Homegrown Hops – Week 3

Categories: Brewing, Updates

Just a quick update. Farmer Xon and Dean kegged up the Double IPA experiment finally. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it, but Dean tells me that both batches smell amazing. It will be nice to see how the different hops are going to effect the beer.

In the growing department, the hops are sprouting up like crazy. I think Xon said we’re over 16 inches now (that’s what she said!)! Still not sure if we’ll get any yield this year, but at least they are fun to look at so far.

Also, we heard today that there may be a brewery starting up in Fremont called “Brews n Bites” or “Bites n Brews”. I did a quick search online and could only come up with what looked like a festival in San Luis Obispo as well as a restaurant, but not brewpub, in PA. From the word on the streets, it’s supposed to be in the Five Corners area of the Irvington district. If you have any idea on what’s the deal with this place, please let us know!

Update: Looks like there is a place that opened up in Hayward not too long ago called Buddys Bites and Brews, maybe it’s an expansion on this place?

Hop Growing – Week 1

Categories: Brewing, Updates

I’m sitting here cleaning kegs as I do just about every Thursday morning, pondering life’s important questions with Will (brewmaster at Jack’s Brewing). Questions like what hop profile to use in the next expirimental double IPA and how long fruit should sit in secondary. Then it donned on me that we have been neecting to share our extremely entertaining lives with the world. So here is what’s been going on the past two months…

THE FAIL PALE

The sessionable pale ale we attempted ended up at well over 90% efficiency, which was a tad higher then the 75% we estimated for our brew sculpture. So it went from a light pale to an IPA. However we did revamp the recipe from the ground up and we’re excited at the next attempt here in the coming months.

THE RETURN OF THE DIPA

The double IPA that was made during the SF Beer Week event went really quickly (Recently Dean and Tim bought places next door to each other, so the consumption of our beer has increased significantly). That being said, we whipped up another round of DIPA. We generally use multiple hop varietals when we dry hop. This time around we split the beer up after fermentation into multiple carboys. Each carboy was dry hopped with a single hop variety. Before you go on calling us little girls for only using one type, let the record show that we (over)compensated by using most of our hop reserves for the dry hopping process.

FARMER XON

Being that we are using more hops then Micheal Jordan, why not grow your own right? I mean how hard can it be? Xon planted 4 rhizomes in his backyard, two Cascades and two Mt. Hood’s. We’re not sure how much they will produce this year, if any. If they do produce, you better believe they will go straight from the vine to the beer. Heck, we may even roll the kettle over and clip them straight into the boil.