Christmas is Over

It was a white Christmas in KC. Lots of family for Christmas. The good news is we had a lot of taste testers on my new brew, the bad news is it was a bit salty tasting due to the tap water. I used half tap water and half filtered water from the fridge. Next time I'm buying water. I compared it to O'Fallon's Blonde Ale because really, Blonde Ale is hard to come by around Christmas time. Well the carbonation rocked. The fermentation was rushed so it was a little too malty. Otherwise the taste is great. As you can see it was quite a bit darker than the O'Fallon. By the way the 5 day IPA from O'Fallon and their Smoke Porter are ones that you should pick up. O'Fallon makes a wheat and cherry-chocolate that I do not promote as much. I found a mix pack at Red-X. I'm not sure what I'm going to brew next, maybe a wheat, maybe an IPA. I've got plenty of the blonde ale left over that I'll be handing out to friends and family. I'm going to pick up a Cornie keg or two to put the next brew on tap here at the home. What should I brew next? IPA or Wheat?

1st Home Brew

So the home brewing equipment sat around for over a year before it was touched. I finally hauled it out of the basement with some motivation from my brother. We started this batch on Dec 3rd with the intentions of rushing the process to get some good ale by Christmas time. I know I know, Blonde Ale for Christmas? Well, it's what I had so drink and be jolly. Maybe you can pour some cinnamon in and call it good. The wort really stunk up the house. As you can tell from the picture we did not have a wort chiller handy, but the brew isn't looking hazy so I think we got it cold quick enough. You might be able to see the nasty hop residue on the brew pot. MMM delicious! It's not as good as the scum at the bottom of the fermentation tub. Now that stuff was nasty. We let it ferment for 2 weeks, just long enough to bubble over 2 minutes. Then we went straight to the bottle so that we could let the priming sugar do its thing before Christmas. We did go ahead and take hydrometer readings along the way but didn't really mess with IBUs and gravity, we looked at the % by vol. It turned out to be exactly 6% abv. I was able to get almost 5 gallons (46 bottles). I'll update the post to let everyone know how bad it's going to taste. Let me know if you want a bottle, I may have some left over.

Single Wide

I was down at Boulevard Brewery yesterday getting Christmas presents (for myself) and found out that they're making wine. So I picked up a bottle of Chardonnay to add to the collection. I saw the Single Wide on tap and unfortunately the tap room was not open for taste testing. I still have yet to make it out to a bar that has it on tap. People have already been complaining about too much hops. That sounds like the perfect beer to me!

I asked one of the workers when it was going to be bottled to see if there were any updates and it's still in March of '09. Of course I am now awaiting the Imperial Stout (2) that will be coming as #7 in the Smokestack Series.

The Collection

As a first post, I decided to show my average sized bottle collection. I started this collection in March of 07. My goal was to build a basement ceiling border and fill it up for aesthetics. I completed the collection in March of 08. Ever since then I've been collecting one-offs to complete the specific brewers collections. I do drink most all of them instead of leaving the beer in them like most collectors. Why waste a beer?

I have a need/have list that eventually will be moving to ratebeer.com. Mostly I'm just trying to complete the collections of Sam Adams, Boulevard and Schlafly.