Batch #2

So many different beers to make... what to make for batch#2?  I'm just getting back into brewing, so why the hell not go big?  How about a Pliny clone?  Yea, let's do that.

Brewing

Brewed this one on 2014-06-25.

Gandhi-Bot yeast starter

The previous night I made up a starter with 1/2cup of light DME, 3.5cups of water and some of the yeast I got from New England Brewing right off of the Gandhi-Bot tanks.  It took off nicely.

I used 4.2lbs of Pils DME and 3.3lbs of Pils LME(that's what the homebrew store had), & 12oz of dextrose.  For steeping grains I used 8oz of Crystal 45 & 8oz of Carapils, and steeped them for 45min.

Look at that vigorous boil!

This was a 90 min boil with 3.5oz of Columbus in for the full 90, .75oz of Columbus at 45, and 1oz of Simcoe at the 30 min mark.  Looking back on this, no wonder it turned out so bitter!

At flameout, I steeped with 1oz of Centennial and 2.5oz of Simcoe for 30 min.

I used an airstone with an aquarium pump attached to oxygenate it before pitching the yeast starter.

The OG of this came out to around 1.060.

About 1.060

After it was done fermenting, I harvested off 4 jars of yeast trub, cold-crashed them, decanted off the beer and then combined to 2 jars for reuse later.

I dry-hopped this with 1oz of Simcoe, 1oz of Columbus and 1oz of Centennial for 5 days in a purged corny keg.  Leaving this dry hop back in, I added another dry hop round for .5oz of each again and let that site for 6 days.  After the dry hop, I pulled all the hops, purged the corny keg with CO2 and cold crashed it for 2 days before transferring to the serving keg.

The Verdict

This beer was wicked bitter at first, especially when tasting the hydrometer samples before it was carbonated.  So much so that my wife thought it was ruined. Once it carbed up, it got much better, but still very bitter. Color-wise, this looks pretty spot on with what I remember of Pliny. Ultimately I was loving it by the last 2 glasses from the keg.  So the lesson learned from this one is that you really do need to let them age a bit.  I think if I let this age for 3-4 weeks, it would have been perfect, but I was impatient and didn't have a stockpile of homebrew ready yet.  Now I know.

First post and printf("Hello World")

So we(my wife & I) have put this "brewery" together more as a joke.  We ARE NOT by any means professional brewers and this is not a commercial brewery.  But it seemed like we needed to have a name.  The name itself comes from our 3 cats.

I started brewing back in 1992 or 93, I don't remember exactly.  I went to college at UConn and I had access to the dorm kitchen through my job at the time.  So I brewed beer in the kitchen and I fermented it in my closet.  I think I only did that once.  The rest of my brewing was done at my parents house and stored in the basement.  I got tired of the bottling process and moved onto other hobbies, like computer stuff.  Luckily the computer hobby paid off for me as it got me one good job after another.  As time went on, my attitude towards home brewing was that I felt that it cost too much in terms of time and effort when there was so much good beer I could buy.  But like so many others, after having some great homebrews last year(thanks, Ed from @LastingBrass) and coupled with the fact that some beers are very difficult to get yet you can brew a reasonable clone(Gandhi-Bot, Heady Topper, Pliny The Elder) I decided to try it again.  The big difference this time as opposed my brewing stint in the 90s is that I have a kegerator and can keg my beer instead of bottling it.

I loosely planned for 6mo to make sure I had the right equipment and everything.  And then I took the plunge and brewed a Gandhi-Bot clone, calling it printf("Hello World").  The name was a node to my coding and computer background and also what is typically a computer programmers first application.  It came out very nice and I was very happy with it.

And so begins the brewing journey.

My intention with this blog is to document each of the brews, put up the recipes and just throw out my general thoughts.