[ja]cobdavis

Yeah, I know I forgot about a day. Hell, I even had the day off from work. But I was brewing so I do have that in my defense.

Yeah, this post will be about beer, sorry – not much of a story time.

I have a spreadsheet with the upcoming planned beers and their information – nerd out. First up is the English Bitter mostly because of the short lead time into readiness, my dark saison is nearly all gone so I’ve got to get something in the pipes. The ‘bitter’ name is a bit of a misnomer. Sure it’s a bit on the sharp side, but it (should) have great balance, be a decent session beer, and be quite tasty. I was looking at picking up the Northern Brewer exclusive ‘neo-britiania’ (1945) strain but read the tasting notes and thought the Thames Valley (1275) would provide me with something a bit more of the ‘real bitter’ I was looking to achieve. I cannot honestly say the last time I’ve had a bitter though, take my advice for yeast with a grain of salt. That is until the brew is ready. The fully inflated yeast pack I broke into smelled pretty dang good – looking forward to having a nip. It’s bubbling away at a bit warm 70f in the basement of my apartment. My luck this week is one of the warmest weeks since mid July. Grain bill was 2lbs of Gambrinus Honey Malt and 1lb of Briess Victory. The mixture smelled like honey glazed biscuits – amazing. I don’t have a full grain setup (yet) so I topped with 3.15 lbs of “gold” Liquid malt extract. I was feeling cheap so this brew is all Cascade hops, saved a couple bucks by buying one 8oz pack instead of 1oz packets [note: I only used 2.5oz]. Brew day went off without a hitch. Only issue I had was that the strange setup of this apartment’s kitchen makes for a very warm brew day.

Next up is a Cranberry Wheat beer using a Belgian wheat yeast (3942). The yeast is not chilling after making a 2L starter. The beer is planned to be at 8% so I thought it better of me to make a hefty yeast, give them a leg up. More on this brew day when it happens.