Hops on the rise.

Last month, I planted out an additional 4 hop rhizomes in the garden to bring the total up to six. Well, all but one of them - the Neo1 - have broken ground and are on their way to being productive plants.

The cascade and centennial hops I planted last year are going crazy and have almost reached the top of the roof, a feat they didn't accomplish until July of last year - so I may see an early harvest if things continue. They would likely have already reached the roof if not for a few days of cold, rainy weather this week.

Some more pictures after the break.

Update: Brandy Barrel Quad

A lot has happened in the past month - two weddings, a vacation, and some overtime at work - so now that life is beginning to get back to normal, it's time to address some of the things that have been going on since my last post.

Since brewing my 'super quad' (or a quintupel - call it what you will) two months ago, it's been a rather uncooperative beer. After an explosive fermentation over the first two weeks, as I gradually ramped the temperatures up into the high 80's, eventually it seemed to stall out.

Swirling and ramping the temp to the 90's had little effect, and after several reading over a 2-week period, I concluded the quad had, in fact, stuck at 1.044. What was I to do? Now don't get me wrong, I like malty beers, but I was aiming for a sweeter-than-style quad to stand up to the barrel aging, not syrup.

So, after consulting some friends I concocted a plan. Over the course of a weekend I built up a trillion cell starter of WLP-099 Super High Gravity Yeast, using progressively stronger wort each time - the final round using 1.050 wort mixed with a liter of the stuck quad. Once it reached high krausen I acclimated it to higher ABV with some vodka added gradually over the course of an hour, and then pitched the entire, massive starter into the quad. Two weeks later and the quad is now down to 1.033. If I can get it into the 1.020's I'll consider it a success.

In the Garden 2013 - Hops, hops, hops!

Last year, I took an attempt at starting my own hop farm that was fairly successful - two first year plants yielded about a pound of dried hops - and have decided to step it up in 2013.

The first thing I had to do was make more room - much more room - for this year's crop. I extended the planter I built last year to wrap around the rest of the house before stopping at the A/C condenser. There's enough room for me to plant four more rhizomes. The lucky winners this year are:

• Centennial
• Chinook
• Willamette
• Neo1 (new hop variety from New Mexico)

I already have one Centennial, but it's one of my go-to hops for pale ales and IPAs (plus, you can't legally buy Simcoe or Citra rhizomes, patents and such). Chinook has a nice piney-ness for aroma additions and is a great all-around bittering hop, while Willamette works equally well in American and English/Belgian styles. I don't know a whole lot about Neo1 other than the fact that it's a new breed from New Mexico that is described as "lemon-y) and has a fairly high alpha acid content.

I plan on harvesting a few pounds this year, so I'll hopefully be able to do a wet hopped IPA and have plenty left over for drying.

Brandy Barrel Quad

Last year, a few of my friends got together and decided to clone Westvleteren 12. Those efforts led to the creation of QuadFest. It was successful enough to warrant a sequel, QuadFest 2013. For this year's event the number of participants has grown to include myself, my friend Rick, and perhaps a few more homebrewers from the Reno area; we will be holding our own QuadFest North meeting later this year, as most of us won't be able to make the trip down to Orange County.

Yesterday I brewed my take on the classic recipe. I sought to fuse my two favorite quads, Rochefort 10 and Westvleteren 12, into one brew. The recipe is based on several clone recipes, information from Brew Like a Monk, and some guesstimation on my end - Belgian pilsen, CaraMunich, Special B, and a ton of candi syrup from Candi Syrup Inc. I also followed feedback based on Daniel, Shawn, and Scott's attempts last year. My hope is to capture the complexity of Westvleteren but have the maltyness of Rochefort to stand up to barrel aging. Yes, you heard that right, I'll be putting this bad boy into a used 5 gallon brandy barrel...

Local lambic 2013 + Local lambic 2012 updates

This weekend, I brewed the second annual batch of my local pseudo-Lambic. Last year's batch has  developed into a nice lambic base - assertively sour (but not overly so), with a great bouquet and good color and clarity.

For this years batch, I'm keeping the turbid mash, and using the same recipe - the only change being that I upped the Munich malt by 10% and reduced the boil time from two hours to 60 minutes. The hope is that the extra Munich will offset any kettle caramelization the extra hour would have given.

To make way for this year's batch, it was finally time to do something with the 5 gallons I brewed last April. I have been debating back and forth over whether or not to fruit the beer. I finally decided that the beer would work fine as a fruit lambic base and went back to the original idea to use boysenberries after the plan to use pinot gris grapes didn't work out as planned (with only a few ounces, the flavor and acid contributions were undetectable). I racked a little under three gallons of the beer onto 3 pounds of boysenberries (which I might bump up to five), and racked another gallon into a small glass carboy for extended aging - my intent is to use this in blending for a gueuze-style beer in a year or two.

All-Nevada harvest ale (or, the worst brewday ever)

Yesterday I brewed up a beer that I've been looking forward to since harvesting my first year Cascade and Centennial hops way back in August. A number of factors kept me from brewing this beer earlier (weather, sickness, vacations, etcetera), but most importantly, I was waiting on the right malt.

We have our very own maltster in Reno, Lance, who buys locally-grown barley and malts it himself in a converted garage. The quality is second to none, and it was always the missing puzzle piece in a locally produced beer.

The beer itself is a loose SNPA clone using locally grown ingredients. I bought twelve pounds of Copeland malt (a nice 2-row base malt variety) that was grown in nearby Yerington, and along with the 5 ounces of Cascade and half-ounce of Centennial I was able to grow last year, all I needed was a little water and yeast. Of course, if I had the technology, I'd culture some S. Cerevisiae out of the local air and be 100% local, but for obvious logistical reasons I'm using a packet of US-05 for fermentation purposes.

Tasting notes: Red Flanders & Local lambic

Over the weekend, I got around to pulling samples from my two sours that have been in secondary. It has been nearly five months since I last sampled my cherrywood-aged flanders red, appropriately named Red Flanders, and this was the first time I'd tasted the local lambic.