I am way behind on my goings on with this hobby, but here goes the lightning headline round. The previous post was about making a wheat beer from a commercial growler. The brew day went well other than getting some whole leaf hops stuck in my siphon. I realized only after I took the original gravity reading that I had forgotten my pound of barley DME. This left a fairly weak beer, but I thought, “hey that’s OK, I need more session beers anyhow.” This combined with busily catching up at work before going on vacation led to the beer sitting in primary, a plastic bucket, for almost a month. The results? I accidentally made a Berliner Weiss! It has a clean lactic sour flavor along with the regular flavor of a wheat beer. I was quite pleased.

Also.. the vacation I mentioned was to Bulgaria, where I was able to sample many of the local beers. Unfortunately, many of them are plain old lagers, but they were decent. My wife and I toured one of the only local breweries in the country, named Болярка (Boliarka). I will have some pictures from that tour up in a future post.

I also recently transferred a Holiday Ale I made into secondary, which is tasting a bit like spicy Christmas cookies and Grandpa’s flask. Once it mellows a bit, I think it would be worth entering into a contest. We’ll see!