Brewing Up a Storm

Ladies and Gents, as most of you know, Amber and I had been on a serious brewing hiatus dating all the way back to labor day of last year.  Well the hiatus has officially ended as of last Sunday when we brewed up an American pale ale to help beat the summer heat.  We've christened the brew as Pushmower Pale Ale......a light american style ale with just enough oomph to fortify the spirit of a man weary with exhaustion from having spent 1.5 hours pushing a little craftsman mower around our ~1acre front yard.  Perhaps when we get a riding mower we will brew a corn lager, but for now we will be requiring something a little more potent.

The motivation for a brew.

The brewday was super relaxed with truly minimal effort.  For anyone paying attention to our last few brews you might recall that we became a little distracted by trying to perfect our process.  Everything from water chemistry to yeast health came into question and subsequently led to a fairly rigorous brewday routine that always left us feeling exhausted.  Well for this batch we decided to strip down the all-grain brewing process to it's barest of essentials.......that's right, we did a brew in a bag (BIAB)!  Now, please don't be mistaken, we still took the brewing process very seriously and made every effort to ensure that this beer would turn out well, we just didn't get uptight about the things we used to get uptight about.

The brewday went off without a hitch, and we had a lot of fun brewing.....so much fun that I(Mark) decided we needed to brew a couple more beers.  Friday night Amber went to a concert up in Cleveland. So I stayed home, had some friends over, and brewed up another BIAB......an English ESB.  But i didn't stop there, Saturday night I decided to brew up a Belgian pale ale just to round out the collection of the three primary ale brewing regions in the world.

All three of these beers were brewed with our unfiltered, unsoftened, unfettered well water.  It's really delicious water.  We recently had a water analysis done by a local water treatment company, and the gentleman said that we have some of the best water he has seen.....so good we could get away without any treatment at all(that is what the previous owners did for the past 60years anyway).  Knowing that it would have been in his best interest to sell us a water treatment product I knew he must be telling us the truth.  The only thing that concerned me(as a brewer) was the iron content.  At 0.5ppm it's slightly above the recommended threshold for brewing.  If these beers come out tasting metallic I will know what caused it.  I digress, all three of these beers were also BIAB, all three are ales, all three will be around 5% ABV, all three will have less than 50IBU, and all three will be blonde/golden in color.  The true differentiator for these beers will be yeast and hop character, each reflective of it's brewing region.  I have great respect for the brewers of America, England, and Belgium, and I hope that these three beers stand up to the great brewing tradition of those three countries.

Pushmower Pale Ale
6.5 lbs pale 2-row
1 lb Vienna malt
0.5 lbs wheat

0.5oz Amarillo at 60minutes
0.5oz Amarillo at 20minutes
0.5oz Simcoe at 5minutes
0.5oz Simcoe at 0minutes

Wyeast 1272 American Ale II

lESBaru
8 lbs Marris Otter
1 lb Amber malt

1oz EKG at 60minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 40minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 20minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 5minutes
0.5oz Fuggles at 0minutes

Wyeast 1098 British Ale

Belgo PaleBlonde Patersbier
8 lbs Dingemans 2-row
0.5lbs Dingemans Caravienne

1oz Styrian Goldings at 75minutes
1oz Styrian Goldings at 15minutes

Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey Ale

I'm looking forward to tapping into each of these beers as the weather really heats up.  Come over and share with us?

Every brewday starts with a crush.

A lazy BIABer will tie his brewbag to the cabinets above the stove.

Amber's favorite part......the hot break!

Teaching Gigi the process.....someday she might fill in for our dearly departed Brewmaster Dinx.

Hogan wants to help too!