I realized the other day that my beer closet was full of fermenting beer. I’ve been pretty busy with beer brewing and sharing a lot of it with neighbors by filling growlers, pitchers and pint glasses for them. Getting feedback is very helpful.
Currently Pouring:
- The last half gallon or so of my Blackberry Wheat
- A 3 Gallon batch of an American Pale Ale dry-hopped with Citra (single Hop beer)
- 2.5 gallons that’s left over of the Oaked Imperial Stout. It’s really balancing out over the last 2 months. It’s still too smokey for my taste but some people like it. I may bottle what’s left and sit on it for a while.
Currently Aging:
- My 11.5-12.5% Barleywine. This is a best of a beer and right now it’s incredibly boozy so I have it in the closet at 62 Degrees to get some age on it. No idea how it will turn out but, every time I tap it, I think this is really sweet and has lots of citrus but is still way too boozy.
Currently Fermenting:
- Another Wheat beer. Elizabeth wants me to do another blackberry addition. I’d prefer to do maple but she’s picky about beers so I’ll probably re-brew the blackberry wheat just for her.
- An Ommegang Hennepin clone. It’s a belgian-style saison beer with sweet orange peel and honey added. it is only one week into fermentation so I just added the pound of honey. Things are still pretty vigorous but it should be ready for my work’s home-brew competition next month.
We’re doing an unofficial competition at work where people can bring bottles or kegs. I was going to bring my small pale ale, wheat and saison and see what people think. Should be a success. We’ll see!
So, that’s an update on things. My wild culture is really taking off. Guess I should get another carboy and do a wild beer. It’s a long fermentation process so better to start now.
Give that barley wine a good six months at that temp. It’ll do well. Beers definitely dry-out with age.
RE the Saison: What yeast? I like the Saison II yeast from White Labs. The standard dupont strain really craps out and will leave the beer too sweet. I have an 8.6% saison on tap now that took a month to ferment, only a week or so starting at 67 and ending at 74, but took a further three weeks at closer to 90F to really dry out. I got it from 1070 to 1004.
Not tapping the barleywine is hard but I tried some last night and the ounce I had was incredibly ugh still. I hate sitting on it but it’ll be worth it.
I used the wyeast forbidden fruit. Wow. that’s a nice fermentation. One month sounds good. I added the honey at week one which kick started another storm of crazy fermentation. Looking forward to sharing this one with the GF.
Wow! So I clicked your link through Home Brew Forums and your site is very nice and I’m still working my way through everything you have! Significantly better than mine but then again I have no idea what I’m doing.
Anyways, big beers are tough especially if you have nothing else to take your mind off of them. I like to have a lot of stuff running through my pipeline so I can forget about my Barleywines and Imperial Stouts and Sours and just let them hang out with each other until they decide they are ready to be awesome and get consumed by me and my friends.
http://inhousebrew.weebly.com/homebrewing-blog.html
Hi Charlie. Thanks for the comment! I really liked your blog and awesome photo of the wild yeasties coming alive. I added it to my homebrewing folder I wanna see how that one comes along!
That’s the key thing. I brewed this barley wine almost 2 months ago and put it in a keg..well I only have 4 kegs and 4 taps in my kegerator so it was hard to forget about it. So, I had to order a 5th keg but now it can just sit in the closet in peace until Christmas. Big beers are always nice during the holidays.
Happy to have you stopping by and feel free to critique my stuff. Always trying to avoid mistakes when taking on new projects.