double brew day

The best thing about brew days is that you literally get to spend them sitting outside sampling brews, smelling delicious malt, and eating tasty appetizery food all day while your wort boils away - and then when the hard work is over, there's always an epic dinner (and, if you're me, a cheesecake!) to be enjoyed.

Memorial Day weekend because of the long weekend holiday we decided to go extra ham in the brewing process and make two batches in one day! That meant (after a nice early morning 3 mile walk to counter the effects of all that beer), setting up and starting the burner up around 11 am so we could literally brew alllllll day.

We started off with a simpler extract brew, but a recipe I created from scratch, for an oatmeal stout (I went really light on the oats, though) brewed with some farm-fresh buckwheat honey that a coworker provided me with. This was kind of my "scraps" beer, since I had some leftover LME & hops from precious brews that I wanted to use up - but it will also be the first brew I try priming with honey instead of corn sugar. It smelled sooooooo good!!

The new set up - check out that fancy ass Dark Star burner hanging on the wall above my healthy collection of sample brews ;)

Our brew mates started to arrive around the time this batch was finishing, so after a healthy dose of snacks (yucca chips with guacamole & a metric ton of shelled peanuts for this girl), we got everything not the carboy & set up for the main even: an all-grain Pliny the Elder double IPA clone. 

Let me tell you how fun it was to lift up those 14 lbs of
soggy 2-row malt + 1,000,000,000 lbs of water.

Almost immediately we realized we had a problem - we just splurged on a shiny new Dark Star burner and a gigantic 18" brew kettle, but we haven't build our sparge system yet so were still doing BIAB - and no paint strainer bag is big enough to fit around the lip of an 18" pot!! We ended up having to construct a metal "table" for the bag to sit on at the bottom of the pan so it the grain wouldn't burn. Not the most technical approach, but it got the job done!

Not gonna lie...this one smelled sooooooo good and fresh and hoppy. There are so many hop additions that the wort actually looked green at some points!!!

While it was boiling away, we dug up the last bottle of an old brew a friend of ours made nearly 4 years ago - it was a phenomenal double IPA at the time, but woooooow was it ever strong now. There's a reason those aren't meant to be aged (or, as it's brewer says, hoarded)!! We also sampled Atwater's Maibock, Blue Moon's Pine in the Neck, Lagunitas Undercover IPA, Rogue Ales Yellow Snow, and our very own PCP - a chocolate porter with cocoa nibs that was my very first all from scratch recipe (and it came out better than I expected!)

Post-brew dinner was a BBQ rib feast with corn, potato salad, fruit salad and most importantly PRETZEL JELLO(!!!!!) - but we were so hungry I never bothered to snap a picture.

Both beers started fermenting super fast (probably due to the honey in the stout and the high alcohol content in the Pliny clone) - by the next morning the stout's airlock was already clicking away so loudly I could hear it from across my living room...

My new babes, settling into their temporary home.

The Pliny is just days away from being transferred to secondary and its first schedule dry hop now - can't wait to see the gravity on this baby ;)