Those of you that are members of the Maltose Falcons newsgroup have already seen the challenge I have presented to the club to enter at least 30 beers in the California State Homebrewing competition (aka Stern Grove) to help our finishing push to win the 2009 Anchor California Homebrew club of the year award. As an effort to motivate club members, to pull their weight in this challenge, I thought I'd share some stories from my first Anchor award party in 2005. I'm hoping some other older club members could chime in with stories of their own.
As an update for those of you who are will be attending the 35th anniversary party, the schwarzbier I am contributing is now comfortably lagering at 34 °F. For some reason, this beer seems to do better with a relatively short lagering period (4-5 weeks) than some of my other lagers, particularly my O'fest.
Speaking of parties, I am off to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver with my good friends Roger Bott and Jay Long next weekend. Anyone else from the club going to be there?
Drew guilted me into including my recipe for yesterday's brewing festivities. It's been tweeked a little bit fro mthe last time I brewed it, we'll see how it tastes.
BeerSmith Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com
Recipe: Schwartzbier
Brewer: Matt Bourbeau
Asst Brewer: Paul Resendi
Style: Schwarzbier (Black Beer)
TYPE: All Grain
Taste: (35.0)
My alarm went off at 6:30 this morning. Normally on a Saturday, that would meen I was a dumbass and forgot to turn my alarm off the night before. But not today. Today was a brew day. I don't normally brew a lot this time of year, and I certianly did not plan on it being 100+ when I decided to schedule a brew day today, but that's the way the ball bounces. I decided I needed an early start. Fortunately, my brother-in-law Paul came over to help, which was invaluable, particularly for clean-up. We doughed in at 8:00 and took the mash trough a 4 step, direct fire mashing schedule (125 °F
I've never actually bothered to Blog about things befroe, but given the hard work that went into the design of this new web site, I
feel obligated to give it a try.
Last evening, I began what I refer to as my lager ritual, that is, the start of my yeast starter for a lager. Those of you familier with my brewing philosophy know
that I firmly subscribe to the notion of pitching large quantities of yeast, particularly in my lagers. This approach was given a challenge this year as I finally upgraded my boil kettle to
