetness. Only time will tell just how drinkable the finished product is. The beer is currently resting on 1.5 ounces of Glacier dry hops. They’ll remain there for another two weeks, and then I’ll keg.

After sampling the beer, I’ve already formulated a new Double IPA recipe that will be even more intimidating than this one. I call it Hump’s HMS Belleraphon. The main changes in the recipe are that it has a different malt bill that I think will make the final result have a more bready maltiness and less residual sweetness and that it has an even heftier hop bill: ³/₄ of a pound of high alpha varieties (including three ounces of dry-hops) that takes the recipe a little bit closer to the Pliny the Elder clone. That beer, from Russian River, is one of the most famous and exalted examples of the style. That clone recipe has helped numerous homebrewers win awards, including Mike McDole’s success at the Sam Adams Longshot competition.

You might ask, “Why don’t you just brew the clone recipe?” And I’ve heard many sage brewers (Jamil Zainasheff among them) explain that you really have to brew a recipe exactly as it is before you can get an idea of how you want to tweak it. I do understand that viewpoint, but I also have a lot of pent up energy when it comes to formulating recipes. I have to flex my creative muscle. And, you know what else? I’m not trying to make a clone of Pliny the Elder (hell, I’ve never even had it and couldn’t easily get my hands on it anyway). I’m just trying to make damn good beer, and I use my palate and my knowledge of ingredients to formulate recipes that I think will make that beer. My expertise isn’t perfect, and I do make mistakes in my formulation, but that is how I learn. I know my methods are far from scientific, and that they can hinder the learn-by-experiment process. But I still progress, and my recipes are slowly converging into my own view of perfection. And I think my latest Double IPA recipe will be delicious. Is it more like the clone recipe than my current Double IPA on deck? Definitely. Should I just brew the clone recipe instead and be done with it? I think definitely not.

That paragraph may have sounded like I was standing on a soap box. If so, I apologize. It must be the delicious liquor known as Dogfish Head 60-Minute IPA, coursing through my veins…

Arriving Early

As is frequently our nature, Malin and I showed up early. We looked at some of the small shops adjacent to our destination, and then decided to go on in. The doors were locked. We were in the process of heading around to the back door when someone poked their head out telling us that the market was closed for a private dinner. Once we told them that we were there for the dinner, they happily let us in.

The place is small and quaint - smaller than both Muss and Turner’s and Alon’s. They have a smaller selection of gourmet food products (artisanal beers, sodas, cheeses, condiments, simple prepared foods like various salads, and the like) than Alon’s, but they are better known for their gourmet sandwiches, served during lunchtime. We’ve never gotten a chance to try their normal food fare, but we’re hoping to go and see how it stacks up against the other two (which also both have a nice selection of gourmet sandwiches).

In addition to reputable lunch fare, the place also serves dinner and specials in the evening, and there is a bar in the rear left of the place.

We arrived early, so I figured we would ask for beverages before the dinner began. There was a man standing at the bar who happily served me a half pint of Left Hand Chainsaw (a double-strength batch of Sawtooth Ale) and poured a glass of red wine for Malin. I later learned it was the rep from Savannah Distributing, and he gave me the drinks at no cost. There was one woman who worked at Fifth Earl who thought it was odd, perhaps even inappropriate, that I was trying a Left Hand beer at a St. Bernardus event, but we were early and just wanted to whet our palates prior to the feast. They served the Chainsaw in a Tommyknocker glass (pictured at right).

The Reception

The reception included a lovely glass of St. Bernardus Blanche along with a delicious, hearty soup consisting of garbanzo beans (aka chick peas), roasted tomatoes, fresh lamb sausage, and topped off with a mustard dressing.

This was an awesome way to start the evening. The subtle Moroccan spices in the soup and the sausage were a great pair with the exotic and refreshing contributions of coriander and orange peel in the witbier.

Though this was not the fanciest course of the evening, it was one of the highlights, due to the great marriage of food and beer.

