Brew days are getting a little too hot for my liking. Bruin, my dog and company mascot can’t even hang out with us out in the desert of the parking lot. I may have to adopt the mash-in at 5:30 strategy as much as I dislike any time with 5 in front of it. Moving on…
We made two beers yesterday, a Duseldorf style Alt and a Farmhouse Ale. The Alt I am very interested in serving as a spring-fall seasonal. We’ve made it many times before, in fact it serves as the basis for our session ale, but we abandoned the style as a year-round because it is extremely difficult to get right. Before, I was hoping to do 6 days of primary and ten days of cool lagering at 45 degrees to keep it within an ale timeframe. At that schedule it just wasn’t doing the style justice. So we altered the overall recipe which we still really liked, to be our Rubber Room Session Ale. This time, I will be using a more tradtional Alt schedule of 6 days in primary and 3 weeks at lager temperatures. Let’s see what a difference lagering can make. I expect the bitterness to subdue significantly and the beer to be very clean an crisp.
The other beer we made is a Farmhouse Ale. My LHBS, Fifth Season had some French Saison yeast, so I bought some a few weeks back. I have made a Farmhouse Ale before that was pretty decent, so I stuck to a similar recipe, but as I was investigating the yeast strain on the WYEAST website, I saw that it accentuated herbs and spices. So, I thought to myself a while about what kind of spices would be different, interesting and above all delicious. I settled on ginger and white pepper. These flavors are somewhat present in the yeast already, but this should really accentuate them, and I am planning on adding local honey and ginger to the secondary fermentation that should really dry the beer out and add a little extra spicy-sweet kick to it. I’m really excited about tasting this one. I’m going to be keeping the spice additions close to the vest and see what people are able to notice at our tasting on July 19th at Bottle Revolution, so if you’ve read this, congratulations, you know something everyone else doesn’t.