New Brewing Blog...First Post

Greetings! I started this blog to separate my running exploits from my brewing exploits. The intent is to still post about brewing on my other blog, but to go into more depth regarding brewing on this blog. To start out, I'm reposting my last brewing-related blog:


HOMEBREWING News from the Bad Ben Nanobrewery:
Monday, December 26th at noon, I started working on my latest batch of homebrew. I finally had the time to brew my most recent version of an Imperial Stout. The weather was perfect and the brewing session went well. Alex came over to keep me company for a while. He had brought some munchies, and we commenced having a good bullshit session. I was on a time deadline for brewing this batch, because my wife and I were going over to the next door neighbor's for a friendly game of Uno at 6:00 pm. A 10-gallon all-grain batch usually takes me every bit of 6 hours to complete, especially when there is so much grain involved (for an imperial-style stout). I got finished at 6:03 pm, and just had the brew kettle left to clean. Alex helped me haul the heavy stuff back into the house before he left for home.

I changed the recipe of this stout somewhat from my last posting. I didn't add the cocoa, and I jumped-up some of the other ingredients for an even larger grain bill. I'm also going to split the batch after primary fermentation into two 5-gallon batches (for secondary fermentation). One batch will age in whiskey-soaked French oak, and the other I will leave alone to it's own devices. The final wort starting gravity was at 1.084 (20.23 Plato), which was a little lower than I expected, but I had cut my boil time to only 1 hour, instead of a planned 80 minutes, due to the time constraints.

I also finally transferred my Imperial Rye IPA to it's secondary fermenter. I ended up dry-hopping the batch with 6.5 ounces of leftover Zatek-Bor (Bohemian) hop pellets. Zatek-Bor hops are really hard to find outside of Eastern Europe. It will be interesting to see what kind of aromas and tastes prevail with this fun brewing experiment. (Remember that I used the last of my homegrown hops in the original boil). It is already down to 1.014, so it's almost completely finished with fermentation. It might eek down to a final gravity of 1.012, I figure, for an alcohol percentage of 9.3 percent (by volume)!

Happy Trails and Cheers!
Bad Ben