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.

Update: Harvest Wee Heavy (2012)

It's been awhile since my last post, but last weekend I finally got around to bottling my pumpkin beer. Some of the spicing didn't come out as strong as I had intended, luckily Rick lent me some of his pumpkin pie flavor extract - I ended up using about 10 drops for the entire batch.

Head past the break for some additional photos from the bottling day.

Ribs 'n Stuff

 

Last weekend I smoked a few pounds of ribs. I started with my homemade dryrub (mostly brown sugar and black pepper), and then smoked the ribs for nearly six hours.

 

 

My uncle got us a bottle of Dreamland Barbeque sauce (from Alabama) which I mopped on the ribs during and after cooking. We also had some corn and fried green tomatoes from the garden to go with them.

 

Good eats!