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?
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.
Categories: Brewing, Updates
The sun is starting to come out here in California….finally! This is probably something that should have been done before heading out and brewing in front of a bunch of strangers, but better late then never right? It started with just running cleaner and sanitizer through all the keggles, lines, carboys, and empty kegs. However , it is embarrassing to say our mash/lauter tun has had some nasty burnt crusties on it since we purchased it used last year. A new high pressure hose nozzle and elbow grease got most of that crap off.
For the guys who came out for our event, you all know that we had problems with our PG&E thermostat regulators which control the flame on our hot liquor tank. Dean and Xon tinkered with the internals and were finally able to get the flame from a pretty looking candle to cinching your freakin eyebrows off.
At our brewday, we also discovered an efficiency problem we were having with higher gravity brews missing their mark. When we attempted an imperial porter, we missed our gravity points by more then I care to admit. Will over at Jack’s shared a common problem he had with sparging too quickly killing the efficiency mostly due to the sparge water finding a common path through the grain bed and missing out on all those precious sugars. We slowed everything from the lauter to the sparge way down to a snails pace. We probably doubled the time it takes to lauter/sparge the batch, if not more. In the end, we were hoping for a target gravity of 1.048 and ended up hitting 1.064! Needless to say we’re still dialing in the brewing sculpture to our liking with all of our batches, but it’s nice to see the dial move to a higher efficiency for a change.
On another note, the Double IPA from our SF Beer Week Homebrewing Demonstration was kegged and Dean is getting it carbonated up this week. We tried out two different yeasts with this batch, a California Ale and a California Ale V. The samples of both are leaning towards the California Ale being a crisper beer which allowed the brilliance of the hop profile to come through. But we’ll reserve our judgement until we try them both chilled and carbed up. If you’re interested in trying some, leave us a comment here and we’ll work on arranging getting you over to try some.
Categories: New Toys, Updates
Even though we’re technically not a business entity yet, we still like to act like one. We had some relatives with professional experience tweak the logo a bit and throw it on an epic layout. It’s not an earth shattering design, but we think it rocks. Totally a mullet of a business card….business in front, party in back.
BTW – I only blacked out my phone number so you hooligans don’t drunk dial me…just drunk email me instead.
Categories: Updates
Today is our good friend Xon’s birthday! He’s the shy one you can recognize in all our photos. He typically has his back turned towards the camera, or if we catch his face he edit’s it out.
We spent a great portion of the weekend partying and celebrating the event. It was a nice change from last weekend when just about everything went wrong on our brew day. We didn’t even go check on the porter, felt it was best to let it go another week and try to forget the yeastie explosion next to the carboys. We’ll circle back this weekend and try to salvage the 18 gallons of beer.
Posted on May 24th, 2010 by tsmith
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