Second Floor Brewing

Well lets call it a week of anticipation: waiting to see if Devil’s Pale Ale is the winner of the Pratt Street Ale House homebrew competition and waiting to hear back from Mr Marlon, requester of our first “pro” brewing gig, to see if he still wants the Old #1 we brewed for him.

Beer Notes: The only thing wrong with the aforementioned Evil Ale is a bit of over-carbonation.  We will try to cut back on the bubbly next time we bottle.  Maybe 3/4 of a bag of priming sugar would be enough, maybe just 1/2.  On the positive side, everyone seems to like the beer.  Everyone except one PSAH brewmaster so it seems.  As for the Old #1, the brew started out at a low OG so I threw in some extra DME we had from our last extract brew.  That raised the OG to just under what I expected.  There was a large amount of fermentation activity.  The beer seems to be coming along nicely.

Full On Double Racking: This weekend we transferred both the Old #1 Pale Ale and our beleaguered Munich Helles to clean carboys for dry hopping and lagering respectively.  The pale ale looked, smelled, and tasted amazing.  The pale lager, on the other hand, looked, smelled, and tasted like it needs some serious help.  We’ll see what a month in fridge does for it.

Adios: I’m leaving for the west coast for a dozen plus days.  I hope to have some sweet beer shots for you when I return and maybe a few posts from the road.

I hate it when I have two TMQ’s in a row.  Sometimes you have stuff to say.  Sometimes you have to aggregate.  Other times you have to write longer than necessary intros.

DTA is bottled but the concept is dead.  I even went to far as to call it out “Jaggery British IPA” on twitter.  It fits the style guidelines for an IPA but I don’t really think it should be called one.  That’ll do until I think up a better name.  If we win the PSAH contest, I hope that they can do the recipe justice, make it a true Evil Ale.

I’ve been wanting to do a sour beer for a few weeks now and while I may still do a Berliner Weisse, I think our next beer may end up being our anniversary beer.  I’ve known that is going to be our first lambic attempt for a while now or as I like to call it: a wonderful way to take one of our carboys out of commission for a year.

Either way SFB’s first anniversary is September 29.  Mark your calendars.  On that day we will break into the SFB beer cellar for the first time and try a few of our earlier beers (aged one year).  Honestly, the first few beers in the cellar are corked in old wine bottles and are growing mold so we wont drink those.  And a few bottles have exploded so we wont drink those either.