Tonight I brewed Bill Pierce's St. Chuck's Porter, an excellent robust porter that I've brewed once before. This was my first time batch sparging. The brew session went well -- I came within two points of hitting my target gravity and batch sparging knocked about an hour off of the time it takes me to brew. This should be a good beer and I'm definitely a batch sparging convert. Batch sparging required a lot less "babysitting" than fly sparging and gave me the same efficiency I had been getting with fly sparging (~75%). I'm stoked. And I must confess, I have an ulterior motive for brewing this beer: I'm using it to build a big ol' yeast cake for my next beer, a Wee Heavy!
I met up with the Bay Area Brew Crew, a local homebrew club, at the Toronado this evening. I met them through Alan Chambless, a brewer that I met on the HBD Forums. We had a good time and sampled quite a few good beers including A. le Coq Imperial Stout, Westvleteren 12, Victory Golden Monkey, t IJ Columbus, Karthuizer Ipso Facto, and draft Chimay White. Tonya, Jeremy, Lan, and Diana also hung out. Jeremy had a few too many Chimay's and ended up hurling, although fortunately not in the bar. After we left, Tonya and I walked over to the Pilsener Inn looking for our friend John but he wasn't working. We hit Safeway for some snacks and then walked home.
Today, I bottled a barley wine that I brewed last January that has been sitting in secondary for the last six months. The barley wine, an Anchor Old Foghorn clone that I put together, tasted good and will likely be excellent after it's bottle conditioned for a couple months. My recipe calls for 90% pale malt and 10% 55L crystal malt to 1.100 and bittering to 60 IBU using all cascade hops. I was a little apprehensive about using cascade hops, as Old Foghorn doesn't have a strong citrusy hop character, but after six months in secondary, the hops don't really stand out that much. I used White Labs Burton Ale (WLP023) yeast, not my first choice but I happened to have a big yeast cake of it available. When I transferred from primary to secondary, the beer was very estery and tasted slightly of green apples. When bottling, the beer was still slightly fruity but the Burton yeast qualities had significantly diminshed. There are definitely a few things going on in this beer, although the flavors aren't as blended as I would like; aging should remedy that.
Tonya, Jeremy, and I took BART over to Oakland this afternoon to visit the Pacific Coast Brewing Company. The weather was gorgeous and we spent the afternoon out back in the beer garden. This was the first time that I had been to Pacific Coast and I was quite impressed. A few of their beers are excellent. I ordered the sampler and tasted their Blue Whale Ale, Cask-Conditioned Blue Whale Ale, Killer Whale Stout, Gray Whale Ale, Imperial Stout, Deviator Doppelbock, and a couple others that I don't remember. I also tasted Moonlight's Bombay By Boat IPA. It's amazing that Pacific Coast's beers are brewed with malt extract. A few of these beers are proof that it's possible to brew excellent beers using an extract base. I was also shocked at the tiny size of the brewery. It consists of a couple (4 bbl?) kettles and four fermenting tanks. The entire operation could fit in my living room, and my living room isn't very big!
I brewed a Belgian Tripel with my friend Holly tonight. She's intrigued by brewing and is considering starting to brew herself. It's nice to be able to pass on the knowledge and fun to have company while brewing.
I'm not sure how the Tripel is going to turn out. I added a corriander to the recipe for a little subtlety in the background and I think I added a little too much. It tasted a little strong going into the fermenter. Here's the recipe:
Matt's Tripel
OG: 1.066
IBU: 28.5
SRM: 4.5
8.50 lbs Belgian Pilsener Malt
0.25 lbs Belgian Aromatic Malt
1.00 lbs Caramel Pils Malt
1.00 lbs Flaked Soft White Wheat
1.00 lbs Belgian Candi Sugar
0.50 lbs Honey
1.25 oz Hallertauer Pellets (4.0%AA) (60 min)
0.50 oz Hallertauer Pellets (30 min)
1.00 oz Czech Saaz Pellets (15 min)
0.50 oz Bitter Orange Peel (30 min)
0.25 oz Corriander Seed (15 min)
1.00 tsp Irish Moss (15 min)
0.50 oz Corriander Seed (5 min)
White Labs WLP500 Trappist Ale Yeast
Single infusion mash at 155°F.
