Milk Stout

This past Sunday I decided to finish off the 3rd of three kits I bought from Northern Brewer back at the end of Spring. The last kit was for the APA and the extract was a bit old which I believe led to some off flavors and the beer coming out too dark. A good stout isn't as likely to be impacted by either of these problems as much so I still had some high hopes for this beer. The biggest problem I had was old yeast. This was the first smack pack I had that didn't blow up like a balloon. I decided to pitch some of my Muton's dry ale yeast, and opened up the smack pack to check the quality of the liquid yeas. It smelled fine if a little boozy, which leads me to believe it smacked a while back and created a small beer in the pack. I pitched that yeast anyway, because it didn't smell or look bad. I tried the overnight specialty grain mash and it looked, smelled and tasted great come morning. I choose to do something less than a full boil, holding back maybe a gallon and a half of the water to allow me to dump in some ice cold water to help in the cooling. At this time of year the immersion chiller with Valley tap water just can't get the temp down enough. This appeared to work fine. This may be one of the last extract brews I do for a while, as I am planning to move towards all-grain. I did get some really great sounding extract with partial mash recipes in the latest BYO magazine, that are made to be low hop requirements. They had a Rye recipe that I am thinking I need to try sometime soon.

Dead Soldiers

So this weekend I decided to do a little cleaning. I actually only emptied one of these this weekend. Last weekend friends cleaned out 2 of these that I had transferred a 1/4 barrel of Coors Light into and I had emptied out my original keg of cider about 2 months ago. The keg I did kill was the EPA that I had brewed this summer. It wasn't my best effort, so I wanted to plow through this beer and get on to better things. Next up is a milk stout next weekend. Not a standard summer fare, but one I have been looking forward to nonetheless.

SanTan Brewery

I finally visited SanTan this past Sunday. I had tried some of their beer back at the Strong Beer Fest in February and wasn't super impressed, but it is hard to turn down the fact that this is the closest microbrewery to my house. I don't count the Gordon Biersch that is much closer as it is a macro microbrewery with a chain of restaurants and cost to cost distribution. I wasn't in an IPA mood, so I started with their Big Red. It was a nice American red with a clean hoppy finish. I can't say that American reds are my favorite style, but it was good representative of the style. I followed this up with their Gordo Stout to have with my meal, pork adovada. They were out of rice so they doubled up on the beans, but that was fine. The stout was on nitro, but it could afford to be bigger if they are going to go with that serving style as the nitro held back the flavor too much for my taste. I would go with more roasted malt profile. I finished the night with their Oscuro. Despite the name this is an amber more than a brown and not that dark. This also came on nitro and I don't think this helps. The flavor was very reserved. I think that on CO2 this could be a really good beer, but I also have a feeling that they have altered the recipe a bit with the hop shortage. One of the brewers was there and he mentioned that they are having a real problem securing aroma hops, not that this is news to a homebrewer. I want to go back and try the Sunspot Gold which they are calling a blonde ale and give their "sesonal" IPA a shot. I think that my wife will really like the place and she is likely to enjoy several of the beers.

Made in the Very Wet Shade

So last Saturday I went tot he 2008 Made in the Shade beer fest. After last year being quite warm we were looking forward to the forecasted highs in the 70's, but didn't realize it would come with a cost, lots and lost of rain. We arrived at a little before 2 for the 2:30 VIP start and it looked like rain. By 2:00 it was raining and by 2:20 when they moved us out from under an awning and into a staging area for ticket checks it was coming down in buckets and hailing. Once my tickets were checked, my wife ran to the barn for tastings and I went out to enjoy a very wet fest all by my self. Stopped by the Sierra Nevada tent and grabbed a Bigfoot to help start the day out with the big stuff. Moved on to the Sonoran Inebriator and then went to see what folks had and find something new. I stopped by Stone to check for their 12th Anniversary, but they told me they couldn't score a keg. I settled for an Oaked Arrogant Bastard and kept looking for new things. I found a new old thing that floored me, Prescott Brewing's amber in a can. They were actually debuting it at the fest and we should see it in stores by the end of summer. Other highlights included my first taste of Dogfish Head's Midas Touch. Nice change from the standard offerings most breweries had. The other highlight came from the longest line we waited in of the day, Lost Abby. Serving from their signature champagne bottles, I had 2 tasters of Devotion Ale which was great and reaffirmed my love of a good Belgian.

Bandersnatch in the Shade

I am trying not to get my hopes up too much, but I checked the list of breweries one last time before the fest this Saturday (particularly as I will be heading North on Thursday and have no internet access) and found that a few new breweries had been added including Bandersnatch!!!!

The aren't officially open yet, but they have announced a new location out in Buckeye so I won't be making many trips out to the new pub, but if they bring their milk stout to the festival then I just might set up camp in front of their booth for the afternoon.

Extra Pale Ale Tasting

On Saturday I racked my Extra Pale Ale into a keg and took my first shot at force carbing a keg. I hooked it up to my 40 PSI Root Beer gas line and shook the keg every few minutes for about 20 minutes. I then left it hooked up for another 30 minutes while I took a shower. Flash forward to last night and I decided that I would give the beer a try. I hooked it up to gas and a picnic tap and drew a pint. The appearance was good. Not as pale as I was hoping for but pretty much dead on to Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. There is a bit of a haze to the beer, and this would be proper for the style. It has a nice hop aroma and a great hop flavor. I can also taste a bit of the Pilsner malts that I mini mashed for the recipe. It gives it a nice bit of a malt taste to go along with the hop flavor. I am quite pleased with this beer and I can't wait to share it.

Extra Pale Ale Brew Day

I purchased a couple of kits from Northern Brewer about a month and a half ago and still hadn't gotten around to brewing them, so I remedied that this Sunday. I had a Milk Stout kit and an Extra Pale Ale kit and decided to go with the much more summery EPA. I have fond memories of the Summit EPA from my trips to Minneapolis and I had heard that this is a pretty close clone. I smacked my yeast on Saturday night and did a mini mash with the steeping grains. The mini mash was unnecessary, but I am practicing for mashing more of my own grains to cut down costs. I was also able to leave the mash on the burner over night and add this extra wort to my boil as evaporation occurred. This was a simple recipe with 2 hop additions and a carton of LME, and with some great preparation the night before I was able to wrap up with everything including clean up by just before 10 am. I altered the recipe a bit by cutting back on the bittering hop charge from 2 oz to 1.25 oz and used .75oz as a flavoring hops rather than 1 oz. This leaves me an extra 1 oz of hops that I can use to brew something else or that I can use to dry hop once I have tasted the beer. I am trying to mellow out my beers a bit and make them more approachable so that a wider group of people will drink them. Not that I mind having to drink 5 gallons of my beer all by myself, but I really enjoy sharing my beer as well. I ether need to alter what I brew or get different friends.

2008 Made in the Shade Beer Fest

I mentioned, but didn't directly post my experiences from the Great Arizona Beer Fest this year I alluded to the fact that I had some issues with it. Through my post on BeerAdvocate's website in a threat about the fest, I met Sam Wymer. He mentioned that he was the coordinator for the Tucson version of this fest, and was aware of improvements they were making to ensure a good fest in Flag. You can read about some of these improvements here on his blog. I talked it over with the wife, and we are going to give the Flag fest another try and go VIP. I found the VIP experience up there to be quite pleasant and it does address some of the issues I had in Tempe, but I do believe that VIP and GA limits (or lower limits) need to be put in place to improve the overall experience. Check back in a month for my review and some pictures.