And so it goes

Wow I have not posted since April? That cant be right can it? Any way the adventures in brewing continue and I have been able to brew a few beers during the summer. I also joined the IBU or Iowa Brewers Union. This is the local home brew club here in Des Moines. I hope that my club experiences will help me become a better brewer. I look forward to the monthly meetings which are a lot like AA only in reverse. About 50 people show up so there is lots of other home brews to try and the conversation is always informative!

Most of the beers I made this summer were good one was great and one was meh. The main thing is not to lose focus and try harder next time and thats how brewing goes when your just getting started. I am really starting to learn my system and with a few tweaks here and there I feel that soon I can brew consistently good beers. So far for 2012 I have 8 batches under my belt for a grand total of 40 gallons! Yesterday while recovering from an unplanned and very painful dental procedure I found the strength to bottle my 8th batch. This beer is an extract kit from Northern Brewer called Lefse blonde. It is loosely based on a recipe that was supposedly brewed in Lutheran monasteries in Minnesota. Fact or fiction I think this is going to be a nice easy drinking beer. Next up is Speckled Heifer which is an clone of Spotted Cow A popular cream ale that is only available in Wisconsin it will be my second brewing this one. This is a partial mash kit so the brewing process is a little more involved and thus I am waiting for the right time to brew it.

As for the beers I made this summer the one that was meh it was a Honey Weizen. Adding honey to beers will give it a dry wine like finish. While this brew has that then it quickly vanishes and leaves a very blah after taste. I have thought about bringing to the next club meeting and see if someone can tell me what went wrong!  The other brew that was fantastic a simply American Wheat extract kit that I aged on a bed of frozen Great Value brand frozen Raspberry's man that was good! Its almost gone so I will have to brew another batch soon! I also brewed a Rye P.A. which I thought was great but a few club members thought it needed more Rye however they also said it tasted good the way it was. The sad part was this beer was also a bit over carbonated and the bottles had some hop flakes in them as well. This batch taught me a lot of valuable lessons about quality control. Even with those issues it turned out to be a pretty solid beer and it has a great hoppy taste to it so we will put this in the win column as well!

So where does my journey take me next? Well I really want to start kegging my beers sometime this winter as bottling beer by hand SUCKS! That will be a big investment for me but will also be a time saver as bottling can take 4 to 5 hours and you don't have to wait 2 to 3 week to drink it like you do when you bottle! I am also looking at 10 gallon brew kettle so I can make larger batches. Right now I am limited to 5 gallons batches but with a 10 gallon pot I can brew 5 gallons for me and 5 gallons for you. I think this will be a lot better than what I have going on now. I say this because the best part of home brewing to me is sharing and most of the time there just is not enough to go around. One other benefit of having a 10 gallon kettle is that I can finally move to all grain brewing and from there the sky's the limit! All grain brewing will let me not only brew a lot higher quality of beer but also wider variety of beers as well!  Until the next time CHEERS!