Malin was quite taken with how the color of the beer so closely matched the color of the shoes she wore that night:

This is the only beer that photographed well (due to the inability to get truly high quality pics from Malin’s phone), so here is yet another image of it:

1^st Course: Tuna

The next course featured the Watou Tripel paired with seafood: rare, sushi-grade tuna served over a bed of plantain salsa and topped with a dash of citrus aioli.

The food was really, really good. The beer was also really, really good. However, this would be the weakest pair of the evening. The chef described the pair as being tied together by citrus flavors - hops in the beer and the aioli in the food dish. But my palate detects much more grassy, earthy impressions from the hops rather than citrus, and the fruitiness in the beer is more banana and pear (due to esters, not hops). The two were great on their own, but didn’t bring the other to new heights when combined.

2^nd Course: Lobster

The next course featured another Belgian Tripel and another seafood dish.

This time the beer was St. Bernardus Tripel. The difference is that the Watou beers are actually brewed on the premise of the abbey, whereas the St. Bernardus beers are all brewed offsite. The Watou Tripel is a little lighter in alcohol and, overall, more deftly made - subtly and sublimely better than its non-Abbey counterpart.

The seafood this time was a duo of lobster. The first half of the dish was a grilled lobster tail. It certainly tasted good, but the preparation was far from inventive. The second half was a lobster salad “club” sandwich. This was much tastier. The bread it was served on was nice, the lobster salad was light and lobster-y, and there were also lettuce, tomato, and bacon (everyone’s favorite!) making an appearance in there.

The dish was certainly the most light-hearted and bucolic dish of the evening. The beer went well with it. But better food was still to come…

3^rd Course: Duck and Foie Gras

The next dish was the richest and most decadent: duck breast and foie gras served over a bed of Tête de Moine spaetzle. Tête de Moine is an amazing, specialty, cow’s milk, Swiss cheese. Spaetzle is a type of Eastern European noodle, very similar to a small dumpling.

The dish was paired with St. Bernardus Prior 8: a delectable, Belgian brown ale that is like a Belgian Dubbel, but stronger.

This course was phenomenal. The beer pairing worked very well, too.

4^th Course: The Cheese Plate

Between the main course and the dessert comes the cheese plate. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the cheeses featured here, but I do recall that they were spectacular. One was a semi-hard cheese that was quite flavorful. The other was a very soft, creamy, buttery cheese that was supremely decadent. The cheese was served with crostini, two types of preserves, and St. Bernardus Pater 6.

5^th Course: Dessert

The dessert was a rich bread pudding with a beer-infused ice cream (it was made using the same beer with which it was paired) and banana. The beer was the flagship of the St. Bernardus line-up: St. Bernardus Abt 12.

The bread pudding was very well-made, and this course was a nice end to the evening.

Wrapping Up

Throughout the meal, the cast of folks running the place talked to the attendees, describing the dishes they were about to eat and the beers they were about to drink. They recruited the brewer at Twain’s Brewpub, just down the road, to come and talk about the beers and the brewing process behind them. He was the least lively of the bunch (perhaps he had a long night at his brewpub before coming over, or maybe he had tied on one too many of his own brews).

There are four people standing in the center of the picture above. They are, from left to right, the owner of Fifth Earl Market, the pastry chef for the evening, the Chef de Cuisine for the evening, and the Fifth Earl Market’s usual Chef de Cuisine. I apologize that I do not recall any of their names - a travesty for sure since a nameless acknowledgement is lame indeed (sorry guys and gal).

As we were leaving, the servers picked up our glasses, washed them, and returned them to us, as gifts for the evening. There were supposed to be two such gifts but the other, also a piece of glassware, was ruined - all broken during shipping. The ones we took home, though, are very nice, high quality goblets:

Even though the samples of beer with each course were small, since some of them were rather strong, the total amount of beer was equivalent to about two and a half glasses of wine. I made sure to drink plenty of water in between courses, and we walked around Decatur for a little bit before getting in the car for the ride home.

The wonderful evening gave us a lot to talk about for the ride home. A good time was had by all.

