GBS had their first annual Champion of the Pint competition on April 10th.  We ended up getting 132 entries, and had a lot of great beers.  I ended up judging American Ales in  the morning and the Specialty category in the afternoon.

The competition was a great experience, and for being our first it went off with relatively few hiccups.  The few that we did have were noted and we have added it to lessons learned.

Champion of the Pint Medals

I entered 4 beers: an ESB, a Northern English Brown, a Dortmunder Export, an American Wheat(Gumballhead Clone), and a Weizenbock.  The Gumballhead Clone ended up winning  a gold, with the Weizenbock, Northern English Brown, and Dortmunder Exports all winning bronze medals.  I’ll post recipes for the winners in a followup post. (The Dortmunder is already posted).
My hops are going Crazy this year, they’re already in excess of 15 feet.

I’ve also finally gotten around to adding Quick Disconnects to my mash tun to facilitate pump hookup for recirculation (vorlauf) and pumping to the boil kettle.
That’s it for now, I will be posting recipes for the beers mentioned above soon.

More to come…

http://www.basicbrewing.com/index.php?page=radio

It’s the January 14th episode.

I was shooting for the top end of the style, kind of hoping I’d go over (wanted to make a bigger version of the style).  I got my wish, hitting 85% efficiency.  When checking the pre-boil  gravity, I noted this, and adjusted the BU:GU ratio accordingly.  Having a BU:GU ratio of about .5 in this beer is pretty important, as the style depends on balance.

Below are some pics, and the recipe.  The recipe is scaled to 85%, to show the actual final gravity and new correct BU:GU ratio.  I made a 4.5 liter starter with 2 vials of WLP830 German Lager yeast.  I am fermenting it at 51 F.

Note the beer is about 3 points out of style, I’m interested to see how it turns out.

Dortmunder 2.0

For the base beer, I decided to do an American Wheat, with WLP320 as the yeast.  I also decided that some citrus might complement the Agave, so I threw in some sweet orange peel and lime zest toward the end of the boil.

I was estimating a 1.053 OG…only hit 1.047.  I’m thinking I overestimated the potential SG of the Agave Nectar.  Still, 1.047 is within the range, and I don’t think it’ll be too light.

One other thing that could have contributed to the low OG is that with only 2 gallons of water in the tun and 7 lbs of grain, the grain bed did not hold temperature as well as it ususally does.  I normally don’t even lose 1 degree over an hour, and in this case lost around 8 degrees.  There’s a chance this may affect the body of the beer too, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Below are pics and the recipe.



I decided to use the juice and the zest.  First, I took the 6 tangerines and zested them. Next, I used a borrowed juicer to juice the tangerines.  I got a lot less juice than I was expecting out of 6 tangerines, but that could actually be a good thing.

I added the zest into the juice, and heated it up to 170 degrees F, then covered it and let it cool to room temp.  Then I dumped it into the primary and will let it sit for about 5-7 days before kegging.  Below are some pics.

As I thought about what to make, I remembered that I’ve had some dark chocolate flavored with orange and tangerize zest, so decided to do something along these lines.  I settled on something like an American Brown Ale, with some citrusy hops to compliment the tangerines and some roasted malts to give some chocolate character.  I decided to use Amarillo hops because of their prominent citrusy character, and also used cascade from my backyard plants.  I will zest and juice all 6 tangerines and add the juice and zest to the fermenter as fermentation starts to slow.

I used my smaller 9 gallon pot  to do a 5 gallon batch, and on my new burner boiled off around 3 gallons in an hour!  This obviously raised my OG, so I added back .5 gallons of water to get where I needed to be volume and gravity wise.

Below is the recipe and a few pics.

Tangerine Brown

I took Friday off, and will be brewing then, posting pics, and the recipe.  Stay tuned.

First, had a GREAT time at the Augusta Bottoms Beer Festival on Saturday.  Our local homebrew club, Garage Brewers Society had a booth there along with several professional breweries.  Lots of great beers there, and once again we were a hit, winning Favorite Brewery this year!  Very exciting.

Best 'Brewery' Winners! Go GBS!

Next, I have used the Conical  Fermenator twice so far, with good results.  It is very nice for getting a nice clear product straight into the kegs, for harvesting yeast, and kegging is very fast since you can pressurize the fermentor.  Only drawback so far is it does take some time to sanitize.   I’ve made a point to get it filled with sanitizer the night before brewdays now.

In early August, a few friends an I went up north on a brewery tour.  We hit Piece in Chicago, Three Floyds, Two Brothers, Bell’s,  and Founders.  Had a great time, and it was very cool to taste so many of those beers fresh from the tap. Puts a new perspective on quite a few of the great beers those breweries make.

Lastly, I did a harvest of my hop plants.  Ended up with 1.6 lbs wet which turned into about 6 oz dry.  I dried them on a screen and vacuum packed them with a Foodsaver.  I hope to use them (Cascade) in an APA or hoppy wheat beer soon.

Pics of all described above and more below.