Bitter Pils To Swallow

Homegrown Mt. Hood hops.

It's Pilsner time. In fact, it might be late for Pilsner time. But I made one anyway, because my wife likes 'em, and because I don't know how else to get rid of all these Mt. Hood hops I grew last year. A friend of mine had asked me if I'd ever tried Firestone Walker's Hoppy Pils. I hadn't, but it sounded like fun. I threw together a recipe assuming about 4.5% alpha acids on my homegrown hops. If the beer winds up too bitter, well, I warned you, right? It's in the name. This is a Bitter Pils To Swallow.

Tilapia: A West Coast IPA

The time has come again to brew! I went so many weekends thinking, "I should brew this weekend" only to have it come to naught. Not last weekend! I had the ingredients and I was ready to go this morning. This was a really long brew day with a few interesting twists. So I wound up brewing a slightly different beer from what I had expected to make, I ran into a couple of process issues, and I finished it off by doing a fairly deep clean in my brewery.

Cherry Stout Racking

Today marked 8 weeks of the cherry stout ("Cherry Mama") sitting on the cherries. I figured it might be time to rack it off. I'd opened the fermenter a couple of times to see what was going on and to make sure there wasn't a pellicle or something funky developing on the top, and there was definitely a strong aroma of cherry. I've never left fruit in for that long, but everything looked fine when I opened it up, although there were still bubbles coming from the cherries. I'm not sure what that means, I guess I didn't puree or smash up the cherries, so it is possible that the yeast were still getting to some of the sugars inside. The cherries were frozen, though, which should rupture the cell walls and help with flavor and color extraction.

Tea Beer Phase 4: Tasting

The time has come. It's been a couple of weeks in the bottle, and it's time to taste the tea beers!