Cobwebs

are gone! Just finished a long day in the home brewery. Spent an hour and a half cleaning, organizing, and battling cobwebs before I cracked the kettles. Two of my favorite people in the world are getting married next year and Homebrew Club has decided to hijack the beverage concession for all the festivities. I'm going to contribute a batch of Bride's Ale (among other things) and wanted to get a test batch going to tweak a previously brewed recipe. The first Bride's Ale was a pretty straightforward Belgian-style Wit flavored with coriander in the mash & kettle, dried lemon & orange peel, and chamomile. This batch starts with that recipe, adds just a bit more grain, some honey in the kettle, and a more ambitious approach to spicing with coriander in the mash & kettle, fresh lemon & grapefruit rind, sliced fresh ginger, cloves and twice the chamomile as last time. In tasting the gravity sample, everything is way overdone. Not fatal, but just too much. Mostly what I expected though, this batch will give me an excellent starting point for the next one. The first batch was fermented with the Wyeast Wit strain. For this batch I got curious about mixing two strains, the Wyeast Wit strain and the Wyeast Trappist High Gravity (Westmalle) strain. I'd initially thought that I would mix them both into one fermenter and roll with that. But in a slight "Aha!" moment I decided to split the wort, pitch for primary seperately (both splits will get mixed together later), and then keep each type of yeast on hand for repitching later.

Second batch that got put up was 5gal of roughly Czech-style wort that'll ferment with the Wyeast Czech Pils strain for repitching into a few more carefully considered batches of Czech-style beer. Bohemian Pils, nice soft Dunkle, and some pale Bock for Christmas time.

Oh and just a bit of that Czech-style wort was kept aside for a starter of the Wyeast California Lager strain. That will go into a batch of my Robust Porter and repitch from there into some Baltic Porter. Yum. Mee.