Collaboration Day

Brewing beer is fun.  Brewing beer with friends is more fun.  Collaborating to brew a lot of beer with friends is even more fun!  That’s what I learned this weekend.  As you know if you read the last entry, David and Amanda from New Main Brewing came over on Saturday to brew up a double batch of a Dark Mild recipe David and I collaborated on to come up with via email a few weeks ago.  The idea got its genesis when we shared a tent at Operation Bravo back in November.  We wanted to do something we could enter into the Bluebonnet Brew Off, and since the deadline to have entries submitted is Jan 28th, we needed something that would be ready quickly.  A British Dark Mild fits that bill nicely, as it’s pretty routine to go grain to glass in just over a week.

It was a little chilly on Saturday afternoon, but that didn’t stop us, or stop a couple of neighbors who showed up sporting nearly-matching Pittsburgh Steelers jackets from the 90s, I think.  My next-door neighbor, David, even had one of those old beanies from the 70s with the pom-pom ball on the top!  But I digress…With 15 pounds of grain and 14+ gallons of water, it’s a good thing I have the new 20 gallon kettle.  The total mash volume was just over 16 gallons, so with my old one, or with David’s keggle, we would have needed to add a sparge step to make the mash fit.

We doughed in a little warm, but with the cool temperature outside, we got it back down to our target mash temp of 155°F pretty quickly, and wrapped the kettle in blankets to keep it from dropping too much more over the 60 minute mash.  The rest of the day went pretty well, no hiccups to speak of.  We ended up a tad under the goal of 11 gallons, but not by much.  We each had nearly 5.5 gallons to take home.  I pitched a 1L starter of WLP007 and David used a packet of Mangrove Jack M07 dry yeast.  They’re supposedly the same strain, from what I’ve seen, but we’ll see.  We’re planning on meeting up once they’re both done and seeing which one we like better to enter into the competition.  I think we have similar fermentation plans, so it will be interesting to see how much different they actually turn out!

In other news, I think I’ve got the Last Straw bottle filler figured out, as I was able to get a couple of bottles filled with the saison and opened one last night, and it was pretty well carbonated still, and had the correct amount of head space.  Since I’m entering the saison in its category as well as the New Entrant category, I need 6 bottles of it.  I’m not going to enter the dunkelweizen I’ve decided.  While it still tastes good and drinks well, the scorching during the boil (see last blog entry) gave it a bit of a burnt flavor.  I don’t mind the flavor, and it doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the beer, but it will definitely cost me points, and I’d rather brew it again without the scorching and get comments on it that way.  This way, I know most of the comments are going to be about the burnt flavor, and that’s not really going to be helpful.  I also need to see if I can get three bottle of the quad from the keg.  If not, I’ll just drink the rest to free up the keg and the space in the fridge, since I need to keg the bitter soon, as well as the mild.

Those loyal readers who have been following along for a while will notice that I removed the pages banner from the top and moved the recipes portion over to the right hand side.  I’ll work on adding recipes this week until I’ve got them all up there.