My pipeline is almost empty. This is a scary thought because a few things transpired in the last 30 days to cause this and I did nothing to stop them. August and September are my biggest months for people that rent my cabin. I haven’t been home in 3 weeks. It’s just 3 different groups booking my place for a week at a time and a cleaning person going by after each person leaves to clean up. The issue is that I didn’t untag any of my kegs before leaving. Beer is a “perk” along with the open bar. I have never had an issue with people drinking too much liquor but the beer seems to go very fast. 6 people a week for 3 weeks and 4 kegs were empty. Uh-Oh.
So, yesterday I ordered some beer supplies and ordered the ingredients for my first all-grain batches. This is pretty exciting. First, what’s in the fermenters now that I can transfer over?
- I have 4 kegs that are dirty and must be cleaned. that happens tomorrow.
- I have a very dry honey saison with some coriander and orange peel in the fermenter now for about 4 weeks that needs to be kegged
- I have a 10.5% Imperial IPA all Galaxy hops that is ready to be kegged. It’s been in the fridge for a week so the yeast cake should be pretty hard and beer should be easy to rack. It’s a 4 week old beer now so I hope the HUGE tropical fruit profile is still in your face. With that ABV, maybe the 4 weeks was actually a good thing?
What’s Next:
- I bought the ingredients to make my first soda. My GF loves Root Beer so I’m going to make that first. I also bought extracts for Raspberry Soda and Cream Soda. I’ll make one as soon as the other runs out. I’ll always have a soda on tap which will be pretty cool. I need to do more research on how serving sodas is different than beers. It’s a VERY high sugar content so does this mess up my serving lines over time?
- After that, I’m making my first “sour” but it’s not a Lambic style sour. It’s actually a Berliner Weisse. The beer is consisting of a lot of german malts and will be a very low ABV like around 2.5%. It will have some sour characters to it which get stronger the longer you keep it in the fermentation chamber. The german notes of this beer will come out in the first 10 days then 2-6 months later, it will develop very sour notes. I’m adding Raspberries to it to have a nice fruitiness to accompany the tart characters. This beer won’t be ready until January at the earliest.
- I’m also doing a honey porter that’s an extract recipe kit from Midwest supplies. This should be delicious as the temperature drops. I’m going to consult my buddy dave over at Blue Lobster. He did a citrus porter once with lemon zest and I hear it came out great. I’d like to know the percentage of zest he used. I watched him grind it fresh and it seemed like a lot of work!
- Also arriving this week is an all-grain Hefeweizen. This will also get the fruit treatment. I’ll probably use Raspberries but I was thinking of Blackberries as well since they’re in season up here in New Hampshire. I have a week to decide on that one.
- I’m trying my hand at an Imperial Stout again. This is a partial-mash stout. Last time I added too many toasted oak chips and too much chocolate. The stout was unbalanced so I bottled about 2 gallons of it. No one liked it except for one friend. Maybe it’ll get better in 6 months. Doubtful. So, this is an Imperial stout and I won’t be adding any smoke to it at all. Instead, I’m going to brew some coffee and add a slight bit of chocolate to it. Tweaking this one for balance is key. I hope it comes out alright.
- Finally, I’m going to do an All-Citra Double IPA again. The last Citra IPA I did was delicious and I loved the one glass I had before my guests finished the keg as soon as I left. Same recipe but it’s going to be all Grain instead of extract. Should make for a prettier batch. We’ll see.
—–
I now have 5 carboys, 2 fermentation buckets and 5 kegs and a case of swing-top 1 litre bottles so I can brew these up pretty easily. I have to get one more carboy probably since the Berliner Weisse will take up one of my carboys for so long. The total cost for “what’s next” was $210. That’s not too bad for all that I’m getting. I imagine the Saison and Imperial IPA that are being kegged this week will be finished off at the Hill Farmstead Harvest fest next weekend. I’m taking the kegs to that to share with friends. I bought two ball-lock faucets so I can hook up CO2 to the two kegs and serve off the faucets that can just be thrown on the connector. I just have to figure out how to keep the kegs cool all day. Oh, I should be clear..these kegs are for the night time camping activities.
So, that’s the pipeline. This upcoming week will be a brew day every single day until I run out of fermentation chambers which shouldn’t happen.
If you have any thoughts specifically about the zesting of lemon for the porter or how much chocolate or coffee to add to the stout and finally, when I should add the raspberries to the berliner weisse, I’m all ears. Thanks for reading and for the always awesome comments.