2009 Spring Big Brew
This past Sunday my brewing buddy, his dad, and I brewed up thirty gallons (three ten gallon batches) of summer beers. Whats a summer beer? Well for me Summer beers are light in color, typically have wheat in the grist, and are refreshing in nature. Every year I brew my Wader Patch Wit so that we definatly in the plan. Last year I brewed up an Oberon Clone – cleverly named Oberkey Wheat. My lovely wife did a side by side blind tasting of it and chose it over the real deal so that is in the cards as well. The third batch was kind of a toss up. I love me some hops, and I love trying new things so I figured I would make a run at a Black IPA as well. I named it the Black Beta IPA.
As typical Jon was late getting to the house and had some lame excuse about having to clean up dog vomit. I say if you are going come bearing excuses next time make it something original. I mean dog vomit, that is weak.
It was a long ass day lasting over 12 hours. Longer than usual but fun none the less. I think the problem was that we were very inefficient in getting our recipes ready for the next batch. Instead of having batches ready to boil immediately following the cleaning of the boiler, there was a lot of downtime. I think honestly that it may be my last day of doing 3 batches in a single day.
I modified my standard wit recipe adding 1 oz of organic lavendar from whole foods @ 5 minutes.
The black beta is more of a brown beta at this point. I am going to try and take the color darker by doing a very quick steep of probably a lb of dark grains, doing a 10 minute boil, cooling and adding to the exsiting fermentation. It should work, I will keep you posted.
