The Beginning

I have decided to try and catalog my brewing adventures here. I try to keep notes personally but I want a more robust chronological document what I am doing. Here is a stock of my current and upcoming projects.

Currently I have one of my most complex and challenging projects under way:

Russian River's Consecration








This is currently souring with Brettanomyces Lambicus since November 11th and will continue until December 26th (about 4 weeks) with two pounds of dried currants. This had short primary fermentation of 3 days with Abbey Ale yeast as well. Next up is a Roeselare blend which contains Lactobacillus and Pediococcus and will sit for about 4 months. Then it gets the oak chunks from Russian Rivers own barrels. The brew day on this was relatively simple, it was my first extract brew in quite a while, but I had no real challenges getting it done. So far I have hit almost every number recommended by the recipe spot on. I have really high hopes for this as it has been a fairly costly and time consuming venture. I will put up a whole post detailing this soon.

I currently have this in bottles:

Lakefront Brewery IBA Pro Series All Grain Kit







It is pretty delicious. I haven't been able to find a commercially available black IPA that I actually like. Some have come close but I always find mine better (sorry). I'm not sure if its because the fresher beer allows the hops to shine through more or if I just manage to get a better balance of hop and dark malt than on the commercial scale. I'm not able to get Lakefront beers in my area but if they're product tastes close to what I made they have found themselves a fan. I made this one in the past and thought it was great and will probably make it in the near future.

I have two beers coming up soon that I hope to have fermenting before the new year:

White House Honey Porter (All grain)

Chocolate Covered BEAVR Nutz ALL-GRAIN Kit







The porter I got because I was looking for a porter recipe so why not the presidents? Its fairly straight-forward with the only oddity being the honey, which I really hope comes through. I also coincidentally got it on election day so that bodes well for this beer.

The second is a Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout which is just a mind blowing in concept. It requires powdered peanut butter which had to be purchased separately but Amazon sure enough came through. I really can't wait for this. I've had success with chocolate stouts before but this sounds too good to pass up.

So as I move forward with these projects I will try and document them here along with my experiments with new equipment and techniques. Cheers!