While getting the rest of some gardening ready this year, my wife noticed that the Mt. Hood hops that failed so miserably last year actually started growing again! They are taking off quite aggressively up the twine this year, so hopefully with a little luck and a lot of water, they will actually give me a few cones. My real goal with them was to have just enough to make a good harvest ale of some kind, so any extra will be considered gravy.

Once I get the yard cleaned up a little better, I will actually put some pictures up.

It has been 13 days since I put the original beer into the fermenter, so it was time to crack it open and get half of it moved over to “secondary.” The beer tastes pretty good, but there was a disturbing amount of funk that came off the top when I opened the pail. The FG seems like it will be around 1.016, but we’ll see what happens with the yeast in the experimental batch.

Basic Brewing Radio and Brew Your Own Magazine are collaborating on a set of brewing experiments to test out some of that “common knowledge” among homebrewers. Dispelling myths is one of the aims of science, but when you dispel brewing myths, you get both knowledge and beer. How could I not participate? Especially when for Experiment 1, my idea for a myth to dispel was chosen. I will not rehash the details as James and Chris have done a nice job of fleshing out the idea already.

I just finished putting my entry into the experiment into the primary fermenter. I have dubbed it “Black’s Breeches,” named for Joseph Black, the Scottish scientist who discovered, among other things, carbon dioxide. It is a Scottish Ale weighing in at 1.060 OG. It is bittered with Fuggles and uses some of Crowjoy’s homegrown hops as aroma hops. The recipe is based mostly on the winner of the 2008 GABF Pro-Am competition.

My hypothesis is that there will be very little if any detectable difference in the two treatments of the beer. If there is a difference, I do not think that there will be one or the other that is better, just a difference. I look forward to drinking the results.

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!