Second Floor Brewing

Regarding our currently fermenting beer, also known as A-OK Super #1 Pale Ale, I dry hopped it with an ounce of Cascade.  I think the dry hopping worked pretty well with the Pumpkin ale.  For that beer I only used a half ounce of hop pellets.  I am hoping for a more pronounced floral scent.  If one ounce proves ineffective, I will bump the next beer we dry hop up to two ounces.

Elsewhere, I’ve been trying quite a few “Christmas Ales” or “Winter Ales.”  How do you classify them?  Some are dark but most are a rich golden color.  The more I drink the golden Christmas Ales, the more I desire to make a beer that sparkles golden.  I think that once we switch to the dried malt extract or to all-grain brewing, we will be able to achieve that type of color.  Until that day, we are stuck to russet at best.

At the SFB sponsored, 3rd Annual Christmas Sweater Bonanza this past weekend, we spread what was left of the pumpkin around pretty heavily.  All-in-all people liked it which is always exciting.  One party pooper claimed it was bland.  I shook my head in incredulation (assuming that is a word).  Someone must have slipped him a Yuengling (not necessarily because it is bland but because we had some of that beer flowing around as well) and told him it was a pumpkin.

Also at the Christmas Party, I met a man who went to Oregon State which apparently has a Fermentation Sciences major.  It checks out.  I think it sounds pretty interesting.  He liked the pumpkin too.  I was excited about that. 

Impending: New recipe!  I have nothing.  I keep forgetting my flipping paperwork at Ryan’s so I haven’t been able to make a recipe for our next beer.  It is coming up on the end of December, perhaps a winter beer is on order.  There are some within SFB that would like to see a lager come out of the carboy.

Is there anything that, you, the reader(s), want to drink?

This post is all about firsts and lasts, beginnings and ends, alphas and omegas, Phantom Menaces and Return of the Jedis, etc…  There is beauty in the symmetry of life.  Wait, don’t stop reading… I’ll get to the beer.  The feelings of excitement in discovering something new and wanting to do it again, knowing that this will be something you will enjoy into the foreseeable future can be so perfectly eclipsed by the discovery of a new or the remembrance of a past hatred that the experience, in retrospect (of course), always leaves me awed.  This came to mind because of beer but I can see parallels throughout the rest of non-beery life.

I did a few (beer related) things for the first time this past Saturday that I’d like to tell you about.

1: I assisted the SFB partners with brewing up a batch of beer that I created the recipe for.  Right now I’m calling it Old #1 Pale Ale.  That’s good for now but has plenty of room for improvement.  The beer itself came in a little bit higher than my intended OG but that’s ok with me.

2: I used a yeast starter for the above mentioned brew.  Since I prematurely slapped the pack almost a week before we brewed I decided that they needed a pick-yeast-up before pitching.  So far the results look promising.  I wonder how much activity we would have seen if the yeast was fresh and added to a starter.  We will try that for the next one.

3.  I purchased and drank Southern Tier’s Old Man Winter Ale.  This is also the first time I had a bad Southern Tier beer.  Well. its not so much that it was “bad” as I felt like they put in a bag or two too many hop pellets.  I use hop pellets and while I don’t mind if commercial brewers use them too, I do mind it when their beer tastes like the use them and my beer doesn’t.  Just saying, ST.  I had such high hopes after trying your Pumpking which was everything I wished our Pumpkin beer could have been and everything our pumpkin beer will be next year.

4. I drank two new Dogfish Head beers: Pangaea and Midas’ Touch.  Both were excellent(!) as usual.

As well, I did a few (beer related) things for the last time this past Saturday.

1: Drank Keystone Light.  Sigh.  I don’t want to talk about it.

2: Purchased Southern Tier’s Old Man Winter Ale.  See #3 above.

Potpourri:
A few places online have been hating on using liquid malt extract.  While we have had mostly good results using liquid extract (see: Damn You To Hell!! Red) I like the idea of using only dried extract in the future.  We can save it and its possible we won’t have to travel to Tom’s as often.  I want to ultimately move to a all-grain brew, in the short term I think we will be moving to dried malt extract for all future recipes.

Still on that all-grain kick, we are going to construct some sort of lauter tun soon.  Updates will ensue.  I cannot say what form it will take but the sooner the better and, as always, the cheaper the better.