brew day

Hello all. Adam and I did a brew yesterday. All and all things went smoothly. We used the Blichmann for the first time and realized a few things. Number one is that we need to tighten the brewmometer because it is leaking ever so slightly. Number two is that the brewmometer enters the kettle above the water line of any partial mash brews, basically rendering it useless for the time being and thus, number three, we need to step up to all grain when it is seasonally possible. Not really willing to sit out in the bitter cold for an hour brewing. We had to revert to the digital thermometer we bought when we first started brewing a year ago. The thing died due to H2O exposure but I revived it by stashing it in a rice bag for 6 weeks.

So for this round of brewing we chose a recipe out of the book Clone Brews by Tess and Mark Szamatulski. We use this book quite often. The recipe was a clone of a beer called Bert Grant's Imperial Stout which was brewed by the Yakima Brewing and Malting Company. Bert Grant was a Scottish born brewer whose family emigrated to Canada when he was two. At some point he relocated to the heart of northwest united states hop country, Yakima Valley in central Washington. Here he set up a brew pub and eventually a craft brewery. Bert was a hop head. It was rumoured that he carried around a vile of hop oil that he would add to Bud or Miller if he was forced to drink them. His Scotch ale was often criticised for being too hoppy, but he contended that since he was Scottish it must be a true Scotch Ale.

The Imperial stout called for quite a bit of malt, including several specialty malts, galena and cascade hops, and a new ingredient for me, clover honey. All in all the brewing went rather smoothly. Check out the pictures below. I didn't really document the process as well as I planned. It's hard to brew, drink, watch the giants get their asses handed to them, and photo journalize at the same time.

Ingredients:

Adam showing the honey:
Preparing to sparge:
Getting my boil on:

Let the fermentation commence:

New feature for beer blog,
What I'm drinking:
Bear Republic Racer 5 India Pale Ale
and
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale