Summer was too hot to ferment, so I took a few months off. October has brought relief.
About a week and a half ago, I started fermenting a cider: 5 gallons of apple cider from Dixon's farm, with 5 pounds of honey, and White Labs sweet mead yeast. (This isn't really a mead, though: I'd need at least twice as much honey for it to count as one. Still, I think this is probably a good yeast strain for the job.)
But the cider was just to get into the spirit of things. The season truly began last night, when I finally brewed my first BEER since the spring.
It's called "America, Fuck Yeah!" (because of the all-American ingredients; no brit stuff was used in this brew) and I've been mulling the recipe over in my head for probably 6 months.
It's an American Pale Ale (though with a touch of wheat, for no good reason). It's heavily hopped, probably *over* hopped. It was a partial mash (I mashed 4 lbs of barley and 2 lbs of wheat, and also used 5 lbs of DME). Bittered with 1 oz Chinook, flavored with lots of Simcoe (3.5 oz), and aroma-ed with Amarillo (1.5 oz). That's a lot of hops, and another .5 oz of Simcoe and .5 oz of Amarillo will dry-hop in secondary. (I think I probably should have cut the Chinook down to 3/4 oz, but we'll see.)
O.G. 1.056. I'm fermenting with White Labs California V ale yeast (WLP051, which I think is the same strain as Wyeast 1272).
Summer was too hot to ferment, so I took a few months off. October has brought relief.
About a week and a half ago, I started fermenting a cider: 5 gallons of apple cider from Dixon's farm, with 5 pounds of honey, and White Labs sweet mead yeast. (This isn't really a mead, though: I'd need at least twice as much honey for it to count as one. Still, I think this is probably a good yeast strain for the job.)
But the cider was just to get into the spirit of things. The season truly began last night, when I finally brewed my first BEER since the spring.
It's called "America, Fuck Yeah!" (because of the all-American ingredients; no brit stuff was used in this brew) and I've been mulling the recipe over in my head for probably 6 months.
It's an American Pale Ale (though with a touch of wheat, for no good reason). It's heavily hopped, probably *over* hopped. It was a partial mash (I mashed 4 lbs of barley and 2 lbs of wheat, and also used 5 lbs of DME). Bittered with 1 oz Chinook, flavored with lots of Simcoe (3.5 oz), and aroma-ed with Amarillo (1.5 oz). That's a lot of hops, and another .5 oz of Simcoe and .5 oz of Amarillo will dry-hop in secondary. (I think I probably should have cut the Chinook down to 3/4 oz, but we'll see.)
O.G. 1.056. I'm fermenting with White Labs California V ale yeast (WLP051, which I think is the same strain as Wyeast 1272).