Dry January was a long year for me. BUT, it is now wet February and #beersaturday week 395 is perfect to catch up with the other beer enthusiasts on Hive!
How does a #beerologist celebrate completing a long month of beer abstinence? Homebrewing, brewery touring and a LANparty with 12 other beer hounds.
Right out of the gate, our head brewer who also endured Dry January, suggested we visit a local brewery after helping a friend move a big heavy shelf. I shared a couple snaps form that last 'Hops post but this one was for the road. Sleigh My Name Sleigh My Name Pale Ale is a realy interesting Pale Ale with Orange and chocolate hints, as well as a naughty little Santa fetish they seem to avoid even acknowledging in any product description. Very enjoyable.
Funny enough, another local brewery was calling my name. Jobsite Brewery has a monthly trivia night with the proceeds going toward local charities. I like to go every month and the January version was celebrated with a non-alcoholic IPA from Collective Arts Brewery. I enjoyed the February version where I was back into their Impact New England IPA.
The last frothy draft pint I will showcase is our very own Jungle Rules IPA which taunted me from my new keg fridge all January. It chilled and settled at 6.8% for a nice hazy, tropical and lightly malty awesome pint if I do say so myself.
Speaking of the beer that we brew for ourselves, we had 8 different beers on tap for a 13-person, all you can drink, LANparty just like we were college kids still. Hopefully through my Hive procrastination, I will tell the LANfest tale this week. The aftermath of the 8 different kegs was 4 kegs getting completely emptied and the rest reasonably drained. Speaking of brewing our own beer....
Time to Brew!
These 7 taps are actually located in the garage that the brewing magic happens. Boiling mash throws fog into the air but I was appreciating seeing the bags of grain, barrel of other malts, heat exchanger, brewer and fermenter all hanging out together while we started to brew.
These Grainfather brewers are so great. The recipes are programmed into the computer that runs the temperature and timing of the different stages, alerting our smartphones through an app.
It seems right to grind our own grains and I just love seeing the casings and sugar rise to the top while the mash is brewing. Imagine that beer is just crushed up grains with the sugar boiled out of them, fermented with yeast and spiced up by hops.
Besides the big grain bill, IPA is mostly defined by a ridiculous amount of hops. In the background, we have a pint glass half full of our boil/flavour hop Amarillo. These infuse the beer with a citrussy, tropical fruit body. In the foreground is a mason jar of Citra/Galaxy/Mosaic hops which are my preferred perfect hop combination for hopstand/bittering hops. That is a ridiculous amount of hops.
Once all 50 litres of beer are transferred to the fermenter, this is what is left in the brewer. You can see the hops that bubbled on top of the boil and the swamp of hops in the bottom.
This is an IPA brewing spectacle and I bet I am not the only brewer who has to stop and snap a picture of the ridiculous hop cake that has nowhere to go but the green bin. I do more brewing than buying but I think this is over $100 CDN of used hops.
After a few hours and a couple beers, we have maybe 50 litres of New England IPA in the fermenter at 1.060 initial gravity which should mean for a 6.5% ABV bold and beautiful hazy tropical IPA. We will have to wait 3 weeks of fermenting to find out.
#BEERSaturday!
There's a few reasons I should not have done Dry January.
Join me, 
I am almost 2/3 through Dry January and plan a big return in Feb so thanks for keeping me beer up through your #beersatturday exploits.
