The annual trip to Delaware for the horseshoe crab survey and visit to Dogfish Head was this past weekend. The weather was lovely and the counting was a challenge. We use a sampling technique and don’t count them all, but we estimated that there were about 15,000 crabs on the…
About a year ago when we made our four ‘big’ beers, we realized that we needed to bottle them so we could drink some, age some and share some. It’s harder to do those things when the beer is in a keg in my garage. Bottling meant that we would…
Chris brewed the third beer for the Oktoberfest. I showed up around hopback time to pick hops, finish the brew session and clean up. The hop vines were much improved this year. They were picked and put directly into the hopback for flavor and aroma. This is called wet…
Yesterday we brewed more sours. About three weeks ago, a first batch of sours in 2014 was brewed. Our standard batch volume of about 18 gallons results in three 5 or 6 gallon carboys. That gives us the ability to have a single recipe to which we can add three different…
Last weekend the Brewers had a bottling session for the last two big beers that were brewed this spring. Beer #14 was Brewer Joe’s imperial smoked porter. It smelled and tasted great with the smoked character coming through well. My experience is that the smokey essence tends to get reduced in…
Brewer #4 was in Ohio for a week-plus, around July 4th. Driving out instead of flying meant lots of car space for some Westside bombers to share with his Cincinnati homies. The locals were NOT scared off by the strange new ideas being tried out in B’more. Sours? Weizenbock? Horse…
We bottled Tom’s Barleywine on Saturday. The other brewers chose 22 oz. ‘bombers’ for bottling, but I decided to use half liter containers (about 17 oz.) and go with plastic PET bottles. I have never used them before, but heard good things about them. They sure were easy to carry…
OK, so we have clearly made more than 11 beers. Here’s the deal. We just decided to start numbering our experimental beers in 2014. This is a marvelously complex, yet perfectly balanced Rye IPA that was aged in our rye whiskey barrel. It is being served in a few select…
This will be a fun year. We have been brewing quite often and have a lot on the agenda for the rest of the year. We brewed three nice crowd pleaser beers for the Mayfest: a Czech Pilsner, an American Pale Ale, and a Bourbon-barrel-aged Smoked Rye IPA that was…