There are now a number of restaurants in the Atlanta area who frequently host beer dinners: The Lindbergh Station location of Taco Mac, The Brick Store Pub, Twain’s Brewpub, Five Seasons Brewing, Muss and Turner’s, and Fifth Earl Market. Hopefully we’ll get to go out and do something like this again.

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend. It was held during the week, and I do not live anywhere near Buckhead. So, alas, I missed my chance to try the Undercover Shutdown Ale and the HopStoopid… Even were it during the weekend, logistics would be difficult since there is a fair amount of beer served with the dinner. They serve 4 to 6 samples of beer - one with each course - and each sample is 8 to 12 ounces. But some of the beers are quite strong, so this leads to a total amount of beer that would require a nearby hotel or a long cab ride.

Since I wasn’t able to attend, I picked up some Lagunitas brew at the package store last Friday. I nabbed their IPA, which is one of the few beers they sell here in Georgia that I had not yet tried. It is quite tasty with lots of piney hops and a wonderful caramel malt backbone. I think I prefer a little more citrus to prevent the level of pine from tasting too herbal - dare I say “shampoo”. But it is still quite drinkable.

I also picked up the latest offering from Victory that is available here: the Sunrise Weissbier. It is an absolutely fantastic Bavarian wheat beer - totally top-notch. I topped off my outing with a 750ml bottle of Allagash Four and a bomber of Avery Maharaja Imperial IPA - both quite good.

And now on to the fun stuff: homebrew! This weekend saw a lot of homebrew activity at the hump house:

Saturday, Malin helped me to keg the Black Kriek - a Robust Porter flavored with lots of sour cherries. Despite the fact that I used a lot of fruit - 3 lbs. of cherry blend purée (included both dark sweet and tart cherries) and another 5 lbs. of puréed, tart, red cherries - the beer is far from overwhelmingly fruity. In fact, not only is it not overwhelming, it is subtle. I was hoping for something more in your face - like a sour cherry Belgian beer (Kriek Lambic or Kriek Flanders Rouge) - but instead created something more sublime. The cherry flavor is noticable, but is not particularly sour nor bold - almost like the cherry flavoring added to cola, except a little less overt.

In any event, kegging was quite a chore because of the massive amounts of puréed fruit in the carboy. We filtered the beer through a cheesecloth to eliminate the chunks of fleshy cherries. Cheesecloth isn’t remotely fine enough for the finished product to be considered “filtered”, and it lets all of the yeast through. So the final product is still a delicious, unfiltered ale.

Later on Saturday, I cooked up a 1 gallon yeast starter, and then dispensed some of the Dunkles Hefeweissbier into bottles (for giving away and perhaps for entering into a competition). That keg is getting low, so I needed to draw some beer out of the keg for safe keeping before I accidentally sucked the whole thing dry.

Sunday, I cooked up an Imperial IPA. This time I did the mash on the stove top instead of on the propane burner outside. It worked much better as far as getting the mash to a consistent temperature and in keeping the mash at that temperature for the whole duration of 90 minutes. To maintain the temperatures (in this case 149 degrees to produce a fairly dry beer), I placed the pot into an oven heated to 170 and then cut the oven off. It maintained the right temperature with very little variance throughout the 90 minute mash.

Unfortunately, the starter had not completed. It was still chugging away anxiously - even after I put it in the fridge for numerous hours, hoping to slow the yeast and let them flocculate out so that I could decant the starter beer off the top. So I had to put the big fermenter in the fridge (so that it would be cool enough to keep any potentially offensive, nearby critters [like wild yeast or bacteria] inactive) and pull the starter out (so that it could finish fermenting and be ready the next day).

Tonight, the starter finished. I pulled the fermentor full of super-hoppy wort out of the fridge, let it warm to over 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and then racked it into another fermentor (because a ton of green trub, from all of the hops, settled as it chilled). Meanwhile, the starter was put back into the fridge so that any yeast remaining in suspension would settle to the bottom. About half an hour ago, I racked the starter beer off and pitched two pints of yeast slurry into the eagerly waiting wort.

