The last of the Mamut

On my last day in Lima last week, we pulled out the last bottle of my Mamut Barley Wine, which had been aging in the fridge there for a year.

It aged nicely. It was flavourful, and some of the very overt hop bitterness that had been so evident when it was young had softened into something rather pleasant and more rounded.

Abbey Ale

I helped my friend and fellow club-member, Vito, brew an all-grain batch this morning. It was to be a pilsner, but because I don't have temperature control in my fermentation space, I pitched Abbey Ale yest into my share of the wort.

Ingredients  - for 15 gals. post boil

28 lbs German 2-row (2.0 SRM) Pilsner malt
2.8 oz Perle hop pellets (8% AA) - at 60 mins
1.5 tabs Whirfloc - at 15 mins
1.4 oz Hallertauer Hersbrucker pellets (4 % AA) - at 15 mins
1.4 oz Hallertauer Hersbrucker pellets (4 % AA) - at 0 mins

Ingredients - Fermentation of my 5-gal share

2 vials White Labs WLP 530 Abbey Ale Yeast

Procedure - 17 gal. boil

RO water, 5.3 ph
Single recirculating infusion mash
Sparged with 14 gals 168°F water
90-minute boil


Pitched Abbey Ale yeast at 70°F.


We used the specs sheet from Vito's previous brew of the recipe as the guide:

Oct. 2017: The beer was weird. The Belgian flavor was there, alright, but one could tell that the grain bill was all off for that yeast.  It could only be described as a hybrid beer, and a not very good one.  I'm afraid that I wasted Vito's perfectly good wort.

Housekeeping time ...

So, today I did the long-overdue chore of thoroughly cleaning the keggerator. I even unscrewed and took up the metal plate that protects the floor of the fridge portion, and cleaned and sanitized underneath that.

I also replaced the gas lines with some of those Brew Ultra spiral-curled PVC-free gas tubing.  It sure makes the inside of the kegerator a lot tidier!

Brewing for the Zombie Crawl

I'm trying to throw together a light-bodied porter with reddish undertones for the 2016 Zombie Crawl in our town on Oct. 22nd.

6 lbs pale liquid malt extract
0.5 lb American chocolate malt
0.5 lb black malt
1 lb 120°L crystal malt
1 oz. Simcoe (12.8% AA) hop pellets (@ 60 mins)
0.5 oz. Willamette (5.1% AA) hop pellets (@ 0 mins)
White Labs' WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast

BACBF 2016

Just got two brews kegged for my participation in the 2016 Bay Area Craft Beer Festival's homebrew tasting tent.

Getting ready for NCHF

From the 2015 Bay Area Craft Beer Festival's homebrew tasting tent