Beach Brew

I bottled this yesterday morning. It got a bit stirred up when I moved the fermenter for racking to the bottling bucket so was a bit murky when bottled. Hopefully it will clear up over it’s conditioning time.

Was tasting really goo but maybe a little over attenuated. It was also a little grassy but that is to be expected when i is fresh from 14 days worth of dry hopping and I’m sure that will subside over the next couple of weeks.

I took really poor notes when making this beer. I have found I have been getting pretty slack on that front. I think I am getting too familiar and comfortable in my brewing. I think eventually my brewing will suffer for that. So from next brew onwards I am going to get back to taking good comprehensive notes. You can’t improve your beer if you don’t know what you have done.

Have done a couple of brews since the last update. The first was an American pale and and the second an American brown ale. The second beer is heading for the local Christmas case.

The Christmas case is a thing we do between local brewers at the end of each year. We all brew a beer and do a big swap. After the swap everyone ends up with one of everyone else’s beer. It’s a great idea and you normally get some really good beers in there.

The American Pale brew day was a bit of a disaster all round. I have been playing with my mill settings lately and I really opened it up for this brew. Unfortunately my efficiency dropped a lot more than expected. I thought I would hit abut 1.048 but I actually hit about 1.042. So it is significantly lower gravity than what I normally make this beer. On top of this I got called into work on the brew day, which was a public holiday, as someone else was sick. The wort ended up sitting in the kettle for eight hours while I was at work. It was tasting nice at bottling though so hopefully all is not lost.

The American brown brew day was a pretty standard affair. Though I has a couple of other brewers drop by and a few ales were had so my notes were not up to their normal standard. I’m bottling it this weekend. Hopefully it is up to scratch for the case.

The bock hasn’t turned out quite how I had hoped. It’s nice clean decent lager but just doesn’t have the rich malt character that you would expect from a bock. There is some malt there but just not what you would expect when using all Weyermann Munich 1 and 2 malt. I even did a decoction mash on this.

Tasted it with a couple of other guys today and they agreed. I guess it has come out closest to an Okto. I can only think it is something to do with the yeast except that I used the White Labs German Bock yeast. Though reading their descriptions I think their 820 would have been a better choice.

The American Pale got racked into secondary and on to some dry hops today. It has finished fermenting and is smelling and tasting good. I also brewed an American Brown today. A pretty straight forward beer that that is mostly ale malt with a little choc and crystal malt. Hops is almost all Simcoe. It does have a little Amarillo to in one of the late additions. After 7 days in primary I will rack it into another fermenter and onto some hops.