Tomorrow morning I expect to see serious signs of fermentation, and I expect to smell lots and lots of glorious hops. After primary fermentation, I’ll be dry-hopping this bad boy with 1.5 ounces of Glacier plugs (leaf hops that have been stamped into dense discs of hoppy goodness).

I used two pounds of rye malt in my recipe. Doug mentioned that he and his friends have designed plenty of rye pale ale recipes, too, and that they’ve found that one pound - or maybe even a little less - is just right. Even one and a half pounds is a little too much since some of the flavors in the rye begin to detract from the finished beer when it is present in too large a quantity. I don’t mind the “Reeb” finished product - in fact I like it a lot. But the rye flavor is certainly strong - at least when drinking the first one. If you have a second helping, you don’t notice as much :)

While at the homebrew store I bought three ounces of high-alpha hops - the final acquisition of luscious hops for my upcoming double IPA. While there I also decided to do my part to help out with the hop shortage by purchasing a couple of hop rhizomes. This, of course, is also a hedge against decreasing hop availability and rising hop prices - and it’s just plain fun! They are already starting to produce shoots, protruding from the dirt. Malin is planning their final planting location in the yard and has already designed a trellis for the vines once they start to get big. The hop vines can grow as long as 20′ in the first year; and, once they are mature and really growing (not sure how many years go by before that happens, but it apparently doesn’t happen in the first year), they can grow as much as 1′ per day! We’re pretty stoked. Doug says that his hop plants grow great, despite our not having a climate like the classic hop producing regions (Pacific Northwest US, Southern Germany, and Southeast England).

I bought one rhizome each of Mount Hood - a US aroma hop based on a German Hallertauer cultivar - and Chinook - another US hop that is high in alpha acids (so it is frequently used for bittering) and has strong notes of evergreen (pine needles) with some bitter citrus (grapefruit).

The former had a beautifully bright hop character to it which has, unfortunately, diminished somewhat. But it is still a very drinkable pale ale with lots of wonderful biscuit and bread character from the Maris Otter English malts. Its aroma is wonderfully strong with fresh hops and the flavor has taken on a distinctly grassy Goldings note (despite being bittered with Chinook and dry-hopped with Amarillo, the Goldings flavor hops dominate the character). The bitterness is nice and balanced.

The latter has turned out nicely rich in character. I’d liken it closer to a “wee” Weizenbock than to a normal Dunkelweizen. It’s potent character comes from chocolate wheat malt, Munich malt, and Belgian Special B in the mash. At the same time, it has a nice wheat character (I love to use torified wheat to accentuate this) and the usual cast of “weizen” fermentation by-products: clove/spice phenols and banana esters. Despite its big flavor, it is also refreshing and drinkable.

I brewed Hump’s Black Kriek on Sunday. The intent was something like a Cherry Porter - lots of chocolate and strong with tart cherries. I achieved a mash efficiency that was much higher than expected (nearly 80%), so it will have even less bitterness than I originally designed for it. It’s practically finished in the primary already and is anxiously waiting for an addition of over 5 pounds of sour cherries (tomorrow, hopefully).

Next on the list: Hump’s Brain Bludgeoner Double IPA. I’ve managed to stash away some extra hops left-over from my past several batches and trips to the homebrew store, and I’m hoping to acquire three more ounces of super-high-alpha hops later this week. The resulting brew should be big and hoppy as hell. This will get cooked up sometime in May.

Also sometime in May, I’ll foray into my first all-grain batch. Since I haven’t yet upgraded equipment to handle a proper amount of grain, I’ll be making a teeny beer - both in strength and in volume. Hump’s Itsy-Bitsy Bitter will only weigh in at 3.2% alcohol by volume, and I’ll only be making 3.5 gallons of it. Depending on how well (or how poorly) that goes, I may decide to expedite the purchase of necessary equipment to make every future batch an all-grain batch. But I’m currently expecting to continue to produce brews with only 25-50% of the fermentables coming from grain and the rest from extract…