Ah, hmm, so, that's right... I have a blog don't I? Ahem, well, that year and a couple weeks off ought to have thinned out the all non-True Believers, eh?

While you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that this site is absolutely dead, it does actually inhabit my thoughts from time to time and I do in fact have plans to give it a through redesign one of these days and then actually get back to posting again. A whole relaunch, if you will.

The first thing will be to get off this ancient blogging platform and on to something a little more modern and standard. Wordpress or something similar, most like. Then we'll see where we are and if I actually in fact have anything worth yammering about...



Matt on 03.31.12 @ 11:48 AM PST [link]  [No Comments]

Ah... or you know, I might remember to post this a month later or some such thing...

Water: Filtered San Diego tap
Grain:

• 20lbs Domestic 2-row
• 4.5lb Belgian Munich
• 1.75lb Caramunich 80
• 0.75lb Crystal 60

Yeast: WLP001 - California Ale (Yeast cake from Hornbier I)
Hops:

• 56g? Summit 16.5% First Wort Hopping
• ??g Super Alpha 12.7% @ 60min
• 28g? Centennial? 8.7% @ 10min

Mashed at 154 for 60 minutes. Boiled 80 minutes.

OG: around 1.096

Hmm... I have more or less completely forgotten my hop schedule. I guess that's why you're supposed to put this stuff down the day you do it.

So, I totally thought this beer was going to be a complete and utter failure. I based it on Denny Conn's "Old Stoner" recipe (with substitutions based on things I already had and things homebrewmart was out of) and had never done the whole first wort hopping thing. So when it came time to add the bittering hops it suddenly occurred to me that "wait... the first wort hops are going to be boiling the entire time too... that's going to be a crazy amount of bitterness (something like 250 IBU, I thought)... I must have misunderstood something!" But not knowing what else to do I just decided to cut back my bittering hops slightly and hope for the best.

Now, I also totally missed my gravity with this one... I'm constantly ending up with less wort than I want at the end of the boil so I played it pretty fast and loose with the sparge/strike water. A little too fast and loose... I ended up with almost 7 gallons after boiling. So I put as much as would fit into the carboy and dumped the extra.

And man oh Manuel did this thing ferment. Within 3 hours of dropping it onto the yeast cake it started going crazy and stayed crazy for at least 3 days. I mean, we had to close the door to bedroom for a couple nights because the bubbling (used a blowoff instead of an airlock) was keeping us awake. In fact it still woke me up once or twice even with the door shut.

BUT... when I was racking it into my 5 gallon secondary a couple weeks ago, I ended up with an extra half gallon that wouldn't fit. Being the economical type that I am, I put it in a growler in the fridge for a couple days and have been drinking a glass every now and then since. And it's good. Even uncarbonated and full of sediment, it's really not bad at all. Unless something terrible happens between now and when it's bottled, it's gonna be some tasty stuff. And through some process I deeply deeply do not understand, the bitterness is pretty restrained. In fact, I shouldn't have cut back the bittering hops at all. Weird. I guess there's a reason that Denny guy wins awards.

Oh, as for the name? Beats me, I just liked the sound of it.

Matt on 03.17.11 @ 09:54 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]