brew dog blog

An obsession with drinking beer can only take a person so far into completely understanding beer.  At some point, most sufficiently nerdy brew-heads think about making their own beer, and in my case I’ve certainly been no exception.  I decided to start brewing in a pretty unconventional way — jumping right into All-Grain.  After gathering up the gear from places like Northern Brewer and Brewd00d, I headed down a path that I’m quite sure is irreversible — complete obsession with homebrewing.

For my first beer I wanted something that would be tasty, refreshing, hoppy, and weird.  I wanted to brew a beer in a style that is forgiving, and one that would be appopriate to ferment in my basement in the summer.  All signs pointed to Saison, basically, which is great because if Saisons isn’t my absolute favorite beer style, it’s certainly in the top 3.  Hoppier than most Belgian beers, generous in terms of its wide range of styles, and potentially infectable without complete destruction, a Saison is just a wonderful kind of beer.  So I gave it a shot.

I formulated a recipe after an enormous amount of research (both reading and drinking) and came up with a 60/20/20 Pils/Wheat/Rye blend for my mash, Cascade Hops for bitterness and aroma, and Wyeast’s Farmhouse Ale yeast which I made a starter for and pitched the dregs of a bottle of Jolly Pumpkin’s Calabaza Blanca, a funky wheat beer.  Mashing schedule was a single step for an hour at around 150 (a few degrees higher than hoped), and the boil was for an hour, with three hop additions plus a flameout addition, all of Cascade.  Yeah, it’s original, weird, and

idiosyncratic — just like a Saison should be.  Right now the beer is in Primary fermentation, and though I haven’t taken a gravity reading yet (the beer’s OG was around 1.058, a little lower than I was aiming for), the massive amounts of activity makes me think that it’s well on its way to drying out.  The beer gets lighter everyday, smells great, and more and more trub is collecting at the bottom of the carboy.

Here’s a couple pictures of the brewing process plus the beer in its current state.  Stay tuned for more recipes, experiences, and hopefully homebrew enjoyment.  I’m going to also post a roundup of good web and print homebrewing resources and post them here.